Kurt Cobb

Dear Readers, From today forward I will cease posting here. I invite you to visit my blog to subscribe via email or in a reader or to visit me on Facebook or LinkedIn. I thank you for your interest in my work and your thoughtful comments through the years. resourceinsights.blogspot.com

The dramatic drop in the cost of AI demonstrated by Chinese upstart DeepSeek is great for buyers of AI tools, but very bad for the incumbent developers of those tools. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/02/after-…

Empowering the individual has become a frequent slogan for today's tech pioneers. As that empowerment grows, it makes it possible for an individual or a small group to threaten all of society. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/01/democr…

Can you think of anything built by humans that you would expect to last 100,000 years? I can't. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/01/wishfu…

A long-running elevator outage at my favorite cinema lead me to find out about America's "elevator crisis." My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/01/elevat…

Increasingly, it seems that the ongoing spread of bird flu among cattle and the possible evolution of a strain that can be transmitted between humans will be the biggest story of 2025. I hope I'm wrong. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/12/bird-f…

When governments decide to speculate in financial markets, history suggests that things will turn out badly for them. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/12/when-g…

@EkermanVan4619 Understood.

@kurtcobb yes that's what I said 😀

The roiling discontent that is showing up in recent election surprises is real. The solutions offered in response are, not unsurprisingly, largely irrelevant. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/12/presid…

Someone needs to buy U.S. trade policymakers a periodic table of elements. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/12/us-chi…

@EkermanVan4619 I didn't foresee that investors would be willing to dissipate huge amounts of capital on an ongoing basis in a losing proposition for a decade. The confirmation comes from inside the industry: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2019/06/shale-…

@kurtcobb you didn't foresee fracking, maybe you'll be happily surprised again, we'll see

Deglobalization is proceeding apace for many reasons. Here's one more. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/11/more-d…

Concern about a surprise acceleration in the decline of human fertility is missing the most critical factor. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/11/fallin…

The same factors that led to Donald Trump's election in 2016 are still with us. I revisit a previous piece that discussed these before the 2016 election with more detail on the thinking of French philosopher Bruno Latour which inspired my 2016 analysis. resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/11/donald…

"Metabolical", a book by a medical researcher and physician, tell us that the relationship between our diet (heavy on processed foods) and chronic disease is far more profound than we've been told. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-am…

Is the next pandemic on its way? The dramatic spread of bird flu in American cattle is very concerning. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/10/bird-f…

Modern humans have come to believe that new technology is better and also benign. The downsides of AI and synthetic biology are already visible. Now, they are being combined. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/10/ai-syn…

Supply chain problems keep popping up as industries fail to recognize their vulnerabilities. A little-known and critical vulnerability for the tech industry just made itself visible in the wake of Hurricane Helene. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/10/single…

Memory is how we orient ourselves in time and space. In the age of the internet the repositories of memory are exceedingly vulnerable. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/09/memory…

Differing opinions are not the primary thing dividing us. My post for this week: resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/09/just-c…