[911]

(11-18-2017 12:23 PM)questor70 Wrote:  

Not sure anyone wants to get into a protracted debate on this when it's really about Musk's alpha/beta frame, but thermodynamic / entropy is a lot more complicated than you think.

There's a lot of controversy over the effective EROEI of fossil fuels, especially considering that we're at a point where much of it is coming from increasingly difficult sources like ultra-deep water, tar-sands, shale, and requires a lot of refinement and ultimate delivery to the point of use. While gas is still cheap at the pump, the average EROEI of fossil fuels is getting progressively worse as we've already consumed most of the low-hanging-fruit. Since oil is a non-renewable resource, this situation is NOT solvable. Innovation in the oil sector does help in the short term (hence the shale boom) but it only kicks the can down the road.

Renewables may be intermittent (hence the need for battery storage) but they are the only reliable long-term energy source outside of pie-in-the-sky plans for next-gen nukes or fusion.

We're currently reaping the benfits of the can having been kicked but there are a lot of articles trying to determine how much time that's bought us and what the consequences are when it runs out. Some suggest we only have a few years before we wind up roughly where we were in the fall of 2008 with oil at $147/bbl. The best time to hedge bets on this and shift to EVs is now, not when we're panicking with $4+ prices at the pump and tens of millions of newly sold gas guzzlers on the road.

But let's just say women aren't the only ones who have difficulty with long-term planning.

Questor as an inveterate blue piller on many subjects, you might have a hard time accepting that many of the basic cultural and scientific precepts we've been spoon-fed all our lives through academia, the media and popular culture are in fact manufactured propaganda.

So you might have a hard time wrapping yourself around the idea that oil is a plentiful, replenishable and abiotic natural compound. It's not dinosaur juice, the concept of "fossil fuel" was a propaganda ploy by Rockefeller over a century ago in order to assign a false sense of scarcity to a plentiful resource, and to artificially pump up its price. Oil is a natural compound which is created deep in the earth crust, it is the most plentiful liquid on the planet, after water.

There were no dinosaurs, or plant life, ever, on Saturn's moon Titan, yet that place is awash in oil and hydrocarbons, so much for "fossil fuels":

https://www.space.com/4968-titan-oil-earth.html

There's enough hydrocarbons left to power the planet for centuries, unless you believe in that even bigger scam of anthopogenic global warming. When you understand the former, the latter makes sense, because they have to build artificial limits into oil, gas and coal in order to milk the world economy and control people.


https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-Gener...elves.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/26/scienc...rally.html

This Corbett video is a great introduction to the cultural and economic history of oil and the American globalist oligarchy, one of the most important documentaries on YT:

[questor70]

(11-18-2017 02:32 PM)911 Wrote:  

Questor as an inveterate blue piller

Unfortunately, once a group decides to use the red-pill / blue-pill analogy that it tends to pull conspiracy theorists in such as yourself who have their own definition of what it means. Just because I have been "red-pilled" about female nature doesn't mean I must believe all the other things you do. You can slap whatever label on me you like.

I actually was heavily involved in the peak-oil movement about 10 years ago and back then they too used the red-pill / blue-pill analogy. So for you to suggest that "red-pill" enlightenment about oil is to believe that it's abiotic is an inversion of the term. I have probably spent well over 10,000 hours (ala Malcolm Gladwell) in studying peak-oil and related fields. Enough that I could talk you through it for many hours without repeating myself, but I doubt the membership would be interested.

Suffice to say, a lot of the issues that I discovered back then which scared me shitless are no doubt part and parcel of what is driving Elon Musk in both Tesla and SpaceX. This was a guy who, before he founded Tesla, bought and totaled a McClaren F1. Somewhere between then and when Tesla was founded he had red-pill epiphany, which was around the same time for me. The smartest people alive today except for a few exceptions such as your Ray Kurzweils have become very concerned about the trajectory of population, resource use, and pollution on this planet. If the increasingly dysfunctional sexual marketplace causes birth rates to collapse, count me as someone who feels this would be the best thing to happen for the future of a liveable planet. So I do not buy into the idea that a healthy society needs to be like something out of the 1800s with a woman barefoot in the kitchen and pushing kids out like the Duggars. The planet is already headed towards Soylent Green as it is.

