Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Explore a hypothetical with me

so sorry for being honest on a internet thread. i return the programming to the original poster.

sorry for disrupting the status quo.

BMT: cost, my friend. Cost.

It will simply cost much more to move things and people. How- pray tell- does our economy absorb THAT one, when we can't even manage things in times of cheap energy and (therefore) goods?

I'm not advocating for giant government. I'm so sick of government I could puke. But I'm also not seeing our current free market system as a clear way forward either. Wealth concentrates; in theory, it's then used to capitalize business ventures and viol�, we get to work for those ventures or make an entrepreneurial play off of them (like me making parts for a manufacturing company).

But if you grant my hypothesis of a massive recession/depression... Does that wealth un-concentrate? I'm not so sure.

BTW, there's other converging "doom" factors, from dropping aquafirs to climate change (yep) to collapsing fisheries and so on. Ever killed a bird with a shotgun and wondered upon dissection how those 3-4 pellets killed it so convincingly when none were really lethal? Cumulative effect. It's a force multiplier.

All in all I do believe that my scenario is quite likely.

Hawk, he is much easier to take this way, believe me.

Its like talking to my daughter. She wants to test for her black belt. Fine, pay the $450 fee from your own earnings.

Her initial response was worry about making the money in time. She was soooooo concerned, she kept asking me to solve the problem. I refused. Solve it by working. So she figured out a way to get business (babysitting).

Once shown the power of her own initiative to selve her own problem, she was able to handle it.

This Thread is just a bigger problem that humanity will have to work on. When government decides a problem is Too Big for the people--it is wrong.

BTW-one aspect of this that you do not address--YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.

So am I.

So is Gus.

Failure to recognize death as natural, skews the debate. Here, in your problem, PEOPLE WILL DIE. That is the worlds only unchangeable fact.

BMT

And I NEVER "toggle", trust me!

But when nobody can pay a babysitter, then she can't take those lessons, and the instructor loses her and her peers, and then goes out of business. Nobody takes over the lease on the building, which means the strip mall is now running at a loss, and neither the mall owner or the karate instructor can buy a car... washing machine... shoes... all of which are now ridiculously expensive because the cost to transport them has gone exponential.

I get that man will prevail, yadda yadda yadda. But since, again, we can't even run our affairs in anything even approaching "sustainable" even in a time of cheap, abundant, portable energy, why are you so sure we will prevail (in anything approaching our current form as a nation)... without it?

I'm kind of thinking the current pallette of political concerns that we are all so horned up over are pretty trivial in comparison. I'm trying to figure out how, or if, this changes my thinking of how or who to vote for.

Our current free market system is anything but free, Jeff

Eyeball, that's true. So in the hypothetical I'm putting forth, are we better served by making it more free (less regulated) or less free?

The answer isn't as obvious as it seems. The problem I'm describing is, in large part, one of infrastructure. That's been the domain of government here due to it's scope.

If we have to retool our infrastructure, say for hydrogen powered semi's and electric cars, are we better off taking a free market approach or a more regulated approach? I don't know. It's a question that's coming though.

Why don't you like nuclear?

It makes a mess we can't dispose of.

-------

Here's an example of how this'll work. My dumbass kid missed her bus, so I had to drive into Eugene to pick her up. At $3.65/gal, this cost me ten bucks. Annoying. At $10/gal, this is a $30 trip. At $15/gal it's a forty-five dollar car trip.

Many things we take for granted, become not feasable, with skyrocketing fuel.

Now add in that in a recession money gets tighter for most people and make it a BAD recession that never ends and the problem is clear. Economic paralysis. Now make a pair of jeans cost $70, instead of $30. Transpirtation costs... Ear of corn is $3.50 instead of 3-for-a-buck. Who buys it? What happens to the farmer, then?

This may very well be the tipping point that has me never vote Dem again- not advocating for the "D" view here- or it may convince me that national debt isn't even relevant anymore and therefore, not a deciding factor... but it sure does bear some thought beyond just the usual political crapola. IMHO.

So do you.

Couldn't resist that one.

Not for lack of trying though, eh?

Jeff no one can manage the future. All I know is that if people have the liberty and freedom to solve problems they always will.

History does show this. I watch a DVD college course on the middle ages and all the way through the middle ages people kept solving problems. I always though the middle ages were pretty stagnate and not much was accomplished. Boy, was I wrong.

I know one other thing, change is inevitable. Those can change will survive and those who can't won't.

Jeff don't look to others to fix your problems, fix your problems your self. Be self reliant.

Preach it, brutha Tim!

I'm in the process of setting up a new business. Change is stressful <g>.

I reckon some folks will have to move back to town!

Go to work, come home! X 5

Take a bath on Saturday and go to church on Sunday!

REPEAT!

Problems solved!

Things will become MUCH more local, and that ain't a bad thing.

It'll also smooth out the cheap labor in foreign markets problem. That labor will be much more expensive with transport for the goods factored in. Make it easier for the US worker to compete.

Good post!

Pretending to look into the future and clamoring that the problems of tomorrow cannot be solved because one only thinks of today's solutions and economics is a wasteful exercise.

The serious problems of tomorrow will be (are) societal and will be far more difficult to solve than energy problems which in many ways are already solved and nevertheless will receive new and better solutions.

They can and will be solved, but not in time to spare us decades of pain.

Carter, in his doofy cardigan, had a point when he turned down the White House thermostats. If we'd started then, we'd have been operating from a position of strength. We didn't. We aren't.

Let me put it bluntly. There IS NO solution that maintains the world as we know it. None. Anyone who says otherwise, is lying (if a politician) or clueless (if otherwise).

It can be debated WHEN, but not IF, our ability to produce oil begins to decline. Pessimistic PROFESSIONALS say it's already happened. Optimistic ones say 5-10 years. Think on that. There's NOBODY credibly saying otherwise. Oil supply has peaked or is about to. Oil demand is increasing. Oil consumption is growing, not decreasing. See the problem?

The key here is not that oil runs out. It won't, ever. There will always be another barrel in the ground. The key is that it gets very expensive. The big, easy fields are found and actually are mostly in decline. New finds are trivially small when viewed against global consumption, and, as a rule are much more difficult (expensive) to extract. The days of poking a stick in the ground and hitting a gusher are long gone. For instance, there's oil in the Gulf but it's 6000, 8000 feet underwater! That's a whole other extractive ballgame. And from memory, even what's in the Gulf is equivalent to ~30 days of consumption.

Again, the key here is COST. Rising oil costs WILL. drag everything else down with them. Everything. Virtually every object and activity in a modern American life is directly connected to the price of oil. And costs WILL rise, dramatically, forever, exponentially, and soon.