mbohu

Wendy, so nice to see it written ANYWHERE that someone remembers her standing up for better healthcare 25 years ago (and getting slaughtered for it.) Whatever else she may be (and she is definitely an "old-style politician" with all the baggage that includes), I was frustrated to no end that no one on the left--the part of the left that vilified her almost as much as the right--remembered and honored this--although most likely they were all not born yet (but they could have educated themselves a bit before vilifying her?...oh well: I realize that is a completely unreasonable expectation) Anyway, it gave me joy reading that short statement from you! :-) (and I guess that means you must be a little over 20?)

A simple google search reveals: "Dr. Jonathan Lesser is the President of Continental Economics, Inc., and has over 30 years of experience working for regulated utilities, government, and as an economic consultant."

Cool! I started with AFF at 50 and at 53 am 350 jumps in, participated at my first nationals in 4-way and didn't even place dead last. PLF on your first 20 landings, find a canopy that you like and trust (consistent soft openings would be a good primary criteria) and don't listen to all that "downsizing" talk. --that's about all the advice I have! Oh, and being a bit older may make you less strapped on the $$$ issue, so you can have someone pack your chute when you want to keep up with younger jumpers trying to get on a 20 minute call after landing!

Well, interestingly (not sure if on purpose) neilmck (10th post down) showed a way to delete a post: Simply edit out all the content, except for a period. (this may be frowned upon--but seems technically possible) Of course, now it's somewhat too late, as yobnoc quoted the complete original post 2 posts further down, which can't be deleted, except by him.

I would echo Wendy's advice--although I have to admit I did not quite follow it myself in the beginning. If you just got your A-License, or are still working on getting it, you do not know enough about your own skydiving to be likely to get the right suit. It's not about knowing anything special about skydiving in general, but it's about knowing what kind of skydives YOU want to do, who YOU are jumping with, what your ongoing challenges may be (falling too fast, falling too slow), and so on. RW (or competition) suits will have booties, which are useful (almost required) if you want to do serious 4-way, 8-way or big-way RW--but they certainly aren't necessary to join others on belly jumps and even get on some jumps with more serious organizers (they'd probably be more concerned with grippers, but even those aren't usually necessary) On the other hand, if you also want to try some freeflying, the booties will for sure get in the way (I still have to try to sit-fly with my belly-suit, some day! I'm sure it's fun!) See, if you can get a cheap used suit (maybe with some grippers if you want to do RW, and of a size that helps you with freefall speeds (large and baggy, if you usually fall below the group, tight and slick, if you usually float above them) That should take you through the next 99 jumps. By that time you may know more. Congrats for starting at 50--that's when I started, so I think that's an ideal age for starting to skydive!

Unless you are doing high-performance turns, I would also say that an altimeter for judging turns in the pattern isn't really necessary. I think it's much better to train your eye to judge altitude and turns in the pattern. Get used to what it means for your ground speed during landing at a given wind strength, when you turn higher or lower onto final, and how to do turns that do or do not loose a lot of altitude. I think this is done best visually (and carefully), and not by reading altitude off an altimeter. Personally, I use an analog altimeter (because I feel that the needle gives me a much better sense of altitude during freefall--altitude is an analog phenomena, after all, and I feel it cuts out one intermediate step where my brain has to convert a number into a "delta" function...but I'm sure others would disagree, and of course there are digital altimeters with a needle readout, which are more accurate). Since the analog altimeter isn't very useful in the pattern, I use at least one audible low speed alarm at 700 ft. which lets me know exactly where I am during the pattern. I don't use that alarm to start a specific turn (I may be in my downwind leg, just start it, or have turned to the base leg, depending on wind conditions and many other factors, but I like getting confirmation of how high I really am, and it helped me hone my visual sense of altitude.) Now, in special situations (night jumps, etc.) I may have additional low altitude alerts (at 1000 and 300 ft, for example) to make up for the reduced visual reference (I still don't use them as a signal that I have to start a specific turn, just to know where I am.) So, in conclusion: If you don't have an audible, I'd definitely buy that first.

That's a funny thing for a skydiver to say! "I'm half way down without a parachute and none of the scary things they said will happen, happened. I'm going to be just fine." Edit: oh, someone already pointed that out. Sorry!