Respectfully, you can believe what you believe, and I'll do the same, but I won't enter into a flamewar over this stuff because I've learned long ago that nobody ever changes their minds.

[911]

No one is interested in a flame war, but I think most people on here would be interested in a rational discussion on this subject, so feel free to distill some of what you've learned from your research on here.

I've done quite a bit of research as well, more so on various aspects of "global warming" than on oil geology. I don't share your views on peak oil/resources, though I agree about pollution being a problem. This and other environmental crises have been completely overshadowed by the false problem of AGW (BTW, do you believe that human activities are causing potentially catastrophic global warming?)

Explosive demography is only a problem in places like sub-saharan Africa. The planet can feed 20+ billions, easily. The amount of land being cultivated has been shrinking as the world population is still growing ("peak agricultural land").

[Repo]

911, there are quite a few strawmans in that post. To my understanding, the official explanation is not that oil cannot be abiotic, but oil generated from abiotic processes is too rare and hard to reach efficiently, and isn't generated quick enough. The existence of oil on Titan doesn't actually go against any official explanation, so it is mute.

Also the idea of where fossils are found is mute, as the official explanation is the vast majority of oil was generated from the millions and millions of years that trees and other vegetation existed before bacteria evolved that could break it down. So you had millions of years of dead buildup. So "Fossil" fuel is I credibly misleading, as even the man in the video acknowledges, but then he contradicts himself by talking about where fossils are found.

Anyway, I find this theory that there is plentiful abiotic oil hard to believe, because if it were true and it could be found anywhere deep enough, then there would be little reason for any country to buy it from another country. The only reason that makes sense is it actually is really costly to get to, so there is a limit on the amount of easily accessible oil. Nobody is denying that oil can be generated from abiotic processes. But good luck getting hundreds of miles below the surface and drilling in extreme temperatures.

**edit**

This discussion probably belongs in its own thread, I won't respond anymore here

[911]

Yeah, this discussion deserves its own thread.

(11-18-2017 03:18 PM)Repo Wrote:  

911, there are quite a few strawmans in that post. To my understanding, the official explanation is not that oil cannot be abiotic, but oil generated from abiotic processes is too rare and hard to reach efficiently, and isn't generated quick enough. The existence of oil on Titan doesn't actually go against any official explanation, so it is mute.

Also the idea of where fossils are found is mute, as the official explanation is the vast majority of oil was generated from the millions and millions of years that trees and other vegetation existed before bacteria evolved that could break it down. So you had millions of years of dead buildup. So "Fossil" fuel is I credibly misleading, as even the man in the video acknowledges, but then he contradicts himself by talking about where fossils are found.

Anyway, I find this theory that there is plentiful abiotic oil hard to believe, because if it were true and it could be found anywhere deep enough, then there would be little reason for any country to buy it from another country. The only reason that makes sense is it actually is really costly to get to, so there is a limit on the amount of easily accessible oil. Nobody is denying that oil can be generated from abiotic processes. But good luck getting hundreds of miles below the surface and drilling in extreme temperatures.

**edit**

This discussion probably belongs in its own thread, I won't respond anymore here

Just a quick quibble here: on the surface, about the bolded part , the idea that vegetation, which emerged about 400 millions years ago, could evolve faster than bacteria. That idea doesn't sound very plausible.

[Repo]

One last comment, to clarify, bacteria existed. But not bacteria that could break down dead vegetation. Just like now bacteria that can break down plastics is evolving, but they used to be far more rare.

[911]

(11-18-2017 03:49 PM)Repo Wrote:  

One last comment, to clarify, bacteria existed. But not bacteria that could break down dead vegetation. Just like now bacteria that can break down plastics is evolving, but they used to be far more rare.

You're making my point here Repo, bacteria evolves in a much, much faster rate than plants. Plastics have only for a century, yet you are already starting to see bacteria that can break it down.

If we are to believe that oil is purely a fossil fuel, you would have to have tens of thousands of years' worth of vegetal deposits in order to have oil deposits the size of a Ghawar Field, which is practically a large inland lake of oil.

