What in the world is Hopium?

Jiggs, lots of words and yet once again you can't even tell me a single thing that could happen that would show you you're wrong about peak oil.

Not one!

Wow rig count is cyclical? Knock me over with a feather.

Like everything else you get flat wrong, I'm not Greek. But don't let that stop you from relying on baseless guesses as the foundation of your racist arsenal.

It's interesting that you scramble to find any Greek academic you can in order to sugarcoat your bigotry. Do I get to do that too in the other direction?

Greece's lenders were happy to pour money into the country, only to shirk their burden-sharing responsibilities when it became clearly unsustainable. Over-eager creditors willingly underwrote this absurd risk premium. And when it became painfully clear that Greece's debt mountain had entered into insolvency territory, creditors delayed the moment of truth.

I'm on record as admitting flaws in the Greek system, just as I am in seeing flaws in the Venezuelan system. But you're not on record as recognizing the far-more present factor of debt-peddling by your Northern European heroes.

No doubt, to a troll like you, the 2007 real estate crisis was all the fault of "non-homogenous, lazy" borrowers, while predatory lenders did nothing wrong.

No, it isn't, rookie.

It's been on a pretty steady increase for many decades, until Q1 2015 or so.

I have many, many times in the past, liar.

If the global economy could afford sustained $100+ oil prices, the incentive would be there to extract resources that are only "plentiful" at that lofty price. Unfortunately, time and time again, the global economy has shown it can not afford that price and bumps up against that $100-110 ceiling.

I've shown it over and over. There is a massive gap between the minimum oil price the industry needs to remain profitable and the maximum price global capitalism can afford to maintain healthy growth. It is an unsustainable imbalance, and it's a gap that widens every year.

Flaws?

Amazingly, they were able to write their entire paper without using the words "sick" or "stupid".

Pass the popcorn, Jiggs! Let's head on over to BFI and watch all the investors scream with terror as the market collapses!

Wait... what? WTFBBQ, why isn't the sky falling??!?

Who said the sky was falling? This was more about the beginning of the end for the European Union, which is f***ed.

I never indicated this was the trigger event for global depression. It is yet another log pulled from the teetering Jenga tower, though. ...

Still, the media has done its job of calming fears a while longer, pumping out story after story about how the UK can/will just stall this out, and little is gonna change. Yawn.

Last week was a clear rejection of the status quo. It's what happens when the pie starts shrinking, and absolutely no one has any solutions about what to do. I suspect Italy's banking collapse soon will be the next log pulled. Tick tock, tick tock.

People like you can troll it up as you like and pretend the game has been decided, as desperate central banks do what they do to paper over problems. ... Unfortunately, the reality is that things are not getting better. They're getting worse. And no one on "Team No Problem," from the IMF all the way to bullish message board trolls, has any idea how to fix what ails the global economy. None whatsoever.

So, yeah...

You jizzed your pants over a minor downswong. You told everyone to buy gold after the prices jumped. You're exactly the kind of level-0 sheep that make the game so easy to beat.

In jiggs defense he is more right than tooth. Also you have to go to like post 25 before he mentions gold, when you ask him what to invest in (so you could do the opposite).

Bullish message boards?? You have zero idea what drives markets if you think message board opinion plays any role. It's hilarious that you work in an industry monitoring oil and gas and you can't get anything right about it. You are the best contrarian indicator jiggs. What Italian banks should we short sell?

Why do you think the global economy is "ailed"?

Apart from a massive and needless and incredibly wasteful duplication of capital by China - which is the ultimate source of slower global growth - the global economy is doing very well. Production is strong. I can buy whatever I want whenever I want for a very good price. The potential oil crisis as conventional neared limits was handled by a massive injection of capital and major technological advances into tapping unconventional, such that we're off the hook until electric cars take up the coming eventual decline in the next 10 years. Crops are strong, mining is strong, technology is improving daily, inflation is low, more people globally are wealthier and better fed and clothed and housed than ever.

We live in one of the best times in the history of the world, if not the best. 2010 has been the best and most prosperous decade of any except perhaps the 90s.

