Author Topic: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation  (Read 134034 times)

Oliver

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #200 on: February 07, 2017, 01:21:27 PM »
Hey Syonyk, I basically agree with your assessment of the future and I don't have much to add. Remember though, that the stock market is maybe not that good of an indicator of anything at all. There are plenty of failed states out there – a couple more every year – that are farther down the road that we're traveling. How are their stock exchanges doing? A cursory look says maybe they're not so bad.

KayakMom

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #201 on: February 07, 2017, 01:43:50 PM »
I don't know what a granola or a Johnny is, but THANK YOU for wanting to (and taking action to) help me out! And lovely that you had that happy outcome, too :)

She must be talking about www.granolashotgun.com, Johnny's been writing a lot about practical disaster prep and what kinds of places are going to decline in the future.

Thanks for posting. Love this site so far.

TheAnonOne

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #202 on: February 07, 2017, 01:44:17 PM »
This thread is so pessimistic, my facebook feed is so pessimistic, and I personally refuse to be pessimistic!

Life is so extravagantly amazing now that even if we lost 10 or 30 years of progress overnight we would live like literal kings of old.

The markets arn't going to drop to 0, the whole forum is entirely based around survival of downtimes and staying the course. I'm going to hold some VTSAX and VTIAX and work hard to build those numbers up. Is the 4% rule safe? Who knows, and honestly, fuck it. Work another 1 or 2 years and hit a 3%. Not a big deal. Need a chicken farm to feel safe? Build a god damn coop.

The mega nuclear war end-of-times talk is pointless, because I'll be a puff of dust in that case. Will oil run out? Sure, big fucking deal. We can litterally produce oil in factories with power and carbon if it came to that.

Will shit hit the fan occasionally? Hell yea! I'll be dammed if I can't enjoy the swings myself!

Yee, fucking, haw!

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #203 on: February 07, 2017, 02:11:26 PM »
This thread is so pessimistic, my facebook feed is so pessimistic, and I personally refuse to be pessimistic!

Cool.  Don't come knocking if that doesn't work out for you.

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Life is so extravagantly amazing now that even if we lost 10 or 30 years of progress overnight we would live like literal kings of old.

Not sure about that - 30 years ago, we didn't really have the internet or GPS, and now almost everything relies on those. :)

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Will oil run out? Sure, big fucking deal. We can litterally produce oil in factories with power and carbon if it came to that.

Can, yes.  Can do so energetically favorably enough to actually run an industrial society?  I'll let you do the math on that and come back.  Don't forget, there's no solar panel fairy who waves a wand to make solar panels.

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Will shit hit the fan occasionally? Hell yea! I'll be dammed if I can't enjoy the swings myself!

*shrug*  As long as you're able to convert your money into what you need (and get out to do that), great.  Have fun!

I really don't quite understand how applying history to our current point in the world makes one pessimistic, though.  Personally, I think the "ALL IN INDEX FUNDS" thing often proposed requires sticking one's head in the sand, but, hey.  Irrational optimism is still optimism, I guess?

TheAnonOne

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #204 on: February 07, 2017, 02:35:45 PM »
This thread is so pessimistic, my facebook feed is so pessimistic, and I personally refuse to be pessimistic!

Cool.  Don't come knocking if that doesn't work out for you.

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Life is so extravagantly amazing now that even if we lost 10 or 30 years of progress overnight we would live like literal kings of old.

Not sure about that - 30 years ago, we didn't really have the internet or GPS, and now almost everything relies on those. :)

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Will oil run out? Sure, big fucking deal. We can litterally produce oil in factories with power and carbon if it came to that.

Can, yes.  Can do so energetically favorably enough to actually run an industrial society?  I'll let you do the math on that and come back.  Don't forget, there's no solar panel fairy who waves a wand to make solar panels.

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Will shit hit the fan occasionally? Hell yea! I'll be dammed if I can't enjoy the swings myself!

*shrug*  As long as you're able to convert your money into what you need (and get out to do that), great.  Have fun!

I really don't quite understand how applying history to our current point in the world makes one pessimistic, though.  Personally, I think the "ALL IN INDEX FUNDS" thing often proposed requires sticking one's head in the sand, but, hey.  Irrational optimism is still optimism, I guess?

Yes, all index funds all the time is a bit hopeful, but I cannot fathom even 1 solution that won't fail under some situation. If the index fund thing works out, I'll be litterally rich. If not I'll have had years or decades of freedom and PROBABLY see an issue before I slam into a concrete wall of doom.

FIRE is all about remaining flexible. The tone of this thread to me is hopeless, as in, we're all dead so might as well end it now. This puzzles me, because life is, and had been on the upswing for 1000s of years.

The market itself has seen numerous 'big deals' and still exists in glorious abundance.

Who knows, maybe I'll keep working a whopping 2 or 3 months longer to have some cash for land, guns, and chicken coops. Those things are CHEAP.

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #205 on: February 07, 2017, 02:41:40 PM »
Huh? Who's talking about "ending it now"?

Recognizing the storm clouds on the horizon and doing something about it is literally the opposite.

Do you really expect to be successful your first year with chickens or a garden? The learning curve is why I plan to "work ahead."

Prairie Stash

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #206 on: February 07, 2017, 02:59:45 PM »

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Will oil run out? Sure, big fucking deal. We can litterally produce oil in factories with power and carbon if it came to that.

Can, yes.  Can do so energetically favorably enough to actually run an industrial society?  I'll let you do the math on that and come back.  Don't forget, there's no solar panel fairy who waves a wand to make solar panels.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534996/megascale-desalination/
http://www.iea.org/
Here's the math on freshwater and energy. Desalination already is widespread, its more expensive then free rainfall, but its not unreasonable to supply drinking water to entire countries with desalination technology as it exists today. As for energy, maybe expand beyond solar? Wind, Geothermal, Nuclear and hydro all have proven track records and known costs. In my neck we already have small scale bio-energy popping up, its a popular heat source but can also make electricity. 

In the USA there's RFS - Renewable Fuel Standards specifically devoted to producing non-Fossil Fuel inputs for the US transportation sector. The sole goal is to develop technology to end the use of fossil fuels, but maybe ethanol and bio-diesel aren't your thing? In general if we were to do a widespread shift from Fossil fuels to non-fossil fuels the costs of energy would double to triple what it costs today - roughly to the price in Europe. If you're going to get stuck on ethanol from corn I suggest you research cellulosic ethanol. Its proven to work at a higher cost, there's still work to fine tune the catalysts, in the meantime the cheaper corn method is a stop gap measure.

Its not that it can't be done, technology already exists, people don't want to double their bills (the horror of electricity going from $100 to $200 a month!). When gas doubled in price around 2012 society didn't stop, people complained more. You're being pessimistic if you start assuming society can't adapt. How do you rationalize the behavior of $5 gallon gas? Its the perfect real world case study of high cost fossil fuels in the USA.

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #207 on: February 07, 2017, 04:14:35 PM »
As for energy, maybe expand beyond solar? Wind, Geothermal, Nuclear and hydro all have proven track records and known costs. In my neck we already have small scale bio-energy popping up, its a popular heat source but can also make electricity.

Right... and we aren't generating nearly enough solar panels, windmils, geothermal sites, or new nuclear plants to have a real impact on anything.

I'd love a bunch of newer nuclear plants with high burnup percentages and breeders for using the stuff we've got warming swimming pools, but NUKLEUR is a scary word to enough people that they're not getting built.

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...but maybe ethanol and bio-diesel aren't your thing?

Ethanol?  Depends on if it's a corn farmer subsidy or an energy source, and the US is quite on the wrong side of that now.  I'm all for biodiesel, but we don't have enough cropland to grow a significant amount of our liquid fuels, especially when they're a diesel-and-natural-gas intensive way of converting fossil fuels into "renewables."

Generally, if we solve energy, we solve a lot of other problems, and I don't see the rate of growth needed to "solve energy" before things get bad.

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Its not that it can't be done, technology already exists, people don't want to double their bills (the horror of electricity going from $100 to $200 a month!). When gas doubled in price around 2012 society didn't stop, people complained more. You're being pessimistic if you start assuming society can't adapt. How do you rationalize the behavior of $5 gallon gas? Its the perfect real world case study of high cost fossil fuels in the USA.

Well, then, if society adapts, I'll be quite happy with things.  I've just read a number of reports talking about how a useful renewable response to finite oil supplies would have needed to start back in the 70s, and we're well, well beyond the point that things can adapt - and energy storage is useful, but plenty of problems in terms of available supplies of materials.

Kriegsspiel

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #208 on: February 07, 2017, 05:14:42 PM »

FIRE is all about remaining flexible. The tone of this thread to me is hopeless, as in, we're all dead so might as well end it now. This puzzles me, because life is, and had been on the upswing for 1000s of years.


Vanishingly slowly, then really fast once we started using fossil fuels to free us from the Malthusian Trap. A Farewell To Alms makes this case and is really interesting otherwise.

