Conclusion: We're going to either make this civilization thing work or we will go extinct as a species.

If your parameters are economic collapse leading to social collapse, then I strenuously disagree. If you are including climate change of the +6 degrees C variety, then I agree. A new Ice Age less a snowball Earth scenario also would not lead to the demise of the species. What are your assumptions?

The 6C+, Snowball Earth and global nuclear war are the three scenarios I could see leading to the demise of the species. Other than that, we are too adaptable, too creative and too able to terraform the planet to go extinct otherwise.

In a complete collapse scenario you would still have groups, both large and small, banding together to survive. If the planet can support farming, people will farm. What will NOT be possible until after a massive die-off and some years of regrowth of the ecosystems will be large bands of hunter gatherers. It would be hard in most, but not all, areas for more than small populations to be hunter gatherers for at least some years.

However, fish populations indicate the rebound of animal populations can happen quite suddenly once you leave them alone. But the oceans are relatively intact ecosystems compared to land ecosystems. I suspect they would rebound faster for that reason and because of the sheer numbers of offspring many aquatic lifeforms have. On land, the population growth should be slower for the opposite reasons: the ecosystems are wrecked over a large area of the earth and most lifeforms - animalia, anyways - breed fairly slowly by comparison.

Of course, much depends on the speed (and type, but let's ignore that for a moment) of die-off. A sudden collapse of the human population would remove constraints on flora and fauna quickly and likely result in a relatively fast rebound of life. However, the ecosystems would need time to balance, so any stocks would not be reliable for some time. Still, say one to five years for a stable food supply excepting climate impacts. If die-off is slow, then one would expect the environment to be even more severely degraded by people taking desperate measures to simply survive. Billions of out of control people would spell a massive die-off of flora and fauna, too. With the additional environmental degradation, destruction of ecosystems and depletion of flora and fauna to minimal levels - and the extinction of many - it would take longer for ecosystems to balance and would help drive the human population to very low levels.

Or maybe not. I'm writing this with only my own thoughts to back it up, so...

Cheers

Gee...I read The Road some time ago. I can't recall a bimbo in the novel.

Though I must say Theron is nice to look at but?

This movie if true to the book will be a 'killer'. Scare the shit out of the audience.

The part about the gangs storing the others in cellars to feast off them at leisure was rather disturbing. But the real plotline was about the fathers very real attachment and concern for his son.

Overall it was overpowering and extremely dramatic. Not for the faint of heart.

Airdale

The Road is wonderful and heart-wrenching. A heavy read. It knocks the mercury out through the top of the doomometer--fitting for the mood of our times. I hope and fear that the movie will stay true to the book.

no. There is a provision in the bill that allows your tax payer money to buy bad assets in other countries with you seeing any benifet. The bill is not much of a bail out, but a engineered collapse because we will be taking on debt that no one will want to buy from us later.

Isn't the point of the "bailout" to keep home prices propped up long enough to let the biggest banks get out from under their own frothy investments...

Probably. It's Enron Economics on a National scale. Andy Fastow is in jail for doing what everybody else in Investment Banking has been doing for the past 20 years: Moving bad investments to toxic portfolios and leaving the profitable ones on the books with the goal of inflating the stock values of these preferred investments. That's why we all invested in IRA's to prop up this game. Racketeers used to call it: keeping two sets of books. Now we, the lowly taxpayers, get to buy these overinflated (they won't even tell us what they might actually be worth) losers with the hope that somewhere down the road the economy will get better and this perrenial gravy train will roll into a bright yet green future.

In the long run the only way that home prices might stabilize is for wages and employment to rise-substantially. Chance of that happening: Zero

I have several wild-ass guesses where this might end up at but the one common denominator is most of us (self included) end up as serfs.

Joe

Equity from the house as a retirement plan was fundamentally a kind of pyramid scheme. The idea was that one would buy a big house to raise a family, and then downsize for retirement, cashing out the delta between the big family house and the retirement house. However, that only works so long as there are at least as many people in subsequent generations to buy your big house as there are big houses to sell.

The other big source of retirement income was supposed to be the 401K. Of course, boomers (to the extent they had any money in their 401Ks) are watching that money shrink. A friend of my wife's was complaining that the fund she'd said up for her daughter's college expenses was going down faster than she could put money into it, and that was before the last downdraft in the markets. Peak-to-trough, we will see at least a 60% decline in the markets. It could be more. The decline in the Great Depression was nearly 90%.

I look at my parents, who retired with pensions, good health insurance, and reliable social security, and wonder how I'm going to get by when I'm their age with none of that. I think the US is facing a humanitarian disaster as the boomers get old and feeble. Many people assume they'll be able to get jobs at McDonalds, but I don't think so. How many old farts is McDonalds going to need? The generations after mine are all up to their eyeballs in debt. I don't see how they're going to take care of their parents & grandparents.

Would-be retirees you mean.

Unfortunately many will be forced into retirement involuntarily, either by layoff, or because of ill health. The more fortunate (boomers like myself), may be able to work longer than intended, and perhaps will skate through with enough.

As an example of the hit to retires. I had a portion of my portfolio in individual bonds, a rather common thing for retirees, who do this to make their protfolio less volatile (i.e. this was standard practice to make investments low risk during retirement). Well the bonds I have are now worth on average 68 cents on the dollar. They have done even worse than the stock portion of the portfolio.

Cf. UCLA prof Edward Soja's urban studies book 'Postmetropolis,' he talks about Orange County as the center of the international 'scamscape'...that was a decade ago already ha.

http://www.amazon.com/Postmetropolis-Critical-Studies-Cities-Regions/dp/...

Hello Leanan,

IMO, it is inevitable for families to start going postPeak tribal; for extended families to come together on one property.

Please plan ahead: If the house is going to be too crowded--> plan ahead by having a small, used trailer or used cabover camper on the property. It is no big deal to run an extension cord to power this shelter, and the self-contained toilet can be emptied as required into the sewer cleanout, but more hopefully added to a compost pit.

These shelters are not inherently super-insulated from the factory, but the money you save buyng used should help you park it underneath a cheap suncover to save on A/C costs, or inside a garage or barn to save on winter heating costs.

If an emergency develops, such as the recent hurricanes in TX/LA: temporarily evacuating, then camping out in these rigs is much cheaper than staying in a hotel. The teens and adults can sleep in tents or the other family vehicles, but those babies, sick, or elderly, sensitive to temperature extremes can stay in the genset-powered, thermostat controlled A/C camper interior. If an RV-campground has the hookups for water, sewage, and electricity--even better.

I get the feeling that many TODers that post are wealthy enough to be well on their way to having Eco-Tech shelters. This is more aimed at those TODers, like Leanan and I, plus many TOD-lurkers that are much further down the wealth scale and have no property.

Recall TODer Fleam, who unfortunately got trapped as a vulnerable and exposed 'rabbit', instead of having the minimal resources of a decent and mobile camping 'turtle shell'.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

The cell phone cost is one thing, but objective researchers conclude that pre-teens should not be using cell phones much because of the brain cancer link (supposedly it is more dangerous as the physical size of the brain is still growing). IMO down the road the cell phone/brain cancer link is going to be a huge story (naturally the USA guv is working hard on behalf of money keeping the public unaware).

I'm surprised you didn't mention this nugget:

Rule 8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades . . . This doesn't resemble ANYTHING in real life.

in the context of the bailout.