I am putting this post up to give commenters who would like to carry on conversations related to previous posts a place to comment, since comments on my last post have been cut off.
Also, my family and I recently returned from a two-week vacation to Japan. The combination of the time away and jet lag has given me less time to research and write a full article. Here are a few observations, based on my recent trip to Japan:
General
The scenery is beautiful, but it is clear that the Japanese people and agriculture are squeezed into the small amount of land that is not mountainous and forested.
The amount of land being used for agriculture has been steadily falling. Our tour guide remarked that if an older person wanted to leave agriculture, getting solar panels installed is an alternate way of obtaining income. We did see quite a few solar panels. But does this approach make sense, when the amount of land farmed is relatively small and falling year-by-year? The USDA says, “Based on total calories consumed, Japan imports about 60 percent of its food each year.”
Tokyo-Edo Museum Visit
When we first arrived in Tokyo, before our bus tour began, we visited the Tokyo-Edo museum. This is a photo of one of the exhibits from the museum.
In previous posts, I have talked about economies being dissipative structures–growing for a fairly long period, before collapsing or obtaining an infusion of cheap energy. I thought that it was interesting that the Edo Period lasted 265 years (1603 – 1868). This is about as long as a person might expect an economy to last in its role as a dissipative structure. In the latter part of the Edo Period, there seemed to be increasing wealth disparity and problems with the government collecting enough taxes. These are things that we would expect to happen, as resources per capita start to fall and complexity starts to increase.
Free English Language Guided Tour of Museum
The three of us (my husband, son, and I) received a free three-hour English language guided tour from a volunteer guide at the Tokyo-Edo Museum. The guide told us that he is a 75-year old retired business man. There was no charge for his services; we were also told not to tip people in Japan.
My impression is that the no-tipping policy is a holdover from the gift economy approach that much of the world used before our current capitalist approach took over. Under the gift economy approach, people are expected to offer their services for nothing, with the expectation that others will reciprocate. This system has pluses and minuses. If pensions of some elderly people are inadequate, it makes it harder for them to provide personal services for wages, since others (with more adequate pensions) will do the same thing for free, as unpaid volunteers.
Traveling School Children
Everywhere we traveled, we encountered a large number of school children traveling on school trips. They often stayed at the same hotels as we did and visited the same sites as we did. In fact, in several places they seemed to be the majority of hotel guests.
The group of children shown above had prepared some type of recitation and response to be offered in the Hiroshima Peace Park. The group is lined up for their presentation, even though there was no real audience for their performance, other than a few of us from our tour bus who happened to be walking by. I can’t imagine US children doing this.
Our tour leader told us that only children whose parents can afford to pay for these class trips are allowed to go. As a result, there is a great deal of pressure on parents to save up money for these trips.
Roads in Japan
The roads in Japan impressed me as being incredibly expensive to build and maintain. Everywhere, we saw walls built along the side of the road, presumably to prevent falling rock. In the US, we just put up signs, “Beware of Falling [really fallen] Rock.” Of course, we have more space, so we don’t build our roads quite so close to the road cuts.
The white line near the side of the road is to mark off what I would call a “sidewalk substitute.” It is a low-cost way of giving pedestrians a little space to walk.
We saw other features that make roads expensive. Our tour bus drove through countless tunnels. We also drove on many sections where the road was elevated, so that more roads could be squeezed into less area.
Nearly everywhere, soundproofing panels have been added because roads are so close to buildings. Roads are being made in an earthquake-proof manner, which also adds to costs.
Our bus frequently drove through toll stations. Wikipedia indicates that most expressways were originally financed by debt, and the tolls are being collected to pay off this debt. The Japan Guide indicates to drive the length of Japan, toll payments of 39,000 yen ($349) are required for a private passenger automobile. This is expensive compared to tolls elsewhere.
Man Made Rocks
Something else I noticed in Japan that I hadn’t seen elsewhere was the use of man-made rocks. Here, they are being used to keep the sea from causing erosion under a major road that is very close to the edge of the sea. We saw other shapes of rocks being used for other purposes elsewhere.
Government Pensions in Japan
The National Pension program in Japan (somewhat equivalent to our Social Security) is based on the assumption that all participants in the program will make equal contributions to the program, regardless of income. In 2017, these contributions amount to 16,490 yen (or $147) per month. To get the maximum pension amount, a person has to contribute at the full level (whatever it is declared to be, each year) for 40 years.
Our bus tour guide told us that because of changing employers and resulting low income, he has been unable to make contributions in recent years. When he retires, he expects that his pension payments will be very low because of this. He seemed to be well educated and hardworking. If he is having pension problems, I expect that many others are also having pension problems. In fact, some may be having pension problems today. We saw quite a few older people working.
Bullet Trains in Japan
One thing we discovered is that Japan’s bullet trains are for people, not luggage. The racks over people’s heads hold a backpack or brief case, but not much more. If people have luggage, they generally send it a day or two ahead of time via a luggage transfer service. There is also no internet service available on these bullet trains.
We chose to take an airplane from Osaka to Tokyo. Airplanes will transfer both people and luggage.
Photo in Kotohira, Japan
This is a photo of my husband, son, and me, after we had climbed 865 steps to a shrine in Kotohira, Japan. We had a good but tiring trip.
I recommend the book The Tartar Steppe. Or the Italian movie
I think it has beautiful parallels for slow collapse
Is there a Just in Time supply chain depicted in this movie?
What about a global financial system that can be torn to pieces with a few key strokes triggered by algo programs that are set to immediately sell on when the data inputs indicate the CBs are pushing on a string?
So come, those of you living in the DisUnited Kingdom: xabier, Norman, and whoever else. There’s a general election campaign underway. What are you thoughts? Is it worth voting for anyone, or are we all doomed anyway? My main observation is the lack of a discernible campaign by the Toryservatives, probably because they though they would storm it, just by keeping quiet. Meanwhile, Corbyn has started wearing a suit and is looking less of a ragamuffin than usual.
Corbyn is universally hated by the press. A bit like a school teacher, no one will admit to liking him but a lot secretly agree with what he says
The Tories do anything they can to cut middle class public service jobs which removes the last of punters with money to spend locally. Only the rich get richer, everyone else goes down. They are called fhe Nasty Party. There are nurses going to food banks now…
Labour will go on a spending spree, and to a degree this will pick the economy up, at the expense of government debt
Given that the whole thing will blow up in due course, I would spend the money and build some houses and fix up the hospitals… at least it will keep the infrastructure up for when the downward spiral takes hold. The money may go ‘phut’ but a brick house will stand a while here (few hundred years)
Yes, the disparities in wealth are obscene these days. But states and governments don’t have any real control over this any more, because of all the offshoring and the power of the multinationals. It would require the USA, as world leader, to take back control, but that is not now going to happen, despite what Trump said before he became president and got co-opted.
Also, if Corbyn became prime minister, what would the markets do to the pound? “Socialism!”, they’d scream. Of course, we’d have to put up with ridiculous amounts of political correctness from Missie Abbott and her friends. It all makes me think, what the hell, I won’t vote.
Well, I dislike all the parties and have no ideological loyalties.
Corbyn is ghastly and May reminds me of my old maths teacher (although an older voter I know finds her sexy and intriguing! ).
Civilised life on this island is doomed in any case.
The Monster Raving Loony Party is, alas, no more, therefore I can’t vote for Screaming Lord Sutch.
So, I’m………gardening. 🙂
I can’t blame you, xabier. The leaders of the parties, including UKIP and the SNP, and especially the Lib Dems, are all so ugly we ought to turn it into a “most ugly” competition and make a reality show of it.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t vote in the last federal election either. I was simply too disgusted with the lot of them. I think at this point the stage is set, albeit, some leaders could make things worse faster.
I’m with Xabier; watching and listening to the blackbirds around the yard or looking at insects going about their work while enjoying the garden.
The mind numbing evil BS that politics has become these days…I suppose it wrong to be sitting here well off and ignoring it and the carnage it brings but there is little that can change it now.
Theresa May offers: nuclear first strike, higher education costs (ie. student debt), privatizing healthcare, lower taxes on the very rich.
Corbyn offers: pacifism, free higher education, greater investment in public healthcare, re-nationalizing the rail network, higher taxes on the very rich.
The sheeple are of course going to vote for May, sheeesh :-((
The more TV you watch, the less you know.
Thomas Frank wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas” – he could have written “What’s the Matter with England”.
Tis true, Jeremy. But look at recent history: the Brexit referendum – entirely unexpected, though it won’t address any real issues; and the fact that UKIP came second in so many seats in 2015. UKIP is a Thatcherite party, of course, so won’t solve anything, and in any case the UK voting system (“first past the post”) militates against smaller parties.
More money for everybody and for the health service would be nice, but then I read Tim Morgan (“Surplus Energy”) and wonder how we even afford what we have, with all this debt. One day we will be found out – by the early 2020s at the latest, I would imagine. But, despite everything, Labour may do a fair bit better than anyone expects at the moment.
I know nothing about english politics, but I have heard there is no free lunch.
politicians are driven bty the same forces as the rest of us.
if a troup of circus monkeys ran governments departments, as long as surplus energy was flowing into the system, the fortunes of the nation would advance in material terms.
now that there is no surplus energy, nations are slipping into decline and we expect politicians to to ”do something about it”—but they can do nothing.
yet the vast majority remain convinced that prosperity can be voted into office.—and we will go on voting in this respect until governments collapse altogether.
then voting will be pointless
“then voting will be pointless”
It probably already is. Anyway, you used the phrase “surplus energy”, which is now copyright, so you will have to send Tim Morgan a ten shilling postal order. 😉
if you use ”shillings”—you’ll confuse everybody in here
Could this be legit news or another MSM obfuscation, hiding it in seasonality effect:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-27/saudi-arabia-trim-oil-exports-us-force-inventories-lower
Should this be for real, we are getting closer as bigger guns(tools) are allowed on the scene suddenly..
Twilight in The Desert?
Given the extreme efforts to get shale out of the ground … one wonders if the failure of Ghawar (on a scale up their with North Sea declines…) would be the camel that breaks the straw’s back
If they are having production problems they may have been hoarding through the winter to meet their own domestic demand. If they have damaged their fields it could be the storage isn’t enough. Their peak consumption hits around August let’s see what happens.
Saudi Arabia’s worldwide oil exports have been close to flat since 1990. All of the statements about Saudi Arabia “flooding the world with oil exports” are not really true.
Saudi Arabia needs to keep raising its production, in order for exports to stay flat. It is possible the agreement to continue to restrict output really means “we can’t really increase out by much any more–we haven’t been making enough investments in new production.” If total exports are dropping (because production is too close to flat), then someone has to be left out. Saudi Arabia has chosen that country to be the USA.
The statement (and in fact the new agreement) could be a way of deferring people from noticing that Saudi Arabia can no longer increase its oil production. If this happens, exports are likely to fall, especially during summer.
On the question of where do you want to be as collapse unfolds, this is my short answer:
-there is at least some local water and food supply
-demographically you are part of the majority or at least a sizeable minority
-away from coastlines and other disaster prone areas
Of course all of this is easier said that done, due to climate changing, people moving, etc. And because we are socialized within particular cultures, most of us can’t just pick up and change countries. Everywhere is crowded these days. Also, wherever you go, the possibility of war or political breakdown, etc. is very real.
Take Venezuela for example. A superficial observer of collapse might conclude that they would do well because of their oil reserves. But what we know here is that the oil is very expensive and difficult to produce, and production collapsed with the recent fall in price. Also, the country is politically mismanaged, which can often happen in countries which are resource rich.
Or you might think to stick it out in Sweden, up until now a well managed country, only to realize you are being replaced by Islamic immigrants, and the country is subservient to a corrupt EU, etc.
So even if you move, you will still have to fight for a particular vision of what you want your area or country to be.
As always historically speaking it’s the very rare blend of foresight-instinct, down to earth preparedness mode, sheer luck in may ways (timing cycles, place of birth, personal traits and skillz, .. )
That’s why they called it a bottleneck after-all, lolz.
Monkey with fist closed over fruit in a jar, holding on to it as the hunter approaches to kill it.
Having what it wants is the monkey’s curse, but it doesn’t know it.
Open the fist, lose the fruit, but get through the bottle-neck. 🙂
Moving to a new culture has its problems as well. Even if you look like the local residents, if you don’t speak the local language, it is likely to be a problem.
Some melancholic music for the end of times (and i’m not even a big fan of fado)
Haha JMS your Portuguese pride shining out 😉
Not a fan either, but my dad is, we had quite a few of her vinyl records at home growing up 🙂
Here’s one to showcase my Greek pride 😉
Written my Mikis Theodorakis and performed by Mary Linda
The first part of the song says:
“When you go to the other world,
be careful not to become a cloud,
be careful not to become a cloud,
and as a bitter star of the dawn
not to be met by your mother
who waits patiently upon the door.”
I’m not much of a patriot, nor do I like fado, but I make an exception for Amália, she’s awesome.
Thanks for the greek song. I know nothing about greek music. But I know some fine greek poets. For example, the great Cavafy:
Awaitng for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
***********
Happy the Romans, who still had the barbarians to wait for. Who are our barbarians today, our saviors? The spent fuel ponds maybe?
Thanks JMS for the poem…I’m not very big on poetry (too complicated to interpret with my puny brain 😉 ), but I do know that Cavafy, alongside Giorgos Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, were among the great poets from Greece in the 20th Century!
Of course is not a matter of brains (I know dozens of dumb people who love poetry!). It’s just a matter of practice of reading it. Poetry is a kind of specialized knowledge and language, like chemistry or math. I wouldn’t be able to understand the most basic mathematical equation even if my life depended on it…
“Telling the truth is like poetry… and you know most people hate focking poetry.”
Overheard in a Washington D.C. bar by Michael Lewis, author of ‘The Big Short’.
Cheers.
I like to listen to this one, when thinking about what is coming to our civilization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lrq5oGHdrY
Very good…I love the following song as well when pondering our impending collapse..I actually commented on the song on Youtube over 3 years ago that this is the type of music I would like to hear when Industrial Civ is collapsing all around us, and how ironic it was that said music was a product of said IC 😉
This is another one as well….I will stop at that because I could be posting songs fitting for collapse all day 🙂
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Iran Confident of Oil Price Rebound
Iran Confident of Oil Price Rebound thumbnail
The unexpectedly negative reaction of global markets to OPEC’s decision on extending crude supply cuts into next year is temporary and prices will gain ground, says Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh.
Thirteen producers on Thursday agreed at the 172nd meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna to extend an accord to scale back crude oil production by nine months to March 2018.
The initial agreement, announced late last year, was aimed at cutting the group’s collective output by 1.2 million barrels per day, with Saudi Arabia shouldering nearly 40% of the cuts. Hours after the OPEC announcement, 11 non-members, led by world’s top producer Russia, renewed their pledge to reduce supplies by 600,000 barrels daily.
But joint efforts by OPEC and non-OPEC producers to chip away at inventories and lift oil prices did not go well with international markets. Crude prices plunged nearly 5% and international markets, particularly oil and gas stocks, slid following the extension of cuts.
