John Day
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
@ Bluebird,
How do paradigms shift? Who starts that process?
Yes, it is a smallish percentage who see the global cheap oil Ponzi collapsing, but it is not so hard to see that oil will run out. The poor can see what they have not. A majority of Americans and plenty of Europeans and Asians can see that fuel and food and rent have gotten expensive.
There is a certain resonance to growing a food garden. I can’t claim that for bike commuting. At least doing something, and being seen, will begin the process of normalization of the activity for others.
Supposedly 5% who openly change paradigms can start that process along.
Anyway, it’s easier to change before the harshness forces it in a regimented way.
Sudden, regimented change is not always survivable.
I remember when, by the early 1980s, everybody agreed that energy efficiency and high mileage were good.
Understanding global Ponzi schemes, global elites, the JFK assassination, the suspension of laws of physics on 9/11/01; all of these can be chosen as markers for the kind of mind that can look into a future of “degrowth”
This site (blogspot incarnation) really got me looking at financial collapse issues in the spring of 2008.
Thanks Ilargi and Stoneleigh (Nicole)!Oops, Powerdown essay link.
(This essay posits a really Buddhist worldview, ya’know?)
To be less hypothetical, we can all start engaging in “powerdown”, the voluntary reduction in energy use. There are lots of aspects to it, and as I became a bike-commuter in 2006, I began to conceptualize my needs and travel activities differently. Powerdown is a process, upon which we can voluntarily embark, and in a number of ways. I’ve dug up the back yard a foot deep and taken out all the stones, and I’ve planted a winter garden.
I’m a baby boomer with 4 adult kids in higher education.
My wife and I work hard, and the kids work hard.
We all have low expectations for the future.
Eat real food. Be active in productive labor, like food gardening.
Death is the easy part.Rapier, Jon Stewart is in agreement with what you say here. He lets the “conservative” elites paint the background, while he provides the accents, and takes the pope’s side, too.
He’s at his deflationary best here.
“When Worlds Collide” might be the follow-on to “Parallel Universe”, but when will those worlds collide?
Hugh Hendry has been a perma-bear, and he’s right, and we all know it, but what is he seeing, which makes him publicly and overtly change his tack completely?
This is an investing tactical change, not a strategic change of view, as I take it.
This is, as I read his twisted-tongue-in-cheek, a limited-term capitulation to the ability of central bankers to blow one more big asset bubble for a couple more years.
The other option is that they can’t, and we get collapse sooner, much sooner. YMMV.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-06/hugh-hendry-throws-bearish-towel-his-full-must-read-letterHi Sid,
Sorry, I don’t have much time of my own to get online, just a little in the late evening.
The extent of arctic ice in the spring isn’t much of an indicator, since it expected to be near maximum extent. September tells the story of thinning and weakening and breaking up.
It’s a lot thinner, even now, than it was when we went to discotheques in tight bell bottoms.
It might be all broken up in a few Septembers.
Hard to tell, huh?Canada has another big problem. Vast swarms of pine beetles have crossed over from their ancient containment West of the Rockies, and are consuming the boreal forest, which has never known them, and is defenseless.
This is because the winters have gotten a little warmer.
One must really wonder about who intended what in this drawn out fiasco of squeezing out all the blood before applying the tourniquet.
We were told that the Russian oligarchs would be caught with their pants down and all their ill-gotten gains in far away, remote, inaccessible Cyprus would be forfeited to shore up the poor little country.
This would prevent the ECB from taking the whole loss. The ECB was reported to hold a lot of bank bonds from Cypriot banks, and Cypriot government bonds. Maybe they still do. Later we heard and heard and heard that details couldn’t be worked out, until they finally fell back on just letting the poor bank collapse naturally, and let the chips fall where they may…
However, by then we were hearing that the nasty Russians got their assets out through English branches.
