Collapse Cafe 2024

[RE]

The 1st broadcast of the Collapse Cafe, a solo effort since this website is loaded with a bunch of panty waists.

Enjoy.  Only 20 minutes.

RE

[RE]

18 views and 3 comments already on my New Year's video!      I'm still a Superstar of Collapse!

RE

[TDoS]

Interesting that the folks of yore who would talk on these things are making excuses. "I know there is going to be a major crash." Good thing you then predicated it with 20 years this time, you appeared pretty pessimistic just a couple days ago thinking 2024 might be the year. Why the sudden shift in just a few days? Rampant optimism! Or just learning from past missteps in the prediction game?

You can't blame others for not wanting to stick their necks out. Again. It is likely that the kind of reaction they received when folks found out they were end of worlders last time was less than positive. Maybe they have decided to feel a little optimism, when peak oil 2005 was a bust, the unexpected speed of recovery from 2008 Great Recession, Yellowstone didn't explode, the Mayan calendar thing was a dud and Planet X was bubcuss, Hoover dam lacking water suddenly became Hoover dam with water, peak oil 2018 happened and no one noticed, most folks survived Covid, and then the Fed looks to have achieved a semi-soft landing for the economy? I mean, Holy Cow, other than a war in Europe right now and the whole of South America wanting in on the American economy, wages and whatnot, doomy winds appear to be meager.

Maybe China could be configured...again...into becoming toast...since it didn't last time...and that could be something to build a good doom scenario around? They've got problems with the US trying to unravel globalization and the US signing that legislation to make it an EV powerhouse to compete with them, rather than try and bring them into the global fold?

[Tonyprep]

Yes, the apparent lack of detrimental impact of post peak crude oil production is confusing. It may be partly due to all liquids (including NGL) production continuing to increase and partly due to the fact that economic activity is still below 2019, due to COVID lockdowns in 2020 and later. The lack of crude oil growth may start to be noticeable this year.

[Tonyprep]

It might be nice to blame someone, or somefew, for our polycrisis but it really is no-one's fault. Homo sapiens is acting like a species, and so should be expected. The ability to access fossil fuels has accelerated the environmental destruction and perhaps made it unrecoverable. Modernity could never have been made sustainable because it has to consume non-renewable resources and end up consuming renewable resources beyond their renewal rates. And so it was inevitable that environmental damage would eventually reach a level that couldn't be assimilated by nature. Far all of these reasons, modernity, with 8 billion people and a decimated wildlife population, couldn't and can't be made sustainable.

Be thankful that the great acceleration has given those alive today the possible opportunity to witness the early stages of collapse.

[K-Dog]

It might be nice to blame someone, or somefew, for our polycrisis but it really is no-one's fault. Homo sapiens is acting like a species, and so should be expected. The ability to access fossil fuels has accelerated the environmental destruction and perhaps made it unrecoverable.

Nature will recover fine and something akin to buffalo will once again plod the prairie at a future time.  Nature recovers, humans will not. 

In time another arrogant biped may evolve and arrogantly claim they are god's shadow like we did.

In the meantime.

Prepping stuff like that.  Activities that are perhaps a wank.  But whatever, prepping is certainly an indifferent activity that harms others no more or less than what most humans do most of the time.  A moral neutral.  Some people are into wood turning.  Another moral equivalent.

Does the Diner have any purpose?

I say it does.

Remember when the bullshit (advice spawned by a bullshitter) was to put all your eggs in a floating basket.

Water-world.  Avoid collapse by taking to the seven seas in a boat that can't call on a friendly port for food and supplies, and which if it did, would have no money to spend.  Because collapse means among other things, no fucking money or law on the high seas.

Take to a boat with no more than a couple months food and no way to get more of it except what you catch.

Escaping collapse in a sail boat is a not so poor man's logical equivalent of moving to Mars to escape collapse.  You get air with a boat, but pirates stealing your food and raping the women after they kill you, hardly makes having air to breath on the boat an improvement.

The Diner knows we have been fools, and we have learned.  We have seen the collapse charlatans, and we know more of them are coming to take advantage of the fears of newbie doomers.  As they have done before.

To counter the charlatans we have a modicum of wisdom to share.  And sometimes calling bullshit is fun.

[RE]

It might be nice to blame someone, or somefew, for our polycrisis but it really is no-one's fault.

Blaming everyone is blaming no one.

