non breeders 1 of 2

NON BREEDERS

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note: many thanks to WP and SF for their generous donations.  Cheers.
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In a collapse, things tend to not work.  Imagine our surprise.  But as preppers, most of us are actually surprised, not least because we look at each problem in isolation.  Not to mention a whole lot of denial going on.  For instance, if our entire plan for the apocalypse is to stockpile fifty thousand rounds of ammo for our semi-auto arsenal, and you even hint at or suggest that their finances are in danger, they react negatively to your suggestion.  WOW!  Easy there buddy, I’m only the messenger.

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Take my situation.  I live in an area where agriculture is near impossible for any significant number of people.  A VERY small tribe could range over a wide area collecting plants to condition a small amount of soil.  It is far better to let animals graze and be herders.  Now, as that is the only way to live post-apocalypse, how am I going to respond to any forecast of a 500 year drought in my area?  I’m going to deny it, aren’t I?  I’ll gay that up, talk about probabilities and possibilities, perhaps search for Gore Warmer lies to bolster my case against drought ( even though a climate growing colder will also be drier ). 

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That is just what passes for logic for most people.  If you look at our country today, you’ll either find illogical thinking, denial or one dimensional thinking.  And of course, there is dingus all anyone can do about anything, so it makes sense.  Folks keep talking as if the collapse was reversible, as if we just needed to tweak a buggy software.  Like Microsoft has been trying to do for God knows how long now.  Just add a few more million lines of code-what could possibly go wrong?  Adding complexity doesn’t cause a collapse, it is a feature of the collapse.  High or low energy is far more important than too much or too little complexity.

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Now, I grant you, complexity certainly doesn’t help matters.  It makes systems far more vulnerable.  When a drought happens, each house having its own water storage might be preferable to having a centralized point of water collection.  There is more resiliency.  But the complex system, in this case centralized water, started life as a way to save energy.  Rain catchment systems on an individual basis ( as well as sewage and power generation ) was at one time more expensive and resource intense than a central system.  You got efficiencies of scale.  All a new house needed was a small pipe feeding off the street pipe, rather than metal roofs and gutters and storage tanks.

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Right now, everyone thinks their own PV power is the cat’s meow.  In the past, running a generator or a water wheel was expensive and delivered very little energy.  If it takes twenty years for a PV panel to generate as much power as was consumed in its manufacture, and with its battery it delivers a negative net energy, it would have been cheaper in resources to just hook up the home to a central power system.  That was why the system evolved as it did.  You can’t look at a century ago through today’s eyes.

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As will be repeated until your will to resist the idea is weakened, nothing can be done collectively.  Only personal solutions will work.  PV is an individual solution, not a societal one.  It is all about stocking lifeboats, not magically having a rescue ship ready to seal up the tear in the side of the Titanic.  Even though stocking those is far more energy intense than not.  Just following the Mormon plan of putting a years wheat aside for everyone would deplete grain stocks and disrupt supply.  It is LESS energy intensive to have just one reserve stock that ONLY goes to the area experiencing famine, rather than proofing everyone against it.  Complexity ( as taken to mean a centralized system ) saves resources.

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Complex systems, the Threads Of Connectivity, increase vulnerability, and that shows up in a Seneca collapse, but PRIOR to that “one weak point taking down the system”, complexity was a result of decreasing resource availability.  It postponed collapse.  Okay, look at shelter.  A century ago, stout wood girders and thick walls made for such quality structures many still stand today ( even if a bit wobbly ).  Today’s structures are thin shells a good wind will take out.  But you get ten shelters whereas before you got one.  The same resources yield far more structures.  They just fall much quicker.

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As population increased and more shelter was needed, importing sheet metal from overseas and increasing the engineering complexity stretched out resources.  You need complexity to avert widespread shelter shortages.  Complexity doesn’t cause collapse, it just causes the collapse caused by resource depletion to happen faster.  Tired of dirty rotten corrupt politicians?  As complexity was needed to stretch resources, the built in corruption that goes along with big government and big business has increased.  It is a feature of resource contraction ( shortened to “fighting over the shrinking pie” ).  There is no cure but collapse.  Then we return to brutally honest local warlords.  You’ll wish for another Pelosi or Hillary.

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We are at that stage where the overly complex system is accelerating the collapse.  Look at an oil well, 150 year old technology for a new conventional rig.  Basically just tapping into a keg of beer-the pressure delivers through your pipe.  Contrast that with fracking oil, with its vastly more complex supply lines for chemicals and deposal and extra pipe and extra finance per BTU unit and etc.  That complexity allowed the last of a resource to be extracted.  It was complex oil, or a drastically falling amount of more primitive extracted oil.  And it is so efficient at extraction that we reach No Oil quicker.  But it is that or collapse sooner.

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A better example is through the banks.  To make money, ever increasing fraud is needed, as a contracting oil supply actually is a bankers energy contraction ( less energy and the increasing interest payments cannot be generated ).  Complexity in the banking system stretches out the time until collapse.  Without finance, global trade halts and without global trade all the nation states collapse as few are self sufficient ( even if, say, Russia could go it alone, anarchy from disintegrating China or Kazakhstan would call for far too many military resources to contain ).

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This article was titled Non Breeders, and is about the dearth of births, especially amongst Other Colors.  I’ll eventually get to that.  Continued tomorrow.

END ( today's related link https://amzn.to/2sjWGDU )

 

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