Global Collapse

Whose lifetime?  Mine?  NF? Cam? The 10yo I play chess with?  How bad does it have to get to meet your criteria for collapse?

I seem to recall mentioning that you and I and generally older farts aren't likely to see collapse. And I've already given my definition of a collapse, something along the lines of 15-20-25% annual reduction in human population, arguably across a single year, but I'll admit it could continue at that rate for a few years should the collapse be really bad.

I don't consider this important anymore. 

Of course. As I've previously ventured, most of us here are much more likely to see our personal collapses before we ever get a noticeable real one. My definition for collapse of course, not the ones that just can't live up to the name.

Just the trajectory, not the timeline.  I predict things will continue to get worse, not better.
RE

The good news being, the timeline is quite important, as we now know. We are all still here, and there is no "real" collapse in sight yet, even after these couple decades now you've been involved, right? I find it interesting that in the end it might end up being more climate related than any of us old school doomers were going on about, you know, lack of oil, the Amero, the Iranian oil bourse , China collapsing, Elon collapsing, the reinstatement of the American draft (thanks Matt for immortalizing that one), 50% inflation, all the really interesting old school memes. Malaise....stagflation...the stuff all us old farts have been through before in the US...just don't have the same kick.

Quote from: Phil Potts on March 21, 2023, 12:20:22 am

Richard Duncan has never been mentioned, let alone offered as an oracle, why then equate him with any of us?

RE has used his graphics before. And proffered up that graph in the article (with what I believe was a different cliff date), so you must have missed his relevance. And who is "us"? The 3 or 4 of us doomers on this forum, or doomers at large?

Quote from: Phil Potts

What he fails to consider, like many others, is what plans are implemented to maintain order, control, and manage the decline. He states that the US govt is well aware of the problem but doesn't go into those details.

What Matt failed to consider was that peak oil isn't required for bad things to happen. But he was an ambulance chaser by profession, and quite a famous early doomer, being quoted on the floor of the House and everything. And you are right about Matt and the government being aware, if memory serves he was a Ruppert compatriot and support but didn't have quite the stones to jump that far into the..dare I say....imaginative side of the peak oil narrative.

Quote from: Phil Potts

I don't see how you can talk about "our lifetimes". By the logic you employ to say we are all wrong on a coming collapse as long as it has not already fully played out, you can't claim you will one day die.

I can talk about our lifetimes because we've had them. You and I and RE, we aren't spring chickens, right? I think we can give Monsta a pass, he has more time to run than us old farts. And the coming collapse is a given, and has been since folks began realizing what growth and consumption and capitalism and pollution will do, call it Earth Day 1970 if you want me to pick a date when the basics of collapse were coming into view reasonably widely.

But the definition of collapse is what Monsta and I were commenting on. We, the collective we, cheapen the word, using it as we do for inconsequential events.



Again, you don't speak for me only pontificating and making prognostications on a process of decline and decay. My years in the 20th Century are only a few more than the years in the 21st Century, but I am as stolidly a 20th Century man as the geezers RE has for company, hence your seeming slight over estimation on my near completion on an allotted three score and ten. 

The difference between myself and most others of my cohort is that I notice a lot more changes and trends, make more associations and reflect much more on a systematic theory of everything. When I got in the car this afternoon, I caught some interview about tattoo removal and the interviewer saying he got his first tattoo at 48. He said it was because it really meant something to him. To me this is simply another quintessential example of collapse in action. Getting everyone to largely deface and there by degrade themselves as de riguer, demoralizes the population making them far more amenable to undergo whatever form of processing they are programmed to accept. I don't buy that this guy never previously got tattoos because there was nothing so meaningful as now. He is unoriginal in following the herd and giving a standard unoriginal explanation. That is not to say there never were people who did get things that mean something to them, but they were the minority. A critical mass of conformist statists is essential to control as more rights are removed.

If you want to say we have had our lifetimes, then you must say also we have had our civilization. You can not object to pointing out known signposts and markers of collapsing empires and civilizations as not being like experiencing vascular dementia and incontinence.

Quote from: Phil Potts

The half tank mark on your fuel gauge is peak petrol. As with peak oil, you don't need to get out and walk when you reach that point. You can go about as long as you did from the F to the 1/2. When you reach E in another hundred years, you revert to horses as you were doing at the F reading. Obviously the timeline is not guaranteed to be an even distribution, but the point is nobody here said the engine splutters to a stop as soon as the needle points to half.

