Even just with the normal variability and demand vs levels of carryover stocks from year to year , it only takes 3 standard bad crop years to get us into a full blown serious global food crisis.
people are sleeping on this as one of the biggest risks, its not a matter of if, its a matter of when.
i think the argument can be made that about 4% of the population are sociopaths and they rise to the top. if we continually liquidated them we could get to a new equilibrium that wasn’t dystopia.
the domesticated people who just folllow and do their bidding like zombies are the source of power unfortunately.
unfortunately the benevolent do not rise to the top or else the good could harness the followers rather than the malevolent using them.
There are some papers about distributing resources so that everyone has enough. we can elevate standard of living while reducing ecological impact. Much of the west is miserable because despite having tons of clothes and TVs and iphones etc… they dont have basic shit like shelter or healthcare or friends. just this hollow life on the treadmill miserable. So you could substantially reduce the GDP of somewhere like america while potentially increasing gross national happiness just by doing something like legalizing shelter , reducing workweeks , having community bbqs and block parties , switching roads for bike lanes etc… Lower total ecological impact but have better life.
then with resources that would go to all the rich first worlders distribute those resources to people in actual material poverty like the ones starving to the point of permanent stunting.
Then if we continue with womens rights and birth control we can taper off the human population to sustainable levels over the next 200 years without requiring draconian measures. we just have to make it past the next few hundred and come out the other side in a good place.
We dont have the top down global coordination to do this so we will just crash this train and have to pick up from degraded afterfuture. best to start making small scale lifeboat communitiies to practice this stuff
i think about these things quite a bit.
Im more interested in building ones that can exist within our current system that allow people to flourish while simultaneously removing power from the incumbent system, in a way that will produce better outcomes for the populations within during the decline/collapse.
Its worth it to start at a human and tribal scale then scale up from there and iterate.
the top down models are failures best to let them fail and hasten that process while carving out some refugia that provide standdard of living for participants in them while establishing “best practices” that could be rapidly franchised out as more people want to exit the system as much as possible.
one of the problems people dont want to talk about is people abdicating personal responsibility and societal coordination to sociopaths out of sheer laziness and apathy. Nothing good works unless people want it. and people seem to be willling to trade any amount of freedom or justice or even money away to avoid the tiniest bit of inconvenience in the moment.
Best thing to do is hunt down other people that want to build alternatives now and start working with those people , fuck everyone else.
absolutely standard of living is severely restrained by laws that actively block humans from solving their problems.
Just think about it like this. for the cost of 1 years california minimum wage in materials and using my own labor i could build a permanent house that is small but completely adequate for me to last the rest of my life sheltered never again paying rent. The reason people cant do that is simply its illegal.
then think about zoning , the reason people even need cars and all the HUGE expenses associated with that is because its illegal to put stores , cafes, multi service gov offices, and other things where people need them where the people live .
our society is batshit crazy and the thing that drives me insane about this personally , when you talk to any yuppie about this they will absolutely irrationally freak out as if anything changing around the way things are is an existential threat. the reaction to the ideas like this are so extreme, to them it is inconceivable, and i dont understand what the origin of this particular mental blockage and emotional reaction is to them.
HOWEVER , another deeper issue is economic rent-seeking where people extract wealth in a way that is negative to standard of living, See georgism / geoism/ progress and poverty book to understand. there are types of economic activity that are creating more pies and selling them which generally ends up with more pie and cheaper for everyone, and then there is rent seeeking which is taking one pie, taking control of it then selling microslices to the highest bidders while using some profits to lobby making laws that say its illegal for pie makers to compete by producing more pies.
its good that the dems are at least trying to come up with something and recognize the working class matter but its too little too late. the dems heads are so far up their owns asses i don’t see them managing to escape their elite bubble and ideological straight jackets anytime soon until enough of these neoliberal dinosaurs die off.
wouldnt surprise me if we have to go through full civil war with fascists first. and then the most likely outcome isnt reform its just a pendulum swing to authoritarian leftism rather than reason.
