[K-Dog]

What conspiracy accounts for someone of high moral fiber and expectations as well as experience deciding to risk it all?

I can't believe this is serious.  When I was 12 years old I believed stuff like that too.  Besides which there was nothing to risk,  much more to risk by defying the wishes of the men in black.  Orders of magnitude more risk.  Risk or a nice gift. 🎁  Maybe they told her that national security was at stake.  That going with the flow would save western civilization.  Going with the flow feels like it does.  The warm fuzzy feeling of doing what somebody important tells you to do.  Makes it not hard to do.  Like you are part of things.

MSN.COM • 2026-02-03

Sickening Jeffrey Epstein autopsy photos reveal staggering neck injuries

Images from Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy documentation exposed the devastating severity of the convicted sex trafficker's neck trauma.



"The postmortem examination revealed that Epstein's alleged suicide resulted from multiple fractured bones in his neck. While bone breaks can occur in hanging cases, forensic specialists note they appear more frequently in strangulation homicides. The report documented that investigators observed numerous "hemorrhages" extending from Epstein's lips to his eyebrows."

[TDoS]

Can't disagree with this meme. Oh...but Epstein wasn't a duck.

The analogy doesn't reference & compare Epstein, it references & compares Suicide.  I taught Analogies on the LSAT for The Princeton Review.  You would not have scored well.

RE

Really? Well...an interesting factoid. And I doubt the Duck analogy is limited to just suicide. Never had any teachers or instructors from Princeton....I learned from Harvard grads. Lawyers, mathematicians, and a very particular resource geologist running an E&P.

His story on why he accepted Harvard was very interesting. He interviewed with several Ivys, including Princeton, Yale and  Brown. Stanford just for fun. He said they all touted the quality of their professors and their accomplishments, how many Nobel prizes, their facilities, accomplishments, and future potential.

Harvard didn't say a single word about anyone else. Those at the top of the heap don't have to pimp themselves.

Among my graduating class in high school, the most popular destination were the military academies. Out of the 40 of us 8 went to Annapolis, 1 to West Point and 1 more to Air Force Academy. Everyone I've ever worked with from BCG were Harvard grads. No more than another 10 in my high school went to various Ivys.

Deffeyes got his PhD from Princeton. You know....Mr "Peak Oil Happening Thanksgiving Day 2005".

Forgive my looking askance at what anything related to Princeton. Other than they get kudos for having Einstein and Oppenheimer hanging around at one point.

 

[TDoS]

What conspiracy accounts for someone of high moral fiber and expectations as well as experience deciding to risk it all?

I can't believe this is serious.

Well, I haven't found any evidence that the medical examiner was in on a conspiracy. Have you? The only part of your quote that matters is:

"forensic specialists note they appear more frequently in strangulation homicides"

Being one of those experts that chips in, in my field of expertise, I am quite willing to allow another most certainly certified expert venture their official opinion and in order to contradict it, you need more than "more frequently".

When I was 12 years old I believed stuff like that too.

Not sure what "like that too?" is referring to. That accredited experts know more about their topic than amateur hour folks?

The three of us here are all smart guys. None of us are forensic pathologists. I don't argue with you about EE issues, no one here is qualified to argue with me about the geosciences, and I don't tend to argue with RE about genetics and microbiology stuff.

<shrug>

So....what does another forensic pathologist say? "Appear more frequently" isn't even a reasonable statistic expression for anyone educated on calculating probabilities...which is where experts come in to make the call. One fully capable professional did that. So....how have you discredited HER or involved HER in your conspiracy angle?

And I wasn't 12 when I learned how to do statistical investigations, so you must have been quite precocious as a youngster. I was took busy learning to feed my family back at that age by hunting and trapping and whatnot. World class statistical analysis and stochastic modeling didn't happen until after I was out of college, learned it as a lark.

[RE]

Those at the top of the heap don't have to pimp themselves.   

Then you must be at the bottom of the heap.  You've barely taken a breath between self pimping posts for the last decade.

RE

[TDoS]

Those at the top of the heap don't have to pimp themselves. 

Then you must be at the bottom of the heap.  You've barely taken a breath between self pimping posts for the last decade.

RE

I would say last 7 years. Name anyone else who solved all future peak oils. What is amusing is how by the time I did it, those who couldn't, had managed to discredit the entire concept, and themselves, in the process.  And what I had done went virtually unnoticed. Sort of.

[RE]

Name anyone else who solved all future peak oils.

