[onlooker]

Okay is the weak point in our Economies the Electrical grid? As per the "olduvai cliff". The financial markets? International commerce and trade? What will be the initial straw that will break the Economies back? Perhaps something exogenous to the Economy ?

[radon1]

Collapse is already happening right in front of you. Look at Venezuela. This is what happens when a territory drops out from the international system of the division of labor. Expect more of that sort as time goes by.

[dohboi]

But another big global financial crisis may be right around the corner:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]global debt — including the debts of governments, households and non-financial businesses — reached a record $152 trillion in 2015, an amount much higher than before the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

[KaiserJeep]

I'd say many of you are still enamored of the "fast crash" scenario, an event with no precedence whatsoever. The Great Depression, two World Wars, the Cold War, innumerable financial conniptions, the Spanish Flu pandemic - none of these things stimulated worldwide collapse. Most probably the widespread collapse will never happen as an event.

All the evidence I see favors the "slow crash" scenario. IMHO, the End of Days, TEOTWAWKI, whatever you want to call it, began a couple of centuries ago, when the human race went into population overshoot. You have lived your entire lives within the slow death of planet Earth, as did your Grandfathers, and all your ancestors since about 1800 AD.

Now for the rest of your lives, and that of your children, for people all over the globe, life gets steadily more difficult forevermore. At some point, people will notice that this long drawn out process (rather than an event) has crossed over from inconvenience to desperation.

There will not ever be anything you can distinguish as "The End". Even though some of you are rabidly partisan and will probably consider the swearing in of Trump or Clinton as The End.

[onlooker]

First off, I myself have never committed on time tables. I have simply commented on processes and dynamics. Neither am I predicting. I compare it too what the study Limits to Growth yielded. That is different scenarios under different input variables. My only solid conclusion, is that a huge die off is coming along with a severe indefinite economic slowdown. Different regions will experience different facets of this collapse scenario differently both in intensity and timing. But again, both the lives of rich world denizens and poor world are going to be drastically affected even as poor country folks are already feeling some severe effects.

[Hawkcreek]

I agree, a huge die-off is coming. But will it take 10 years or 200 years? I'm betting on around 50-100 years, at least.
I think the catalyst will be a gradual reduction in living standards for the bottom 95%, resulting in near anarchy, and revolution (think Venezuela). I believe a sudden economic collapse will not happen because the necessary corporations will be kept afloat by transferring their debt to the peons.
I think TPTB will remain in control throughout this, but it will be hard to keep making diesel for the tractors and distribution networks when the refineries are blowing up. Thus the die-off.
Of course, all bets are off if they to speed things up with a nuclear war, or gene-engineered disease.

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('radon1', 'C')ollapse is already happening right in front of you. Look at Venezuela. This is what happens when a territory drops out from the international system of the division of labor. Expect more of that sort as time goes by.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')All the evidence I see favors the "slow crash" scenario. IMHO, the End of Days, TEOTWAWKI, whatever you want to call it, began a couple of centuries ago, when the human race went into population overshoot. You have lived your entire lives within the slow death of planet Earth, as did your Grandfathers, and all your ancestors since about 1800 AD.

[EdwinSm]

Easter Island is a poster child for 'die-off' in human population.

Some time back I looked at a number of internet articles trying to put some figures to this. Maximum population figures ranged from 7 000 to 20 000, and a lot of the time tables varied as well as arguments over were the topping of the statues an act of war, or a reverent laying them down, and how much civil war there was.

What surprised me most was that the "die-off" on Easter Island seemed to take about 100 years. While the population is estimated to have collapsed by 75-90% it was not an 'instant event' (which was the impression I got from Monte's postings - although the reindeer on St Matthew's Island did collapse in one sever winter).

This all helps reinforce my idea of a slow collapse over years, with different communities experiencing differing rates of reduction in standard of living. Also that due to numerous stress factors we will never be able to agree on a single event causing 'collapse' (although if enough of society survives the later day historians will simplify what happened and pick one event).

[careinke]

I think the collapse will start with an economic collapse. As a matter of fact I support it as our only chance.

[radon1]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('GHung', '
')The costs of dealing with and protecting against failed states (many of our own creation) will be a growing drag on the ship of BAU. Greer touched on it this week in his discussion on Joint Operating Environment 2035:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... sight.html

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('radon1', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('GHung', '
')The costs of dealing with and protecting against failed states (many of our own creation) will be a growing drag on the ship of BAU. Greer touched on it this week in his discussion on Joint Operating Environment 2035:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... sight.html

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'O')kay is the weak point in our Economies the Electrical grid? As per the "olduvai cliff". The financial markets? International commerce and trade? What will be the initial straw that will break the Economies back? Perhaps something exogenous to the Economy ?