We have a society where a few people have the power to make decisions which all people are stuck with.  If the Captain of the Titanic reads the weather charts wrong or hits the wrong lever on the boat and sends it careening into an iceberg, it's the Captains fault when the boat sinks.  It's not the fault of the passengers because they bought a ticket on that boat.  It's not even the fault of engineer who was running the engine.  That so many died IS the fault of the designer of the boat, who didn't equip it with enough lifeboats for everyone.

You can assign blame for the way our society was engineered, because those decisions were made by a very few people who had the power and stood the most to gain by engineering the build out the way they did.  The consequences were known, just as the consequences of smoking were known by the tobacco industry when they designed ad campaigns to get as many people addicted to smoking as they did.  Fault was assigned and damages assessed.  Not that money can buy back anybody's life of course.

No amount of damages can pay for what has been done to the environment, and most of the main people who put us on this path are dead anyhow.  Nevertheless, there are still people at the top profiting from perpetuating the model and lying about the consequences.  They most certainly can be held accountable for this and judgements can be rendered against them and damages assessed.

Not easy to do of course, because the very same people own the courts and the political system  That unfortunate reality doesn't make them any less guilty though.

RE

[RE]

Remember when the bullshit (advice spawned by a bullshitter) was to put all your eggs in a floating basket.

I believe you are referring to the "Sea Gypsy", Ray Jason who I interviwed a couple of times and is still out there blogging about a dystopian future world of obscenely rich rulers and a slave class fed on bug protein, with his solution of free people living on sailboats, as he has done for the last 30 years or so.

http://theseagypsyphilosopher.blogspot.com/

We referred to this whole idea as "Seasteading" which actually has captured the imagination of many people of the Libertarian ilk who long for a place free of Goobermint, which they want to set up in International Waters.  You can read all about that here:

https://free-cities.org/seasteading-the-movement-history-and-perspectives/



Both are nice but wholly unrealistic fantasies, although like with owning an RV as insurance against homelessness, if you can afford one a sailboat big enough to live on and capable of blue water voyaging is a nice insurance policy for leaving a failing country and going somewhere else that isn't quite so bad.  However, when you get anywhere, you're still going to need a passport and visa and jump through immigration hoops if you want to make it permanent.

You also need some sort of income, in most cases yachties who live this way are wealthy enough to have passive income or are retirees collecting pensions and social security.  Ray financed his sailing writing for the sailing magazines and when he was younger street performing as a juggler.  Actually living this way without a steady income of some type is close to impossible.  There are fees at every marina and customs fees to be paid, and these boats take a lot of maintenance to keep going.

Once collapse progresses far enough, finding places to stop and provision up where you won't be robbed or killed for your boat will become increasingly difficult, and out at sea you're very vulnerable to small pirates with offshore speedboats like the drug runners use.  So as a long term solution it's not very realistic.

For right now though, you could sail pretty safely from Alaska to Hawaii to New Zealand for provisioning, and find nice quiet coves and lagoons in the society islands away from people and pretend you're  Robinson Crusoe for a while.

RE

[18hammers]

The 1st broadcast of the Collapse Cafe, a solo effort since this website is loaded with a bunch of panty waists.

Enjoy.  Only 20 minutes.

RE

I have never really cared about discussing  collapse as such, as a topic. Really more interested in  hearing about how others are adjusting and making their lives more durable and the lessons learned. People must learn that their own personal collapse (age related, health related, monetary related ) in what ever form that takes is what they need to plan for and by default this will leave them in a better position for any other occurring event.

[K-Dog]

I was actually thinking of he who will not be named.  He who's family trips to a collapsing Soviet Union turned him into an 'expert' on collapse.  In the same way, if I jerk off enough can I get the experience to be a sex therapist?  I was actually thinking of he who expects all whom he meets to contribute lavishly to his greatness, prostrate themselves as unworthy supplicants on the ground, and kiss his feet.

The guy who thankfully has a hockey player with the  same so he is not thrust in your face the way he used to be every time you did a search for collapse.

I am NOT trying to convince large numbers of people to abandon their lives ashore and adopt the full-time cruising lifestyle. Instead, my goal is to inspire those who are already living aboard their sailboats. My hope is that I can encourage them to band together with other like-minded sailors who believe that society-wrecking catastrophes might lie just below tomorrow's horizon. <-- Ray

Ray is an 'exceptional' man who from an economic point of view has only had to worry about himself.  Ray has been able to earn when he need pay for boat supplies or he has had other means.  Ray has been able to quit and walk away when he wants to.

