[Narz]

Yeah, I have problems with all this "productivity" crap.

If we are so damn "productive" why are we working 50+ hours a week?

How hard to the Amish work?

I know we share different view points, so if you can share mine for a bit.....

Think of a farmer with a wife and two kids. He needs to produce something on the order of 7,000 calories of edible food, plus wood to heat his house, plus maintenance on the house. If he has draft animals then he needs to produce their intake also. This is productivity. Ditto for a fisherman. When they have enough surplus they can sell or trade.

It's basic survival. I think alot of people on peakoil glamorize it. And yet they stay online & don't go off & join the Amish so what gives?

If you're holding your breathe waiting for people to voluntarily go back to the 1800's you may want to reconsider.

A cobbler needs to produce enough value added that the farmers in his vicinity will "pay" him in gold, dollars, or wheat, for his services.

I personally like being able to trade for books, clothing, etc. with people I've never met. I like playing board games made in German. Perhaps they could've been designed & sold in ancient times but I never would've heard of them.

INow think of a city dweller who is working at a health insurance company filing forms or administering contracts. Or think of a DHS worker scanning you at the airport, or a lawyer prosecuting a libel case, or etc. Their "productivity" is greatly removed from the daily needs. That kind of work can only exist in highly organized cultures. You don't find a lot of health care program administrators in the bush.

I agree most jobs & most "productivity" is neutral at best & toxic for both worker, client & world. I also agree they wouldn't be needed in "the bush" but who wants to live in the bush. Noone posting here to be sure.

But not all jobs are shit. Games, movies, books, art. These things may not be necessities like food & water but they do help make life tolerable.

I work a lot with bureaucratic organizations and have had the opportunity to do maintenance audits on their productivity. The audits were done against an established industrial scoring mechanism to evaluate the organizations efficiency. The score ranges from something like 20% productive (even a broke clock is right twice a day) to 65% productive (gotta take brakes, fill out forms, do training.) It's been a long time ago so those are rough numbers. My clients inevitably came up at the 20% figure. What's more, despite much chest beating and ballyhooing, NOTHING CHANGED.

At least one chap who worked on these audits with me is now in charge of one of these organizations. He is a good and honorable man, very energetic....and NOTHING CHANGED.

The point of work in our society has nothing to do with productivity, it is all about finding a way to keep people occupied in something that they think is meaningful, even if it is not.

I agree with most of that. Same reason kiddies are in school, kept out of the way so they can become good worker bees.

That said, this is all the more reason I'm not as worrying about peakoil as I used to be. Society is so wasteful, people are so busy on frivolous & useless stuff. Trillions of killowatts are being burned right now keeping offices lit up, furnaces burns out of control in some buildings, leaving tenants to leave the windows cracked even in the dead of winter, people leave their cars & trucks idling. There's so much waste. Even if fossil fuel supplies dropped 20% we could just reduce half our waste & putter forward... maybe with a little more motivation.

IOur culture has no rational response to our already extraordinary productive (brought to you through the use of non-renewable fossil fuels.) On the one hand we whine "there are too few jobs." But then we complain about government spending and fuss that we need to both be more "productive" and that we need to raise the retirement age. Really? Raise the retirement age? Wouldn't that just make the unemployment situation worse? Of course it would, our response is not rational. In the end it really doesn't matter, the fossil fuel glut will eventually come to an end, and with it our ludicrous life style.

Once in a while I'd like to hear someone say "We don't have too few jobs, we have too many people."

I agree, overpopulation is the real problem.

If one chases this line of investigation far enough you eventually come to ask the question Why do we NEED people? What is humanity trying to accomplish? That leads us to another place of inquiry altogether which has been discussed here....

the-entropy-thread-merged-t19059-400.html

I don't think humanity is thinking about it. People eat, they screw carelessly, making babies. Some of them climb up into mountains & renounce it all & become monks. Not a day goes by that I don't envy monks in their hermitages, away from the maddening world, noise, unconsciousness, crazy women, crazy friends, needy people everywhere, hungry ghosts.

Yet here I am, here we are. Cities could be so much greater if anyone gave a damn. Humanity could be.

