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Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

For discussions of events and conditions not necessarily related to Peak Oil.

Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby tmazanec1 » Sat 03 Sep 2016, 15:24:08

claman wrote:vtsnowedin , I wonder what EWS means ?


Early Warning Signs, I believe.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby dohboi » Sat 03 Sep 2016, 15:34:28

T, I'm not surprise that large portions of the country are disgusted with the traditional representatives of the two parties and are ready to look elsewhere. And in a way it's not surprising that many of them would pick someone who presents himself as the 'strong, successful father figure.'

But Drumpf in particular made a good portion of his money specifically screwing poor and lower class people, and, unlike, say, Bill Clinton, he can't exactly claim to have come from hard circumstances and made all his own money.

But the same dipwads also voted in born-with-a-golden-foot-in-his-mouth Dubya, twice, so I guess you're right that I really shouldn't be too surprised that they went for this flashier version. The Donald is, if nothing else, a consummate conman, and he certainly has shown that he knows how to con this segment of the population.

To answer your last question, my local and state 'life' is not doing too bad under mostly democratic control. But everyone knows that everything's pretty well fubar on the federal level on all fronts.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby frankthetank » Sat 03 Sep 2016, 23:18:07

I think the signs are everywhere. I just have no idea how long we can keep riding this plateau..could be days, could be years, could be decades... it isn't going to take much for it all to crumble.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby dohboi » Sat 03 Sep 2016, 23:45:02

"I think the signs are everywhere. I just have no idea how long we can keep riding this plateau..could be days, could be years, could be decades... it isn't going to take much for it all to crumble."

Immemorial quote of the ages.


Hang in there.


none of us really knows what is going down

but whatever it is, I do sincerely hope


that all you assholes make it through ok
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 03 Sep 2016, 23:53:07

frankthetank wrote:I think the signs are everywhere. I just have no idea how long we can keep riding this plateau..could be days, could be years, could be decades... it isn't going to take much for it all to crumble.


My spouse and I were discussing the future over dinner tonight. As a history nut I just finished watching a video about a team who built a family scale Roman bathhouse of the type built around 200 AD. The team used traditional materials as much as they could, right down to the point of roasting limestone to convert it into lime, then soaking it in water to make hydrated lime to add to the sand to make the mortar to assemble the brickwork.

In any case I pointed out that 100 or even 75 years ago in America many masons knew how to roast limestone into lime and make mortar that way because the process had been relatively unchanged for close to 3000 years. Now every mason I have ever met on a building site (four different ones from different companies I can think of off the top of my head) get their mortar as a pre-mix bag of sand and hydrated lime, just add water, of on one occasion buckets of lime and a truckload of sand that they mixed in the correct proportions. The manufacturing of lime in large kilns is today a nearly universal mystery to even the people whose very jobs depend on this 3000 year old technology. Sure getting your mortar pre mixed is very convenient and because of economies of scale very inexpensive. But there is something to be said for at least knowing how to make it from raw materials if you need too. Trowing some lumps of limestone gravel into a pot and heating it up to red hot and keeping it there all day is not exactly a highly technical task. Traditionally the lowest level apprentices would have the job of doing it on any large construction site, roast the limestone all day today, let the pot cool overnight, hydrate the lumps of lime in a separate container the next morning while you reload the pot with more lumps and get it back on the fire all day. You can make the same argument about carpentry as you make about masons, the whole purpose of the apprentice/journeyman/master system was to ensure everyone learned every step of the type of job from the start to finish. Greek carpenters could build you a whole house with not a single nail in it, and so could every carpenter right up until the Steel making crucible invented by Henry Bessemer made iron cheaper than dirt. As we were having dinner the conversation turned to food preservation via canning, salting or smoking. Outside of our own extended family we only could name two families that can their own food.

Take away the grocery store and the big box construction supply chains and we are in a world of pain. Say Uncle Sam manages to just barely maintain the food supply. The farm equipment and delivery equipment are kept working by hook or by crook. How long until the masons run out of bricks and mortar? How long until the carpenters run out of pre cut lumbar and nails? It takes a heck of a lot more than food and water to maintain a working society, but our culture has disassociated itself from the fundamental skills to do very much of anything. All of the things like nails and lime that are end used by the home consumer or the commercial builder have been widely separated from up into some factory, likely on the other side of the ocean from us.

This is not the formula for long term success.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Sun 04 Sep 2016, 00:22:08

I just changed jobs, now driving a concrete agitator truck for a company owned by umpteenth generation Italian concrete/ cement family. The city of Melbourne started where it is because there was a huge abundance of shells on the beaches, which sufficed for lime & allowed for the first infrastructure to be developed. Growing up here, we all learned this history in primary school, so most people have an idea how concrete works.
At my new job, every order is custom made to the specs of the builder, using a batching machine which selects from about 20 different materials to add to the lime, water & sand. Premix bags are only used for small jobs. (I'm in Australia).
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby onlooker » Sun 04 Sep 2016, 05:56:04

but our culture has disassociated itself from the fundamental skills to do very much of anything.

