Preparedness for when

[Deleted User]

CTC there is a wonderful word and idea in Sweden that is 'LAGOM'! It means in moderation, it also means enough, also a fair amount and is a very good principle to have in your mind as a lifestyle choice. When the ads on TV say it's ONLY £599 but that price ends on Tuesday next week I always hear that tiny word 'lagom' the brakes go on, the mind says I don't need it and I have enough already. A good word Lagom!!!

COOLTRIKERCHICK

Can I say ' Lagom' to my hubby when I have had enough of him farting lol

That is a lovely sounding word. And I think you have now planted that word into my thinking..

I think it's taken the financial crash to make alot of people open their eyes to the vast amount of brainwashing that has been going on with big companies, making people think they need this/ that etc.. And they derserve this, that and the other.. And what people take for granted, are actually luxuries

RAS

Frugalsod wrote: »

Secondly there are highly efficient forms of farming called permaculture that use little or no fertilisers and have far higher land productivity. This could feed the population very much more easily.

The other highly efficient farming techniques that are worth exploring IMO are John Jeavons work http://www.growbiointensive.org/ on micro farming and Savory on grassland management http://savory.global/

[Deleted User]

What I really don't understand is why if you have something that works well and does the job it was designed to do efficiently and well people constantly feel the need to buy the 'latest' version to hit the market. I've got some things and clothes I'm afraid that I've had for more than 20 years, the clothes are as good as the day I bought them, OK they've been re-dyed a couple of times but are still as good as new, and equipment in the kitchen that still works as well as the day I first got it. There are many new versions and many new clothes available but I'm happy with what I already have, why would I want to buy a newer one until the old one fails in some way? It's a mystery!!!

Frugalsod

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

I think the timescale for the 90% die back in population was over the first 100 years so a relatively gradual thing but with the numbers involved I suspect life would be hazardous as resources dwindled and food shortages bit. Permaculture is a wonderful concept, I've taken Permaculture Magazine for many years now and unfortunately a permaculture garden/forest garden takes quite some time to establish as a mature plot, I'm not sure you could rely on it to be instantly able to feed the numbers of population that would be needing to be fed in a Post Oil scenario. It would in the fullness of time be a good and productive plot but if you tried to crop it too hard in the first few years the trees and shrubs that are the 'bones of the system would not thrive and the whole thing might fail.

From what I have heard permaculture takes a good few years to take root but it does have a very high rate of return for a small plot of land.

Then there is aeroponics and aquaponics which could feed cities very efficiently. Vertical farms in old tower blocks would be very efficient and could even combined with housing.

There are plenty of solutions and I think that starving the population into shrinking is not a good way to start. Populations tend to have a falling growth rate when you maintain certain social contracts like a welfare state and pensions. Remember for millennia children were the pensions of the older generations. They invested in children to provide for them in old age. With state pensions that is no longer necessary. As long as governments maintain this then that is possible without cutting food supplies. Most of Europe no longer has a birth rate that is sufficient to maintain populations over time.

Frugalsod

RAS wrote: »

The other highly efficient farming techniques that are worth exploring IMO are John Jeavons work http://www.growbiointensive.org/ on micro farming and Savory on grassland management http://savory.global/

I was not restricting solutions to permaculture but would like to see any form of efficient farming solutions.

GreyQueen

An issue with wonderful cultural things being achieved in the pre-industrial age is to think about how they came about.

Artists and sculptors were working under the patronage of the extremely wealthy, the royalty and the aristocracy of various countries including our own. The 1 percenters of their day. That wealth was achieved off the back of the sweated labour of almost everybody else, and even off outright slavery. High culture has very dirty feet; how many people's children had malnutrition so that some rich g*t could fart through silk while commissioning music, paintings, sculptures and buildings?

I'm a keen gardener and pretty self-sufficient in veg. However, due to the rain coming too late for my second early potato crop, last year's spud harvest was about a third of normal and I have less than a month's supply of spuds to use. I normally can feed myself on homegrown spuds until the new harvest is in.

If this were a real peasant economy, I would be looking at a very lean patch without my primary carbohydrate. As it is, I have this thing called 'money' in a functional society. I can buy other people's spuds, I have pasta, I have rice (foriegn-grown). I know very well that there are and have times and places where there are no surpluses to be had, unless you are able and willing to take them at the point of a sword or a gun.

