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All posts tagged "economy"
Dmitry Orlov
Club Orlov se ha convertido en una de mis fuentes favoritas de información realista sobre el colapso (de la civilización, se entiende). Ya he citado a Orlov anteriormente, pero me siguen maravillando sus doctos -y sarcásticos- análisis de los procesos que pueden conducir, o que lo están haciendo ya, a una nación poderosa como Estados Unidos a un estado pre-tecnológico. El tío es una especie de Noam Chomsky del armagedón.
“Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket chains, but they are no substitute for food security, because they too depend industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified potatoes, various soy-based fillers, factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and so forth, are derived from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as well as fertilizer made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in business longer, supplying food-that-isn’t-really-food, but eventually they will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply chain. Before they do, they may for a time sell burgers that aren’t really burgers, like the bread that wasn’t really bread that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi blockade. It was mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour added for flavor.”
Algunos de mis posts favoritos:
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Five Stages of Collapse
“If Stage 1 collapse can be observed by watching television, observing Stage 2 might require a hike or a bicycle ride to the nearest population center, while Stage 3 collapse is more than likely to be visible directly through one’s own living-room window, which may or may not still have glass in it.” -
Social Collapse Best Practices
“I happened to be in Russia during a time of gasoline shortages. On one occasion, I found out by word of mouth that a certain gas station was open and distributing 10 liters apiece. I brought along my uncle’s wife, who at the time was 8 months pregnant, and we tried use her huge belly to convince the gas station attendant to give us an extra 10 liters with which to drive her to the hospital when the time came. No dice. The pat answer was: “Everybody is 8 months pregnant!” How can you argue with that logic?” -
Burning Our Bridges to the XXI Century
“We are making an effort to save financial institutions, which are the ultimate ephemera of industrial civilization, and are absolutely guaranteed to have no reason to continue into a future in which debt, denominated in future earnings that will be meager at best, and money, which will only hold its value for as long as it guarantees access to sources of pure, concentrated energy, all steadily dwindle to nothing. It is as if the doctors decided to only try to save persistent vegetative quadriplegics with terminal cancer, or if the environmentalists decided that the endangered species list only has room for one animal: the vampire bat.” -
Bullets from Drug War
“This is no longer a war against drugs; it is now a contest between alternative drug distribution systems. One alternative is a centralized, paramilitary organization run by CIA remnants, former military, and former police. Another alternative is ethnic mafias, which will diversify into many other kinds of trade. The third, nautrally most cost-effective alternative will be provided by informal, local distribution networks based on barter, which will be all that is left once the dust settles. The downside of all this is that it will be hard to find anyone sober enough to operate a light switch. The upside to that is that the national electrical grid will go away, so there will be little need of that.” -
Superpower Similarities
“The rationale for imprisoning over two million people in the United States, the world’s highest rate of incarceration, is that it deters crime. Sociologists slice and dice crime statistics looking for a correlation between increased rates of incarceration and decreased crime rates. The best they seem to be able to find is a correlation of about 0.25 between an increased rate of incarceration and a decrease in the crime rate. It is sometimes possible to find a stronger correlation between, say, rain dances and rainfall amounts.”
Por cierto, leyendo a Orlov se da uno cuenta de que muchas de las cosas que asociamos con el fin del mundo ya han sucedido en Rusia en algún momento de su historia.
Disfrutadlo.
En mi estado actual lo máximo a lo que puedo aspirar es a hacer reblog de alguna foto chula y pegar dos citas de autores que me gustan. Internet se me escurre por entre los dedos, líquida e inaprensible. Irónico: en parte me contrataron porque siempre estaba al tanto de todo lo que pasaba por aquí…
(foto via yimmyayo)
How much money will go into one of your collages?
Most of any given piece has only a single layer of paper on it, so you can tell about how many bills go in by imagining the surface covered once by whole bills, plus a few extra for what overlap there is. In the studio we keep hoppers of bills separated into parts to use piece by piece as well as binders of prepared texture swatches and collaged passages to add wholesale. I love all the process. For some of the collages we track how many scraps of paper are glued down. I see that sort of accounting as an interesting extension of the material. When “Liberty” is complete, for example, we’ll be able give statistics on each of her 13 panels individually, and also say that the whole thing took 1234 bills cut into 54,234 pieces, or whatever, and here’s all the scraps we didn’t use.
What happens when a town loses its newspaper? »
From Time:
What effect do newspaper closings really have on a town? Or a nation? Depending on a person’s reading habits, the answers to these questions range from “It’s the death of democracy!” to “Newspapers? What newspapers?” But with the demise of two major metropolitan dailies, the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News and the almost equally venerable 145-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the last month alone, the issue is becoming a matter of practical rather than just theoretical concern. (See the 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America.)
A glimpse into what might happen has been offered up by a new study out of Princeton University. Assistant Professor of economics and public affairs Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido looked at communities affected by the closing of the Cincinnati Post at the end of 2007, and it’s not an attractive view.
The study is very small in scope, since the Post had a total of only 27,000 subscribers in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. And it measures only the outcomes in northern Kentucky, since Ohio has not had municipal elections since the Post’s closure. But even with those limitations, a few trends seemed to emerge: in towns the Post regularly covered, voter turnout dropped, fewer people ran for office and more incumbents were reelected. That is, when there were fewer stories about a given town, its inhabitants seemed to care less about how they’re being governed.
(thanks, cyn-c)
“A worker walks over hot steel plates at the factory of Swiss Steel AG which is partly owned by the Schmolz + Bickenbach group in Emmenbruecke, outside Lucerne, Switzerland on October 15, 2008.”
Men at work.
(via Ingram)
Recession: McDonald's Is Lovin' It »
Pobres yanquis, cómo se nota que no conocen Mercadona.
Because fast food is cheaper than classier restaurant fare, and sometimes cheaper than eating at home, too.
