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The Abundance Illusion

carlyle.com

1–10 of 46 posts

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#2
There might be some missing context here. China and the US are not experiencing growth and development at the same rate at the same time.

In the US, everyone that has access to electricity has had it for decades.

In China, the first year where 100% of the population has had access to electricity is 2013, according to the World Bank.

China is also putting its middle class into automobiles almost a century later than the US did, and they’re almost entirely skipping internal combustion. The US has basically no urgency to replace internal combustion as they have a well-established supply of oil.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#3
Sometimes when I’m programming I get a little lost in trying to make a pipeline more efficient. While it’s a noble goal, I have to remind myself: “somewhere here, you have to pay the piper”. No matter how you squeeze the bits, distribute the work, or optimize the input, you still have to draw those pixels to the display.

The simplification and optimization makes it easier somewhere in the process, but all of those pixels still have to be drawn, somewhere, sometime.

Extending the metaphor a bit far, we’re about to try to draw the entire buffer. And we’re still populating it.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#5
In addition to this article, I've seen well thought out assertions from knowledgeable people that Hormuz is far worse than the market thinks and the market just continues not caring.

Maybe they're both right? Horrible things can happen to oil importing economies without derailing the AI build out that's driving the US economy and stock prices.

I think there's a catch-22 where Trump will hold out as long as the market lets him and everyone in the market wants to look through him throwing in the towel.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#6
> The hard work Carter asked for — building the physical capacity to never need the buffer — was quietly abandoned.

But since then, US natural gas production doubled [1], and solar power is growing exponentially [2]. Leaving that out of the history seems excessively gloomy.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9050us2a.htm [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183447/us-energy-generat...

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#9
'Figure 2: US energy exports outpace production'

We're producing 14,000,000 barrels of oil per day and exporting about 6,000,000 per day, but the author used a graph with two different y-axis scales to make the lines cross so it looks like more oil is being exported than produced.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#10
“…for energy is the lifeblood of this society and when the chips are down he who controls the energy supply controls Planet. In former times the energy monopoly was called ‘The Power Company’; we intend to give this name an entirely new meaning.”

— CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Centauri Monopoly

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