Just who gave whom a reach-around here? (Please forgive my indelicacy)
How many more details will we slowly get, of how the little people got sucked dry when their representative appeared to protect them, but somehow did nothing of the sort?Hey, I’ve been enjoying your wisdom since you were 4 months old.
Here is more of the meme of “Global Financial Collapse Might Avert Global Extinction” (definitive answers in next 2 decades, stay tuned).
Professor Guy McPherson, at Nature Bats Last makes it really clear in the second little video, the one with the 3 undersea pictures:How does one create alternatives?
It is very difficult,and needs to already be in process.
Going back down the economic ladder, to places where people eat from their gardens and don’t have so live without industrial fuel, food and technology, is the key (I think).
Oh, and you have to be directly useful to the community of resourceful poor people you have gone to join.
Speaking the language helps.There is a reference even older and more perplexing than the Limits to Growth thesis, and it’s not actually different, but comes at it from a very different angle.
Some of the greats were involved in this project, but sadly, they are mainly known for their later efforts, which really don’t make the same point at all. This was brilliant in 1972.
I keep thinking about mitigation, and I’m often led back to the idea of very warm garment, which are still comfortable, and can be worn in house or bed, when temperatures are cold, by skinny-old-ladies.
I just don’t have any fresh ideas.
Things can be done with Peltier junctions as heat-pumps, and there are some special fibers which might be used as heat transfer channels, by these things are pretty speculative, compared to wool and goose-down.
Jimmy Carter was very unpopular when he appeared on TV in a sweater, urging Americans to turn down their thermostats that winter.
Ronald Reagan borrowed from the future, sold out Social Security, “proved deficits don’t matter”, and claimed that “happy days were here again”. He was a “good president”.
Maybe warm, comfortable and inexpensive clothes can be a policy priority.
Some kind of warmers for wrists and ankles could just be thermal mass, heated on the stove, to keep hands and feet warm, but that seems cumbersome.I don’t think Barak Obama was allowed to get where he is without having multiple kill-switches attached.
He can’t really do anything independent of his masters.
FDR could.
Different days back then.
We’ve had hints all along of the kind of scandals which could eject Obama faster than the bullets that got JFK.
I’m sure there are bigger things than that to pop the top on.
No surprises from Obama.
He shrinks the economy while supporting the top 0.01%.
He lives, and prospers.
At least we can see that.After an intense 3 days of difficult choices and complexities of packing order, a 45 ft shipping container is packed for rural Hawaii, including a 13 year old Chevy (Toyota) Prizm and an ’87 Isuzu P’UP diesel long-bed pick-up , both with under 90k miles and a lot of fixing-up.
Also a complete off-grid solar power set-up, with 10 kWH of Edison cells is in there, and 5 55 gallon Kikkoman soy sauce shipping barrels of food grade plastic, and other forward-looking tidbits.
I’m optimistic that it and I will get there.
I’m flying back for Christmas on 12/21/12, late flight from Kona.
If the world ends that day, I am going to stand there and be a pain-in-the-ass until they credit my card for the flight.Thanks for the replies.
Yes, there’s more complexity at work than that one graph can show, but all complex systems seem to conform to Seneca’s ancient observation of gradual arising and abrupt collapse.
“Interesting times” we face, if history rhymes, as it usually does.
🙂I’m packing a shipping container over Thanksgiving weekend.
Perhaps I have vicarious optimism bias for my 4 adult offspring, who are all veteran bicycle-tourists and have backpacked through the Himalayas and Laotian jungle, and so on.
I’m not sure that I should actually hope for the survival of our species, which has been fitting flint blades to spears for over half a million years to kill more effectively.
Gail Tverberg at The Oil Drum has this graph of oil production growth curve-fits. It looks like terminal decline is next, and I’ll expect Seneca’s Cliff.
https://www.theoildrum.com/node/9622#more
I do hope there is time to make this lifeboat, but not expecting to have it made before TSHTF, just during the next 7 years or so.