The basic outline of world economic history is surprisingly simple... Before 1800 income per person--the food, clothing, heat, light, and housing available per head--varied across societies and epochs... the average person in the world in 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 BC.  Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world's population was poorer than their remote ancestors... Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: thirty to thirty-five years. . . . average welfare, if anything, declined from the Stone Age to 1800.  The poor of 1800, those who lived by their unskilled labor alone, would have been better off if transferred to a hunter-gatherer band.  The Industrial Revolution, a mere two hundred years ago, changed forever the possibilities of material consumption.  Incomes per person began to undergo sustained growth in a favored group of countries.  The richest modern economies are now ten to twenty times wealthier than the 1800 average.




Prairie Stash

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #209 on: February 08, 2017, 10:04:02 AM »
As for energy, maybe expand beyond solar? Wind, Geothermal, Nuclear and hydro all have proven track records and known costs. In my neck we already have small scale bio-energy popping up, its a popular heat source but can also make electricity.

Right... and we aren't generating nearly enough solar panels, windmils, geothermal sites, or new nuclear plants to have a real impact on anything.

I'd love a bunch of newer nuclear plants with high burnup percentages and breeders for using the stuff we've got warming swimming pools, but NUKLEUR is a scary word to enough people that they're not getting built.

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...but maybe ethanol and bio-diesel aren't your thing?

Ethanol?  Depends on if it's a corn farmer subsidy or an energy source, and the US is quite on the wrong side of that now.  I'm all for biodiesel, but we don't have enough cropland to grow a significant amount of our liquid fuels, especially when they're a diesel-and-natural-gas intensive way of converting fossil fuels into "renewables."

Generally, if we solve energy, we solve a lot of other problems, and I don't see the rate of growth needed to "solve energy" before things get bad.

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Its not that it can't be done, technology already exists, people don't want to double their bills (the horror of electricity going from $100 to $200 a month!). When gas doubled in price around 2012 society didn't stop, people complained more. You're being pessimistic if you start assuming society can't adapt. How do you rationalize the behavior of $5 gallon gas? Its the perfect real world case study of high cost fossil fuels in the USA.

Well, then, if society adapts, I'll be quite happy with things.  I've just read a number of reports talking about how a useful renewable response to finite oil supplies would have needed to start back in the 70s, and we're well, well beyond the point that things can adapt - and energy storage is useful, but plenty of problems in terms of available supplies of materials.
With nuclear there's 67 plants being built right now, mostly in Asia. In Utah there's the first pilot scale small nuclear reactor (50 MW) being slated for production in 2024. It might be a flop, but it won't be the last attempt. The trick is to get them built without doubling electricity costs, it can already be done at triple cost (nuclear subs, aircraft carriers are current example of small scale reactors), no one wants to pay triple though. Keep in mind that the lifecycle of coal power is about 60 years, its weird to expect change to happen quick when its already planned out for the next 30-60 years. Solar life cycle is 30 years, wind is 30, hydro is 100; these are long term plans and 2024 is actually pretty soon comparatively.

Ethanol is already producible for $2.50/gallon from cellulose. Ethanol from corn is cheaper and gasoline is cheapest. These are real world technologies already being use, not hypothetical futuristic tech. As soon as gasoline costs rise due to shrinking supply these plants become economical, but not a day before, apparently its already close to par. If you want to see society adapting, here it is: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=17851

The switch from grain to cellulosic ethanol has started as predicted a decade ago. Everyone knows corn ethanol is just the transition, not the end goal. People lose track of the big picture that spans decades, society doesn't transition in 10 years.

I think I just made you quite happy, society is adapting. Technology is being deployed today, not in the future.

Telecaster

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #210 on: February 08, 2017, 11:01:28 AM »
For example, The Russian Tsars were replaced by the communists, who were replaced by the oligarchs.  The rulers changed, but the basic institutions and culture stayed the same.

Sure, but even with those transitions, "normal" broke down pretty badly.

Read some of the stuff written during the recent Soviet collapse and transition - it was a pretty rough decade for people living there as power transferred and new forms of government got worked out.

And after it got worked out, Russia's GDP tripled. We've had lots of rough decades in the country.  Great Depression, Long Recession, etc.     To be 100% clear, there is a lot to admire in striving to be self-sufficient.  The old adage "Hope for the best and plan for the worst" is an old adage for a reason.   I'm not taking issue with the direction you are headed, I'm just trying to understand that rationale.   

Classical_Liberal points out the USA is losing its dominance in several areas, which is framed as a decline.  But I'm certain that if you examine those areas more closely, it becomes apparent that other countries are catching up, not that the USA is necessarily declining.  Overall, other countries catching up is surely a good thing, no?  Durrant joining the Warriors doesn't mean Curry got worse. 

Addressing a couple comments/ideas I've seen in this thread (in no order)

--World population won't be able to feed itself.  This is true right now, but the trend is towards less hunger.  First world nations produce a general excess of food.  Producing food really isn't the issue, affording food is.  In the last 25 years, extreme poverty has been cut in half.  The number of people living with hunger similarly has been about cut in half.   Globally we've made enormous progress in this area in a fairly short period of time. 

--World population in general is increasing, which causes all kinds of problems.  This is true, but fertility rates worldwide are plummeting.  If current trends continue, world populations will stabilize fairly soon, and may even start decreasing.  Providing sixth grade education for girls and access to television (believe it or not) are major drivers in lowering fertility rates.  This ties back to poverty levels, which are as noted above decreasing rapidly. 

--Peak Oil/Energy shortages.  The amount of petroleum on the planet is finite.  But as petroleum prices increase, new technologies for extracting petroleum become attractive (think the fracking boom), as does conservation, as do new energy sources.  It is more correct to call it plateau oil.  In recent years, we've seen GDP increase with less energy consumed, combined with dramatic drops in the prices of both conventional and renewable energy.   Renewables in particular are becoming competitive and even cheaper than conventional sources in some cases. For example, compare the price of wind energy vs. coal.  In some states, wind is actually cheaper without subsidies.  And here is another option:  nuclear.  Not much (but some!) new nuclear is in the pipeline, and sure some of that is NIMBYism, but most is because it is expensive.  If other energy sources became expensive, then nuclear would become attractive again.  Nuclear is a mature technology, the implementation is well understood.   If the pitchforks come out due to high energy prices we'll be building nuclear like crazy, I guarantee. 

--Loss of the Dollar as a reserve currency.   That's another trend I'm not seeing.  But there are disadvantages to the dollar being the reserve currency.  Specifically, it creates a demand for dollars, which in turn drives our trade deficit.  It wouldn't be entirely tragic to go to an international system for that reason.  All central banks print money.   Having a reserve currency is not a requirement for that.   

There certainly could be a Black Swan event that throws the world into chaos, and there is a lot of wisdom in preparing for the unexpected.  But I just don't see any significant trends that suggest the world is getting worse, or that the US specifically is in decline.   


joonifloofeefloo

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #211 on: February 23, 2017, 09:21:04 AM »
Hunted down this thread to share this... 

Thought of this thread (specifically the subtopic of surviving short term or long term environmental disaster, mobility, etc) when I watched it.

Highly recommend the documentary The Babushkas of Chernobyl, for the MMM-related reasons outlined in my post here:
https://brainquirkcash.com/2017/02/23/the-babushkas-of-chernobyl/

Tyson

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #212 on: February 23, 2017, 11:31:02 AM »
Its interesting, we all have access to the same facts (more or less), and some of us read them as pessimistic and others as optimistic.  I used to be fairly pessimistic but I've made a conscious effort to be more optimistic about things.  I find that my daily life is much more pleasant and happy now, as a direct result of this shift. 

If SHTF in 20 years, I'd rather spend all/most days during that time in a happy and optimistic mood.  20 years of happiness seems like a much better experience than 20 years of worry.  Especially since SHTF is not a certainty (or even really a probability, IMO).  You guys can build bunkers and stock up on guns.  Me?  I'm going to be having good times with my family, especially while my daughter is still young.

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #213 on: February 23, 2017, 11:53:10 AM »
I really haven't seen much "bunkers and guns" stuff in here.

Solar with grid down capability, gardens, greenhouses, food storage... hardly bunkering.

Tyson

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #214 on: February 23, 2017, 12:39:34 PM »
True, and I like gardens and solar and being able to make/store food (although I am doing none of those things at the moment).  It just seems like a slippery slope to be on.  I guess I feel that if you're doing it because self-sufficiency is cool and fun, that's one thing.  But doing it because you think society will collapse is another thing. 

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #215 on: February 23, 2017, 12:57:53 PM »
Why can't it be both?

If I'm right, I'm ahead of the curve. If I'm wrong, I eat well.

Linea_Norway

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #216 on: February 24, 2017, 02:25:12 AM »
Although I have earlier in this thread been quite pessimistic about the future of the world, I would like to be more self efficient to save money during early retirement and because it is fun growing or catching your own food.