“I was surprised by the negative reaction of global markets as well as the oil price drop. It wasn’t ordinary. But hopefully, prices will be revised and maintain an upward trajectory as that’s what producers hoped to achieve from extending the cuts,” Zanganeh said, Mehr News Agency reported Saturday, citing an interview published by the Oil Ministry.
The minister said that members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have come a long way from their deep discord in the last several years which contributed to the collapse of global oil prices to multi-year lows in the beginning of 2016.
“Everyone was much more at ease at the Thursday meeting compared to other ministerial meetings of OPEC in the past three years. There was no major disagreement or contention among the members and every decision was made quickly.
Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s de facto leader, and Iran spent most of the last year wrangling over a mechanism to reduce oil production. Tehran pressed for bigger market share as it was recovering from international sanctions which had stifled its output, while the Saudis said Iran had to be part of any supply cut deal.
In November, OPEC announced a rare and historic agreement to reduce supplies in which Iran won an exemption from the cuts.
Iran Oil Production Policy
Tehran is firm on its policy of raising crude production in the long-term, Zanganeh said.
“No one in the OPEC can dictate to us to reduce our production. Nothing happens unless we express our consent and agreement. No one has the audacity to tell us to reduce output unless we want to,” Zanganeh said.
On Thursday, Reuters quoted Zanganeh as saying that “All OPEC decisions are short-term decisions. Production capacity is part of our long-term plans.”
He also noted that the oil producing bloc “outdid market expectations,” by extending the current supply cut deal by nine months.
But according to some analysts, the extension was apparently not enough as there was mounting anticipation before the Vienna meeting for deeper production cuts.
Financial Tribune
notice how the oil price dropped when the news broke out completely opposite to what should happen could this be a sign that the end is nigh
Neither US crude oil stocks,
nor total stocks, including oil products and condensate, has done much, with the previous runs of cuts. More of the same doesn’t come across as being much of a solution.
In Japan nearly everyone travels by train. On shinkansen, you put your luggage behind the last row of seats in your carriage, where nobody will steal it. Shinkansen is expensive but there are also ordinary trains at about half the cost. Of course as a tourist, the Japan rail pass is even better value.
Although I’m sure income is an issue for older people in Japan, so it’s inclusion. You see a lot of older people doing jobs that don’t pay for themselves, like waving traffic around road works. The point of this seems to be to make older people active members of society rather than send then home with a pension.
Rail seems to be very popular. I noticed the bullet train we took from Tokyo was more and more empty, as we hit less densely populated areas.
I looked up to see about profitability, and I found this comment:
Japan seems to have the healthy idea about what a company is: A company exists to provide goods and services that people value. A company should be profitable, but only so it can continue providing goods and services without burdening someone else.
The West follows Milton Friedman’s dangerous idea that the sole purpose of a company is to gather money for its shareholders, and the company’s products or customers are irrelevant. The more that a country believes this, the more its trains suck.
That notion of a company pre-dates Friedman by at least 300 years.
In fact, 700 years ago mercenaries formed ‘companies’ which existed only to make a profit for the (armed) shareholders and didn’t give a damn about society! 🙂
I am not surprised – taking the train in Tokyo at least — is a total pain in the ass…
Because the lines are owned by different companies — when you change lines — you need to sort out another payment for the onward journey….
Collapsnik’s exhaustion (calm before the storm?) as of Q2/2017:
…several peak oil sites gone…
– Orlov is already partly behind paywall and when the boat is ready..
– Greer is changing focus and moving the web site, announcing to delete the blog archive
– Hamilton announced moving from the subject and already deleted the blog archive
– Ludlum is on blogging vacation
– Kunstler, Gail, Bardi, and Ch. H. Smith plus few other chiefly economic focused tend to soldier on for the moment..
Dr. Tim somehow dropped out from the top list by accident, sorry to him and others.
Kunstler and the Automatic Earth mostly provide conjecture on politics now, waxing and waning between approval & disapproval of Trump, to certainty the ‘Deep State’ is responsible for their opinion it is a no-merit Russia investigation. Maybe they are now listening to Alex Jones, but I’d much prefer they stick to peak oil and it’s knock on effects as slow as they may be.
Generally speaking, what’s happened is akin to waiting for a bus that never comes. People have been suggesting, predicting and otherwise certain on oil blogs of imminent collapse for so long it’s now like the bus just never arrived. The first time I went on The Oil Drum in 2005 they were writing stuff no different in tenor to what is being written on this blog today. One supposed expert had Russian oil production descending sharply in 2007, but instead it’s just ratcheted up and now they are pulling oil out of the Arctic 10 years later which was supposedly a non-starter due to cost of production.
Twilight in the Desert never happened on a timescale Simmons or the rest of those on the blogs were sure it would and still hasn’t happened. The movie Collapse had things winding down so fast we shouldn’t be here now, but here we are. It’s called boredom. At some point waiting for something that doesn’t happen is like waiting for a bus that never shows up. You get bored and shuffle off to do something else. I still frequent these sites but only dolph believes me when I write about how BAU keeps going and there’s no sign of collapse at least in our respective neck of the woods.
I suggest everybody just forget about it and go on with their lives. If it happens there’s nothing that can be done other than holding up someplace with some freeze dried food and water, with some way to heat up the food. Once you’ve got your cache, just do as you please and take the whole idea of imminent collapse with a grain of salt because it’s already been on a longer timeline than anybody in the peak oil blogosphere thought. Take in a ball game or go sailing, or bust a move on a woman, or make a toast at a big party…
I liken it to a slow motion train wreck. We are in the back. We know something bad is going on in the front, but it just takes a long time to reach us. The insta doomers just don’t get how long the train is and how slow the motion is.
Wow, slow-collapse is on a roll here. How many posts in a row before the instadoom posse rounds us up? 🙂
As Gail repeatedly says, we don’t understand the timing issue very well. Things are unpredictable yet some people here preach with absolute certainty that the entire world economy will stop permanently within days of a financial failure event.
Just because everything eventually ends – doesn’t mean it will end anytime soon. People fail to see the truth. Every day we post here on OFW is another day of BAU. I even think there is a chance BAU will outlive OFW. Now that’s a sad thought…
I’m starting to think that there is more than 5 stages of grief regarding collapse. The 5th step is acceptance (of doom), but the 6th might be acceptance of slow doom.
I guess its not practical to point out that 2007-2008 was the breaking point in the global system. Or that we wouldnt be here unless the CBs hadnt started buying just about ‘everything’ from about 2012 onwards. Or that the plunge protection team has been in overdrive since 2015-2016 resulting in stockmarket all time highs, even if profits have gone down.
Its funny that you guys think its perfectly natural that the system just rolls on.. that its just fine that we currently are living inside the biggest magic trick bubble of all time. Its not a real economy any more, with all the CB intervention and the huge debt levels, its an illusion.
Now here is a question for the slow folks.. what happens to a bubble when it hits the cold hard rock of reality? The cold hard rock of reality can be the affordability of coal, it can be the availability of a rare earth mineral, it can be global famine, diminishing fish stocks in oceans, deflatory death spiral by consumer consumption reduction due to maxed out credit cards, or a major supply chain disruption due to storms or floods etc. But rest assurred, those debts can not be serviced
What does a bubble do, when it finally hits a rock? What follows, is it slow or is it fast?
You are very correct. But this stage since 2008/2012 could take 20-35yrs more to unwind fully for many of the core countries to play out, while the periphery drops out one by one in the meanwhile..
And that changes the equation quite a bit given the lifespan of human life. Obviously in grand theoretical schemes of zoomed out macro concepts such delay doesn’t matter that much..
With our dependence on international supply lines, it is hard to believe that the decline could take that long. Also, we are seeing more and more signs of stress. And our dependence on energy products is important–once energy per capita starts heading downward (as a result of falling coal consumption, for example), the world economy is likely to start heading downward.
Van Kent
Very true. The erosion of mass consumption capacity – which the CB manipulations can do nothing to restore and in fact make worse through asset inflation beyond all reason (who can buy stuff when they are crippled by such rent and mortgages?) – is perhaps like the erosion of fertile soil and deforestation in an agricultural economy – one day, it’s simply all gone, and very rapidly.
Bringing the whole structure down, forever: from great cities amid fertile plains to a wind-swept waste where a few skeletal goats wander among the ruins…..
Gail is correct to insist on this point, the failure to provide an economy in which the mass of people can comfortably afford the products of that economy (setting aside all ecological considerations for the moment). What we are seeing now is that even the credit-expansion stop-gap is failing.
Perhaps many people fail to grasp the fragility of the financial system because the crisis of 2008 was simply too-well managed – the food shipments didn’t stop, the lights stayed on.
But I know people working in the City of London who did realise the implications of what was happening on their screens, and ran out of their offices to get thousands in cash to provide for their families in the emergency which was developing.
They tend to believe that ‘they’ (the central banks) will somehow fix this when it all unravels…
That said a friend’s daughter teaches in a top private school in the US…. and quite a few of the students arrive post Lehman in tears because the parents thought they were headed to the poor house…. or perhaps worse …. death would probably be a more welcome fate to losing the house in the Hamptons for these tossers…. so no doubt they were not aware of the implications should the CBs have not ridden to the rescue
nobody admits their collapse is ”now”—thats the whole point
as a Syrian refugee—he hopes to go back and ”restart” his life.
Ask someone living in a tent city in the USA–they will say the same thing
It’s called the Micawber syndrome—“Something is bound to turn up”
Collapse is only seen in the rear view mirror–when you know for certain that things are not going to change for you and yours personally.
I don’t think its a coincidence that conventional oil output peaked in 05, and we had a collapse in 07/8. 10 years ago—
Many doomsters still think of collapse as something instant—in historical terms it is instant, but in our terms its more a shuddering grind to a halt, ups and downs in different places at different terms for different reasons—Syria has no oil left–so warfare erupts—their fight is one of denial
When the USa has no oil left–the same thing will happen, but in 20 years maybe, but it could be a lot less–but it will still be a fight of denial, same as Syria and few will admit collapse
but still part of the same collapse
Thank you VK for responding to this slow collapse nonsense….I was too lazy to do it, but my comment would have been exactly in the same lines as yours…This time IS different, and since 2008, we have been kept “artificially” alive (by CBs) but that was never going to last long…
Good way of putting our predicament!
“Its funny that you guys think its perfectly natural that the system just rolls on.. ” – I agree it takes a hail mary amazing amount of just-iin-time deliveries to keep things rolling along. JIT delivery is off people’s radar so they don’t realize how fragile their existence really is.
Ya — the 6th phase would involved being unable to understand or accept the obvious… and going full DelusiSTANI
Well, if you don’t know the bus schedule………………BAU will continue at ALL costs. I agree with you in principle, BAU is booming where I am, but when the NNR tank is empty, we’re done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuEdU_lrtZk
(but the biosphere make kick our asses first)
BTW thanks for the post Gail
And the thing is that it’s not even a question of running out of NNRs….simply not having enough NNRs to grow the financial system (that facilitates all of IC, including the extraction of NNRs) collapses it…and without the financial system NNRs stay in the ground forever…
Its all about the rate of extraction. We don’t have to run out of resources we just won’t be able to get them fast enough to keep up with exponential growth.
I agree. I have read various collapse sites that contained a grain of truth and a lot of nonsense. All of the authors claimed to know exactly how it was going to happen and provided estimates of how long we had left. Most of the authors eventually just burn out because 1) the mainstream never gets it anyway and 2) predictions that fail cause a crisis of faith. I think some of the authors even lost faith in themselves.
After watching all of these blogs and sites dissolve, I have taken the same attitude suggested above. I have read both of Catton’s books and I fully believe that the bottleneck is out there. There is simply no way of knowing what will cause its arrival or how long we have. Malthus made his predictions centuries ago and his predictions might have been correct if it had not been for the discovery of fossil fuels. We don’t know what is out there yet that could change the trajectory of human population. Something yet unknown may cause us to dodge the inevitable a while longer.
I take reasonable precautions against the collapse of a fragile system, but this isn’t a religion for me. I don’t hold a set of doctrines about collapse other than that it exists. In the meantime, I’ve decided that I want to travel and learn to play the violin. I hope I get to perform before collapse, but even if I don’t, it’s been fun.
We’re all going to die anyway. None of us knows when. The way I see it, knowing about collapse doesn’t change that much.
Sceadu
What this knowledge has changed for me is enjoying life so much more: every day the system functions is a reprieve.
I know so many middle-aged people who, even in their mid-40’s, are worrying about pensions and care homes, etc, and stuck in their ruts. Desperate to maintain ‘lifestyle’ and status as the screws tighten.
It has placed everything into perfect perspective, although I was half-way there temperamentally before – I have never really bought into BAU and all its toys.
Same here Xabier, I don’t sweat the small stuff, and with what is awaiting us it’s ALL small stuff…everyday the system is in place is a gift from the Flyiing Spaghetti Monster 😉
I guess I have never bought into the idea that one can be completely secure in having prepared for the future. As I’ve said in other posts, humans are notorious for incorrect predictions. For example, I have a pension. There is absolutely no guarantee I will ever collect it. I also supposedly have earned excellent retirement healthcare. Things like this make other people feel “secure.” But I am relatively young — early 30s — and even apart from collapse, the world situation may be so different in 30 – 40 years that all of my retirement preparations may be laughable or obsolete. Having some grand detailed plan for this part of my life has never felt well . . . realty-based. To some extent, all of us will be winging it in whatever situation comes. If the system is still there, the chances that it will look just like what the Boomer generation had are slim to none.
I would say that collapse has brought me the awareness that we can’t take “later” for granted. I also have a family member with a terminal illness so we have been ticking off bucket list items together. I don’t think this is, or should be a mentality specific to collapse. I can imagine that I “have” a house and a car and a pension and all sorts of things, but events beyond my control can take those things in a flash. It’s not worth putting all my effort into obtaining things when that is the simple truth.
Sceadu, you did not “supposedly earn excellent retirement healthcare” …you were given it, most likely at the expense of future workers and debt slaves. Winners and losers will be pitted against each other in the future. I know what side you will be on.
I have two friends, one worked for CA educational institutions all his life, the other worked on the same types of projects but as a contractor. The first has an exhorbitant pension and healthcare for life, the second is destitute.
I expect that as the future unfolds, the actual position of the two workers is closer than they expect. They will both end up destitute, or depending on the favors of others.
I’m not sure where you think the winners will be, Jesse James. If the system collapses, we’re all going to be in the same boat. There will be no one there to pay my pension or healthcare costs in 40 years. I am not quite sure how you think this makes me a “winner.” The winners are the ones who are collecting it now while young people like me are working to pay for it. I’m paying into a system that is charging me in advance for a pension by taking money out of my wages which I will never see back. I’m not sure why you think this is such a great deal for me.
Sceadu, yes you are scr ewed. From a 59 year old who is only slightly less scr ewed. People who are 70-90 hit the sweet spot.
Yep Ed, the current crop of 70 to 90 Year-Olds (at least in the First World) seems to be the sweet spot (no need to go to WW2, however some Americans had to suffer Vietnam, and some others (including a few from other countries ex-SK and PRC) had to go through the Korean War…but in general, it was smooth sailing in a generally growing global economy, enabling them to have decent jobs to support a family (and now collecting on their pensions), have kids that have gone to become adults and give them grandchildren…many have and will be checking out without ever knowing the impending doom awaiting their kids and grand-kids…however many will be here, but they have already juiced the lemon of IC for all its worth..
