he mentioned something along the lines about AI exponentially driving productivity upwards

He literally prefaced that with “even if we assume the most technoptimist predictions about what AI is going to be able to do soon, which I don’t”. So he isn’t talking about the future realities of AI, but bracketing AI as not changing his conclusions in the rest of the video “even if” the absurdist fantasies of AI are true. So maybe you need to work on your reading comprehension skills as well.

On Nuclear EROI, your linked paper never calculates an EROI for nuclear, it just lifts a result from an obsolete study a decade before, which has since been refuted (in the very article my article discusses). So you’ll need to try harder. But this time read my article on it, and comment on that article, not here. The EROI of nuclear is not a subject here. So discussions of it should occur there. But make sure you are informed (actually read my article and its sources) before commenting there.

You seem not to understand how causal science works.

Well, I am not (yet) a scientist by any means, so you are fair to point that out. I am basically just triggered because in his extrapolation he mentioned something along the lines about AI exponentially driving productivity upwards. So I thought it was odd that he included that in his analysis and didn’t mention the most obvious factor which would drive the costs further up instead. Besides that, I think the video is very well made.

That isn’t the reason.

According to this paper EROI of nukes is 5-15. Even that estimate is too high in my armchair opinion. Every single nuclear station in the US runs on government subsidies. The ones that do not go out business very quickly. If that’s not the reason why, then I have no idea. Nuclear energy is always amazing on paper, but is far less stellar when it comes to real world impletentation. I guess we are only “20 years away from nuclear fusion”, aren’t we? 😉

Ecology affects all sectors. The video is about why certain sectors have diverged and what “should be done” in result of that singular fact; not “all the problems arising across the entire economy.” In science, you isolate a variable and control for the rest, so you can talk about the one thing you are talking about. That’s what he did. You seem not to understand how causal science works. That impression is reinforced by the fact that you seem not to understand the video, which is about cost disease and offshoring, not “reductions in efficiency.”

And that impression is further reinforced when you said…

if it was economically feasible, Earth would have been covered with nuclear stations long ago.

That isn’t the reason. Making up stories from the armchair without checking the actual history of why things are the way they are signals someone who isn’t taking any of this seriously.

Ecological factors would be one of the forces affecting the economy, the interplay of which results in whatever tendencies we might observe. The fact that EROI alone doesn’t explain the chart doesn’t make it irrelevant. I’d argue his explanation is incomplete without considering ecological factors — they are the backbone of our society. I was especially triggered by his extrapolation of the chart — his prediction contradicts not only the known laws of ecology, but also doesn’t even follow from the chart itself, as some of the sectors of economy denoted by the blue lines have been already showing signs of reductions in efficiency.

Speaking about nuclear, if it was economically feasible, Earth would have been covered with nuclear stations long ago. Didn’t happen, won’t happen — EROI of nuclear energy is laughably low.

The drop in fossil EROI is outside his explanatory window, so it cannot be causal to anything he is discussing.

Moreover, EROI is not productivity. In the period he is explaining, more, not less, fossil energy became available, which is why the economic growth has been largely steady. That cannot explain the chart he is explaining, as the divergence happened at the same time as that, so it can’t have caused it.

Drops in EROI only become a “problem” when it eats up the economy, i.e., you have to stop making and doing stuff to divert that energy to extraction, processing, and distribution. That has never happened yet. Our economy keeps growing; it has not shrunk, least of all due to lost EROI. So it won’t be relevant to his analysis.

But for my take on EROI in general (which may be out of date now as the EROI of renewables has increased since I published it, but I don’t think enough to reverse its conclusions): The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear (and tangentially: We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming).

Otherwise, thanks for recommendations! I am really enjoying the Three Arrows channel so far. Looking forward to getting more recommendations from you.

“My point is just that Brexit needs to be viewed as a localized fascist phenomenon, in line with Euroskepticism which is of course omnipresent among fascists (back during Brexit I was talking to American Nazis who just parroted all the nonsense). “

I actually would say I’m not so different from you on this, it’s definitely mostly a right wing project and the vast majority of the far right backed it and a lot of the more “moderate” Brexit supporters, or “libertarian” ones, like Daniel Hannan have basically revealed they’re fascist adjacent at best. Brexit was a deeply reactionary project at its heart, which is why Lexit (Left wing Brexit) was mistaken.

I think a lot of left wing Brexiters also were paleoleftists, people like George Galloway and Kate Hoey are quite good examples of this, i.e they’re leftists who look back rather than forwards and are quite conservative (well a bit reactionary on cultural issues in Hoey and Galloway’s case).

It may well be that right wing Euroskepticism is another one of Enoch Powell’s poisonous legacies, as he was the only major Tory to be against joining and actually who campaigned to leave in the first referendum in 75.

“The challenge Britain has is that it is relatively conservative and so, while its fascist tendencies can seem softer in some regards because they are more institutional, it also means that the fascist tendencies go deeper.”

I think this is a curious comment (in a good way). I think it’s definitely true that there is an instutitionalised far right in the UK, so I’d agree to a large extent. One thing about the Tories, is that they have always been a big tent party, it was true in the 19th century where you had more moderate, sensible people like Benjamin Disraeli and you had out and out reactionaries. In a sense, because the party’s aim is to keep the social structures etc intact (and the Good Old Boys in charge), the difference is how you do it, i.e do you make concessions, or do you really hammer down on the people who want change.

