Global Financial Crisis 2- The Biggest Crisis is a lack of imagination and acute Private Frazierism.

 

 

Visitor to a village stops a local and asks, “How do I get to Aberdeen from here?”


Local answers, “Och, if I were going to Aberdeen, I wouldn’t start from here!”

 

http://www.nakedenergy.co.uk/product/how-it-works/ combined vacuum tubes and solar voltaics’ an awesome Project. I was just musing on whether this had been done yet and sure enough, here it is.
Lots of doom and gloom is very easy to embrace, yet the more I look at the Tech sector not just in digital signals and controls capability but also microgrid networking and permaculture portfolio solution as opposed to high efficiency monoculture solutions the more clear it becomes that the starting assumptions employed for diagnosing the current problems are not and should not be the same starting assumptions used to break into the Future Paradigm.

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Money is simply done wrong at the moment I found this short article quite instructive I read it this morning.
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2018/06/the-five-stages-of-money-and-why-were-stuck-at-stage-4.html
The Five Stages of Money (and why we’re stuck at stage 4)

Stage 3 money so efficiently and effectively made possible—they can also be issued and used as direct government payments for non-profitable goods and services. This can happen because (a) it “costs” the government nothing to produce the promissory notes, and (b) they provide real income to the citizens providing the non-profit generating services. In other words, Stage 5 money can uniquely and directly be used to pay citizens, on a large scale, to undertake, design, build, and provide non-profit goods and services which, until now, could not be undertaken or accomplished without stressing the monetary system itself (i.e. by “printing money”).

Its worth reading the whole thread Here to get a flavour.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2018/05/30/128-gfc-ii/#comments

 

 

The great weaknesses – probably fatal – of our global, industrialized civilization: the dependence on ever-greater levels of credit/debt creation, (and on the capacity to service both by states and citizens) and the total dependence upon complex machines which are themselves the product of a global, over-extended (from a resilience point of view), supply chain.
The two are inextricably linked. Even simple products are no longer manufactured as they would have been pre-1945, nationally. No growth = failure of all financial structures and mechanism = collapse; self-evidently.
What would be the model for a no-growth, or imperceptible-growth, economy and society for say, the UK? It would take us back to that existing in 1066, with corresponding population levels. Even then, international trade existed, above all for raw wool, making England the richest kingdom in Europe, and so worth the trouble William the Conqueror took to seize it (and the hire of mercenaries to do so).
We cannot have modernity, vast populations, and ‘no-growth’, and therefore it cannot in any way be planned for. Unfortunately, the soil fertility and natural and human resources available in 1066 no longer exist and cannot be conjured up even over decades. The peasant/hunter is born, not trained. The soil is degraded and infertile, and as for woodland, heath, water…….. Population level would have to far, far lower than that obtaining then.
Ideas of ‘doing more with less’ trough technical inventiveness are puerile fantasies in this context: complexity does not solve the problems of complexity in such a crisis situation, of such profound extent and magnitude.
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Historically, when complex societies can longer sustain themselves – see Tainter and not a few others – survivors have fallen back on agriculture and pastoralism, which, and this is of supreme importance, were modes of life which had continued largely undisturbed by the growth of the metropolitan areas, ad often environmental degradation was limited, above all when complex irrigation schemes had not been developed and over-grazing taken place. Nomads just carried on doing their thing…….
Previous empires climbed the ladder of growth, but left the lower rungs largely intact, and mankind could climb down and start again, or stay at that basic level (see Greece, which was no more than a collection of primitive -but well-adapted – villages and very small towns, when the Ottomans conquered it).
In contrast, modern industrial civilization, inflated grotesquely on oil and gas, has effectively kicked away all the lower rungs – creating vast populations, which cannot exist outside the urban environment, minutely divided as to labour and specializations, and destroying the ecological base of future production.
As an foot-note, this destruction of natural capital also means that the quantity of rations which ensured survival in 1939-1945 i the UK would have utterly inadequate nutritional content today, and more would be required – I believe the less has been quantified as 20-50% of nutrition due to soil degradation. The result would be slow starvation, consequent epidemics – and loss of mental capacity

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Two Videos I think Point towards the essentially differing world views The Doomers and the Optimists have , here they are.

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This does not embed but click the link it is worth watching.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/188886964?color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0 Martin Nowak: The Mathematics of Cooperation from Why Are We Here? on Vimeo.

A Final Word from Peter Kropotkin, a Biologist, from his Classic Text, Mutual Aid a factor in Evolution.

The importance of this distinction will be easily appreciated by the student of animal psychology, and the more so by the student of human ethics. Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed. But this subject lies outside the scope of the present work, and I shall only indicate here a lecture, “Justice and Morality” which I delivered in reply to Huxley’s Ethics, and in which the subject has been treated at some length.
Consequently I thought that a book, written on Mutual Aid as a Law of Nature and a factor of evolution, might fill an important gap. When Huxley issued, in 1888, his “Struggle-for-life” manifesto (Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man), which to my appreciation was a very incorrect representation of the facts of Nature, as one sees them in the bush and in the forest, I communicated with the editor of the Nineteenth Century, asking him whether he would give the hospitality of his review to an elaborate reply to the views of one of the most prominent Darwinists; and Mr. James Knowles received the proposal with fullest sympathy. I also spoke of it to W. Bates. “Yes, certainly; that is true Darwinism,” was his reply. “It is horrible what ‘they’ have made of Darwin. Write these articles, and when they are printed, I will write to you a letter which you may publish.” Unfortunately, it took me nearly seven years to write these articles, and when the last was published, Bates was no longer living.
After having discussed the importance of mutual aid in various classes of animals, I was evidently bound to discuss the importance of the same factor in the evolution of Man. This was the more necessary as there are a number of evolutionists who may not refuse to admit the importance of mutual aid among animals, but who, like Herbert Spencer, will refuse to admit it for Man. For primitive Man—they maintain—war of each against all was the law of life. In how far this assertion, which has been too willingly repeated, without sufficient criticism, since the times of Hobbes, is supported by what we know about the early phases of human development, is discussed in the chapters given to the Savages and the Barbarians.

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Author: rogerglewis

https://about.me/rogerlewis Looking for a Job either in Sweden or UK. Freelance, startups, will turń my hand to anything.

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