Sigh…I lost my optimism in the 1970s, and wondered what was going on in the 1980s, and just had nose to grindstone from mid 1980s on, but I’ve been seeing visions of a crash of global proportions for a decade, and I’m stocking a lifeboat now.
Sigh…
I hope there’s time.Economic Transition Zone:
We have exponentially growing debt-based fiat money.
It is not sustainable in a world where oil is in peak plateau, with rising prices, and soon to decline.
The 200 years of exponential growth is over.
ZIRP from the Fed is a transition move for the banks, but the people, nations and corporations that still have interest bearing debt will be squeezed, and bankers will own a much bigger piece of the global pie after this transition.
Also, the global austerity squeeze appears to be the default answer/strategy to deal with severe climate change and terminal resource depletion.
There will be lots of talk, but austerity and wealth redistribution do not look like they will ever be mitigated, except by revolutionary change.
Violent destruction of the embedded energy and order in infrastructure, manufacturing and other orderly processes might never be replaced in this scenario.
WW-3 could really destroy the abilities to get deep sea oil, manufacture integrated circuits and things like that.
It’s best avoided, right?
I am working on reducing my dependence, and I’ve been a bike commuter since 2005, but what do you do when it’s really cold, or really hot, or you live in NYC in a high rise, without electricity?@ Professorlocknload,
It looks like you are doing diligent investigation of Arizona.
It’s still good to rent, keep your powder dry, and wait ’til you see the whites of their eyes.
There may very well be another big leg down in housing. I sure expect that to be the case. Renting gives you an option on any good deal you may find in such a scenario…
Mish really has good insights sometimes.
Other times he has rabies.
This rant looks like “Cujo”.@Professor Locknload,
You should spend some time there, year round, before buying.
There are a lot of specific little regions and cliques in Arizona. Most of it is desert, but the little oases all have personalities, and outsiders may always be outsiders in some places.
Money won’t buy acceptance in most places.
I lived on the Navajo Reservation in Chinle Arizona for a couple of years. Working as a doctor did get me accepted, but accepted as a white man, which is like a different species.
The oil is running low. The Navajo can live without electricity, at least the ones who live the old way.@Professorlocknload
You might look at Nature Bats Last, Professor Guy McPherson’s blog about that sort of low impact, off grid, sustainable kinda’ life. He’s in that area you are looking at, but it’s pretty hot. There are little lslands of better climate with streams and so on.@Professorlocknload
I’m moving to Hawaii, Big Island, rural, nice bicycling, good little job, fresh fruit.
I fly December 1, flying back with my wife after Christmas in Texas, and shipping container arriving January 2.
Just saying that I agree, sir…While we are at the point of discussing power-intrigues in the era of declining resources and debt bubbles, why did David Petraeus resign from the CIA with public announcement of sex-outside-marriage? Here is a story which points to a plotted military coup against Obama, should he win the election. A lot of other things I’d found puzzling, make sense in this scenario. (Fighting over lifeboats on deck of Titanic?)
Veterans Today editor, Gordon Duff:
https://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/10/29/269376/us%2Dmilitary%2Dplanned%2Dmutiny%2Don%2Dthe%2Dbounty/The Oil Drum has an update, mainly on the future of coal production, but it looks at natural gas and “all liquids”, too.
You’d best get all your business done in this current decade.
Sooner is better.
Really:
https://www.theoildrum.com/node/9583#moreMax Keiser is featuring this story on his show.
https://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-364-max-keiser/I think people misunderestimate Obama. I see a lot of long faces because the Fed will spend-spend-spend, as it has been doing.
That was then. This is now.
Obama came in promising to change everything. He betrayed his constituents, and will do so again, and this one will come fast, with the “Grand Compromise”.
The fiscal cliff was a bipartisan creation in Summer 2011, and neither party will take credit/blame for the resultant effects. It is like a lumbering zombie. They will do whatever they have to do, but if they run away, deep austerity cuts will come to the social safety net, and everybody’s taxes will go up.
