 | Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008--July 31 Update | The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: August 3, 2008 |  |
314 comments on DrumBeat: August 2, 2008
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BTW, before any of the Konstant Kunstler Kritics (KKK) jump in, I would like to point out that Jim made a "C" in high school history, so he is clearly wrong about all of his views, and the collapse of suburbia is an illusion.
I'm not sure which way your sarcasm is supposed to cut, it's not clear from your message. I assume someone raised that clearly irrelevant argument against him somewhere else, and you are attempting to pre-empt it.
I regard Kunstler's predictions as a convincing possible future, but certainly not inevitable. Suburbia has a lot of disadvantages but I think at least some portion of it will continue to be inhabitable and inhabited. Not so much because I am in love with suburbia, but because of simple economics: people have already invested so much in their homes that they will make do to the extent possible. Selling and moving won't be such an easy option when their house's value drops, while the value of more livable/walkable homes may skyrocket (relatively speaking). Given a choice between abandoning everything they put into a suburban house and starting from scratch, or trying to make do however possible, I think most people will make the latter choice. Certainly some of the more outlying, more recently developed suburbs may come to be largely abandoned, but older suburbs I think will continue to be inhabited. While people have less access to each other and to common supplies, they have space to grow gardens, and can probably borrow a ride once in a while to stock up on certain things.
That leaves the question of jobs, and how to get to them, which is the most disruptive problem. Many more people will be working at home, either telecommuting or running a small home business. Shops will open in people's neighborhoods, perhaps even in people's garages. Carpooling will become much more prevalent for those who have to commute. That still leaves a gap, and outlying areas will again be the least practical, but by no means is it a total collapse.
"That still leaves a gap, and outlying areas will again be the least practical, but by no means is it a total collapse."
So how do the "supplies" get into the "city" to be distributed to
these still inhabited suburbs?
Start thinking Nigeria pipeline explodes as people line up
to get gasoline from them.
and helos sold by Taliban after stolen from supply "train"
into Afghanistan.
I went to town the other day. I needed some steel. "Town" is 140 miles round trip. The drive both ways took about two hours. If I rode my Mule, it would be a four day trip, at least, and maybe five, depending on what I did while in town. How valuable is fuel?
I make the trip into town every couple of months for stuff I can't get around here, mainly steel for my shop, or sometimes, bullets (I keep a Winchester next to the front door for critters). I've noticed this year the lack of highway maintenance. The highway is cracking and there are many unfilled cracks. I guess the counties have other priorities for spending their limited budgets. Asphalt apparently isn't one of them. Best Wishes from the Fremont
depending on what I did while in town.
So what is the problem? That 5 day trip sounds like it would be my choice! :)
What I do in town? See a movie? Bad Chinese food? Maybe a junkyard visit? No problemo. Five days round trip, that's OK. Four nights sleeping out no problem either. Wintertime will be a bit rough, but I can do it. The five hundred miles, round trip, to visit my Daughter will just take up one half of the month, maybe a bit more, again, it depends. Whatever minimum wage is, $7 per hour (?), well the five days for 140 miles, 8 hours per day, times $7/hr. times 5 days = $280. To compare, my truck gets 15 mpg diesel, at $5 per gallon = 10 gallons for the 150 mile round trip, more or less, or $50 in fuel vs. $280 lost wages at minimum wage for the 5 day trip. Of course, this is pretty meaningless. The point is, we get a lot for our fuel costs, even at $5 per gallon. A $50 fuel bill beats the hell out of five days round trip and four nights on the ground, rain or shine.
Hey, the world as we know it is about to end and you gotta go all coy and serious on me? And here I was going to invite you to Mabel's place when you had that day in town.:(
Wouldn't a bicycle be quicker than your mule?
Don't have to feed it either.
You can't pull a plow, or a wagon for instance.
And speed will not be a prerequisite BTW.