If the world really goes apocalyps, I don't expect my little vegetable garden to save me. I am also not the person to build a shelter full of arms and food. In that scenario, I am probably one of those who doesn't survive the worst case. So be it. Let's just hope it takes a long time before this happens.

Abe

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #217 on: February 24, 2017, 03:40:21 AM »
I agree with an optimistic outlook regarding energy and overall growth. We have broken through the technology barriers that previously made solar (and to lesser extent, wind) unaffordable. This is evidenced by large-scale investment in them by countries without huge entrenched oil interests (China, India, most of Europe). We can quibble about subsidies, but all energy infrastructure is subsidized by governments. It's unreasonable to expect that our country will just stay with oil out of spite. We are stubborn, but also greedy and once prices for these energy sources becomes equivalent to fossil fuels, we will slowly switch. Yeah we may have a crappy climate before that happens, but we aren't going to burn up in an inferno unless we burn ourselves to the ground before that switch. In that case, there's also the possibility of moving to another country with more opportunities. My family has done it several times, it's not the end of the world. Presumably we will be financially independent at that point, making the move easier.

Linea_Norway

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #218 on: February 24, 2017, 04:02:46 AM »
I agree with an optimistic outlook regarding energy and overall growth. We have broken through the technology barriers that previously made solar (and to lesser extent, wind) unaffordable. This is evidenced by large-scale investment in them by countries without huge entrenched oil interests (China, India, most of Europe). We can quibble about subsidies, but all energy infrastructure is subsidized by governments. It's unreasonable to expect that our country will just stay with oil out of spite. We are stubborn, but also greedy and once prices for these energy sources becomes equivalent to fossil fuels, we will slowly switch. Yeah we may have a crappy climate before that happens, but we aren't going to burn up in an inferno unless we burn ourselves to the ground before that switch. In that case, there's also the possibility of moving to another country with more opportunities. My family has done it several times, it's not the end of the world. Presumably we will be financially independent at that point, making the move easier.

Recently the Dutch government wanted to build a big windmill park in the North Sea. It turned out that the cost for building it was only half of what they expected. This means that in many cases clean energy is already a very good alternative. Think also about solar energy on places that lay far away from existing power stations. It probably paid off big time. In Greece every house has a black painted tank on the roof to warm up their shower water. As long as it pays off, people and governments will choose the cheapest alternative. And clean energy is getting very competitive.

ChrisLansing

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #219 on: March 10, 2017, 06:46:48 AM »
Syonyk

Starting with your OP I could tell you'd been reading JMG and reading about peak oil.    Me too.   

I don't want to dwell too long on peak oil but I'd like to say just a few things.    It's pretty widely accepted that US "production" peaked in 1970.  The question now is when will world "production" peak.   I'm not that concerned whether the date is Thanksgiving day 2005, or June 17, 2028 at 3:05 EST.    The facts are, oil is finite and we keep using it.  We can only use it once then, for all practical purposes, it's gone.  Forever.   We speak of producing oil, but of course humans can't produce oil.  We can only extract it and refine it.    There has been a steady decrease in the total amount of oil ever since the first oil well started "producing".    We know this because oil is finite. 
The fact that we are now pumping chemicals into the ground to help extract more oil is an indication that all the easy to get oil has been pumped, or is being pumped.   IOWs fracking is a good sign that peak oil is here or soon will be. 

Are we in decline?  Well, this is MMM, and there is that article about the benefits of outrageous optimism.   I guess I should be surprised that so many take the view that there's a bright shiny future just around the corner.  Maybe they live in a birght shiny present, going from their loft through their walkable neighborhood, to their bright shiny tech job and back.   I don't know.    What I see is crumbling roads, crumbling bridges, crumbling public buildings, vacant boarded up houses, poisoned city water systems,  and more frequent interruptions of electrical power.   These things can all be summed up as infrastructure problems, but there is also a problem with our priorities - we'd prefer to spend our tax money on regime change rather than fix our infrastructure.    We overbuilt during boom times and now, in our decline, we can't afford the maintenance.  The real unemployment rate is much higher than the phoney-baloney official rate.    Lot's of people are unemployed or underemployed.   How anyone can look around at modern America and not have the evidence of decline slap them in the face?     

I'm not sure why we need to look at the extremes of optimism/pessimism.   It seems to me it's wiser to be more nuanced - something like cautious optimism.    A sober assessment of real conditions isn't, to my mind, pessimistic.   

What should we do if we are in decline?   Well, I'm 60 years old, so I'm not going to do very much.   I plan to insulate my house and get rid of one car when I retire.   I'm going to start a garden but I'll never be able to be self sufficient in food production.   (yard too small)  Unless the oil runs out next Thursday I can probably live close to my present lifestyle until the actuarial tables prove to be correct.    If I were a much younger man I'd be making plans to live with a lot less access to oil, and a nation in decline.     

Learning skills is good, but it should be approached from the POV of what will help you, not so much what are people willing to pay for.    If we are in decline, and we are, there will be fewer and fewer people able to pay for your goods or services.   Let me give a few specific examples.  Perhaps you learn to brew beer.   If you can figure out how to do it I probably can too, thus neither of us will make much money selling each other beer.   We'd both benefit from producing it for ourselves.   The same rationale applies to soap and candle making, bee keeping, gardening, and many others.   If you want to sell your services to others it not only has to be something they need, but something they can't easily learn to do for themselves. 

The important thing is that the decline will probably be generally slow and gradual.  It will have some plateaus to interrupt the decline.    We won't go from cell phones and the internet to living in caves.   As we decline we'll slip back to older ways of doing things (what choice will we have?) and lower per capita consumption of energy.      We may find ourselves living as our grandparents or great grandparents did.   But that's still a long way from the caves. 


BTDretire

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #220 on: March 10, 2017, 07:04:25 AM »

Quote
Life is so extravagantly amazing now that even if we lost 10 or 30 years of progress overnight we would live like literal kings of old.

Not sure about that - 30 years ago, we didn't really have the internet or GPS, and now almost everything relies on those. :)


 It was really difficult, but I worked hard at finding things to
waste my time on before I got the internet at 40 trs old! /s/
 And I still don't have GPS.
 My daughter sent me a birthday card the other day, it said,
"Happy birthday to someone old enough to have lived through
the hardships of not being able to Google something. :-)
 And the beat goes on...

Classical_Liberal

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #221 on: March 10, 2017, 10:34:24 AM »
The important thing is that the decline will probably be generally slow and gradual.  It will have some plateaus to interrupt the decline.    We won't go from cell phones and the internet to living in caves.   As we decline we'll slip back to older ways of doing things (what choice will we have?) and lower per capita consumption of energy.      We may find ourselves living as our grandparents or great grandparents did.   But that's still a long way from the caves.

I tend to agree with this assessment.  The decline will likely continue to to be slow, even slower because the loss of energy per-capita will be compensated with new technology.  Meaning it's even possible that we can (on a "mean" global scale, at least) maintain current standards going forward.  It's likely that he changes will be notable over decades, not years.

Learning skills is good, but it should be approached from the POV of what will help you, not so much what are people willing to pay for.    If we are in decline, and we are, there will be fewer and fewer people able to pay for your goods or services.   Let me give a few specific examples.  Perhaps you learn to brew beer.   If you can figure out how to do it I probably can too, thus neither of us will make much money selling each other beer.   We'd both benefit from producing it for ourselves.   The same rationale applies to soap and candle making, bee keeping, gardening, and many others.   If you want to sell your services to others it not only has to be something they need, but something they can't easily learn to do for themselves. 

I partially disagree with this assessment.  Yes, there will likely be a trend towards self-sufficiency, however, economic specialization has brought society a great deal of benefits from an efficiency standpoint.  Consumers purchasing goods which are are produced very cheaply far away will decline due to increase costs associated with fast shipping (think foodstuffs).  This will be a direct relationship with energy costs.  However, specialization will not go away anytime soon.  Even prior to fossil fuels communities has cobbers, seamstress, farmers, beekeepers, etc.  Some humans (and companies) have the means, capital, and ability to produce things more efficiently than others. This is why currency exists. So, investing the time to become a very good and efficient producer of beer will still provide cash flow as others will not have the skill level to produced it as well.  They will choose a different specialization, perhaps alternative power generation.  You will sell her beer and she will sell you the means to produce electricity (hopefully at a discount after consuming generous amounts of your beer)... It is the way of things.

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #222 on: March 10, 2017, 11:40:30 AM »
Yes there have always been specialists.  That's a very valid point.    I'm just talking about the average person, not someone who becomes a craftsman.     Soap and beer were made on "commercial" scales 100, even 200 years ago.  But they were also made at home.   I'm just saying that home crafts won't be sold to others, to any appreciable extent.   What you can make at home I can make at home.   If you want to open your own micro brewery and make beer on that scale, yes, there may be opportunities.   