And when we can get a decent 20-25% annual decline in human population we don't need to use analogies to describe collapse, or convince others it is here through old graphics, convoluted or illogical arguments and conspiracies.

Do you think that we'll have a collapse, a real collapse, in our lifetimes?

To me the dumbing down of the population with revising down the mean IQ, so that "I literally died" is now a common utterance, IS real collapse. Nobody did try and convince anyone else any particular final eventuality is here. nearings fault specified what he envisions and that's something I see as probable also.  By your logic you do not get to also try and convince anyone you are past your heydey and will die, unless you have lost 3 pints of blood and are still gushing blood like a hydrant. You can only say "I literally died" when you are equivalent in blood loss to an annual 25% population reduction. That logic is probably acceptable to the lower primates you are tasked to tell we are idiots, as none of us said we would be extinct within 4 yrs of peak oil. The fuel gauge analogy would not have been necessary if you didn't insist we did.
Another apt analogy is Nixon saying Watergate is conspiracy.
If a whole page proving a point is  too complicated, Twitter to not exceed today's attention span might be a better forum




 






 

This happened:

Cool graphic. I remember when the wheels were coming off in 2008, that one caught everyone's attention.

Quote from: Phil Potts on March 14, 2023, 11:16:22 pm

Why didn't you provide the rest of the article? It's just a waste of time  not analysing what anyone really says or why they say it.

Quite true. Here you go. I believe he put out a book as wel. Great fun he was.

Quote from: Phil Potts

I read the whole letter to Congress and response of Congress circa 2005. It did not say anything about rolling blackouts in 2008 that I noticed. 

Rolling permanent blackouts were Richard Duncan's schtick. A bit of an oxymoron I suppose. Originall they were starting in 2012, but he revised it to 2008 back in the Energy Bulletin days Here is the full article, with the cliff in 2008 on page 7.

Folls claims where it was published is some anti-immigrant published by rascists rag. I have no opinion on the matter, I mean, it's the internet, people saying silly nonsense on it comes with the territory. Might even be why peak oil got such a foothold only after it came about rather than took over when it was being called earlier, but in science journals and whatnot.

Quote from: Phil Potts

As I mentioned at the start, the Pentagon is promising war with china by 2025.

Interesting. By any of the folks who told us Star Wars was going to stop Soviet nuclear weapons during Ronny's reign?

Quote from: Phil Potts

What's the difference between Eddie, RE, Matt and Kovid  preparing for probable eventualities?

As prepping is personal, there is no difference. And probable eventualities...sure..but in who's lifetime? Ours? Or our childrens? Assuming they even want those buckets of beans, ammo or whatever else their parents squirreled away just in case. I figure the Mormons are preppers for a reason, and been at it far longer than modern doomers, reasonable, faith based justifications work better at keeping to the path better than anything.

Quote from: Phil Potts

Fresh fruit and veg is becoming unavailable and unaffordable, as is meat for most people. Farmers are being paid not to farm, systematically shut down. Insect protein is touted as the future. Why not then keep a few tomato seeds in a bugout bag if you imagine an evacuation to be permanent.

Sounds like a good idea. And it doesn't even need fresh fruit or veg becoming unaffordable, or meat. Is that happening where you live? We should ask RE how he is being treated, you would think if fresh vegetables and meat isn't available, folks who can't do anything about it would be the first to feel it. Maybe he can chime in and let us know how the food is in his well priced rehab facility?

Other than obvious displaced homeless folks locally, I haven't seen anyone mentioning anything about insects for food or not finding fresh vegetables or meat at the store. Things are more expensive though, that is for sure.

Quote from: Phil Potts

I don't keep abreast of latest developments in the rollout of 15 min cities beginning with Oxfordshire. You don't start pushing or walking 5 miles past half a tank anyway. The planning is the fuel gauge working.

I'm not sure what the fuel tank reference means. I'll keep my eyes on Oxfordshire. That isn't in the States is it? Foriegners can really do weird things, the good news being there is no requirement a bad idea makes it Stateside.

Richard Duncan has never been mentioned, let alone offered as an oracle, why then equate him with any of us?

I got around to reading Savinars Feb 2005 paper. The teaser you posted s akin to clickbait. Reading it in full, his thesis is mainly a prediction of ongoing inflation and resource wars. So he's with myself and monsta who you defer to. I didn't notice any uncertainty in monstas short term prognosis of continued slide into poverty. What do you extrapolate that then leads to, if you say you agree with him?

