Grat-i-tude (noun)
The state of being grateful; thankfulness.
Sheesh, what a good little wage slave I am becoming these days. The company where I’ve been working awhile has in the last year done three things which it’s never done before in its 40-year history: wage freezes, hiring freezes, and a layoff of approx 12% at our other facility. To be blunt, I am expecting one more thing along these lines: a reduction in hours and/or hourly pay. Perhaps a 32-hour work week?
Oddly enough, though, I’m not feeling economically terrorized by contemplating this likely next step. If anything, I’m feeling grateful that the boss has decided to take little steps instead of bigger steps, and is actively trying to preserve as much of the structure of the company as he possibly can. If he was convinced that we’re in a dead end, he’d be working to sell the place, and he’s not even remotely considering it.
There is not anyone I know anywhere who feels safe now in his or her job, and that in itself is a powerful message ~ and I know people working all over healthcare, engineering, government agencies, etc. I am thinking that if a lesser evil takes place at our company ~ like a 20% pay cut or loss of 1 day per week or the addition of a few other duties at no additional pay ~ then I’ll try to be a good little wage slave, suck it up, and be thankful that the lights are still on, the company’s doors are still open, and they’re still keeping me on the payroll. Of course I have already spoken with a number of friends about renting from them if push comes to shove and it’s no longer feasible for me to rent this little hole in the wall or keep a car on the road. But I hope to be OK .. everything is long since paid off .. and it doesn’t cost a lot to stay here.
It’s the total loss of job that brings about the less pleasant consequences. The job market here is deader than I’ve ever seen it, and that’s saying something considering that I moved here just before the tech bubble burst in the very late 1980s. Upstate NY is far deader .. Ohio is even deader than that .. yet those are the places I’d probably have to go to move in with relatives who own property and have got indoor living space and outdoor gardening space and who wouldn’t mind an extra pair of hands around the house. (and as a side benefit, living a few hours closer to GB means taking lessons from the gardening sensei)
All it’s going to take is another moron year or two of this to make me forget I used to be able to walk out of a job on Friday afternoon and have something new lined up for Monday morning. Such was the market for office temping during most of the time I’ve been in the workforce. More often than not, the companies involved were expanding along the way, the expansion involved something with computers, and that’s what helped or let me find job niches here and there. What we’ve got now is the opposite: the slow shedding of many jobs over a longer time span, and the consolidation of more specialties into fewer job positions.
Economists of all kinds are using a throw-darts-at-board approach or a guess-how-many-months approach when it comes to “when the ‘recession’ will end”. The main assumption is that it’s got to end sometime, so they keep guessing. Slightly more sophisticated (but still wholly dense) economists compare this ‘recession’ to previous ‘recessions’ and try to figure out when it will end. I hate to break the news to these folks, but matching up charts isn’t what’s going to cause a recovery .. capital formation (job & wealth creation) is what’s going to bring about a real recovery.
The real question is this: what conditions would be necessary for healthy business expansion (not fueled by credit or by credit spending) to happen?
June 9, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Your situation and millions of others is something not captured in the unemployment statistics, yet it has a profound effect over the economy as a whole. The principal effect is fear resulting in less spending, secondly there is less coming into your pocket, thus less going out.
Already there are large numbers of people–I can’t really guess at how many–who are working at something less than they’re qualified for at lower wages; again an overall economic effect. I’m one of those: I used to work in the entertainment field, film and TV and now drive for a courier company. And even here we’ve had 17% of our drivers and dispatchers laid off. For instance we used to deliver a lot of documents for lawyers and realtors in the booming housing market. Now, hardly ever.
Meanwhile, I live in Vancouver B.C. which has just been rated the most livable city in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit (a division of the Economist magazine). Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea (where I once did a documentary) has been rated last. Perhaps when TSHTF those positions will be reversed.
June 9, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Ugh, don’t wish for Port Moresby, Patz. I doubt it could get moron worse than that place, although Bogota and Mexico City could get honorable mention. The problem with Vancouver is the crowding. I visited there as a kid in the early 1960s and more recently in the 00s. My that place has changed a lot, but so has a lot of cities.