Its just history . IF you dont think history is rife with polycrisis you haven’t read much history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis
if you have money you can just buy black market methadone or opiates on current dark net . you could plant opium poppies and make laudanum then wean yourself. if it was me i would stockpile and grow the poppies, then be ready to be miserable for a year as you ride the edge of misery until you can quit and renormalize. you can use kratom but its also addictive and no better than just being opiate addict. do all the things, most importantly accelerate your detox as much as you can so you can handle it . save as much of your wafers as you can each dose and use it to taper if they cut you off
Depends on what you will be using the knife for and how much your budget is? i wouldn’t go thicker than 3/16th, ive found all that does is increase weight and make them less able to slice because the thickness gets in the way, and if you fuck up a knife that thick its because you are using the wrong tool for the job.
Some stunning numbers
Results We analyzed 3 392 364 deaths among the full US population aged 25-44 years from 1999 to 2023. Mortality increases across most causes of death produced substantial excess deaths compared with extrapolations of pre-2011 trends (Figure). Early adult excess mortality was 34.6% higher than expected in 2019 and then further accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, all-cause excess mortality was nearly 3 times what it had been in 2019 (116.2 vs 41.7 deaths per 100 000 population). In 2023, excess mortality decreased, but only to approximately midway between its 2019 and 2021 levels (79.1 deaths per 100 000 population). As a result, early adult mortality was 70.0% higher in 2023 than it would have been had pre-2011 trends continued, reflecting 71 124 excess deaths (Table).
The 5 causes of death that collectively accounted for almost three-quarters of the early adult excess mortality in 2023 were drug poisoning (31.8% of excess mortality), the residual natural-cause category (16.0%), transport-related deaths (14.1%), alcohol-related deaths (8.5%), and homicide (8.2%). Additionally, the combined contribution of cardiometabolic conditions, including circulatory and endocrine, metabolic, and nutritional, was substantial (9.2%).
I noticed crucible steel just went bankrupt again. They made the best particle metallurgy steel for knives so if anyone wants that ultimate survival knife better buy up that 3V and Magnacut quick while bars are still floating around. Last time crucible went bankrupt I made some money hoarding some new old stock carbon V knives which was just coldsteels marketing name for a decent but primitive Sharon steel that was just a small chromium and vanadium addition to 1095. Hopefully European company that does advanced steels will buy crucible and start it up again or take on the production of advanced formulas that depend on particle metallurgy in their own plants. Though I suspect the steel industry in Europe is going to be struggling equally or moreso if they don’t have economic energy supply.
If we lose this third generation particle metallurgy tech it will be interesting example of collapse . I had thought about just buying these steels by the ton in case of such a scenario and becoming the knife baron but it hit out of nowhere, makes more sense than hoarding gold in a crazy collapse scenario. The knife business is just a drop in the bucket so the industry won’t operate around making these things available to consumers, the fancy steel is just a side thing they do, but the meat and potatoes of their business is for automotive and other industrial applications .
China doesn’t have replacement for this as far as I know. So if USA and Europe lose the tech it’s just a lower level of complexity… if the price for the auctioning in bankruptcy goes low enough it could make sense to purchase crucible just for the specialty metal production and you would have some semi monopoly , if bohler uddelholm also succumbs to the European deindustrialization.
Worst case scenario I think we will still have 14C28N available which is a decent formula that works as a regular ingot steel, though it doesn’t have any vanadium or niobium carbides so it tops out in wear resistance earlier than the good CPM grades.
lots of the world doesnt even have the option for insurance. if anything most of the world is still catching up to the usa in the amount of insurance
it sucks if you live near these places because its polluting the fuck out of the environment every time they flood
Marxists have a horrific track record on the environment.
A nature based way of living is as alien to Marxists as it is to capitalist societies, often moreso.
Russia has some interesting thermal mass multi use oven/heater/bed combinations
See the ushanka show on YouTube
I wish they published more of the actual data they are working with . I guess i have to research which company has largest lowest cost reserves in politically stable areas and make a far OTM call LEAPS bet to be ready for summer next year. Hedging saved my financial viability in the last big inflation, fertilizer stocks paid for my food. so long as the financial system stays together .
This will likely hit in the apex of this current record breaking everything bubble , seems like the best candidate to pop the bubble.
you just described what you did in your post
nonsense. Link sources to demonstrate you aren’t just making stuff up
an extraordinary streak of 415 days above previous highs and we just crossed back to the previous year level
whats the terrible take? im just describing society