It's hard to leap before you are pushed.

Wonderful quote, RalphW! It captures much of the human nature that lies at the heart of inaction. Thanks for that.

Find someone that can grow vegies and trade eggs for vegies. Pick up skills in hand tool use be it wood working, or sewing, or something that be traded for vegies. You can also go see your local Master Gardener classes and see if you can pick up the skills needed to grow vegies, it is not as hard as it looks. Given time and training you should be able to pick up enough to grow things even though you don't think you can now.

A long time ago I was afraid of the water, and I forced myself to go deeper and deeper. I didn't like the idea of being pushed into the water, so I changed it so that I could leap in whenever I wanted to. Change is not easy, habits are hard to break, but you can change and you can break habits. The best way is slowly, we don't want to be forced into it, it'll hurt more that way.

Charles.

All good points, until that bit about the SUPERSYSTEM monitary system.

I am an entrepreneur, the sort of cautious small business owner who will never make glossy magazine covers because I try to be as boring as possible. What used to be risk was just ignorance and lack of research experience.

Greer put it well when he said that any business model has to work in the here and now or it isn't going to work. It also has to be appropriately scaled. At the small business scale it's possible to try various transitional alternatives and see what works. It's possible to keep revisiting strategies and asking "is this sustainable yet?" If I were dragging along a whole corporate beast, most of the things I try (and yes, a lot of them don't work) would just be counterproductive.

The way I see it, any "opportunity" that there might be beyond the inflection point, tipping point, paradigm change, or whatever you want to call it, is more likely to be along the lines of an opportunity to avoid losing your shirt.

Yes, we will hear of a handfull of people who took some incredible big risk and made out like bandits. What you are less likely to hear about will be the hundreds of thousands of others who tried to pull the same stunt and ended up flat on their face, broke, and maybe even homeless.

The best "opportunity" one gets in a hurricane is the opportunity to evacuate before it hits.

"Those businesses that thrived and prospered in an environment of high risk will almost certainly be squeezed into extinction within just a few year's time."

Large investment banks being one of the first major waves.

In a context where there is ever more energy available every year, a lot of things that would be risky in a low or no-energy-growth environment are viable, for a while at least.

In a context where the energy available is steadily contracting, even things that wouldn't seem risky in a no- or low-energy-growth environment become quite risky.

Paradigm shift indeed.

Which "boring" businesses do you see as most promising in this new scenario?

The build your house for cash over ten years while you live in a shack , drive a new pickup twenty years to the town job, borrow nothing against the home place, borrow only to buy more efficient machinery, keep on growing your own food when it is cheaper to buy it-This is the Scots /Irish/ Baptist heritage of the southern mountians, intermixed with a little too much whiskey and gunpowder for "normal" times.

But we have been lucky for so long that abnormally good safe prosperous times are nowadays mistaken for the norm.

If you want to survive consider acquiring a few southern hillbilly buddies old enough to remember how thier daddies and grand daddies and great grand daddies got thru got the last part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.

People with long term roots in Arkansas and Texas will understand whereof I speak.( HL Mencken once remarked not altogether tongue in cheek that among other adventures he had been shot at several times and actually been to Arkansas three times.)

( I can see Buffalo Mountian from a hilltop behind my house.Local lore , fairly well documented, has it that the Buffalo was the meanest place anywhere in the hills during the Prohibition era.The actual most intensive moonshining occurred a few miles to the east and south .)

The murder rate around here in those days was (per capita) high enough to make any modern city seem safe as a Sunday school picnic.But if you didn't actually give somebody reason, you were reasonably safe-it's just that disputes weren't settled in court.

If ts really htf the rules are going to change so drastically about ninety percent of the nice civilized believe-in-dialogue-and-negotiation office dewlling types will die in the first six months of anarchy.

In a declining economy, your business plan should be premised on avoiding indebtedness altogether. Debt is going to be every bit as bad as risk - worse, actually, because many downside risks won't come to pass, but debts WILL have to be paid. Don't expect bankruptcy laws to continue being as forgiving as they are now for much longer, either. The easy forgiveness of bankruptcy made sense in a growing economy, where risk taking was encouraged. It makes no sense at all in a declining economy, where you want risk taking to be minimized. No, I figure that within the next decade, the bankruptcy laws will be changed in such a way that if you are responsible for your company to go bankrupt, that will have serious constraining consequences upon what you can do and how much income you can retain and enjoy for the rest of your life. We won't have debtor's prisons, your wages will just be garnished until your die.

Your business plan will need to anticipate 100% equity financing. Commercial banks might very well be in the business of helping you line that up. They will be interested in having you do your banking with them, and this may be one way to get it.