Not likely. If out of a group of 500, you pick a random 3, and all of these 3 are members of another group (i.e. debunked scientists), the likelihood of the other 497 to all NOT to be part of that sub-group is near zero. The likelihood of a majority of the 497 to be also part of the sub-group is very large and even the likelihood of all 497 to be part of that same sub-group is not insignificant. I am sure someone with a background in combinatorics and more time than myself could give us the actual numbers pretty easily.

That is an unrealistic standard. There NEVER is an explicit "this for that". When someone comes to your business with 3 goons carrying baseball bats, and suggests you purchase protection, because it would be really helpful to make sure no one trashes your store in the near future, there is no explicit "this for that" and yet it is quite obvious what is meant. The reason Trump used to keep repeating "no collusion" and "no tit for tat" is because he wants to set the goal line at specific standards that are impossible to be met with any certainty. He is setting up his ability to say at the end: See: "no collusion", no matter what was revealed: "collusion", for example isn't a legal term, so was never going to be in the report, so he was sure that he would be right in the end--same here.

well, not really...but I'd trade anything in this forum for some jump tickets!

I would argue that this is not entirely true. They took some elements of what they saw in the established system and emphasized them and developed them further (even turned things into "principles" and "truths" that were not obviously so, which you can see if you look at others who strongly disagreed with them at the time) and so they set directions for the system to evolve. I have to admit, I am too lazy to look for quotes from philosophers who preceded them (mostly because the main work on the history of Philosophy I recently read is from Richard David Precht and he writes in German) but Keynes and Smith were preceded by other philosophers who developed some of the basis of their thinking: David Hume-John Locke-Robert Boyle-Isaac Newton (and others had very different ideas: Immanuel Kant for example) So, maybe we can say that as far as humans go there is always a feedback loop between development of thought (sometimes pure thought without much regard to its practicability) and action in the physical realm. So again, it is very worthwhile to THINK about alternatives, even if at the time you do not know how to IMPLEMENT them. Yes, but there are a number of points here: 1. This sounds a little bit like the idea based on "social darwinism" (correct me if I misinterpret you there) and the way I read that, this is really something that has been disproven pretty thoroughly by now. Even Darwin thought that competition was only one minor part of the evolutionary drive and gave much more importance to cooperation. It is easy to see that, if you just look at nature. Many of the most successful species are ones that display a tremendous amount of cooperation (alongside some competition) This actually is another sign to me how our system grew out of a specific philosophy of the time of Smith (and before) when there was a conflict between the ideas of the (mostly British) empiricists and the (mostly German) idealists. As far as economic systems are concerned, the Brits won out. 2. The main issue is not "profit" or resource maximization. The systemic issues I see are threefold: a. The incentives in the system are skewed to rewarding individual profit without regard to profit for the whole. If you study a bit of game theory you will see that systems that are set up this way (simple example would be the prisoner's dilemma) will always result in solutions that are sub-optimal. The outcome this system can produce is always worse than the best possible outcome within the system--and even that best possible outcome is worse than the best possible outcome in a system that is set up to reward profit for individuals that also maximizes profit for the whole.--see EDIT BELOW! (I know, the idea of social darwinism is that there is no "natural" system that can maximize profit for the individual and the whole. "win-win-win" scenarios are idealistic ideas of hippies that have no practical value. I disagree, and many system-thinkers do so as well.) b. While money was originally designed as a medium of exchange representing real value (things, services, etc) it has been so decoupled from that value (financial sector, derivatives, derivatives of derivatives) that the smallest amount of interactions in the world are still representing any of that real value. If you want to make REAL money, you will not focus on activities that provide real value in the physical world. The incentives are to focus on activities that trade various abstract representations (currencies, stocks, derivatives, futures, even real estate but used only as an abstract symbol that does not maximize the utility of said real estate in the real world). c. With an abstract medium to measure value (money) you run into the problem that it only measures a certain KIND of value and leaves many other kinds of value (resources!) out. We looked at this before but: The tree that provides tremendous value for the forest, the animals around it, the humans that breathe the oxygen it produces, etc, etc. has NO money-value as long as it stands in the forest (as this cannot be measured easily) but has very specific value once it is cut down and turned into lumber. Now it has value for ONE person only, but that value can easily be quantified in Dollars. (What's important to me here is that the person who cuts down the tree is not a "bad" or "immoral" person. He is a person that acts in accordance to the incentives of the system. If he wasn't doing that he would be a looser in the system, which also means he would have less and less resources and power within the system, making his "morality" and "goodness" irrelevant--because it has no power to change anything.) All this together provides certain incentives for action. People who listen to these incentives will be successful in the system. Those who don't will fail. The problem is that many systems thinkers, when they project this out, come to the conclusion that a system with these parameters will eventually self-terminate. Cancer is an often used example: When a cell stops to be connected to other cells (in its function and purpose) and starts working only for its own reproduction and benefit it becomes a cancer cell. Initially it benefits and reproduces its genetic code exponentially, outcompeting all the other cells around it. So it "wins" temporarily. However, eventually it kills the entire organism that it depends upon for its survival and self-terminates. So in the end it looses. One can argue that it is in the nature of the cell to only look out for its own benefit--but that isn't true for healthy cells. They look out for their own benefit, but in a way that also benefits the whole. And in the end this is the more successful strategy...and it is also the more natural one, I'd argue. So these are arguments, why it would be useful to think about systems that are not self-terminating and yet have a relationship to our "nature" (keeping in mind that our "nature" is as much influenced by the system we grow up in, as it influences that system) Now: You may be right that we have no idea how to IMPLEMENT such a system, if we ever came up with it, given that we already know that "planned economy" does not work. But to me that is no reason not to think about the implications of systems (and especially the implication of self-termination). Fortunately the people, whose thoughts around this I like, are very clear on the fact that implementation can never be a "planned/forced" process (for many reasons) and are also generally clear on the fact that such a system can actually not be "designed" in the sense that it can be written down as a set of unchanging rules that are THE BEST rules. They are clear that it will have to emerge naturally, but there will be some features that may have to be "artificially" implemented (the step from legs to wheels, because there is no natural intermediate step) and some features can only be striven towards (in the sense of steering into a direction) and others again, will have to surprisingly emerge on their own. EDIT: The important thing to know about these game theory examples is that the preferred outcome of such games is not just sub-optimal for the WHOLE but is also sub-optimal for the INDIVIDUALS in the game, even though they each strive to maximize their own benefit. They each loose out, compared to what they could have gotten.

