Guest Post: Returning to Simplicity (Whether We Want to or Not)
Submitted by ChrisMartenson.com contributor Gregor Macdonald
Returning to Simplicity (Whether We Want to or Not)
Eventually the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity.
- Joseph Tainter
The modern world depends on economic growth to function properly. And throughout the living memory of every human on earth today, technology has continually developed to extract more and more raw material from the environment to power that growth.
This has produced a faithful belief among the public that has helped to blur the lines between human innovation and limited natural resources. Technology does not create resources, though it does embody our ability to access resources. When the two are operating smoothly in tandem, society mistakes one for the other. This has created a new and very modern problem -- a misplaced trust in technology to consistently fulfill our economic needs.
What happens once key resources become so dilute that technology, by itself, can no longer meet our growth needs?
We may be about to find out.
Recent History
The twin disasters, Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico and Fukushima in Japan, took place only nine months apart in 2010-2011, but together they have provided the world’s economy with a lesson in 21st Century un-priced risk. Our various energy systems, vastly arrayed across regions and hemispheres, have now reached a late phase of complexity. And societies, particularly in the West, have enjoyed technological progress for such a long, uninterrupted period of time that the delicate nature of this modern infrastructure has evolved to escape notice.
The BP disaster arose within the oil and gas sphere more than a century after the start of widespread oil extraction. The collective knowledge of the industry was, in one sense, a support to the operation that allowed the recovery of oil several miles below ocean and earth, using ultra deepwater drilling techniques. But a century of global oil production was also a constraint, as Deepwater Horizon illustrated the outer reaches to which a mature industry had been driven to obtain its next tranche of resources. The capital BP has set aside for cleanup stands at $40 billion. Additionally, government resources, from equipment to personnel, that were diverted to the Gulf and Gulf Coast that summer (see photo above) were reminiscent of a small military operation.
Deepwater Horizon also showed that modern energy extraction now occurs with the greatest-ever separation between human operators and their resource target(s). This physical distance is so great that, in the case of very deep offshore oil drilling, it’s no longer possible to reliably stop a blowout. Why? Because no equipment exists to easily take men and material to such depth to conduct repairs. Indeed, it was at least as much due to luck as skill that BP was able to halt the well flow several miles down. And the almost comical trial-and-error efforts (junk shots) proved what many have long asserted: In the past decade, the cost of the marginal barrel of oil has crossed a threshold to a completely new era. It now becomes possible to ask the question, Is it worth it? Is it even economic to obtain this new tranche of oil?
The Fukushima disaster, triggered by the an offshore earthquake, ripped the lid off Japan’s power grid and illustrated how the country has historically balanced its lack of domestic fossil fuel supply against its enormous manufacturing base. On a small level, the actual sequence of events at the Fukushima nuclear power plant revealed an amazing vulnerability. For it was not the passing of the tsunami that performed critical damage to the installation’s structure; rather, it was the auxiliary power that was knocked out, depriving the plant of its cooling functions. Hence the meltdown, and the subsequent issues with recriticality (resumption of fission).
Meanwhile, on a larger level, the world came to understand how dependent Japan had become on nuclear power, which provides 30% of the country’s electricity needs. Japan is also one of the largest importers of LNG (liquefied natural gas) and still has to import 80% of its overall energy mix, which includes oil and a very great quantity of coal. (Indeed, Japan is the fourth largest world consumer of coal, behind only China, the US, and India). Unsurprisingly, the country had to significantly boost imports of LNG and coal in the wake of the disaster.
What has been the cultural response to the Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima disasters? In the US, the oil spill in the Gulf, which exacted a great economic toll, echoes the aftermath of other post oil-spill environments: The moratorium on offshore drilling was quickly lifted, but in its place lies a new set of regulations and restrictions. Most of these have a single aim -- that similar blowouts in deepwater be preventable or fixable. The evidence seems to suggest that deepwater drilling in the Gulf has peaked. The rig count has recovered but is still down below the highs, with many of the largest and most expensive operators having left for other parts of the world.