[monster]

(11-17-2017 11:08 PM)Razor Beast Wrote:  

If you can't offer more than a blanket dismissal I can't have a conversation with you. It's hard to have a conversation with someone who puts words into my mouth and then can't point out a specific problem with what I am saying and refute it with evidence. The original post was actually about Elon Musk and Tesla, so it logically makes sense that by extension we would talk about himself and his company in this thread, right? In all my discussions about Tesla in my life I have never had someone react emotionally to discussion of the company who was not invested in the stock. If you don't want to engage that way just withdraw and I'll stop replying to your posts.

I'm sorry you can't support your arguments with evidence, only with broad, incorrect assumptions.

[Genghis Khan]

(11-18-2017 06:47 AM)H1N1 Wrote:  

Razor beast, would I be correct to venture that you are an engineer by training/profession? My impression is that you most likely are. I have employed a lot of engineers over the past few years, and they tend to conform to a type: brilliant, orderly, highly conscientious - great people and the backbone of any business looking to innovate.

However, ignoring the vanishingly rare exceptions like Dyson, there is probably no archetype more at odds with an entrepreneur than that of the engineer. The two are so different in temperament and approach to problem solving as to almost be divergent strains of humanity. Consequently, the one rarely understands the other and the relationship is often strained and uncomfortable despite the essential symbiosis.

I don't know if I buy this argument. I don't disagree that quite many engineers are of the highly conscientious type. I think you need a high level of orderliness to make sense of the chaos and come up with working analytical solutions. Quintessentially, what characterizes an engineer is the ability to take reality, write it down as equations and use said equations as a basis to manipulate reality. I bet the manosphere is heavily dominated by the nerdy engineering type for that reason. But that's really as far as it goes: I've met way too many founders with an engineering background to see engineers and entrepreneurs as exclusive archetypes.

As a sidenote, Jordan B Peterson argues it's openness that determines entrepreneurship, not conscientiousness. I'd say with engineers it's maybe an even split in terms of openness, though perhaps slightly more geared toward less openness.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg were both computer science majors (arguably a subset of engineering) and Musk was about to get his PhD in applied physics (aka engineering) before they dropped out. Bezos is an engineer by education. So is Steve Wozniak. And this extends beyond computing to all forms of technology. The entrepreneurs in any technical field are inevitably going to be predominantly engineers (or engineering types) who specialized in that field.

I don't know the statistics, but I'd be mind-blown if the vast majority of Silicon Valley startup founders (entrepreneurs) weren't the engineering type.

My general observation has been that engineers will become entrepreneurs only when they find the underlying idea intellectually exciting. Questor really nailed it on the head imo - there needs to be a challenging problem to solve.

This is different from the entrepreneur who is an entrepreneur because he wants to be an entrepreneur. The guy who is genuinely excited by interacting with people, influencing them, sales, marketing and MONEY. The shark-tank entrepreneur who comes up with a product that he/she finds useful himself and realizes other people might too. The brothers who come up with high-protein peanut butter for gym bros or the guy who used magnets to clip on his glasses to his shirt.

You've got the Shark Tank entrepreneur, you've got the high-tech engineering PhD entrepreneur (Intel founders were all STEM PhDs) and you probably got an entire spectrum of entrepreneurs in between.

That said, combining the two extremes really do make a formidable team. A friend of mine (electrical engineering undergrad, MBA) is the founder CTO of a company with hundreds of restaurants and bars as clients. Almost like clockwork, he's focused on the machine learning and app development aspect (the problem-solving component) while his two non-technical MBA co-founders are focused on the sales and PR aspect (the people interaction component).

So to say entrepreneurs and engineers are archetypes at odds...I don't see it. There's a hundred and one reasons to start a company and so there's also going to be a lot of different types of people who become entrepreneurs.

Quote:

There is also a level of truthfulness, and a bond, between company and customer when one is pushing boundaries and the other is supporting that ideal financially. An innovative company's public facade is for people who currently have no skin in the game. It is a mistake to think it is to pull the wool over the eyes of existing investors and customers. An innovative company needs loyal customers and investors much more than an established company. This is because these investors and customers will be asked to endure much more than a business really has the right to ask of them - and they will be asked to pay for the privilege. The only way to retain these customers and investors is through honesty, and a shared understanding of what you are working towards together.

