Reverse Engineer
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That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a person, such as yourself, that takes an ounce of gold to the bank, and leaves with a debit card that has one ounce of gold of buying power.
If you have a BANK involved, then there are BANKSTERS. Who does the accounting? Who does the Inventory? Who writes the software? Who assays the Tungsten? BANKSTERS! Gold will magically disappear from your account and appear in theirs. Poof!
RE
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is a pompous ass who flashes around a Classical Education while demonstrating how completely he is out of touch with reality on just about all subects. I am a bit surprised he didn’t mention Heraclitus or Socrates in this post. He also dredges up analogies to 1930s political and economic problems whenever it suits him, but right now he wants to keep his access to Wolfgang Schauble and all the rest of the Euroclowns for interviews, so his spin is they are all “honorable” men trying to do the “right” thing. Ambrose is of course full of shit.
As for the suicide, its very reminiscent of the Fruit Vendor who kicked off the Arab Spring. In a volatile situation, such events tend to galvanize the emotions of those struggling who empathize with the Seppuku. Which is of course what this is, its a question of Honor and the Japanese had it all codified out. However, you do not have to be Japanese to commit Seppuku, its happens in all cultures under the right set of circumstances.
RE
Golden Oxen post=1905 wrote: @ pipefit Would most likely be gold and silver, worked well in the past and are real. Digital system using both already in place via goldmoney.com.
“Digital Gold” is a Ponzi waiting to happen.
RE
Interesting that the Krauts can attempt to exercise some “Democratic Rights” in their Parliament that the Greeks were unable to exercise in theirs. “Democracy” appears to work better for the Creditor Nation than it does for the Debtor Nation. LOL.
Anyhow, even if they manage to exercise some Democracy here, if they vote to stop subsidizing the Greeks (and Italians, Spics et al), they’ll just end up crashing their own economy, so keeping Democracy functional in Krautland doesn;t do a whole lot to ameliorate the problems here.
You cannot resolve a basic economic problem by political means, be it Democracy, Plutocracy or Dictatorship really. They can vote any old way they like, there STILL won’t be enough Oil to go round here through all these economies to keep them perking.
RE
Along with the rest of the Collapse Addicted here, I also spend many hours of my day either reading or writing about what is going on around us. It’s a lot of information to be sure, but to really get the Big Picture you have to sift through a lot of source material.
As to what you can do about it, well you can’t stop it from happening but you can make yourself ready for it both physically and psychologically. A big part of the reading is a means to psychologically prepare yourself.
Anyhow, Peter just installed a new Video Widget on the Homepage of the Diner! Great video up for today, go check it out! We’ll be changing it regularly so make sure you check in to see what is playing at the Diner!
https://www.doomsteaddiner.org
RE
Now, the second part of that twin news item states that those same European leaders managed to come up with over $1 trillion to save EU member states, which of course should be read as: “to save the world banking system”
Gotta love that. Always seems to be another $1T hiding somewhere to backstop Bankster losses. I was told when I was a kid that “Money doesn’t Grow on Trees”. It must be Growing on SOMETHING though, because they always seem to be able to Harvest just enough more every month to Feed the Banks.
I want one of those Laptops with the “Infinite Money Creation F4 Button” on it! Where do you download the App for this? Is it on DaFed.com Website? If you need to be a Member for the Download, I’ll fork over my Email Addy and all my Demographic Information also for data mining purposes! Hell, I’ll even give Google Carte Blanche to capture my entire hard Drive and every Keystroke I make also! I’ll keep my Cell Phone turned on all the time also so they can track me every time I go to the toilet to take a shit! I’ll also Video it so they can add that to the database! Just give me that damn App already!
jal post=1867 wrote:
Are humans smarter than other species?(Bees, ants, birds, sharks etc.)
There are social systems that have lasted millions of years.
Surely, we should be able to build a sustainable society.
By most definitions of the word, sure Homo Sapiens is smarter. However, being smart might be counterproductive to running a sustainable social system. Perhaps only stupid creatures can run sustainable social systems for millions of years.
jal post=1863 wrote: Interesting observation.
In historical context, both system have come about from other systems which lasted longer, (1,000 years) than our present economic/financial/social system.
The evolution of Goobermint isn’t all that complex. It basically evolved up from Tribal level into Monarchies and Oligarchies and then pasted Parliamentarianism on top of that.
However, what we are talking about here isn’t so much Goobermint as it is Economics. The reason Tribal and then Monachies lasted so long was mainly because we weren’t stressing the environment so much. We were essentially inside a world of great surplus, so that economics which externalizes the waste costs sorta worked.
Far as models go in the animal kingdom, they tend to be pretty hierarchical overall, at least for the ones that work in larger groups. Again though, its not so much the political organization as the distribution of scarce resources you have to deal with. Animals don’t really deal with that problem, they just die off. People seem to get all bent out of shape over this problem though. Everybody figures it is the OTHER guy that should go to the Great Beyond. Rich people fiigure its all the Poor people; and Poor people figure its all the Rich people.
Reverse Engineer post=1856 wrote:
In the spin down I project, Liberal and Conservative aren’t very useful distinctions. Nor do I think Private Property will last very long.
I’d like to clarify my position on this one some.
While I do not think the Liberal/Conservative divide or the Dem/Rep ones are very meaningful distinctions in the long term, clearly they make a difference in the near term insofar as how the vast majority of the population is “lining up” here. The problem of course is that neither group really understands the problem and both groups tend to revert to ideological concepts that aren’t real valid.