Meanwhile, the global response to the Japanese catastrophe rippled through several economies, especially those, such as Germany, that rely heavily on nuclear power. German chancellor Angela Merkel announced that her country had to accelerate its transition to renewables, becoming less reliant on nuclear. Other countries have increased their inspection procedures, and for the first time in many years, it seemed possible that many aging plants in the US would not see their licenses renewed. In Japan, there have been protests. And given the long lifespan of the nuclear event, which will ripple outwards for decades upon the affected portions of the northeast Japanese coast, it is not surprising:
TOKYO (AP) -- Chanting "Sayonara nuclear power" and waving banners, tens of thousands of people marched in central Tokyo on Monday to call on Japan's government to abandon atomic energy in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident. (Source)
Western Faith in Progress
Education in the West has, as a core feature of its curriculum, a narrative of progress. This is especially true of US history offerings and of any discipline that addresses the post-Industrial Revolution (roughly the two centuries after 1800). The examples of technological progress most available to Western cultures, as we moved from the Age of Wood to the Age of Coal and finally the Oil Age, are highly confirming of the view that humanity always finds a way. And in particular, it finds a way to grow, and even thrive.
It is particularly worth noting the symbiotic relationship between the machines that were developed to extract resources (like the steam engine that pumped water from coal mines) and the life cycle of those machines as utilizers of those resources. Coal mining triggered development of machines that would run on coal, just as oil would eventually power the latest machines that would be used to extract oil. It is this awesome ratchet effect that’s so persuasive to Western culture, and it is the story it repeatedly tells itself.
One can hardly fault the highly educated person, with an advanced position in business, communications, technology, or academia, for generally believing that innovation (and the power of prices) will obtain all of the resources we require. I believe this bias is what Daniel Kahneman would call an availability heuristic. The risk to this bias is that at some point in human development innovation and technology may very well carry forward and confirm society’s faith, but at the same time start to offer increasingly diminishing returns to progress. In my opinion, that is the lesson of Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima. And I expect it also to be the lesson of the Alberta Tar Sands.
There is a lens through which we can view events like Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima. Charles Perrow, in his important work on Normal Accident Theory (NAT) examines these accidents by type and plots them according to their complexity. See, for example, where nuclear power is located on the following grid: (Source: Accidents, Normal -- opens to PDF).
What has begun to take place in global energy extraction is that the current tranche of resources obtained by more complex methods -- deepwater drilling, underground fracturing, in-situ mining, and other strip mining -- have begun to move towards the quadrant of Perrow’s chart that is occupied by nuclear power and chemical plants. Here, systems are both technically advanced and tightly coupled, which is to say that failures anywhere in their operations can spread easily and cause systemic failure.
Additionally, the boundaries of those failures can also be rather broad. That nuclear contamination spreads over large geographical areas has been known for some time. But Deepwater Horizon warned that contemporary oil extraction has also crossed the threshold into very wide boundaries. Despite the current euphoria over North American shale natural gas and the continuing confidence that production can be lifted in the Alberta Tar Sands, there are already indications that groundwater supply is going to become a much, much bigger issue as we try to increase access to these resources.
As Joseph Tainter explains (see the quote in the header to this essay), resources in civilization are eventually marshaled not for further growth but simply to maintain current systems, usually in their most advanced iteration. This is the terminal phase of expansion that the large, OECD regions (Japan, Europe, US) have likely reached. This is a vexing and frustrating limit that just about everyone, no matter their political orientation or economic view, will struggle to digest. For example, in an analysis of Fukushima’s impact on future energy policy, I thought this reaction from the team at the BTI Institute, was somewhat correct but perhaps a bit hasty:
Yet lost in the hyperbolic claims of nuclear opponents, the defensive reactions of the nuclear industry, and the carefully calibrated repositioning of politicians and policymakers is the reality that Fukushima is unlikely to much change the basic political economy of nuclear power. Wealthy, developed economies, with relatively flat energy growth and mature energy infrastructure haven't built a lot of nuclear in decades and were unlikely to build much more anytime soon, even before the Fukushima accident. The nuclear renaissance, such as it is, has been occurring in the developing world, where fast growing, modernizing economies need as much new energy generation as possible and where China and India alone have constructed dozens of new plants, with many more on the drawing board.