In Bogota and Port Moresby, the staff at the hotel advised us to not leave the hotel grounds. The Port Moresby hotel had a large barbed-wire-chain link fence around the grounds and two armed guards at the entrance.
In Bogota, after we ignored their advice to stay inside, they said to at least stay away from the banks (as they occasionally blow up) and watch out for the pseudo-police that are actually kidnappers after your cash and credit lines–then they dispose of you.
Mexico City is OK as long as you stay in the public, tourist areas and don’t wander down side streets, especially at night. Great stuff to see there, all the vestiges of a violent cultural past.
June 9, 2009 at 6:06 pm
“The real question is this: what conditions would be necessary for healthy business expansion (not fueled by credit or by credit spending) to happen?”
Real innovation, technological or otherwise. That’s the short answer
Let me illustrate the current creative mollase: the other day, we heard JR griping about no good summer movies. When one does come out, it’s usually a remake, e.g., Star Trek, based upon an old TV show from the 1960s. That’s the best Bollywood can come up with, or some Transformers schtick? That’s a movie based upon some kids toys. Where is the imagination? Where are the breakthroughs?
We are a nation and a global culture running short on many fronts. My guess is a root cause is poor education, and/or poor nutrition = mass stupidity. Now add low morale to the mix.
June 9, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Patz, the people over on LayoffDaily.com and at the HBB have made some attempts to gauge the effect of this type of behavior. It is seen in certain current or trailing indicators: volume of mail per month passing through a given location – retail sales numbers for various things – etc. Even if you’re lucky to get the same money you got last year, you’ll still cut back on spending, and save what you can, if you perceive that your job future is less than certain.
My unfinished degree was for physics with minors in CS & math; my current job title is “sales secretary” which is really a cover for doing all sorts of admin projects, computer programming, some minor work with the engineering dep’t, etc. We’ve got people with bachelors degrees working in customer service, a former law student working in marketing, and so on. Some of our salespeople have previously worked as independent editors and publishers. Some of the guys working in the plant have got degrees too.
There have been a number of recent news articles about how difficult it is for recent college grads to secure jobs in this market. The situation is even worse for the HS grads.
The people next door to me (two guys and a girl; only one of them has a job) are already crammed into a 1BR 300sf apartment and getting by as best as they can. I know other households out here like that. I know people delaying their retirement over this.
Doom, the innovation thing is a good short answer, but probably there must also be the opportunity to put the ideas to work, plus a market for the fruits of the idea. Look at what’s happening with vulture, err, venture capital these days: it’s drying up rapidly. Look at how much money has been pulled /away/ from wind, solar, and other alt-E crapola recently. Another year of this and it will not matter much if you can produce thin-film solar panels at half the previous cost; no one will be buying the product, and no one will have the money to invest in the start-up if one is required. Our economy has gone into “standby” mode and is still powering down. It takes awhile to get down to the same sort of low idle state it achieved in the 1930s.
Lotta angst out there over this. Therapists and counselors will have their hands full. What few police officers are still working will also have their hands full.
June 9, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Guys, here’s a little doom to feast on:
Empirical proof .. Obama stimulus fail
http://market-ticker.org/archives/1101-EMPIRICAL-PROOF-Obama-Stimulus-FAIL.html
(cute graphic at the bottom of the pic)
April YTD Machine Tool Consumption Drops 71%
http://www.monitordaily.com/app_enews/news.asp?news_ID=23610
June 9, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Hey ho…
I suppose I’m as secure as anyone in this economy at the moment. We’re entering a new phase of product development, and our strategy looks to be the same as what worked in the early part of the decade: throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. At least five new boxes to document up front, and tons of new features in the backend firmware. I’m probably going to have to find some time to help build a customer portal as well, since we’ll be competing with established playaz who have such goodies. Don’t get my hopes up for a fast crash, I’m not that lucky.