This seems to me a real strong indicator of societal collapse in our time.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby Newfie » Sun 04 Sep 2016, 06:54:19

"Fundamental skills". Hell, from what I see most people can't make pancakes without premix batter. Forget fundamental, many people today are nearly clueless. Sure, they may knock the heck out of income tax forms or be a wiz at gaming code but it stops there. I'll go further, many folks have not the slightest idea of how to think, deductive reasoning, logic. Nearly 100% straight up emotion.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby Subjectivist » Sun 04 Sep 2016, 11:19:05

Newfie wrote:"Fundamental skills". Hell, from what I see most people can't make pancakes without premix batter. Forget fundamental, many people today are nearly clueless. Sure, they may knock the heck out of income tax forms or be a wiz at gaming code but it stops there. I'll go further, many folks have not the slightest idea of how to think, deductive reasoning, logic. Nearly 100% straight up emotion.


Speaking of pancakes, a few days ago I was craving buckwheat pancakes like mama used to make when I was growing up. So I looked for a recipe online and much to my chagrin nearly every one of them starts with a premixed base and just adds flavours like blueberries or chocolate chips. I can remember my mother using flour and baking soda and a couple other powders with eggs and milk but it's hard to find a recipe telling how much of baking soda and flour and something else. The problem is I don't remember what the other powder was, it was a small quantity of something to activate the baking soda.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 04 Sep 2016, 12:22:45

Usually it's both baking powder and baking soda.

This reminds me of a cook book I once saw from the 1800s where they said that they wouldn't bother to include a recipe for bread, since every housewife in the country makes it every day.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby Hawkcreek » Sun 04 Sep 2016, 15:34:48

I believe one sign of collapse is the declining birth rate in developed countries. When people choose to not procreate, whether for economic reasons, or for some subconscious fear that all is not well in the world, it is one of the beginning steps towards collapse, IMHO.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby Subjectivist » Sun 04 Sep 2016, 19:01:36

dohboi wrote:Usually it's both baking powder and baking soda.

This reminds me of a cook book I once saw from the 1800s where they said that they wouldn't bother to include a recipe for bread, since every housewife in the country makes it every day.


Aha! It's Cream of Tartar! Cream of Tartar activates baking soda, the combination was the original formula for Baking Powder.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby Being Frank » Mon 05 Sep 2016, 07:22:17

No one here from Yemen, Syria, or S.Sudan? I suspect they might have a few insights to offer. :-D
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby dts » Mon 05 Sep 2016, 17:33:59

This has all happened before and technology is lost and people have to learn all over again.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby dohboi » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 08:20:39

Back to something like the topic at hand...Here's how NASA thinks collapse is going to happen:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... se/441375/

The researchers used what they termed a Human And Nature DYnamical (HANDY) formula to reach their conclusions. The formula uses factors such as birth rates, resources, and income classes to create a mathematical equation to project outcomes.

The study was sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and headed by the National Science Foundation’s Safa Motesharrei.

For those who think modern society is immune from the problems that brought down ancient civilizations, a “brief overview of collapses demonstrates not only the ubiquity of the phenomenon, but also the extent to which advanced, complex and powerful societies are susceptible to collapse,” the study said.


(Thanks to Hank Roberts at RC for this link and quote.)
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby onlooker » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 09:01:50

Any talk of societal collapse I think would be incomplete without the book by Joseph Tainter "The Collapse of Complex Societies" One of the main premises of the book is that as societies become more complex they incur more expenses and costs derived from that complexity and that complexity begets more complexity creating a feedback loop that produces diminishing returns as costs more and more outpace any benefits from increased complexity
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 09:46:42

Subjectivist wrote:
dohboi wrote:Usually it's both baking powder and baking soda.

This reminds me of a cook book I once saw from the 1800s where they said that they wouldn't bother to include a recipe for bread, since every housewife in the country makes it every day.


Aha! It's Cream of Tartar! Cream of Tartar activates baking soda, the combination was the original formula for Baking Powder.



The best pancakes, like the best bread, are sourdough, no bicarb, no bought yeast, just wild yeast & flour water & egg. If you get the hang of growing a wild yeast mother for sour dough, the same mother will work for pancakes.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 10:24:13

Onlooker,
I've not read the book but I get the concept. Not to belittle the point but it seems kind of obvious.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby dohboi » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 11:12:47

Tainter is a big figure in academic history circles and beyond. Boiling down any complex book to a few sentences is, of course, going to make it sound simple. The thing he did was show how this dynamic played out in a number of civilizations. Certainly, most of the quite smart people inside these societies failed to notice (or at least to effectively counter) these "kind of obvious" dynamics.

But for those who have been following these threads, it should indeed not be news--these are themes we have covered many times before. (This reminds me a bit of some students who complain that Shakespeare's plays are full of cliches, but that is of course because so many people have parroted his well crafted phrases for so many centuries! :) ) We hear more about Jared Diamond, but he got most of his best ideas from Tainter.

He also has some nice lectures online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI

A particularly interesting moment is in the Q&A session at 1:26:30 where he discusses whether the dynamic is absolutely inevitable. He can only come up with a couple instances in all of history where a society managed to avoid it.
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Re: Early Warnging Signs of Societal Collapse

Unread postby onlooker » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 11:38:00

He can only come up with a couple instances in all of history where a society managed to avoid it.

Well isn't that the surprising thing how common this trajectory yet how unavoidable. Striking is the mention of how the elites and leadership group are the last to notice given their vaunted positions and the most reluctant to implement great changes precisely because of their favorable position within the status quo. Any way the pancake talk is also intriguing :-D :-D
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