2014 is already here in most of the United States, less than an hour away where I am.
I’m looking forward to the new year, I see many positive signs. Two things have been dragging the economy down, energy shortages and education.
Where energy is concerned, anytime the economy would heat up, so would energy consumption, demand would exceed supply, prices would skyrocket, and the economy would recede. This is beginning to change. First, fracking, with all it’s environmental problems, is temporarily expanding the availability of fossil fuels. This is only a temporary fix however. The second thing is that both wind and now solar have reached the point where they are becoming economically viable and competitive with conventional energy sources, and as a result their adaptation has been increasing exponentially.
Where education is concerned, we’ve run into a situation where there are jobs that go unfilled because we don’t have enough people trained in new technologies that are being widely deployed, while we are artificially creating ditch-digging jobs to employ people with inadequate education but this is not sustainable.
Artificial intelligence is starting to supplement human intelligence in technologically demanding areas and technological education is becoming widely available online and as competition expands, there are educational bargains to be had. More and more information is available online allowing people to self-educate more effectively. Conventional colleges and universities are also going online, which broadens their perspective audiences and forces them to be more competitive.
In 2014, I see both of these trends continuing and expanding. As our energy supplies become more sustainable, predictable, and environmentally sound, I believe we’ll see our economy continue to expand.
I also believe we will be seeing more technological developments that will make new energy sources available to us and allow us to use existing sources more effectively, such as improvements in batteries, electrical transmission, and developments in fusion, both cold and hot, and understanding of physics.
We will see some of these developments come out of China, which more than any other nation, has an urgent need to develop cleaner energy sources. Their pollution is so bad that it is actually reducing agricultural output. They have made significant advances in their fusion research program, particularly the EAST nuclear fusion tokamak reactor proved the super-conducting magnet technology necessary for commercial power producing tokamak fusion reactors.
Another thing that has hurt our economy is “The Fed”, which has intentionally held the money supply at levels that keep the unemployment rate above 6% and the inflation rate below 1.5%. I believe more reasonable inflation rate target would be 3%. I believe that BitCoin and possibly other electronic currencies will lift the cap off the Feds ability to restrict the economy. I believe this will contribute to a stronger world economy.
God or whatever label you might want to call a greater power or awareness is tweaking things beyond our control in ways that save us from ourselves. For example, if we look at the subject of global warming, global temperatures has been increasing at a rate of about .1ºC per decade, but this is masked by changes in the solar radiation over the 11 year solar cycle that result in about a .3ºC swing between the solar minimum and maximum, so during times when the solar activity is decreasing, global temperature decreases happen faster than global warming caused by increased carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor and people point at that and say global warming isn’t real.
Well, for those of us who actually understand this cycle we know that it is real, however, this solar cycle, the peak has been extremely weak, and perhaps it will remain weak long enough for oil from fracking to run out.
I’m going to make another prediction, Fukushima won’t significantly impact our health, even those of us on the West Coast, except maybe mental, and perhaps dietary changes that people make because they’re afraid they’ll get radiation poisoning from eating seafood. This isn’t to say that it’s a good thing, it’s just that the ocean and the world is a huge thing and by the time the radiation reaches us here it is very dilute. People that are nearby where the radioisotopes haven’t been heavily diluted will be more affected. I’m not saying Fukushima is a good thing, but it’s not the end of the world, and in many ways might even be good, for example by pushing us to saner sustainable energy sources.
Another positive I see this year is that sales of electric cars and LED lighting will grow and this will contribute towards a positive energy situation. 17% of the electricity in the United States is used for lighting and LED lighting is even more efficient than compact fluorescent, doesn’t contain mercury, is longer lasting, can be dimmed, is available in non-flickering varieties, and almost any color you could want. Prices are rapidly coming down and as they do we’ll see the percentage of energy used for lighting come down significantly.
With respect to electric cars, because most will be charged overnight, and there is enough surplus generating capacity at night that if the entire US fleet went electric they could be charged without adding any additional capacity, switching to electric will save huge amounts of energy.
Many people will tell you electric cars just move the pollution source but this isn’t true because most power plants can’t be rapidly throttled so at night huge amounts of energy are just dissipated as heat into the atmosphere when there isn’t demand for it on the grid. The exception to this is hydro and to a lesser degree natural gas plants. But for the most part, electric cars will use energy that otherwise would have just been dumped as heat in cooling towers. They will allow the electricity generated to be used more efficiently and should result in a reduction in the cost of electricity.
On an energetic level; if you take a metal plate and put it on top of a speaker and sprinkle some salt on it, and feed it with an amplifier fed with an audio signal generator, at various frequencies the salt will form various geometric patterns as resonances in the metal plate are found. As the frequency increases, the complexity of the patterns increases. Between resonant frequencies the salt takes on a very chaotic state without a clear pattern.
Now I think something like that happens in terms of the kind of spiritual energy of the planet, and as time goes on the energy frequency increases. In the 50’s and 60’s we had low frequency resonances and patterns that were rather simple. Then in the 70’s we went through a period between resonances and things were rather chaotic. In the 80’s we went into another kind of resonances, a bit more complex than the 60’s and kind of ugly where greed became not only socially acceptable but popular. In the late 90’s and the early 2000’s, we went through another chaotic period, and now we’re entering another higher frequency resonance and clear patterns are begin to emerge again but they are even more complex than those in the 80’s but also to me at least, they feel more positive. I think a lot of the apathy we’ve seen in the last 15-20 years has been a direct result of this chaotic energetic pattern, and now that a new resonance pattern is starting to materialize, people will want to take an active part in shaping it to be a more beautiful one, and I see this as a positive.
One of the outcomes of this is that I think people are going to start to reject negatives like war, hatred, greed, restrictions on creativity, freedom, and I think this will be a natural aspect of the new resonance we’re coming into. I think this will have a positive impact on things like music, literature, and other forms of art.
I think it will become apparent that what is bringing us through these new energies is bigger than us and I think this will be a positive thing for the planet.
That’s not to say that we don’t have significant challenges in the coming year but I feel much more positive about our ability to confront and tackle them.