That’s about right, isn’t it?
The gridlock default scenario is about right, from a rational fiscal perspective, but it involves robing people of their retirements, though not right away, and it involves taxes on the rich and middle class going up to what they were under Clinton, which is less than under GHW Bush, and less than under Reagan, and so on.
Republicrats are painted into their respective corners, and there is just one person to call “bullshit” on this.
She just got voted into Teddy Kennedy’s seat.
Elizabeth Warren, this is your next moment of greatness.
Don’t fly in small planes like Paul Wellstone and John Kennedy Jr did, OK?What can Obama do instead of bring on the zombie apocalypse, that we’d get with Romney?
I guess it’ll be more reasonable incremental cutting of the social safety nets until there’s a panic of some sort and capital gains taxes have to be cut to make more 20 hr/wk jobs.
Maybe we can have a war-against-climate-change. That would be a nice image.
Maybe there will be a cyber attack on US banking, and all the amounts in all the accounts will be hacked, leaving the banks with all the money and no records of who it used to belong to.
Sigh…I would like to say something with gravitas, but I’m drawin’ a blank. Here’s a humorous 2 minute mock political ad for Romney, that’s pretty funny. “Equal time, ya’know?
Aloha Stoneleigh/Nicole,
this is really an update for the talk you gave in Austin in May 2010. Now there is so much fractal-like micro-detail to the process of deflationary change. you spoke and gave examples, but it is certainly fascinating to see the details of this unfolding change, which you lay out here, while maintaining the focus on the overall zeitgeist/mass-conceptual-state, and the real-world drivers of it, as well.
You still rock. I’m moving to that “lifeboat” in Hawaii, where I work at that little clinic. I’ve got 1200W of solar panels, 10kwh of Edison cells, and jungle and marine-rated charge controller and inverter.
this is my neighbor and friend, Jim Channon showing his food forest, about 10 min walk from where I’ll be staying. (Skip the commercial. It didn’t used to be there.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLi28tRxk9I
It’s real nice bicycling, too!Balance sheet recessions last longer, and we are in a counter trend, but the second leg down is about to be upon us.
Here is an article about that.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-10-24/how-different-is-the-recovery-from-the-financial-crisis
Economics is a fractal process, not so linear, and timing is not possible unless you have a hand on some secret lever.
None of us do.
Stoneleigh is still right, I believe, as she was in 2009. All the stops have been pulled out in the global Ponzi finance scheme to keep it rolling, and this is what we have to show for it.
The hands on those levers are not our own, but the connections from the levers to the financial system are getting soggier and weaker with every use. There are some glaring weak points, too, like the potential for cyber attack or EMP to overturn the entire table and crash the game onto the floor in disarray.
We shall see.
We are not the ones who should be making tight bets on the timing of trends, but rather building some kind of stable support for a rocky tumble ahead.It’s time to stop piling all the breaking eggs into this one basket.
That is not the way to survival.
It just ups the ante for those who control the basket.
“Everything-on-red” indeed, but you know the house “never-gives-a-sucker-an-even-break” and there’s a magnet under that spinning roulette wheel.
Suckers lose all.
Then what?@TheTrivium4TW
I have a pretty holographic conceptual model of the Monetary Debt Tyranny paradigm, and the chart was still just awkward for me, so I think it is like a shorthand, for those that already read shorthand.
The historical quotes were more accessible.
This is really a complex and arcane concept, which makes it sort of mysterious. It IS a “daring daylight robbery” and it was approached through centuries of slowly building cultural paradigms, like goldsmiths holding gold for others, then lending it with fractional reserves, then with paper certificates for the gold holdings, then removing the gold and silver when everyone was used to the paper, then going electronic with credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, HFT…
The “Chicago Plan of the 1930s” which Lindberg and Ford backed was like the “greenbacks” of Lincoln, and the JFK attempt, which ended with his death. There is good data on that.