PS Don’t get me wrong many of these 70 to 90 Year-Olds in the First World have had sh.tty lives, but at least they got to get to that age which for us under 60 years old (IMHO even under 65 years old) wont..
Good points!
The thing that people missed is the fact that the problem that occurs is low prices, not high. That problem started in force in mid 2014.
Once that problem hits, it takes a few years for the low prices to translate into real problems for the oil exporting countries. Also, even with low prices, the price is high enough that oil companies, themselves, can sort of (barely) get by. The big problem is that taxes cannot be high enough for oil exporters. Furthermore, investment in new infrastructure cannot be high enough, without a lot of debt. Buyers of oil actually do better, given the low oil prices.
So the next stage is still clearly still around, but it does not look like the high price problem most were forecasting. It is likely a financial problem, or an oil exporter problem (uprising, not enough electricity). There is going to be a big problem fairly soon, it is not certain exactly when, however.
It also takes a while to figure out how bad intermittent renewables really are.
Nothing is going to keep the grid up 24\7\365 for 7billion people. Here on my farm, electricity 6hrs/day is infinitely better than no electricity. Pump some water and charge some batteries is a big deal. At my level of mitochondrial function, I can’t pull up enough water to feed my animals. Its 34ft to the water in my well and I no !longer have the horsepower. God bless solar panels.
This only works as long as the whole system keeps operating–the batteries keep operating or can be replaced, the solar panels keep working, and the connections and controls continue to work. You have a temporary system that works for you.
A simple wind-driven system without batteries would be a lot cheaper, and might be easier to keep up post collapse. Small windmills are what we used to us for pumping water for animals.
Decisions, decisions..
It’s always a bet about uncertain future, you can now burn ~25k (50k) for reasonably quality solar+wind+batt storage single phase (or three phase) system sized for a household or small countryside establishment and somewhat hope for at least ~15yrs lifespan out of it, perhaps a bit more. Or spend the funds on completely different set of tools, much rudimentary or even “retrotopia” style stuff..
If the grid is going to stay working (and in reliable) fashion for this time period, you made a very foolish bet, you have thrown the money into a black pit of sorrow. If the grid is going to disappear or get annoyingly unstable you won the rat race for a brief moment. Similarly if the place is not on the grid and the connection would be prohibitively expensive to build in the first place, go for the alternative, it’s a wash at worst, so good enough.
We are discussing marginals anyway, since most folks are ~urban dwellers and country side is soaked in industrialism as well..
34ft is nothing Says the person that uses gravity.
Fast was having a hard time with his pump do you have details on your setup.
I can live off grid but find I need other people that are on grid.
nice summary of our present and near-future situation, Gail. sounds like you had a great trip to Japan, also.
Bergen
Your observations about there being no sign of collapse to the casual observer where you live are wholly believable – same here, and I imagine in every growth hub.
I’m tempted to liken it to the destruction of the pollinators: they are still buzzing around and a casual observer from town would be tempted to say ‘Collapse, what collapse?!’
But the statistics derived from scientific observation tell a terrible story. Same with birds, other insects, frogs, water quality and availability, tree health, etc, etc.
And so with the human population, and our whole civilisation.
The view from the top is amazing and then…
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VK04KNf0nAQ/UyKEQWWwiRI/AAAAAAAABFs/aSwf91aT-v8/s1600/Seneca+Cliff.jpg
Another great way how to visualize it.. images inside..
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.cz/2017/05/the-clepsydra.html
Thanks for the link. Hadn’t read that but it supports my previous posts. What is often missed is when did the collapse begin. How long has increased complexity been applied already to prevent it.
Right. The increased complexity leads to more wage disparity, and this is a big part of what leads to low commodity prices and collapse.
I’m thinking that the resurgence of neoliberal economics in the 70s and 80s with Reagonomics and Thatcherism deregulating and privatizing everything was a response to the fact that we were already starting to hit limits to growth…
Right!
+++++
There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes… that we can not even imagine
Thanks! I have gotten a lot of good insights from Ugo Bardi over the years.
Ugo Bardi also posted this a couple of days ago which I found good..when you’re in the car looking straight ahead in the first few seconds after having driven off the cliff everything seems fine….and then…
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9kjKr_S0S14/WSbafG1kYZI/AAAAAAAAVIA/5PcXLgfrMeEb8vVjoV5gleEGxh65PnUawCLcB/s1600/nsg73m.jpg
A bit different from the revered “Hubbert Curve.”
Look at how well our younger generation is doing, compared to their parents. Poorer job opportunities, delayed marriages or none at all. This is a major sign of our problems.
2Pet 3:3
3 First of all know this, that in the last days ridiculers will come with their ridicule, proceeding according to their own desires 4 and saying: “Where is this promised presence of his? Why, from the day our forefathers fell asleep in death, all things are continuing exactly as they were from creation’s beginning
even as a raving atheist—I’m getting to like Corinthians 15 ,52—At the last Trump!!!!!
Especially after saying a couple of years ago we will be sideswiped by something we never saw coming.
Definitions:
1) Oil resources are the total quantity of liquid resources in the ground.
2) Oil reserves are the subset of resources that can be profitably extracted.
3) Overproduction occurs when extraction costs fall below market prices.
Remark: Note that the amount of oil reserves in the world depends on price.
Conjectures:
1) Peak oil comes about because extraction prices rise faster than market prices resulting in chronic overproduction.
2) The extraction of oil reserves peaked in 2014. Oil production has not yet peaked because of the willingness of the financial sector to finance the drilling of oil wells that will not pay out. In other words at least 5% of oil extraction since the collapse of oil prices in November 2014 is resources that are not reserves.
3) Extracting resources that are not reserves causes economic contraction. Since the price of oil falls when the economy contracts, the current overproduction is transforming reserves into resources that are not reserves.
4) The reason websites no longer follow peak oil is because authors’ characterization of peak oil is bad so they don’t know how to recognize it when they see it.
I’d like to channel Jessie Pinkman to translate:
“We’re on borrowed time bitchez….”
Thanks!
For those of you who don’t remember, Schinzy is a mathematician/economist in France. He is one of the authors of a recent paper regarding why oil prices tend to fall rather than rise, as we reach limits.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs41247-016-0016-6
I generally agree, but there are nuances everywhere. These are a few technicalities that may or may not be important.
1) A person gets in trouble when he or she talks about liquid resources. A fair amount of the resources are not really liquid, but can be made to be liquid, with the expenditure of enough energy. Canada and Venezuela both have a lot of non-liquid “oil” resources.
2) Oil reserves are defined to be resources that can be profitably extracted. What is reported as “oil reserves,” may or may not correspond to this amount. Saudi Arabia, and other producers from the Middle East, seem to publish highly politicized, unaudited amounts. I don’t think anyone believes them. Countries and companies that have had high published reserves when prices were high, will take them down as slowly as they can convince regulators it is OK to do so.
3) Overproduction happens in the case you define, that is, when market prices are higher than extraction costs. But it also happens in other cases. There are really three different price levels–a) high enough so that oil exporters can get adequate tax revenue to maintain their countries’ economies and other oil producers can continue to invest in new field development, to offset declines in existing fields; b) high enough to offset the direct costs of extraction, and c) below the direct cost of extraction. A lot of confusion arises because there is a big gap between price level (a) and (b). When the price falls between (a) and (b), it tends to send the world economy toward collapse slowly. I think that is where we are now. (There are other nuances as well, since the direct cost of extraction varies a lot.)
A few thoughts regarding your conjectures:
1) Peak oil occurs because market prices fall below what I have called price (a), but not below (b). (In fact, I supposed willingness of lenders to lend can even allow the price to fall a little below (b) temporarily.) I think it is a “falling” situation with respect to prices. The underlying problem is that extraction costs are rising faster than market prices, which is what you are highlighting.
2) The amount of oil reserves peaked in 2014 because oil prices dropped below my price (a) in 2014. Some, but not all, countries have adjusted published reserves to reflect current price levels. I agree that much of oil that is now being extracted is far below price (a). The fact that lenders are willing to lend to Saudi Arabia and others is keeping the world economy going, for now, but this approach will eventually lead to collapse. I am not sure how you calculate your 5% of extraction that is resources and not reserves. The multilayered pricing issue tends to confuse the situation. Borrowing is needed, even between price level (a) and (b).
3) I agree.
4) I generally agree. Peak oil is not the best name for the phenomenon, either. The issue really is an energy resources per capita issue. This causes rising disparity of wages, and more workers who cannot afford the output of the system. Falling coal consumption causes just as big a problem as falling oil consumption. The problem occurs when a growing share of workers cannot afford the output of the system.
We agree, but I look for generalities that I might be able to put into an
equation while you dig into how things work on the ground.
Comments:
1) Computing reserves is an extremely difficult nonlinear problem because
the quantity depends on price which is extremely difficult to forecast.
The methods used to compute reserves seem extremely crude (Hubbert
linearization, creaming curves, etc). What is remarkable is how well they
have worked historically. I view all estimates of reserves as very
approximate.
2) Oil extraction used to be profitable enough that companies could pay
interest as well as the principle on loans, reward share holders with
increasing share prices and dividends, pay good wages, and pay taxes which
is just a way of sharing profits with the State. Times are changing, oil
companies are resorting to debt to meet these obligations see for
example http://crudeoilpeak.info/royal-dutch-shells-upstream-earnings-peaked-2008-now-in-the-red.
My interpretation of Art Berman’s
article: http://www.artberman.com/low-break-even-prices-everyone-not-just-shale/
is that oil companies are paying lower wages.
3) Why do I think that at least 5% of current oil extraction is extraction
of resources rather than reserves? The low oil prices has put E&P companies
under stress. Under stress companies invest short term: they maximize short
term production pushing existing wells as hard as they can to pay bills and
cut long term investment. Notice that oil discovery in 2015 and 2016 was at
multidecade
lows http://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2017/april/global-oil-discoveries-and-new-projects-fell-to-historic-lows-in-2016.html.
My guess is that most of the LTO wells drilled in 2014, 2015, and 2016 will
not pay out. According to Haynes and
Boone, http://www.haynesboone.com/publications/energy-bankruptcy-monitors-and-surveys,
since 2015 over 120 E & P companies have declared bankruptcy concerning $80
billion worth of debt. Recall that junk bonds with 10 year maturities
financed a large part of LTO wells beginning in 2009. This means that the
companies that went bankrupt were unable even to pay interest on their loans
as the principle on the loans does not start to really kick in until 2019. I
believe that maturities due were on the order of $25 billion in 2016 and
will be on the order of $250 billion in 2023. I do not believe that oil
sands are profitable at current prices, and I do not believe that a portion
of deep water offshore extraction is profitable at current prices.
4) Why do I think that extraction of reserves has peaked? Because I am a
bear with respect to oil prices. My forecast is that oil production will
remain roughly constant until 2020 with WTI prices below $60 a barrel so
that there will not be a great increase in offshore investment. The IEA
believes that without increased investment, oil production will begin to
fall in
2020 http://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2017/march/global-oil-supply-to-lag-demand-after-2020-unless-new-investments-are-approved-so.html.
Eventually falling production will cause prices will spike. Because of
outstanding debt, unconventional oil extraction will not rise. Then I expect
financial bubbles to pop which will cause oil prices to fall preventing
major investment in offshore fields sending them into deep decline.
I pretty much agree with you.
The reason that I bring up the two price level issue is because so much of the work being done seems to miss this issue. EROEI analysis seems to be an an analysis of getting oil out of the ground. It really needs to get the oil to the consumer, including paying the taxes that the government needs to keep operating. Somehow, the whole system needs to work.
2) The extraction of oil reserves peaked in 2014. Oil production has not yet
peaked because of the willingness of the financial sector to finance the
drilling of oil wells that will not pay out. In other words at least 5% of
oil extraction since the collapse of oil prices in November 2014 is
resources that are not reserves.
+++++++
Although I would slightly amend this to ‘because the Elders have ordered the financial sector and the MSM to do whatever it takes to make sure oil that does not pay comes out of the ground’
The IEA just recently warned of oil shortages and price spike by 2020. And Chevron’s CEO was on CNBC a few weeks ago and publicly admitted Shale can’t save us. Just hold on my friend once the shortages come the stock market will crash and that will be the end folks. Then we all go to sleep..
Or maybe a lack of debt will crash both the stock markets and commodity prices. We will have a huge glut of oil, because people cannot afford to buy it. That will be the end of folks.
I don’t see why “shortages” are always in your story–perhaps too much “peak oil” literature?
To some extent I agree….
But then I never took much notice of the peak oil story … until the near collapse of the financial system in 2008.
And unlike previous predictions of the end game… the current situation is completely different….
Growth is 100% via the actions of the CBs….. the global economy is on life support…. the next recession = the end game…
We are watching, discussing and debating a life and death battle that 99.99999% of the people on this planet are not aware of
Some find it fascinating to be among the so few that are aware of this situation — while at the same time using the knowledge of how precarious things are to enjoy life…
Every seen an NHL playoff game? If it is tied after regulation time they play until someone scores… we are in overtime with BAU … OT is the most exciting part of the game.
Isn’t this exciting? Aren’t you entertained?
And then there is the fact that FW provides a place to mostly avoid the DelusiSTANIS that one has to deal with in day to day living….
Let’s hope it goes as long as this game….I was up till 2AM watching it in 1987 lolllll!!!!
IMO collapse will start this year. Current maximum oil price that world economy accepts is too low to sustain supply (peak supply was November 2016). And this maximum price is going down. ETP model is probably wrong, but the idea of falling maximum price is logical.
I agree–we are certainly close to the edge.
http://earthfirstjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/MarkerMemorialDay.jpg
The other day I was driving in traffic. In the road up ahead there was a small black object that looked like a piece of plastic fluttering under each car as they past by. As I approached it became clear that it was a small black bird avoiding the tires of the miles of lumbering mindless machines driving along the divided highway we were on. It was clear he had a problem he couldn’t fly and wouldn’t be able to get past the barrier. As long as he could stay on his feet he could live. It was inevitable that small bird was going to die that day. The irony is the complexity of that small bird is vastly superior to the cars and trucks that would eventually kill him. He was more efficient more productive and more intelligent. Inside each of those vehicles was a life form that had more in common with that little bird than the beasts they were driving but would anyone notice? No one mourned the death of that bird because of “Progress”.
We are that bird.
We are those idiots in the cars……
https://www.rt.com/usa/389813-us-potential-nuclear-disaster/
It seems like I read about this same simulation not too long ago. Or is this a second, similar simulation?
http://www.afr.com/business/mining/coal/blackrock-says-coal-is-dead-as-it-eyes-renewable-power-splurge-20170524-gwbuu6
the collapse of middle east is near
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-lights-are-going-out-in-the-middle-east
http://www.dieoff.org/page224.htm
Should this occur, any number of factors could be cited as the ’causes’ of collapse. I believe, however, that the collapse will be strongly correlated with an ‘epidemic’ of permanent blackouts of high-voltage electric power networks — worldwide. Briefly explained: “When the electricity goes out, you are back in the Dark Age. And the Stone Age is just around the corner.”
100% agree.
When the electricity goes off permanently — the horror will kick off. People will be cowering in the dark…. in shock….