Doc, Hollywood has been coasting since before the millennium. You’re just now figuring out that they’ve run out of ideas? Actually, that’s not true… it’s just that they pour their marketing efforts into the same ol’ shit because they know it will make the margins they want. There’s plenty of creative stuff out there, you just don’t see it in the Boringplex 13 down at the maul. I suppose you can’t really blame them; Dizzy has always made huge bucks recycling old stories (Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, need I go on?). Everything on TV is either unreality or a variation on investigative police work. There won’t be anything new until people start tuning out, and you know how likely that is. (Which is why I’m stayin’ employed, stayin’ employed, ah ah ah ah…) Ahem.
Solar/PV… seems like they’re doing OK, at least they say so. Capacity is up 65% over 2008, big tax credits await purchasers, they sold about 342MW of PV alone last year & 9GW of those concentrators (mirrors focusing on a boiler to make steam power) are supposed to be coming online this year. I know there have been layoffs, seems like conflicting signals there.
I sometimes find it amusing that financial doomers even care about how many deficits are getting run up… if it’s all coming down next year, who gives a flying fark?
June 10, 2009 at 5:37 am
Far, glad to hear you’re in a safe place and that wind/solar haven’t quite dropped off the map. Those last two alt-E things are mentioned often enough on LayoffDaily.com.
On LD there was a linked article about city workers in LA protesting the furloughs/layoffs by marching on city hall. Too bad that the problem did not begin with decisions made anywhere in the local LA government, but with decades of built-up lifestyle expectations running aground on the shoals of affordability. I understand from firsthand accounts posted on the HBB that in CA too many people retire early on 6-figure tax-free pensions, then live another 30+ years at incredible expense. Then there’s the free healthcare & education for undocumented illegal immigrants. No doubt a lot of this made some kind of sense during the heyday of expansion, but now that expansion is gone. We can’t even maintain what we’ve got now .. there’s going to be a fall of sorts.
About Amurrican Bollywood .. there was a time in the past when “new and different” sold well compared to reruns of the same old same old hokey stuff. Perhaps it was back when the demographics were more skewed toward the younger side? When too many folks would rather go see Star Trek XXI than something new (unknown but possibly very good) then this is the type of output you’ll see from the studios. They’d rather have sure performers than worry about what sticks to the wall. Too bad. I wind up watching a lot of indie movies just to get away from the Bollywood same-old same-old mindset.
I get the impression that even if international trade for bulk commodities dies off as Kunstler opines so often, we won’t see a huge “recovery” in the paper industry (presumably through lack of competition taking advantage of cheap labor elsewhere plus cheap global shipping) because the overall level of business will be so much lower. Nothing about the way we live or do things here is geared around people being able both to afford the products they take part in producing and to make a decent living wage off that activity. Globalism just stretches that out via arbitrage; the factory workers in Malaysia don’t earn the salaries that would let them buy the goods they produce for the UPL market.
At some point, we will have to discover for ourselves (as the Europeans have done many many times) how to manage our lifestyle expectations relative to what we can realistically make from our domestic economy. The sooner that happens, the better.
(Far, I got a laugh out of your BeeGee’s reference)
June 10, 2009 at 5:51 am
By the way .. the new header pic is from a downtown bicycle parking lot in Amsterdam.
Reportedly they bicycle in all kinds of weather there. Kudos to them. I’d bet that what the cyclists save in money (owning and using motor vehicles is expensive for a reason) personally is probably doubled in terms of healthcare cost savings by society at large there. We have such an epidemic of obesity here that just going by the MallWart parking lot on Saturday can be a thoroughly nauseating experience. Of course they cater to it with those little fattie-hauler carts and with extra-wide asiles. Even at the local grocery store I occasionally see some 5′0” 350# woman park her enormous SUV as close to the entrance as possible, then waddle around at great effort. She’s acquiring that “they’ll have to saw a hole in the wall to get me out of my trailer” look. Mega-yuck
She just needs the purple jumpsuit, gold chains, and sunglasses to make that look work for her. I doubt very much it’s occurred to her yet that parking as close to the door there doesn’t do anything to give her moron exercise that might help shed the extra ton or two. Sigh. But they haven’t taught objective thinking here in many years anyway.