Ultimately, complex systems collapse to the highest point of complexity, at which they are inherently stable.
It’s a long way down from here…@TheTrivium4TW
Thanks for the detailed reply.
There are always things to consider when currencies fail, and they can fail in stages.
So the dollar may fail as global reserve currency, yet mortgages still need to be paid in dollars. that would be a point of significant loss of faith in the dollar, but not total loss of utility, just greatly reduced utility, and reduced value.
This would likely entail collapse of the current global financial system, which would entail a global loss of faith in the debts denominated in dollar-exchangable currencies. We see more and more of this in Europe. We also see that there was something like a $1.6 trillion flux of secret money from the Fed to European banking, during the acute phase of the 2008-2009 crisis.
There is so much complexity, and there have been so many times in history when communities found themselves temporarily without any functioning currency, not just a crummy one, but none.
One has to be very careful, as I see you are, in considering future scenarios. So many “preppers” just consider one scenario, and don’t seem to think it all the way through.
As for me, I already bought an off-grid solar set-up with the tax returns this year, including nickel-iron batteries, which last forever with routine maintenance. I’m moving to where it makes sense.
I agree that one must consider the full implications of various likely scenarios and prepare as much as possible, before it becomes impossible.Hi Dave,
There are currently competing monies.
Margin calls in 2008 were happening in dollars as stocks plummeted, and dollars were what was required, and anything else was scrambled to get those dollars.
There was a lot of downward price manipulation of gold in July and August 2008, and the Saudis bought a lot of physical gold and put it on a ship to Arabia. Later that year, when data came out, it was Bank of America, I think, that had been heavily shorting gold to drive the price down. After the crash, they did OK on those short positions.
When gold is THE MONEY, it isn’t subject to those kind of sloshes. I’m looking more at what will be globally accepted after debt based fiat currencies are retired, as I think they must be in a shrinking-resource-constrained world. No more exponential growth economic model…
I don’t see gold as a short-term holding for profit, but more as a strategic asset for individuals, and the basis for international trade deals across the ages.
I think it will be that again, in a powered-down world, but that is a view to the indefinite future, after the dollar hegemony ends.@Dave Fairtex
Thanks for the reply. There were banking publications in the 1800s in the US that served as a means of communication and coordination of banking trends, such as premeditated deflations and calling-in of loans, in order to catch borrowers with no possible recourse but to lose collateral to the banks. I forget where I read this, possibly in Ellen Brown’s Web of Debt writings.@The Trivium4TW
Thanks for the reply.
(I spent a half hour getting this picture into my “avatar” file. It’s not “copyrighted” so I’ll keep it on the desktop. I used to be a neighbor of this statue.)
The hard times I’m envisioning include loss of faith in fiat currency, 98% of which is now electronic, as I understand.
I’ve been considering the virtues of buying a couple thousand dollars worth of nickels, as an example. These could serve as a local currency at some time in a small area. It’s just a thought. The “paper dollars” will be devalued a lot in an upcoming phase, but nickels are already worth more than 5c.
They’ll be going away soon…
One interesting consideration regarding physical fiat money is all those new design $100 bills sitting in a warehouse in Ft Worth “waiting to be destroyed”. https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40531910/ns/business-cnbc_tv/t/bills-new-facelift-goes-awrycnbc/#.UHH_UDlVjow I’ve thought that there are a whole lot of them (1 billion), and they could serve as emergency physical currency in a cyber-war scenario, or EMP attack.
Anyway, I’m really not assuming continuity of the global monetary regime in the upcoming global musical chairs game of attrition at both elite and proletarian levels. There will be fewer and fewer chairs at the dinner table and the tables of power.