While it’s true that the long-forecasted nuclear renaissance in the West never took place, with little prospect now that it ever will, it’s not exactly true that the developing world is choosing nuclear power in any meaningful way. Coal remains the dominant energy source in the developing world, for obvious reasons: it’s portable, it stores well, it remains cheap, and (most of all) it is not complex.
Given that the externalities of coal use are rather brutal, it also the case that human beings place steep discount rates on the future. Society is much more fearful of accidents which take place suddenly and with little warning, than of the long term negative effects of a different set of policies on their health. It may not be logical, but that is our preference.
Tilting Away from Complexity
An emerging theme out of Silicon Valley over the past few years has been the epiphany that venture capital experienced regarding the extraordinary difficulty of greentech. “No mas” has been the conclusion. Why build expensive prototype energy boxes or invest in large vats of algae, when little apps can populate quickly across Internet devices, with no heavy lifting or messy cleanup? The difference between the two worlds has been summed up like this: In Atoms vs. Bits, it’s undeniable that “atoms are simply too difficult.” Yes, and this, too, is the lesson of Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima. If investment in complex resource extraction has either tail risk that could overwhelm returns, or externalities that overwhelm the well being of society, why do it?
Recently I spotted an insightful remark that addresses the issue, from Alan Nogee on Twitter.
In Part II: Why We Must Embrace Simplicity Now, we explore how diminishing returns have now triggered in our various complex systems. Eventually it will become clear that the cost to repair damages from their destructiveness is simply too great. Technology is practically telling us (begging us?) to place less faith in its ability to solve all problems.
It's obvious that our elected leadership has no concept of a growth limit that could render the economy’s obligations insoluble. The Fed transcripts are yet one more piece of evidence that unless we get a better handle on the enormous, complex systems we are already operating, we will continue to suffer more frequent and painful "unexpected" economic accidents. Given our track record in this regard, the alternate route would be to step back from these complex systems and regain our footing in simplicity. Or else maintain the status quo approach until market forces pressure us to.
Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).
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maybe less people will need a pill to get thru the day,,,,,,bearish for drug stocks
Maybe there will be less people.
Simple is Simple. I am only interested in The Simple.
i wonder where everyone thinks their power is gonna come from...turn off the nukes? LOL. asinine
i wonder who could possibly be behind a decades old push to discredit nuclear energy... or why? /s. not real hard to figure out.
PhotoVoltaics are good candidates for mass production economies of scale so
it's quite normal they got cheaper. Nuclear plants are certainly not mass produced,
and the imperatives of safety and research mean that every new iteration must
integrate new ideas and design, so you'd expect costs to stay relatively high.
There's also a bias towards creating weapons grade waste in the US, which is
responsible for suppressing other safer technologies like molten-salt reactors.
The question is will it be a trend to localise and decentralise, or rather the inverse
being a trend to monopolise and bring more efficiencies of scale to the system?
This depends on whether energy becomes the next bubble. If we find enrgy of higher
density, we could see simplification in process where there is wasteful competition.
Useful competition will be in research for digital power grid, pumped storage hydro,
Perhaps we can envisage intensive agriculture in a similiar vein, with central
monopoly entities running the infrastructure of wind/solar farms, grid, water,
and nutrient inputs, with competition amongst greenhouses plugged to the tap.
You forgot the cascading blackouts of 2003? The grid eventually turns itself off.
I'm fat unless they turn off the Sun - I've not been a power company sucker for over 3 decades now. "You gotta start early if you're gonna stick it out".
I'll even be able to drive my Volt without any gasoline. Have plenty food, ammo, land, tools. Bring it.
-28 degrees celsius today -44 with wind chill, keeps it simple and less people
Advocating less people? Because if you are, I know who to ignore. Instead of hate, how about spreading awareness?
Otherwise you are just as deplorable as the people at the top.
There is never been over-population of intelligent people, and there never will be. It's not the people; it's thwe grey matter that never gets lit up in an information-arbitrage society.