This whole "survival" thing takes us into exactly what you mention and what's implied - specialization, division of labor, economies of scale.   I'm trying to point out that many shifting into "survival mode" whether of necessity or just because they want to, are still approaching skills as something to sell, rather than something to employ in your own behalf.   If you want to be a furniture maker, and make items for other people to buy with cash, you'd better be very very good at it.   Perhaps 10 or more years as an apprentice and at least another 10 a a journeyman before becoming a furniture maker in your own right.   If you just want something for your own use made of plywood then your skills can be mediocre.  Cabinet making isn't a survival skill, it's a craftsman skill.   It isn't something you'd teach yourself to do along with learning gardening, brewing, soap making, sewing, etc. etc.  It's something you'd have to dedicate yourself to for decades.   You can become passably competent in a dozen or more skills, but you can only master a few, if even that many, in a lifetime.     I do agree with you though, there will still be specialists after the oil runs out.   

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #223 on: March 10, 2017, 09:46:47 PM »
Starting with your OP I could tell you'd been reading JMG and reading about peak oil.    Me too.   

Certainly true.  Sounds like JMG is taking a break from his blogging activities - perhaps some new books coming out? :)

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The fact that we are now pumping chemicals into the ground to help extract more oil is an indication that all the easy to get oil has been pumped, or is being pumped.   IOWs fracking is a good sign that peak oil is here or soon will be.

My preferred Greer quote (expanded a bit) on that is, "We're busy scraping the bottom of the barrel and pretending that the muck we're scraping out means the barrel is still full of sweet crude."

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What I see is crumbling roads, crumbling bridges, crumbling public buildings, vacant boarded up houses, poisoned city water systems,  and more frequent interruptions of electrical power.

Even in those "Bright, shiny areas," a lot of that is the case.  I felt like I needed a dirtbike's suspension to deal with a lot of the roads in Seattle.  They were bad.  And the usual boarded up buildings lit on fire by squatters, you couldn't leave your bike out, even locked, because a methhead would swipe it, etc.  You know, Utopia!

I expect more of that in the future, at least if we follow Greer's Catabolic Decline theory, which seems decently backed by history (and, annoyingly, doesn't have that "Well, nothing we can do, so may as well enjoy it!" sudden wall at the end so many hope for).

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These things can all be summed up as infrastructure problems, but there is also a problem with our priorities - we'd prefer to spend our tax money on regime change rather than fix our infrastructure.

A sad image meme I saw recently was basically, "Wait... with the state of our infrastructure, what exactly is the military supposed to be defending here?"

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We overbuilt during boom times and now, in our decline, we can't afford the maintenance.

Suburbia is going to be hit the worst here.  They were built ~50 years ago, for a ~50 year lifespan.  Huge swaths of it are going to need major infrastructure work - roads, sewers, water mains, electrical... all of it.  And that's not likely to happen, and suburbia is uninhabitable without infrastructure.

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What should we do if we are in decline?   Well, I'm 60 years old, so I'm not going to do very much.   I plan to insulate my house and get rid of one car when I retire.   I'm going to start a garden but I'll never be able to be self sufficient in food production.   (yard too small)  Unless the oil runs out next Thursday I can probably live close to my present lifestyle until the actuarial tables prove to be correct.    If I were a much younger man I'd be making plans to live with a lot less access to oil, and a nation in decline.

Not a bad strategy.  I'm slightly over half your age, so I'm likely to see it, though our little rural corner may weather things better.  Or maybe not.  Either way, I have plenty of acres to work with (2 in our name, functionally 8-10 connected that's family land), so we should be able to run a nice little garden and aquaponics setup out here if I try.

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The important thing is that the decline will probably be generally slow and gradual.  It will have some plateaus to interrupt the decline.    We won't go from cell phones and the internet to living in caves.   As we decline we'll slip back to older ways of doing things (what choice will we have?) and lower per capita consumption of energy.      We may find ourselves living as our grandparents or great grandparents did.   But that's still a long way from the caves.

Certainly likely - which, unfortunately, will lead to a century or so of howling from people who've sucked down the Religion of Progress about how this [whatever] can't possibly be happening, because Progress Has to Make Progress!  And, of course, refusing to do anything useful about it, because if they just elect the right savior person, all will go back to normal.

The problem with going backwards in terms of tech levels is that most of that older technology has been forgotten and destroyed in the rush towards Internet Connected Things (which are then promptly hacked by... whoever, not like there's a short list).  The skills of our great grandparent's generation are dead or dying, and very few people keep those up.  That's actually one of the reasons I'm trying to get stuff going now - so I can learn the hard lessons while I can afford the screwups that are inevitable.

Tyson

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #224 on: March 11, 2017, 12:14:16 AM »
I'm just curious about something, if you wouldn't mind a small hypothetical.  Much of the concern here seems centered on fossil fuels running out. 

Hypothetically, if we switch over from fossil fuels to something renewable like solar without too much difficulty, do you then stop worrying?  Or do you say, in effect: "Well there's always the next thing that's going to bring it all down"? 

Put another way:  Do you prep because you see a real existential threat and you'd stop prepping if that threat was avoided?  Or do you just keep finding more threats to justify being a prepper?

Have you considered that you might be depressed and life seems hopeless and fragile because of that? 


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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #225 on: March 11, 2017, 02:13:01 AM »
I'm just curious about something, if you wouldn't mind a small hypothetical.  Much of the concern here seems centered on fossil fuels running out. 

Hypothetically, if we switch over from fossil fuels to something renewable like solar without too much difficulty, do you then stop worrying?  Or do you say, in effect: "Well there's always the next thing that's going to bring it all down"? 

Put another way:  Do you prep because you see a real existential threat and you'd stop prepping if that threat was avoided?  Or do you just keep finding more threats to justify being a prepper?

Have you considered that you might be depressed and life seems hopeless and fragile because of that?
On the plus side, shale gas plays have been much, much larger than expected in the United States. Peak oil has been a concern for decades; so far we keep finding more oil (Smiths Bay, etc.) And using even more natural gas that comes out of these same holes, further extending an already distant future free from oil. While it is a (probably) finite resource, the end of recoverable stashes has yet to be seen.

ChrisLansing

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #226 on: March 11, 2017, 06:27:37 AM »
I'm just curious about something, if you wouldn't mind a small hypothetical.  Much of the concern here seems centered on fossil fuels running out. 

Hypothetically, if we switch over from fossil fuels to something renewable like solar without too much difficulty, do you then stop worrying?  Or do you say, in effect: "Well there's always the next thing that's going to bring it all down"? 

Put another way:  Do you prep because you see a real existential threat and you'd stop prepping if that threat was avoided?  Or do you just keep finding more threats to justify being a prepper?


Have you considered that you might be depressed and life seems hopeless and fragile because of that?


I suppose this was directed more at Syonyk but I'd like to answer anyway.   It's a fair question.   

If the switch to renewables goes smoothly and we can maintain present lifestyles, then the only thing to worry about is the decline of the American empire.   Decline and fall happens to all empires, sooner or later, for multiple reasons.       As others have pointed out, it need not be a catastrophe.    As Syonyk has pointed out, it does tend to be a bumpy ride. 

The word "prepper" brings to my mind the image of someone digging an underground bunker, filling it with Army surplus MREs, and collecting automatic weapons.   I don't consider this an intelligent response to decline, whether it's due to running out of oil, or due to other factors that make empires decline.    I don't think of myself as a "prepper".   

It's confusing to me why people keep insisting that a forecast of the future which is less than "bright and shiny" is a sign of depression.  When you listen the the weatherman and he forecasts rain, do you assume he's depressed?    Do you channel surf until you find a more optimistic meteorologist?   Might there be valid reasons to predict rain and thunderstorms, or is it all due to one's state of mind?   

Oil is finite.  It's not a theory.   This ball we call earth is of a certain size and can only contain X amount of oil and coal.  Unless we can colonize other planets, we are stuck with the amount of oil and coal this ball contains.   No more.   How much is left?   We don't really know.   As Syonyk pointed out, we are scrapping the bottom of the barrel now.  But possibly we'll discover more oil and it will be relatively easy to get at.    The day of reckoning may be put off further into the future.     We may be getting ready for an age of decline that isn't coming for several hundred years.  Some of us look at present trends and conclude that it looks like rain.   If we are wrong, then we carry our umbrellas needlessly.   What if we're right?   

I'm skeptical that diffuse sunlight can be substituted seamlessly for highly concentrated energy sources like coal and oil.     I could of course be wrong.     