For those of you with solar powered lights —- I recommend you do not turn those on — because they will signal to the world that there is light — and probably food …. at your location …. and the zombie hordes will be headed your way…..
Oh and if you have a fire box… do NOT use it during the light hours…. only use it at night…. if you use it during the day the zombie hordes will zero in on you ….
I highly recommend the newyorker article.
Any news on Venezuela and electricity? I can’t find anything, nor Guri dam level.
This is an article from July 2016, saying that rationing was being ended because the drought was over. The dam had “recovered.” http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2016/07/05/Venezuela-ending-electricity-rationing-as-dam-recovered/6681467718091/
I would presume the lack of recent articles would indicate that hydroelectricity, and thus electricity in total, are now doing much better than they were in early 2016.
Thanks
Fast Eddy Challenge ultra lite… turn off the power for an hour ad 10pm tonight…. it is quite an uncomfortable feeling… particularly when you think that some day soon — that will be a permanent condition
In Micronesia, I turned if off for a year.
Of course, there was no switch.
After asking our sales manager about a recent trip to Dubai and what was it like he stammered if it wasn’t for air conditioning Dubai wouldn’t exist – period. They wouldn’t couldn’t survive without air conditioning.
The end of Middle East oil production may come because workers cannot get air conditioning for their families. Of course, if prices were higher, taxes would be higher, and the government could work on improving the electricity situation.
Ah yes but Dubai has learned well how to modernize the slave trade. What they have done to the Pakistanis and Indians is horrifying, truly horrifying.
Hi jerry,
“…the slave trade…is horrifying, absolutely horrifying.”
Good grief. Here we go again.
jerry, please carefully re-read the pages in your bible where god authorizes, justifies, and encourages slavery. And demands and commands that slaves and young girls be taken as war booty.
Note that there is absolutely nothing horrifying about it at all. In fact it’s simply business as usual, right?
Commit those verses to memory so you won’t forget that it’s “perfectly ok” to enslave your enemies after defeating them, and taking their females for your own personal use.
Then (just a suggestion here) find a good editor to prevent these gross and embarrassing contradictions in your thinking and writing.
Cheers.
Get over your prejudices.
The Bible documents thinking at the time. It is not really a view of what “God” wants us to do. This changes, depending on the circumstances.
Back then, the world was very dependent on human labor. In the language, there was a single word meaning both “slave” and “servant”. There was also a plan for freeing slaves after a certain length of time, as I recall.
In the US the plan was referred to as The Civil War….
This is not good at all!
Hi Gail,
“Get over your prejudices.”
“Prejudice” is thinking “not based on reason”. So you are using the wrong word here. It’s quite reasonable to be against rape and slavery.
“The Bible… is not what God wants us to do.”
So the bible is NOT the word of god? And is just man-made “thinking at the time?” Your public transition to atheism is commendable.
But please don’t try to justify rape and slavery because “the world was very dependent on human labour” which makes it “perfectly ok”. That kind of belief leads us back to some rather unpleasant laws and institutions .
Cheers.
The Bible is not the “word of god,” in any literal sense. It is the documentation of the myths and stories told by ancient people to their children. Sometimes these were clearly “made up” stories to teach their children a point. Sometimes they documented what was actually happening. They always reflected the thinking of the day. Scholars look at these stories and see how they compare to other stories from other cultures, at the same time.
We can read the Bible, and take from it what might be helpful in living our lives today. I see the big benefit of any religion as helping people live their lives today.
You seem to have a “Baptist” view of the Bible. This view is certainly not held by all Christian religions. I have no idea where you get atheism out of this view.
Hi Gail,
“The Bible is not the “word of god…”
So far so good.
“It is the documentation of myths and stories… that were clearly made up…”
Even better.
“Scholars look at these stories and see how they compare to stories from other cultures…”
Yes, of course, and they find that they are basically derived from bronze age fear and driven by a human desire to explain life and death and the world.
Religion was our first attempt to explain the cosmos – and therefore it was also our worst. Today we have far better knowledge, methods of inquiry, and explanations and we no longer must base our understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology (or energy, finance, and economics) on myth, and no need to base our answers on superstition.
“We can read the Bible, and take from it what might be helpful…”
Yes, we can. And it’s this “cafeteria style” of picking out the good parts and ignoring the bad parts that caused Judaism and Christianity to become reformed from violent theocratic tyranny to relatively benign placebo.
But Islam, being the youngest of the monotheisms, has not had time for this reformation, and its extremists do indeed take the bad parts “in a literal sense” to “teach their children a point” who then grow up and fly planes into buildings. And seek to wipe out other followers of Islam who “teach their children” a slightly different story and interpretation. (The brutal civil war within Islam and a spreading international jihad with the infidel West might very well be a trigger for the collapse we talk about here at OFW.)
Judaism and Christianity did the same thing, of course, but over time were forced to let go of this kind of intolerant and barbaric behavior by the shear force and pressure of science and modernity.
“… the big benefit of any religion is helping people live their lives today.”
And the “big” cost? Helping to destroy the lives of others today, through (returning to our topic) rape, slavery, and war, which you have stated is “perfectly ok” because it “helps keep population in control.” These real costs far outweigh any perceived benefit, imho.
You seem to have a “Baptist” view of the Bible.”
You seem to have completely missed that my comments here are grounded in atheism…
“I have no idea where you get atheism out of this view.”
… which apparently causes you to make a statement like that.
On a conciliatory note, while we disagree on religion, it should be clear that we both agree that there can be no infinite growth in a finite world and that carrying capacity overshoot is driving us toward the edge of the Seneca cliff.
Cheers.
Dubai and Singapore — two of my least favourite places in the world…. they are both Life in a Air Conditioned Shopping Mall.
Great article, thanks
Shouldn’t we be entering a new Ice Age according to our denier friends?
http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/603608-1.jpg
I didn’t read anything about a visit to Lovely Fukushima? Didn’t you went there to see the EIGHT WONDER OF THE HUMAN CIVILIZATION?
Pyramids made of radioactive soil
Anyone that engages in extra-pollution (vulgar for tourism!) to Japan and does not visit Fukushima IS NOT A GOOD EXTRA-POLLUTER!
Shame on you…
I am afraid Fukushima is not on standard tour bus itineraries. Renting a car to drive fairly close would not work well either. For one thing, driving is on the left side. Outside a few major cities, pretty much everything (including road signs) is in Japanese script only. There aren’t necessarily hotels; more likely lodging in a “Bed and Breakfast” arrangement with a Japanese family that does not speak English. You come and go when the family dictates (assuming you can understand them). If the family sleeps on futons and sits/kneels on mats on the floor, you do as well. Bathroom facilities are shared with the family.
Without speaking Japanese, I am afraid such an arrangement would be beyond me.
Those aren’t very good excuses for not seeing the Eighth Wonder! 😉
I am afraid my family would leave me if I decided to go visit Fukushima.
That is even awkward!
Wouldn’t it be fun to hire a boat and go fishing downstream from the reactor…
http://beforeitsnews.com/contributor/upload/291278/images/mutant%20fish.jpg
Pollution Tourism!
What other itineraries do you have available?
Perhaps for a bit of adventure one can land on this
http://media.factmyth.com/2016/02/plastic-garbage-island.jpg
A guided tour of
http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/china-bad-pollution-climate-change-25__880.jpg
That’s a nice tourism package! Fortunately, for all of us, Pollution Tourism is available everywhere! Planet Pollution…
No wonder some scoundrels dream to go to Mars! It’s a fresh start and a brand new grain of sand in space to pollute!
The clan-tribe has shown its vitality so far.
Only this factor of running a tightly knitted clan structures across industries and govs is surely behind ~3/4 of the successes with the massive can kicking effort to prolong their version of BAU for so extremely long. Is it going to last forever, nope, do I expect to see the times, when this changes profoundly on global level as well as inside the very regions under their thumb, I don’t count on it, it’s a very shallow probability for near-mid term. Sorry, the world is today, what it is, it takes tremendous momentum to change it, energy depletion/affordability, overshoot and so on are indeed such forces, however, the timelines and sequencing could be predicted only in broad brushes.. simply we are not there yet..
I was reading a comment from Energy Sceptic by teal and got to thinking, are the masses of people really filled with selfishness, greed, and competitiveness? Or is it actually only the elites who think; Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good.
These same thoughts came to me while watching the The Belko Experiment movie. There the COO becomes the most bloodthirsty murderer of all because “he has to provide for his wife and kids”. But also in that movie, the COO, the “elite”, is the biggest problem, for everybody. The sheep, the zombies, the masses are actually quite compassionate and “good”.
Our brains should be wired to be responsive to other peoples needs. We have a chemical called oxytocin flowing in our brains. When people perform behaviors associated with compassionate love—warm smiles, friendly hand gestures, affirmative forward leans—our bodies produce more oxytocin. And oxytocin makes us bond with each other.
Maybe its not only our sosiopathic capitalist culture, of destroying all living things on this planet to get to be good consumers. Maybe the elites could be interpreted literally as being quite evil. If its a cutthroat competition to get to the top, the ones who cut the most throats, then reach the top? But also if this is true, then the absolutely worst place to be in SHTF would be in a billionaire bunker, a Vivos underground shelter, a Musk Mars colonization spaceship or on Richard Bransons private island. Those places would become just awful, when scarcity finally sets in..
Im not that convinced about absolutely rural settings either, because in those settings some charismathic figure could set up some sort of ‘cargo cult’. Worshipping the lost BAU that once was. Making everybody perform stupid mass rituals of playing with their smart phone, commuting to work, watching the telly, and turning everybody to more traditional moral values, to appease the BAU gods, to get the glorious BAU back.
Maybe the best place after SHTF would be with people who are living a ‘hard life’ now. Barely getting by. But still keeping the community intact. People that are used to being compassionate and altruistic. If such a places exists anymore?
But if all this plays out like this, then the absolutely worst place would be with ‘winners’, the people who are used to cutthroat competition, who wouldnt hesitate to start cutting throats to get resources for their family.
So, when we look at movies where zombie hordes consume all life. Or read about SHTF, an all out war, everybody against everybody else. Or hear people describing how people will ripp each other to pieces if scarcity sets in. Maybe those musings are just the elites extrapolating what they will do to each other. But that doesnt necessarily hold true in settings where there are no cutthroat elites to be seen.. if oxytocin is given a chance to flow, then oxytocin will flow?
I am not sure I understand oxytocin. I usually associate it being the hormone that allows mothers to bond with their babies.
Wikipedia says (among other things),
More oxytocin would be a plus, based on this description, especially if a person is not a hunter/gatherer.
oxycontin ???
oxycontin, oxy, OC, O are street names for this popular narcotic. To take oxy you have to bypass its time relaes, you can do this by peeling off the coating and chewing it, crushing it up and railing it, or in rare cases disolve it with a little water and slam it, that is to say inject it. Oxy is the most expensive drug out there ranging from $20-$50 for a 40mg pill or $35-$100 for a 80mg pill, $25 if you’re lucky. An average user will use a minimum of 80mg to a maximum of 320mg a day. That’s up to $300 a day!!
You’ll start taking oxy because it helps you work or it makes you feel good whatever but watch out take too much oxycontin for too long and you’ll end up where if you don’t do it, you’ll be in the worst pain of your life.
Imagine the pain of the worst flu you’ve ever had in your life, take away the stomach aches and multiply the weakness, body aches and the feeling of pins and needle in every muscle of your body by about 10 and you have the pain of an oxy withdraw.
People will do oxy at work because it takes away the pain you get in your legs and feet after standing for hours on end. bust a rail and you’re good to go.
The high you get from oxy is the greatest high in the world, getter than coke, and all that, it’s indescribealble. If you think about it it’s kind of like an insta-tanked pill. Once you take it you’re loose and free kinda like being drunk but you wont get sick and you don’t feel bad in the morning
You can also party like a rockstar all night long without getting tired.
If you have a hangover or you’re getting sick bust a rail you’ll be better in seconds.
Needless to say there are many reasons to get on oxy but a warning to all… You will spend every dime you have and a lot more, you’ll hit rock bottom and guess what, there’s nothing you can do about it because you physically can’t stop railing this magic pill. You sleep habits get messed up 12 hours of sleep will feel like only 4 hours of sleep, the only way to wake up is to hit up a rail, but once you do that you;; be good to go like nothing ever happened. Be carful though, once you exhibit the symptoms i’ve just listed, that’s when you are officially addicted… The end will be inevitable.
This drug is a great thing but dont abuse it my friends, you’ll never forgive yourself
I’ve been doing oxy for about 2 years now and have spent tens of thousands of dollars on it. I know people that have spent more than that
its a mental and physical addiction that you cant beat and i cant give you an answer on how to get off because i’ve never met anyone who has been able to accomplish this feet. Jack Osborn and Rush both supposedly got off but they both went to a detox clinic.
Good luck to all of you
see you in the next life
I am afraid I don’t live in the world of street narcotics. I have been known to confuse things.
Even though I know you are often remiss with with your quotes, with your brutal frankness I thought at first you were talking about your personal experience!
I’ve never tried… but it sounds like something that should be stockpiled in the container….
I read an account of one of the big cholera epidemics in a city in 19th c England which came before the cleaning up of the water supply.
It noted that the ‘common people’ in the over-crowded poor parts of the city were almost universally kind to one another, stayed with their friends,family, and neighbours, nursed the sick with great care. Only one woman in the whole city was known to have thrown out a sick person, and was despised as a result.
However, I suggest that if a brutal criminal culture has taken grip of a social group, then kind behaviour in a crisis won’t suddenly appear. Drugs might be the key here.
As for smiling, oxytocin levels in this village are in deep negative territory: I don’t bother trying with the old-timers anymore, and concentrate on the much nicer new people! With every funeral, the atmosphere improves……
Falling rocks is a problem in Norway as well, here from Telemark yesterday: https://www.nrk.no/telemark/sekund-fra-a-verte-treft-av-stein-1.13533724
That is a big rock!
https://gfx.nrk.no/U-T88_1TlkH3gmEv8Jwv1wFmC_gjo0ca5avK5K4Ozd7w
A money economy takes the disconnection, and therefore the failure, one step further. The higher the level of economic development, the more money tends to become an abstraction rather than a counter for something concrete. Thus the economy can boom as the ecology disintegrates. This is particularly true if the society resorts to currency debasement or loose credit as a way to evade encroaching physical limits and foster an artificial prosperity, for then the economy becomes completely unhinged from concrete ecological reality. Overshoot and collapse is the inevitable result.
Not a bad summary huh!
From Energy Skeptic
Thanks! That is a good point.
Isn’t it something like ..get rich or at least die trying..
This has been part of our “civilized culture” for thousands of years. And that’s why every avenue for kicking the can will be eventually exploited, every stone turned over so to speak to find the churn and relative advantage. That’s why hair brain schemes like outsourcing manuf into Asia came into being, buying extra 40+yrs so far.. or how today CBs/govs directly support the markets and so on..
I guess it’s a curse.
Owners of Manhattan luxury homes are waking up to a simple reality: If you want your place to sell, drop your price.
For high-end homes that found buyers in 2017, the median asking price was the lowest in at least five years, according to data from luxury brokerage Olshan Realty Inc., which measures contracts for $4 million or more. Last week, the median asking price for deals in that range was $4,997,500, the lowest since September and only the fourth week since 2013 that it dipped below $5 million.