[onlooker]

Is this a trick question? haha. Seriously, I am not sure. According to ETP modelers availing themselves of the ideas put forth in the The Korowicz paper a fast devastating economic collapse can and probably will happen. This is briefly based on the weak links of the financial sector in particular JIT shipping/trade and the funds to back up said trade given that nothing backs fiat currency anymore. Along of course with a serious disruption in the energy sector as either producers or consumers or both have a very difficult time accessing energy/oil. Answering directly your question Tanada, if the Economic collapse was truly worldwide and devastating, I expect that in five years time from now, we would be seeing a very different world in which whole industries have collapsed and a form of martial law has been put in place to service the needs of the populace and to enforce law and order. Kind of similar to the Great Depression with people on food lines and such. I am not dogmatic on this. Nor am I an expert on ETP modeling. I did read your rebuttal to it which was quite good So in light of your views I am sure you do not forsee such a dramatic unwinding and collapse in the Economies scenario. I am unsure. It is also possile we can see a Long Emergency as written by Kunstler and Greer. That long emergency would entail a steady deterioration and downturn in economic conditions for vast numbers of people.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'I')s this a trick question? haha. Seriously, I am not sure. According to ETP modelers availing themselves of the ideas put forth in the The Korowicz paper a fast devastating economic collapse can and probably will happen. This is briefly based on the weak links of the financial sector in particular JIT shipping/trade and the funds to back up said trade given that nothing backs fiat currency anymore. Along of course with a serious disruption in the energy sector as either producers or consumers or both have a very difficult time accessing energy/oil. Answering directly your question Tanada, if the Economic collapse was truly worldwide and devastating, I expect that in five years time from now, we would be seeing a very different world in which whole industries have collapsed and a form of martial law has been put in place to service the needs of the populace and to enforce law and order. Kind of similar to the Great Depression with people on food lines and such. I am not dogmatic on this. Nor am I an expert on ETP modeling. I did read your rebuttal to it which was quite good So in light of your views I am sure you do not foresee such a dramatic unwinding and collapse in the Economies scenario. I am unsure. It is also possible we can see a Long Emergency as written by Kunstler and Greer. That long emergency would entail a steady deterioration and downturn in economic conditions for vast numbers of people.

[ROCKMAN]

Seems like we have a long human history of rather violent responses by many countries that suffer economic "collapse". In fact it often didn't take full collapse but just significant decline. Granted I don't see Greece becoming much of a direct threat to its neighbors let alone the US.

But eventually all countries will see stress levels grow over time. And I haven't noticed any significant changes in human nature.

[EdwinSm]

While I do lean towards a slow collapse, Friday's internet attack could indicate a possible catalyst for an economic collapse. The internet service company Dyn was attacked. Twitter, Spotify, and Reddit were among the sites taken offline on Friday. Also Amazon Web Services was affected.

Given the larger and larger share of e-commerce a sustained attack that knocks out a major e-vendor for several days (not just hours) might be enough to trigger an economic panic. The attacks don't seem to be at this stage yet but they might get there soon.

The attacks on Friday used smart home devices ... so [using an idea someone else posted (on other forum)] imaging your new fridge hooking up with other fridges to bring down society


In the early days of commercial programming (like in the 1970s) there was a lot of teaching about redundancy in the system to help keep the resilience of things going. The department store company I worked for had a secret computer backup location, that as a programmer I was told existed but I never knew where it was. Now, in the name of efficiency more and more power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer companies, which makes for a cheaper but less secure system.

[KaiserJeep]

Hold on a minute, the internet and computers I do know about. The resiliency and the bandwidth and the availability of the network is in fact constantly growing. The network gets more and more robust as time passes, not more and more vulnerable.

The digital-denial-of-service (DDOS) type attacks that have been taking place recently do not reflect a network vulnerability, only a lack of resilience in the sites being attacked. As individual devices like PCs get higher and higher levels of performance, they can hammer individual websites harder and faster. When the number of service requests overwhelm the server for the web site, individual sites go unavailable. It is an indication that any server that suffered an outage in a DDOS attack needs to be upgraded.

When the sites being attacked via DDOS are also distributed, redundant, and part of the infrastructure, the servers themselves are already fairly robust. The attackers had to first spread a Trojan virus which activated simultaneously in hundreds or thousands of PCs, in order to generate the transaction load for directly-attached-to-the-backbone infrastructure sites like Twitter, Etsy, Github, Vox, Spotify, Airbnb, Netflix, and Reddit. The ability to do this is limited, requiring pre-planning, and since the various servers exist in multiple machines with multiple backbone interconnects, the outages were confined to one geographical area - the East Coast of the US from the Mid-Atlantic states to New England. I was using NetFlix pretty constantly on Friday here on the West Coast, with no outages, no slowdowns, no problems.

Embedded somewhere in the Trojans that caused the attacks are digital signatures from the hackers responsible. Every WWW user has an existing profile, and if you have ever written code for apps used on the WWW, you have a file containing examples of your work, so that you can be recognized when you write some code to a more sinister purpose.

They are going to get the creeps, and when they do, they will get a long vacation in the barry place with no network.

[evilgenius]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Hawkcreek', 'I') agree, a huge die-off is coming. But will it take 10 years or 200 years? I'm betting on around 50-100 years, at least.
I think the catalyst will be a gradual reduction in living standards for the bottom 95%, resulting in near anarchy, and revolution (think Venezuela). I believe a sudden economic collapse will not happen because the necessary corporations will be kept afloat by transferring their debt to the peons.
I think TPTB will remain in control throughout this, but it will be hard to keep making diesel for the tractors and distribution networks when the refineries are blowing up. Thus the die-off.
Of course, all bets are off if they to speed things up with a nuclear war, or gene-engineered disease.