Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 6:55 pm Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
kakkerlak wrote:
Hi,
I'm 23 years old, poor and renting in a city (Amsterdam). My situation doesn't allow me to move away or buy a house in the next few years, so my only option is to stay in the city, prepare and hope for the best.
I am VERY interested in ideas on how to prepare in the city and how to do that with a limited amount of money.
Big city dwellers of Europe are in fact better shape than most of the rest of us,Any city NOT devasted by WW2 and rebuilt falls into this category,Paris, Amsterdam,Copenhagen, etc. fall into this category, they are ancient,they were built in a PRE-OIL time! they are engineered for in town gardens, water supplies and self sufficiancy. the newer buildings are irrelevant and basically in the way.the "newer cities" like London,Berlin,Hamburg,Russian and Polish cities,i wouldnt want to be in those, they were eiether rebuilt by Communist ideolgues or on the American/modern pattern around automobile/truck usage Amsterdam is like Venice with many canals and is very defensibe,another plus of the old cities.the one drawback to amsterdam is it is the capitol of a small ,militarily weak ation, in a resource war, it ouldn hold against a French or German force trying to occupy it, dont laugh this off, the Europeans may be the EU, but their own nationalities would come first.
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13189 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 7:08 pm Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
Paris now has a much larger population than it did during the pre-oil era. _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
Joined: May 28, 2008 Posts: 109 Location: Old Dominion
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 7:37 am Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
Ludi wrote:
Paris now has a much larger population than it did during the pre-oil era.
Yes, and its due to the lowered European immigration standards that allowed millions of muslims to enter. Now, Islamic radicals are busy. They have their own plan for Europe. Native Europeans will have more to deal with than just hunger! _________________ "If everything is going well, you obviously overlooked something."
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13189 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 10:55 am Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
ORCA wrote:
Yes, and its due to the lowered European immigration standards that allowed millions of muslims to enter. Now, Islamic radicals are busy. They have their own plan for Europe. Native Europeans will have more to deal with than just hunger!
Bigot. _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
Joined: May 28, 2008 Posts: 109 Location: Old Dominion
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 12:43 pm Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
Ludi wrote:
ORCA wrote:
Yes, and its due to the lowered European immigration standards that allowed millions of muslims to enter. Now, Islamic radicals are busy. They have their own plan for Europe. Native Europeans will have more to deal with than just hunger!
Bigot.
You betcha. Locked and loaded, too! _________________ "If everything is going well, you obviously overlooked something."
Joined: Oct 15, 2005 Posts: 1634 Location: Portland, Oregon
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 1:09 pm Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
Its a shame that most of The Peak Oil crowd talks up the rural life so much...because they are deluded.
It is nice to imagine a full spread of land that is self-sufficient without any need for help from folks ourtside their neighborhood...but that is a myth.
The Peak Oil ruralista likes to imagine an idealized life where a few hardy folks band together in the countryside while the city folks starve and kill each other. They neglect to think about how all the stores will close up, the renters will move to the cities, those with a mortgage will quickly not be able to pay their bills and be foreclosed on, and they will still need all those pesky things that are manufactured...in the city.
They like to imagine truckers out of fuel not delivering food to the cities (neglecting to imagine that most rurtal folks need to goto the grocery store too) and then 200 million city folks starving in the streets within a couple weeks. Wow...
I live in Portland, have chickens, garden every square inch of my property and just need staples. I hunt, fish and chop my own wood. I will depend on...agro business...to continue providing me with those staples.
The ruralista...will rely on getting to jobs in more built up areas and manufactured goods made in cities to keep up their infrastructure on their land. The relationship is symbiotic.
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 4:14 pm Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
Planning for the future with so many variables is just about the hardest thing in the world. "The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley".... no matter what you do the risks are huge and the chances of success not as good as most think.
I do not have alot of capital stashed away and am not long out of university having just started the first really good paying job since then. I need to save a decent amount of money for a few years before I can get a deposit down on a property. The idea of paying for property in cash is just never going to happen. My objective is to have enough land to be able to subsidise my calorie intake not necessarily to completely get all the calories from the land. I just dont see me being able to afford enough land in a short space of time. My thinking at the moment is almost the reverse of what everyone else is saying about suburbs and moving into a relatively distant suburb. I have already cycled 20 miles to work for the past three years (until I started my new job in november) so I am thinking of moving against the trend of the getting as close to the city as possible. My hope is to steadily build up enough money to eventualy buy a small holding that can be manually farmed with a permaculture basis and produce a small surplus for trading.