Bingo. Thank you government funded schooling.
Any one want to invest in my new buggy whip factory?
Just found a copper still no one was using, awesome. Well that covers my fuel and entertainment for the future.
just remember to use the first two shot glasses out of every batch as lighter fluid... Then, let the party begin...
Yeah, it's all fun & games - right up to the point where you realize you forgot the hookers.
The proper quote about "fun and games" is it's all fun & games until the cops show up. The hookers of whatever sex and style always show up for the money in whatever disguise that works for you.
We live in a finite world. Never ending growth is not possible unless we leave this rock. Even if we learn to harness the power of the sun to fully run our society will not be enough as that also is a finite resource. However this is discussion a future generations will be having. hmm wonder what my google shares will be worth in the year 6billion!
We live in a finite world. Never ending growth is not possible unless we leave this rock.
True enough, but look down from an airplane some time: The VAST majority of it is still empty.
True, but all that green stuff creates oxygen and food. Also, all of that emptiness just might be empty for a reason. Personally, I'd rather not live on planet in which humans live like ants and cover every inch of earth with no escape from them. But, then, I'm just not much of a dominionist. I gave up that kind of thinking when I outgrew Christianity in my late teens.
Yes, because there are hard limits to how fast biological cycles can be pushed and still sustain life (at least as we know it). Wake the fuck up, many of those "empty" patches once held vast diversity of life, long since extinct. Despite what you may have been told, there is a very real carrying capacity. Oil, coal and Natural gas have allowed us to play games with the oxidation states of certain essential elements, but the bottom line is that you can move the capacity around and have more life in one spot at the expense of life elsewhere. With or without fossil fuels, only certain types of organisms catalyze essential reactions in the biological cycles. kill the right organisms and it will be game over in a hurry, population back under a billion in a few years.
LOL... take a drive through southern France, or Northern Florida, or a hundred other places. Get a window seat on a cross-country flight. There are millions of acres of superb land just sitting.
My planting 40 acres of corn in Florida magically makes 40 acres in Germany useless? Yeah, sure, I believe.
I have been in agriculture for 30 years and know exactly how much energy it takes to produce several tons of food. No shit you can "make" land productive moron, that isn't the question now is it. The question is how much ENERGY do you have in order to do so. "Simple" things like delivering clean fresh water is expensive for christ sake. Troll harder fucknut.
Gee LawsofPhysics, don't you know that economic ideology ala Ayn Rand trumps the Laws of Thermodynamics?
^^^^This^^^^
we eat oil - and a boat load of it each and every 2000 calorie meal.
have a nice kill off
Mandatory reading: William Catton's "Overshoot" (1986)
e can't run out of food.
There's always more at the drive thru.
Luckily Americans were smart enought to become disgustingly obese...when the food stops coming, only fat, disgusting, bellowing land pigs will survive.
The corpulent shall inherit the Earth.
LOL.... I'm a moron and fucknut and troll if I disagree with you.
Right back atcha, slick.
And, while I'm basking in your arrogance and malice, I think I could find a few things on those extra 40 gazillion acres to generate some energy with.
But, please, continue, I'm sure, you have more hate to spill.
CH1
Show us the product, produce, production, plus transportation of energy to "fuel" all said in your magical 30,000 foot POV. Then add start-up cost. HHMMMM?
Afghanistan has immense natural resources, landlocked without water around. Even with transportation no mandatory water. No wonder they are forced to stick to demand of poppies.
But they DO seem to be able to grow the poppies ...
Wow, you guys are REALLY embedded in your doctrines.
Ever heard of wood? Burns real nice. Heats houses, can be traded. Can even be regrown!
Who woulda thought?
Is that your HS grad photo as your avatar?
It would go a long way in explaining your myopic world view....
Just curious...
Grow produce that does not require more fertilizer, than any other crop on the planet.
Corn is negative energy produce. More used in growing than derived from.
Won't feed seven billion.
and neither will your big 10 ac. organic farm...and modern agriculture is doing a piss-poor job of feeding 7B...but, that's not the point of this discussion.