Sorry I posted that previous thing without thinking it through. Blame it on the lack of coffee. What we’ll have to do is decide on sensible pay difference scales here (like perhaps 7:1 max from top to bottom) in order to get to the point where our own workers can both make a decent living wage off their jobs plus afford to buy their own products plus allow the company to make a profit.
June 10, 2009 at 9:02 am
Far,
Provocative on the “finance doomer” stuff. I think it hooks me because it is where one of the more compelling macro pictures of “whats going on” resides. I am a sociologist, but not an economist. So I am learning on the fly how so many things work and understanding that we are repeating history. The template that is our economy contains the templates that are destroying both the earth (the ultimate marco perspective), our relationships, and our psychic makeups. There are clues everywhere if we just look for them. Dunno, maybe I am trying to derive meaning out of something fundamentally meaningless. But if we don’t try to learn from all this, it truly is hopeless and pointless.
The finance angle has opened my eyes to power in ways that transcend race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. That list is the cannon in my industry. I used to identify myself as a liberal. Can’t take a label seriously anymore. The labels are distractions from the raw truth, we are in a buttload of trouble. I even have compassion for Republicans now. They are right about a lot.
On the deficit thing, what it represents to me is how much value we have pulled forward from the future that will be impossible to pay back. We have taken that value from the other species that live on this planet and we have taken it from our kids, grand kids, etc.
In the big picture, we are coming up against the limits of the petri-dish. As a fellow organism, I would like to tell the other organisms with me to stop eating, building and breeding so much. Finance underpins this. Finance is broken. All the so called developed countries are insolvent. The USA for all intents and purposes is a corporation, like China, like India etc. All the major world banks are insolvent. They/we have a puzzle too fucked up to untangle, but they try to anyway with new proclamations and rules. We need to let it fall apart but instead we are leading Potemkin lives, clinging to the old ways of doing things.
Or I could just tell you I find the finance stuff so riveting of a disaster/soap opera I can barely take my eyes away from it. I could just say that!
June 10, 2009 at 9:09 am
Hey Far,
When I run across your posts these days as I wander around different sites, you sound, well, the first thing I want to say is angry. But that does not quite nail it. How about this– looking for a fight.
I won’t fight cha’ cause I know you are a good guy. If you see this, love to you.
June 10, 2009 at 1:05 pm
MOU, I think you’re focusing on the finance angle because it’s a way for you to cope, as you are obviously distressed about the potential for collapse, or the slow progression toward it. That’s OK, we want you to be sane(er), no sense freaking out about it, as if we could change what’s going down.
You know, I spilled beer on my keyboard and it took out my period/dot key. That’s an important key! You know how I fixed the problem? I borrow a period from others, like you, who post them, by cutting & pasting! Now I’m good to go–I just copy and hit hit “paste” at the end of sentences. Think about that, grasshopper.
June 10, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Doc, if your keyboard is missing its period it might be preggers!
I knew a guy in the Y2K days who used commas in place of periods. Maybe he had the same problem? BTW, shame on you, spilling beer! It goes down your gullet, not the keyboard!
If you’re too drunk to hold your mug straight… well, that’s why God invented straws. And bottles with narrow openings.
MOU, I’m not looking for a fight. I’m not even angry. Just frustrated with the cognitive dissonance I see (on both sides), I guess… maybe I should take a break for a while. I suppose if I’m going to be honest with myself, I’m rooting for the financial system to collapse while expecting a miraculous last-minute “save” by… someone. Maybe Obama’s team, maybe not. That’s why I said “don’t get my hopes up,” because I know how this is going to play out… things will get ugly, approaching GD levels using the same metrics, then just when it looks like the corn-pone fascists and the socialists are going to square off in the Steel Cage Death Match of the 21st Century, something will happen to get everyone climbing down off the ledge. And I’ll be stuck here paying this freeking mortgage that I didn’t want in the first place.
So yeah, when the pollies (old Y2K term) talk about people wanting it all to go to hell… that would be me. I’m not proud of it.
