Quote from: comrade simba on Jan 19, 2025, 04:49 PMThere will be a certain percentage of homeless that aren't permanently crippled by drug use and truly horrid upbringing - the second generation homeless people I have come across might be okay for picking fruit. Not too far a cry from collecting cans. (groan)

QuoteYou make a very important point about the creation of a new level of underclass, 2^nd Generation homeless, the children of formerly working or middle class who are growing up bouncing through failing schools as their parents are bounced from one temporary housing situation to the next.  Similar of course to kids in the foster care system who also get bounced from one foster family to the next who have the additional issues with substandard foster parents who often do that just for the money they get from the state to care for kids.  They are not much different from people who run the many small Assisted Care Living homes for old folks.  In fact the people who ran the Gulag that I was stuck in for 7 months started before that raising foster kids and did well financially at both endeavors, with a nice retirement home in Mexico they spend a few months a year at while they leave an older woman manager running the ACL they pay $25/hr running the place with her sociopathic husband.

However, you really have to broaden it, because schools are failing so broadly across the country that even if parents haven't actually gone homeless, we have a generation growing up now where more than 50% of the kids are getting virtually no education who also have virtually no hope of getting a decent job when they hit 18 and get kicked out of the education system with a piece of paper that says nothing more than they successfully survived being warehoused in a public school for 13 years.
 

QuoteI built a campervan out of a Promaster for my retirement gift to myself and the wife and I travel all over the country in between visiting the furniture in Klamath-Falls Oregon. I see mile after mile of grievously mismanaged pasture everywhere we go. Have you read any of Joel Salatin's cattle raising books/literature?  I'm betting at least half the acreage irrigated for hay destined for feedlots would be more profitable for grass fed beef, and use a 1/4 of the water, zero fertilizer/herbicide, and a comparatively minuscule amount of fuel. And nothing begs goats like the strip between roadway and fence row on any highway in america. Fuck john deer tractor sales. "Me and Julio runnin goats down the median"

I'm not knowledgeable in the area of permaculture and sustainable agriculture methods and haven't read the canon of books by guys like Salatin that Doomsteaders use as a Bible settng up their Doomsteads.  I did interview quite a few of them though over the years, so I picked up a little knowledge from my discussions with them.

There's no doubt that land use has been thoroughly mismanaged for the whole trip down the collapse highway of the automobile culture.  You can go back to the famous line from Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", Pave Paradise & put up a Parking Lot.  Fabulous Ag land all over the country has fallen to strip malls, subdivisions and urban sprawl over the last 50 years, and reclaiming it will be  an essential aspect of survival for any people who survive the Zero Point of collapse.  However, all that asphalt has poisoned a lot of the land, and even just ripping it up is going to take generations.  I don't think it will be quite as simple as herding goats down the median of the Interstate Highways.

RE