'Ordinary' men like myself, live lives where others depend on them.  Their obligations and understandings of life are different than from my point of view.

I do not find Ray to be a fountain of wisdom.  I consider him to be an average libertarian conservative.  But Ray does not like OTHER conservative types of the same ilk, claim to be more than he actually is. I have not read many of his essays, if I read more of them I might have objections to some of his 'philosophy', but I give Ray the benefit of the doubt. 

The Sea Gypsy.

I never had a problem with the sea gypsy. If I were him, surviving on the seas in a collapsing world would make sense.  A lifetime of experience and knowing where to go makes a bit of difference.

At sea one needs a destination.  Always.  In collapse there will be no destination.  Everywhere you go there will be hunger.  Hunger which you as a sea-gypsy will ignore after you lament about the horrors sufficiently.

Then you sail away.  Magic cans of spinach appear to satiate your hunger.  This does not impress me.

[K-Dog]

The 1st broadcast of the Collapse Cafe, a solo effort since this website is loaded with a bunch of panty waists.

Enjoy.  Only 20 minutes.

RE

I have never really cared about discussing  collapse as such, as a topic. Really more interested in  hearing about how others are adjusting and making their lives more durable and the lessons learned. People must learn that their own personal collapse (age related, health related, monetary related ) in what ever form that takes is what they need to plan for and by default this will leave them in a better position for any other occurring event.

People must learn that their own personal collapse (age related, health related, monetary related ) in what ever form that takes is what they need to plan for and by default this will leave them in a better position for any other occurring event.

Exactly Right!

[RE]

Ray is an 'exceptional' man who from an economic point of view has only had to worry about himself.  Ray has been able to earn when he need pay for boat supplies or he has had other means.  Ray has been able to quit and walk away when he wants to.

All true, and single men do compose the majority of people who pursue the Yachty lifestyle.  However, there are quite a few couples who do it, both same sex and opposite.  I met several lezzie couples during my brief vacation yachting in the Greek islands one summer in the 80s.  I also met 1 family with 3 girls, age 6, 9 and 11, but they also were only doing it for the summer.  Periodically if you read Cruising World (the magazine for Yachties), they feature a family who does it as lifestyle, homeschooling the kids aboard while circling the globe.  Those deals usually take a couple of years while they do a circumnavigation.

Over the last 50 years or so, it's been possible to do this in reasonable safety, although a few Yachties have been kidnapped and held for ransom over the years.  Usually these folks did their cruising in dicey areas in SE Asia or around the coast of Africa.  The Mediterranean, Bahamas and Pacific Islands for the most part pretty safe.

Yachty families really into it let their kids go off on their own quite young to adventure this way.  Laura Dekker started her solo circumnavigation at age 14 and finished it at age 16.  That's remarkable independence and says a lot about the lifestyle for raising kids.

RE

[TDoS]

Yes, the apparent lack of detrimental impact of post peak crude oil production is confusing. It may be partly due to all liquids (including NGL) production continuing to increase and partly due to the fact that economic activity is still below 2019, due to COVID lockdowns in 2020 and later. The lack of crude oil growth may start to be noticeable this year.

Could be, but liquids aren't crude. Butane and propane and ethane just aren't something you jam into your internal combustion engine in any real volumes. If we were building a bunch of propane and butane powered cars it might be something to think about, but so far humans have leaned more towards EVs.

[TDoS]

Far all of these reasons, modernity, with 8 billion people and a decimated wildlife population, couldn't and can't be made sustainable.

Yup. Turns out being a biped lizard with big claws and teeth works for millions of years as an apex predator, and silly little biped monkeys thinking sentience was a big deal turn out to be no smarter than a family of cockroaches trapped in a bucket with 5# of sugar...happily enjoying themselves until....

Be thankful that the great acceleration has given those alive today the possible opportunity to witness the early stages of collapse.

Thankful! Yes! That is better than optimistic...be THANKFUL that we didn't die back in the 80's when we were supposed to, or during the peak oils of the late 20th or early 21st century, or during the Chinese economy collapse a decade ago, or ongoing climate continuing to change, or the Cold War, or the Mayan Calendar or Yellowstone exploding...we should be grateful. That we made it through like everyone else, and are far closer to dying in our sleep than becoming MZB fodder.

[TDoS]

The Sea Gypsy.

So...the blog doesn't exist anymore? I thought you were talking about Orlov most of the time during the post.