June 10, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Doom, around here a computer isn’t really considered to be part of the household until it’s had something spilled on the keyboard like that. This particular laptop just got baptized by hot coffee the other weekend .. I was in a chat session and the others were bemused at the way I couldn’t do caps or pronounce the letters a, s, z, x, c, or n. As colorful as it was, the problem had, uhh, evaporated by the next day.
MOU: keeping an eye on the financials is a good way to retain some portion of a feeling of there being any objective reality available at a time like this. Sad to say, but I have pretty much lost that feeling. The ongoing malaise (any better names for it?) is making everyone crabby, is making the mad SUV’ers even madder (why at me? heck, I’m conserving fuel just so they can waste it more cheaply!), and is pushing even American Idle out of the center of the focal zone of the one eye of that single-brain-celled-critter that is the public attention span in this country.
OK, so I have some friends out here who are already doing the multiple-income-household thing by having more than two unrelated non-sleeping-together adults under the same roof. Yeah, they’ve got less personal privacy than I do, but at the same time I applaud them for making a sensible choice in the face of what’s happened and what’s going to happen next. Heck, they even go out to eat a lot more than I do (1x~2x monthly) and generally eat pretty well and seem to have a good time.
Hang in there Babystepper .. we’re with you in spirit if not in person.
June 10, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Guys, while we are on this employment thread .. let me add something please about how job mobility has got to be hitting new lows these days. Not saying this is the evil, horrible thing we should think it is. I know a number of people who profess to hate their jobs – yet they still remain at them and take the paycheque, even as they plan to bail as soon as prospects brighten.
When qualified (or, heck, overqualified) employees leave, the former employer is stuck with the sunken cost of whatever extra effort it invested in training those people. Here in the land of Instant Gratification Über Alles, it is a not-so-well-acknowledged fact that our tendency to flip from job to job to job, every so often, surely adds to the “cost of doing business” here ~ you know, that same thing that we whine about because it helps create some of the conditions that make it worthwhile to export our own jobs to other places where people move less from job to job. (the government, prodded on by special interests, creates the rest of those conditions, but that’s another story)
Here in Amurrika, we cringe openly at the thought of anyone remaining with the same employer for his or her whole working career. Gosh, we think, how boring .. and that “boring” factor weighs more heavily than the costs of going broke moving somewhere else and being unable to find work ~ as happened to me when I foolishly moved here to Mazzland when the tech bubble had just begun bursting.
All that being said, I confess to being bitten occasionally by the “boring” bug. Is it safe to chalk it up to having lived my entire life after the so-called cultural revolution, when “doing what you want” us the both the ultimate good and feel-good thing?
June 11, 2009 at 6:10 am
MOU .. this made me think of what you mentioned earlier about finances ..
Just heard something on the nooz about how Mazzland was given a few billion dollars in bailout money that was supposed to be for education and was supposed to last until 2011. Oops, bad news: Mazzland has instead applied those funds against the commonwealth’s general budget deficit, with the sad result that the funds will run out so much sooner. (prior budget calculations had of course planned to make use of that money for education, with the result that now the general budget and the educational budget will both go broke that much sooner .. see? we have our own special version of “severely retarded” here)
Collectively, we are STILL not “getting it” with respect to the need to scale down our expectations/spending to what we can afford without having an unsustainable constantly-expanding credit-fueled economy running here. Clearly, we’re going to keep on keeping on until we run out of the money for even that .. and then we’ll raise taxes higher than the Rockies just to get us through this “rough spot” in the economy.
I wish I could speak better of my fellow petri-dish inhabitants, but I cannot.
Far writes in Far Future about the Opt-Outs, and I’m wondering how much more of that we’ll see in the current era’s form of it, which probably comes out as organized homelessness, like those folks in NJ living at a campsite in the woods. At some point, the power of the local law to shut down such camps like that may well become a thing of the past. For sure the PTB are going to keep raising the taxes well past truly-insane levels rather than pare down their own salaries or creature-comfort costs.
