Minimalist post. Cool! I see what you mean, although we do have a car (just the one). But we (my family) often fantasize about Boston without cars downtown, how cool it would be to be able to walk and ride bikes safely on the city streets. Plus, of course, the lessening of pollution and noise. A perfect, thought-provoking little note.
The Orlov video was good and hit the nail on the head with the comments after “if unsuccessful…”
War will likely be a growth industry, as it’s a tried and true means of rallying a pissed off population and because it’s a short term economic “stimulus” of sorts. My guess, Iran in the short term, China in the long run. China would seem to be inevitable, simply because they are poised to take over global leadership with our now certain demise, and American pride simply ain’t going to let that happen without a fight. We’re far too bought into our own bullshit of “American exceptionalism” to ever let that happen.
The rest of the high tech assurances of continued prosperity are all as predictable as they are delusional. Matter of fact, they’ll signal pretty accurately our collective acceptance/denial of peak oil issues by their rise and fall.
My guess is that we’ve still got about ten years before the preponderance of people in the US even accept that we have a problem. By that time of course, it will MUCH too late to take effective action on a mass scale and the REAL fun will begin. A whole lot of people waking up to the fact that their worst nightmares are about to come true ain’t gonna be good for anyone.
One of the electric vehicle engineering groups I used to frequent had a member whose signature said, “The complexity of your life is directly proportional to the number of internal combustion engines you own. Two-cycle engines count double.”
Dmitri is good. I love his work, but for the sake of simplicity, he tends to ignore the corporate factor in the U.S. when comparing with Russia. Our corporations ARE the government right now, and they can more easily divest themselves of the facade of public service into individual ‘states’ run by the likes of Cargill, Monsanto, GM, or Microsoft. The neocon wingnuts and teapartiers wanted to rid us of government interference, and the corporate states are the result. As some scream “Overpopulation!”, others (the ones with money) will be building robots or other systems to maintain profit margins based on mechanized consumers even as the organic ones die off. Why keep the masses around when you can more cheaply program a robot to go to the mall to buy new clothes to go to the mall? Robots don’t need health insurance: just a little oil now and then.
The automobile factory workforce of the future will consist of a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.
We already worship and devote our existence to our automobiles. It is only a matter of time until the automobile God gets bored with people and their waste of resources to grow ‘food’ and debate ‘morality’.
P.S. Not that I want to defend Henry Ford (and his fascist-favoritism mindset), but his original plan was not to sell everyone two cars. It was to lease them a farm on land he owned to buy a car and a tractor. Though cheap tractors (like cheap food) never did anyone any good, the idea of people being at least half useful to themselves was on his mind.
Then the accountants took over. They used to determine their budgets by the weight of the invoice stacks. Now they have computers to do the same thing (ignore the reality of actual numbers on the papers).
Though the system as we believe we know it is collapsing economically and physically, there are sub-systems of economics (corporations) and resources (human labor) which are underutilized as long as the Big System provides services that they don’t have to provide for themselves. The Ford System of monolithic production from iron mine to retail store may yet again show itself in some parts of the world as larger entities realize they can have their own security, food, and government separate from annoying things like voters and treaties. The drug trade already controls a huge chunk of Wall Street’s money, the food systems are already monolithic entities outside real government oversight, and people have mostly been superceded in decision making by the mathematics of profits vs. morality.
We are corporations in the present System of systems, not human beings. The sooner we understand that we have no place in the systems we have built, the sooner we can abandon them. We certainly cannot fight to win on their turf.
PS. On the climate change scoreboard thing: The part that isn’t possible to show very well is the exponential rise which is already happening, and how all of the discussions tend to think that somehow, that exponential rate of change is not really there, and that by changing a few light bulbs or imagining we are going to enforce some tariffs, an exponential curve will turn into a flat line. You can even see the proportional difference between the goal, the negotiations, and the probable reality in the cute little thermometer graph, yet we still somehow imagine that the future, which has already been destroyed in the past, can be repaired next week(month, year, decade) “before it’s too late”.
