Reverse Engineer
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FrankRichards post=830 wrote: F=ma
PV=NRT
E=IRHow could you forget the other 2 important Fundamental Equations of Existence?
E=Mc2
and
S=G/E ?
jal post=815 wrote: Myths are everywhere.
Since this article is referring to christian myths, I thought that you might like to take apart the 50 virgins myth with a few questions. The answers might make someone think twice before dying for such goals.Those 50 virgins had to die to be in the afterlife to do your bidding. There cannot be that many left on earth.
Is the pool of 50 virgin in the afterlife limited by age, religion, race, looks or relationship to you?
Are the deflowered virgins discarded and replaced with a fresh supply? Eternity is a long time.Perhaps, it would be best for those young men to put their destiny in their hand rather than to rely on the promised pleasures of the afterlife.
If you postulate Heaven is run by an Almighty God, the Virgins don’t have to Die to be in Heaven. God could simply snap his fingers or wiggle his nose like Samantha on Bewitched and conjure them up into existence. He could also recycle them and make them “Eternal Virgins” by sending them to the Cherry Repair Shop and wiping their memory so they would act like Virgins and be indistinguishable from “real” Virgins in all their behaviors.
Heaven doesn’t necessarily operate by the same set of Natural and Physical Laws that we elucidate in our Corporeal Existence. Much like when you Dream, you don’t have to obey any of these laws, you can Fly, walk through Walls, whatever your mind conjures up here. So if Heaven is non-corporeal and an eternal existence of Ideas, then really Heaven is just what your mind makes it up to be. So if some guys really BELIEVE they will get 50 Virgins when they go to Everlasting Glory in the Kingdom of Heaven, they very well might get that, on the assumption their thought process holds together without containment in the physical world. If you DON’T believe its possible, then you probably would not get 50 Virgins, but only what you figure is really possible.
Conclusion: Don’t be too locked in to what you think is Possible or likely in Heaven. If it does Exist, then you will do a whole lot better in Eternity if you have an Open Mind and a Good Imagination 🙂
Basically the real economic utility of Industrialization comes from its power to build a War Machine that can roll over everybody else who is not industrialized. Carz weren’t invented to take J6P to the Mall, they were invented to beat the crap out of anybody still riding Horseback.
Capitalism is and always has been theft on the grand scale of the Nation State, utilizing the Big Ass Military as Enforcer. As Al Capone put it, “Capitalism is the Legitimate Racket of the Ruling Class”. “Legitimate” because the guy with the biggest gun makes the Law and only enforces them to benefit himself.
Not forever though. These systems are all destined to go the way of the Dinosaur. They are not sustainable. When they pass into history, and pass they will, then the Playing Field will be levelled. Then the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth. Right AFTER the Meek get very, VERY angry.
No, I think it is because the navigation is only showing the articles published in the Lifeboat section of the Blog, its not showing the Topics being discussed in the Lifeboat section of the Forum.
RE
Peter posted the first part of his series on Hydroponics on DD. His stuff is a MUST READ if you want to try growing your own food with limited space availability.
Direct link is
RE
Yup, that’s the one! Have you found any way to navigate there besides scrolling through the Recent Topics?
RE
I’m going to have to sort out one of my Speedy Gonzalo Demolition posts 🙂
The folks fixating on Gold, HI and relative price valuations between fiat and gold simply don’t understand how money accrues value.
Anyhow, be sure you go read “Energy-Money Equilibrium: The Value of Money in the Age of Oil” on DD. I got Part I up yesterday, probably will get Part 2 up tomorrow.
RE
ashvin post=723 wrote: RE,
Nice looking blog you have there, and your latest piece was a very good overview of how societies have evolved more complexity from surplus energy and derived money systems (although anthropological research has shown that many ancient surplus societies have maintained without internal money systems for quite some time).
Many societies, such as the Tlingit and other tribes of the Pacific Northwest worked in surplus for millenia with no money. They used Potlatch, the gift economy instead. However, such societies were all H-G based. To my knowledge, no Ag society has ever been run without using Money.
When it’s all said and done, you are correct that the EROEI from human labor will not support a complex global society such as ours or perhaps even national scales of society. However, you are really talking about a time frame that is well beyond the scope of most of our lifetimes. Human labor will provide plenty of EROEI as long as some level of fossil fuels or alternative energy production remains, as well as modern technological processes. That is especially true if the humans are used as throw-away labor dolls who are only maintained at basic sustenance levels over the course of several years, like many were in the convict leasing systems. If you have over-population and excess labor force, then it really makes no sense to not use them as slaves and work them to death during a prolonged period of contraction.