The Conservative wants to perpetuate Private Property ownership, but of course by doing so he legitimizes the concept that a Corporation can Own all the Water in a given area. Or the Oil, or the Food extracted from the land, whatever. This is what Standard Oil does, or Monsanto, or in fact an individual does if he ties up all the resources available on “his” land.
The Liberal wants to put all the reources into the Public trust, but lacks the means to make an equitable distribution of scarce resources. He also has a real legal problem which comes from centuries of the Commons being tied up under Property law codified in English Common Law.
Neither side can really “win” here in a situation of massive Population Overshoot. What you will get are slightly different types of scenarios which both end up in failure. Followed to its logical conclusion, the Conservative ideology ends in Fascism and the Liberal ideology ends in Communism. Both of course are forms of Totalitarianism just with a slightly different result in who tends to be sent to the Great Beyond. In Communist redistributions of wealth, many private property owners get sent to the Great Beyond (see Mao). In Fascist redistributions of wealth, many impoverished people are sent to the Great Beyond (see Adolf).
So generally speaking, anybody who has some property tends to line up with the Fascists, in the hope that by doing so he gets to keep his property, at the expense of course of all the non-property holders sent to the Great Beyond.
Similarly, anyone with little or no property lines up with the Communists, in the hope that by doing so he will get a piece of the pie redistributed when the Property holders are sent to the Great Beyond.
Conservatives all tend to be people who have in some sense been “succesful” in the paradigm of Ownership and Wealth collection; Liberals all tend to be people who have been in some way shut out or disenfranchised in this process. There are of course lots of exceptions to these general rules of thumb, but on a statistical basis that is how it plays out.
In both cases though, as long as the large structure of the Nation State holds together, you will end up with Totalitarianism and a whole lot of Dead People of course. Which of course is inevitable in a world of Population Overshoot also. You are likely to see both of these solutions undertaken in different places epending on a whole lot of differing variables for a given location. Here in the FSofA, the Fascist Solution seems most likely, in Venezuela a Communist soluton seems more likely.
Eventually of course, both solutions will fail, because they cannot sustain themselves, they self-destruct over time. You have to work your way down to smaller tribal sizes of Goobermint ebfore you can get enough equity and enough repsonsiveness in Da Goobermint for it to be sustainable.
So, that is why I am a Neo-primitive Darwinist. I’m just working ahead of the overall game here, leapfrogging the whole Conservative-Liberal, Fascist-Communist dichotomies. The problem of course is that while I can leapfrog this on an intellectual basis, I cannot avoid the fact that in the near term my local Goobermint will take on either Fascist or Communist ideology. Because of that, I just try to stay as far away from the whole mess as I reasonably can, in one of the lowest population zones on the face of the Earth. I don’t know whether it will end up Fascist here or Communist (though I expect the former more) but in neither case is it a very good solution and won’t be pleasant to live under.
MR166 post=1851 wrote: Thanks RE, That explains a lot.
No doubt 🙂
In the spin down I project, Liberal and Conservative aren’t very useful distinctions. Nor do I think Private Property will last very long.
MR166 post=1848 wrote: So RE you actually think that a person owns the rain that falls on his roof?
No I do not think so, for a couple of reasons.
First off, rain is part of the Commons, the resources of the Earth that God bequests to all his children. I don’t think any person or corporation can claim ownership over that which all need for survival.
Second, I don’t believe in the ownership of private property beyond that which you can carry with you. Since a roof is generally speaking too big for you to carry, you can’t claim all that rainwater as yours. You could however claim all the rainwater that fell on your Tent as yours, since you can carry your tent with you. I will add that you can have the help of your Dogs insofar as what you can carry with you (or horses or oxen if you are in a different climate)
Insofar as giving me a label, it’s best described as Neo-primitive Darwinist. I don’t fit very neatly into Conservative-Liberal pidgeon holes.
MR166 post=1844 wrote: Ah, the socialist brain at “work”.
Actually no, this is the Capitalist brain at work. It comes as all things once in the Public Domain become Privatized for Profit. A Corporation buys all the rights to the Watershed and then sells the Water back to the people for a profit. The water falling on your roof is not “your” water, it belongs to somebody else. If you use it without paying them for it, you are stealing it.
Not only do they own the Water you need, they also own your Goobermint. Through regulatory capture, they get the laws written so that they can in fact legally prevent you from collecting rainwater. nothing you can do about it either, because you don’t have as much money as they do to buy the Politicians votes.
This my friend is end-stage Capitalism, otherwise known as Fascism. It comes when a wealthy and powerful plutocracy runs da Goobermint for Private profit. Its not socialism, which is quite different. In socialism, the water would be held by the state and distributed to the people for free, with the costs for the infrastructure distributed out over the population through taxation. It is very important to understand the difference between Fascism and Socialism. Its a very common error made these days by people who think Da Goobermint is “Socialist”. Its not, its Fascism, or end-stage Capitalism, whichever you prefer.
skipbreakfast post=1840 wrote: One of the more unusual “deflationist” perspectives has been posted over at ZeroHedge:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-gold-cracked-dam-and-feds-small-thumb
I would love to hear if anyone finds merit in the argument. It’s an odd one. Essentially, the writer tries to demonstrate that a drastic deflation will accompany total US dollar fiat currency collapse. In fact, the writer insists that the USD collapse will be a driver behind deflating asset prices.
Typically, a deflationist would be arguing that US dollars will appreciate in purchasing power in a deflation, as cash is the only king, and the US dollar will be the least ugly choice among currencies. The only way I can imagine arguing for deflation AND a USD collapse is if you are really arguing for hyper-inflation in all currencies, including the USD, except you expect gold to appreciate wildly as the only safe-haven asset. It’s hard to imagine a single commodity like gold appreciating wildly in any deflation…but have a read and tell me what you think of it all.