The original tweet, really isn't the big deal here I think. Yes, a President should know how much his word counts and what effect it may have on people if it scares them about something that isn't really an issue for them, so he should have made doubly sure that he got the right information before tweeting out states that could be affected. However, we already know that Trump doesn't do that, and considering that it was quickly corrected by NOAA, this really could have been a completely minor slip, not worthy of much attention. BUT: The entire circus of what he did afterwards, just to not have to admit that he made a mistake is absolutely grotesque: Using a black marker to draw something on an official map, is so unbelievably childish (and simply incomprehensible that he thought that would be a good idea--a 9 year old would know that this would be too obvious! I mean: He could have ordered someone to use Photoshop to alter the map...that would be scary too, but at least it would seem more adult!...or he could have shown the map that Coreece posted, if that was an official map that was available.) So the arguments about the original mistake (and how inaccurate it may or may not have been) are really irrelevant. I just can't fathom how anyone can see this and think there isn't something wrong with this person?!

DZs being harassed and/or shut down by 1. residents (usually just 1 vocal or rich resident worried about real estate values, in a community of 100,000+) 2. Airport Management 3. fire marshals

Thanks. Yes. If you look at the history of philosophy, you will notice that at the time when our current system started evolving, there were many thinkers who thought up pretty much every element of the system long before it was implemented. Not only that, they thought about the underlying psychology and some of the very ideas that our system is based upon: Most of the arguments you are using now have their roots in the thinking of these philosophers and they were completely new, crazy ideas, that the current establishment at the time dismissed with the same force as you are now dismissing newer ideas. Some aspects of our system may have evolved slightly different than they thought it up, but you can see pretty much every idea the system is based on, in the thoughts of these philosophers. Yes, and I would say, in the case of the human race, our ability to think and create is part of the evolutionary force, so the very distinction of "naturally evolved" versus "created" becomes almost meaningless. Hurricanes, global warming, poverty, hunger, disease, natural resource depletion, meteorites, people getting killed in mass shootings (to at least mention the original topic)...there are plenty of "outside teams" that we are playing and wanting to win against. Except for your very last conclusion here, this is very much what I am saying. There are inherent problems with a system that not only maximizes profit over anything else, but that is also set up to reward this behavior and encodes it in law (corporations in the US are by law required to ONLY consider shareholder value in their decisions. They can actually be sued if they prioritize something else over it.) So, if there is an inherent problem in the incentives of the system, one option is to then make laws that limit or try to balance this out--that is certainly necessary right now, but it is a half-measure and people will always find ways to work around it. It's also a bit incoherent from a logical point of view. When the European Union (as the US usually doesn't even try to balance these things out) sues Microsoft or Google over some anti-trust related issue it's a bit like saying: You should be as successful and profit-oriented as possible, except if you get too good at it. Then we have to reign you in. (I know that's not how they say it, but in essence it is something like that. Same with "insider trading". You should use all the information you have to out-gamble everyone else, but if you do it too well--by gaining access to information others don't have--then it's illegal) I think it is worthwhile to think about what it would be like to have a system that is not based on rewarding short-term maximizing of personal profit. If the argument is that this is not possible and cannot be done because of "human nature", I would argue that first "human nature" is not independent of the systems in which it grows up, and second, that there have been many working systems before this one, that did not rely on "profit maximization" as their main driving force. Safety in and acceptance by the tribe, goodness in the eyes of God (or an imagined god), social standing; these all were the basis of older systems, before "profit" became the primary driving force. They all were grounded in human nature. IMPORTANT: I am in no way suggesting that any of these were better or that we should go back to older systems, but it does allow us to think about what may be NEXT without having to be so limited by our current system that we believe it is the only one in tune with human nature and is the only naturally evolved system.

