The good life tv comedy programme could this be done today

RAS

Why can't I thank Lotus-eater?

Lotus-eater

RAS wrote: »

Why can't I thank Lotus-eater?

It's a conspiracy <shifty eyes looking smiley>

RAS

Lotus-eater wrote: »

It's a conspiracy <shifty eyes looking smiley>

Yeah, the thanks button is back!

RAS

Ok, you are really off-topic but let's address this little rant.

cootambear wrote: »

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lotus-eater
I think it was the BBC who had a whole room full of push bike aficionados and their bikes connected up to a houses electricity supply, I think it was about 60 people, all that was just to power one house and they struggled sometimes. At the end they were all done in.

Which just goes to show the total inefficiency of brute force labour. What should we use to build our next hospital? Diggers, cranes, drills, and cement mixers, or 10,000 chained slaves under the command of the Pharoes?

We all know how efficient oil and other carbon fuels are, which is why we used words like horsepower to describe their output.

The issue is that diggers, modern cranes and drils and cement mixers all require the use of increasingly costly liquid fuels or electricity.

This just shows the amount of energy we use in our everyday life. Lets face it, we've become power hungry on cheap and easy power, aka, oil and gas. We've squandered the easy oil on stupid things that we shouldn't have done

Oil that is now easy wasn`t easy 10 years ago.

Let's get this straight - oil will not run out quickly. What is running out very quickly is the easy oil; it used to take one barrel of oil to produce 100 barrels or more but a lot of modern oil fields require one barrel of oil to produce 6 barrels of oil. So it is 20 times harder to get oil now than fifty years ago.

What stupid things? Doubling life expectancy.

The live expectancy of Stone Age humans was about 43-45 years. In many parts of the modern world it is now lower. The massive increase in life expectancy in the Victorian and Edwardian era in the UK was a function of improved hygiene, water and housing. The next big boost was the development of antibiotics.

Eliminating smallpox.

Vaccination was a 19th century development. Its use world wide could have been acheived much earlier if the political will had been there.

Putting a man on the Moon?

Political ego-tripping

Plenty of cheap food?

I agree that households pay a smaller percentage of their income on food; but given the high levels of diet related illness in our society, I am not sure that is so clever.

Domestic appliances abolishing household drudgery?

There is quite a lot of research suggesting that appliances have done little to reduce the time taken to complete household tasks and typically families now require two incomes to afford the appliances.

Tractors abolishing the back breaking toil of the peasant?

Having read " The worm forgives the plough", and grown up in a rural community, I agree in part. The most productive farmers are those with low inputs, despite what DEFRA keep saying. The exact point when mechanical inputs cease to improve efficiency are not yet known, because all the research has been on monetary inputs.

and now we are running out of time to get something sorted out, to continue our life the way we know it.

No we are not. The end of the world is not nigh.

Certainly it ain't, but its capacity to support increasing numbers of increasingly extractive humans is in question. If we messed up completely the world would go on quite happily.

Y2K anyone? Like fools we had made the computers our masters and the sky would fall in.

And like fool we made our whole lifestyles dependent on a number of technologies that require increasing amounts of reducing resources.

All the doom mongers predictions are based on resources identified now, technologies we have now.

The most expert scientists in the world think we have 10-20 years, which is not a lot of time to develop new technologies and create completely new infrastuctures to utilise them. I am trying to remember how long research has been going on into nuclear fusion - fifty years or more and where has that got us?

They never take into account human creativity.

Not sure who "they" is but there are actually a lot of creative people out there already trying to address these issues.

Humans are not the problem, we are the problem solvers.

We are both and as our numbers increase more and more of the former.

Despite having friends that work in the nuclear industry, I can't stand it and I hope we don't go that way.

We`ve had it for 50 years, and it will continue to grow and become more efficient.

Farming wise, I don't know what the answer is, Cuba managed it without oil, but it involved a change to the entire way of life for the population, I can't see us doing that without a massive disaster.

I know what the answer is if we dont invest in energy resources and development - mass starvation.

Lotus-eater is not suggesting we do anything other than invest in energy resources and development, massively. The scary bits are that these need to be in technologies that do not use fuels that are non-renewable and dwindling fast, and uranium happens to be one of those.

However, thankfully I dont think the greens have quite that much influence - yet.

I do not know any greens who weant anythign other than the mssive development of new energy technologies.

Cuba got oil from the USSR until it collapsed and gets it now from Veneuzala. The hiatus in the middle was not caused by an oil shortage but by a US economic blockade.

well since the US economic blockade caused the oil shortage, what is your point here?

cootambear

I wont use perjorative words like rant to describe your post, but it certainly has got a lot of facts wrong.

We all know how efficient oil and other carbon fuels are, which is why we used words like horsepower to describe their output.

The issue is that diggers, modern cranes and drils and cement mixers all require the use of increasingly costly liquid fuels or electricity.

Let's get this straight - oil will not run out quickly. What is running out very quickly is the easy oil; it used to take one barrel of oil to produce 100 barrels or more but a lot of modern oil fields require one barrel of oil to produce 6 barrels of oil. So it is 20 times harder to get oil now than fifty years ago.