Nobody has "solved" Peak Oil, anymore than they have solved the problems of the Atmospheric CO₂, the Federal Deficit, Palestinian Genocide, Falling Birthrates or Donald Trump.

RE

[TDoS]

Name anyone else who solved all future peak oils.

Nobody has "solved" Peak Oil, anymore than they have solved the problems of the Atmospheric CO₂, the Federal Deficit, Palestinian Genocide, Falling Birthrates or Donald Trump.

RE

You are quite incorrect. There were 3 up and running systems that I am aware one, one commercial, one available for a price out of Palo Alto, and the one I was asked to build. You can buy results from the first two if you know who has them, but not mine. These can't be the only 3, but are just the ones I have access to, have built, or been asked to stress test before commercial sales.

The first commerical system was deterministic in nature, working from central tendency inputs, delivering scenario based answers...."if I assume this price path, what is production potential, and for what length of time". Completely manual, price path of hydrocarbons being the only input variable. Maybe you could control the probability estimate in countries that supplied them under the PRMS system.

The second is an LP, working with proprietary economic assumptions and some really poor resource assumptions, simplistic resource cost curves, deterministic in terms of volumes. Lacking any decent engineering component, building stochastic outputs primarily based on variable price paths. Primrily econometric in nature, not enough detail on the resource side.

Mine is stochastic, based on the three main moving dimensions to the peak oil problem. Lets call them #1, #2 and #3. In order to solve it for any two of these dimensions, you assume a deterministic answer to the third. You iterate on the two until you have a 3 dimensional equilibrium. You change #1 slightly, and do it again. And again. And again. You develop an envelope of performance for the combination of a single changing variable. Then you make #2 dimension the changing variable, and iterate. And then #3. You then have a database of substantial size containing as many pertubations of the underlying data as you'd like...or are willing to wait for. It does take awhile.

The trick wasn't in the overall design, I use this technique for quite a few routines, the trick was in then assembling all this data into a matrix of outcomes for a given input that was possible to display to the user, and not screwing it up with cross correlations and weird dependencies. Once you ran it initially, you tracked down combinations that were ridiculous, and began to fine tune the working input ranges in order for a high price to intersect reserves and resources at a country level, not get too crazy over kerogen, stuff like that.

Call it teething problems. Took 6 months to figure out how to use it intelligently and display the statistical outcomes for any given input assumption. What does world oil look like with high prices, low resources, political instability in OPEC, wars, higher taxes in which countries or region, Venezuela comes off the board because no one wants heavy crude, how much oil can come from Russian LTO in the Bazhenov and under what geopolitical circumstances and resulting price consequences, and so on and so forth.

Took 2 years to design. Another year to build. Six months to debug. Cost mid 7 figures. After debugging and testing it with our own scenarios of whatifs, spewing out scenarions and liklihoods based on what WE thought were interesting scenarios, we built a control system on top of it. The user gave the control system a global volume path, and it would work backwards to figure out the price combinations necessary to figure out where the oil and gas comes from (it did 8 hydrocarbon products I believe). You put in a given price for all countries for all 8 products, and it would take everything it already knew and reverse calculate out all the volumes by country. And if you ran it bunches of times, you could develop a range of outcome for all products and prices based on given input ranges of prices or volumes.

Please. Didn't solve peak oil. And by the time it was solved, prices had crashed and nobody even cared anymore. I still run it on occasion, just for fun to see how it looks compared to what happened since its completion. Nearly all top level global run results did come up with an interesting answer, one in particular that tended to cross all scenarios, or all reasonable, non war, non political nonsense scenarios anyway. And these years later, we are approaching that point. If it pans out, I will be quite happy and consider the model validated.

Didn't even need the PhD Harvard mathematician involved, but he did pimp the idea to the right people to get the money.   

Makes the Limits to Growth models look like a Model T if I do say so myself.

[RE]

That's not the problem with Peak Oil.  The problem is that it's a finite resource essential to the operation of industrial civilization there currently is no good replacement for and we are running short of it.

Currently, the only "solution" is to take countries like Cuba and cutting off their supply and sending them back to the Stone Age, thus resulting in a rapidly dwindling number of living Cubans and an increasing number of dead ones.  The solution  is not too popular with Cubans, nor is it popular with Ukrainians. Palestinians, Somalians, Venezuelans and numerous other countries currently at war over this finite resource.