MOU, I’m feeling a whole lot better these days about the Republicans too, at least them who can acknowledge how Shrub II so ruined their future and can point out that making the business environment financially hostile merely discourages companies from starting up or expanding operations.
June 11, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Great blog always cheers me up.
Have any of you guys read John Robb’s site Global Guerrillas? He’s got some really interesting things to say about war, society and collapse.
Recently he mentioned that Globalization is another way of saying that the world has become a closed system and as such entropy is proceeding at an exponentially faster pace.
Really just another take on what we’re talking about. His site is http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/09/bazaar_dynamics.html
June 11, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Hi Patz, and thanks for partaking of the good cheer if that’s what you like. The rest of those doom groups were just too warm & fuzzy for most of what’s discussed here. It would be lost in the noise at CFN; the people on TOD wouldn’t get it unless lots of colorful charts were added and the whole thing put into a sort of powerpoint presentation format; and the boyz at ZK can’t be disturbed from their dueling-YouTube game which I can’t follow anyway. There was nothing else to do but set up a quiet doom corner which is known to just a handful of people. Net popularity is oh so overrated.
Had heard of John Robb but hadn’t visited his blog until now. Not meaning to bust on him, but did he fall into the Archdruid-like trap of conflating the abstract view of the problem with the problem itself? I see that more often than I’d like to. The fact of the matter is that the future will be what it will be, and that’s most of what we can say about it from the vantage point of here and now. No need to discuss the theoretical formation of sustainable communities, when the future will unfold anyway by the simple expedient of all that is unsustainable failing on its own, and other things emerging based on local needs. No need to plan Big Macro Policy on the national level when in fact people will just do what seems sensible to them at the time, as did those several group households I mentioned upthread.
Maybe that kind of thinking is just an artifact of the information-saturated era in which we live. For sure, most of our ancestors working in fields didn’t frantically check their Crackberries every 10 minutes to check stocks, see if the Air France black boxes had been found yet, learn if Brittney hadn’t escaped from rehab again, and browse Amazon.com to see how to spent next week’s wages of a bushel basket of turnips.
These are truly nutty times we live in ~ enough so that keeping the perspective of how nutty they are, while managing to live in and be part of the nuttiness, is quite the chore.
Patz, you’re welcome here anytime.
June 11, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Nudge, did you get my reply to your email? Let me know, thanks!
June 12, 2009 at 12:47 am
Nudge you can bust on John Robb all you like. He’s smarter and hipper to que passe than any of the real politic/Pentagon/US Imperium types, which is what interests me about his writing–his insights. But he’s on their side and actually seems to think terrorists are a real threat.
And thanks for the welcome. I’m not interested in some of the harangues that go down on CFN. And I don’t really care to argue the latest technology or process that promises to save us. Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t be thrilled to have our nuts pulled out of the fire–just don’t believe/expect it will happen. Well I would seriously qualify that last statement but will save it for another day; just too tired now.
June 12, 2009 at 1:04 am
I am lurking and thinking.
I am watching another blog splinter off with a crew of commenters leaving to chat on Skype with the claim that the others are repeating themselves and not accomplishing anything to move forward.
Sound familiar?
Nothing happens on CFN. I like the effort to press forward here. I think the ZK blog is a place to play, relax, and reaffirm community. Not bad. Kind of like the bar “Cheers.”
Again, just lurking and thinking.
June 12, 2009 at 1:15 am
Our boy sold out:
http://kunstlerclubs.ning.com/page/charter-1
June 12, 2009 at 2:14 am
MOU, I had a Ph D graduate student who used to do a lot of “reading and thinking” (excuse me, may I borrow a period from you? Thanks!). So, I used to give him major shit by saying “Wot, you been readin’ and thinkin’ again?” That’s one of the ways men tell each other they are loved.
Agree with your assessment of ZK and CFN.
I commented on your comment re: JHK’s new move on ZK.
June 12, 2009 at 5:13 am
Good morning folks.