All all that is economical is `easy oil`.

How can one barrel of oil make 100 barrels, barring Jesus performing a miracle?

I think we are all familiar with the law of supply and demand. Re oil, when prices rise, oil that was formerly deemed uneconomic to drill now becomes profitable. This then levels price spikes.

Moreover, it drives refinement of technique that makes that oil even easier to get. Oil price rises also drive innovation for methods to extract from other types of supply that were not considered economical. For example, just one of many new potential sources of oil is shale oil. Estimates of reserves are 1 trillion barrels. Estimates of extraction costs of course vary from field to field, from $90 dollars a barrel to just $12. This isnt a Buck Rogers vision of the future, extraction technology is being developed right now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics

The live expectancy of Stone Age humans was about 43-45 years.

Sorry, it was twenty

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Life_expectancy


The current world average is 65 (2009 est).





In many parts of the modern world it is now lower.

In poor countries that have not had the economic growth that the Greens wish to deny them of.

The massive increase in life expectancy in the Victorian and Edwardian era in the UK was a function of improved hygiene, water and housing. The next big boost was the development of antibiotics.
.
Vaccination was a 19th century development. Its use world wide could have been acheived much earlier if the political will had been there.

I agree about political will. The misanthropy of the political elite, its retreat from the concept of progress, is what is holding us back from making the world a better place.


These technologies - for that is what they are - were the result of rapid economic growth, and you cant get that without energy. Then as now doom mongers were saying that there were too many people. Then as now they were saying we were running out of energy. Not to miss out on the bandwaggon, some are even predicting the doomsday of `peak uranium`.

Putting a man on the Moon?

Political ego-tripping

There is no doubt that one of the major drivers of the moon landing was cold war competition. But is competition neccessarily a bad thing? Competitive exams encourage lazy students to get out of bed and study to develop their critical faculties and get degrees.

Competition between scientists unlocked the DNA sequence leading to better treatments for inherited diseases. And what of nature? The laws of evolution state that plants and animals develop in competition with one another (please abandon any myths of `harmony`).

There was more to the Moon than that. It was an era of can do, not cant do due to `health and safety`. An era of grabbing a problem by the balls and fixing it. We are explorers by nature. To deny us the cosmos is to go against nature.

Plenty of cheap food?


I agree that households pay a smaller percentage of their income on food; but given the high levels of diet related illness in our society, I am not sure that is so clever.

We have enough food to feed the world, sorry I think thats a good thing. Sure many people are overweight, but they do have a choice about what they put in their mouths. In famine, people dont have a choice. Apologies for the cutnpaste.

`Malnutrition results from food shortage within weeks. Children fail to grow and cannot learn in school, and both adults and children experience weight loss, lack of energy, and decreased work ability. Permanent blindness can result from vitamin A deficiency that accompanies a deterioration of dietary quality. Malnutrition also puts people at a high risk of dying from common infectious illnesses. Diseases such as measles, malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea are the most common causes of death during famine. Psychological impacts result from fear and uncertainty about having enough to eat or to feed one's family. people resort to desperate measures (such as stealing) in order to eat, or when old conflicts are renewed due to some groups having more food than others. Losing land ownership and selling valuable assets such as livestock, jewelry, or other goods can prevent families from recovering financially after a famine`.

http://www.enotes.com/public-health-encyclopedia/famine

Famine or plenty? I know what I prefer.

Domestic appliances abolishing household drudgery?

There is quite a lot of research suggesting that appliances have done little to reduce the time taken to complete household tasks and typically families now require two incomes to afford the appliances.

I wash my clothes in a washing machine, not the sink. I clean my carpet with a hoover, not a carpet sweeper. I often eat microwave meals, rather than spend hours preparing a meal. I use flash all in one for surfaces rather than sand soap and elbow grease. Some people have a dishwaher(I dont). I really cant see how this doesnt save time annd effort,

Two incomes are required these days for the main reason that houses and therefore mortgages - are so expensive. Building on the so called `green belt` would slash the price of housing.

In 1969 Which? magazine’s best buy Hoover Automatic 3221h washing machine cost £88 (adjusted for inflation that would be about £1,044 today) while dishwashers, freezers, even central heating were still out ofreach luxuries for many. A typical 22in colour television set would have cost about £300 (£3,500 today).
[/I][/B]

Tractors abolishing the back breaking toil of the peasant?

Having read " The worm forgives the plough", and grown up in a rural community, I agree in part. The most productive farmers are those with low inputs, despite what DEFRA keep saying. The exact point when mechanical inputs cease to improve efficiency are not yet known, because all the research has been on monetary inputs.

By low inputs I take you too mean less machinery? Are you saying that a horse and plough is more efficiennt than a tractor?

No we are not. The end of the world is not nigh.

Certainly it ain't, but its capacity to support increasing numbers of increasingly extractive humans is in question.

Back to malthusserism again. The theory that has predicted a population limit time and time again, and has always failed. As a throery it has to be the worlds worst.