“People are thinking harder about price cuts sooner,” said Donna Olshan, president of the brokerage. “A lot of buyers came off the sidelines when they saw they could get a break.”
Luxury sellers trying to stand out in a market saturated with high-cost properties are finding that discounting is the surest way to a deal. Contracts for co-ops, condos and townhouses priced at $4 million or more are up 18 percent this year through mid-May, compared with the same period in 2016, data compiled by Olshan show.
Those 539 transactions came only after sellers reduced their prices by 8 percent on average, the biggest whittling in the six years that Olshan’s been tracking that data.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-25/manhattan-luxury-home-sellers-getting-the-message-cut-the-price
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iwnS9BAoBDvU/v1/800x-1.png
London house prices post most dramatic annual fall since financial crisis
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/24/london-house-prices-post-most-dramatic-annual-fall-since-financial-crisis.html
Investment loans have dropped to their lowest level in 10 months, fueling speculation that the Australian housing boom is set to end.
Loans to investors peaked at over 50% in January, but have now dropped to 48% on the back of the Federal Government’s efforts to crackdown on the out-of-control property market.
Sydney’s housing prices had not dropped in 18 months until April this year, and have been steadily falling since.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4506528/House-prices-fall-investment-loans-lowest-level-10-months.html
Why Vancouver home prices are dropping – Video – BNN
http://www.bnn.ca/real-estate/video/why-vancouver-home-prices-are-dropping~934970
GTA home sales plunge as much as 61 per cent | Toronto Star
https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/05/26/gta-home-sales-plunge-as-much-as-61-per-cent.html
“Although the price per square foot is down slightly to about $667 in Toronto on average, condo prices overall were up nearly 30 per cent year over year in the same 60-day period to an average sale price of $548,186, according to the Condos.ca market index.”
Prices are still absurdly high relative to incomes, I expect.
Home prices in Hong Kong, where a nano-apartment of less than 200 square feet can cost as much as USD500,000, have surged more than 137 percent since the …
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-property-analysis-idUSKBN18O0TO
Very nice article on your trip and fascinating about the Edo period of Japan…
Thomas Merton was equally intrigued about “sustainable” people toward the end of his life..
This especially is an interesting review
http://www.catholicbooksreview.org/2015/merton.html
“The Sacred City” (60-81), a response to Ancient Oaxaca, edited by John Paddock (1966), looks at the early Zapotecan city of Monte Albán and similar centers in Mayan Guatemala as exemplifying an urban culture that is associated not with “kingship or at least with militaristic autocracy” (60) and based not on “commerce . . . war and conquest” (61) but on a sense of human identity not equated with “the empirical ego” but “fully integrated into a cosmic system which was at once perfectly sacred and perfectly worldly” (65). Evidence cited by Merton suggests that these sacred cities were built not by forced labor but from spiritual motivations incomprehensible when considered “solely in economic or technological terms” (68). He sees such magnificent accomplishments as evidence of a way of life in profound harmony with the patterns of the natural world, “a peaceful, timeless life lived in the stability of a continually renewed present” (71), having a “direct, sensuous contact” with its surroundings, “celebrated in an aesthetic and ritual joy” (74) manifested in its sculpture, ceramics and other works of art which were “marked with a very special charm, humor, and taste” (76-77). For still unknown reasons, these sacred cities were eventually abandoned, but only after their creative period had extended for perhaps as long as two millennia. While Merton resists the temptation to set up a crudely simplistic contrast between the sacred cities of ancient Mesoamerica and the contemporary secular city marked by “the turbulent, unstable, and vulgar affluence of the warfare state” (79) – noting in passing his own somewhat chastened affection for New York City – yet he does see the importance of integrating a knowledge of these radically different ways of social organization into contemporary consciousness as a salutary challenge to complacent modern assumptions of moral and cultural superiority and above all to a faith in technology as the solution to problems that are at root not merely scientific, political and economic but essentially spiritual, problems of human identity and of the direction and purpose of human personal and social life. ”
Seems I remember the article and contributing factors of the collapse was overpopulation and aggressive military actions of neighboring states.
Thomas MERTON. Ishi Means Man: Essays on Native Americans. New York. Paulist Press, 2015. pp. viii + 81. $9.95 pb. ISBN 978-0-8091-4911-7. Reviewed by Patrick F. O’CONNELL, Gannon University, Erie, PA 16541.
In the last two years of his life (1967-68) Thomas Merton wrote five articles on Native American topics, four appearing in The Catholic Worker, the fifth in Unicorn Journal. In 1976 these essays were collected and published by Unicorn Press, with a brief foreword by Dorothy Day. Long out of print, the volume has now been reissued by Paulist Press in this centenary year of Merton’s birth
Very enlightening volume to get to examine, most likely at the local Library system
There are certainly a lot of historical civilizations that can be investigated.
Exclusive: Bankrupt Westinghouse ends pensions for ex-CEOs, executives
(must have gotten the wrong memo- they usually raise the pensions for CEO’s, and cut them for the people who actually did the work.)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westinghouse-pensi-idUSKBN18L2AF?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+reuters/businessNews+%28Business+News%29
Interesting! We don’t usually see this happen.
On a related topic, I read in the Atlanta Journal Constitution that there are two companies that want to bid on finishing the Georgia nuclear reactors.
Booner Cashes In The Chips:
Smoker John Boehner Joins Board Of Reynolds Tobacco Company
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-boehner-reynolds-tobacco-company_us_57dac338e4b08cb1409429a1
John Boehner joins lobbying firm
http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/lobbying-hires/296822-john-boehner-joins-lobbying-firm
CBs must be spending huge money on making this happen….. a circle = a square… 1+1 = whatever they want it to….
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-26/stocks-surge-7th-straight-day-us-macro-data-hits-15-month-lows
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2017/05/23/20170526_EOD6_0.jpg
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2017/05/23/20170526_EOD5_0.jpg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bT8CRi9k4bo
America First? Trump shoves aside Montenegro PM at NATO summit
That’s narcissism in action.
That smug look after the shove doe…
Oh I absolutely wanted to slap that look off his face as well. He is such an embarrassment.
Yeah, slap or while he’s adjusting his suit, knock him out cold with a straight right jab to the chin. The whole world (except his base) would cheer wildly.
Am I the only here getting tired of Bergen regurgitating liberal talking points on here?
No one gets far in politics by being a nice guy.
Life and global politics, to a certain extent is a zero sum game. You’d rather be the person doing the shoving than getting shoved.
You are correct, and I’m certain the Anglo Zio American banking cartel is quite aware of the issues discussed here.
Yep… at the end of the day the civility that is normally on display is a veneer over what is a vicious battle for the planet’s resources….
Metaphorically … world leaders are gouging each others’ eyes out at the negotiating table…
At lunchtime at a time of year close to the summer solstice on one of the rare days with blue skies everywhere, the UK managed to generate 24.3% of it’s electricity from solar power. Whoopie doo!
UK achieves solar power record as temperatures soar
With the gargantuan industrial capacity, it’s obvious that “renewables” + “flow batteries” have the potential to alter the energy pie in many countries, there is enough natgas, coal and reused uranium for the companion or rather the back bone – base load to operate with that. Not sure about the timelines, extent of that change (few% to dozens of percents) in the energy mix near-mid term, and regional specifics though. As we could have clearly witnessed there have been waves of various energy domination related conflicts during ~16 past yrs only. The various factions and players across dominions seem to be occupied about their relative position, simply game of “losers vs winners” changing places.
Yes, the overall trend on the overshoot path is undeniable, yes the former opulence of large segments of population is most likely a history now, YET the societies in (pre-)turmoil are still not able to form coherent rebellion, that would take at least support ~20-30% of the pop, and how do you assemble that now with non homogeneous populations with various minority affiliations, off the charts demographic artifacts (spike of elderly vs stagnating and falling prime age producers-consumers) etc. ? Well, you CAN’T, hence the space allowed for further can kicking on the road to quasi feudal order societal structures in the meanwhile.
Lets no be cultists here, I’m listening to imminent doom from approx ~2005 (and there have been guys going back on that theme since 1960-70s), the future is unknown, and the vantage point of single human lifespan is rather a short and limited one to form super precise predictions.
This is exactly correct. Remember all the doom back in the 1970s and 1980s? And yet in the coming decades, millionaires were minted left and right in IT, entertainment, wall street, etc. And then millionaires were minted every day in China.
Our situation now is different to be sure, but doom is always personal, never systemic. And even when systemic, it’s personal as well. If your neighbor loses his job, it’s a recession. If you lose yours, it’s a depression. If your friend gets cancer, it’s a funeral. If you get cancer, it’s the end of the world.
“Remember all the doom back in the 1970s and 1980s? And yet in the coming decades, millionaires were minted left and right in IT, entertainment, wall street, etc.”
That’s why I have two distinctly different strategies; 1) freeze dried food and water, with cookers that do not need E enough for 6-8 months survival & 2) Graded, Vintage Baseball cards. If disaster happens I’m prepared and if there are ever more millionaires and billionaires I’m also prepared as the value of all those Clemente, Koufax, Mays, Mantle, Aaron, Rose’s from 63 to 74 just keep on going up like they have been. PSA graded Near Mint – Mint 8’s mostly with some Mint 9’s and a few Gem Mint 10’s. Now the whole load of them could go belly up if all hell breaks loose for everybody, but if instead we continue on down a path similar to what has been happening, i.e. the end of a game of Monopoly in which the wealth quickly shifts to the best positioned to take advantage, then I’m well positioned. In a sense I’m back-dooring this by hitching a ride on what the super wealthy want, i.e. assets like valuable collectibles. I’ve got this knack for finding gems in a sea of crap. An 8K investment starting a year ago through until today is already worth 35K. Dozens of these are no longer available to even buy at the grade level I got them. The higher grade cards are disappearing, but it’s not the regular issue, but the inserts and unusual Topps editions like the 64 & 71 baseball coins, the 63 Salada Junket coins, the 70-71 topps Super cards!!!, the 68 Game cards, 69 Decal & 69 & 74 deckle edge cards that are going up in value fast. I wish I’d started doing this a long time ago. I got a Gem Mint 10 Pete Rose 69 Decal for $41 in an auction worth 450. A 70 super Mays for 21 at auction + 18 for grading at PSA worth over 500. A 70 Super Clemente Mint 9 worth over 800. A 63 Clemente worth 1,000. A 71 Clemente coin PSA 8 you can’t find anymore. A 68 Clemente sporting news 8 no longer available. A 1956 Mac Boy Mantle Decal for $19 worth 550. I could go on but listing them all would be exhausting. But it takes a knowledge of them from childhood and some good old fashioned research to know what to get. A lot of it has to do with population numbers and following it long enough to know the value trend and what’s disappearing at high grade levels. If you find something there’s only 1 of for sale at that grade level or higher, get it and often what happens is it never comes up for sale again and sometimes if that happens get that one too! Then you own something no longer available. What’s that worth? Yeah, from there they go up in value fast.
I can lose on the card values if all hell breaks loose, but then there’s the cache of survival food to last through a bottleneck and see what’s on the other side of collapse. Meanwhile the super wealthy and the many joining their ranks will want what I’ve got. Bingo! Remember it’s now a game of musical chairs and those remaining in the chairs are getting wealthier and wealthier! Cozy up to them and you’ll still have a chair too.
Really? You think baseball will be Big in post BAU? The Mona Lisa will be worth less than a hamburger but someone wants baseball cards? I think what’s missing is the “elite” or “Elders” will be impotent without BAU. Without a viable currency there is no means of exchange. The best anyone could hope is food. But that would be foolish. Once the bottom falls out the “elites” will destroy the remaining surplus out of envy. If they can’t profit it will be destroyed to prevent others from gaining access.
This is a pattern read your history. Jerusalem 70ce.
Excellent strategy! Myself I’m doing beans, bullets, Batman comics.
You need a whole lot more than 6-8M to last through the bottle neck. You need to last through the bottle neck and them up to 15M more for your potatoes to grow.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/603535-1.png
Good luck!
“Not enough bio-capacity to grow our way out of this mess.”
Interesting article.
http://www.batr.org/negotium/052715.html
The article ends,
I am afraid it is not quite right.
“…the world could recover…”
‘Nuff said, no need to follow the link…neeext..
“The elders.” Yo yo. I have read the “protocols”. And in some way it is like reading the news today. But the “elders of Zion” are just a projected fiction. Scapegoats invented by the Real Ones, who think of themselves as Demi Gods. Sure, among the Real Ones you find some with Khazar DNA, but also plenty of AngloSaxons, and of course Germans and Russians and Chinese. It is called the Great Game. And the price is the earth. So they think. But they start to worry.You cannot eat gold and money.
Wolfgang
KING MIDAS. 🙂
Sort of—
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6Kp19x_A9_E/WSWtuaTsxjI/AAAAAAAAuO8/HPZndNb2ueQoSR8HLEXMfuvKmMfBqpuaQCLcB/s640/trump-nude-troll-doll-chuck-williams-2%2B%25281%2529.jpg
Ha ha, love that pic !
The Real Ones? What are you talking about?
“The amount of land being used for agriculture has been steadily falling.” That is like in Slovakia: my neighbours have just abandoned their small field and sown the grass there. As they have neither manure producing animals nor compost (or, more exactly, no free energy to transport it there), their field turned into dead yellow soil.
The role of the animals in the past was to collect organic matter, process it and transport it to the depleting fields. The grass mowers itself can not do that.
The loss of open space is a universal worry. Where I live it is farmland and forest being sacrificed for housing developments and other construction, such as a new mega-church.
Same here, sorry to say. Good land going under development and a pleasant old landscape destroyed to house the workers in biotech and gaming (! gaming……is this the depth we have reached?).
Pouring concrete and laying down asphalt is the ONLY game in town now, for banks, institutions (in this case a university of global standing) and governments, and every little rent-seeker that ever crawled out from under a stone.
The only flesh left on the bones of a once-fertile and varied world, and the hyenas of finance will gnaw on it until the end.
In the meantime, I have the consolation that my local tax bills will stay reasonable, with all the new payers flooding in……..
If there were no limits to growth and no environmental blow-backs from IC (eventually collapsing the biosphere), I am convinced that we would have literally finished up asphalting the whole planet…literally…
But obviously that will not happen, Mother Earth (with her resource limits and her climate change) will take care of our lot way before we come close to that!
xabier-
“The only flesh left on the bones of a once-fertile and varied world, and the hyenas of finance will gnaw on it until the end.” Man, you have a way with words.
It is so different where I live. What were once fields and pasture has been reclaimed by forest. Huge amounts of land. Across the road from my father’s place there was a hayfield when I was a kid. Today it is a beautiful spruce forest. that I hunt rabbits in.
People that have not come here for years remark at how much everything has “grown in” since they last visited. When left alone, mother nature can still get the job done.
Not all good though, there is still plenty of clear cutting in some places yet.
Joe, spruce trees are awesome – very vigorous growth, beautiful and very beneficial to wildlife and mankind. I planted 25 Norway spruces this spring in an adjacent woodland that was mostly deciduous. I would even recommend them for reclaiming the field of dead yellow soil that MG mentioned. Wild animals help recycle nutrients, as do domestic animals.
