The Exponential: From Rajoy's Debt to the Coronavirus

The Exponential Function in Debate: Debt, Energy, and Infections

A 2% annual growth rate might seem trivial. One forum user translated it into the constant 0.02 within C=Co*EXP(0.02*t), warning that if left unchecked for a few years, the figure would skyrocket beyond any graph. This was the trap being discussed: the exponential function is easily written down and poorly understood until the outcome is imminent. The thread discusses this first with oil and then with a bicho, always with the same misunderstandings.

Rajoy and the Debt Figure

The discussion included a quote from the then-Prime Minister: “Greece owes a lot of money, a little over 90% of its GDP. It’s as if in Spain we owed 900 billion euros, which is an astronomical figure.” Raulisimo used the quote as proof that those managing public affairs don’t grasp basic arithmetic. He also argued that exponentially growing debt is arithmetically unpayable, not due to creditor bad faith or occasional negligence, but because of the curve’s inherent nature. Another user jokingly suggested applying a logarithm to the data.

Peak Oil and the Price Drop

With debt lingering, the focus shifted to resources. Peak oil—the maximum rate of petroleum extraction—reappeared in the 2015 thread when the barrel price plummeted. Some interpreted this as a refutation of the thesis. For Abu-Yunis, the price drop was a deliberate war against the US fracking industry, which operates at higher costs with unlimited funding and was a bubble about to burst. Underlying this was the conflict between two worldviews: one seeing physical limits and the other seeing only prices.

And on the table, a case cited by rom: silver. Photographic emulsion stopped consuming it, but mobile phones with cameras—millions of units where there were once dozens—use it for selfies. His conclusion was that the economic system reuses any efficiency until the material is depleted.

The Energy Return of Photovoltaics

Here, the debate became technical. For rom, measuring a solar panel in euros is misleading because prices are set in an economy that still burns fossil fuels to manufacture, transport, and install the panels themselves. He countered by citing energy return and a study by Pedro Prieto and Charlie Hall which, according to him, showed an 11-year payback period for the invested energy. The donkey analogy summarized it: if you load a donkey with €10 of food, feeding it costs €5, leaving €5; the journey doesn’t add up if part of the route is by truck.

The Counterattack: Value Doesn’t Weigh

Against the physical limit thesis, luisito2 argued that economic value has become dematerialized. A significant portion of a drug's price is generated in Switzerland, even if assembly occurs in India; a mobile phone is valued for its code, not its grams. If value grows without requiring more matter, he contended, the planet’s finitude ceases to be a ceiling. Nico replied that this supposed efficient country stopped manufacturing steel, clothing, and cars to import them, and that consumption didn't disappear, it just shifted borders. Moving from production to exchanging paper isn’t efficiency.

The Petri Dish and the Exponential of Contagion

And then came the cobi19. The curve discussed abstractly moved to ICUs. The thread suggested that infections trinc exponential propagation until hitting a limit—lack of hosts, confinement—just as a Ponzi scheme collapses when no new people are willing to join. The coefficient changes, not the mathematics. One user speculated figures of tens of thousands of deaths, and Pedre maintained that several Madrid hospitals were already overwhelmed, citing a headline. A participant compared the planet to a Petri dish: a species that saturates its environment collapses without having learned anything. The question left hanging was who decides when one stops watching the curve and starts calling it destiny.