Well first off I have a real problem with the Gold Bug aspect of this fellow’s argument. He makes a tacit assumption that the collapse of Fiat will enable a Gold based economy to be rebooted. I do not see how that can happen since Gold simply does not circulate in any meaningful way.
The next problem is in trying to figure out how anything at all gets “valued” in a dollar collapse scenario. Dollar collapse is not the same as a Peseta collapse or even Euro or Yen collapse. When a small subsidiary currency collapses, its reletaive worth against the surviving Major currency gets adjusted, radically downward of course. When you have only one major currency left standing, what does it revalue against?
Since the Dollar is basically a proxy for Oil, the simple conclusion is that it would devalue with respect to Oil, but that ignores the issues of Demand Destruction in a deflationary environment. It also ignores the fact that the Dollar distribution chain is already terminally broken. Helicopter Ben can issue endless Dollars to the Primary Dealers, they can in turn prop up the Stock Market, but that does not translate into job creation or the distriution of the dollars to end consumers.
Deflation is almost a certainty as far as the dollar is concerned, but really only in earnest after subsidiary currencies like the Euro and Yen go to the Great Beyond. Despite the Nickname, I do not see any way Helicopter Ben will go sprinkling Dollars down on the end Consumer here, so if they do not have money to buy, prices must fall or more liekly production simply ceases as there is no profit to be made in it.
A while ago I thought this process would happen very rapidly, but these days I think its going to be stretched out by triaging out some economies off of Oil and only gradually killing subsidiary currencies. By arbtraging between these currencies as long as they function, you can ladder down without a massive crash. It takes a lot of liquidity at the top level though and a lot of swaps of currency to do that, which I think is what both Da Fed and the ECB and the BoJ are currently engaged in doing.
TheTrivium4TW post=1835 wrote:
Both of you are correct, but you talk past each other not fully understanding how the other defines “wealth.”
You are correct that we are defining “Wealth” in a different way, and also correct that we are generally talking “passed” (note spelling!) each other.
My goal here however is to get people to understand that the definition of “Wealth” which looks at it anthropomorphically from just the perspective of the person who sets up a rain collection system and cistern is not looking at the Big Picture.
You are aware perhaps that some communities and Goobermints now regulate and in some cases outlaw rain collection systems. Reason is two-fold, first off if you become water independent in some way, you no longer have to pay for the water provided by the local water supplier. Second reason is that if enough people are sequestering water, its not making its way into the general supply of water. In a very arid environment, this can cause a lot of problems.
So, the person who has his own water collection and storage system is “wealthy” but he is wealthy at the expense of other people and other organisms that need the water he sequesters for himself. Zero Sum Game.
Drop enough people into a given area, if the pool of natural resource generally considered the “commons”, any one person’s “wealth” comes at the expense of somebody else’s poverty. You cannot lever up and make EVERYBODY Wealthy in a resource poor environment. You cannot “create” wealth that is not there in Nature to extract to begin with.
Steve Jobs got plenty Wealthy before he croaked designing Ipads, Iphones and generally making it difficult to copy digital information. Did he “create” Wealth though? No he did not, the whole system is extracting wealth from the Rare Earth mines in China and from the labor of poor folks at Foxconn, and levering that on the back of a power infrastructure that runs all the routers and cell towers and so forth. Those costs are externalities to Apple’s Biz, so they don’t pay for that, its subsidized out of the general pool of wealth the society is accessing through the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels.
Until people grasp that no Wealth is ever really created but just moved around from one spot to another and generally consolidated up under the Ownership paradigm, they’ll continue to believe inthe canard of Perpetual Growth in a Finite World. It just can’t happen. You run up against a wall when the population is so great it stresses out the seemingly ‘bottomless’ well of natural resource. We have hit that wall.
Well, I think both Ross and myself are mostly Deflationatos, but the general debate is about the possible differing effects and how you might try to secure yourself.
Generally speaking I think if you have some money, you have to Hedge against either possibility. Long term though, I don’t see it making much difference since its my belief the monetary system will collapse in its entirety.
MR166 post=1826 wrote: “People do not “create wealth”. People only do Work to reform the Wealth that is out there into different forms, at the expense of some energy transformation and entropy depletion.”
What a bunch of BS.
Are you trying to tell me that a farmer is not creating wealth by harvesting his crops or that someone who creates shelter from the forest is not creating wealth? Even mining a non renewable source of minerals is creating permanent wealth if they can be recycled.
Absolutely, that is exactly what I am telling you. When a farmer harvests crops out of the earth, he is depleting the soil to do it. You can recycle waste through the soil to maintain fertility, but over millenia as long as you run itnensive agriculture you eventualy deplete the soil and or water table. The Middle East is the result of that.
Taking Minerals and changing their form isn’t creating wealth. An Iphone is just a collection of rare earths and semiconductors which in the absence of electical energy is just a neatly constructed paperweight. without the energy, there is no Wealth in an Iphone.
All wealth stems from taking Energy stores and moving them downhill, in essence burning them up. When you run out of the store of potential energy to run the gradient, you run out of Wealth. POOF.
The amount of Wealth you can access without Machines which run on the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels is exceedingly small by comparison, but in any event nobody ever “creates” wealth. They merely harvest it in some manner, or steal it from some other part of nature. Besides what the Sun rains down each day on the earth and some geophysical energy, all the “Wealth” that is here has always been here, it just gets redistributed. Take away from Biological diversity, expand the Human population, etc. Zero Sum Game baby.