So unlike many I'm not praying for the dieoff, for nature to hit the reset button & the homesteaders will survive & dance on the graves of the sheeple by candlelight. Not necessarily saying this is you... shoot I might dance on certain graves by candlelight & don't think I haven't romanticized the past either. Medieval carnivals/fairs always seemed so fun, the hustle & bustle & aliveness of the streets. But it was an ugly, ignorant world as well. I certainly wouldn't trade my life for one in any other time, though I'd certainly visit.

My apologies if I come across as obtuse. I have some ideas that are far from mainstream and which challenge our basic principles. While I think they are correct, they are very difficult to describe in such an abbreviated venue. And I'm not about to write a book even I would not read.

Best wishes.

Best wishes to you. I don't mean to come off as obtuse either, just sharing what I think.

[Narz]

That's too bad. You should at least dabble in DIY, even a tiny bit gives one a sense of empowerment, helps unplug your mind from the Matrix. Maybe if you did that you wouldn't have such a skewed view of self-sufficiency.

I agree I enjoy doing certain things myself, from making kim-chi to kombucha, I don't have much of a green thumb though. If I had to be a bumpkin I'd probably prefer raising animals to plants.

I think my view of self-sufficiency is correct though. Self-sufficiency simply can't compete with interdependence. It's a hobby & it will remain one unless you bomb ourselves back to the stoneage. And as soon as we the first tribes will start to try to make contact with other tribes to set up trade to rebuild the world.

[Narz]

I find living or working in the city doable. Living AND working in the city is NOT, much to my surprise.

We are now working part time, half in the city, half on the boat in a small marina. It is not unusual to see several bald eagles in a day. That exposure to nature is somehow a requirement for my soul. Full time in the city was just terribly depressing.

Yet I know others who find it invigorating. Gracie Burns said, "I love Nature, as long as it stays in its place, outside my window."

I don't agree with Ms. Burns. Cities could be beautiful though. We could have a hanging gardens of Babylon on every roof (fed by graywater). Cars banned in half the city streets. Or electric cars only. There's no reason cities have to be as ugly & dirty as they are.

[Newfie]

There's no reason cities have to be as ugly & dirty as they are.

There is, humans are ugly and dirty animals; as are chickens, pigs, and cows....when kept in over crowded coops and not allowed to range freely.

[Narz]

It seems in the heart of every doomer is at least a little misanthropy.

I'm not a filthy animal. As long as I have at least 15'x15' to myself and somewhere to bathe.

[Loki]

It seems in the heart of every doomer is at least a little misanthropy.

You need to stop projecting.

Newfie was talking about keeping animals in unnatural, confined conditions. Unconfined, hogs, chickens, cows, etc. will roam and won't mess their nest. Confined, they have no choice.

Could, would, should. Irrelevant. Cities are what they are, and what they've always been. Battery hen cages.

[Narz]

It seems in the heart of every doomer is at least a little misanthropy.

You need to stop projecting.

Who's projecting. I'm taking him at his word. Humans are pigs. At least a step up from Montequest's yeast.

Newfie was talking about keeping animals in unnatural, confined conditions. Unconfined, hogs, chickens, cows, etc. will roam and won't mess their nest. Confined, they have no choice.

We're all domesticated. Deal with it.

Could, would, should. Irrelevant. Cities are what they are, and what they've always been. Battery hen cages.

Cities rule the world. I don't think peakoil.com is running out of a barn.

You're typing in your little box in your home (or maybe you're supposed to be working right now, who knows), I'm typing in mine. There are trees outside my window. The buildings are just a little bit bigger & I don't need a car. All this disdain for cities seems emotionally driven.

@Pstarr, that is one strange picture.

[Quinny]

I remember reading a book 'Entropy a new world view' think it was Jeremy Rifkin, where in it he puts forward a theory about how the bigger the reaction the more waste. He expands this to cover human social interactions attempting to explain how large cities produce more social waste than smaller communities. It struck a chord with me.

[Narz]

What is social waste?

[Newfie]

What is social waste?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_Kills_Landfill

[Newfie]

Narz,

Clearly we are talking past one another. To my ear you come across as a denier, one who refuses to see the obvious truth due to some ingrained bias. I'm pretty damn sure you see yourself differently from that. I suppose you hold a similar view of me.

