Debt Rattle May 30 2016

 

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  • #28430

    Jack Delano Foggy night in New Bedford, Massachusetts 1941 • The Mystery of Weak US Productivity (Luce) • China Default Chain Reaction Threatens Produ
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle May 30 2016]

    #28431
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Well, I see the growth mantra is alive and well; which further dooms us to eco-cide, by a hundred thousand cuts.
    There is no such thing as sustainable growth any longer; we passed that metric decades ago.
    We’ve been warned for more than half a century to no avail. A scientist/anthropologist figured out the sustainable population for North America was 50 million humans; that was in the mid-60’s; 1960’s.

    #28433
    Dr. Diablo
    Participant

    This scientist/anthropologist is either hilariously inept or he’s measuring an isolated N. Am. in pre-1500 terms.

    The population estimate before contact was some 30M, so you can start there. However, Turtle Island was largely alien to the land we know today. All things we take for granted, the weeds, dandelions, hay crops, honeybees, apples, pears, cows, chickens, entirely missing. In their place, Ice-Age like orchard grass, conifers, and endless nut forests.

    So not only is it possible to have everything they did–rivers teeming with fish, buffalo plains, etc, but we have cleared, drained forests and fields, with the seed and animal base of the entire planet. You could double 50 million even with native-level technology. So you could probably double it again with rudimentary, mostly non-electric technology, either 1850-style, or modern, post EMP-style. After that it gets more challenging to figure, but I expect you could double it again with arid permaculture, not wasting 100% of American lawns, and applying abundance to where we presently monoculture.

    Sustainable is perhaps definitionally opposite to growth, but we’re not anywhere near the carrying capacity of N. America, not even on a low technology base. So whether to kill 250M Americans is a voluntary choice, not a technical one. Would things have to radically change? Of course. But they already did: from contact to now the land is unrecognizable. From 1940 to now is unrecognizable. So from now to 2070 should be no different. It’s just a matter of choosing mass life, or mass murder.

    But that’s specific to N. America. For other places besides Africa, I cannot say.

    #28434
    Babble
    Participant

    The Financial Times won’t allow us to read more unless we have a subscription. Posting a partial article is nearly useless. Any site that requires a subscription probably has the same issue.

    #28435
    Raleigh
    Participant

    Dr. Diablo – agree with much of what you have to say, but you’ve used the word “murder” several times now and I’m wondering what you mean. Nobody is talking about murdering anybody. We are talking about letting populations decline naturally. You say, “We’re not anywhere near the carrying capacity of N. America.” Okay, but why wouldn’t we start to limit growth instead of waiting for full carrying capacity and then saying, “Whoops, I guess we’ll have to start decreasing now”? Why wait? Nobody needs to be murdered, just a natural decline of population.

    It’s the same with my body. I’m about 4 pounds overweight, still fit into my teenage daughter’s jeans. I have lots of extra carrying capacity, could probably balloon up another few hundred pounds if I let myself go to town, but the point is I don’t want to get to the point where I’m at “full capacity”. I want to stop before it gets really difficult and I’m “forced” to do something about it.

    Maybe if you explained what you mean by “mass murder”, I might better understand where you’re coming from.

    #28436
    Nassim
    Participant

    “The Financial Times won’t allow us to read more unless we have a subscription”

    Babble,

    Good question
    Here is a useful trick.
    1- Copy the headline of the article you are looking for – say “China developers face troubles abroad”
    2- Go to Google and do a search for “China developers face troubles abroad”
    3- If there are too many wrong results, click on Google News to refine the search.
    4- Click on the link you get and you will be able to read the whole article. My link for the above search was
    https://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/56a15fdc-23b6-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d.html#axzz4AD3aLqnn

    The bit behind the # – axzz4AD3aLqnn – tells the FT that you came from Google and they have a deal to allow Google searches to lead to full articles. 🙂

    BTW, I have been prevented from posting comments of FT.com for three months – until a few days ago. They do whatever it takes to stop criticisms of Russia and the so-called “war on terror” from being shown to be a sham.

    #28445
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Dr. Diablo

    I know full well what the guesstimates are of the native populations of N.A.
    Tell me something I don’t know; your post is contradictory and flat wrong.
    I’ll tell you something you don’t know; you have no idea what you’re talking about.
    You constantly spout bad science re: the climate, the planet and basically everything, near as I can tell.
    Do you know and understand the simple word sustainable? I think not.
    I’d like the paradise that was North America the same today as 400-500 years ago.
    If we understood “sustainable” and gave a shit about it; we could have had it all; but no, we utterly failed to understand the Eastern Nation’s advanced farming/agricultural techniques and instead destroyed huge granaries, and food stashes of the natives.
    And then embarked on a non-sustainable farming binge to this day. We’ve destroyed the soil, aquifers, wildlife, and ultimately ourselves…
    Your’s is a defence of an indefensible life style and abject denial of what your lying eyes see for the last half century.
    Sustainable simply means the maintenance of an ecosystem for the foreseeable forever; even a blind man knows we’re nowhere close. Quite the opposite.

