I leave my brain and street cloths in the dry and carry around a bag of tools fixing broken stuff.
I have a clear view of future of my job completely unsustainable non renewable resource based, carbon emitting, SO2 NOX, leaching, chemicals, and human costs.
I do this knowing its nuts, but I do this because it is what I do.
I am a mass consumer too.
I am part of the problem, got that petro chemical monkey on my back, I just bought stuff in Ebay and Amazon even though I do not agree with the platforms.
I am KEENLY aware that if you turn off the gas taps and electricity this all goes to hell fast.
As much as I like to think I am pretty handy I am not going to kid myself and say I can survive in a post technological society any better than an office worker.
Once there are not machines to fix…
Funny how Youtube spits up stuff from the past.
This started to play in the mix after Alexi Sayle and Franky Sidebottom ( comedians with social commentary from the UK in the 80s )
Sometimes I think the savant machines we build to sift our data and amuse us are quietly telling us something about our way of life.
Laurie Anderson - O Superman
Excerpt from song
Lyrics
Well, you don’t know me,
But I know you.
And I’ve got a message to give to you.
Here come the planes.
So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come
As you are, but pay as you go. Pay as you go.
And I said: OK. Who is this really? And the voice said:
This is the hand, the hand that takes. This is the
Hand, the hand that takes.
This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They’re American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
Of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
Completion of their appointed rounds.
'Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice.
And when justice is gone, there’s always force.
And when force is gone, there’s always Mom. Hi Mom!
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me,
Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms.
In your arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.
You should go to sleep at night hoping that never comes to pass Barry.
The suffering would be on a scale that makes all the great disasters of the past small and insignificant.
You need parts and an infrastructure to fix things.
Half of one and half of the other is not going to cut it.
It would only be dire for the people living in cites. The “prepers” and folks like me, and there are many that moved to the country will get along just like our parrent’s parents did before all the modern gizmos. As far a fixing things, there will be more parts than ever. Every time a person that CAN’T fix has something break, there will be many parts available from the broken object to us repairing your product.
I go to sleep just hoping that I wake up in the morning knowing if I do, everything will be ok. TomC
голод і чума
Translates to hunger and plague
The “holodomor” голодомор a compound word above phrase ( loosely ).
Even written in English it sounds nasty like something you don’t want to know.
We do not know the meaning of or the horror of hunger in our industrial society.
One of these days our technological cleverness will fail us if we do not smarten the hell up real soon up and start living in a sustainable way.
The next one will no one untouched.
you guys talk about a “great awakening” with the yellow vest protesters but I think its important to note that so are other groups are being “awoken” I’ve heard the media people talk about the “alt right” and I just thought it was some scare tactic to further their agenda. I’m sure a lot of you have seen chucky2009s videos about welding, and I certainly have learned from him, and enjoyed his videos but about a few weeks ago he posted a video of him reading out the christ church shooters manifesto and another video of him saying he was an ethno-facist since 2014. I guess that made it seem actually real? that a real life guy who makes good money could be so extreme. I’ve been thinking about what would happen in the event of societal collapse and it makes sense that local gangs like the aryan brother hood would take power… so I guess If we do have any sense of surviving a collapse and with our freedom intact, then I guess we will need a lot of bullets and a lot of wood.
I think you will see much worse than the aryan brotherhood.
The only way to survive in that scenario is to stick together. Evil groups will rise because it’s easier to take what others have instead of providing for yourself.
But good groups can prevail if good people will stand and fight.
How do you find these parts? If the grid goes down, modern communications also goes down.
In the US, reliability was addressed by Bush in 2005, and Obama fine tuned it to make it more economically viable for utilities to get it done by using RE projects to create the necessary line capacity and interconnections. We hoped something like solar could become cost competitive which helps create a viable distributed grid to get around at least part of the problems you are talking about as well as give the consumer the ability to have a real alternative from the utilities jacking up prices.