I guess that's hard to understand if your worldview revolves around fear and The End of Times or its intellectual equivalent.

Yes, that's because it's an academic working paper.

I'm sorry you don't approve of my language. However, bear in mind I'm not a bigot like you. I don't mind how people express themselves - the free unfiltered exchange of thoughts is a good thing.

As for using such strong language, I do it for effect and constrast. Current Greek culture is indeed deeply delusional and prideful, and reality-detached apologists like Jiggs make the world a worse place by claiming that Greek problems aren't self inflicted. Their problems are indeed self-inflicted, and the product of a sick and deranged culture. Nothing will change in Greece until people understand that. Bailout after bailout and soft language and sympathy for their deranged conspiracy theories (which are widespread) and responsibility avoidance just condemn the Greek people to another generation in the economic and philosophical and political wasteland.

People should speak freely about such things imo, and I do it in strong language to make the point that we should be saying such things forcefully.

We've really entered a bizarre age. Discussion was robust and freethinking for most of history. Only in recent decades has speech become so pathologically policed.

Go read some of the headlines and articles of Pulitzer's newspapers, for example. Sensationalist, bigoted, rabidly attacking. And you know what? They shone a light on the world and on corruption and unfairness in a way our vapid and self-apologizing media just doesn't do today.

The founding fathers were far more like Trump than Obama.

Definitely this. People bitching about how bad things are, or how much better things use to be are just plain ignorant. I get its human nature to romanticize the past and fear the future, but by almost any objective measurement we (as in the human species) are better off now than at any time in the past.

Man, the old "You're the real bigot line". Never gets old.

The founding fathers are hardly an example of who I would want leading my country at this point in time.

I forgot though aren't you the one that claimed Trump might be one of the greatest minds of his generation? And then never bothered to offer any sort of rationale except for "We're all too dumb to appreciate his greatness"?

I f love how the flatearthers are always the ones plugging how we live in the best of times like it has anything to do with their opinions of reality.

I don't know what this means.

What measurements do you use to determine when the best of times was?

Median Household Incomes Peaked in 1999

There are other indicators that point to late nineties being much better than the present.

Yeah, I'm talking globally not the US.

And even if median incomes have fallen globally since 99 (I doubt it, but I wouldn't be surprised) I'm quite fine saying that continued advances in technology and medicine have offset them.

Even for the US, I'd argue life is better now than it was in '99 based on technology and medical advances alone (offsetting a metric like lowered household incomes).

Re-reading my original post it looks like I might have meant there aren't any objective measurement that show life is worse now than previously.

Obviously some things have gotten worse. My point is more that if you come up with an objective measurement that covers all different facets of life - it's hard to argue we aren't currently living in the best time.

Wait a second, if life is worse in the United States and people in the USA are bitching about it then their gripes have merit no?

Ummm... We weren't talking about the US. The hints are phrases like 'global economy', 'history of the world', and 'we (as in the human species)'.

So you can't just completely change the context and assume what we said apply to the new context.

But anyway, ignoring all that, I don't agree with your premise. Median income being down is hardly enough to conclude that 'life is worse'.

I guess because of the considerable body of world events that I've provided already. A list that's really just the tip of the iceberg. I could pepper the thread daily with similar news accounts of economic dams cracking. But I don't really need to any longer.

The hopium is strong with this one. Some of the best spin in the history of PU right here.

LOL... sad troll. I neither fear, nor see ongoing net energy decline as "The End of Times." ... It's soon the end of of times for modern, globalized, bubbled, crony capitalism as we know it, that's for sure. And the fallout from it will be breathtaking. I guess that's essentially "The End Times" for free market cultists like yourself, so I understand that you can't see the distinction.

I suppose the ever-increasing probability of war between nuclear nations nullifies all bets, but you hopium addicts have already assured us that's never going to happen ... or if it does, that it'll have nothing to do with energy shortage... You know, just like the smaller-scale conflicts that are already underway somehow have "nothing to do with" conflict over natural resources.