Finally, individual response to the "end of oil" must look crazy to the majority.    But individual response is pretty much the only possible response.    It would be great if we could just get our fellow Americans to agree to lifestyle changes that would take our per capita consumption of oil down to European levels.    Germany uses about 2/3s what we do, per capita.   Czechs about 1/3.   Life is not horrific in either place.    If we could bring our consumption rate down to those levels we might buy a considerable amount of time to transition to other energy sources.    But the chance of getting Americans, as a group, to ride trams instead of driving SUVs, and the many other lifestyle choices that would be required to reduce per capita oil consumption are pretty much nil.    As MMM constantly has to point out, most Americans won't even make lifestyle changes to save their own money.       
« Last Edit: March 11, 2017, 06:29:25 AM by ChrisLansing »

FireLane

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #227 on: March 11, 2017, 06:46:47 AM »
I'm skeptical that diffuse sunlight can be substituted seamlessly for highly concentrated energy sources like coal and oil.     I could of course be wrong.     

Probably not seamlessly. The biggest advantage oil and gas have is that they're highly concentrated, which is why you can drive your car hundreds of miles on one full tank. We haven't invented a battery that offers that kind of storage density for electricity. Range anxiety will probably always be an issue with electric cars, and it's hard to see how it could ever work for planes.

But in terms of overall energy consumption, there's no problem at all. The statistic I've seen is that the earth gets as much energy from the Sun in an hour as humanity uses in a year. Even if they never get any more efficient, we could supply our entire civilization's energy needs with 25,000 square miles of solar panels. That's about the size of West Virginia. Ambitious, but absolutely doable, especially if that capacity is spread over rooftops:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2014/0729/How-many-solar-panels-would-it-take-to-power-Earth

Tyson

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #228 on: March 11, 2017, 09:50:00 AM »
"The declining American Empire" idea ignores the fact that other empires (oh, like the UK) that declined, now have average citizens that live FAR better than anyone lived at the peak of their so called empire.  The world as a whole is on a massive upward swing as far as quality of life is concerned. 

The idea of empires is a red herring.  Even right now, America is not rated as a #1 place to live in a lot of categories.  So in a sense, the 'empire' has already declined relative to other parts of the world.  Doesn't mean America is not still an awesome place to live.  It is. 

And you didn't really answer my question.  ASSUME that we get past coal and oil and onto something like Solar.  What do you do at that point? 

Abe

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #229 on: March 11, 2017, 10:00:39 AM »
I'm skeptical that diffuse sunlight can be substituted seamlessly for highly concentrated energy sources like coal and oil.     I could of course be wrong.     

Probably not seamlessly. The biggest advantage oil and gas have is that they're highly concentrated, which is why you can drive your car hundreds of miles on one full tank. We haven't invented a battery that offers that kind of storage density for electricity. Range anxiety will probably always be an issue with electric cars, and it's hard to see how it could ever work for planes.

But in terms of overall energy consumption, there's no problem at all. The statistic I've seen is that the earth gets as much energy from the Sun in an hour as humanity uses in a year. Even if they never get any more efficient, we could supply our entire civilization's energy needs with 25,000 square miles of solar panels. That's about the size of West Virginia. Ambitious, but absolutely doable, especially if that capacity is spread over rooftops:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2014/0729/How-many-solar-panels-would-it-take-to-power-Earth

Two thoughts on range anxiety:
1. Range anxiety assumes we use electricity to charge batteries, which I agree are currently limited in their energy density compared to oil-based products. However, using electricity for hydrogen production is still being researched as an alternative. Hydrogen storage suffers from different issues with energy density, but that is improving faster than with batteries.

2. Range anxiety for commuters is more of a society/lifestyle problem than a real roadblock for electric cars. Initial cost of battery production is probably going to remain a bigger issue for some time. If one is commuting >50 miles a day, then either there's a problem with where they live vs. where they work (90% of people, I'm guessing) or they just travel a lot for business and an electric car at this stage isn't the right mode of transportation. I already have a stupidly long commute (11 miles each way to primary hospital, 11 miles another way for secondary hospital) yet wouldn't need a 300mi+ vehicle to make it. At any rate, once we upgrade our charging infrastructure (which we already essentially have, just need to upgrade the cables for higher voltage charging), this will be even less of an issue.
« Last Edit: March 11, 2017, 10:07:37 AM by Abe »

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #230 on: March 11, 2017, 11:07:33 AM »
range anxiety:

The other issue being the more infrequent, but longer range trips people take via their vehicles.  I would imagine most folks on this forum who follow rule # 1* put on most of their vehicle miles in such a manner. I am definitely in this category.  Proper infrastructure building for the future would alleviate this problem (think Hyperloop).  Sadly, one of the hallmark problems with a declining empire is too many resources are spent maintaining decaying, old infrastructure vs inovative building for the future. If we stop fighting last centuries battles the US still has the resources to minimize it's decline.

*Rule # 1, live close to work!

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #231 on: March 11, 2017, 01:07:29 PM »
I found this reddit thread interesting:  https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5y0alt/til_of_ossip_bernstein_a_famous_chess_grandmaster/

This Russian genius basically built 3 fortunes and lost them all.  Things can get pretty shitty.  But relatively speaking, a lot more russians, jews, never lived through WWII..so he is pretty lucky in comparison.

If you're lucky enough to be FIRE in this time period, consider yourself lucky, period.  Enjoy the brief time we have on earth, and don't waste it worrying about shit you can't control.

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Bernstein was a successful businessman. He earned considerable wealth before losing it in the Bolshevik Revolution, earned a second fortune that was lost in the Great Depression, and a third that was lost when France was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940. Bernstein was exiled in Paris, only to be driven to Spain by the Nazis, because of his Jewish origin.

Telecaster

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #232 on: March 11, 2017, 03:20:14 PM »
"The declining American Empire" idea ignores the fact that other empires (oh, like the UK) that declined, now have average citizens that live FAR better than anyone lived at the peak of their so called empire.  The world as a whole is on a massive upward swing as far as quality of life is concerned. 

I was about to post the same thing.  For the average Englishman, losing the empire was the best possible thing that could have happened to them. 

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #233 on: March 11, 2017, 09:20:01 PM »
Hypothetically, if we switch over from fossil fuels to something renewable like solar without too much difficulty, do you then stop worrying?  Or do you say, in effect: "Well there's always the next thing that's going to bring it all down"?

First, I think the likelyhood of switching over to renewables and maintaining our current energy budget very, very low.  And since there is a very, very strong correlation between GDP per capita and energy use per capita, that means a good chance that a financial system that requires exponential growth in order to survive is going to do some very interesting things.  None of them particularly useful if you're planning on investment returns.

There are also very real problems with high renewable penetration - how to keep the grid stable and function with high DER (distributed energy resource) connection rates is quite an open problem, and there are all sorts of interesting feedback loops and paths to blackouts.  The UL listed grid tie inverters are part of the problem - by design, they have basically zero frequency or voltage transient ridethrough capability, and will shut down completely if things go marginally out of spec.  Oh, and you often get a bonus feature since they all implement the minimum shutdown period - if they all go out at once, they all come back at once, which is a great way to get another voltage or frequency transient to shut them down again.  Lots of interesting behaviors, and that's not even counting the fact that the security of them (because, of course, everything has to be internet connected) ranges from "adequate" to "awful."  And any large scale DER based power grid has to have some sort of centralized control over the devices.  Do you trust a computer from 10 years ago to be secure on the internet today?  Inverters last an awful long time...

I think there are things that can be done that would at least prolong our nation/empire, but historically, those things don't happen.  Political systems end up dysfunctional, frozen, and incapable of action, even in the face of obvious actions to take.  Sound familiar?  Historically, it doesn't get better - so, consider that we're dealing with a useless political system going forward, and on top of that, have a system optimized for short term thinking - who cares what happens after you're out of office?  That's the other guy's problem.

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Put another way:  Do you prep because you see a real existential threat and you'd stop prepping if that threat was avoided?  Or do you just keep finding more threats to justify being a prepper?

I can't speak to other people in the thread, but I really don't consider myself a "prepper" - though I suspect some people would consider me one.  I'm looking at ways to reduce my costs and improve my anti-fragility regardless of what happens.  Solar on the roof and things keep going well?  Great, I've paid for my power for a long while, and it should continue to pay off in the future.  Things aren't going well?  Great, I can keep my house powered, run cables to the neighborhood, and have the basis of a small hyper-local power station.  Either way, I don't see a huge downside.

Same for food - if things go well, darn.  I eat a lot of garden-fresh stuff and know where it grew (and while I'm not deep down the GMO-is-evil rabbit hole, Monsanto and Bayer merging scares the hell out of me, because they now have a seriously perverse set of incentives to make people sick).  If things go poorly?  Great, I have local food production, and the local knowledge to helps scale that in my community.

I can't see myself "not having a reasonable set of supplies stored up," because that's just generally wise.  Were I more confident in the direction of the country, I'd probably be a bit lazier about getting gardens and greenhouses set up, but it's a direction I want to go anyway, and it's useful in a wide range of futures.

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Have you considered that you might be depressed and life seems hopeless and fragile because of that?