Yes, I noticed that. That is one indication, I think, that they are struggling with their business model and are seeing the writing on the wall, but aren't ready or capable of making more structural changes in their business model (or are trying to drag the necessary change out as long as possible.)

Most years, yes. This year we will, for example, because August was (relatively) cool. The one thing that I keep wondering about and usually miss in these discussions: It seems to me that the change from a centrally controlled energy production (large plants generating most energy) model to a distributed and networked model (private homes with solar panels, small wind-farms and geothermal generators, etc all feeding the network) is at least as big a change as the change related to the method of energy generation. It seems that this would also have a number of very positive and necessary benefits as well as challenges: 1. Energy security: A distributed system should be many times more resilient than a centrally run system. A single terrorist attack--and probably more importantly right now--a natural event like a hurricane would not be able to take out the entire system (or a big part of it) in one single swoop 2. The system would also be resilient to price manipulation and economic downturns. 3. It would be better for individuals as it makes you more independent from government and large corporations (conservatives should be all over this!) Challenges may be necessary updates of infrastructure, and how to efficiently manage the flow of surplus and shortage (Although both could be solved via technological solutions.) But what I really wonder about is, if the slow progress with transitioning to such a system isn't also related to the fact that large companies don't like this distributed model, and haven't figured out how to control and OWN it in a way that can lead to monopolies similar to what they now enjoy.

Everything that everyone else said...and: 1. If you can jump with a group of (at least slightly) more experienced jumpers, let them make you the base. That means you get out first (or do a 2-way linked exit) and they come to you. Then you can focus on doing a formation and staying with it and even turn some points. That will tremendously increase your confidence and teach some basic skills, like keeping the fall-rate aligned with the rest of the group, flying your slot when in the formation, not immediately building up tremendous horizontal distance as soon as you let go of your grips, etc. At this point it's only frustrating to focus on diving to a formation. I'd say that is an advanced skill and not that important right now. Let them dive to you. If you're usually falling faster, and the group has any common sense, you should be the base anyway. (You should never have to try to fly up to the formation. They always should come down to you!) 2. If you can, use your tunnel time wisely. What helped me the most was an actual 2-way belly league, where we competed in 2-way formations in the tunnel. If no one organizes such a league in your area, simply find a friend with similar (or better) skills, go to https://www.tunnelflight.com/competitions/draw-generator , create some 2-way draws and see how many points you can do in a 2-minute segment. If you keep doing that, you'll be surprised how much you will improve (of course, if a coach can watch you and give you tips, that will be even much better!) 3. Look for any opportunity to get some serious 4-way training: Skydive Arizona has a "Rookie Roundup" twice a year for newer jumpers (under 200) where you can fly with some of the world's best; or find a beginner 4-way camp, etc. Like everyone said: At 100 jumps and with your infrequent jumping schedule, you shouldn't be expecting to be much further ahead...YET!!!!

