Thinking anyone believes her.... Sure, hun. Santa Clause is coming. The Easter Bunny is real. There's going to be oil *forever, and the markets aren't rigged.

What's wrong with us pea-brained Marxist fuckwits is that we can do arithmetic. We know that eventually, oil gets too expensive and yields too little net energy to sustain an interdependent "just-in-time" web of supply chains capable of supporting 7 billion people, and we'd sort of like to to something about it before we all wonder where our next meal is coming from. Some of us, you know, don't trust capitalism to magically produce all those solution in real time just when needed. In fact, we don't believe in magic at all, which means that sometimes you actually need to think ahead, and beyond that which makes a momentary profit (e.g. highway systems, rural electrification, NASA, and the military).

The empire grew as long as there were new peoples (i.e. slaves and material resources) to be conquered at the periphery. This works for a while, but the area of a circle grows much faster than the circumference. You have to defend and maintain everything within the area of your empire, while the flow of peoples and goods coming in from the periphery shrinks in proportion as the empire grows.

So, Rome reached it's limits. Slowly. Its army eventually failed due to lack of resources and money. Without military force, the remaining group of rulers (i.e. Romans/invaders) developed the art of religious coercion and control, and the Roman empire eventually became the Holy Roman empire.

And the money continued to flow to Rome, for centuries....

While there might be trillions of barrels of "oil" in the Earth, little of that is both economically and energetically profitable. When enough investors figure this out, asset prices drop to zero or negative (Used oil platform anyone?) and financing for new equipment dries up as the returns look iffier and iffier.

So, the oil industry does what it does. It buys people at government agencies at the EIA to make the reports look less scary. It google-bombs the net by publishubg hundreds of little stories in small on-line publications where commenting is not present, to reassure naive investors that everything is OK, there will be oil forever and that business as usual will continue.

And it will, until the next economic crash.

You need a certain threshold of economic activity to maintain the current petroleum production industry. Since most of the cheap oil is gone, that threshold is very, very high compared to what it was 50 or 100 years ago when *cheap* oil was easily and widely available. The next economic crash will start the decline of the oil industry in a big way. It won't die for lack of oil. It will die for lack of money.

The one thing that would improve computer science is better use of the English language. I realize that many of the terms commonly used in CS are derived from mathematics, however, these terms often obfuscate rather than clarify. Terms like "regular expressions" or "virtual" when first encountered, sound like so much gibberish. After a few years, they become intuitive. So would Cantonese. They serve more as a barrier to entry than as useful tools for understanding.

This will be the epitaph of our civilization.

To discover that one of the USA's middle eastern client states might have been provided with the materials for nuclear weapons just in case the USA had to throw a bomb or two at a particularly stubborn oil producing country without making the USA itself an immediate target for nuclear retaliation.

When I was a student, I discovered that if you restricted your diet to grains, vegetables, eggs and cheap cheese, you could get through a week very cheaply. Crock pots were your friends.

When I was in school, the Hare Krishnas were still a thing. Free vegetarian dinner every Sunday (We called it "Sunday dinner at Uncle Harry's"). Hilarious mockery thrown in as an extra added bonus. They may be loonies, but the food was awesome.

in an ocean, what could go wrong? Except maybe typhoons, rogue waves and terrorists....

Every time I look at Yahoo's home page, I know in my heart that it is not only worth less than nothing, but is actively, positively evil. It makes People magazine look intellectual.

Beyond the local school board, is there anyone out there who actually thinks their vote counts for anything? Anyone?

Vote in anybody you want. Vote in your fucking dog. Money IS political power - the only kind that matters. If you think anything else, I'm pretty sure I've got a bridge to sell you.

If the same behavior occurred between two adults, the perps would be going to jail. It might be time to start adding that little life lesson to high schools.

When I went to high school. The spineless swine who get to be school administrators *always* punish the victims of bullying, not the perpetrators (usually, the popular kids or athletes). The victim is just one kid, usually powerless, who will be out of their life in a few years. The families of the perps are many, and they're often as dangerously aggressive as their spawn.

Going to the moon is expensive AND pointless. You have to do everything you do in Earth orbit, but it has to happen farther away from safety and at the bottom of a gravity well. There's absolutely nothing of value on the moon that couldn't be gotten cheaper by snagging bits off of a water bearing comet, or bringing that same water or up from Earth, for that matter, or mining a few local asteroids in-situ.

Look, gravity is *bad* and expensive. You don't go looking for it. You simulate it a bit with centrifugal force when necessary, but that's all.

In either a sudden collapse, or gradual decay, much will be lost. Let me remind you that when the Roman civilization decayed, technologies as simple as the making of cement were lost.

Cement.

Not exactly what we'd consider "high tech." It demonstrates just how fragile our scientific advancements are. They can be wiped out by a few generations of relative illiteracy for the great mass of survivors. In three generations, electric lights are a distant legend and those ubiquitous round copper disks find their most frequent use as quick, easily made arrowheads.

Watch your epistemology, now. It only proves that Australia can be conceived of. Still, a major discovery, since many of us weren't even convinced of that.