However I honestly feel in about 4 or 5 years this is going to be a very very popular idea and that the farms near to the cities will be fiding it very popular to try to break themselves up into smaller holdings and sell themselves off. On the other hand I suspect once the government realises what is going on they will ban the break up of farms into smaller units in order to maximise productivity.
The point is that with a long term 'plan A' in focus and with only an even chance of bringing that off in the mean time, also to prepare for unemployment, finacial turmoil and social unrest. Minimizing my personal outgoings and living a spartan life are a part of this. Storing my wealth in a building society is not too clever in an inflationary world, but I am sort of struggling to see other alternatives. Also important is building up a stock of food. I think 3 months seems sufficient in the near term and a good trade off of space and calories. After a certain size it just gets too bulky for a rented room. This is not to survive some peak oil sudden armageddon, just to ensure that if there is long term strikes and other disturbances I am covered. The most cunning and laughable idea is to buy a few second hand cheap car batteries. If power becomes erratic I can store up energy when its on and have a wee bit of power if we start getting brownouts and rolling blackouts. I also need to look at solar cells in some form to ensure a modest amount of energy independence.
Joined: Jun 15, 2007 Posts: 594 Location: St.Albert, AB
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 4:33 pm Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
I'm going to Norway.
I'm leaving the Canadian suburbs to a 30$ an hour job, a country with an enormous surplus of 300$ billion and a marginally sustainable community. It isn't perfect but their homes do use 25% of the energy of the average British home. The population is small. Lots of fjords and fresh water. I'll have to rent a place but I'm thinking of posting an add in a local paper asking if any old farm couple needs a young fellow to help them out. We'll see how it goes, I hope for the best.
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 4:38 am Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
ORCA wrote:
Yes, and its due to the lowered European immigration standards that allowed millions of muslims to enter. Now, Islamic radicals are busy. They have their own plan for Europe. Native Europeans will have more to deal with than just hunger!
Not as bad as when the Indoeuropean immigrants came with their forest cutting and soil destroying imperialistic farming tech, with their patriarchal culture and endless petty wars, and took the land from native inhabitants.
Joined: May 10, 2007 Posts: 3352 Location: Resiliency Farm
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 4:52 am Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
MrBean wrote:
ORCA wrote:
Yes, and its due to the lowered European immigration standards that allowed millions of muslims to enter. Now, Islamic radicals are busy. They have their own plan for Europe. Native Europeans will have more to deal with than just hunger!
Not as bad as when the Indoeuropean immigrants came with their forest cutting and soil destroying imperialistic farming tech, with their patriarchal culture and endless petty wars, and took the land from native inhabitants.
There were of course great civilizations that arose on the N. American and S. American continents prior to the arrival of the europeans, some had already collapsed (in part because of an "imperialistic" farming practices) and some were in existence (being nice and imperial against their own neighbors) when the Europeans showed up. Native Americans were equally capable of "petty wars" and taking land from one another.
Without defending Orca, we are all part of one species and the human condition applies to each culture. We make war, we try to push one another off of resources, we commit genocide, we hate "them" and they hate "us," whoever them and us are. We have a plan for Iraq and some muslims have a plan for europe. some Mexicans have a plan for the American southwest and some Chinese have a plan for southeast Asian. Some Russians have a plan for the former USSR nations and some Ethiopians have plans for Somolia or Eritrea.
Orca and Bean are peas of the same pod. They romantisize one culture to the detriment of another, only the objects of their affection and disdain are divergent. Both mental moves are equally flawed. _________________ “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
"The time has come for men to act like men; and for women, well, to act a lot more like men."
-Ma Cur
Joined: May 10, 2007 Posts: 3352 Location: Resiliency Farm
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 5:09 am Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
thuja wrote:
The relationship is symbiotic.
Such silliness...
And if that symbiotic relationship were to undergo a radical re-organization over the course of a decade or two, where the goods and jobs of the city were unavailable to the rural individual and the staples of the rural areas were unavailable to the urban areas, where would one be better situated to be?