I do not have to plant the trees: the former pasture near my house has turned into forest just in 20 years time. The forest is crawling to us…
Sounds like the Atlanta area!
till Birnam wood to Dunsinane shall come
Remember reading a State of the World factoid that indicated as a undeveloped country industrializes, it loses HALF of its agricultural land. Reason ….closes to the urban areas, near roads and transportation sectors and easiest to build upon.
Lester Brown of the World watch Institute was dismayed at China , India, and South Korea
This was a quarter century ago, wonder how much has been paved over..
According to a 2015 study by the University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre, the planet has lost a third of its arable land due to pollution and erosion in the past 40 years. The combined effects of over-cultivation and heavy fertiliser use have depleted soil at a rate that far outpaces the earth’s natural ability to recover. Climate change and extreme weather events have accelerated erosion, exacerbating the situation. The dramatic loss of fertile land comes at a time when the demand for food is rising: by 2050, food production will need to increase by 50 per cent to feed the world’s projected population of 9 billion.
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/article/2094426/farming-without-soil-new-japanese-tech-makes-growing-fruit-and
Japanese tech makes growing fruit and vegetables possible in any environment
Japanese experts make a breakthrough in farming technology, using polymer film to grow food
BY MELINDA JOE
See, no problem technology can’t fix….plastic will fix just about anything! LOL
Exactly! A high tech solution to everything in Japan. Most citizens are sufficiently poor that they cannot afford cars and vacation travel, so energy consumption per capita remains much lower than in the US and Canada. Also, Japan is generally a fairly warm country, so it doesn’t need much heating for the areas where most of the population lives. (The northernmost island is sparsely populated.) The castles we saw had no heating arrangements whatsoever, other than bringing in heated water from elsewhere. European castles have heating arrangements.
And the fact that countries lose their arable land, as they industrialize, is important too.
There are limits regarding the scale of such farming: maybe some vegetables can be grown like that. But what will replace the big corn and wheat fields?
Much of high tech farming seems to be geared towards greens, not calories.
That this product is for high-end restaurants tells me it is expensive which tells me it is resource ineffective since money = resources.
Quite a bit of high-tech farming is for organic food–growing food in deserts, for example, and flying it back. Sounds like it would be worthwhile, but it is mostly expensive and unsustainable.
towns always grow and expandwhere it is easiest to do so, and when a reason exists,—thus they grow at river crossings and sea edges
there always has to be good land nearby, or supportive fishing
it follws then that expansion eats surrounding land–up to a certain limits.
unfortunately oil energy temporarily removed any such limits, so cities are unknowingly sowing the seeds of their own destruction
When I read articles like this:
https://medium.com/@thugznkisses/theres-more-to-the-ecological-crisis-than-global-warming-2de8a66de4d
I get the feeling we should be much more educated in 1.water filtering, storage, collecting and irrigation, 2.soil restoration and 3.phosphorous and nitrogen cycles. And maybe 4.seed and seedling storaging.
If we dont have best practices, techniques and workable solutions in those four, everything else is pretty much useless info.
If I think of the Roman legions why they were succesful. Or why the Mongol hordes swept over Asia. There are these key resources that come to mind. The war pony, the war bow, their armour and silk undershirts, practicing riding and archery from birth, strategy of feigning a retreat and then making an ambush, chinese war machines, the division in 10 -100-1000 men units, promoting the brightest to be the generals. Without these, maybe the mongols wouldnt have spread out in to Asia. And its difficult to say which one, is the most important element, but with all of these together they were unstoppable.
So, just thinking again, that maybe instead of playing videogames, or travelling around, eating in fancy restaurants, we should try to learn how those four work? Maybe, just maybe, if we would know all there is to know about these four, maybe, just maybe, our species would not go extinct?
I’m not sure if water storage even existed prior to civilization. Large scale water storage won’t be necessary if the only way humans can survive is as nomadic groups. A steady supply of clean water seemed to be an issue up until the late Middle Ages.
The knowledge is out there but it’s probably in very old books and in common knowledge among of non-industrial societies.
the fired clay pot was a critical part of civilized advancement, before that water could be carried in ostrich eggshells maybe, but its not feasible to carry more than a day or two’s needs at any one time over long distances–weight carrying makes you work/drink more, and it would likely be in hot areas if water supply was difficult
difficult to imagine even modest water storage projects prior to civilisation–i imagine they just followed water availability.
clean water was a problem until pumps and pipes became available in common use (1800s)
Clean water was one of the major advances that allowed longer life expectancies.
Yes, pots and buckets, water channels and cisterns.
Much more significant than going to the moon.
And the next step: metal containers in which to heat food over fire.
Leading to…… furnaces, in which to burn children as sacrifices to the gods – as the Carthaginians apparently did. Oh, dear, we do go astray with our inventions don’t we?
Helped keep the population from rising. You need to see the bigger picture. This is the way a self-organized economy works.
Very true, Van Kent, but the current system won’t reward any of those behaviours.
It wants us only to make useless journeys, play games, and so on.
Even the most basic steps towards resilience as individuals and communities are not fostered by government and education systems, when it would be quite easy to do so, and when money could actually be made in that new context.
We exist as consumers, only to justify the sunk investments of the blind and foolish in a dying system.
We don’t have good techniques for a lot of things.
Disease transmission will be a problem with people living as close as they are, without very careful handling of waste products. Contagious diseases are likely to become a major problem.
most invading armies of whatever era, succeeded by looting what they needed as the went along—it was essential, because the further you go from home, the longer the supply line
Hence the Romans established a 1000yr empire by settling in areas and enforcing roman laws and absorbing energy resources as needed….it lasted as it did because they didnt run into anyone stronger for centuries,
The Germans thought they could pull off the same trick, but of course they ran into the USA and the British Empire–(Japan the same)
Hence their empire didnt succeed
Our modern techniques help us get along with less land for farming. If we lose those techniques, it will be very difficult to produce enough food.
” Our modern techniques help us get along with less land for farming ”
Actually Gail .. I’m in the process of re-reading Wendell Berry’s ” The Unsettling of America ” ( for the fifth time since new ) … and what you are saying is the myth being perpetuated by both academia , agra-business and the government agencies deluded by the rhetoric coming from the corporate world who’s sole focus is greed and control . In reality Big Agra farms with all their tech etc produce lower yields per acre ( 30-40% less ) than a Amish or Mennonite low tech / no tech farm is capable of … not to mention using 80-100% more energy [ read oil ] as well as chemicals etc . Also so called ‘ modern’ techniques are focused solely on quantity not quality placing little or no emphasis on the care of the land . Which means not only is land used for farming diminishing at a frightening rate with the land being used producing lower yields per acre of lesser quality … but that the land being farmed is slowly being destroyed by Big Agra’s ‘ modern ‘ techniques .
Another point Berry makes in his now 40 year old book I’m being reminded of is that the less we as individuals produce ourselves [ including cooking etc ] the more susceptible to the whims of the market place we are .. and the more consumeristic we become .. therefore as farms and farmers diminish an even greater number of non-discerning irresponsible consumers are created . And in this Finite World we live in neither is a good thing
Which is to say borrowing the title ( and the thoughts ) of a Jacques Ellul book ; ” The Technological Bluff ” posing as ‘ modern ‘ techniques in fact create at least three new problems for every one they claim to solve . That is a scientific fact too often ignored especially by academia and the corporate world focusing solely on short term results ( and profits ) while ignoring the consequences both short and long term [ FYI ; if titles matter place a PhD before my name ]
Suffice it to say … everything is connected .,, interconnected and intertwined
Human population certainly rose, once we started supplementing our traditional techniques with fossil fuel based ones. I really don’t know. A big part of the problem is getting enough water for plants. Fossil fuels help a whole lot with irrigation. Irrigation is “traditional” but generally energy intensive. (It can also lead to soil salination.) Refrigeration is extremely important for allowing food that is grown to reach markets. I see lots of claims, but I have not seen evidence that the claims are really true.
And likely that’s why Phoenix went farms to housing. Never mentioned but the irrigation killed the fragile soil.
‘In reality Big Agra farms with all their tech etc produce lower yields per acre ( 30-40% less ) than a Amish or Mennonite low tech / no tech farm is capable of’
Bull Shit.
Green Revolution in Rice: IR8 and the Philippines[edit]
In 1960, the Government of the Republic of the Philippines with the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation established IRRI (International Rice Research Institute). A rice crossing between Dee-Geo-woo-gen and Peta was done at IRRI in 1962. In 1966, one of the breeding lines became a new cultivar, IR8.[13] IR8 required the use of fertilizers and pesticides, but produced substantially higher yields than the traditional cultivars. Annual rice production in the Philippines increased from 3.7 to 7.7 million tons in two decades.[14] The switch to IR8 rice made the Philippines a rice exporter for the first time in the 20th century.[15]
Green Revolution’s start in India[edit]
See also: Green Revolution in India
In 1961, India was on the brink of mass famine.[additional citation needed][16] Norman Borlaug was invited to India by the adviser to the Indian minister of agriculture C. Subramaniam. Despite bureaucratic hurdles imposed by India’s grain monopolies, the Ford Foundation and Indian government collaborated to import wheat seed from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). Punjab was selected by the Indian government to be the first site to try the new crops because of its reliable water supply and a history of agricultural success. India began its own Green Revolution program of plant breeding, irrigation development, and financing of agrochemicals.[17]
India soon adopted IR8 – a semi-dwarf rice variety developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) that could produce more grains of rice per plant when grown with certain fertilizers and irrigation.[18] In 1968, Indian agronomist S.K. De Datta published his findings that IR8 rice yielded about 5 tons per hectare with no fertilizer, and almost 10 tons per hectare under optimal conditions. This was 10 times the yield of traditional rice.[19] IR8 was a success throughout Asia, and dubbed the “Miracle Rice”. IR8 was also developed into Semi-dwarf IR36.
Wheat yields in least developed countries since 1961, in kilograms per hectare.
In the 1960s, rice yields in India were about two tons per hectare; by the mid-1990s, they had risen to six tons per hectare. In the 1970s, rice cost about $550 a ton; in 2001, it cost under $200 a ton.[20] India became one of the world’s most successful rice producers, and is now a major rice exporter, shipping nearly 4.5 million tons in 2006.
More https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
If not for the Green Revolution we would not be here today — because Malthus’ nightmare scenario would have hit many decades ago.
The Green Revolution sealed our fate (along with spent fuel ponds) because nothing grows in soil farmed using chemicals…. once the chemicals are withdrawn…
But would anyone here suggest the Green Revolution was a mistake?
Actually, the Haber process doubled the human population of Earth.
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/haberbosch.html
Norman Borlaug and the “Green Revolution” would not exist without Haber.
Borlaug is our father.
He f789ed the planet begetting 7.5 billion of us.
He also was involved it inventing Zyklon B gas. Maybe he ran the numbers.
I lived under the illusion amish didn’t use oil at all (for farming).
You would be wrong. I had thought the same …
But then I had a chat at the St Jacobs market with an Amish farmer…. they farm industrially …. oil – pesticides – chem fertilizers — tractors — they use banks to finance their property purchases… plugged right into good ol BAU
I asked the guy — you don’t drive a car but you have a tractor? Well – ya — we have to be able to compete on price and we’d never be able to do that without using machinery
I should have asked him if he had ever heard of Kim and Paris….
So basically they’re regular people in uncomfortable clothes that don’t work on sundays?
Well… I would think they don’t Tweet….
I think there may be some amish that don’t use modern methods. From what I know the amish are not a monolithic block but quite varied.
What you mean Gail is “our modern fossil fuel based fertilizers, pesticides and herbicide (and now GMO) help us get along….”
Fixed it for you.
Besides these techniques, refrigeration and irrigation are important. So is fast transport to markets. It is really a whole chain of activities.
On the subject of agriculture, I suspect that many think that when fossil fuels diminish in availability and costs rise to use them for agriculture, the amount of food produced will reduce in a linear fashion. So if we have 30% less oil, then we might expect 30% less food. I think it will be much worse. When land that has been factory farmed with chemicals, no longer has those chemicals, the super weeds will take over and the land will become unusable. This will not be a linear process. The same can be said for insect pests, they will become exponentially worse. It will become like a biblical plaque. The land will be cursed, by our technology.
I think you are right about the decline not being linear. I am not certain it is the cost that rises, though. It is more that the ability of the farmer to afford to buy them goes down, because commodity prices fall.
It wasn’t linear on the way up why would it be linear on the way down? Even worse because the availability of FF has continually mitigated ever increasing crop failure risk.
Agree. Food production will fall off a cliff…
Soil that is farmed using petro-chemical inputs — will support no crop once the outputs are stopped – without years of intensive rejuvenation involving organic inputs.
Effect of Pesticides on soil fertility (beneficial soil microorganisms)
Heavy treatment of soil with pesticides can cause populations of beneficial soil microorganisms to decline. According to the soil scientist Dr. Elaine Ingham, “If we lose both bacteria and fungi, then the soil degrades. Overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have effects on the soil organisms that are similar to human overuse of antibiotics.
Indiscriminate use of chemicals might work for a few years, but after awhile, there aren’t enough beneficial soil organisms to hold onto the nutrients” (Savonen, 1997). For example, plants depend on a variety of soil microorganisms to transform atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates, which plants can use. Common landscape herbicides disrupt this process: triclopyr inhibits soil bacteria that transform ammonia into nitrite (Pell et al., 1998); glyphosate reduces the growth and activity of free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria in soil (Santos and Flores, 1995) and 2,4-D reduces nitrogen fixation by the bacteria that live on the roots of bean plants (Arias and Fabra, 1993; Fabra et al., 1997), reduces the growth and activity of nitrogen-fixing blue-green algae (Singh and Singh, 1989; Tözüm-Çalgan and Sivaci-Güner, 1993), and inhibits the transformation of ammonia into nitrates by soil bacteria (Frankenberger et al., 1991, Martens and Bremner, 1993).
Mycorrhizal fungi grow with the roots of many plants and aid in nutrient uptake. These fungi can also be damaged by herbicides in the soil. One study found that oryzalin and trifluralin both inhibited the growth of certain species of mycorrhizal fungi (Kelley and South, 1978). Roundup has been shown to be toxic to mycorrhizal fungi in laboratory studies, and some damaging effects were seen at concentrations lower than those found in soil following typical applications (Chakravarty and Sidhu, 1987; Estok et al., 1989). Triclopyr was also found to be toxic to several species of mycorrhizal fungi (Chakravarty and Sidhu, 1987) and oxadiazon reduced the number of mycorrhizal fungal spores (Moorman, 1989).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2984095/
Organic inputs will be hard to come by considering nothing can be grown – and most if not all animals are killed and eaten.
Less than 1% of all farmland globally is farmed organically.
Get ready to starve. No matter where you are:
https://assets.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/agriculture3.png
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/08/which-countries-have-the-most-organic-agricultural-land/ (note – most organic land in Australia is rubbish and supports sheep only)
Here is an example of a local rancher. He used to run 50 cattle, and annually sprayed weed killer and then fertilized his pastures. When the price of the weed killer, fertilizer and diesel went up, he stopped spraying. Now he runs 15 cattle and makes more money. His pasture is a mess of weeds and it will never again be sprayed. Weed killer is now 350% more costly than before. A 66% decrease in beef production. The percent decline for factory farmland will be more drastic. Think 100%.