So, for 30 years all you've know is how things don't work, right?...and never explored how things could work?
This guy does an excellent job feeding thousands with sustainable integrated aquaponics...and produces food across all four seasons...in Milwaukee, WI.
and oh yeah, before you start screaming energy inputs, he's figured out a method to heat many of his green houses with compost, costing less and placing less stress on his redundant back-up systems.
and oh yeah, before you start screaming nitrogen inputs, he's figured out the nitrogen cycle using the fish and beneficial bacteria to fertilize the greens he grows.
and oh yeah, before you wow us with your expertise, we know you have a PhD in "nitrogen" and somehow believe this is somehow impossible, yet anyone who keeps an aquarium could probably figure this out if they thought about it.
He devised a simple, elegant system...on a shoe-string.
He won a MacArthur genius award. Where's yours?
http://www.growingpower.org
He produces a million pounds of organic food on 3 ac. How much do you produce?
http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/will-allen-and-a-million-pou...
His operation is the largest year around food producers in the midwest. How much food have you put out this winter?
http://rendezvousyou.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/will-allen-%E2%80%93-plant...
Here's a guy doing something similar in his backyard for his family of four.
http://gardenpool.org
year round solar production in unheated greenhouses were common place in europe a hundred years ago. It is currenlty dropping six inches of snow outside my house in northern Washington and I just pulled kale, broccoli, onion, beets, carrots and collards out of my greenhouse for some stew. Year round localized food production and more important, a deemphasis on current crops and reemphasis of a wide variety of perennial, tree, bush and other sustainable systems require tremendously less work and "energy" to get the equivalent calorie out. On top of that, the variety also delivers superior nutrition. Mother nature has been working on her system for a few billion years. It is the most complex and sustainable "system." It provides it's own fertilizer and pest control. But if you notice, mother nature looks nothing like a corn field. Permaculture mimics these forest garden systems and other ecologies then applies our "intelligence" to increase the systems without destorying them. Working smarter not harder.
This is a decent introduction and a good comment on peak oil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xShCEKL-mQ8
Good for you.
Thanks for the link. It looks like an interesting series. I'll make the time to watch it.
Expect Laws of idiocy to reply back how anythng other than the petro-based corporate ag system won't feed 7B (which it is not doing now by the way), how it's impossible to do what growingpower in Milwaukee is doing on any kind of scale (wrong, because it is happeneing) etc...therefore, it's all pointless, we're all gonna die, etc... (except for him on his 10 ac. "farm" and his neighbors.)
I've lived in a few rural communities and have known quite a number of green and dairy farmers. To a man and woman they are open, adaptable, innovative and optimistic...Laws of Idiocy is the exception.
He'd better be growing organic pot on that farm...maybe the "hordes" will see the "value of his labor" as he likes to tout and let him operate, otherwise he isn't going to make it with that attitude.
BWAHAHAHA!!!
Do like I do. Encourage the family to go out at night and make a big steaming night soil on top of the tomatoes.
Uh, I think what you are referring to there is the use of corn to produce ethanol. It is negative net energy on balance. Since the actual corn is grown from a lot of free natural energy ( sunlight ), it is not negative net energy in itself.
planting broad swaths and acres of one crop vulnerable to pest, disease and soil depletion and totally dependent on oil for nutrient and pesticide is definitely NOT how the future of food production will look.
Any idea on what my oxidation state would be after drinking a pint from your still?
I figure, in an inebriated state, I'm going to lose quite a few electrons!!!
There's a good explanation as to why so much territory is "empty*," most of the world is composed of oceans, arctic ice and desert.
* What is "empty" to a human man not be empty to another life form. "Empty" is the popular propaganda for what the continental US was before the white man came; that has long since been proven false (though they did do a pretty good job emptying it).
Arable land, it's all pretty much in use. Its paltry 4" (ave) layer of topsoil is what keeps us alive.
In response to the comment about there being a limited amount of solar energy, well, yes and no. What's limited is our capacity to capture it; problematic, however, would be in wide-scale alteration to solar absorption: intercepting solar energy for say energy would mean keeping that energy from being absorbed in the earth- who the heck knows how we'd affect local climate conditions as a result (or, if you're a poor neighbor, how we'd interfere with someone else's climate).
the injuns were here before the white man. Their nature management consisted of extincting all the really large mammals. They were like locusts.