There is an idea of Wendell Berry (sorry I do not remember which essay) where he observes that it is the rural areas and people that built the cities. If you were to wipe every city off of the face of the earth, we would rebuild them. If, however, you were to wipe the rural landscapes from the face of the earth the cities would quickly die and never return.
I do not question the fact that there is a symbiotic relationship. I know that many of my neighbors will be forced into urban areas very soon because of heating bills, but what will happen to the urban people who cannot afford heat? Perhaps our grocery stores will shut down, what will the people you are depending upon to provide you with your staples eat?
As we are forced into a radical reorganization I would rather be close to food than close to concrete or sewing needles. I can go a lot longer without new steel than I can without new food. There will come a time when deputies will stop enforcing foreclosures, I only need to last that long. If my neighbors leave, so much the better, fewer people means fewer problems... what will happen if people in the urban centers cannot afford to buy food?
Some "ruralistas" are unrealistic but so are some planning to stay in urban areas. "Unrealism" is an aspect of being human and not limited to one party or another.
After the re-organization I believe that symbiotic relationship will return. It is managing the transition that I am concerned about. I can acknowledge the logic in your decision, it would be nice if you could acknowledge the logic of those who choose differently than you. _________________ “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
"The time has come for men to act like men; and for women, well, to act a lot more like men."
-Ma Cur
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 6:32 am Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
kakkerlak wrote:
Hi,
I'm 23 years old, poor and renting in a city (Amsterdam). My situation doesn't allow me to move away or buy a house in the next few years, so my only option is to stay in the city, prepare and hope for the best.
I am VERY interested in ideas on how to prepare in the city and how to do that with a limited amount of money.
one of the best prepared people i know is a linguist who works for the government, out of San Francisco. i think he works for the NSA; he speaks fluent Russian. he also teaches yoga and helps manage a small community garden.
another person who has created a public face for himself is Ran Prieur @ RanPrieur.com. i think he worked in New York City during the "dot com thing", got totally sick of it, and used family connections to buy a piece of land WAAAY in the country. but he lives mostly in the city, and does a lot of Freegan-ing (getting food from dumpsters).
if you're the cool head during a major economic collapse, that will help you survive and other people will notice. _________________ http://www.LASIK-Flap.com/ ~ Health Warning about LASIK Eye Surgery
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 6:39 am Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
wisconsin_cur wrote:
we are all part of one species and the human condition applies to each culture. We make war, we try to push one another off of resources, we commit genocide, we hate "them" and they hate "us," whoever them and us are. We have a plan for Iraq and some muslims have a plan for europe. some Mexicans have a plan for the American southwest and some Chinese have a plan for southeast Asian. Some Russians have a plan for the former USSR nations and some Ethiopians have plans for Somolia or Eritrea.
"Species" is a culturally dependend scientific consept. What should one think about culture that considers its culturally dependent relativistic ideas as universal truths that all peoples and languages everywhere should accept in the name of "development", "white man's burden" etc?
I think such a culture is a Borg trying assimilite all and everything to it's narrow confines and don't believe zombie members of that Borg deserve to be called humans, in the sense I understand the word.
Quote:
Orca and Bean are peas of the same pod. They romantisize one culture to the detriment of another, only the objects of their affection and disdain are divergent. Both mental moves are equally flawed.
Joined: May 28, 2008 Posts: 109 Location: Old Dominion
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 8:16 am Post subject: Re: Big city dwellers...what's your plan?
Various human cultures have been shoving each other around on the face of the planet since the beginning. That "imerialistic" practice won't end with the onset of hard economic times.
In planning for a bleak future we may not even be able to visualize, we planners have to take into consideration ALL likely risks to us and ours that includes the level of hazard each risk could present.
Like it or not, the risk of Islamic facsism is currently present throughout Europe. Some locations more than others. Referring to me as a "Bigot" does not change that fact.
I was once smitten by the Native American - that "Regal Savage" - until I began educating myself on actual historical events invloving the interactions on this continent between the aforementioned culture and the Spanish, French, English, and the "new" Americans. Its quite eye-opening to discover that the regal savage was every bit as imperialistic, conniving, blood-thirsty, and bigotted as any person of European decent. While this subject has no purpose in this thread, it was brought up as a diversion (a common practise when someone can't argue the origional comment) and I wanted to address it.
Now back to your origional scheduled programming! _________________ "If everything is going well, you obviously overlooked something."
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