I think some people look at the new production of 15 cattle, and say, “See, going without chemicals can be profitable.” Yes, but the amount of beef produced is a lot lower.
Sears Revenues Plunge, to Hit Zero in 3 Years, Shares Jump
The ingenious strategy of cost-cutting and store-closing your way out of trouble: Pretty soon, it leads to zero.
Sears reported earnings for its first quarter of fiscal 2018 today. “Earnings” has been a bad joke with Sears, which has lost money every one of the past six years, $10 billion in total.
First things first. Revenues plunged 20% year-over-year to $4.3 billion. Some of that plunge was caused by the endless series of store closings with which Sears is trying to keep itself out of bankruptcy for as long as possible. And some of it was caused by same-store sales which plunged 12% at the surviving stores. That was about twice the decline a year ago. So the downfall is picking up critical momentum.
How bad is $4.3 billion in revenues? It was another modern-era low. It was down 20.3% year-over-year. It was down 27% from Q1 two years ago. It was down 45% from Q1 three years ago, and so on. It was down 63% from Q1 2008. This is what the accelerating revenue shrinkage looks like:
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/05/25/sears-revenues-to-hit-zero-in-3-years-bankruptcy/
http://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/US-Sears-revenues-2018-Q1.png
They should hire Elon Musk. They could then enjoy a proportional stock value increase to meet their perpetual losses. Soon they could become a top 5 market cap with absolutely no sales at all.
Although…
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-many-failures-of-elon-musk-captured-in-one-giant-infographic-2017-05-24
That’s what I mean. In a world where everyone gets a trophy failure is rewarded. What’s good is bad and what’s bad is good.
” In a world where everyone gets a trophy failure is rewarded. ”
That trend began with entitled upper middle class and wealthy families who refused to acknowledge accept the fact that not all their children are exceptional. Now, it’s spread to all the social classes, under the banner of social justice…where what used to be bad is good and what is good is bad because old white straight men suck or something. They don’t want equality…they want to turn the social hierarchy that existed previously on its head so that it’s white straight men who are marginalized…”social revenge” if you will…this stuff used to be fringe but now it’s being legitimized on all kinds of media platforms…for reasons I cannot understand.
Regarding the Elon Musk infographic
There’s nothing really noteworthy here, aside from the number of rocket launch failures . Wealthy people are allowed to fail more.
Elon Musk’s resume is not too different than that of George W. Bush. We all know George W. Bush’s family’s wealth and connections helped him get multiple shots at high profile elite occupations but who kept giving Elon Musk multiple chances to fail at capital intensive activities such as launching rockets into space?
Wow!
Not good at all, but “shares jump.”
Don’t fight the CBs
According to a Bloomberg article posted just hours ago, the stock has taken a big hit and is back down when news broke to investors that the rate of decline for Sears is accelerating.
He is making up for the loss in volume
I think he is Amazon on steroids
I’m surprised Sears is still in business. Supposedly they are on the watch-list for companies that will not make it past 2017.
If I am a supplier to Sears — I am waiting payment in advance on all shipments
not to worry, Sears will make it up on sales volume.
Maybe this is interesting: In the moment I am going through the archives of “Rigorous Intuition”. A Blog that covers many topics. Among them mind control and psychic warfare. In the blogpost “Full Spectral Dominance (Part One)” the author (Jeff Wells) writes about the psychic Bob Monroe: “Monroe developed a technique he called “hemi-sync” for inducing altered states of consciousness by entraining the brain towards certain frequencies. In the early ’80s, INSCOM (United States Army Intelligence and Security Command) officers and the military’s remote viewers were visiting Virginia’s Monroe Institute every few weeks for it’s five-day “Gateway Lifeline” program to hone their paranormal skills, though for their sake it was given the less squishy title of “Rapid Advancement Personal Training.” (Monroe’s military-intelligence connections might have been a birthright: it is said that his father was James Monroe, Executive Director of the CIA’s mind control cut-out the Human Ecology Society.) Monroe’s first book, Journeys Out of the Body, includes a number of diary entries from the late ’50s and early ’60s which recount his early experiences with astral projection before hitting upon hemi-sync.”
I copy here only one of his visionary “precogs”:
“6/12/63
Gasoline is unavailable, electric power has been shut off. there is a great sense of fatality among everyone. It doesn’t seem to be the product of atomic war, and there is no concern as to radioactive fallout. There is principally a feeling of doom and the breakup of civilization as we know it due to something momentous having taken place, a factor beyond human control.”
I would say, some of them know (call them the dominant minority, the 0,0001%). And they are in panic. They are about to try a reset, but it is beyond their control. And the reset will be disastrous. For them and for us.
very interesting wolfgang astral projection is true and a gateway to timetravel it would have been good if he had seen a date during that journey
I lived in Micronesia in the 70’s and 80’s, and ended up in Japan numerous times. Japanese were our major clients for dolphin watching, diving, sailing and fishing.
I’ve slept with them, taken numerous LSD trips, shared meals and weddings, but I still don’t have a clue what is going on.
My brother negotiates major contracts with Japanese Corporations, understands the nuances, but it still a mystery to him.
We seem to be barbarians.
We seem to be barbarians.
That last sentence can reasonably be read in two ways, Duncan.
So I have to ask, are you referring specifically to you and your brother, or to gaijin in general? 🙂
Living among the Japanese for 35 years now and able to do reasonably good impersonation of speaking their language, I am able to communicate well and I grasp a fair amount of what’s going on social interaction-wise. But I still have as about much idea of what goes on in individual Japanese minds as a congenitally blind person has about the difference between blue and green or violet and indigo. It’s a black box that I can’t get the lid off to look inside.
With people of similar cultural and linguistic backgrounds, we can make a lot of assumptions about what they are thinking with at least the reasonable expectation based on our own experience of being raised in a similar cultural environment that we we might be guessing correctly. When the cultural gap is wider, a lot of the intuitive knowledge we would normally take for granted as giving us insight into how others are thinking or feeling can actually work to lead us astray.
Perhaps it’s because you are older and the Japanese you associate with are older? When I was a student and had Japanese friends who were also students they didn’t seem so very different to me. They didn’t like to be part of a society in which conformity was expected and individuality discouraged. “Like robots” was how they described feeling. They were certainly dreading getting jobs and entering the Japanese corporate world, anticipating that the long hours and dedication expected of them would mean the end of all happiness. When I met them all again a year after they had started work they had lost a lot of their youthful exuberance. Of course, that happens to people who start work in Western society too (we all have to grow up sometime), but to a lesser extent.
In general.
But in any culture one could make a case my brother and I are barbarians.
I’ve pillaged (and more) at Gaspanic a few times…. they seem to dig barbarians…
I’ve made some embarrassing errors with people from the Middle East, due to my earlier failure fully to understand ‘shame culture’: ie if a fact in any way is deemed to reflect ‘shame’ on that culture or group, it is not to be mentioned or acknowledged in any way.
Even if it has no direct relationship to the person you are talking with, and if it occurred centuries ago, it will be seen as a shameful thing to them and cause acute mental discomfort and social embarrassment. For instance, a defeat in battle some 1,000 years ago is a neutral fact to an historian, but not to them.
Of course, with good will on both sides this can usually be smoothed over.
Japanese have amazing self-control. They are amazingly conscientious. Their kids seem to behave well, even when they are very young.
I was at the Nagano Olympics hockey …. Japanese people beside me spilled a bit of a drink onto the stadium floor… they carefully wiped it up….
They must freak when they come to stadiums and arenas in NA!!!
We had some interesting experiences too.
In Tokyo, we arrived a couple of days before the bus tour began. We reserved a room in the same hotel the tour used, but needed to move to a different room when the bus tour started, because the bus tour had reserved a different class of room for us. My husband had a commercial bottle of water with about two inches of water left, which he intended to throw away, which he left in the first room. We brought our luggage to the lobby, minus the nearly empty water bottle, on the day when the transfer was to take place. A little later, we came back and went to our new room. We were surprised to find everything we intended to transfer, plus the nearly empty water bottle.
There were two other times that we left small items (old brochures, etc.) on restaurant tables, thinking (hoping) that the staff would toss the unwanted items. Both times, the staff came after us, concerned about our potential loss of a possibly valuable item. (There are very few trash cans in Japan.)
I don’t get it — what’s wrong with these people!!!
They need to GET WITH THE PROGRAM!
I suspect Trump was elected to spare italians the shame of having elected the most rude and self-conceited president of the last 50 years.Compared to Donald, Berlusconi is a gentleman, a model of good manners and gallantry. I suspect the pope and the italian-american community had something to do with it (All the more so because, as far as i know, God is italian). Hum…
I have to say, he beats even the former King of Spain for lack of manners.
In the days of duels, that push would have justified a challenge: I doubt he’s have a steady hand, he’d probably wobble like a giant orange jelly. 🙂
In America, “we” and I use that term loosely, throw things on the floor . I’ve seen a man drop a disposable foam container of food in the middle of the sidewalk and kept on walking. This man was either a recent immigrant or the offspring of recent immigrants.
Somehow he had gotten the idea that it’s someone else’s job to clean up after him.
I see janitors at my current job who make a mess in the bathroom knowing that ONE of them has to clean it up…
I think there’s some truth to the perception that some Americans have a sense of entitlement.
You are right. We live next to a university campus. Our sidewalks are often littered with left over drink containers and bags from fast food.
Gail, thanks for sharing info from your trip to Japan. It looked like a great time with your family. When I think of Japan’s aging population, limited energy resources and massive infrastructure maintenance costs; I don’t think they have much time left before the bottom falls out.
Which leads me to my main question. How do you see the collapse scenario unfolding? I know you believe collapse will be the result of declining energy affordability causing economic crisis. But, how does that scenario play out? Will individual countries fail one at a time with months of years before the next fails? Recent history looks like this might be happening. Some countries seem more resistant to collapse than others. Or do you see a rapid process of collapse as each failing country acts as a domino knocking over the next weakest country causing a worldwide collapse? What specific events should we look for that would trigger a rapid collapse? Due to our global interconnected civilization, once started could this collapse cause a shut down of the world economy in as little as a week or a day?
I doubt that very much happens in as short time as a day, except when some natural disaster takes place. I do think that financial problems one place will create financial problems other places, as well.
There are a lot of things that could trigger collapse. If the US cannot approve a budget (or continuing spending resolution), it would seem like this could be a trigger for a significant downward step. If Italy pulls out of the Eurozone, that could essentially be the end of the Eurozone. Major debt defaults, and bank failures, could be a problem anywhere–including China, Italy, Spain. Problems in the derivative market could cause major bank failures. If major oil producing countries have financial problems and overthrown governments, this could create a problem. The combination of rising interest rates by the Fed and layoffs by Ford and other auto producers could push the economy into recession. The existence of so many problems guarantees that at least one will happen.
My guess is that collapse will happen in stages, with the early steps perhaps preceding the late ones. The timing between the earlier and later stages is (my guess) somewhere between months and a few years. But timing is something we don’t really understand well at all.
But when the financial system goes down …. collapse will hit pretty much immediately – globally.
The financial system is the problem–you are right. But I expect that the financial system may not go down immediately, all at once. The IMF will try a bailout. There will be QE types of approaches by some countries. Governments will try to change the rules as much as possible allow insolvent companies to continue operating. It is only when these measures fail that the lights will truly go out.
I suppose that if there is a big physical cause–a Carrington type event that takes down the grid, for example, that cannot be fixed, for example, or some nuclear bomb explosions–it could happen more quickly.
Definitely — they will do – as we have seen ‘whatever it takes’ to keep the financial system alive…
It’s a compounding effect. The Fed QE intervention is creating information loss in the capital system leading to misalocation of resources. The likely result will be a shortage of critical replacement parts.
The time horizon is so short people are only interested in the immediate. This results in underdevelopment.
So resources are being pumped into Elons dream world while companies like GE who actually build stuff are ignored.
At some point the grid will start to fail and there will be nothing to repair it with. JIT will become Too Late Delivery.
timing? I often wonder if it wasn’t for lotteries https://www.playnow.com/ we would have long ago witnessed collapse? people winning huge sums of money can only help the economy. lol
and like my sister lol said to me can you imagine what a great place to work BCLC. You never ever see sad unhappy people ever!!!! Everyone coming through the door is laughing and smiling!!!! Check it out lol
https://youtu.be/HSFvCP7Layw
So moar? Hell, yeah! Keep the tickets coming hard and fast look the auto industry is desparate for the cash isn’t it? and Sears, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, J.C. Penney etc etc….
Lottery tickets (at least around here) tend to be purchased by those with very limited incomes–in other words, the one who really cannot afford to buy them. The concentrated money goes to one person or family.
I expect the money would do more good for the economy, scattered among those with limited incomes. The newly rich person can still live in only one house at a time, and can only eat about three meals a day. The person is likely to buy disproportionately more services (send children to private universities, for example). These services do recirculate wealth, but they don’t do as good a job of keeping commodity prices up, since they use less commodities.
‘Maybe politicians make decisions based on a perception of what campaign contributors would prefer. These contributors no doubt represent concentrations of wealth. The power of these contributors comes from the way our system is set up. It also seems to be associated with the way dissipative structures work.’
Yes of course — the Eld-ers are not micro managing … as I have pointed out this is a system … they only really care about getting directly involved when their authority or their system is challenged.
Other than that they pretty much leave the goy to run things as they see fit.
Try messing with the petro dollar and you’ll get their attention (see Putin…) Try threatening their global hegemony and you will get their attention — notice how both parties line up every time there is a war to be fought…. Try questioning the reason why a private company has the right to print the reserve currency or better still .. try to do something about that… as we have seen nobody even dares to go there….
Then of course there is Israel… the El.ders stand by their homeland… through thick and thin.
“Based on total calories consumed, Japan imports about 60 percent of its food each year.”
Wow, that’s a telling statement and imagine my expression upon hearing from one of our executives, yes, Jerry, this is the reason why McDonalds doesn’t have any French Fries in Japan when I was mentioning the large amount of freighters sitting going nowhere in the bay just outside Singapore a couple of years ago.
The thing though that one must and surely understand is just how dependent Japan is upon the ocean for its food source. An island nation needs the ocean and here’s a good essay on the dangers of plastic, another glorious invention of man and oil, sic question mark!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/apos-ocean-smog-apos-taking-090105455.html
I remember all to well too their problem with jellyfish a few years ago and how the island is being choked to death with thousands. Japanese fisherman were at a loss about what to do and killing them apparently only made the situation worse. Can’t imagine if this is still occurring?
Your website Gail and all of the comments has and continues to be an eye-opening experience for me and if it all hasn’t lend a huge amount of weight to the words:
“For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now – and never to be equaled again.” Matthew 24:21
This surely has to be a reference to our day and age and the deindustrialization of our world. What a horror we have created for ourselves. Not even Hollywood could have created such a horror show as we are about to experience on this planet and some scientist thinks we need to go to another planet?
Maybe it is a horror show, but that is not the view that a person gets from main street media. According to them, the economy is strong, and another interest rate increase in June would work just fine.