That is only a theory.
Is not neither. The Arikara ate all the mastodons, which is why there aren't any more Arikara. Well, that, and the Pawnee genocide.
Once again, whenever you paint history, you lean so heavily on one pigment that your art resembles a truly "elementary" character.
So the dark skinned people regularly performed mass extermination of their mammals. What a pile of oversimplified crap. Who exactly mass executed the bison? Actually, the more these "scientists" take a look at many of the north american tribes and their food systems, they realize they integrated very sophisitaced permaculture methods that integrated the seven layers of plant food types and incorporated free ranging animals and their byproducts into crop production and pest control. It's just that whitey, being too arrogant and ignorant, didn't realize what he was looking at. Worse, whitey peformed mass extinciton of many of these food trees and others. Only now do wise folks like Mollison and Holmgren see this "primitive" method may be the only sustainable and healthy system. Not saying those injuns were perfect cause no one is but they weren't as stupid as your ignorance suggests.
Worldwide... all at around the same time... despite various strains of humans being at different technological levels...
You're a fucking idiot, 98% of the time Trav. This being one of them.
Truly large mammals were never like locusts - never could be - not enough food to go around. If you had one clue in your PR bachelor's degree-holding head you'd know that.
Yeah, Trav, I guess they just simply weren't white enough to make more of the continent.
Fucking collectivist, racist piece of shit.
What large animals did the locusts extinct? Musta been some B-movie sized giant locusts.
the american megafauna was eradicated in neolithic times,
way before cultures we recognize as "injuns", and such mass
extinctions occured in northern europe as well in that period.
You must be one of the children that multiple-choice exams didn't leave behind. The bad answers they made easier; you thought you were getting smarter, but you were getting done the entire time. Nature is the teacher for the survivors. What you know that ain't so is killing you off.
Complex societies always need a new energy source to reach a more complex stage. Our current one is exhausted and we will collapase back into simple societies. Which is why I studied pretty much everything except for plants and all the useful things that go into farming and plant hybridization etc.
Because basically those understandings will be in massive abundance.
"Because basically those understandings will be in massive abundance."
Now that is fucking funny. So you think that all those paper-pushing fucknuts that currently make up the vast majority of the GDP are going to have this kind of knowledge or the resources to act on it, post collapse? LOL, well our future is looking brighter every day. Definately won't be throwing out any seed stocks soon.
I will...because that other dude GOT this mfer
it's good to know that all these room temp IQ nitwits have totally come up with the ideas on how to solve this
No, but they make great fertilizer.
Modern economics has no conception of the reality that there is a point of stasis. Even in the boom times, there is a point of stasis. Growth cannot go on forever. At some point, supply equals demand. And this is the fallacy of modern economics ... believing that true economic growth is perpetual.
No, what we're really talking about is inflation. We all know that true perpetual economic growth is impossible. It is nothing more than a euphamism for inflation. So it would be more accurate to say that the modern world depends on inflation to function properly ... not economic growth.
I would also add that our modern economy was allow to operate with numerous externalities, wherein the public, or future generations, picked up the tab for today's privatized profits. Such discrepancies are usually ignored in most free-market religious tomes of the era.
Please, don't mix free market capitalism with what we have now around the world.
Market is a natural system, which adjusts to the present conditions and does not accept interventions, hence free market.
In a capitalistic construct by its very nature, as capital investment requires long pay out times, the human trend is to tilt the table to make sure you win in the end; if you be entrenched TBTF competitor with big stick. Marx said it first, all the while providing a solution worse than the original evil, but the world has learnt to its eternal regret that its a recurrent theme, this 'greed is good' atavism.
Its always been this way in society. Free markets are fine when you sell tulips; until the tulip becomes the symbol of capitalist speculation and then...all hell breaks loose. Tulipmania! (1637). It was the first recorded mega world-wide financial bubble in the dawning capitalist age, in the then capital of western world : Amsterdam, having become center piece after Cristopher's unique voyage.