It's a pity.

It's also curious how such divergent and strongly held opinions develop, especially when we seem to agree that population is a fundamental problem.

It's always tough finding ways to close such gaps.

[Newfie]

@Pstarr, that is one strange picture.

The point of my post and picture I (believe?) was to agree with you. I have lived in the city, the country, the suburbs and small towns. The most filth I have ever seen is in very rural very poor places, back-country and small towns. People dump and crap into streams. They live in isolation, away from 'prying eyes' and get away with all sorts of atrocities.

The suburbs and cities will never decline like that. Dense populations, policing tends to even out the worst human instincts. Folks will under pressure clean up after their neighbors just to avoid the stench and unsightliness. Even in a collapse, most sewage will continue to be carried away by gravity.

Some day I hope to visit this planet you live on.

Sent from center city Philadelphia.

Yes, folks can be pigs in the country, and in the city. I too have seen too much of both types. But my personal observations are diametrically opposed to yours. One simple example, near our boat, downstream of Philly, is a small park which has, what our neighbors have dubbed, bottle cap beach. The beach is completely covered with nothing butt bottle caps, many deep. Barrels and barrels of 'me. When we go for a walk we always end up bring, lugging back, trash bags full of plastic trash we put into the recycling dumpster at the parking lot.

You must live UP stream!

[Loki]

@Pstarr, that is one strange picture.

The point of my post and picture I (believe?) was to agree with you. I have lived in the city, the country, the suburbs and small towns. The most filth I have ever seen is in very rural very poor places, back-country and small towns. People dump and crap into streams. They live in isolation, away from 'prying eyes' and get away with all sorts of atrocities.

The suburbs and cities will never decline like that. Dense populations, policing tends to even out the worst human instincts. Folks will under pressure clean up after their neighbors just to avoid the stench and unsightliness. Even in a collapse, most sewage will continue to be carried away by gravity.

Some day I hope to visit this planet you live on.

Sent from center city Philadelphia.

My strongest memory of my one and only visit to San Francisco was the overwhelming stench of urine (and lots of excellent Chinese food). It was smog in LA. And horrible, soul-destroying sprawl in Houston. Some cities were OK, lived in Vancouver, BC, for a year, crazy stupid traffic, but overall not a bad place. Seattle is adequate. Lived in London for a few months, struck me as massively overblown but fun in small doses. Ditto Tokyo and Rome. Sydney seemed OK, but Melbourne was more to my taste. Tried to hitchhike to Paris, but no one would pick me up and I ran out of money.

Portland is good as cities go, but even Portlandia has its problems. I planted/maintained street trees in Portland full time for 2-1/2 years. Spent lots of time working in parking strips, can't count the number of times I stepped in dog shit, has to be in the dozens if not hundreds (parking strips are urban dog owners' favorite place to let Scruffy take a dump). More than one dog owner let Scruffy piss on my tree irrigation equipment while I was there, currently handling it. Found several used needles. Found tree watering bags stuffed with garbage on a regular basis.

And Trimet buses smell like piss. Brings me back to the Golden Gate every time I ride one.

I lived in the city for 15+ years. Far too long. There are positives to city life, and it suits some folks, but best move I ever made was out of town.

[Loki]

Newfie, Loki, those bottlecaps are the accumulated mess of thousands of individuals collected by the tide or sand or something. I can show you backyards that have 1,000x the refuse from a single household, accumulated over generations . . . a lot dirtier and polluting than a steel bottle cap. You need to get out.

Huh?

Guess where Superfund sites are concentrated in Oregon. You won a lollipop if you guessed the Portland Metro area. I doubt this is unique to Oregon. Oh, and did ya know that every time there's a heavy rain in Portland, raw sewage flows into the river? Luckily it hardly ever rains in Oregon.

My experience in rural Oregon is nowhere near your's with rural California. But maybe northern Cali is a cesspool compared to rural Oregon. Or you need to find better friends.

[Loki]

Here's what it looks like when cities experience temporary disruptions in garbage exports to the country:



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/world ... d=all&_r=0

This is in Europe, where they supposedly have their urban situation sorted.