It’s already too fucking late. As Dennis Leary would say, “Open ass, Insert head.”
A point I’ve contended for some time is that as the handwriting on the wall regarding peak oil and/or climate change becomes clear, perversely, the incentive to consume remaining fossil fuel stocks while they last will actually increase. In a strange way, I think increasing consumption to accelerate the whole process might almost be a good thing, although no matter what I think of the process, that seems to be happening anyway.
I have no idea what the climate change science has to say on the relative virtues of a faster spike in greenhouse gasses vs a slightly longer one. Might be of little or no difference either way, as we’re talking about only 25-50 years at the very most.
Simply from a dealing with the post fossil fuel era point of view, I think sooner would be better, as it will also hasten the demilitarization of the world. Although, that brings up the wild card in the deck – the nukes. That’s a humdinger there, and to my mind, makes the U.S. – US – the REAL rogue nation in the world. Gonna come a time – and I think it will be shortly – that the rest of the major powers come to realize this and make some sort of move(s) to neutralize it. That’s just me thinking out loud, but you’ve gotta admit it would be pretty foolish if they didn’t.
James,
I tend to agree with you. I think faster is better from a natural world aspect and peak everything. On Minyanville.com (financial website), they say “the Car Crash or the Cancer”.
As for climate vs. spikes: back to the damage that’s already been done with acidity in the oceans. The models of CO2 have a hard time with the amount that the oceans absorb, and the data doesn’t match the predictions. I suspect it might have to do with overfishing combined with dumping nitrogen fertilizer everywhere…but that’s just a shotgunned answer.
Nukes..yeah. War (and it’s minions) is unpredictable. ’nuff said.
Not that there is a long term option available, but one discussion a while back was whether the warning signs posted outside the storage facilities would ever be able to outlast the deadliness of the materials stored there. In a post-apocalyptic world, you don’t go anywhere without a geiger counter.
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Minimalist post. Cool! I see what you mean, although we do have a car (just the one). But we (my family) often fantasize about Boston without cars downtown, how cool it would be to be able to walk and ride bikes safely on the city streets. Plus, of course, the lessening of pollution and noise. A perfect, thought-provoking little note.
The Orlov video was good and hit the nail on the head with the comments after “if unsuccessful…”
War will likely be a growth industry, as it’s a tried and true means of rallying a pissed off population and because it’s a short term economic “stimulus” of sorts. My guess, Iran in the short term, China in the long run. China would seem to be inevitable, simply because they are poised to take over global leadership with our now certain demise, and American pride simply ain’t going to let that happen without a fight. We’re far too bought into our own bullshit of “American exceptionalism” to ever let that happen.
The rest of the high tech assurances of continued prosperity are all as predictable as they are delusional. Matter of fact, they’ll signal pretty accurately our collective acceptance/denial of peak oil issues by their rise and fall.
My guess is that we’ve still got about ten years before the preponderance of people in the US even accept that we have a problem. By that time of course, it will MUCH too late to take effective action on a mass scale and the REAL fun will begin. A whole lot of people waking up to the fact that their worst nightmares are about to come true ain’t gonna be good for anyone.
One of the electric vehicle engineering groups I used to frequent had a member whose signature said, “The complexity of your life is directly proportional to the number of internal combustion engines you own. Two-cycle engines count double.”
Dmitri is good. I love his work, but for the sake of simplicity, he tends to ignore the corporate factor in the U.S. when comparing with Russia. Our corporations ARE the government right now, and they can more easily divest themselves of the facade of public service into individual ‘states’ run by the likes of Cargill, Monsanto, GM, or Microsoft. The neocon wingnuts and teapartiers wanted to rid us of government interference, and the corporate states are the result. As some scream “Overpopulation!”, others (the ones with money) will be building robots or other systems to maintain profit margins based on mechanized consumers even as the organic ones die off. Why keep the masses around when you can more cheaply program a robot to go to the mall to buy new clothes to go to the mall? Robots don’t need health insurance: just a little oil now and then.