It symbolised in its botanical journey the transfer of capitalistic power from Mediterranean world to Atlantic world; imported into United Provinces from original Constantinople to Amsterdam, via Augsburg and Antwerp in 1559!
A bit like today, the Atlantic world now bows to Indian Ocean and PAcific world.
Joan Robinson, UK economist, explained in the 60s how the perennial norm of all capital constructs is Dominant position. The current banker's cabal, its NEW iconic moment under Reaganomics, the NEW capitalistic norm, highlights this in all its raw destructive fury. So much for level playing fields and invisible hands, imaginary Holy Grails alike the now proverbial Snitch!
It wasn't all that long ago that people seriously mistrusted technology and feared science gone wild. Now in a world of diminishing resources it's gone the other way where technology is the new religion. Have we become too trusting? Time will tell.
I hope that someday my children will grow up to be as smart as their phones
Don't be too sure of that. The world is still full of Luddites who seek to protect "jobs."
You mean investment bankers?
A "Luddite" is someone who wishes/seeks to avoid technology, it's got NOTHING to do with "jobs." Technology pretty much relies on the unsustainable, in which case there's a very sane reasoning behind not being to dependent on it ; the Amish are semi-Luddites, and folks like these will be around far longer than the majority of us.
Well, maybe, but you'd never know it by looking at the Amish today. They're definitely NOT thriving.
The ones I know are doing just fine. Glad I'm not one of them for entirely other reasons.
The Amish (and Mennonites and Hutterites and so on) I know are the same as they ever was.
Thriving? Your mileage may be different....
http://www.cracked.com/article_19376_5-scientific-reasons-your-idea-happ...
I am Mennonite.
Which is more like quasi-Luddite;
So we don't mind some "simple" technology like buttons ...
(of the electric variety [and the ones on our shirts too]).
IMO, tech is the new religion because TPTB have reached the end of the line and insist upon something coming along to bail their asses out. Power must be retained!
Watch Frontline tonight on PBS.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/nuclear-aftershocks/
In Nuclear Aftershocks, airing Tuesday, January 17, 2012, at 10 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE correspondent Miles O’Brien travels to three continents to explore the revived debate about the safety of nuclear power, the options for alternative energy sources, and questions about whether a disaster like the one at Fukushima could happen in the United States.
flattrader
Fukushima
Was a MAN MADE disaster,and criminal charges should be brought against ANYONE still using these models of Reactors.
The tsunami was the actor that started the disaster, but it was just a matter of time before they did what they did.
They were outdated, and dangerous, a time bomb waiting for the slimmest of reasons to Melt Down.
We have a few still operational here I believe, they need to taken offline immediately.
They were outdated, old, and dangerous when NEW.I would dare say they had design flaws when GE built them.
Good thing there ain't any near the San Andreas or New Madrid fault lines.
Oopsy! Looks like there's a couple ironically named Dresden 2 and Dresden 3 in Illinois, a couple more in Cordova IL, and 3 in Decatur, Alabama, only 200 miles away.
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/gemk1reactorsinus.pdf
The modern world depends on economic growth to function properly...
No... the BANKERS do... & the world could get along just fine without them...
"modern" world = banksters
Martenson just didn't connect all of the dots.
Well, I don't know about you, but there are few bankers in my world. Fuck the banks.
In the end, they can only invade as far as any individual (or group of individuals) permits them...
Well,
I'd have no problem with them if that were the case, however, as we are all forced to use the currency for transactions and they are able to expand the money supply at will, it makes it pretty damn impossible for an individual not to give over some of their productivity.
As the top bankers ascend into top government positions, advise the government, and are highly involved in the financial affairs of governments, they are able to influence spending of taxpayers money, to borrow from central banks at base rates and to buy government bonds that yield high rates, to accept bailaouts when their industry fails, unlike any other industry I know.
This system fucking stinks. Until we take away these powers 99.9% of us are their slaves.
But I agree, the less interaction with 'their' scheme, the better. Anyone who puts their money into a pension scheme is asking to get arse-raped.
kill all bankers! oh and the lawyers while we are at it!