One can tow several hundred lbs. of payload on a bike trailer, and more on the bike/trike itself.
http://worksmancycles.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/page6.html
Best Hopes for Bicycles & Tricycles,
Alan
Do you know anyone who does this regularly, or even occassionally, for the distances mentioned? I bike to work (and everywhere else, as I don't have a car), an 8 mile roundtrip with significant hills in 15 minutes there, 20-25 back, carrying up to 40-50 pounds when work requires traveling, and I can't imagine towing several hundred pounds up the hills I encounter on my trip would be pleasant, whether trying to brake or pedal. Granted I've never tried towing weight before, but towing that much weight on anything but rather flat ground strikes me as a challenge I would rather dodge. Anyway, just curious if this does happen.
You can pull an amazing amount of weight with a bike trailer. Going uphill is tough, and stopping is too. But, gearing is everything, and as long as you accept very low speeds on the climbs, 1000 lb on a smooth road is very doable with the right gears.
If you ride enough with your trailer, maybe you can make the Olympic cycling team, like Svein Tuft. This is an AMAZING story:
http://www.bcsportsbeat.ca/More/olympian_svein_tuft_story_719.htm
20 years ago in Beijing the streets were full of bicycle "trucks" carrying all sorts of goods around the city. They were slow but it was amazing what they could carry.
Scien: Suburbia is a generalization, as you state. The inner burbs should be as strong as inner urban areas, IMO. The car culture is too important to too many people to leave without a fight.
Or it might be a made up absurdity to point out the irrelevance of many of the attacks on JHK.
Jim calls it the "psychology of prior investment." I call it throwing your money away. But in any case, more and more people are walking away--because their mortgage is more than the value of the financial black hole that they reside in.
We just have way, way too much housing space. Zoning regulations will probably be scrapped, and a lot of houses in reasonable proximity to mass transit lines will be subdivided and/or turned into tenement housing.
I'm still waiting for the Y2K bug to wipe us out, like he predicted :)
y2k may happen again in 2038!
Have you ever been wrong about something? Does that determine you're wrong about everything or anything else? So now Kunstler's a shill for software engineers who conspired to reap $ by inventing a false flag catastrophe?
Jeff
Being an imaginary catastrophe, it wiped out your imagination catastrophically!
You do not realize it but your pixels were replaced and only your name remained the same. It still is 'Cashew' as in the 'nut' isn't it? :)
The Y2K problem was serious. The government and private industry threw millions of dollars and hours of senior programmer's time into solving it. We'll never know what might have happened if the problem wasn't addressed before it blew up in our faces.
Maybe if we put as much effort into solving the peak oil problem before it hits, we'll never know either.
Negative evidence isn't worth much.
Indeed, I happen to personally have replaced 2 financial systems which were tested and were *already* beginning to fail in strange ways as we got closer to Y2K. When it came round, what do you know, everything just worked...
Actually, kcrnsnova, the Y2K problem was exactly as Crystalradio wrote - a con and a swindle. Most systems that were multi-year had been set up initially for many years or had the work done much earlier so they wouldd not fail. Any system dealing only with the current year had no need of change. The only systems that might have had anomolies were accounting systems used by companies whose fiscal year was not coincident with the calendar year.
All the control systems still dot't care about the date just duration. Only accounting systems care about dates.
Mostly it wss management CTA.
I'm sorry but that's not true. Y2K was solved because a lot of work was done in the two years leading up. I can guarantee you it would have been a disaster for the Fortune 100 company I worked for at the time if we had we not tested, found what was wrong and put a lot of effort into fixing it.
I was doing docmentation for a small mainframe software company at the time. They developed a program specifically to deal with this issue. It was not a fantasy by any stretch.
Cheers
Actually, kcrnsnova, the Y2K problem was exactly as Crystalradio wrote - a con and a swindle.
Really? And your opinion on this matter is due to your knowledge of computers?
Most systems that were multi-year had been set up initially for many years or had the work done much earlier so they wouldd not fail.
And your 'proof' of this is?
All the control systems still dot't care about the date just duration.
All? Every last one? Wow.
And yet - here's one showing "all" isn't right.
Phillips Petroleum Y2K test - an oil rig hydrogen sulfide detector system stopped working.
Now, you gonna call me out and produce my source on that one?