... why does everyone seem to think I'm depressed?  I quite enjoy my life out here on a few acres with family nearby and no HOA to tell me that my cracked basalt path (current project) is against some regulation or other.  I'm radically happier out here than I was in the Seattle metro shithole, with neighbors complaining that my truck never moved (which was not true, I just happened to have a good way of parking it within a few inches of the same spot every time, and once I started parking crappier, the complaints stopped), that there was an apple in the back yard attracting rats (complaint on file with the city, and, yes, there was an apple tree back there), etc.

Nations have their arc through history, and there are an awful lot of nations that no longer exist - why do so many people seem to think that "Things are Different Now"?  It's just one of those facts of life - people age and die, nations age and die.  Nations that live on "change" seem to die faster than nations that value stability over all else - the nations that have lasted thousands of years without serious disruptions didn't have much in the way of technological change.

I certainly don't feel that "life is hopeless and fragile" - I just see that there's a good chance of things going in a direction that is not commonly considered, and am working to handle that case as well.

To borrow an analogy from myself (in some unpublished work), if you're on a boat, it's taking on water, and the crew is busy insisting that it's not sinking, and besides, it's the other guy's fault, would everyone just stop being so pessimistic - at some point, the wise action is to go find yourself a life jacket and put it on.  Maybe the ship is sitting a few feet above a sandbar and won't actually sink, or maybe somehow the crew will do something useful, but just in case, there's no harm in a lifejacket.

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #234 on: March 11, 2017, 09:29:52 PM »
On the plus side, shale gas plays have been much, much larger than expected in the United States.

They have been, but the well decline rates on the shale wells have been awful - 70+% reduction in flow in a year is reasonably common on those, and some are worse.  When you factor in that the best spots are drilled first, it's a short term relief, at best.  On the plus side, I haven't been hearing any yapping about 100 years of Saudi American Energy recently - so, at least, some truth has blasted through skulls.

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Peak oil has been a concern for decades; so far we keep finding more oil (Smiths Bay, etc.) And using even more natural gas that comes out of these same holes, further extending an already distant future free from oil.

We live on a finite planet.  Evidence seems to indicate that using the atmosphere as a sewer for long-buried matter may not be the best idea we've ever had.  We will run out of economically extractable oil at some point.

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While it is a (probably) finite resource, the end of recoverable stashes has yet to be seen.

The problem isn't running out completely - it's running out of the stuff that can be extracted cheaply enough (in both an energy and economic sense) that you can run an economy on it.  Oil where you spend as much energy getting it out of the ground as you get from the barrel isn't useful as an energy source.

It's confusing to me why people keep insisting that a forecast of the future which is less than "bright and shiny" is a sign of depression.  When you listen the the weatherman and he forecasts rain, do you assume he's depressed?    Do you channel surf until you find a more optimistic meteorologist?   Might there be valid reasons to predict rain and thunderstorms, or is it all due to one's state of mind?

Good analogy, thanks.  I will keep that in mind for future reference. :)

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But possibly we'll discover more oil and it will be relatively easy to get at.    The day of reckoning may be put off further into the future.

This is in the realm of "Possible, but absurdly unlikely" - the planet has been pretty well explored for recoverable oil and gas deposits, and the rate of discovery of new fields has been lower than the rate of extraction (I agree that "production" is a bad term) for quite some time now.  Even with better technology, we're still not finding huge amounts of oil we can get at.

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Finally, individual response to the "end of oil" must look crazy to the majority.    But individual response is pretty much the only possible response.

Sadly, that's about where I've ended up as well - I don't expect a useful response as a nation/civilization, so individual responses are the option left.

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But the chance of getting Americans, as a group, to ride trams instead of driving SUVs, and the many other lifestyle choices that would be required to reduce per capita oil consumption are pretty much nil.

It's also that we've built infrastructure that assumes individual point to point transport.  Mass transit just isn't feasible in an awful lot of areas, and suggesting using less energy on transportation leads to a huge comedy of excuses.  An electric bike uses 1/10th the energy per mile of an electric car - casually suggest it sometime in a group and see how rapidly people explain that they couldn't possibly ride one because...

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #235 on: March 11, 2017, 09:36:51 PM »
But in terms of overall energy consumption, there's no problem at all. The statistic I've seen is that the earth gets as much energy from the Sun in an hour as humanity uses in a year. Even if they never get any more efficient, we could supply our entire civilization's energy needs with 25,000 square miles of solar panels. That's about the size of West Virginia. Ambitious, but absolutely doable, especially if that capacity is spread over rooftops:

Unfortunately, getting power useful to an industrial civilization from the sun requires solar panels, which require their own energy to produce and quite a bit of material.  So the question then becomes, "Can we either obtain enough of the materials needed to build solar panels to do this, or can we build good-enough solar panels out of things easily obtained?"  The answers to those are still up in the air, but it's not like there's a solar panel fairy who can simply conjure panels into existence.

The world as a whole is on a massive upward swing as far as quality of life is concerned. 

On the backs of cheap energy, certainly.  If that energy gets less cheap, or less useful for, say, container shipping (which basically burns the sludge left over from refining oil that we haven't figured out how to make useful for anything else), that global rise in living standards is in peril.  Especially when you look at just how much food production is tied to oil use in terms of energy and fertilizers.  We quite efficiently turn oil into food, but other inputs are starting to run into issues (rock phosphorous being one that's likely to be a major issue in the next few decades).

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And you didn't really answer my question.  ASSUME that we get past coal and oil and onto something like Solar.  What do you do at that point?

Answered above, but energy is far from the only issue that is a concern.

And, again, if I'm wrong, then I eat hyper-local food, produce a lot of my own energy, and have more money from investments than I know what to do with.  I'm OK with having that problem.

1. Range anxiety assumes we use electricity to charge batteries, which I agree are currently limited in their energy density compared to oil-based products. However, using electricity for hydrogen production is still being researched as an alternative. Hydrogen storage suffers from different issues with energy density, but that is improving faster than with batteries.

Hydrogen production for transport only makes sense if your problem is that you have so much energy, you can't figure out how to waste it fast enough.  The end to end efficiency of a hydrogen system is awful compared to batteries.  It's a great way to get government subsidies from politicians who don't understand physics, and it's a dreadful way to actually transfer and store energy.

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #236 on: March 12, 2017, 01:35:59 AM »
Thanks Syonyk for a fascinating and thought provoking thread. I hear a lot of where you are coming from, and I agree that having an enjoyable hobby and lifestyle that also happens to make your life more robust or even anti-fragile sounds like a no lose proposition.

Plenty of others have pointed out the difference between declining geopolitical influence of the US and the imminent end or decline of all western civilisation as being to completely different scenarios. I do think reading your posts that you seem to be taking evidence of the former as support for the latter, which seems to be a pretty America-centric view which is understandable for someone living in the USA. But while we often cant escape our own biases it is helpful to try and learn to recognise them, I think doing so might help you to upgrade your assessment of the future.

Speaking as someone living in a formerly great superpower (UK) I'm pretty comfortable with our diminished global importance. (With a caveat for the colloidal act of self harm that is brexit, long term I'd guess we'll likely be ok just materially less well of than we wouldn't have been otherwise) Would I rather be alive in 1917 when the UK had an empire on which the sun never set, Sterling was the global reserve currency, Britannia ruled the waves and official government policy was that the Royal Navy must at all times exceed the strength of the next two largest navies combined? Or 2017 as only the sixth (or so) largest global economy? I don't think I need to answer that. America's growth as a superpower in the intervening decade has not made living standards here worse, and there is little reason to think that growth of economies like China should do that for USA.

Not saying you shouldn't do your self sufficiency, just maybe do it more for the satisfaction of it and less for the fear of catastrophe. I do understand the attraction of self reliance, it's one of the things I love about long distance sailing, which is our planned post fire lifestyle.

In fact I'm surprised more people worried about the future don't look to sailboats as a way to "bug in & out" - a well found blue water boat say 45' equipped with solar, wind and diesel generators, generous diesel and water tankage and a reverse osmosis water maker can be had for $100k or $150k and is about the closest you can get to being fully self sufficient. This can support a family of 4 easily for 6 months, cruisers travelling to remote areas will often provision for this long. And on survival rations you could probably stretch this to 18 or even 24 months. Provided you can catch fish, which most cruisers do, your main limitation will be diesel for making water but with good tankage and careful conservation you can stretch this pretty well.

Factor in that you have satellite and short wave radio to communicate with whatever is left of civilisation, and can travel under your own sail to literally anywhere in the world in that timescale, you should be able to sit out a short term crisis or get to somewhere less affected by a longer term one. Heck even the total collapse of western civilisation would have almost negligible impacts on the more remote Pacific islands. Sure you may struggle to outrun a nuclear winter, but then what better alternatives would you have in that scenario?

Metric Mouse

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #237 on: March 12, 2017, 04:30:26 AM »
On the plus side, shale gas plays have been much, much larger than expected in the United States.