    #28447
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Dr. Diablo

    Mass murder? What are you talking about? We’re effectively committing mass suicide. Nobody has to kill us; we’re doing that just fine thank you…
    It’s too bloody late; we blew it, NA will never (in the span of humans) be pre-Columbian; that’s done, finished.
    And; we’re so far past the “carrying capacity” of N.A. it’s not a question; hell; we’re past the carrying capacity of the bloody planet!
    Anyhoo; I’m done with this; we’ll never likely agree; but after holding my typing finger for more than a year, I needed to type up and offer my disdain for your POV…
    Time will out the truth, which I’ll venture, escapes us both…

    #28448
    Dr. Diablo
    Participant

    Well I’m certainly upholding my namesake’s advocate.

    “Murder”? Strong words. But I constantly hear how “we can’t sustain”, when we are already carrying the present population while barely using the arable land, wasting half the food, most of the oil, and spending trillions on defense. This negativity leads to the conclusion that we must, inevitably, reduce to *some number*. That is to say, millions will die. Since millions will die because we don’t do a darn thing, and that death is pretty much optional, it’s more or less deciding to kill them all. And we as citizens collectively acquiesce to that view, that is to say, agree. Manslaughter might be more legally accurate, as you’re arranging mortal peril or not preventing a death, but it’s often called 3rd degree murder.

    If you want to have populations decline “naturally”, which is probably a good idea, you immediately get to the question of “who?” Who decides? Who gets to decline? Me? You? How fast do we “decline” them? Say, stop providing care at 72? By wealth and status? Intelligence? Then it seems we’re right back to eugenics and mass murder. The ways I would alter society to be more accepting of life and death are subtle, complicated, and voluntary, but nobody’s going to listen to me. Eugenics and central, government control of Plato’s Philosopher-Kings is eminently logical–it’s sensible to treat men as cattle and cull them before the pasture’s dry—but that’s one of its chief dangers because it always ends badly, in holocausts and horrible, early death for all, most specifically the vulnerable. Let’s find another way. Since we don’t have to in North America at least, we have time. Personally, I wonder why culturally we’re all so terrified of death and spend the fortunes of our children to prevent it; we never used to. And they’re violently attacking anyone who doesn’t want to live at all costs–that’s what the work on helmets, seat belt, vaccines, swimming life guards and living in a tiny, carpeted box, clicking on a tiny screen is all about. Leave them alone. Let people live, and with the necessary addition of letting them die if they want. I’m not deciding what’s safe, how could I? That’s the approach of a psychopath. I’m not deciding who should live or die, who reproduces or doesn’t, I’m not God. But I can leave them alone to be free men, to experience life as we all do with neither hinderence nor egomaniacal “help”. So far as I can tell, that’s the cost or consequence of freedom anyway. Presently they take billions from me to save millions of men so they can later spending more of my billions to kill or “population limit” them like chess pieces in a global cock fight. Cut out the middle man: leave them alone at both ends.

    Calm down V., I read and respect you. If you agree on the pre-contact populations then you’d have to agree with me that the addition of a million things—10,000 new plants, a thousand breeds of new animals, roads, cooking pots–would have to wildly increase the possible population. Now we’re only talking about how many more. Differences on the cause of climate change aren’t applicable to this specific question, although thankfully men are still able to have non-identical points of view.

    You’re assuming me and my lifestyle. You’re assuming what I see and don’t see. I see it. I know it. I’ve spent my life buried in it and surrounded by it. But I also know this: there are an awful lot of things we’re not doing that we could do, and it sounds like you agree with me on this. How do I know? What do I do for a living beside point out where science is failing? I’ve spent a lifetime growing things, acres and acres. In pots, in driveways, in rail yards, in fields and forests. I’ve spent a lifetime learning how it used to be done, in a burnover with a deer-bone hoe, and in the most modern ways we know. I drive by the million American houses with a million acres of unused land, and the thousands of abandoned malls and factories, down the highways with a hundred-thousand acres wasted on each side. Not an able-bodied man is out. Like “Tomorrowland” no one is doing anything. With not a foot of that land in use, you don’t think we can increase the capacity of the nation? If we stop wasting all our oil driving, all our steel and timber building things we intend to knock down? Of course we can. By orders of magnitude.

    How do I know? Because I don’t read it online. I get up, go out, and grow stuff every day, summer and winter. I keep up with the latest greenhouse, aquaponics, and desert permaculture. I convert houses from fossil fuels to sustainable ones. But the one thing I can’t stand is the fatalistic attitude that it’s all over, we’re all going to die, why bother? We *are* all going to die. Your time is indeed short. All the more reason to go out and move the world in a positive way. That many will not heed the call and will most probably do selfish, deadly things does absolve me of my responsibility to do what is right. What is right is to work, and work, and work some more, and tell them, and to have the tools at hand should anyone want to save their fellow man. And I do. But they will and do literally die cursing rather than pick up the shovel I saved for them.

    It is right not to assume the worst of others and their lives as I would not assume that of you. Clearly you care. But caring has to be turned to action. I can guess carrying capacity because I’ve spent my whole lifetime working on the problem agriculturally, ethnologically, technologically, from stone age to space age. The knowledge is far too vast to put in an encyclopedia, much less a post, but if you want, I can forward the sites, titles, and knowledge of growing to you, and you can start planting, growing, and teaching too. The world of pre-contact is gone. But we can build a better replacement if we try, and if not we will indeed die. Your choice. It starts today.

    #28470

    Nassim et al,

    Google has these deals with many new organizations. Go through Google News for access to FT, WSJ and many more.

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