Thanks for your support ImSceptical, but I'm also sorry as it was Kiashu who implied that - I was merely being a wiseacre:)
As a computer "hacker" type ( meaning I know what a debugger is, how to decompile, and fix at the assembly level, regardless of source code ), I felt the Y2K bug was a total overblown publicity stunt.
This was in 2000. Every software was compiled with one of several standard compilers, and it was routine in that day for us to "fix" software by removing purchase authentication hicks, much to the annoyance of software authors. It seemed even every high school had at least one kid who knew his way around a debugger and would fix programs for his friends. Geez, whats a failed time code next to a deliberately coded-to-be-confusing purchase authenticator?
I see the situation today as more dire, as all sorts of encryption schemes, and law passed to make sharing of knowledge of the intimate inner operation of copyrighted computer programs illegal. A few years ago, I could easily go to the local bookstore and buy books on assemblers and debuggers. Not so today. I am just glad I bought those books when I did.
Same with digital encryption schemes used on digital TV.
I fear the day when a bunch of radio amateurs cannot retune their rigs to broadcast in the public band should the need arise. Its a comforting feeling to know that whatever the "enemy" could do to a few commercial broadcasting sites, there was simply NO way to shut down our communication system between our authorities and the public.
"Whack-a-mole" would be putting the situation mildly.
All the radio amateurs I have ever known made it a point to make the local authorities aware of the existence of their capabilities and offer it for public service should the need arise.
Leanan speaks highly of resilience, and having many people with the technical knowledge of our infrastructure makes it very difficult for that infrastructure to be disabled.
Having techincal ignorance imposed by law results in a system that when disabled - few, if any, know how to fix it. Further, today's outsourcing guarantees there are fewer people in this country with the skills to maintain infrastructure designed abroad.
I shudder at the thought of having to "debug" a modern program written with difficulty of "fixing" it in mind.
You really think a multi-billion dollar company is going to allow its employees (who go in and disable legal license checks with debuggers on critical sofware) to then try and fix several hundred errors occurring in tens of thousands of routines all on one day (1/1/00)?
The type of "hacker" you describe should never be allowed within a million miles of a critical system. It doesn't matter if they can patch it sort of 90% of the time. It's the unintended consequences that can take multiple production lines off-line for months. All it takes is something as simple as just not ordering one critical component with a lead time of 6 months.
Attempting to debug hundreds of complex high level language subroutines in real-time (your systems are down) using nothing but a machine code debugger is asking for disaster.
You raise some very real worries. I am not a programmer by any stretch, but I can see real problems with deliberately hidden proprietary systems. The answer starts at the far end. You have to suggest a revenue source for programmers and engineers [not large companies] which then allows standardisation [what you guys call open source]. No one should generate extra revenue by fitting odd sized bolts to a system.
I'm still waiting for the Y2K bug to wipe us out, like he predicted :)
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Very brave opening up this old chestnut but here goes my 2c worth....
I recently thumbed through a Y2K doomer book in my local library (last borrowing Date Nov 1999) and it was laughable, in hindsight, just some of the things they were predicting. Interstingly though the areas of risk had been broken up into the 1-3 day disruptions, 1-3 weeks, months years and decades and the long er the disruption, the less it was seen to be of a mjaor problem as people could adapt to a situation very quickly once they had a time frame.
Y2K if it happend was going to be an acute event where the damage could be assessed very quickly and the market would allocate resources to repairing it just as quickly. A cynic would suggest that it was a beat up by the IT industry to blackmail the market into handing over vast sums to fix the "problem" (did someonae say 2038?). If Kunstler swallowed all the doomsayers prophecy from the nindustry then he wasn't the only one.
Peak Oil and climate change are chronic problems where the symptoms are mild and diffuse but nevertheless debilitating in totality. If you really want to listen to someone who is not quite as sensationalist as Kunstler, I recommend head over to Global Public Media and Listening to Jason Bradfords excellent interview with David Holmgren of permaculture fame. Holmgren has also done some excellent work on how to go about refitting the suburbs to become worthwhile places to live again.
The rub with a 'C' average is that you're probably about HALF-Right in your efforts. Now to determine WHICH HALF to listen to...