If we were a very localised economy, growing our own and primarily supporting ourselves, it would be very difficult to manage lean times. And what of those people who are specialists serving us all, such as doctors and dentists? Would we want a surgeon with life-changing skills to be hoeing beans for part of their day? Or would we want to support them so they could do that which aptitude and long training has equipped them to do? If everyone is spending the lion's share of their time attending to the basics of life, there is little left over for the finer things like education, culture, art, you name it.

A basic society isn't something like one of those Soviet-era propaganda posters of rosy-cheeked peasants in the fields on lovely sunny days. It's mainly a lot of unpleasant things, such as burying more of your children than you safely see to adulthood, having worn, decayed and painful teeth, women dying in childbirth and suffering life-changing gynaecological injuries the same way.

And mud. Without a welly boot in sight.

Which is why, across the globe, people are racing to get away from subsistence farming and off to the cities as fast as they can.

[Deleted User]

I think it would not be a deliberate 'starving' of the population but with the demise of oil based fertilizers the land would not produce the artificially high level of crops that modern farming has become accustomed to. Even the best managed farms would struggle and a diminished yield would leave many going hungry because of shortfalls in the production. That coupled with the fact that so many varieties of all types of crops are now limited to maybe half a dozen specifically developed varieties that have been bred shorter to make modern machine harvesting easier, should those machines be redundant for lack of oil based fuel and should we have to go back to the old way of growing and rely on people to bring in the harvest it might make things difficult. A lot of modern 'engineered' crops are only successfully viable because we have specific fungicides and pesticides that are applied regularly to ensure the heaviness of crop that will feed us all, both these things are mostly oil derived. We'd be up the creek without them!

Frugalsod

Today I saw this on zero hedge and there are so many things wrong about it that I had to say something.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-05/keynesian-economics-101-4-simple-lessons

1) First Keynesian policy does not say anything about increasing money supply creates economic growth. Keynes mentioned aggregate demand. What we have now is a branch of neoclassical economists who call themselves Keynesian but are anything but in fact are probably monetarists who go on about money multipliers and velocity of money. Keynes advocated fiscal policy which is off the table everywhere because of conservative policies. What we have in reality is central banks covering for the failure of politicians to actually act and spend money.

2) Keynes said nothing of the sort. He advocated savings but said that when everyone tries to save it does not work because of the fallacy of composition. So what he proposed was that government spent to allow households the time to rebuild saving. Which is not what the Austrian economists are saying. Once people are once again happy with their level of savings then they will spend again and at this point governments no longer need to over spend to maintain the economy. So basically a lie.

3) Again wrong. What deflation does do is unravel the Ponzi financing that is banking, which relies on every increasing credit to maintain their balance sheet. If there were regular periods of deflation debts are unlikely to be taken on just in case the next deflationary period is close and then they struggle to repay those debts. Banks hate deflation because it is a cramp on their business model. So it is central banks and banks that are against deflation. Also governments love inflation because it hides their mistake and allows growth without their doing anything. Deflation is common with new technology and many products. It gets cheaper over time as efficiencies make it even cheaper to produce and so as it gets cheaper it gets into the hands of more and more people. Remember the first mobile phones. Big as bricks and cost a fortune to operate. Now you can get an old dumb mobile for £10 and even smart phones are falling in price though high end phones need to keep adding features to get them to maintain the same sales price.

4) Another lie/mistake. None of these actually boost economic growth. If anyone take time to look at history you can see there are solutions. During the Depression in 1936 the US congress thought that they had stimulated the economy enough and were concerned about government debts, so reimposed austerity and basically slammed the world economy back into Depression for several more years until world war 2. While World War 2 did get every economy out of the depression it was the fact that they had a target and ignored fiscal balances for the duration. So we could boost the world economy without the need for a war. What we need is an objective that keeps us on target. Today that target could be to decarbonise our economies. No need for a single person to die in a war, and again another lie told by Austrian economists.

Remember that much of what Austrian economists say is to build support for their theory that only gold is money and if they can persuade enough fools to believe them then their holdings of gold will make them very rich.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

GQ.. In a scenario, where oil is at the top end of premium, due to the lack of it.. And prices have sky rocketed to an eye watering height..surely everything would go back to what could be produced or sourced locally?? As no one could afford to run a car, or afford the price of a bus, and if they could they could do Ltd amount of shopping due to the prices??

Hydroponics, has its down falls too, as that needs artificial nutriant s to be put into the water , unless you have loads of fish to poo in the water ..lighting?? Heating system in winter??

I know this sounds like an extreme situation.. But what if in 10-15 years we run dangerously low of oil?? What does others think it would be like potentially??