True enough, I am more concerned with very long term outcomes here. The issues raised around population overshoot bring about the possibility that this is an extinction level event, in which case slavery is a relatively moot point since all will be dead, slaves and masters alike. The debate we had over on OFW we had recently on Overshoot was a very good one, I put that one up inside the Diner also.
Anyhow, Industrialization never got rid of Slavery, it just got transformed. Here in the FSofA we are all slaves except for a few of the Elite, always have been if you are part of this system. It just was a more comfortable form of slavery for a while as Oil did the work and fed the Useless Eaters.
As societies increase in size and complexity they form up rules and hierarchies, you see this through the animal kingdom. Worker Bees, Alpha Males, blah blah. Independent folks seeking Freedom never function well in such societies, and if you go back in Mr. Peabody’s WAYBAC Machine to the early days of Industrialization here, Freedom Seekers didn’t stay inside the Industrial Rat Holes, paid in Company Scrip good only until the Mine ran out, at which point you got left high and dry.
Freedom Seekers left those places and went out to the Frontier. To find their Freedom, they stole the land of others who got there before them, using the FSofA Cavalry and the disease of Smallpox to empty the land. A few others went still further out than that, and became Mountain Men. That is abotu the last time anybody could find real Freedom, you cannot even find it here on the Last Great Frontier of Alaska for the most part, at least not yet while the Park Rangers still have their Float Planes and Helicopters you cannot.
Someday though, those beasts will no longer fly, and the few folks who will remain up here and can find a way to survive will once again be Free. Truly Ash, I do not believe that time is all that far away, not so far as you might believe. I think I myself might even be alive to see the day when the Float Planes no longer fly, and the Dogsleds take over from the Snow Machines.
If you stay in the Big Shities, if you stay in the Flatlands where the Tanks can roll, its not just Slavery you face, its Conscription as well. There will never be Freedom to be found there, if you stay you will Die in Chains. You must RUN AWAY. As far and as fast as you can, and then hope you can make it through the Zero Point. I am confident some people will, and this is not going to be the Swan Song for Human Sentience on Earth. Probably not me, I’m just too old now and too soft living as I have, a child of the Age of Oil. I’m not going to leave this world in Chains though. Even if I cannot make it out there, I’ll walk out into the Bush and give myself up to the Bear or I will take that last Kayak trip out to Sea. I WILL NOT walk into the Human Waste Reprocessing Facility in San Antonio. No way, no how. I was fortunate to live as a Slave for many years with comfortable and loose fitting chains, this existence is unlikely to be possible anymore. I will not buy my ticket to the Great Beyond in chains though. I will go out as a FREE MAN, one way or the other. And God as my Witness, I will be damn sure if I have the opportunity I will take into the Great Beyond with me anyone who seeks to chain me, or those I hold dear to me. I will make them regret the day they were ever born. I GUARANTEE it.
jal post=730 wrote: @ Reverse Engineer
You have a nice site.
Keep up the work. Don’t get disappointed by the number of hits or the few comments.
The knowledge and point of view are important to have on the web.jal
The site is the work of Computer Wizard and Hydroponics Guru Peter. If you wanna know everything there is to know about Hydroponics and how to grow all your own food inside your own HOUSE, you’ll visit DD regularly. Eventually I suspect people will become less shy about posting.
As for me, if I cared about site hits I wouldn’t be writing. I’ve been writing inside my members only Yahoo Group for years. I just got sufficiently pissed off at a Yahoo Bot censoring some of my prose a couple of weeks back Peter suggested it was time to Host elsewhere, so we are collaborating on the Doomstead Diner.
I started writing on the Peak Oil message board in 2007, right after a lightbulb went off in my head with the failure of Bear Stearns. Besides that I have done some stints writing on OPB (Other People’s Blogs). On OPBs, you face Censorship and Banning if you have a spin the Admin or Moderators do not like. I have been banned from Peak Oil, Market Ticker, TBP, and Raging Debate. Only reason I never got banned from TAE is that on their old Blogspot location I never was able to post here. LOL.
Anyhow, I have a backlog of hundreds of articles I can post up without ever writing anything new, and I write every day. If you ever want to discuss them, drop on in the Diner and order up your favorite dish 🙂
Viscount St. Albans post=711 wrote: @ Reverse Engineer.
Thanks for that comment above. I enjoyed it and your rationale. It’s a nice supplement to the themes introduced in El G’s article. I would love to hear more about the details of your experience in Brazil in the 60’s. I’m very interested in on-the-ground perspectives of folks who’ve lived through wholesale financial meltdown. How did it look and how did it feel. How did the daily acitivities and patterns of life devolve as instability grew around you. What did the neighbors say and when did they start to panic….that sort of thing. It would be a great feature article (IMO).I’ve written some articles about my Brasil years in the past, but I was a Boy/Observer of the effects, not an Adult Brasileiro who had to deal with it. My family also was relatively immune from these effects, because my father was receiving his salary in Dollars.
