The worst is those people who bought houses out of town at the top of the real estate market because they believed the propaganda about WFH being permanent. However I never trusted C-level execs or directors not to renege on this, so I didn't do that.
Yeah and this whole agenda of RTO rolled out worldwide directly after Davos 2023 when a bunch of CEOs were tweeting about it from there. But noticing this makes you a conspiracy theorist.
In the old days people used to have their own servers...
And you can still buy them...
And the cloud really isn't cheaper...
But whatever, it's ubiquitous today. Maybe someday people will wake the F up.
God I hate Amazon now. They're basically Wal-Mart these days with half the results being sponsored (advertisements) - and you see that even if you pay for Prime. There are some things you can only get there, but otherwise, since all e-commerce is converging, I don't see the point of enabling their bad behavior. But whichever global corporate enterprise you take your business to, they will likely have a similar mindset.
It's underappreciated how much of a story this is. This is happening in wide swathes of the USA. Big chunks of the West are abandoned, because of wildfires, earthquakes, etc and all along the Gulf Coast as well, including big chunks of Florida (which tons of people have moved to in recent years).
You may be right. I keep assuming that Western politicians are smart people who are playing dumb for the public so that they can keep their grifts going. But they may not be playing in many cases. That might explain the rather sluggish response to what looks like a very serious crisis unfolding over the next 1-3 decades.
What I don't understand in our current situation is the lying. We're not attempting to transition to green energy because we have a choice, because it's better for the environment, or any of this. We're doing it because there aren't too many other options now that easily accessible fossil fuel is being burned up. What would be the harm, at this point, of just fessing up? It's most disconcerting that Western governments have gotten addicted to lying like this, even when they don't have to.
Wow, and this comes from the horse's own mouth of corporate publication. We are headed for hard times, and soon, as the Permian depletes. It's surreal that normies are completely unaware of this when it's like a freight train of doom bearing down on us.
The insects have gone gangbusters this year in the Upper Midwest. This follows 3 summers ('21-'23) which had abnormally low insect volume owing to severe drought. The drought corrected this year, therefore so did the insects. There are probably local fluctuations like this but as I understand the global situation is pretty dire. A lot of it is from habitat loss, same with other wipeouts of biodiversity, but also ecumenical use of pesticides.
The song was about SoCal in the 1990s but it could equally apply to Florida or Texas circa now.
It has gotten to be dogma that "Malthus was proven wrong" on all sides of the mainstream's political spectrum. I always found that odd, because he didn't make any predictions. All of his work was based on historical data and known cases; he was very much a British empiricist. The only prediction in his essay, to the extent he made any, was that the principles wouldn't change in the future because of some nebulous "progress".
And they didn't. What happened instead, as the article rightly notes, is that we temporarily increased carrying capacity. And in so doing we built a trap for ourselves from which we won't be extricated in the coming decades. No one knows exactly how the trajectory of energy and resource descent will play out, but that it will happen, is happening now, is not in doubt.
Ever since Covid, by far the most money I have spent is on transport (gas) and food, apart from housing. Beyond that, most of my discretionary spending has been entirely on items that can be immediately used like clothes/outdoor wear, kitchen ware or books. I also try to buy whatever I can used, since there's such an excess of unwanted stuff in consumer society that you usually can find things used. The next step would be more DIY projects for a range of things and accumulating hard skills instead of items, but I haven't quite crossed that bridge yet. That would stand me in good stead for the future that's actually coming, though.
The system has been broken for pretty much my entire adult life and I'm doing my part not to make the problems of our time worse.
I read Ages of Discord and it was very interesting. For example, he had kind of contrarian takes on the Great Depression (e.g. deflation was bad for the financial classes but actually helped the working and middle classes achieve broader prosperity). Which others would you recommend? A friend recommended Secular Cycles a long time ago but I haven't got around to it yet.
I'm very sorry to hear that about Canada. I visited many times and it was not this bad, but it has been years. They sound like they are well into another stair-step down on the catabolic collapse curve. The USA is too, but not as obviously bad where I am, although the health care system is showing severe strain and will probably go into full blown collapse in a few years with the rate this is going. The Covid era was clearly the inflection point for this process.
Location: Upper Midwest, United States
A major climatic shift in late spring from the pattern of recent years. Since 2021, the pattern shifted as meteorological summer approached, with temperatures getting hotter, winds increasing, and drought setting in for the whole summer -- this was repeated in '22 and '23. Now it is humid and stormy with the drought of the past years basically wiped out. I will continue to watch this trend.
Economically, the official story is that things are great. In reality, inflation clearly accelerated this year and leisure/hospitality seem much deader since about the end of last summer. Going out recently, establishments are quieter. It seems there's a widening wealth gap because many people are still spending a lot while many others are pulling back.
Anecdotally, many complain of being unable to find work. But the mainstream says this is not happening.