The most extreme excitation of human pain sensors in the history of our species.
So pray everyday we need a miracle.
One thing that I wanted to say that I couldn’t in the previous blog post is that I think doctor dolph.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF79zsgjmw8
who is according to his judgement as doctor is smarter than everyone else on this blog, may be right about the housing bubble not popping anytime soon.
Most of the people who said that the real estate prices were heading downwards, have pointed to the willingness of the Fed to raise interest rates. The last time the Fed raised interest rates, it contributed to the popping of the 2000s housing bubble. Most of the people who said that the real estate prices were heading downwards, have pointed to tightening lending standards; a general tendency for banks to offer mortgages to borrowers who can pay them back.
Most of the people who said that the real estate prices were heading downwards, have pointed to stagnant wages.
The PTB have been very successful at keeping real estate prices from falling in major urban areas. A large part of their success is due to the fact that many people still believe that real estate is expensive and should be expensive. Too many highly paid and highly valued workers are willing to pay a premium to live closer to where they work–as long as they don’t have to mix too much with the undesirables, their parents fled to the suburbs a generation or two ago to get away from. Real estate is still seen by most people as a “hard asset”.
In developing countries, real estate prices are relatively expensive in relationship to the wages of local workers. Despite the low, low wages in China, many Chinese workers cannot afford housing in urban areas but the lack of affordability has not caused a Minsky moment in housing prices in China.
Gail has talked a lot about a need to increase housing density to where an extended family lives under one roof. Dense housing is a reality in poor communities–the limits to denser living arrangements are psychological.
I think that Dolph may be right: I think that the real estate prices will stay high in important urban areas until the very end of BAU. Falling real estate prices in Flint, Michigan is not a sign that the real estate market is in trouble. Falling real estate prices in Manhattan, NY or Tokyo, Japan would? Why? Because that’s where a lot of economic activity happens.
Interest rates have a major influence on real estate prices. If interest rates can stay very low, I would agree that home prices are likely to remain high. If interest rates rise, then all bets are off.
I recently posted a summary of a ‘creed’ OFW readers would agree to.
My ultimate motive was to begin to understand how regular visitors to this site could possibly interpret Gail’s insights as anything other than the near term apocalypse of human life on this planet.
There seems to be a rash of ignoramuses who think there is some way forward… Who are you and what logic drives you?
Not sure if I’m an ignoramus or not. Lol
I believe that our current civilization is doomed. I guess that makes me a doomer.
I believe that a few well prepared individuals could possibly survive. I guess that makes me a prepper. Apocalypse, yes. Extinction of the entire human race, maybe.
I am not sure that I would call the people a “rash of ignoramuses.” More likely, it is people who are less far along on their search for understanding of the situation. We need to be understanding of people who are less far along. Point out posts to them that might be helpful to read, for example.
Some are stuck in a rut… no matter how hard we try to pull them out…. they seem to like the rut.
Eddy-
I think Gail is right as far as people who end up here go. Now as far far as getting them squared away in a game of “good cop, bad cob” you are the the best bad cop ever!
Sometimes you need to beat people upside the head to make them receptive to facts and logic.
Or perhaps the DelusiSTANI can be beaten out of them?
Welcome to Japan.
I find it interesting to read your conclusions after only a few weeks in country. Many of us expats who have lived here for years have similar concerns. Many of the problems lie deep in a culture that does not accept change until the situation forces it. However that same culture and work ethic have made this resource poor country into a world economic power. Sadly it also appears to have doomed it as the environment is developed to the point where traditional methods do not “improve” returns, yet they continue practicing these same outdated solutions. For example just about every river has a concrete bottom and banks, then again flooding has been a traditional problem here in Japan. At least they have national health care and relatively safe living conditions for example in my neighborhood I do not need to lock the door at night. Overall its a pretty good life on the archipelago although the glacial pace of change can take some getting used to.
One thing that surprised me about Japan is the fact that the forested hillsides don’t seem to be used at all. In China, there are people everywhere, and in Norway, there were settlers up on the hillsides at a very early point in time. The Big Island in Hawaii also seems to have people scattered everywhere. Having no one living in the hillsides means that pretty much everyone needs to live on the little bit of flat land. I am sure it is easier for transportation, but it contributes to the concentrations within the city.
I noticed how much the rivers seemed to be controlled. This is a photo I took of one small stream. I take pictures like this, when other folks are busy looking at the “normal” scenery.
This project looks incredibly labor intensive. To some extent, I get the idea that the government is using road building, wall building, and stream control as a way of providing jobs for citizens. Anyone who has looked at Japan’s financials knows that the government has borrowed an absurd amount of money over the years. I get the impression that this debt is being used for projects that are very labor intensive, quite possibly to provide lots of jobs for citizens. This tends to keep citizens employed, so that they stay happy with the government. This may be a very long-standing way of doing things.
Wow, to do that to a creek is showing some serious control issues.
It seems seriously Non-Zen to me! Concreted streams?!!
Other countries sometimes redirect rivers using concrete beds in densely populated areas, to try to get more control over the river/stream. But the amount of stonework in Japan was amazing.
Interesting source of information on Fukushima and radiation. http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-commentary.html
The Japanese government is up to its ears in debt. It is hard for it to do a lot, even if it wants to.
Thanks – I was about to check into the Betty Ford clinic….
Thanks for the happy memories. I lived in Japan for 3 years in the 1960s and have only grateful memories of its wonderful culture–and its resilience: on a recent visit I found it 100% intact, despite generations of foreign occupation.
The material future, however, does not look bright, and I am appalled by the social security program. What a departure from their otherwise sterling GINI record. Strange…
You can read the details of the program at the link I gave. I am afraid that pretty much every nation will have problems with their government-sponsored retirement programs. Japan is “closer to the edge” with its aging population than most countries, so seems to have started cutting back on benefits.
We did find that the Japanese were amazingly conscientious and hard working. They didn’t allow any trash anywhere. People were well behaved and respectful. In some ways, the culture reminded me of the US many years ago-say 1950s.
Japan’s culture is why some preppers think the Japanese will find a way to make it through the end of industrial civilization.
At this point, all I think Japanese culture and demographic situation may do, is allow the Japanese to go out with a whimper, rather than widespread violence and chaos.
The bus tour guide told us that Japan now has a fairly significant homeless population but this is to a significant extent hidden from foreign visitors. We did, in fact, encounter a very small number of people who looked to be homeless. We also saw a few apparently abandoned properties as we drove through more rural areas (driving on very major roads, however).
The tour guide also told us that in Japan there is a very high inheritance tax when a person dies and has property (sometimes including a farm) to inherit. When the property is in an area that is doing well, it often makes sense to sell the property and pay the inheritance tax. In poorer, rural areas, the market price is often not high enough to make it profitable to sell the land/property and pay the tax. In this case, the government takes over the property, but does not put the property on the market. The government also does not give property to poor people. Instead, it leaves the property vacant, allowing weeds to grow and the property to deteriorate. It would seem to me that this is an attempted approach at keeping rural property prices up–sort of a rural property QE program.
We were also told that there is no unemployment insurance in Japan. Instead, the government attempts to help find the person a job. Pay is to a significant extent based on seniority. Thus, if a person is laid off, he will generally need to start over at the bottom pay scale. (I also understand from my reading, before leaving for Japan, that there are getting to be two classes of workers in Japan–regular employees and low paid contract workers.)
In some ways, the Japanese approach struck me as being like Trump on steroids. Japan tries as much as possible to have a broad class of winners, based on what they themselves can earn. But financially, Japan cannot keep the situation up. So it ends up with a big class of losers whom it tries to hide as much as possible. These people are mostly in rural areas, but it also includes young people who live with their parents indefinitely.
My husband remarked that in some ways, Japan reminded him of Cuba. In both Japan and Cuba, we encountered streets that were deserted except for pedestrians and bicycles. In both places, cars are terribly expensive to own. In Japan, there is no place to park cars, and toll roads make travel around Japan by car impractical. It looked to me as if prices for parking are very high as well. In Tokyo, parking lots seemed to use elevators to get cars up to high-rise parking spots.
This explains Japan 🙂
http://en.puroland.jp/
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/07/01/15/2A2520C000000578-3145973-image-a-11_1435760405652.jpg
Or just watch Lost in Translation
We saw these cute characters everywhere. This is a photo of my son standing next to one outside a castle in Hikone.
This is a character for sale in a gift shop. It had been made to recognize the building of a new bridge near Imabari, Japan. The hat of the character is in the shape of the bridge. The character is holding a ship under its arm.
My son observed, “Perhaps the plan behind all of these cute characters is to provide employment for graphic artists.”
A person could argue that they represent a simplified view of how people behave/act. They come across as “childlike” to many people.
If a site is trying to promote tourism, they are a “draw.” I understand that at least half of foreign visitors to Japan are from China/Taiwan/Hong Kong and other Asian areas. I was told that these visitors especially like “Tokyo Disney World.”
You’re correct about the cost of cars, at least for big cities, but they still are a status thing and many people own them despite being almost unable to use them. Above a given density of population, cars just are unusable and it’s an efficient choice for Japan to discourage their use as much as possible.
In the small towns of the countryside it’s definitively different. They use cars almost as much as Americans, every family has several in the garage, and it’s almost impossible to go around without cars, with free parking largely available. The toll road are also less numerous, as long as you stay in the vicinity or are not too much in a hurry, it’s possible to avoid them largely.
Thanks for the info. It is hard to make public transport work with low population densities. I should know; I live in Atlanta. It was built with low population densities.
It should be pretty unsurprising that there is no WiFi on bullet trains. They are traveling in and out of tunnels at 100 km/h — where would they connect to? It’s not like an airplane, where they could connect to satellites.
Our tour bus didn’t have WiFi either–perhaps for the same reason. Hotels and stores had WiFi.
The reason for no wifi is that everyone in the entire domestic market already has national coverage.
Thank you for sharing your family trip with us. It’s wonderful to see your human side along the analytical brainiac side!
Open thread contribution
25/5/2017
Australian budget 2017-18 ignores IEA oil price warning
http://crudeoilpeak.info/australian-budget-2017-18-ignores-iea-oil-price-warning
Of course, Australia is affected both ways by resource issues–it imports oil, while it exports other commodities. This other commodities sometimes (but not always) follows the price of oil. China’s imports needs are also is a big issue for Australia. Things go well when China does well; it is not clear that they do as well otherwise.
I did a trip to Japan in 1972, mostly hitch-hiking and staying in youth hostels, from Kyushu in the south to Hokkaido in the north.I was most impressed by the friendliness and politeness of people, the efficiency and discipline with which everything is done and the urban rail systems in the big cities, a paradise of trains. Many private rail lines are owned by big companies moving their customers between their shopping centers, residential towers and business parks. When experiencing rush hour in Tokyo, however, I thought it is better not to allow cities to grow to such a size and rather build smaller cities. You rightly mentioned the problem of space in a very mountainous, volcanic country. I wonder whether you haven’t experienced even a small tremor or earthquake in 2 weeks.
4 years later, I worked as town planner for a new capital in Dodoma, Tanzania, where Canadian architects had designed this:
Sustainable Cities Master Plan
http://crudeoilpeak.info/sustainable-cities-master-plan
Sydney now tries to copy this concept of private metros and high density residential towers around stations because the State government is unwilling to control rail unions and does not want to be criticized for late trains.
From a narrow fuel supply point of view, Australia imports a lot from Japan, after the closure of 3 local refineries in Sydney and Brisbane
Australia more vulnerable than ever to fuel import disruptions
http://crudeoilpeak.info/australia-more-vulnerable-than-ever-to-fuel-import-disruptions
One question: how do Japanese perceive the threat from North Korea? I did this post on South Korea:
South Korea’s oil trade under threat
http://crudeoilpeak.info/south-koreas-oil-trade-under-threat
I didn’t ask about whether Japan is concerned about the North Korea threat. It didn’t come up, so I am guessing that the problem is down the list from some other problems. Needless to say, Japanese newspapers are inaccessible to those of us who don’t read Japanese.
Worries about potential earthquakes seems to be very high up on most people’s worry list. Every hotel we stayed in had flashlights prominently displayed, and instructions about what to do in case of an earthquake (including taking the flashlight along). We heard that people did not like to live on upper stories of buildings, because of concern about what would happen in the case of earthquake. I didn’t notice any earthquakes while I was there.
I did ask about Fukushima, and our guide told me that the people are being told very little about the situation. He said that old people are interested in moving back to the nearby area, but that they do not want their children and grandchildren living near the radiation problems.
There’s a whole crowd that’s convinced that If they are not told scary things about Fukushima, then that *must* be because what’s happening is hidden. Newspaper have mostly run out of scary things to report, and of course they report nothing of the positive things happening, so the impression of not being told about what happens.
There is also the issue that whether there will be long-term cancer impacts is not yet known. The Hiroshima situation has turned out pretty well, over the long term, although there was a spike in cancer deaths earlier.
Dear Gail, I am at work and cannot linger. Please allow me to mark this thus. After living in a Korean Zen Temple, I finally made it to Japan, where, unlike Korea, I had rudiments of language and writing, having missed getting a Fulbright to Japan by millimeters, long story. I skim this post. So brilliant. Thank you. Will reread latter. Love your work. Thank you, David
The Edo period has been offered as an example of a functioning sustainable society. Azby Brown’s book JUST ENOUGH describes the rural and urban life of the period based on historical records. The Edo period was a response to ecological disaster. The society was feudal, housing was small, and there were many restrictions, for example, in access to and use of the forests. The rural peasantry supported the rest of the society in its production of rice. Without, fossil fuels, the society was essentially functioning off whatever the sun could produce within the current or current year or past couple years. The material culture was spare, and things such as cloth was used and re-used. Human waste was used as a fertilizer. At the same time Edo (Tokyo) of that period had several hundred bookstores and Japanese cities were relatively clean and healthy compared to Paris and London of that day. One of the ironies is that the population actually of Japan grew during the Edo period.The Brown book includes a list of sustainable practices at the end of each of its three sections on rural and rural life, and that of the samurai class. Some of these are quite specific and concrete, while others tend to be more conceptual. While Japan can not re-create the Edo period, the sustainable principles it embodied will be applied in the future by other societies and cultures
I expect the fact that “Japan’s population actually grew during the Edo period” was a big part of its problem. The issue is resources per capita. As more mouths to feed are added, and more workers are added who need to be paid living wages, the system becomes less and less sustainable. If Japan had been able to reduce its population during the Edo period, or even kept it level, it could have lasted longer. Rising population is definitely not a sustainable practice.
I am pleased that you had a good time Gail.
I was not aware that comments had been cut off, perhaps partly because have nothing much else to say, you having covered most salient points and the “alternatives” crowd having apparently gone away. I do not see how there can be any alternatives for cheap, easy to extract oil, coal and gas … and quite aside from diminishing resources on our finite Planet, our form of civilization is at about the historic limit for all civilizations.
Best wishes, Gerry.
Comments cut off at 20 days. There haven’t been any new comments since 9:12 am, Atlanta time.
When comments on FW get cut off permanently….. that marks the beginning of the end
1st!
Very nice picture of the family there Gail – looks like you had a wonderful time. One can only weep at Japan’s prospects going forward. A high population, even if in decline, low resource base and the spectre of radiation.
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