MOU, thanks for sharing that hilarious bit about Kunstler Clubs. I almost spewed coffee laughing about that one. Who might “Peak Oil Preparer” be? Patrick? Not Dale. That fool who keeps advertising his LE yahoo group? Not Jimbo. Not JR. Not BunnBunn or his pet human. That fool Ryan Crocker who hasn’t been to CFN in months?
Doom, thanks for the email. Sorry I was slow replying.
My other big CFN laugh for the week was seeing that comment that Dale left about mileage. (he said “Most still drive their cars (of course) but imagine themselves superior to anyone who get 2 MPG less than they do.”)
At first I thought Dale was just missing me, but then it became obvious that he thinks I just changed handles (like everyone else) and am still posting there. Too funny! All we need now are a few people using the word “infestor” to get him going again.
MOU, didn’t mean to bust on ZK .. I just haven’t got the right cultural exposure to follow it. For all practical purposes I grew up in a Nazi submarine and didn’t escape until later in life.
June 12, 2009 at 5:39 am
Hi again Patz .. and thanks for the comments. No need to qualify that last bit about not expecting the chestnuts to be pulled out of the fire at the right time .. we’re all on the same page about that one, I think.
Instead of using the term “war on terrorism” we should be calling it “jihad against jihadists”, or so it seems. (not so ironically, it’s going about as well as our 30-year “jihad against drugs”) Seriously, when some melanin-deficient puke sitting in a bunker in Nebraska twitches a joystick, punches buttons, and obliterates a couple of Pakistani families who were eating or sleeping (and who had no idea they were being watched or targeted or even considered combatants) what is it but terrorism? That it is state-sponsored makes it doubly so in my book. Think small evils vs large evils, like the administration of the Soviet empire or the running of the Nazi death camps.
I am waiting to see school textbooks that say “We’ve always been at war with Afghanistan!” Pretty soon now, especially if the Pakistanis democratically elect someone we don’t like, we’ll be calling them part of the Axis of Weevils too.
Sadly, the belief that the whole world is out to get us now is a requirement for membership in Team America, World Police. By some curious severing of synapses or by an overactive sense of cognitive dissonance, those same people who believe the whole world is out to get us generally fail to acknowledge the role of US foreign terrorism (as mentioned above) in fostering ill-will towards us.
(disclaimer: I’m about as white as they get)
MOU, I am still trying to figure out a lot here and have no clue where it’s going yet .. so thanks
For all I can tell, those group households mentioned earlier are the more common form of “intentional community” than the yuppified folks at places like Twin Oaks believe themselves to be. The people next door are an income- and resource-sharing community of three. They did not grow up communists. They don’t have any burning desire to foster the development of sustainable communities. They’ve probably never heard of the Fellowship of Egalitarian Communities (www.thefec.org) and wouldn’t be interested if they did. They don’t write books about communities, nor do they read blogs about the stuff. Not sure if they do any recreational reading at all. What ever. Yet that sort of “making do” will be a million times more common.
June 12, 2009 at 5:50 am
To clarify that unfinished thought from earlier: the idea of getting together a website to tell people how to form lifeboat communities is as laughable as the notion of devoting a website telling people how to feed and clothe themselves, have sex, and defecate periodically .. it will happen regardless. We are quite literally the cockroaches of the planet when it comes to the range of climates we can inhabit using only the tools and materials at hand in each place.
Will there be fewer of us once coal & oil & nuclear & NG are all used up? For sure.
Will the path there likely be tough? Again, for sure.
Would we have done the past 400 years any differently? Doubtful, since you would have needed a certain viewpoint back then (which seems not to have been present) to imagine the cumulative effects of billions of other people doing the same energy using as you.
The current house-of-cards to which we’ve become so fondly attached will in time become a scattering of playing cards flat upon the floor. How it collapses is perhaps not as important as what we should be planning to do after the collapse has finished.
(oh, and I should customize the blog-viewing options by having a set of slider bars for adjusting the levels of doom, sarcasm, humor, resignation, etc to each reader’s viewing preferences)
June 13, 2009 at 4:25 am
A great up-to-date, hour-long seminar on Peak Energy by Prof Aleklett of ASPO, here: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cops/events/energycontroversies/peak-oil.php
June 13, 2009 at 6:42 am
Doom, great video, thanks
Well worth the watch.