Now, while I like a fun and snarky Acronym as much as the next guy, I would say that the FIAFL rule (Fairness in Averaging First Letters) would let those of us who take dear JH regularly to task be at least tarred with the 'Big Gov't Subsidy' brush of being called the "CCC", instead of such a hate-filled and murderous group as your example inferred. I only rant and rail because I care!
I don't know how much he would chafe at being 'Cunstler', at that point. Could be worse.
"Jim made a "C" in high school history,..."
Anyone making an "A" would be completely wrong about US/World History.
For Example:
Why did the US choose the side of England in WWI?
How many Americans died in the Dust Bowl of 1932?
Why did the US drop 2 nuclear devices on Japan?
When was Saudi Arabia created?
Saudi Arabia was formed in 1932 by King Abdel-Aziz al-Saud.
When was Aramco created?
Surely one of history's greatest bargains, ranking with the legendary purchase of Manhattan for $24, is an obscure contract negotiated in 1933. For a loan of exactly $170,327.50, Saudi Arabia's King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud granted the Standard Oil Co. of California a 60-year, exclusive concession to 320,000 sq. mi. of desert.
BTW-that 60 year long contract was enforced to the year:
"1993: Saudi Aramco gets sole control over domestic refining, marketing, distribution and joint-venture..."
Saudi Arabia took over ARAMCO in 1980.
The old saying is the A students teach, and the B students work for the C students.
It is recorded, George W. Bush "I graduated Yale in 1968 with a 2.35 GPA" http://www.monkeydyne.com/bushresume/early.html
Who are we working for?
And that was with some of his professors being bribed and some of his papers being written by other people.
bruce from SFB - That was Ted Kennedy who got thrown out of Harvard.
Kennedy, Bush, what’s the difference? Neither earned their way to their opportunity. The difference is what they did with it. Even conservatives admit Kennedy has become one of the hardest working and knowledgeable legislators on the hill regardless what you think of his politics. Bush on the other hand…..
Thats what Mary Jo thought also.
Kennedy should have resigned within hours after the Chappaquiddick incident. However, were still paying for Bush’s arrogance and malfeasance. How many more lives are going to be ruined by his actions? The tally continues, well after he leaves office. I suspect he’ll never even have a crisis of conscience about his rule. A true sociopath.
wonder what all those dead iraqi's thought ?
I don't know American college grading. I take it 2.35 isn't very good but how bad is it?
The scale nominally runs from 0.0 to 4.0. Anything below 2.0 is ineligible for graduation.
Looks like McCain is continuing the tradition!!
http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/BDEDE2FD-B26C-4161-9232-8B80274B433E/
At Baylor Med in the 50's the joke was the A students made the best professors, the B students made the best doctors, and the C students made the most money. I never believed that but at least it was intended to make everyone feel good.
i have no doubt, in my personal experience there is truth to that. I can list numerous psychological reasons -the A students are diligent and look at details the C students want to socialize and party -with the B students being in between. Also being C students at a young age imprinted a 'not good enough' psyche which later in life manifests as competing for pecuniary goods, etc.
I don't like Bush, but I would easily vote for a president that had a C average in the future if he was a leader with integrity who surrounded himself(herself) by smart people.
AT my 45th high school reunion, most of the "C" students regretted that they had not taken school seriously -FWIW.
Wow, that is exactly what GWB and his lying campaign minions promised to the very gullible ~50% of American people who voted him in....twice. I bet he would win a third term if allowed...an opportune anthrax scare here, a timely capture of some supposedly high-ranking Al Qaeda lieutenant there, and more tax cuts for everyone and back-room negotiations for the rest of the world to choke on our increasingly worthless currency as the requisite for us buying their exports. Repubs assured us that "yea, he isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he has that compassionate conservative integrity, and although he was a C-student he will surround himself with TOP PEOPLE who will get things done...he is the great MBA delegator...who couldn't properly run a business to save himself.
And the D students made the women
Wow, I don't know what to say, trying to associate those who are critics of Kunstler with a hate mongering lynching group. I have to say Jeffrey you have hit a new low.
Naw, its possible to go lower.
Like shilling for corn eth.