For my friends whose families were paid in Cruzeiros, it was generally panic all the time and a struggle to keep ahead of the game. The military was out in the streets quite often in those days. However, even in Rio in those years the local farmers markets were operational and a good deal of barter went on. It would be quite a different situation today I think.
It also is much different in the sense of being a relative effect. See, when a local currency like the Curzeiro HIs, a currency like the Dollar still works and a Black Market flourishes, the economy essentially “Dollarizes” for a while. Same thing occured with the Rouble in Dmitri Orlov’s crashign Soviet Union.
This is not going to be the case when the cascade works its way back into the center of Fiat money creation, and it does not matter whether its the Dollar or an SDR substitute. There just will not be any functioning FOREX for trade, and the letters of credit will collapse. There really will not BE a Black market at all, not even for buying stuff with Gold Coins stored in your Basement Safe.
This kind of monetary collapse has not occurred since the time of the Roman Empire. Its been a constant build out from the Medici period onward. Many smaller relative collapses, but no COMPLETE collapse of a monetary system has occurred through this time period. In fact in the Historical Record there really are only two of such magnitude, that would be Rome and Babylon before that. This one is bigger than both of those because in fact they were localized to a relatively small portion of the globe being run under monetary principles of debt-credit issuance. In this case it is Global with 7B people participating in it, excluding virtually nobody except a few Amazonian Tribes, a few Bushmen in the Kalahari and a few Inuit up in Nunavut. When it fails, its going to be something to behold indeed, something never before witnessed in all of Human History, and you have a Front Row Seat for it on the 50 yard line. Count yourself lucky, very few people in history get to witness the complete collapse of a monetary system. Its Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.
el gallinazo post=674 wrote: But the point I am making is that you can always extract a surplus from slaves if you work them to death.
No, actually you cannot, its a question of EROEI, just as it is with Oil. When the Cost of maintaining the Slaves is greater than the excess wealth they can sieve from extraction of resources available there is no profit in Slavery, even if you work them to death. Basically, in an extreme situation of contraction and resource depletion, its counterproductive to maintain slaves, they are more costly to maintain then what they can produce.
If there is a plan in this regard, it would be not to enslave people, but to abandon as many as possible and “Free” them as Pharoah did with Moses and his People, alowing them to walk into the Desert, under the assumption they would Die there.
The key here for Slaves is to be able to SURVIVE in the Desert. It can be done. The Bushmen of the Kalahari have done it for a long time. If you want to maintain your FREEDOM, you must be willing and able to walk into the most extreme environments where few are able to survive, and make it out there. That is the only place there is ever true Freedom, and this has been the case already for a very long time.
Ideally also for small groups of people to maintain their Freedom, they must depend on features of Geography that make it very difficult for Mechanized Armies or even Horse Drawn Chariots to maneuver about. Why do you think the Swiss were able to maintain neutrality and independence through all the Wars in Europe? Why do you think the Pashtuns never lost Afghanistan even to Alexander? Mountains. Really BIG Mountains. The Great Wall that GOD built to protect the independent souls of the world.
I agree with most of your analysis EG, but I don’t like any financial instrument which depends on the intermediary of the financial markets to divest yourself of in a hurry. You want the most fungible stuff you can lay your hands on, which generaly speaking are Paper FRNs. They work just about everywhere, even Drug Dealers in Mejico take them no questions asked 🙂
Though Inflation in some commodities is going to occur as long as the TBTF are issued ZIRP money to speculate with, HI is more a relative phenomena between currencies as weak ones get squashed. So the Euro is a ripe one these days for HI, but the Dollar is not yet, and until the Euro is flushed down the toilet, its not likely to devalue that fast.
So anyhow, I’m long on FRNs in the Bank of Sealy and buried in various locations along with some of the Gold I have panned up over the years, and I don’t concern myself with the idea of trying to conserve mega bucks worth of investments I cannot really extinguish for cash. If its a Long Emergency slow crash, I can dribble out liquidiations and exist in perpetuity. In a Seneca Effect style fast crash, just about everything except Guns, Ammo and Pint Bottles of Vodka will be quite worthless.
How do you get hold of FRNs under the Radar? You can’t take out $8K at once, you have to do it a couple hundred at a time, every paycheck. I started back in 2008 🙂
Will HI hit the Dollar at some point? Possibly, but unlikely before it takes out the Euro and the Yen, so you should have decent warning on that. When you see prices going up EVERY DAY in the Supermarket as was the case when I lived in Brasil back in the 60s, you dump your Cruzeiros for Hard Goods as fast as you earn them. Until then its the 3 Fs, Fungability, Flexibility and FOOD in the larder. Oh yea, don’t forget the Guns and Ammo and Pint Bottles of Vodka either!