June 13, 2009 at 6:55 am
Lots of great information mentioned in that video too. The one that really jumped out and whacked me over the head, though, was the figure that a human adult in good shape can produce about 0.5 kWh worth of useful energy per day .. which is roughly 1/60th of the energy in a gallon of gasoline.
Suggest we all look at our monthly rates of gasoline & electricity consumption and say “Oh shit” until it sinks in.
June 13, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Oh shit!
June 13, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Actually, a more useful figure would be how much energy there is in a barrel of oil since the #s of barrels of oil used annually are easily gotten. Then we would have a true ratio of person/day/work to the same for oil.
Of course it’s worse than that as the oil runs machines which cannot be run on human effort alone.
Oh shit!
June 13, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Well, at least Nudge and Patz have gotten it, the Oh Shit! revelation that our society is in store for some pretty rough times ahead. The only questions remaining are how soon and how bad.
One of the Newbies over on CFN made the logical conclusion that in future, we will rely upon the alternative, so-called sustainable fuels to power our society. That currently represents about 3% of the energy mix, excluding nuclear. Better start scaling up soon!
June 13, 2009 at 3:43 pm
The “If” game. If horses had wings they could fly. Much of the so-called PO community is caught up in this mindset. What we need to do to get out of the pickle we’re in. “If only” then fill in the blanks, “government would build more railways … we built sustainable communities… we ya da, ya da, ya da…”
I agree, somewhat reluctantly, with Nudge that it’s laughable (albeit a bit bitterly). If Marx were here he would recognize the flaw instantly. It is not “materialist” thinking. I.e. it is not through thinking that we move through stages it is through the material circumstances. Thus it was not (primarily) through genius, innovation, etc. that the pace of industrialization exploded in the early 20th century it was the discovery and exploitation of oil. And in the western world economics, the primary study of how humans use their resources, ignored this.
We got to where we are—the point of overshoot—organically and we will descend organically, i.e. we will respond to how it plays out organically. By organically I mean we will respond to circumstances as they play out.
I’m curious Nudge you say Math was one of your majors, yes? Do you agree that chaos theory tells us that there are too many variables in the situation to predict how the “crash” will play out?
An aside: I heard an interview yesterday with Julie Payette a Canadian astronaut who is going on her second space mission, today I believe. She is obviously a smart and capable lady. In her interview she stressed the importance of space research because soon space travel will be commonplace and there “will be hotels on the moon.” Seriously delusional!
June 14, 2009 at 3:10 am
Nudge, et al., you will like this article, especially the last 20 points of up-to-the-minute American economic history. The link here: http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune09/depression06-09.html
Kudos go to Matt Savinar for posting this link.
June 14, 2009 at 5:54 am
Doom, very nice link .. thanks for sharing.
June 14, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Patz,
I like your language regarding how we got here organically and we will get out of it organically. Our current economic situation has been a mutation that is getting ready to fail and mother nature is coming back to take what is hers with a vengeance. Our entire culture may be the biggest recipient of the “Darwin Award” ever to blight the face of earth.
Seriously, our economy is “organic.” It cannot be any other way though we pretend it is something unnatural. But mother nature works through us and through our inventions. Nice to see you on the board.
Doom,
Saw that link earlier. Good stuff. This long emergency is long indeed. I just got a kitten, a boisterous boy, one could argue not a good prep thing to do. But it is warm and purring in my lap and it really brings the family together. Life will go on and we will adjust, maybe die, maybe not. Wish we could plan better at the macro level but alas, we are at where we are at and it can’t be helped.
We just gotta love those around us and plan from there.
Peace to you on this fine Sunday.
June 14, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I’ll adjust the above:
Maybe die soon, maybe not.
We will all die. If this truth was embraced with openness and honesty, we would not be where we are (My internalized Dr. Doom editor caught that error). We would not value “things” but relationships. Nothing is permanent.