Candace post=1819 wrote: I think even Illuminati spawn prefer younger guys. 😉
Quit messing with my fantasy Candace!
I’ll just play the Friendly Grandpa who is there for them when they catch their boyfriends cheating on them, then BAM! LOL.
Or maybe they won’t have time to write their arguments for Torts or Contracts and I can offer to do that for them. For a Price of course. BAM!
RE
Bukko Canukko post=1808 wrote:
And if more fall away than the number who stick, then our hosts have just shot themselves somewhere north of the foot. That’s life — which sometimes includes death. If the changes are so difficult that TAE withers, then Stoneleigh and Ilargi can go back to having real lives, instead of living the bloggous-driven life.
You always take a risk with a format change. Readers will adapt as long as the content is appealing to them though.
The single thread system is overall very limiting. its good for a small group of people, but once the numbers are large contributing, it becomes a cacophony. People here seem to miss being able to scroll down through all the comments, but when comments run into hundreds or even thousands, this becomes impossible to negotiate.
My Yahoo Group was a small place where a few people could write in basically one long thread, though it is posile on that system to divide up some based on topic. Even so, if more than 20 or so write regularly, it gets very confusing. So in constructing DD, we put up very much the same type of Forum software TAE is using now, though I am not sure it is precisely the same engine.
Multi thread Boards of course have their own limitaitons, but some can be ameliorated. It is possible to run streams of all recent comments, we run the last 10 or so on the homepage of the DD Forum for that. Hopefuly we wll have a widget soon for scanning all comments on the Homepage of the blog as well. Still, it gets ridiculous if many people are writing to read EVERYTHING. Take Zero Hedge for example. Who reads comments past the 2nd page of any article put up there? And that is WITH splitting up the comments by article! Imagine if ZH had all the comments running in one thread! ACCCKK!
This is in many respects analogous to the problems of Goobermint. Past a certain size, you lose that “family” feel and it becomes a “system” rather than a family or communty. I worry about that problem with DD. My friends and I who started it are a Family, a Community of people who all wrote together on a small forum. We jumped up into this much bigger system, and we are rattling around some because of it. Some people dropped out already because of that.
Still, you have to change and adapt to circumstance. It can go well or go poorly. My feeling is if the content is good, you can survive the changes.
RE
Uglee post=1811 wrote:
As the saying goes, “you can’t squeeze blood out of a stone.”
That is the TRUTH.
If I was UE right now, I would seriously consider going back to school to get yet ANOTHER degree, maybe Law School this time 🙂 A JD would be nice to add to the list of letters after the name. LOL. I don’t think I would have too much trouble finding a Law School which would accept me even at age 55, considering I used to teach the LSAT for The Princeton Review. I’d be 58 upon graduation only 4 years from taking an Early Retirement SS payment, so they can take my repayments out of that until I croak even if I can’t find work as a Scum Sucking Bottom Feeder Lawyer.
Meanwhile, on Credit, I could spend 3 more years at Harvard Law School banging Illuminati Spawn! It would be just like the Good Old Days at Columbia!
jal post=1812 wrote:
A reset is happening and it will not end until GDP is equalized with wealth creation.
People do not “create wealth”. People only do Work to reform the Wealth that is out there into different forms, at the expense of some energy transformation and entropy depletion.
The wealth that one person “creates” out of such transformations results in the depletion of “wealth” for somebody else, or many somebody elses elsewhere. Its a closed system overall.
When you run short on the energy necessary to do the transformations and keep entropy at bay, you can’t rob Peter to pay Paul anymore, and everybody gets “Poorer” in aggregate, though a few people can aggregate wealth out of a diminishing pie for a while.
It really gets interesting when the Big Dogs start fighting each other for what remains to sieve up, once the general population has been thoroughly impoverished. Then you get your Wars.
RE
Dogs are a big part of the Inuit survival paradigm, obviously.
If there is enough Game around the dogs help you run down the game and then help transport it. Overall they work better for this than having more People to do similar tasks.
In a world without Guns, one would expect 2 people with a dozen well trained Dogs would have a survival advantage over a half dozen people with no dogs. The dogs can pick off their kids for food. Kids are Dog Chow in such a situation.
RE
I stand withAshvin on this topic.
Whatever the value of the concepts are in the Constitution, they are limited by the practical application of those concepts and by the structures developed to “enforce” the rules.
Be it the Magna Carta or the Declaration of independence or the Bill of Rights, the attempt to encode equity in society is always undermined by the fact that those writing the encoding laws are really mostly trying to protect themselves from Tyranny, but the protections themselves are Tyrannical in their own way.
A pure Democracy can be as Tyrannical as a Dictator, since obviously if most people are poor they are going to vote to strip the rich of their wealth, right? The IDEAL Goobemint should balance the interests of all people in the society, but clearly the Constitution as constructed does not do that, and it never has done that. As soon as you create large structures like legislatures and courts and an Executive, you create a dynamic in which any one or all of these structures can become compromised. “Checks and Balances” is a canard, over time these structures do not check agaisnt each other, rather they begin to work in synergy to create the very same type of tyranny that an individual Monarch might create, but worse because it is Timeless under the legal structure. At least with a Despot you can send him to the Great Beyond and hopefully get a better person running the show; if you create a Tyrannical SYSTEM, you can’t ever get rid of it simly by changing the players in the system. The Constitution does not really PROTECT against tyranny even in its pure form, it GUARANTEES Tyranny of the system it codifies.
You wil never achieve an equitable society by adhering to the Constitution. Large3 Goobemint structures will never be responsive to the needs of the people they represent, they are always controlled by a small cadre of people, power seekers who gain control over such structures. The bigger it gets, the worse this problem is.