I got Part 1 of Energy-Money Equilibria up on DD to go over the problem in some more detail.
RE
The monetary system did not collapse during the Great Depression on a Global level, nor has it collapsed yet for Eastern Europe. The system still functions to maintain the system of debt slavery quite well now as it did back in the Great Depression. I am talking about what comes AFTER this.
RE
ashvin post=672 wrote: You could still call it “debt slavery”, because debts do not have to be “voluntary” contracts in monetary terms. One could be in perpetual debt to the corporatist sovereign by simple decree, or the very fact of one’s existence (born into debt). These are the people who will be kept alive in chains rather than allowed to die free. That is a very difficult thing to imagine/understand, yet a very real threat. That’s really why I ended the series with a question – because no matter how much I intellectually understand the argument, it remains perplexing to me.
How will I react if I am personally threatened with enslavement to an emerging system, not very different from those of recent history throughout the world and even in the U.S., far beyond any recognizable levels of forced attachment than we have right now? I don’t know.
You’re morphing the question out of “debt slavery” and into a more explicit form of hereditary slavery, blurring the arguments. I did not say slavery was unlikely, just that in the absence of a functional monetary system, debt slavery is unlikely. Debt as a concept transcends money, but in its numerical sense as we use the term it needs a monetary system to have numerical meaning.
Anyhow, the collapsing monetary system is only one of a number of conduits the Elite depend on to maintain the kind of global control they have now, and none are destined to remain functional in a low energy world. What seems more likely here is gradually collapsing large scale systems of debt, replaced by smaller systems which could reflect many different forms of social organization, including collectivism and hereditary slavery as part of the system.
In any event, I spent some time looking at the economics of slavery, and its not viable either in a contraction environment. In the end, it was probably the real reason Pharaoh acquiesced to Moses’ request to “Let My People Go”. In the contractionary environment the Pharoah was in, he simply could not afford to keep slaves.
More later. Gotta work now.
ashvin post=657 wrote: [quote=Reverse Engineer post=655]Ash, I still find it hard to figure out how you can have debt enslavement without a functioning monetary system. Debt denominated in what? Euros? Dollars? It’s all Toilet Paper.
What do you mean by a “functioning” monetary system? I think ben’s reply from the other thread was accurate. Even during/after a process of HI, there will certainly be attempts to establish or re-establish currencies and carry over debts. Many people will still be forced into various forms of labor for basic necessities, provisioned by the full-fledged corpotocracy, and pay their share of taxes (tribute). As I made clear in the articles, though, none of this is guaranteed to be sustained for very long, and it is very likely that there will exist cities/communities that function with “black market” economies and also pockets of forceful resistance.
The operative word in that paragraph being “attempt”. The Money Masters of the Universe may attempt to supstitute currencies; they are however highly unlikely to succeed.Debt is a means of managing surplus, not scarcity. It has been used, as you indicate in your post through history as a means for one class to maintain control over that surplus and extract profit from it. The vast expansion of Debt possible since the Age of Oil began was only possible because of the concomittant availability of vast amounts of thermodynamic energy.
There is an Energy-Money Equilibria that is being disturbed by both Energy depletion and Overshoot problems. In this situation, you’ll get a vast credit contraction for the simple reason nobody is really a good credit risk and no bizness venture is profitable. You folks at TAE have covered this end of the problem on many occassions yourselves.
The bottom line here is it is about impossible to make Debt Slaves of people if you don’t issue credit, and there is no reason to issue credit, it cannnot return on investment.
Credit creation is in a catastrophic Cascade Failure mode now, resultant from depletion and overshoot. It cannot be reestablished until a new equilibria level is reached, and that can only be reached with a massive power down and a population contraction of indeterminate but probably quite significant levels. We’ll see a progressive failure of Fiat currencies across the board, likely ending last with the Dollar due to its status as proxy for Oil and the funding mechanism for the Big Ass Military. Dissapointingly for Gold Bugs, Gold is not a solution to this problem because in fact PM based monetary systems are also highly debt dependent.
I wrote a series of more detailed examinations of the Energy-Money Equilibria problem a while back which I’ll try to get up on DD in the next couple of days. Like you folks, we just moved to our new website and I have a backlog of numerous articles to transfer and catalogue. I’ll provide a direct link once I get that stuff up.
Ash, I still find it hard to figure out how you can have debt enslavement without a functioning monetary system. Debt denominated in what? Euros? Dollars? It’s all Toilet Paper.
Extremely difficult to keep people in debt slavery when you don’t have a functioning monetary system. The Euro is headed for the Great Beyond, the Dollar will not be far behind. So how do you hold people in debt servitude if you do not have a functioning monetary system?