Well, yes, I think you are misunderstanding the context a bit. I was comparing 2 cases where an external force (law) is required to make the cost/value calculation work within the current system, and I am saying that in one case we have no problem to apply this outer corrective force, but in the other this is seen as a thing that must never be done and would be antithetical to "market forces". Case 1: Software, or any kind of intellectual property; Like you said, in order to pay for the value (of development, etc) you have to make the copying illegal and set up penalties for it. So you are applying laws on top of "market forces" to make this work. Case 2: Externalized costs; or let's call it nature's balance sheet. When you extract public water to bottle it or burn down an old growth forest or dragnet fish out an entire area of an ocean, you would--in order to account for the tremendous value that you destroy for nature (or the commons, or future generations, or the ecosystem that we depend on for our survival)--normally have to pay for that in appropriate relation for the tremendous value you obliterate. However, this can only be achieved via an external force (laws) that make you pay for this value as "nature" or "future generations" do not get to keep a balance sheet. This intervention was however seen as "against market forces", by ibx. Personally, I am interested in systems that have internal mechanisms for both cases and for mechanisms that take the best outcome for the individuals (companies, etc) involved in the transactions, but also the best outcome for the whole into account. I believe that this is possible, and is possible without compromising either. However, in the current system, if an external mechanism is appropriate for case 1, then it should be considered just as appropriate for case 2. I hope that clears that up a bit.

I know, we should probably take this to a separate thread--but I guess in this part of the forum there really aren't any rules about this, so: There is this myth that somehow "market dynamics" (meaning the CURRENT system of international markets, including financial systems, fiat currency, international trade laws, etc) are a natural system that does not require huge interventions and a massive system of laws and rules in order to function the way it does. And then everything else (=different rules) is seen as unnatural and artificial--but this is a huge mischaracterization. Here is an example, from the industry I was in myself, and where I owned and ran a company with international reach: If "market dynamics" were really working on their own, the entire software industry would be completely non-existent. The current economical system is built entirely on the idea of scarcity, and for anything to have any value in it, it MUST be scarce. If it is not scarce, it must be artificially made to behave as if it was. Software is infinitely reproducible with minimal cost, and can therefore be only made "valuable" in the current system, by artificially curbing this feature (which otherwise should be an absolute boon to us.) This is only one example where the current system already requires a tremendous top-down intervention to make it work. (=laws that make something that easily could be had almost for free by everyone, artificially scarce, so it can have value in the current system.) So it would be easy to argue, if you do have ANY such intervention, at least it should be the kind of intervention that has outcomes that are positive for the whole, and not ones that are counter-productive (If our "team"--i.e. humanity--were competing against another outside team and instituted rules that artificially limited our team's access to freely abundant resources, the other team would surely laugh it's head off, and would out-compete us in no time.) I think my previous comment made clear that this doesn't seem to be the case here. I would see his attempt at thinking about complete structural change of the system, as similar to what we did in the software industry: When we had a current version of a software program (let's say version 2.1), we would have a team that focused on minor updates to the software, to fix urgent minor bugs and maybe extend its functionality a little within the context of the current system. They would be working on the next 2.x release version and would be able to do these updates in relatively quick timeframes. However, at some point, when limitations that were systemic to the current version became apparent, we would have a second team work in parallel to the first team, to envision a completely new version (3.x) which would eventually replace the old major version and may be built from the ground up without the limitations of 2.x. This is what I think he is doing here. It does not mean, minor updates to the current system don't have to continue, and it does not mean version 2.x wasn't a great step and wasn't better than whatever came before. (i.e. version 1.x) Here I disagree that it would be impossible. I do agree, however, that a " Top down planned market economy" is not what we want by a long shot. We already know that this is a dead-end approach that could not even compete with our current system. (It really just was a slightly modified version of the current system anyway) From what I understand, Daniel is instead looking at systems that simply could naturally out-compete the current system*), while at the same time obsoleting (the destructive kind of) competition within the system, as well as fragility, open loops that lead to exponential growth which leads to collapse, and some other features. Does such a system exist? We probably don't know for sure yet, but there are pointers in a direction that we may look into (which he discusses in other places) and the articles I linked to mainly describe some "design constraints" that such a system would have to have. )* footnote: If you look at history, it was always the case that a new system was implemented or outlived an old system, because it simply out-competed it. Modern economics and democracy did not win over feudalism and monarchies, because they were forced upon us via a top-down approach, but simply because they were so much more powerful and effective that they simply outcompeted their predecessors. I think it is naive to think that the current iteration of our economic system is the last one and will not eventually be replaced by something significantly different. What may be unique right now is, that in spite of its incredible power (to lift millions out of poverty, for one thing), there are some design-problems that are now becoming apparent that put the current system on a path to likely total collapse at some point. This is something that sooner or later will have to be addressed. I, for one, am glad that some people are applying their minds to that issue.