Overall, Human Society probably cannot support any Goobermint structure greater than 10,000 Human Souls and remain equitable in any significant manner. Because of that, as the energy nececessary to hold such large Goobermint structures disappears, we will see a break up of the One to the Many over time. The FSofA and in fact all Nation States are the construct of accessing ever more energy over time to combat the entropy driving these societies apart. Once this energy is not available to access, the society sizes and Goobermint structures will have to shrink accordingly. Once shrunk so, it is not a Constitution that binds the people together, but their dependence on each other to survive.
william post=1796 wrote:
Spain, like the rest, will be free once it becomes self sufficient and imports luxuries not necessities. Sucks but I believe it could take a while.
And yes that means we are all in a lot of trouble.
A lot of TROUBLE, no doubt.
“Spain” and “Self-sufficiency” in the same sentence is an Oxymoron. Same could be said for about every country in Europe, MENA and probably the entire world at this point.
Some places still have good arable land available, but generally speaking they are not the same places that have large energy reserves. The places that have large energy reserves don’t have good arable land and water resource. So they are all interdependent on the basic trade of Food for Oil. When that trade collapses due to lack of Credit availability, both sides are screwed.
I have no idea what the carrying capacity of Spain is without Oil, but I am pretty sure it is nowhere near its current population numbers. Spain won’t be self sufficient in necessities and just importing luxuries for quite some time to come. To get from here to there, they will need a lot of dead people.
I see Dead People.
MR166 post=1794 wrote: Forget any country trying to pay off it’s debts, it will never happen.
I would venture to guess that you can count on one hand the number of countries that do not borrow to meet day to day expenses.
In the US about 45% pay no income taxes. I would guess that 20% of the workers are paid by a government in some form or the other. They pay taxes but with monies that came from the government so they are still a big net loss to government income. Add to that the retired who do pay taxes but less than they take in from SS and you see the picture. Then you have the illegals who use the system, pay no taxes and send money out of the country. So as a real rough guess I would say that only 25% of the workers in the US are paying all the bills. No wonder we have to borrow Trillions each year.
The way the system is set up, everybody from individuals to corporations to Nation States HAS to borrow, because without borrowing there is no Money. The issue of course is WTF is it you are borrowing FROM? Where does the Lender GET money to loan out?
In essence, the Lenders get the “right” to loan out money based on their Ownership of the Assets of the Earth. Land in the old days, Oil most recently. John D. Rockefeller loans you money so you can buy “his” Oil with it. What happens though when Rockefeller runs Short on Oil to sell with the money he loans out? If the resource isn’t there to redeem the Notes issued, they aren’t any good anymore.
All Industrial Nation States have had to borrow from the Owners of the Oil in order to have access to the resource necessary to run an Industrial society, complete with Electric Lights for the people and roads and bridges for them to drive their Carz about on. Everybody, including Mercantilist countries like China and Germany are in debt on Da Goobermint level, because most of the profit from Mercantile Biz flows to Private hands, not into the State treasury. The States only get what they can tax out of this, which usually is not much since Multi National Corporations easily evade the taxation.
Anyhow, countries like Greece and Spain which got in too late on the Industrial Bandwagon have had to borrow the most per capita, with the least return on the wastage. As the resource runs thin, their ability to borrow is triaged out first. However, all remaining industrial societies STILL have to keep borrowing to keep buying what is left of the Oil and the whole game shrinks at an ever increasing pace as each country falls off the cliff.
You cannot stop borrowing under this system. The moment you do, your society runs outta money to buy any Oil. You can create your own money, but it won’t be any good to buy any Oil from the “Owners” of the Oil. Unless you can REVERSE ENGINEER a society that functions in the absence of Oil, you are basically SOL here.
steve from virginia post=1789 wrote:
Worst thing is there is absolutely nothing the Spanish can do to escape their fate of ‘conservation by other means’. Best thing is there is nothing the rest of the world can do to escape Spain’s fate.
Ain’t that the Truth.
The Rain falling on Spain will Mainly be the Pain that Remains after the Insane waste for no Gains.
skipbreakfast post=1758 wrote: Because when something never makes a profit, can it really be called an industry anyhow?
Yes, in fact that is the DEFINITION of Industry. It is always subsidized. You should read Steve’s stuff on Economic Undertow.
https://www.economic-undertow.com/2012/03/25/the-waste-gap/
How many times has the auto industry been bailed out? The airline industry? How about the Railroads? How about Electric Power Companies? The main difference between the Canadian Entertainment industry and all of those is that it probably wastes less and loses less than the other examples do.
RE
mrawlings post=1742 wrote: I totally agree with BK, Glenda and RE. But I also wanted to ask if anyone else out there was finding themselves at times unable to distract themselves with mindless entertainment. Increasingly over the course of the last sixteen months, I have at times struggled with the conflicting sense that while I’d like to sit down in front of a streaming Netflix movie or TV show, I can’t bring myself to care what is happening to the characters or in the story. In the past I could have vegged out to just about anything, but in light of the very serious and concrete events unfolding around the globe, I find myself more and more turning off the “TV” and searching for lectures, articles, blogs, etc. I’m becoming more and more addicted to reality.
I quit on TV over a decade ago now, haven’t owned one in all that time. The only time I see any TV is when I am in a Hotel out of town. My last trip a few weeks ago completely made me puke. The only thing I found to watch for a few minutes was Myth Busters. Otherwise it was all infomercials. Any normal content was all Pay TV/Movies. There was no TV Guide or schedule either I could find on the VERY complicated Menu.