Being the only-game-in-town is obviously (to me) very important to the current Western hegemony. It seems to me that any other financial regime is a direct threat, better destroyed while the hegemony is powerful, than wrestled with once the troubles begin in earnest. That is one thing that made Iraqi acceptance of Euros for oil a threat, and Gaddafi’s plan for a gold-backed African Dinar a threat, and what makes Iran’s Islamic banking a threat.
Islamic banking principles look to be sounder in deflation at first blush, which is all the blush I know how to give such things.@Agtefc
Thanks for the reply, and I find nothing to disagree with in the substance of what you say.
I have been reading TAE since spring 2008, and I don’t think that what you say is unconsidered, merely not presented as such. By narrowing the scope of the blogspot, not the dotcom address, it is possible to have some degree of order and some continuity. The amount of restriction was addressed as such several times, earlier on.
You are not personally restricted, nor am I.
I don’t want to seem aloof, and I do work full time, and scan the ether sphere a lot, so I’m not here every day. I do really agree with your view, and find that all your references seem to be known to me.
Somebody mentioned Sun Tzu’s Art of War book, and it says that “War is carried out by all means”. I think it is the most studied military text in the world.
In this terminal resource decline phase of history, I’m somewhat heartened by thoughts that the power elites are at least “rational” based on selfish interests. That makes nuclear war between hegemony and rising hegemony completely undesirable. There is no reason to think that industrial economy could rise from those ashes again.
Fighting proxy wars and electronic wars, and money wars, and even environmental wars seems safer. (The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than unclassified models predicted, is good for oil drilling and Chinese trade routes, so Russia, China, Norway, Greenland, Canada all benefit.)
It seems that there may be odd-man-out populations that the elites target (God bless Haiti.), but they also need to use something like “free market” selection within their subject populations to let the most desirable workers survive and nudge the bottom half “out of the gene pool”.
There are vast underground bases, I hear, with lots of medicines and MREs and so on. That’s not a life for me, even if I wanted it, nor for my four young-adult kids.
Where to survive, and how to survive, while remaining “free” is the complex problem we face.
I am on a path, and it means being in a place with food security of a very direct and non-monetary sort, and reliable rain, and not too many people, who are mostly pretty agreeable types. This is where to make a lifeboat, and I hope that the kids will choose to come stay, when they complete their initial career training (college and such).
I really don’t want to participate in WW-3, and I want to withdraw my support as I build the lifeboat. I’m not the only one who feels this calling. It is common, especially in places where it is possible…@TheTrivium4TW
Thanks for the reply. I’m physician, not an economist, but my reference to gold as the currency to rule a deflation hearkens back to the “long depression” of the latter 1800s, the one that William Jennings Bryant railed against in his “Cross of Gold” speech.
Debts were payable in gold after the death of Lincoln ended the “Greenback” regime. There was a lot of economic activity across the US as Manifest Destiny manifested itself.
Bankers fairly openly colluded to bring in gold out of circulation and hold it at coordinated times and in coordinated areas.
By doing this they made debts absolutely unpayable, and they took possession of a lot of developed/improved property This was how they used physical gold as the tool of acquisition in deflations which they controlled.
We are near the end of the regime of global “trust” which allows electronic fiat money to exist. In 2008 this trust disappeared, and ships were stuck in port, because the letters of lading from banks were not trusted by other banks.
In truly severe (looming) deflationary times, there is no trust, and in times of no trust, physical gold is always accepted.
Those are my thoughts and impressions about why gold is the currency of choice in deflation, and I’m not really armed with the expertise to go beyond what I just wrote. I am thinking of a long, severe, likely “terminal” deflation as resources decline.@The Trivium4TW
You suggest that deflationary looting comes next(ish).
Yes, but WHO is holding the gold, which is the money of choice in real serious deflation?
I can’t tell who has the gold, except China, Russia and Saudi have some. German gold is supposedly in New York by Max Keiser’s lead a few years ago, which means it’s “Schroedinger’s gold” and resides with his pet cat.
