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Originally Posted by sendler
You have some very inaccurate presumptions and prejudices against Hagens since day one of your exposure to him which quickly degraded to rather vicious name calling against him and me. In my analysis it appears to be the result of the dissonance caused by one of his tenets which is that energy underpins most modern human activity and our access to net energy going forward will start to inexorably decline. This is a shock for techno-optimists to learn about so they attack the message and the man.
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Your statement above is so far off the mark I must try to clarify the facts once again as they pertain to Nate Hagens. He was a High School kid when he had to choose a secondary education major, as many people do while they are still young and inexperienced, and finance seemed like a good opportunity at the time. He is brilliant and so was able to graduate Masters with Honors at U. Chicago and rise straight to the top of Wall Street. A young graduate pursuing the American Dream just as he had been told. But while earning $.5 million/ year managing money for billionaires, he started to notice some things that made him think twice. 1. The rich people were generally miserable much of the time. 2. Big consumption was wrecking the planet.
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So he walked away from his Wall Street job in 2000 and backpacked with his dog from a parked car for two years to read and study what to do next. He went back to school at U. Vermont to get his PHD in the synthesis view of energy/ economy/ ecology/ resource depletion/ human behavior, and has been since 2007 teaching and writing to save the future for $50,000/ year.
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Practice Metacognition. Become aware of hijacking by modern supernormal stimuli and dopamine manipulation. Make the normal, super to reset your hedonic ratchet. Avoid confirmation bias and consensus trance. See the World through nonrenewable energy/ resource lenses. Humans and our livestock now outweigh wild land animals 50:1. Adopt some endangered species other than our own. Wake to the mass extinction event that has begun.Promote for a resilient society. Learn. Think. Talk. Steer the conversation for better outcomes.
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I am absolutely prejudiced against the 'Chicago School' of economics.And I'm prejudiced against Lehman Brothers and their derivatives which created the bubble which burst,nearly bringing the entire global economy down,making necessary,the $10-trillion bailout,while the Chicago School economists made off with their wealth.
I've watched three of Hagen's lectures.He doesn't know anything about technology on a meaningful level.He doesn't know anything about mechanical engineering.He doesn't know anything about civil engineering.Ditto for traffic engineering,automotive engineering,thermodynamics and entropy as it affects transportation,home construction,commercial real estate development,building codes,planning and zoning,leisure activities,consumer capitalism.Having the audience that he has,he's in a perfect position to deliver them to a bigger message,however because he doesn't know what he doesn't know,and neither do you,there's an enormous opportunity lost every time he speaks.
He doesn't really understand the 'arithmetic' of climate change.If he did,he'd be doing a modified talk.If his audience goes away believing that they've been fully informed,we're all screwed.