Omission: this confused me at first, but really the entire article is set 3000 years ago, so it's not particularly ambiguous. If you think in the context of "lecture on the bronze age" you wouldn't expect him to specify every time.
At a certain point the information is simply redundant. The meaning of the naked number can and will easily be inferred from context. You don’t even notice it. Both while writing and also while reading. A proper proof reading will catch that (maybe, though I myself am actually hilariously bad at proof reading and miss obvious stuff all the time, so being able to properly proof read and catch things always seemed like a super power to me) but I don’t think this blog author does that (and I don’t really expect it? It’s fine …)
It totally get that there are people who will be endlessly annoyed by that – I’m also annoyed by people using quotation marks the wrong way. But it doesn’t really impact readability of the context is clear enough (as it obviously is in this case).
And yeah, it's not the best, but it's really not worth discounting his writing more than he himself already does at the end. Lots of smart people have imperfect language skills.
I have no idea where you're from, but oil is not what it once was, especially in the United States. In fact, we have a very recent case study substantiating this claim: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait sees 20% of the entire world's supply transit through when under normal conditions. Yet after being completely closed (then slightly reopened, and now almost completely closed again), the world is functioning relatively normally and is much less impacted than it would have likely been even 20 years ago.
My conclusion from the article is entirely different: collapse doesn't necessarily occur all at once. And given that, maybe to someone living through this collapse, they wouldn't have even recognized it.
> I have no idea where you're from
I'm from the US and looking out my window to the street below I notice that that more than 90% of the vehicles are still running on petroleum. The impact of high petroleum prices seems obvious to me.
An unrelated question, but why do you think petroleum prices are not correlating with with the straight closure. If, as you opine, the world has changed then why did prices rise in the first place? Was it market speculation based on an outdated worldview, or was it something else? I do not know.
[edit:corrected my formatting error]
To follow the red herring about crude oil, you’re making my point for me: you’re looking down at a busy road full of petroleum-fueled automobiles when 20% of the world’s oil supply has been completely eliminated.
To be more specific, the difference between now and 20 years ago is the United States is a net exporter of oil. Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other nearly unbelievable technological leaps have turned the United States into an oil superpower within less than 2 decades. Aside from all of that, I truly believe that in 10 years everyone with a home (rented or owned) and a daily commute will be driving an EV. Consumer demand is far less than transportation/travel/industrial demand for oil, but it is the tail that wags the dog.
> What is clear is that once the collapse started, it was contagious, likely for two reasons: first that collapsing areas produced invading forces and refugee flows that destabilized their neighbors and second because as you will recall above, these states are interlinked and their rulers rely on trade to furnish the key military resource (bronze) as well as to acquire key prestige goods necessary to maintain the loyalty of the aristocracy.
I think the supply chain was probably disrupted mostly because as the empires contracted inwards, there may have been a lack of policing throughout the hinterlands. So, getting from state to state would have been more dangerous.
In today’s terms, this might have implications for the policing of the world’s physical trade corridors: the oceans. What might happen if the world’s global oceanic police force (the United States) decides to no longer spend the trillions of dollars required to police these vast stretches of ocean?