The government has been working on the issue for 15 years. A serious amount of infrastructure work has been done in the last 10 years. Is it perfect yet? no. The US is upgrading their gen1 system to essentially a gen 3 or 4 system as an in place upgrade. It just isn’t easy, when the technology hadn’t been developed or tested, and no matter what it was going to take 20+ years just to deploy.
We added electric cars to help alleviate stress on the whims of oil prices which have contributed heavily to the last 5 recessions. It also gives a greater share of power to the consumers as a lot of them can install solar to lower their overall costs and give them a predictable costs which really helps lower incomes.
I’m not saying you are doing anything wrong by planning on turn of the last century technology, I am just saying your concerns were valid, and have been/are being addressed.
Well there wont be Craig’s list that’s for sure. My opinion is you will scavenge for the parts or trade for them. Just like in the old time.
I’m working on a motorcycle for a fella right now and instead of taking cash for my labor he and his son are helping me cut some ATV trails through my off grid property.
I’m doing something for him that he cant do and being paid by labor that makes my job go faster.
I just reread the last half dozen posts here, and they made me think about a “perfect” world in which woodgassers would prevail.
It’s James Howard Kunstler’s 2008 book, “World Made by Hand”.
He makes the assumption that “oil” disappears rather quickly and then imagines how (USA, anyway) society reacts. Too bad that he suggests a fuel future based on ethanol instead of woodgas, though.
You go back to actually “talking” with people you know. It has only been 25 years or so that we did not have all these gizmoes and we got along just fine.
I don’t recall talking about any problems.
You remind me of my uncle. Back when “the word” was Russia was going to neuc us or the people from mar were going to take over the earth. He spent thousands of dollars on an under ground bomb shelter, with air filtration and stocked it with a year worth of food. They never had an occasion to use the shelter and all the canned food spoiled when the can rusted. Fear caused him to waste a lot of money at a time when he really couldn’t afford it.
So stop worrying so. Like we told him, if you come through the great disaster in you shelter, then you come out and there is no one left in the wold. Now what. TomC
I think it was more of a lucky fluke that we made it out of the 80s at all. There were a couple of very close calls, too many war games and one sounding missile sent on a trajectory made to look like a submarine strike on Moscow. The Soviet leadership decided to take the hit first, just in case they were false alarms, but wheels were in motion, seconds from midnight, to use the atomic scientists metaphor.
I do believe you were right to say that surviving into the nuclear winter wouldn’t have been any prize anyways.
Current problems could leave city people hungry and despondent, though it’s probably the case that very few people anywhere have the broad skill sets and means to get along post collapse for more than a while.
I think in a crisis, most urban mindset people will sort themselves out fairly quickly, most staying in their urban centers.
I think the opposite. They will resort to brawls and robbing their communities and neighbors. I am even prepare for them to try coming and taking what I have. TomC
I have pondered that, and definitely the scenario you envision would occur. Those would be the go-getters. Even worse. Given the impossible logistics of people getting out of a large urban area, I figure 90+% will not get past city limits. Plus, I expect disbelief and wishful thinking will keep people put, they can’t even conceive of life off pavement, they think outside city perimiters is a wasteland, no drivethroughs, or coffee shops!
How many city people even know how to start a fire these days, or get out of the rain?
I am not sure about that last part. Too many of those city people are weekend “naturalists or nature lovers” who come up here hours from the city to “camp” granted they use a camp ground with all the luxuries of home but they also know there are farmers markets up here. If the grocery stores go empty my hope is the gas stations go empty first so they can’t just hop into their cars and try to drive out of the cities.
Yes it did go dark. But I think most rational “aware” people know that something could happen. Theres too many people pissing in other people’s cornflakes.
North Korea is probably the scariest. That little puke is one messed up dude.
But theres also Iran and China to worry about.
Our Canadian prime minister, the waste of skin that he is, had a press conference with China’s president and kept saying he was from Japan.