Here's an excerpt from Savinar: "There will be inflation as billions of people compete for insufficient
resources. There will be famine. There will be terrorism and war.
He went on to say that it will take "presidential leadership" to inspire us to
pursue technologies that might alleviate this crisis.
In other words, the chances of technology saving you from the coming
economic collapse are about the same as the chances of another virgin-birth
taking place.
For you or any other "average" person to expect high-tech solutions to save
you from the economic effects of Peak Oil is akin to a person living in sub-
Saharan Africa to expect high-tech medical treatments to save their
community from the effects of AIDS. These treatments are available to super-
wealthy people like Magic Johnson, not poor people in Africa.
Likewise, many of the recent technological advancements in energy
production and efficiency may be available and affordable to extraordinarily
wealthy people or agencies like the Department of Defense, but they aren't
going to be available or affordable to you.
It may be a tough pill to swallow, but adaptation for 6-7 million super-wealthy
people does not equal survival for 6-7 billion not-so-wealthy people."


What he fails to consider, like many others, is what plans are implemented to maintain order, control, and manage the decline. He states that the US govt is well aware of the problem but doesn't go into those details.

He does mention "global elites", but only in context of peak oil not being just a hoax they pull. He doesn't consider them pulling other hoaxes to manage peak oil, and neither do most peak oilers or doomers say 5-15 yrs ago. They only consider logical outcomes to uninterrupted market forces, which would be chaos.

At the same time, you have giant protests (never covered by the mainstream media) by people who give no opinion on resource abundance or scarcity, but are very clear on their beliefs on being enslaved. These are going on presently in Europe on opposition to the ukr ww3, have been ongoing on dutch farm closures, yellow vests and previously lockdown/vax passport. These are protests in the millions and are the tip of the iceberg on inactive but equally concerned people. It's now mainstream and many people who you would know, but just don't talk about it to you. Mention anything indicating thinking for yourself now, and there's usually a chance they ask if you have heard of the Rothschilds. That conversation will inevitably lead to me mentioning peak oil.

One particular General said war with china by 2025, but there is incessant chatter and beating the war drums for 2030 most usually. While the Pentagon excels at appropriating trillion dollar budgets for white elephant boondoggles like star wars, they also excel at starting wars. The tilling of the soil to be fertile to start a war with china clearly falls in the latter category. I've been expecting it all my life and always said it is a certainty. So if you want to ridicule us, ostensibly because it's quiet, specifically quote me from 2011 talking about why what seemed unthinkable, war with another nuke armed major(s) would come around. I'm surprised it's taken this long, but expansion of the money supply for financial insustry to cover such things as deeper drilling, arctic drilling with receding ice cover, heavy crude, fracking, and tar sands along with progressive consolidation of wealth and ownership into ever fewer hands can't happen overnight like an uncontrolled collapse.

You have said peak oil is a price point that needs to be specified. I say that price point is where a free market economy can function, remembering that our economic system is predicated on parabolic growth. What we see are moves toward ending that entire system, both because it is not affordable or sustainable. As has been said countless times here, the economy runs on cheap energy. In the 20th C any unemployed or min wage teenager with a license, would drive around as much as they wanted, lead footing it in a gas guzzling V8. Today non essential driving is a luxury for anyone not conspicuously  wealthy. Home ownership is out of the question and even renting is becoming increasingly hard for most people under 30. At the same time ever more laws are passed to make being a private land lord unnaceptably risky. Big conglomerates are placed to continue taking over properties.

When there is a war declared, a war economy is also a legitimate reason to end what is already defunct. Rationing of fuel and food, with of course imprisonment of people expressing dissent, as in previous world wars.


I don't see how you can talk about "our lifetimes". By the logic you employ to say we are all wrong on a coming collapse as long as it has not already fully played out, you can't claim you will one day die.


I said the rollout of 15 minute cities was beginning with the UK, so no Oxfordshire is not in the US. Miami and Seattle are proposed as top contenders for first implementing them there.

The half tank mark on your fuel gauge is peak petrol. As with peak oil, you don't need to get out and walk when you reach that point. You can go about as long as you did from the F to the 1/2. When you reach E in another hundred years, you revert to horses as you were doing at the F reading. Obviously the timeline is not guaranteed to be an even distribution, but the point is nobody here said the engine splutters to a stop as soon as the needle points to half.

Can U Spell C O N T A G I O N?

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/17/business/global-banking-crisis-explained/index.html

Global banking crisis: What just happened?

RE