If we messed up completely the world would go on quite happily.

As I have said before, the Earth is completely indifferent to us because it doesnt have a brain. I think what you and I mean by messing up is completely different though.


And like fool we made our whole lifestyles dependent on a number of technologies that require increasing amounts of reducing resources.

Most of these resources are recycled and always have been. Iron goes to the scrapyard to be sold for remelting

If you check the figures the real cost adjusted for inflation of resources like metals etc is much less than it was 100 years ago. And though it might not feel like it due to the heavy tax on petrol, so is oil. The real price of oil has been on a plateau for 30 years now, diregarding temporary spikes like the invasion of Iraq.

Please take a moment to connsider what I am about to say.

Technology is not about consuming more resources. It is about finding new resources. It is about using them more efficiently so that we need less. It is about finding different ways to do things that rely less on resources that are scarce.

Let me give just one example. The microchip. It makes your car more fuel efficient. It powers computers that allow you to shop online, saving fuel. It allows you to see your family face to face in australia without having to travel 12,ooo miles. It allows you to send emails rather than letters. It gives you access to millions of books, rather than traipsing to the library. It can even do the humblest thing like help you find your lost dog.

It costs pennies. Why? Because the `resource it consumes`, is, sand.

All the doom mongers predictions are based on resources identified now, technologies we have now.

The most expert scientists in the world think we have 10-20 years, which is not a lot of time to develop new technologies and create completely new infrastuctures to utilise them. I am trying to remember how long research has been going on into nuclear fusion - fifty years or more and where has that got us?

The `most expert scientists in the world` think no such thing.
Nuclear fusion has had little resource input because it is non considered viable at present. Nuclear fission has been around for 50 years and continues to get more efficient.


They never take into account human creativity.

Not sure who "they" is

the doom mongers

but there are actually a lot of creative people out there already trying to address these issues.

Which is the point I`ve been trying to make


Humans are not the problem, we are the problem solvers.

We are both and as our numbers increase more and more of the former.

More people means more problem solvers




Lotus-eater is not suggesting we do anything other than invest in energy resources and development, massively. The scary bits are that these need to be in technologies that do not use fuels that are non-renewable and dwindling fast, and uranium happens to be one of those.

However, thankfully I dont think the greens have quite that much influence - yet.

I do not know any greens who weant anythign other than the mssive development of new energy technologies.

They oppose nuclear expansion and new oil technologies.

well since the US economic blockade caused the oil shortage, what is your point here?

I was making the point that Cubas oil shortage was not caused by depleted oil reserves, but by a US blockade.

cootambear

Thats it, I`m taking another week off.

cootambear

I am not ignoring your post lotus, I will reply next week.

Lotus-eater

cootambear wrote: »

I am not ignoring your post lotus, I will reply next week.

I can't wait

rhiwfield

These "she said that, he said this" multiple-point posts are becoming impossible to follow

So expanding on just one point that Cootambear has not understood.

Ras said "What is running out very quickly is the easy oil; it used to take one barrel of oil to produce 100 barrels or more but a lot of modern oil fields require one barrel of oil to produce 6 barrels of oil. So it is 20 times harder to get oil now than fifty years ago. All all that is economical is `easy oil"

And Cootambear replied: "How can one barrel of oil make 100 barrels, barring Jesus performing a miracle?"

I thought RAS's point was pretty clear, especially as he said "produce" and not "make" but to explain further. In days when oil was found in large, shallow fields the energy required to extract 100 barrels of oil was as low as just one barrel. As the megafields found 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago inexorably decline (despite the best efforts of new technology to prolong production), we are left trying to find and extract much more difficult to access oil. As a result the energy required to extract the oil has steadily increased. Dont know which fields RAS's 1:6 ratio relate to but the trend of markedly reduced efficiency of extraction is very clear.

So what does this mean? If the ratio has dropped from 1:100 to say 1:6, (it will be somewhat higher than that for many existing fields) and continues to drop in accordance with the trend line, then at some point the ratio will be 1:1. It then becomes no longer worthwhile to extract what's left.Well before that point is reached, oil prices will rise and oil availablity will become a source of major friction between governments. Perhaps we are in the early stages of that end game.

One of the features of oil is how it has become all pervasive in modern society, there is very little made that does not use oil directly or indirectly.

Many of the posts on here relate to a life of reduced reliance on oil, less need for transport of food, reduced use of fertilisers and pesticides, acceptance of a simpler, less consumptive way of life and a greater use of renewable, sustainable energy and materials. A life that doesnt create pollution and environmental degradation. A life where people behave responsibly and consider themselves stewards of the land rather than smash and grab exploiters.

Is that such a shameful thing to wish for?

COOLTRIKERCHICK

anyway... back at the ranch:rotfl:

remember a few years ago there was a programme with sue somebody or other.. they went back and try and live on ratinos during the war.. it was light hearted... and was just showing people how it was like living through those times.... well they are doing on on the good life..... by living in suburbia and trying grow food etc in the back garden..