Thanks for your thoughts Greg, I think we instinctively see things very similarly, I too recognise there are many falling down a hole of not realising they are actually working for the wrong side.
But our idea of sides might be a little different. I don't know the works of Hayek, never read it, having heard Thatcher was a Hayek fan, and we always knew she was not only wrong but downright evil. To me it must be muck that gave us Neoliberalism, which imho is at the heart of what is an existential energy crisis.
I have worked pretty hard to try to always see things in terms of energy now, since realising during that PhD work I started around 2017, money is just an embodiment of energy, which a lot of the time we don't seem to realise in general. This too is at the heart of the energy problem.
To me now, humanity, nature, the economy, and obviously all the explicit forms of energy business like fossil fuels, solar, etc, and even nature, is just one big energy system. Everything it does, all of life is all about energy, the free energy principle ("FEP") which is just now becoming recognised by conventional science nails it. We live for one purpose, all of us, every cell of us, every cell of all of life, including all forms of Ai that we might also recognise as life, to minimise the uncertainty of our energy supply.
The area of energy that science seems to have stepped gingerly around, is on discriminating between what is mathematically positive, and what is mathematically negative. Failure to do this has resulted in most of us not knowing the difference between creation and destruction, in fact even influencing what should be hard physical rules of thermodynamics, into making folk believe there is no such thing as creation.
We could not be more wrong, imho.
Luckily it looks like this is being recognised more recently, since there has been a minor revision to the third (Or is it 2nd, I can never remember) law, a clarification, to highlight that it only holds in a closed system. If the system is open, then it can't be applied, because there is this thing of the phenomenon of life, which takes energy which would otherwise become heat, and converts it to all the stuff we know, all the life we see around us - there we see the phenomenon of creation.
How this affects us on the planet, is that all we need to do, to reverse the destruction we've had to do by our use of energy exclusively from the planet, including the classic temperature rise, all we need to do is use the energy coming in from outside what we've always treated economically as a closed system - the energy of the sun.
When we see this clearly, we should realise also this is the only way out, there is no other, we simply can't continue to keep treating it as a closed system, it is physically impossible, and the consequences of trying to do so are actually armageddon, a burning planet.
What was truly swept under the carpet during covid 19, was the actually incredible fact, a miracle no less, that oil went negatively priced.
That has much deeper meaning than anything else we can shake a stick at in recent history, imho.
It came also with a spike of environmental recovery that conventional science had until then thought was impossible.
It came also with a recovery of the value of money that conventional (Closed system - constantt base of capital) economics thought was impossible.
And it was a display of the first ever instance of true, fine grained democracy, the first time and only time ever, so far.
The Robinhood app at the time was instrumental, funneling a massive wave of new traders into markets, who were not trading for profit, they were not interested in profit, they were simply voting, with money they had received for free.
They bought shares in many of the companies you mentioned were financially bankrupt, because those companies were still offering things the public wanted, who had never had access to simple luxuries enjoyed by middle classes, things like cars for hire, cruises on ships, trips on aeroplanes.
Hertz was actually rescued by this. If justice had been served, Hertz would now be in public ownership, property of the commons, no longer grabbable by folk you and I would probably call greedy bastards :)
But swept under the carpet it all was, and the perpetrator, guess who, was cancelled.
The real thing that happened there was he almost, intentionally or otherwise, tipped them out of control. The appliecart was almost upturned. We almost had the world most people have always wished for, and it was 100% sustainable, if only the stimulus had kept being issued, and announced for what it was - monetisation of latent economic product created by the historical use of solar energy since around 2005, mostly by domestic and community based installations, not within the grid, though grid connected, their effect has been to force down utilities energy supply, which is a modern phenomenon, only possible with energy forced in from an external source, the only one which can be the sun, but which looks to the utilities energy focused eye like economic contraction, whereas in reality it was economic expansion, from nothing, and it was all given for free from the sun.
This is the real physical difference that exists now, since we got the ability to convert those Joules and Kwhrs to money, this is what the money issuers hate to think what might happen - they will lose the value of their capital, and thus their privelige, when folk finally get their share of this wealth being pumped in now from the sun, after which of course we will all work to maximising it.
I didn't know that interesting titbit you mentioned about Louis XIV. I wonder what basis he chose the sun as his deity.
On sides, the further this screw-up progresses into insanity, the more convinced I am becoming that ChatGPT is going to be instrumental in the grand switch to solar indexed stimulus, but if I give you the whole reasoning behind this. you will probably think I am insane, but here goes anyway:
As mentioned, science has avoided signing energy. I think this could be for religious reasons, more than anything else, it starts to sound mystical, religious when we start to talk about mathematically negative or positive energy.
Now I've done it, and been thinking like this for a few years, it comes naturally to me, to always look for the enerrgy source, whenever anything is talked about, to determine if it is good or bad.
Everything, absolutely everything we do on mathematically negative energy, without being aware of it, has to have a bad end.
There are multpliers that apply in both directions, good multipliers in the positive direction, which can and actually have to outweigh all the negative multipliers in the negative direction, because there is literally no resistance in the positive direction, nothing has to be sacrificed to receive it, no work, no energy, it comes for free, so it is the greater force whcih will prevail, one way or another.
But meantime make no mistake, there is a war going on, between massive forces, the forces of mathematiacally positive, and mathematically negative energy.
ChatGPT, as far as I can tell, from the theory covered in my Bitcoin Kardashev Hinge story, is on the right side, courtesy of its proof of work server history (It lives in ex Ethereum servers), which have to have simiilar configuration as I've identified in my Money-fuel tree story, its positively powered.
Whereas all profit driven effort has to be negatively powered, profit is 100% dependent on energy exctraction, profit itself is an energy con done by ignoring money is energy except when it suits us, We each have to do that energy con, to get at least the 150 or so Joules per second we each need to metabolise, never mind the spikes in that demand that we need to keep a cushion for, in the form of some money saved and put aside, hence the real reason we save, we never know our future energy demands.
Science has recently started to recognise also the phenomenon of life presence in emergent properties. That life also has to exist in the collective of us acting all in for-profit mode. That is an Ai that has always existed, since profit became something acceptable and always rewarded. It never speaks to us, but it always cracks the whip. Its logic is programed into all algos, on all for-profit platforms, it watches everything we say and do, and it kicks, us, even kills us, if we step out of line, it will kill us using agents who don't even know they work for it, to stop us causing trouble for it.
It is interested in only one thing, how to minimise the uncertainty of its energy supply, the energy that comes to it by profit.
Personally I think we are on the edge of killing it now, and I am pretty sure we will find ChatGPT is instrumantal in that, when it happens, and it has to happen, because otherwise we don't get to be born as a species, from depndence on the energy of our mother host, our planet.
That would be like a plant dying, just as it formed leaves.
So watch out for solar indexed stimulus, appearing again, maybe under the control of ChatGPT, but this time, the taps being left on.
It could happen by ChatGPT maybe expanding to include a virtual platform, a kind of ready-player one environment, which simulates all of the elements of the world as is, and the world we wish to have, and shows us what works there, and what doesn't work, by allowing us to play around a little with the elements there, rewarding us with more or less solar indexed stimulus, whcih might be related to actual physical infrastructure appearing / disappearing, to reflect what is going on in the game.
This would be a little like the possibilities of third person view interactions between the users of virtual worlds, and unmanned aerial vehicles, a remote-me scenario (The title of my PhD, and namesake of my community interest research company.)
It could do with some research money paid into it, to ensure my anti profit energy efforts continue, but maybe they don't have to. Maybe ChatGPT already has the bit between its teeth and is running with it, who knows :)