Are you sure there isn't something else going wrong? I've had my Spectre for close to 200 jumps and my last jump was the first hard opening I ever had on it (and I'm pretty sure I know what went wrong, as I had to pack real quickly between 2 night jumps, wearing my jump suit with tons of lights taped to it, and even while packing I thought: "this doesn't feel right") On all other jumps the openings were super soft and always completely straight and controlled.

The big bold number represents the average size and the small number in parenthesis is the minimum. So the smallest is about a 210, not 230. I was a bit over 250lb exit weight and they had me start out on a 300, so the chart doesn't really seem that conservative.

Well, personally I would not buy a canopy, before I have jumped that particular canopy. Why buy something that you think you will be "ready for" at some future time? There are many different types of canopies (apart from the size consideration) and if you haven't jumped them, how would you know that you will like how that canopy behaves? I would recommend starting to try out different canopies when you're at the size that you will want to own for a while, and then purchase the kind of canopy that you like best. That's what I did. Of course, it may be that I am privileged to have a dropzone that had a few rental canopies as well as a guy who was renting various types in my area, but between DZs with rental gear, private renters, other jumpers and manufacturer's demo programs, it should be possible to at least try a few canopies before deciding to buy one, no? I tried a PD Storm, PD Sabre 2 and PD Spectre--all in the same size--and after jumping them it was very clear to me that I liked the Spectre and would not have been happy with the Sabre 2 (which pretty much everyone else around me was jumping.) There was no way I could have made that decision accurately if all I had jumped before were student Navigators.

Like I said, it requires a little more reading: "*Please note, my critiques of capitalism are because it is the dominant global economic system. I am not leading in these articles towards suggesting some previous terrible economic system (versions of socialism or communism) as an adequate solution. Obviously not. They were actually different versions of the same underlying autopoietic system that capitalism happens to be the most effective instantiation of (to be discussed later in the series). These critiques are also not to discount the tremendous role capitalism has played heretofore (all the pro-capitalist arguments from Von Mises and Rand to John Mackey and Peter Diamandis are fully factored)." Yes, I understand that you may read it that way, because at first it sounds somewhat anti-capitalist (since he is looking at the system from the outside and is pointing out the big problems it is facing) and we are so stuck in our thinking that we immediately assume he must therefore then be for the anthithesis of this system (i.e. "planned economy", communism, etc.) But this is not at all what it is about. If anything--in regards to valuation--the article points towards expanding the valuation into ALL areas and one of the problems he looks at is, that valuation currently only includes "extractable" simple (or complicated) value and leaves intrinsic (complex) value off the balance sheet: "An economic system that only recognizes extractable and accumulatable wealth. Where nature (the commons) doesn’t have a balance sheet. So unlike interactions with other economic actors that also have balance sheets, interactions with nature don’t have to be equitable, don’t require consent, and don’t require the ledger to balance. "

Well, this is moving a little off the original topic, but here is the bigger problem, I think: Redistribution doesn't provide a permanent solution either. The incentives in the system will work against it so hard, that it is like trying to fly a wingsuit upwards against gravity. Sure, it's been proven that this is temporarily possible, but eventually gravity wins out and the suit stalls or has to pick up speed and go down again. Gravity represents the incentives in the current system. They will eventually increase inequality again, and trying to use laws to work against that may be an absolutely necessary but at best a temporary fix. (...and really hard to achieve, because the incentives of the system will make it very unlikely that someone with power to create laws in the current system will WANT to create such laws--(s)he would be strongly disincentivized to do so--it would be against their own economic benefit!) Here is the most intelligent set of articles I have recently read in this regard: The most interesting sections are in part 3 & 4, so it requires a bit of reading, but it describes the problem in which we find ourselves really well, and applies to almost all the topics that are mentioned in this part of our Forum: https://civilizationemerging.com/new-economics-series-part-i/

Simple: You have to specify WHERE. In the US as well as the European union energy production from coal is indeed falling as has been so for a while--in absolute numbers, not just as a percentage of the entire energy production. Worldwide it is still rising, albeit slower. You can pick countries or regions in this chart to see this: http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Historical-Electricity-Generation-Statistics#tspQvChart