They have been, but the well decline rates on the shale wells have been awful - 70+% reduction in flow in a year is reasonably common on those, and some are worse.  When you factor in that the best spots are drilled first, it's a short term relief, at best.  On the plus side, I haven't been hearing any yapping about 100 years of Saudi American Energy recently - so, at least, some truth has blasted through skulls.

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Peak oil has been a concern for decades; so far we keep finding more oil (Smiths Bay, etc.) And using even more natural gas that comes out of these same holes, further extending an already distant future free from oil.

We live on a finite planet.  Evidence seems to indicate that using the atmosphere as a sewer for long-buried matter may not be the best idea we've ever had.  We will run out of economically extractable oil at some point.

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While it is a (probably) finite resource, the end of recoverable stashes has yet to be seen.

The problem isn't running out completely - it's running out of the stuff that can be extracted cheaply enough (in both an energy and economic sense) that you can run an economy on it.  Oil where you spend as much energy getting it out of the ground as you get from the barrel isn't useful as an energy source.
I hope you don't think that I am arguing prepping (sorry, I  know that is not your favorite or even most accurate description, so please forgive my lazy use of the term) is a bad idea. For all the reasons you listed, most of all your own enjoyment, it is a fine activity to engage in. For me the benefits are greatly outweighed by the costs, for all the reasons I have discussed. The math shows that there is an overwhelming likelihood of the country remaining comfortable for my lifetime, so since I  do not get the same joy from solar panels and green houses as many do, I have not put many of my resources towards such things. I'm more of a "lounge in the life boat on the pool deck, drinking and listening to the band" than a "walk around with a life jacket" kind of guy. Love hearing your perspective though!

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #238 on: March 12, 2017, 06:38:52 AM »
I'm more of a "lounge in the life boat on the pool deck, drinking and listening to the band" than a "walk around with a life jacket" kind of guy. Love hearing your perspective though!

Even if the engines have stopped, it looks and sounds like there's water flooding into the lower decks, and balls all rapidly roll forward on the deck? :)

To flip a previous question, what would it take to convince you that your country was not in good shape and stood a decent chance of undergoing severe issues in your lifespan? And, what would you do about that?

"Don't worry, money takes care of it" is certainly a decent option, it's just that history says that such options have a way of stopping being options very quickly at times.

ChrisLansing

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #239 on: March 12, 2017, 08:55:47 AM »
"The declining American Empire" idea ignores the fact that other empires (oh, like the UK) that declined, now have average citizens that live FAR better than anyone lived at the peak of their so called empire.  The world as a whole is on a massive upward swing as far as quality of life is concerned. 

As Syonyk has already pointed out, this is largely due to the burning of fossil fuels.   If we are right about peak oil -that is, we've already peaked or soon will - then expect this trend to reverse.    Unless of course we can substitute green energy sources.

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The idea of empires is a red herring.  Even right now, America is not rated as a #1 place to live in a lot of categories.  So in a sense, the 'empire' has already declined relative to other parts of the world.  Doesn't mean America is not still an awesome place to live.  It is.   


No, it's not a red herring.   We are a nation in decline.   We can't afford to maintain our current infrastructure.   We are not building much new infrastructure.   We have a real unemployment rate roughly twice the official rate.   We have a massive underemployment problem.   Few blue collar workers could support a family on one job (e.g. spouse not working) What's a red herring is this "relativity" you've introduced.   Yes, America is a better place to live than Bangladesh, and many other places.   But no, life is not getting better for blue collar people in the US.  It's getting harder.   

Of course we don't have to spend our money on the military (nearly as much as all other countries combined).  We don't have to engage in endless war.  But these are the things empires do.     When the empire was extending it's reach and dominance, life was getting better for the average American.   For many people that simply isn't the case anymore.    The cost of empire is too great for the working class and they benefit from it hardly  at all anymore.    So far from being a red herring, this is the very heart of the problem.    It's not THAT our empire is declining (that could be a good thing) it's the WAY our empire is declining.   We're trillions of dollars in debt because we can't let go of our empire.    I'm doubtful that we'll have the wisdom to simply step back the way the British did and settle for 2nd or 4th or 8th place. 

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And you didn't really answer my question.  ASSUME that we get past coal and oil and onto something like Solar.  What do you do at that point?

Hopefully my response above goes some way towards answering your question.   If we set aside peak oil and assume green technologies are going to fill the gap, we still have a declining empire that seems resolutely determined to hang on as long as possible, at all costs.   This is already making life worse for millions of us, and promises to get worse.   

To put things in slightly different perspective, countries were life is getting better and better all the time do not have crumbling infrastructure and unemployment/underemployment problems that get swept under the rug.    You may have heard of the epidemic of heroin use in the USA ?   That's not a feature of a country where life just keeps getting better all the time.    (But it primarily effects blue collar workers, so who cares?) 

But hey, everyone has a smart phone and the internet, so life is pretty cool.   

Classical_Liberal

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #240 on: March 12, 2017, 10:11:29 AM »
Speaking as someone living in a formerly great superpower (UK) I'm pretty comfortable with our diminished global importance. (With a caveat for the colloidal act of self harm that is brexit, long term I'd guess we'll likely be ok just materially less well of than we wouldn't have been otherwise) Would I rather be alive in 1917 when the UK had an empire on which the sun never set, Sterling was the global reserve currency, Britannia ruled the waves and official government policy was that the Royal Navy must at all times exceed the strength of the next two largest navies combined? Or 2017 as only the sixth (or so) largest global economy? I don't think I need to answer that. America's growth as a superpower in the intervening decade has not made living standards here worse, and there is little reason to think that growth of economies like China should do that for USA.

Views expressed here are US-centric, partially because of where the OP is located and partly because the US is the worlds superpower today.  Agreed, we all need to step back and look through other lenses and recognize our biases. This is helpful in all macro-analysis.

Regarding your point about the UK being just as good or better place to live today vs 1917.  This may be true, but remember the British Empire did not go silently into the night.  If I recall my history, the UK had a decades long ride on the "struggle bus" getting from there to here.  Was 1910 UK  better for most than 1915-1945?  It seems the period of change, as empires fall apart, where the worst problems arise.  Edit: These periods can span an entire lifetime.  30 years doesn't seem that long from a historical perspective, but from a perspective of a single life, its a very long time to muddle through.
« Last Edit: March 12, 2017, 10:20:19 AM by Classical_Liberal »

Metric Mouse

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #241 on: March 12, 2017, 01:33:54 PM »
I'm more of a "lounge in the life boat on the pool deck, drinking and listening to the band" than a "walk around with a life jacket" kind of guy. Love hearing your perspective though!

Even if the engines have stopped, it looks and sounds like there's water flooding into the lower decks, and balls all rapidly roll forward on the deck? :)

To flip a previous question, what would it take to convince you that your country was not in good shape and stood a decent chance of undergoing severe issues in your lifespan? And, what would you do about that?

"Don't worry, money takes care of it" is certainly a decent option, it's just that history says that such options have a way of stopping being options very quickly at times.
Even if all that is happening, it's dry and warm in my life boat. When the water reaches my deck I have to cast off my line so I don't get dragged under, which will take a bit of work, but then it's smooth sailing.

Honestly, to convince me, I will need to see oil prices begin to rise, food trucks from thousands of miles away stop showing up at my local grocery, food prices rising, unemployment rising, increased armed conflict in other western nations. While some of these things have happened at some times in the past few decades, there has been no total collapse of society. With America's natural resources and massive military power and geographic superiority, I  honestly see it being great for the longest, allowing people living within its borders the most time and greatest flexibility and resilience to decline.
« Last Edit: March 12, 2017, 05:57:27 PM by Metric Mouse »

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #242 on: March 12, 2017, 02:39:35 PM »
You know, I totally missed the "in a life boat" part of that. :)

Tyson

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #243 on: March 12, 2017, 04:47:30 PM »
Look, we all have access to the same facts and information.  You guys interpret it differently that I do. 

I don't know if you hang out at all in the Investors Alley on these boards, but I see this type of difference in thinking over there all the time.  The markets are at an all time high.  For some that means "great, keep investing its a wave".  For others it's "Red Dow is coming, crash, crash, crash!!" 

Again, everyone is working from the same set of facts, but the interpretation of those facts is vastly different based on your core view of the world. 

If you are so convinced of the fragility of the world that you're doing things like moving your family to a farm and investing in firearms and independent energy because S will HTF, that's a deeply, deeply embedded belief, and I'm pretty certain that nothing will ever change your mind about it.  Me (or others) pointing out that it hasn't happened yet is not convincing because your natural response is "it hasn't happened yet!  But it will.  Peak Oil!"  Or, if you go back to the height of the cold war, people were prepping because of "Nuclear holocaust".  In 20 more years they'll be prepping because of "Global Warming". 

Personally I think all of these things are real, but unlikely to cause serious disruptions that can't be worked around.  Even if we get results that are sub optimal, 'sub-optimal' is not the same as 'disastrous'.

