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Absolutely, this cannot be repeated enough. And I say this as an unemployed member of the masses, not as a large shareholder with my fingers in a bunch of pies

Absolutely, this cannot be repeated enough. And I say this as an unemployed member of the masses, not as a large shareholder with my fingers in a bunch of pies. This of course raises the question of what is to be done; the answer is: live within your means, be responsible, know your neighbors, and don't be a weird conspiracy theorist.

pdonis 13y ago
what is to be done All the items you give are good ones; I would add a few more: * Be skeptical. Much of what passes for "common knowledge" because it is promulgated by the government or the mainstream media is false. Use your own independent judgment. * Be knowledgeable. You can't use your own independent judgment if you don't understand how things work. Yes, that means you have to spend time and effort learning about things like science or economics on your own, rather than just accepting that whatever you were taught in school is true. (For why you can't just accept that, see "be skeptical" above.) * When people who are in power make mistakes, particularly large and egregious mistakes, don't let them off the hook. People in power love to make excuses when they screw up. Don't let them. They also like to say that they didn't mean to do anything wrong, but they're human so they make mistakes. Don't let them get away with that either; if you're in a position of power, you should be held to a higher standard than an ordinary person, because your decisions have broader consequences. For an ordinary person, making a bad decision means you learn to do better next time. For a person in power, making a bad decision should very often mean they're no longer in power. Most of all: * Don't look at politics as a way of imposing your view of what is right on others. Look at politics as a last resort for people with fundamentally different values to use to figure out how to peacefully coexist without either side imposing its views on the other.
einhverfr 13y ago
> This of course raises the question of what is to be done; the answer is: live within your means, be responsible, know your neighbors, and don't be a weird conspiracy theorist. I personally think that collapse is coming. If I had to guess I would say 20-30 years out but to be honest, that's a guess. It could be ten years and it could be a hundred. I don't think the system can reform itself. The fundamental question is how we, our children, or our children's children can plan to survive when nemesis follows hubris. The things you have mentioned are the beginning but I will give you a few more. 1. Collapse isn't the end of the world. As Joseph Tainter pointed out, nutrition for many Romans improved after the fall of Rome. I would add that already nutrition among the poor in Indonesia (at least from what I have seen living here) is better than it is among the poor in the US, so we have already crossed the threshold where collapse makes sense to a large part of the population. 2. Trade locally. Build up local economic ties. 3. Plan on retiring with your kids. Raise them with this in mind. Part of this is inviting your parents or parents-in-law to retire with you so your kids grow up seeing this as normal.
- waps 13y ago
  Ah come on. I'd say there's at least a 50% chance that the US military and the Department of Energy find a workable new energy source in that timeframe (I have -very- little faith in the European academics who have locked themselves down on ITER and are at this point actively sabotaging other attempts. This is beyond stupid as ITER's timeframe is known and is too little, to late. The project should be cancelled, as there's only 2 outcomes : either it fails before the collapse. Or it doesn't, in which case there's zero chance of completion). Alternatively we could prepare for failure. The only way to do that is to make sure we have 150 new nuclear power plants built all around the country in the next 10-15 years though. That should be Obama's Manhattan project. Again, there's two outcomes : either we find something better and it's wasted money (that would be great !) or it saves our collective asses, and gives us another 100 years to come up with something better. If the US army/govt does find a new energy source, it's likely to be a nuclear one (the only real solution to our needs), and our energy problems are over until our grandchildren die.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    You still have two fundamental problems that can't be solved just by inventing new energy sources. The first is smelting and materials. You can recycle steel with just electricity (that's a lossy process) but you can't produce it without burning coal. The same goes for copper and most other metals (aluminum is the only exception to my knowledge). If one wants to support exponentially increasing material consumption, that means, supporting exponentially increasing fossil fuel consumption at this point, since we are already way beyond what we can support there by using biomass for reduction smelting. The second problem is that no matter what you do, if you push for ever-increasing consumption this will have massive environmental costs. We saw what happened at Fukushima and frankly I think the real lesson there is that natural disasters will always have a significant chance to overwhelm human engineering. It's easy to say "well, if they had the newer designs" but I am not aware of any real experience there seeing more recent designs of nuclear power plants go through a massive earthquake and tsunami. At best we can say "well, if we didn't miss something..." but reality is always more complex than our models. So I don't see nuclear as the answer. The only real way to prepare for failure is to reduce consumption, and if you listen to the macro-economists, that would cause failure. For exponentially increasing consumption of energy, even without greenhouse gas emissions you have the problem of the second law of thermodynamics, which leads to a warming planet even with a constant atmosphere. Our path is not sustainable and no amount of technological intervention will make it so. The only breakthrough that could possibly matter in that regard would be the development of perpetual motion machines.