I don't know if I buy this either. As far as I can tell, Amazon while pushing the boundaries of e-commerce, never had to ask its customers to pay for the privilege. In fact, Silicon Valley basically has a mantra of fail fast - either get a product working really well within 1-2 iterations or consider it a flop and move on. The worst thing for many SV types is to work for a startup that 5-10 years down the line hasn't accomplished anything big.

A friend of a friend story about a startup where the founders had to keep up user growth rates to secure further investment from VCs. They have no revenue, but the VCs are OK with it as long as they kept adding more users at a neck-breaking rate. And I think this is commonly the more likely situation - there are strong expectations from users and investors. A few bumps in the road is fine, but not for years and years on end.

That isn't to say there aren't exceptions and Musk/Tesla quite certainly is one. But EVEN he is running out of good will, if one is to look at the drop in stock prices. The only way to retain customers and investors is to actually produce before their patience runs out. Either that or basically scam them by dangling a new promise every time things aren't working out - power wall, solar singles, electric semi...it can only go on for so long before yes, indeed the people pull the wool back and see reality.

Your analysis regarding companies may indeed be true for Musk, but all-in-all I think that analysis and your comparison of entrepreneurs/engineers are too narrow to account for the multitude of startups that are out there.

[Genghis Khan]

Quote:

Suffice to say, a lot of the issues that I discovered back then which scared me shitless are no doubt part and parcel of what is driving Elon Musk in both Tesla and SpaceX. This was a guy who, before he founded Tesla, bought and totaled a McClaren F1. Somewhere between then and when Tesla was founded he had red-pill epiphany, which was around the same time for me. The smartest people alive today except for a few exceptions such as your Ray Kurzweils have become very concerned about the trajectory of population, resource use, and pollution on this planet.

Questor, I totally agree. No doubt Musk is highly intelligent and I too wouldn't be surprised if he hasn't realized the terrifying collision course we're on. I don't know if there's any stopping it, nor do I think I'll ever agree with how Musk went about it - creating a monster of a company with fingers in too many cash-burning pies (the cars, the semis now, the battery packs, buying SolarCity). As someone who likes the potential of renewable energies, I feel Tesla has become the public face of the entire renewable energy sector - and if Tesla goes bankrupt it'll set the entire industry back. Not to mention, I wonder how much investment money has gone into Tesla that potentially could've gone to other companies. Was Tesla a complete distraction? I don't know. But at the same time, at least he's trying something. Will it eventually be a stroke of genius or a complete folly. I guess only time will tell and we may not be alive when potentially our space-travelers discuss this. But damn, that cash-burn and manufacturing delays are terrifying as hell. My annoyance with him really might be because he doesn't have the bean-counter to balance him out.

[questor70]

Another thing about entrepreneurs is that they are risk-takers. That is the most "alpha" thing about them. SpaceX is a private company, for instance, therefore bootstrapped with his own money. Tesla also exists only because Musk dumped most of his fortune (at the time) into it when it was near death. He has explained multiple times how car startups have a dismal track record (look at Tucker, Delorean, etc...).

The alpha/beta paradigm starts to fail when talking about high-tech entrepreneurs because most of these guys are, superficially, beta. But inside they have the same sort of courage and grit as your Conan the Barbarian.

Also, in order to be a risk-taker you need to accept the possibility of failure and to be capable of bouncing back from it. People forget that Steve Jobs was FIRED from Apple and FAILED with NeXT. Some of the guts of NeXT went into OSX but he needed to wander the desert, so to speak, to build the maturity required to rebuild Apple when he came back. (He originally came back only as "interim" CEO, BTW).

In Musk's case, SpaceX has had some spectacular failures. The internet peanut gallery was brutal in mocking SpaceX when it was blowing up rockets left and right. It wasn't that long ago that they had that mysterious explosion on the pad. Had they not found the root cause out and solved it, that had the potential to kill SpaceX dead right there.

Grit. Persistence.