RE

[K-Dog]

That's not the problem with Peak Oil.  The problem is that it's a finite resource essential to the operation of industrial civilization there currently is no good replacement for and we are running short of it.

Concern about the actual peak is like looking at a tree and not seeing the forest.

You can add Americans who have no medical care to your list of unfortunates.

Ukrainians. Palestinians, Somalians, Venezuelans and Joe Six Pack.

NEWREPUBLIC.COM • 2026-02-05

Trump Just Gave Us the Worst January Since the Great Recession

Layoffs have surged to a nearly 20-year high, as job openings plummet.

[TDoS]

That's not the problem with Peak Oil.  The problem is that it's a finite resource essential to the operation of industrial civilization there currently is no good replacement for and we are running short of it.

Of course. The same as every other important non-renewable resource. But for some reason folks got their knickers in a twist over this particular one, and made it popular. And then fled like scalded cats when it turns out they didn't know even the most basic things about a single non-renewable resource.

I viewed it as a technical challenge that fit my skill set, as I already knew folks were getting it wrong 20 years ago, if not more, and took a crack at it.

I'm not a doomer, a class of folks that put the same level of thought into peak oil as they did Planet X and the Mayan calendar. I didn't feel like becoming an astronomist or learning ancient Mayan language to figure out if those were ridiculous as well, so I took advantage of the skillset I had.

Turns out it works well with other econometric models.

Currently, the only "solution" is to take countries like Cuba and cutting off their supply and sending them back to the Stone Age, thus resulting in a rapidly dwindling number of living Cubans and an increasing number of dead ones.  The solution  is not too popular with Cubans, nor is it popular with Ukrainians. Palestinians, Somalians, Venezuelans and numerous other countries currently at war over this finite resource.

RE

Well, I'm not sure what problem you are solving by sending any country back to the stone age via lack of oil, but I would point out that a nice young lady wrote a peak oil book about how Cuba survived peak oil already. So I had my solution for the world, and she trumpeted how Cuba solved that problem decades ago.

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. Circa 2006

[TDoS]

That's not the problem with Peak Oil.  The problem is that it's a finite resource essential to the operation of industrial civilization there currently is no good replacement for and we are running short of it.

Concern about the actual peak is like looking at a tree and not seeing the forest.

Apt metaphor from a doomer perspective. But I'm not a doomer. And after we survived the Great DieOff proclaimed by the doomers during Earth Day 1970 (allegedly sometime by the 1980's) I figured you had to take their predictions with a grain of salt. As any thinking person might.

Layoffs have surged to a nearly 20-year high, as job openings plummet.

Well, it has been awhile since we've had a hard recession. The Great Recession of 2008 was deeply involved in peak oil doom, folks who didn't know how to calculate peak oil randomly assigning it causality with any current event they could find.

The good news is that we aren't anywhere near RE's definition of collapse even with layoffs surging. A 20 year high puts it worse then Covid though doesn't it? Which was according to some the Biggest Recession Since the Great Depression. So we could be in for interesting times.

If it craters the market like the 2008 recession, I'll be dumping in available coinage just like I did back then.

[RE]

Well, I'm not sure what problem you are solving by sending any country back to the stone age via lack of oil

Oil not burned by Cubans available for Happy Motoring Amerikans.

Not sure what problem you are solving either.    Feel free to pat yourself on the back for whatever it is you think you did though.

RE

[TDoS]

Well, I'm not sure what problem you are solving by sending any country back to the stone age via lack of oil

Oil not burned by Cubans available for Happy Motoring Amerikans.

Not sure what problem you are solving either.    Feel free to pat yourself on the back for whatever it is you think you did though.

RE

I know what I did. I don't "think" I know what I did.

[RE]

I know what I did. I don't "think" I know what I did.

Well, I Googled "Who solved the Peak Oil problem" and top of the results and the closest I came to an answer was The Clean-Energy Equation No One Can Solve Yet, so your solution hasn't been pinged yet by their search bots.  Nobody on Reddit seemed to have heard of it either.  You seem to be a Legend in your own Mind.

RE

[K-Dog]

MOTHERJONES.COM • 2026-02-11

Pam Bondi Refuses to Apologize to Epstein Survivors

Officials failed to redact their names—and did little to address the harm.

IRISHTIMES.COM • 2026-02-11

'This screams cover-up': Pam Bondi faces fury over handling of Epstein files

Key committee hears US attorney general accused of 'incompetence' and 'jaded cruelty' over abuse survivors.