I stopped following any Pro Sports teams 20 years ago. if anybody asks me a question about Football, if it came after about Joe Montana I have no clue who the players are or what city the team resides in now.
Far as Games are concerned, I gave those up after they left the Arcades after my college years, when I dropped endless Quarters into Space Invaders, Asteroids and Missile Command. OK, I briefly got hooked on Sid Meier’s “Civilization” on my computer in the mid 1990s, but that was the last one.
Its all just complete mind numbing JUNK! I admit to being a complete Pop Culture SPONGE for the first 30 or so years of my life, but at least Cartoons like Bullwinkle were creative and funny. Pokemon? Transformers? BLEECCHHH!
Anyhow, as far as Entertainement goes, for me observing the Collapse in Progress provides hours of Nightly Entertainment. I’ll miss the Internet when it is gone, but I suspect I will be kept very busy and entertained just trying to figure out how to live for another day when that occurs.
Reminds me of the end scene in Zardoz where the library shelves are all full of Books that are decomposed dust.
I hadn’t heard about Brittanica, that IS sad.
Looks like we will need a new generation of Monks transcribing all the old books once the internet goes dark.
And people say nothing good is going to come from Collapse! The sooner that Professional Sports, Television and Movies and Video Games are relegated to the dustbin of history, the better off we will be.
Kids will actually have to take a REAL bat and ball outside instead of swinging away for the fences with a Joystick (future Drone Commmander!). You can go root for the local tall kids shooting hoops in the schoolyard instead of the pituitary cases recruited by the NBA. Finally, at LAST we will be free of hearing about the latest round of rehab for Lindsay Lohan.
If you absolutely MUST watch a movie, at least for as long as the DVD players still work, there are so many titles already made since the beginning of film you could watch a different one every day for your entire life and never repeat a single one. Then you can get started on all the TV Episodes of “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza”. The CLASSICS! LOL.
On the Schaudenfreude level, nothing will please me more than watching Hollywood and Pro Sports get flushed down the Toilet.
Well of course they will eventually be out of the McMansion, since once they can’t get Gas or it becomes unaffordable the place is a White Elephant anyhow. At $4+/gallon, far flung suburbs are ALREADY White Elephants, this isn’t some distant projection for the future. Meanwhile, long as the Banksters do not want to write down the losses and stop the merry-go-round, you live rent free and use the cash to buy a used Bugout Machine ready for the day you have to abandon the McMansion.
Is stepping off the treadmill by stopping your debt payments a risk-free option? Obviously not, since you pretty much have to stop working with the Banking Biz entirely, assuming you are still employed you have to cash your paycheck at Walmart and operate entirely in Cash.
I don’t find this to be baffling at all because the system may have a a”survival instinct”, but it is terminal and will not survive. Once you grasp that it is heading for the Great Beyond, there are choices that can be made which in other circumstances would not seem logical, but in fact can be better choices.
The whole Banking Biz depends on a critical mass of people “playing by the rules”. When MANY people stop playing by the rules, the system collapses.
RE
Golden Oxen post=1729 wrote: @RE There certainly is a massive change coming. The road from Oxford to today has most certainly ended, thanks in large part to our bankster friends. The universities went along with the easy debt for all game also, and should have known bettter or did. Same old short term pleasure over the long term consequences story. Free or inexpensive internet education might be some sort of solution for many of our poor but knowlege seeking youth?
Education in all its manifestations is a primary focus of mine, since of course I am a Teacher. The University model also interests me, since it is part of my personal history, I’m an Ivy League brat also. This still represents only a small part of time for me in learning, a few years of my life where really I spent a good deal more time Drinking Beer and banging Illuminati Spawn than I did in class time, and really I could say that most of what I learned there hapenned inside of a week or so each year in Low Library right before Finals, charged up on Jolt Cola (all the Sugar and Twice the Caffeine!) and Doughnuts.
I wonder what people really need to learn in the future, and what the best way is to accomplish such learning? Mostly I’m an autodidact, and for me I wonder just why it is that people don’t teach themselves what they want to know? The Internet certainly facilitates that these days, but really Books have been round a long time and Libraries also. I hate the Credentialism of the University system, it stifles a lot of creativity IMHO, and boy the whole biz cost a lot of money/is inefficient in its utility. I cannot see how this can function in a world of scarcity as opposed to surplus, it simply makes no sense.
The technological meme is so powerful that it is very common that people take it as an irrevocable axiom that University Education is the Ticket to economic/social success. I question now that this will be so in the future. I think Learning will always be important, but I do not think as we move forward here into a low energy footprint world that the University Model can survive, any more than Carz or Ring Road Suburbs can survive.
My focus these days as a Teacher is in teaching HOW to learn in the absence of structure. Its not a popular idea really, because ALL teaching paradigms are structured paradigms. Public Education is of course the worst of these structured paradigms, but even the Private University structure is not much better. I don’t think either one will survive this collapse. Something else must take the place of this if what we have learned and hope to learn can be conserved and then prepetuated and expanded on. Its a difficult problem overall.
RE
ashvin post=1719 wrote: RE,
At this point, you are tap-dancing all over the place
That’s why they call me “Bojangles RE”. 😀 (sure wish I could drop in a pic or vid here of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, but the text would disappear so no multimedia 🙁
Ashvin, I have a track record on this one. Back in 2009 I told my nephew and a couple of other friends who were having diffculty making their mortgage payments to just stop paying. All 3 have been living Rent Free for 3 years.