Most people get discouraged by the first sign of failure. That's why we don't amount to anything in life. Other than rare stories of natural prodigies like Mozart, most people do not proceed in a straight line to success. They have to fight tooth and claw and never give up.

[Icarus]

(11-18-2017 02:32 PM)911 Wrote:  

So you might have a hard time wrapping yourself around the idea that oil is a plentiful, replenishable and abiotic natural compound.

From Quora:

Does oil have a biological origin?

Ryan Carlyle's and Ron Maimon's answers are the most interesting, in my opinion. Ryan is a chemical engineer at an oil company and discredits abiotic oil. Ron is a theoretical physics grad school dropout who claims to have "solved" cold fusion; he supports the abiotic oil hypothesis. More cynically, Ryan supports his job while Ron supports his tribe (Tommy Gold was a physicist).

[ProGambler]

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969 Musk dog-whistles the Jewish media and various Jews get triggered. Interesting development.

[CynicalContrarian]

His new goth girlfriend is making him crazy.

[Higgs Bosun]

(05-27-2018 10:00 PM)ProGambler Wrote:  

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969 Musk dog-whistles the Jewish media and various Jews get triggered. Interesting development.

Interesting development. I think it's pretty clear Musk was not dog-whistling the JQ. He was replying to the facile claim that "powerful people" have a vested interest in tearing down the credibility of a "free media" (haha fucking made my day) because such a media would expose these powerful people's machinations.

Musk's reply "Heloo WHO owns the media??" is a rather on-point observation that it is in fact powerful people who own the media, and as such the claim that these people, who own the media, would be interesting in destroying the power of this thing that they own is idiotic.

The twitter jewboys of course know exactly who owns the media, and so they reflexively assumed Musk was attempting to raise the JQ. I'm equally sure Musk is well aware of the JQ himself, but I think he was trying to keep this discussion on a superficial level that doesn't broach the specifics. I've had this same conversation with people in real life who have no notion of the JQ, where my only goal is to redpill them a little bit by making them think about the fact that the Media has OWNERS, and those owners have INTERESTS, and so the Media reflects the INTERESTS of it OWNERS rather than being some kind of magical, disinterested arbiter of objective truth. I never even hint at the JQ in these discussions as that really isn't the goal. So long as they start thinking about the fact that what they see on the television or read in the papers is influenced by the self-interest of a rich fat fuck surveying the world from the 100th floor of a Manhattan office tower then 80% of the mission is accomplished whereas bringing up the JQ would add only the remaining 20% of the benefit while carrying 99% of the risk.

With that said, I think the jewboys will tread carefully here. Elon Musk is kind of a big deal now, and orchestrating his very public downfall around the JQ would probably be counterproductive to the point of such an endeavor.

[godfather dust]

Twitter Jews always fuck up and shine light on the JQ with their constant "he's dog whistling!" neurosis when the synagogue of Satan wasn't even mentioned.

[The Catalyst]

(05-27-2018 11:02 PM)godfather dust Wrote:  

Twitter Jews always fuck up and shine light on the JQ with their constant "he's dog whistling!" neurosis when the synagogue of Satan wasn't even mentioned.

Jewish anxiety seems related to progressive anxiety which seems related to narcissism's low self-esteem. Why do they always read into everything as a personal attack towards them and are always in survival mode. Panic and scrambling when if they can take a step back and think things through rationally...

[CynicalContrarian]

Heh.

[url=https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1000932039128965120][/url]

[Leonard D Neubache]

You Hitlerites know damn well where this is all going.

Tesla cars swerving "randomly" into semites is going to be the next holocaust!

#neverforget

[Teedub]

Elon Musk is a fucking boss. A genuine captain of industry, the likes of which we haven't seen for a very long time. Some would argue Gates, Jobs, and the Google guys, but for me they don't have the same aura.

[url=https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000557142863036416][/url]

And, while I generally avoid discussions about the JQ, their reactions to his 'Who owns the media' tweet are incredibly noteworthy. It's almost as if (since he didn't actually mention Jews) they're saying "Yeah we do own it, but don't tell anyone!". I'm sure posters above me have already said this, more eloquently.

As an aside, I've seen the phrase "dog whistling" on the forum and elsewhere and never actually known what it meant. I learned something new today.