I guess too there is the debate as to whether you see reactionaries and fascists as the same thing or not. I think the modern far right has elements of both ideologies (the hyper-nationalism, plus the populist elements, the cult of the leader from the Italian and German fascists in the 30s, I think from the 19th and early 20th century reactionaries you have the idea of turning the clock back to some imagined past, at least a pretence of liking traditional institutions like the monarchy).

I think your comment about institutionalisation applies to a lot of Europe generally. Certainly in Germany, lots of fascists were hiding in the CDU until pretty recently, when some split to form AFD. Plenty of people who should have been prosecuted in Nuremberg weren’t and even chaired NATO (Speidel and Heusinger) to give a couple of examples.

In France too, the vast majority of Pétainistes didn’t get punished post WW2 and many were involved in the coup that ended up putting De Gaulle in Power. Certainly, the far right has always had a big presence in the French army and the police.

Spain is a very interesting case, because of how the transition worked. The mainstream right wing party, the PP, basically was created by Franquistas who accepted the Democratic Transition in the 70s, and was created by quite a senior Franco-era minister, “Manuel Fraga”. However, the have generally been against things like the “Historical Memory” law, i.e that makes it easier for the relatives of people shot in the civil war to find their loved ones remains (they did vote to condemn the coup in 2002). It’s also worth noting that until the present government, nobody, nominally left or right, dared move Franco’s body from the “Valle de los caídos” monument. Of course, that was never enough for the real nutters and they formed Vox in the 2010s.

Yep. We have the modern free speech and free religion rights we have thanks to leftists, journalists and some courageous Christians.

Oh, I don’t think you explained yourself badly, and to be fair I would need to actually see the content you are discussing because it is wholly possible they framed the issue badly in a way that your criticism applies to.

My point is just that Brexit needs to be viewed as a localized fascist phenomenon, in line with Euroskepticism which is of course omnipresent among fascists (back during Brexit I was talking to American Nazis who just parroted all the nonsense). The challenge Britain has is that it is relatively conservative and so, while its fascist tendencies can seem softer in some regards because they are more institutional, it also means that the fascist tendencies go deeper. That having been said, the fact that the Tories never are tolerably racist for the far-right and the far-right need to make an endless carousel of new parties with repeated electoral viability challenges is a good sign.

I suspect that what may be going on (and I think you alluded to this in the other thread) is that British culture views the ugliest fascism as gauche and low-class.

“Really? I’ve never once encountered even the dullest breadtuber who would actually say that. They may imply that from focus of coverage, but, obviously, Trump was rising at that time, so I doubt they would think fascism was exclusive to the UK context.”

It’s not a majority of Remain voters in all fairness, but you definitely see this in UK social media, not so much the breadtubers themselves as people who phone into people like James O’Brian’s show, or people writing comments in facebook. I think there is definitely a feeling that the grass is greener on the other side. A good example of someone with this kind of mentality is Michael Lambert, who isn’t a major youtuber, but a good illustration of this way of thinking. I think “Maximilien Robespierre” is another example of this, who ironically is happy to live in Italy under Meloni.

“And, yes, the Brexit issue is complex, but a lot of that complexity slips away in the noise. The reason it went through is fascism. Pure and simple. There are lefties who are EU-skeptical enough to want out, for reasons I find incredibly silly as a leftie myself, but they weren’t the ones driving the bulk of that conversation.”

I’d say the majority of Brexit voters were conservatives or reactionaries and the Ashcroft polling seems to confirm this. It was definitely mostly a right wing thing. I would say the EU didn’t do itself any great favours before the vote. The “Lexit” vote wasn’t insignificant, it wasn’t the biggest driver, but I think if it could have been reduced it might have been enough to prevent it.

“And, yes, obviously it’s not just Farage, but you’re making a mistake there too. This is a diathesis-stress issue. Men like Trump and Farage stumble onto a circumstance, fuel ready for the flame… but the resulting fire is indeed on them, precisely because it wasn’t burning until they started it. And these fascists don’t just start the fire, they feed it. Without fascist grifters riding the wave and extending fascist politics, a lot of that rage would die down into a more quiescent state, ready to be reactivated only some time later. There is an incredible artificiality to fascist politics that we can never forget”

Oh I agree with that, I think that’s very clear, you could apply that to the Le Pens in France or Meloni in Italy. I definitely think the fascists are responsible for it, I must have explained myself very badly, I think Farage, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson have done a lot of damage in the Anglosphere particularly.

“the fact that Brexit and isolationism has been working is relevant, and it’s not really due to isolationist tendencies, as indicated by every one of these movements becoming maximally interventionist when it suits them. It’s just racism, and religious chauvinism, and xenophobia. They are afraid of a multicultural world and they are stupid enough to think closing free markets will put that genie back into that bottle.”

Oh no doubt, none of these people are really isolationists. I would love to see a UK government that actually did intervene less, I think the UK is massively deluded (the politicians mostly, but some of the public too) about being a great power.