The automobile factory workforce of the future will consist of a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.
We already worship and devote our existence to our automobiles. It is only a matter of time until the automobile God gets bored with people and their waste of resources to grow ‘food’ and debate ‘morality’.
P.S. Not that I want to defend Henry Ford (and his fascist-favoritism mindset), but his original plan was not to sell everyone two cars. It was to lease them a farm on land he owned to buy a car and a tractor. Though cheap tractors (like cheap food) never did anyone any good, the idea of people being at least half useful to themselves was on his mind.
Then the accountants took over. They used to determine their budgets by the weight of the invoice stacks. Now they have computers to do the same thing (ignore the reality of actual numbers on the papers).
Though the system as we believe we know it is collapsing economically and physically, there are sub-systems of economics (corporations) and resources (human labor) which are underutilized as long as the Big System provides services that they don’t have to provide for themselves. The Ford System of monolithic production from iron mine to retail store may yet again show itself in some parts of the world as larger entities realize they can have their own security, food, and government separate from annoying things like voters and treaties. The drug trade already controls a huge chunk of Wall Street’s money, the food systems are already monolithic entities outside real government oversight, and people have mostly been superceded in decision making by the mathematics of profits vs. morality.
We are corporations in the present System of systems, not human beings. The sooner we understand that we have no place in the systems we have built, the sooner we can abandon them. We certainly cannot fight to win on their turf.
PS. On the climate change scoreboard thing: The part that isn’t possible to show very well is the exponential rise which is already happening, and how all of the discussions tend to think that somehow, that exponential rate of change is not really there, and that by changing a few light bulbs or imagining we are going to enforce some tariffs, an exponential curve will turn into a flat line. You can even see the proportional difference between the goal, the negotiations, and the probable reality in the cute little thermometer graph, yet we still somehow imagine that the future, which has already been destroyed in the past, can be repaired next week(month, year, decade) “before it’s too late”.
It’s already too fucking late. As Dennis Leary would say, “Open ass, Insert head.”
AG,
A point I’ve contended for some time is that as the handwriting on the wall regarding peak oil and/or climate change becomes clear, perversely, the incentive to consume remaining fossil fuel stocks while they last will actually increase. In a strange way, I think increasing consumption to accelerate the whole process might almost be a good thing, although no matter what I think of the process, that seems to be happening anyway.
I have no idea what the climate change science has to say on the relative virtues of a faster spike in greenhouse gasses vs a slightly longer one. Might be of little or no difference either way, as we’re talking about only 25-50 years at the very most.
Simply from a dealing with the post fossil fuel era point of view, I think sooner would be better, as it will also hasten the demilitarization of the world. Although, that brings up the wild card in the deck – the nukes. That’s a humdinger there, and to my mind, makes the U.S. – US – the REAL rogue nation in the world. Gonna come a time – and I think it will be shortly – that the rest of the major powers come to realize this and make some sort of move(s) to neutralize it. That’s just me thinking out loud, but you’ve gotta admit it would be pretty foolish if they didn’t.
James,
I tend to agree with you. I think faster is better from a natural world aspect and peak everything. On Minyanville.com (financial website), they say “the Car Crash or the Cancer”.
As for climate vs. spikes: back to the damage that’s already been done with acidity in the oceans. The models of CO2 have a hard time with the amount that the oceans absorb, and the data doesn’t match the predictions. I suspect it might have to do with overfishing combined with dumping nitrogen fertilizer everywhere…but that’s just a shotgunned answer.
Nukes..yeah. War (and it’s minions) is unpredictable. ’nuff said.
Not that there is a long term option available, but one discussion a while back was whether the warning signs posted outside the storage facilities would ever be able to outlast the deadliness of the materials stored there. In a post-apocalyptic world, you don’t go anywhere without a geiger counter.
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