If you have friends struggling to make their student loan and mortgage payments, tell them to STOP PAYING! With $270B in delinquent payments out there, its going to be quite some time before your friends ever get on the docket. When the Bank calls, reply with the old standby, “the check is in the mail.” LOL
If you think most of this will be paid back, I think you are quite wrong. Of the people who owe this $270B, I doubt they have half of that in assets to strip, and that would INCLUDE their parents. The same people got these loans as got sub-prime mortgages, its tons of the underclass kids of the country, they just got no assets to strip NOW, not in 30 years, and they are not going to have any more in 30 years either.
OBSERVE what is actually occuring here Ash, if Banksters could recoup their losses in sub-prime by asset stripping the debtors, they would be doing that. But they are not because the Numero Uno asset that probably 80% of J6Ps out there have just isn’t really worth much and if they try to auction it off they’ll get pennies on the dollar.
Athough the law reads that Student Loans cannot be discharged in BK, the situation is still worse because there is NO collateral directly backing those loans like a McMansion. The product that the student debtor bought with the loan cannot be repoed at all, and hitting on cosigners would take some significant Lawyering which would be very costly.
At some point in the future if they start lining up Student Deadbeats at the Courthouse I might change my advice, but I don’t see it happening in the next 5 years anyhow. It doesn’t match the tactics they have been pursuing at all. Da Goobermint will paper it over, there will be renegotiation of principle and interest, payment schedules will be lengthened into the 22nd Century and they’ll keep this up until the wheels fly off the Bus.
Golden Oxen post=1712 wrote: Looks as if a college education will be something only the 1% can have soon. What else is new?
That would be a reversion to the historical mean, but I’m not too certain a “College Eduction” will be on anybody’s plate or that the University model will perpetuate itself.
Of all the social structures we have developed since the Enlightenment, the Universities have been among the most durable, with Oxford founded around 1100 or so. Nevertheless, the University structure was developed around the scientific method through an era when we were busy conquering Nature with our inventive prowess.
The upshot of course is that in the end Nature was not conquered, and the pace of innovation is slowing down. I suspect with the collapse of the energy conduits, science and innovation will slow to a snail’s crawl, if it moves at all.
In this world, the University may not have a place, even for the 1%, whoever that turns out to be on the Other Side of the Zero Point.
RE
ashvin post=1704 wrote: RE,
After your last post, I’m not sure there’s actually much of a debate. Like you said, you are taking the very long view of things (I consider 20-100 years the “very long view” in this environment), while I am talking within the next 50 years at most. If students graduating now are either 22 or about 25-26 when they finally get out of school (perhaps older for med students and others who started their “higher education” late), then I’d say the consequences they reap from that debt will last over the better part of their lifetimes.
I do understand what you’re saying about the the value of assets belonging to students (or perhaps their parents), including their labor, in the very long-term, and believe it is a valid point. I have never argued that TPTB will be able to maintain complexity at the scale of a nation-state such as the US in the very long-term, regardless of how much slave labor they have. One must wonder, though, how that changes as we move down to smaller political entities, which may continue to be corrupt/oppressive in their own ways?
Anyway, good discussion!
Good discussion indeed 🙂
There’s a difference in the timelines we are talking about, but there is crossover also. A lot of this could play out inside 20 years, at least the beginnings.
In the near term,again say the next 20 years, what can we expect? Here in the FSofA, debtor’s prison seems unlikely since the prisons are already overfilled. Wht seems most likely is the same old dunning phone calls with threats of litigation, garnisheering paychecks etc. Except how likely is that litigation? I have experience with Bankruptcy court, and unless you have some really big debts the bank doesn’t even bother to show up. Now,student debt can’t currently be discharged in a bankruptcy, but in order to garnisheer your salary (if you actually had one), the bank does have to show up in court.
Why doesn’t the bank show up? Because it’s more costly to send in the corporate lawyers than they can generally get a return on. They know that statistically speaking most of their deadbeat borrowers don’t have jobs or assets they want. If parents co-signed the loan, do they want to take the parent’s house? No, they already are overflowing with foreclosures, they dont need to add to their inventory with McMansions repoed to cover student loans!
So, here we are today where many of the recent graduates are UE, have no assets and also have debts which in theory can’t be discharged. You also have the fairly high likelihood that inside the next 20 years said debtors will not be getting any kind of decent paying job that could touch these debts, nor will they be accumulating any assets that could be repoed, nor is it cost effective to litigate the debts, nor is it cost effective to imprison them, since in prison they certainly can’t pay the debt. Sense a problem here? LOL.
Of course you do, and so do the Banksters and Da Goobermint. The answer of course is to paper over the problem and Extend-Pretend. The trick is for Da Goobermint to fill the hole in the Banks’ Cash Flow problem by covering the interest on the Debt not being paid by the deadbeat students while not seeming like they are “forgiving” any loans. How long can they keep doing this? Well, if what they are doing with respect to the deadbeat housing borrowers is any kind of yardstick here, a minimum of 5 years at least, so you are already 1/4 way through the 20 year timeline there.
To be honest, I don’t think the student borrower is all that much worse off than his counterpart who eschews further education in favor of staying out of debt. Said non-debtor is ALSO going to be broke with no job, the main difference I see is one person got a few years of living on debt while banging some co-eds; while the other one played nintendo in Mom’s basement.
Insofar as the further future following a one to many breakup of current Nation-States? One thing I think is pretty certain is that local Warlords will not have Internet access to banking databases containing debtor information. As to what form local economies will take in the aftermath of systemic monetary collapse, that is a topic all its own, and a huge one to say the least. Leave that for another day.