It is funny though, the longer we go without a major disaster, the more some people feel like we are 'overdue' for one.  It's almost like they don't trust prosperity itself, and that being prosperous itself sets one up for a fall.  The idea that the world can get better and keep getting better is just a foreign concept.

BTW, I'm not speaking quite so directly to the people in this thread as much as musing on observations I've made after similar discussions with others in real life. 

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #244 on: March 12, 2017, 08:45:40 PM »
Of course we don't have to spend our money on the military (nearly as much as all other countries combined).  We don't have to engage in endless war.  But these are the things empires do.     When the empire was extending it's reach and dominance, life was getting better for the average American.   For many people that simply isn't the case anymore.    The cost of empire is too great for the working class and they benefit from it hardly  at all anymore.    So far from being a red herring, this is the very heart of the problem.    It's not THAT our empire is declining (that could be a good thing) it's the WAY our empire is declining.   We're trillions of dollars in debt because we can't let go of our empire.    I'm doubtful that we'll have the wisdom to simply step back the way the British did and settle for 2nd or 4th or 8th place.

Certainly.  The UK stepping down and handing off control to that bunch of traitors across the pond is, historically, very unusual.

Empires normally spend their dying decades insisting that they're not dying, they still have it, and, look, this carefully chosen military engagement means that they still have it!  The song, "Glory Days," seems relevant.  "Man, we kicked ass in WWII, let's do that again!"  "Ok, well... that didn't work, but next time - next time, we'll really show them!"  On and on.

Views expressed here are US-centric, partially because of where the OP is located and partly because the US is the worlds superpower today.

Certainly.  I think Europe is likely to go through many of the same issues, but I simply don't know enough about it, and it's not particularly relevant to me.  As someone who lives in the US, intends to remain in the US (though I do have a valid passport), other countries just aren't something I pay attention to quite as closely.

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Regarding your point about the UK being just as good or better place to live today vs 1917.  This may be true, but remember the British Empire did not go silently into the night.  If I recall my history, the UK had a decades long ride on the "struggle bus" getting from there to here.  Was 1910 UK  better for most than 1915-1945?  It seems the period of change, as empires fall apart, where the worst problems arise.  Edit: These periods can span an entire lifetime.  30 years doesn't seem that long from a historical perspective, but from a perspective of a single life, its a very long time to muddle through.

"The foreshortening of history" is a term I've heard applied to this - looking back far enough, things feel like points in history.  WWI.  The Great Depression.  WWII.  On and on.  They're not points - they're often quite long periods for those living through them.  "A few years" sounds short, until that's the length of time you can't reliably get food at the grocery store (Soviet collapse) - days and weeks matter then.  Living through those times is a prerequisite of getting to the better times at the far end.

While some of these things have happened at some times in the past few decades, there has been no total collapse of society.

No, but those times haven't been great times to live through, and a reasonable amount of self sufficiency would go a long ways if we hit more rough patches.

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With America's natural resources and massive military power and geographic superiority, I  honestly see it being great for the longest, allowing people living within its borders the most time and greatest flexibility and resilience to decline.

That falls into the realm of, "Technically possible, politically infeasible."  If the US would, say, stop spending our huge chunk on the military and focus that money internally, on infrastructure and energy, we'd be in a much better spot.  But, we can't do that for a variety of reasons, and dying empires, historically, keep overreaching until they get their asses kicked, and even then don't manage to learn the lessons.  I expect that with the US - we're very unlikely to willingly contract our overseas military, and one day or another, we're going to get our asses kicked by a country that builds their military aircraft to win, not to be an endless funnel of money into the contractors involved (*cough*F-35*cough*).  And an awful lot of the US heavy bomber fleet is third generation - as in, "The third generation in a family has flown the same tail number."

I figure there's a decent chance that said ass kicking will probably happen closely in time to the general loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency (complete with a media blitz insisting that the dollar is still, totally, for real, the reserve currency), and then the nice little debt ball we've wrapped up will unwind in a hurry.  Very little good comes out of that.

Look, we all have access to the same facts and information.  You guys interpret it differently that I do.

Certainly, though the last election has demonstrated rather convincingly that people actively filter their news sources.

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I don't know if you hang out at all in the Investors Alley on these boards, but I see this type of difference in thinking over there all the time.  The markets are at an all time high.  For some that means "great, keep investing its a wave".  For others it's "Red Dow is coming, crash, crash, crash!!"

Historically, about the time that the lower-grade mainstream newspapers (think "USA Today") start talking about how the latest thing (tech stocks, house prices, tech stocks...) is the New Normal that can continue forever, said New Normal convincingly demonstrates that it was really a bubble by popping in an impossible-to-ignore manner.

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Me (or others) pointing out that it hasn't happened yet is not convincing because your natural response is "it hasn't happened yet!  But it will.  Peak Oil!"  Or, if you go back to the height of the cold war, people were prepping because of "Nuclear holocaust".  In 20 more years they'll be prepping because of "Global Warming".

"It hasn't happened yet!" in no way means, "It won't happen."  And per my understanding of events, the only real reason the Cold War didn't turn very radioactive during the Cuban Missile Crisis is that the Soviet diesel subs weren't reliable enough to make it across the ocean (something like 4 set out with nuclear torpedoes, one made it, and that one didn't launch a nuclear tipped torpedo while getting pounded with depth charges because of one man's decision).

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It is funny though, the longer we go without a major disaster, the more some people feel like we are 'overdue' for one.  It's almost like they don't trust prosperity itself, and that being prosperous itself sets one up for a fall.  The idea that the world can get better and keep getting better is just a foreign concept.

Again - foreshortening of history is required to make that "the world just keeps getting better and better" claim.  It doesn't matter if what came out of the failure of the Soviet Union is better (for some sense of better) if you don't live through the disruption involved.

Tyson

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #245 on: March 12, 2017, 09:03:40 PM »
Right, and at this point we are officially talking in circles. 

I don't think that S will HTF at a level that's truly disruptive.  You do.  We aren't going to agree on this, it comes down to different perspectives. 

I will say this as a parting thought.  To my mind, if S really does hit the fan badly enough to be disruptive, you're going to need to do a lot more to survive it.   If the food supply and the energy supply ever become truly unstable, it's going to be very bad very quickly and a couple acres and some solar is not going to do anything to guard against that type of collapse.

Oh and I totally agree with you that our military spending is absurd and we'd be way, way better off re-investing that $$ into infrastructure and R&D for moving off oil & gas.

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #246 on: March 12, 2017, 09:15:36 PM »
It should help if I've got local community support and can scale quickly.

Tyson

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #247 on: March 12, 2017, 09:53:02 PM »
It should help if I've got local community support and can scale quickly.

Agreed.  Community is key I think - in a real breakdown of national and international supply lines, local community is a critical part of self sufficiency.

Another option would be to just move.  I mean if you are FI, you'll have the means to get somewhere that's doing well and do it pretty quickly and easily.  If America is in decline, it's probably more of a local/state problem and less of a national issue.  IE, the Bay Area is doing way better than Flint Michigan.  If I lived in Flint and was FI, I'd move to some place like the Bay Area, or Denver, or Salt Lake City or Austin or any of a bunch of other prosperous areas. 

If those places were going down the tubes, then I'd look at other countries.  If your idea that America and Europe are in decline, then that means that there's some other area that must be on the rise (I mean, we have to have empires, right?).  So just move to whatever country is doing well.

Unless you feel the entire planet is on a permanent and dramatic SHTF scenario and there's literally no where to go? 

Taran Wanderer

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #248 on: March 12, 2017, 09:58:54 PM »
Posting to follow.

Syonyk

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Re: Thoughts on FIRE in a declining nation
« Reply #249 on: March 12, 2017, 11:20:32 PM »
Another option would be to just move.  I mean if you are FI, you'll have the means to get somewhere that's doing well and do it pretty quickly and easily.  If America is in decline, it's probably more of a local/state problem and less of a national issue.  IE, the Bay Area is doing way better than Flint Michigan.  If I lived in Flint and was FI, I'd move to some place like the Bay Area, or Denver, or Salt Lake City or Austin or any of a bunch of other prosperous areas.

See, the problem with those places is that they are what I quite seriously call "Urban Shitholes."  I do not do well packed in with other people.  Multiple people have told me, quite seriously, that "You're why HOAs exist... I mean, you don't even see a problem with someone painting their house purple."  I live a few miles from someone with a very, very purple house now, and I see no issues.  Like, "You imagine a purple house" shade purple too.  Very, very purple.  And I see no problems with a vehicle or two as a work in progress.  Not on cinderblocks, though!  No, I'm classy.  I use jackstands!

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If those places were going down the tubes, then I'd look at other countries.  If your idea that America and Europe are in decline, then that means that there's some other area that must be on the rise (I mean, we have to have empires, right?).  So just move to whatever country is doing well.

Yeah, but I don't like the Chinese view on the world, and I don't speak Russian.