pdonis 13y ago

what is to be done All the items you give are good ones; I would add a few more: * Be skeptical. Much of what passes for "common knowledge" because it is promulgated by the government or the mainstream media is false. Use your own independent judgment. * Be knowledgeable. You can't use your own independent judgment if you don't understand how things work. Yes, that means you have to spend time and effort learning about things like science or economics on your own, rather than just accepting that whatever you were taught in school is true. (For why you can't just accept that, see "be skeptical" above.) * When people who are in power make mistakes, particularly large and egregious mistakes, don't let them off the hook. People in power love to make excuses when they screw up. Don't let them. They also like to say that they didn't mean to do anything wrong, but they're human so they make mistakes. Don't let them get away with that either; if you're in a position of power, you should be held to a higher standard than an ordinary person, because your decisions have broader consequences. For an ordinary person, making a bad decision means you learn to do better next time. For a person in power, making a bad decision should very often mean they're no longer in power. Most of all: * Don't look at politics as a way of imposing your view of what is right on others. Look at politics as a last resort for people with fundamentally different values to use to figure out how to peacefully coexist without either side imposing its views on the other.

einhverfr 13y ago

> This of course raises the question of what is to be done; the answer is: live within your means, be responsible, know your neighbors, and don't be a weird conspiracy theorist. I personally think that collapse is coming. If I had to guess I would say 20-30 years out but to be honest, that's a guess. It could be ten years and it could be a hundred. I don't think the system can reform itself. The fundamental question is how we, our children, or our children's children can plan to survive when nemesis follows hubris. The things you have mentioned are the beginning but I will give you a few more. 1. Collapse isn't the end of the world. As Joseph Tainter pointed out, nutrition for many Romans improved after the fall of Rome. I would add that already nutrition among the poor in Indonesia (at least from what I have seen living here) is better than it is among the poor in the US, so we have already crossed the threshold where collapse makes sense to a large part of the population. 2. Trade locally. Build up local economic ties. 3. Plan on retiring with your kids. Raise them with this in mind. Part of this is inviting your parents or parents-in-law to retire with you so your kids grow up seeing this as normal.

waps 13y ago
Ah come on. I'd say there's at least a 50% chance that the US military and the Department of Energy find a workable new energy source in that timeframe (I have -very- little faith in the European academics who have locked themselves down on ITER and are at this point actively sabotaging other attempts. This is beyond stupid as ITER's timeframe is known and is too little, to late. The project should be cancelled, as there's only 2 outcomes : either it fails before the collapse. Or it doesn't, in which case there's zero chance of completion). Alternatively we could prepare for failure. The only way to do that is to make sure we have 150 new nuclear power plants built all around the country in the next 10-15 years though. That should be Obama's Manhattan project. Again, there's two outcomes : either we find something better and it's wasted money (that would be great !) or it saves our collective asses, and gives us another 100 years to come up with something better. If the US army/govt does find a new energy source, it's likely to be a nuclear one (the only real solution to our needs), and our energy problems are over until our grandchildren die.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  You still have two fundamental problems that can't be solved just by inventing new energy sources. The first is smelting and materials. You can recycle steel with just electricity (that's a lossy process) but you can't produce it without burning coal. The same goes for copper and most other metals (aluminum is the only exception to my knowledge). If one wants to support exponentially increasing material consumption, that means, supporting exponentially increasing fossil fuel consumption at this point, since we are already way beyond what we can support there by using biomass for reduction smelting. The second problem is that no matter what you do, if you push for ever-increasing consumption this will have massive environmental costs. We saw what happened at Fukushima and frankly I think the real lesson there is that natural disasters will always have a significant chance to overwhelm human engineering. It's easy to say "well, if they had the newer designs" but I am not aware of any real experience there seeing more recent designs of nuclear power plants go through a massive earthquake and tsunami. At best we can say "well, if we didn't miss something..." but reality is always more complex than our models. So I don't see nuclear as the answer. The only real way to prepare for failure is to reduce consumption, and if you listen to the macro-economists, that would cause failure. For exponentially increasing consumption of energy, even without greenhouse gas emissions you have the problem of the second law of thermodynamics, which leads to a warming planet even with a constant atmosphere. Our path is not sustainable and no amount of technological intervention will make it so. The only breakthrough that could possibly matter in that regard would be the development of perpetual motion machines.