RE
Ash, this debate was so entertaining I dropped the last 3 comments onto DD as a Feature Post 🙂
https://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/03/26/point-counterpoint-student-debt/
Jane, you IGNORANT SLUT! LOL
RE
ashvin post=1686 wrote:
Care to explain those blanket statements? I find it very unlikely that productive assets and resources, human labor being one of many, will be worth nothing, to anyone. Or maybe I just forgot how energy is harnessed, food grown, water cleaned, shelters built, etc. If we are talking about “assets” such as money/cash flow/investments/etc., then they will most certainly be worth something until the monetary system completely collapses, never to return.Sure.
On the asset side here, first off more than 50% of the population has no more than 2 months worth of bills in savings, no pension, no investments. If they are living in a McMansion, they are likely underwater, its not an asset.
Of the remaining population the main 2 assets any of them have is their House and their Car. If both are paid off, these probably are not people with student loans.
Even if both are paid off, as gas becomes unavailable, neither the car nor the McMansion are worth anything at all. The suburban ring road model doesn’t work without the automobile, so suburbia essentially ends up a Ghost Town. The car is just worth its scrap metal value.
Insofar as the worth of Human Labor goes, in an overshoot situation all people are liabilities, not assets. It costs more to feed and clothe them than you can get return in value added labor. Like a Car that has no value because the Gas is too expensive to feed it, a Human Being in Overshoot has no value if the food is too expensive to feed it. Dead People hold more value than slaves do, because dead people don’t eat.
Far as this being the only possible outcome, no I do not make that case; I just make the case I think it is the most likely outcome. I also cannot fix an absolute timeline to this. As I have said before, I think we will be going through a period of extreme Fascism here that could last quite some time, 20 years maybe even more though I doubt it. During this period in order to survive you probably have to make yourself useful to the Fascist state in some manner, probably as Soldiers which of course under Conscription is a form of Slavery itself.
Will there be Chain Gangs of Debtors in this scenario? Perhaps, but I don’t think its all the irredeemable debt of the past that matters, many people even non-debtors who did not take out Student Loans will also be so impoverished that their only options will be to serve the State in some sort of low paid job which just provides enough for subsistence living.
The debt system is so oversaturated with debt at all levels here that once Da Fed stops supporting the TBTF, they are not going to be able to replace that money through taxation or slave labor of debtors, its simply too great a debt in Energy terms, not monetary terms. If Da Fed perpetually prints new Debt to keep the TBTF solvent, then the money to roll over all the old debt is not coming from the labor of J6P, its just being conjured up out of thin air on a perpetual basis, further running up the numbers. So under neither paradigm does J6P ever actually pay off this debt, because as I said in Energy terms it cannot be repaid. The stuff is just well and truly gone here, at least the High EROEI stuff.
Its all in how you look at it Ash. I take a fairly long view of things, I’m generally looking 50-100 years down the line here, but I think much of this will become evident inside the next 20 years. I don’t see any way a significant Die Off will be avoided, and by significant I mean on the order of 50% or more of current world population. Under such a situation, I do not see how anything resembling our current monetary system will be perpetuated, so maost of the debt, Sovereign, Corporate and Public will simply be incinerated. The FSofA is never going to pay back its Trillions in unfunded liabilities, McMansion Debtors are not going to repay their mortgages, and Student Borrowers are not going to pay their Student Loans. The system has reached the end of the line, or at least it is very close to it. We will get Political Upheaval, Nation States as they exist now will disintegrate, they will be no more. Property Titles and Deeds issued under these Sovereign States will not be honored, any more than Confederate Dollars were honored after the Civil War.
Is this going to happen tomorrow or the next decade? Probably not, but its the writing on the wall that I read and I think it is the most likely outcome.
RE
ashvin post=1687 wrote: [quote=Reverse Engineer post=1685]Things get messier in the Dark Ages when a lot of the movement of the wealth captured by the Roman Empire was moved through the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Why did I have a feeling “things” were going to get messy?? 😉
Well, not that messy since at least 3 Popes were from the Medici Banking House and lord only knows how many Bishops and Cardinals.
It does seem unlikely we will view this in the same way, like all of history its open to interpretation and unless you actually have Mr. Peabody’s WAYBAC Machine you will never get an absolute answer. It isn’t a question of my being a more brilliant historian than you (even though that is true, lol), its just that I view the world through a different lens. I spin a version of history I think is true and which gives a coherent explanation for how we got where we are today. You don’t wanna buy it, that is your choice. It makes lot more sense though than assuming random action across the centuries. To me, your explanations don’t make a lot of sense, but that is JMHO so if it works for you, go with it.
RE
ashvin post=1683 wrote: What boggles my mind is that you said “I personally tend to be fairly conservative in terms of how far past the “obvious” Conspiracy with its locus at the BIS I will speculate on” in your comment, and then go on to say “we ARE being controlled large scale criminal conspiracy, and it has been in operation for a very long time.”
Ashvin, compared to theorists who figure we are infiltrated by Reptilian extra-terrestrials, this is a VERY conservative statement 🙂
Anyhow, you already cop to the conspiracy that goes back to Jekyll Island, so you are in for at least 100 years there. Go back and review Matt Perry’s forcible opening of Japan and the lead ups to the Civil War, then pitch further back in time to Hamilton’s sell out to Eurotrash banking interests, and its pretty easy to connect the dots through the colonial era and into the latter days of the Elightenment.
Things get messier in the Dark Ages when a lot of the movement of the wealth captured by the Roman Empire was moved through the Holy Roman Catholic Church. However, even there the power and influence of the HRCC still throws weight around, and that whole ball game is definitely a multigenerational comspiracy going back to at least 300AD or so.
To deny the Catholic Church is a multigenerational criminal conspiracy is to deny what is obvious and staring you right in the face. It’s not the only one out there either, by any means.
RE