I think we should follow the Bard"s advice and "The first thing we do, let's kill all the laywers" plenty of time for bankers after that. You didn't see Corzine turn up with other bankers defending him did you?
Entropy, bitchez!
what this article touches on but does not state specifically is that the complexity of civilization impinges deeply on complexity of technological solutions. When civilization was linear technology could be complex. Now that in civilization itself, the social functions, are no longer linear, (man-woman marital/non marital-single parenthood etc., ethnic mix, religious mix, language mix, social class mix, urban population size and transit problems, natural resource constraints), all have become complex. So now technological solutions have to become simpler to cope with civilization's mulitple complexities and internal fracture lines.
Complex societies now need simple technological constructs. We cannot add more sophisticated mass technological complexity to a difficult, complex social, urban and environmental construct.
After studying "sunk-cost" theory and resulting probability, it's not unimaginable to believe we've outstayed our welcome.
Simplicity and decentralization will not suit the
PTB therefore it will be resisted until it is too late.
How can you be taxed, controlled and exploited if you live simply, off grid?
Make your own arrangements folks, the Government is not your friend.
And, "off-grid" means what?
The popular definition has to do with being unconnected to the power grid. This would imply that you have the ability to generate electricity. Which would also mean that you think you can continue to use your electrical/electronic contraptions. Well... perhaps for a while; because, if it really gets that bad then nearly all that eletrical/electronic stuff is going to fail, and it won't be replaced (unless you are ultra-wealthy and then that's not a certainty either).
I was watching "Contagion" and chuckled at how the iPhone, Internet, and the grid in general went on despite the world falling apart. Lousy movie, by the way.
Watch the "Book of Eli." The world's in worse shape than depicted in Mad Max, they even burned all the books. But the damn iPod is still working. Fucking He Larry Us!
Italians developed a grow your own, community based culture after the empire crumbled...
Many of these traditions remain to this day..
I imagine that type of society but with iPads and the net.
Just optimism getting the upper hand...
One major problem of credit expansion has been the creation of artificial resource-dependent needs, that no one really needs, I call it the plastic bag phenomenon. What it does, it offers two perspectives, a hedonic one, simply following anything offered to please onesself and the other one, displaying the extreme contrast of what is available and how fast it is consumed for nothing of real appreciation.
My concern is, we have as society so much followed the hedonic perspective that we now subordinate our evolution to the energy paradigm, devoting endless resources to the more efficient use of resources, completely diverting into hedonism, as we aim to achieve the same useless output with less resource input.
This however only leads us to expect more output from resource efficiency at best maintaining resource consumption levels. Unfortunately, this result is not the sustainable consequence of the extreme display of hedonism.
Our innovation aspiration should at least equally focus on other issues, diverting attention from the consumption of resources and making manking less prone to the hedonic pursuit of resource consumption.
On a meta-level, that is something picked up from a previous article, only non-conformist thinking will manage organic growth.
Any such development would require a different worldview, though. Economic concepts such as competition creates incentives not to share understanding and knowledge, eg on a scope from micro to macro, outperform other in school, in research, as a company (the Apple IP protection best practice), and as nation or hemisphere. For those in favour of extreme imaging, defer Africa from education and thereby create a future with a population size and resource demand not manageable by any by then developed technology leading to more fierce competition aka war.
Just a quick piece of evidence from the top of my head. WHy do you think the Bush family has become protagonists, dominating both the credit expansion cycle and the geo-strategic pursuit of safety of resource availability. It is the plain strategy to maintain the societal will to hedonistic resource consumption and the deafening of voices suggesting ideas for a different path.
the problem in the gulf was the evil indonesian president granting the rapacious murderous bp rights to drill at depths and conditions which had no safety or precedent....bp has had a callous disregard for nature and life - it is a psychopathic organization which should be obliterated....
fukushima suffered from the exact same foul greed and psychopathy where highly flawed steel drums or speres were approved which were ticking time bombs.....and building the plants so close to the ocean was another frat boy stunt to rape the people....
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