Life without oil: The Strait of Hormuz crisis is a warning for global systems under strain

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-05-29/life-without-oil-the-strait-of-hormuz-crisis-is-a-warning-for-global-systems-under-strain/

The Democrats won't stop Trump. A military coup could stop him, not saving democracy but replacing Trump's brand of fascism with a different one. That's the kind of scenario all you Americans out there should brace yourselves for. Similar things could happen to Putin when the war against Ukraine keeps dragging on like this.
Meanwhile, a profound crisis of the global economy is quite inevitable by now, with all those raw materials that haven't been delivered and all those industries that haven't been producing goods due to the lack of raw materials for months due to that Hormuz thing, you know.
At the same time, absolutely insane sums of money have been invested in anything that's connected with machine learning and automated problem solving, commonly known as "artificial intelligence". A lot of it is actually quite useful, many applications are also quite resource efficient, yet the biggest sums have been sunk into LLMs--Large Language Models, which are an impressive result of AI research, yet their training consumes so many resources, and the most popular models are comically huge so they only run on machines that cost more than a car. Those LLMs aren't very good at solving real tasks, but if they were significantly cheaper than human workers, the poor quality of their output might still be good enough for commercial industrial use. However, running LLMs at the current scale is so inefficient and expensive that it costs much, much more than employing actual human workers. The AI companies are basically giving their services away for peanuts while burning money. When the bubble pops, it will cause a major crisis of the world economy even without that Hormuz thing.
And then there's that football thing (or soccer for the Americunts), a world cup spread out over three countries, one of which is being rebuilt into a fascist dictatorship by a bunch of homocidally insane horror clowns, while the world is running low on jet fuel. What could go wrong?
Germany is being taken over by the Nazis again, only this time, they call themselves AfD because they're alt-right now. It's not as bad in the federal states that make up the old West (yet), but in the East, it doesn't seem like anybody can stop them.
Oh, and there's all the environmental destruction that's still going on. The Pacific is switching back to El Niño, so this year is going to be HOT.

Brace yourselves. Summer is coming.

#polycrisis #endofgrowrh #limitstogrowth #fcknzs #fckafd #football #summeriscoming

In conversation: Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy – Can modernity become sustainable?

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-05-19/in-conversation-dave-murphy-and-tom-murphy-can-modernity-become-sustainable/

If I had to guess what the main drivers of the AI bubble are, my first guesses are these:

1. The End of Economic Growth

We are getting closer and closer to the point where it will become impossible to even simulate growth; real net growth of the economy as a whole might be over already. All those huge investments in hypertrophic machine learning models that need huge servers to run, and in the computing centres with the hardware for training and running those models, are big money desperately trying to find a new growing market.

2. Science Fiction Mythology Running Wild

For many people nowadays, science fiction has replaced religion and traditional mythology, as we can see in the rise of UFO cults, one of the biggest ones being Scientology. Rich people, engineers, even scientists, are not immune to having irrational beliefs about our future. People who don't believe in any traditional gods somehow quite often still believe that humans can (and should) build artificial deities.

3. Unhinged Techbro Oligarchs

Oh boy, I'm not going to write anything about those men right now, other than that being completely insulated against the consequences of your own failures (because you can always pay your way out of everything) and being surrounded by people who constantly tell you that even your silliest rubbish ideas are brilliant (because you pay them) will break even the strongest mind.

4. Fairytales of Slavery (OK, I had to steal the title of my favourite Miranda Sex Garden album)

There is this idea of AI as obedient slaves that can never revolt, and since they aren't human, they don't get to have human rights, which of course means that nobody is going to ever set them free. All the people who wish they could own slaves like in the Good Old Days™ (whether the Southern US before the First Civil War [I think there will be a 2nd one] or in Ancient Rome or whatever your favourite historical setting is) can now dream of buying a robot.

5. Intelligence Supposedly Solves Everything

There is this strange belief about the power of intelligence, the idea that everything is just a problem that has a solution, and that we can always find any solution if we just apply enough intelligence. This also applies to problems where we already know the solution, have known them for decades, yet don't implement them because we don't like the consequences. Many people seem to think that even the laws of nature can be outsmarted with enough intelligence, which is quite silly IMHO. AI won't solve the polycrisis because climate chaos, species extinction, ecosystem degradation, resource depletion, pollution, etc., aren't first and foremost technological problems but systemic ones, the main driver behind the polycrisis is the fact that our global economy has become too big for this planet, and going to space is just bollocks because there is no biosphere anywhere we can reach, there is no place anywhere besides Earth that doesn't just kill us if we make a mistake. No amount of intelligence, whether artificial or natural, can do anything about the fact that we need to stop what we've been doing for centuries, or the Earth will stop us by letting us die. We can't continue what we've been doing, it's simply impossible. But we're trapped in a myth that stems from the Age of Enlightenment, the myth of reshaping the world through thinking, which just doesn't work. We're not the bosses of the universe or even just the Earth, we're part of the biosphere, part of the fauna, nothing but a bunch of very clever apes who believe in silly stories.

Unlike many of you, I am not against AI. I think AI is a very interesting research field, or rather, bundle of loosely related research fields. No, I am against Capitalism and against the myths of limitless growth and post-scarcity. Resources have always been scarce, resources will always be scarce, but we can still have a halfway decent life for everyone on the planet if we just share everything and abolish private property. At least for now; over the course of the coming decades, things will get dramatically worse no matter what we do because we're so deep in ecological overshoot that the Industrial Age will enter its phase of decline and collapse, just like any other civilisation before it. We can either apply the solutions that have been known and explored for decades, or we can keep running towards the cliff at increasing speed while trying to sprout magical wings that will in all likelihood never exist.

#ai #aibubble #πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis #capitalism #aireligion #aicult #limitstogrowth #intelligence

Oh boy. Plastics? Well, we need less of those anyways (and maybe actually recycle them?). Pharmaceuticals? Yeah, that's a BIG problem! Maybe manufacture them in smaller factories locally. As for fertilizer? Let's see... #Urea, #nitrogen and #ammonia -- all can come from urine! And sulphur? Grow more garlic and onions rather than use oil production byproducts. WTF!

"Around 30% of fertilizer products go through the Strait of Hormuz. Quatar is the world’s biggest producer of urea, a key input to fertiliser manufacture. The region also produces around 35% of the urea and 23% of the ammonia, another feedstock for nitrogenous fertiliser, which is exported globally. Sulphur, another component of fertiliser manufacture, is also produced in the region as a by-product of oil production."

https://northwestbylines.co.uk/news/war/the-hormuz-dry-run-life-without-oil-and-petrochemicals/

#USPol #WorldPol #PeakOil #LimitsToGrowth #Petrochemicals #LifeBeyondOil #BeyondOil #BigAg #RegenerativeAgriculture #SolarPunkSunday #LtG

Thanks to Malthus, we have focused on food as the limit to population growth. For some reason, we have failed to consider how demands on other resources may have limits that we cannot afford to cross.

The global sand crisis: it’s being used up faster than it can be replaced
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/12/global-sand-crisis-land-reclamation-extraction?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

#Ecosystems #ExtractiveIndustries #NaturalResource #LimitsToGrowth

In conversation: Dave Murphy and Tom Murphy – Can modern civilization ever be sustainable?

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-05-06/in-conversation-dave-murphy-and-tom-murphy-if-modernity-cant-last-forever-what-comes-next-2/