No SHTF so now what?

[The Heretic]

Sure you could cram everybody into a small space, but they would start dying off pretty quickly.

The point was that we are approaching the point of peak carrying capacity for this "big world". I.E., it isn't big enough and doesn't have the resources to support the people we have now, and it is only going to get worse.

 

[erudne]

Ecological collapse may never happen

"We often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts, The Limits to Growth, its basic ideas are still with us. But time has not been kind."
http://www.slate.com/articles/busin...se_is_not_upon_us_and_we_haven_t_run_out.html

 

[JRuby]

Need to invent another conspiracy. We have to have some sort of doom and gloom out there. What will people do without the end of the world coming.

 

[mjbskwim]

Don't worry it will be a hot summer,and it's just starting.
Someone is bound to crack soon.
Too many folks want a SHTF to happen.I'm surprised that someone hasn't just mad something worth while happen

 

[MagDump]

The idea that the world is over populated is wrong. Next time you get on an airplane and fly across the country look down at all the land with no homes, building, etc. Humans occupy a very small part of the earth. Also note how a lot of land is not agriculture. It is idle land and could be occupied by humans. When your plane takes off and lands you pay attention to all the houses, buildings and human activity that pass underneath the plane for say 15 minutes as the plan gains altitude. You then sit back and ignore the next 3 to 5 hours of flight. Land with no houses or buildings (cities) pass by for hours and hours. Then you start paying attention as the pilot says prepare for landing. You look out the window and see human activity everywhere (cities). Think about if you flew around for days, not going to any specific city. You would get a better perspective on the size of United States. Now go do the same in Canada which is several times bigger than U.S. and a fraction of the population.
Over-population is dreamt up by people that live in cities surrounded by concrete. Its like cabin fever that cause delusions of reality. Then again it may be dreamt up by people to control other people.

 

[HansC]

I remember reading an article a few years ago in National Geographic, describing a slum in a big city in India. One toilet per 175 people. I have a hard enough time sharing a two bathroom house with my wife. Overpopulation is a real issue, greatly devalues human life, and has measurable, predictable consequences. Supply chains the world over are, at times, remarkably fragile and tenuous things.

We really do live in the land of plenty. I can't keep grass and moss from sprouting from my sidewalk, but I've been to Northern Africa, and big stretches of it are barely less barren than the moon. Egypt cannot feed itself, despite the Nile, and places like Libya and Syria have endless rocks and sand. We have a skewed perspective in the Pacific Northwest, since we're in such an abnormally fertile, peaceful land.

Getting water to large populations is tricky, just look at all the downstream problems we've caused by doling out an endless amount of the Colorado River to Las Vegas. A water crisis in an underdeveloped country can mean millions suffering and dying within a few days. Realistically, that is an overpopulation problem. There isn't enough money in the world to provide infrastructure to most of the residents. Think about post-earthquake Haiti, where one Nepalese aid worker relieving himself in a river resulted in a huge cholera outbreak, many deaths, and a bunch of extra suffering.
You know how when you make beer or wine, the yeast can only work until it makes enough alcohol that it poisons itself? I have trouble believing we're all that different from all other living organisms. There is a limit to how tightly we can be packed. We are inventive, adaptable, and resourceful, so there is a lot of elasticity to that limit, but pockets of us, from time to time, will experience mass die-offs.

The near eradication of communicable diseases through hygiene and vaccination, and the green revolution of sturdy hybrids supported by chemical fertilizer, has allowed truly exponential growth of the overall human population. If we're really, really smart, we'll have few children, live efficiently, and treat each other well. In that way, we can manage our own population reduction. More likely, we will squander water, or suffer from a fungus or rust that attacks our two sturdy varieties of wheat, or purposefully engineer a terrible disease and let it out into the world. The possibilities are endless, but in tens of thousands of places, we are massed so closely that localized severe population crashes are inevitable.

The United States isn't overpopulated, we can feed ourselves. But look how much food we export. Drought in California affects how much food is available, and its price, the world over. Our aquifers genuinely are being depleted far more rapidly than they replenish. The consequences are predictable and unavoidable. Human behavior being what it is, a lot of people will be left on the short end of the stick. Simply due to accidents of geography, I suspect most of us will fare pretty well, but still be glad we prepare. If I was born in a refugee camp in Gaza, however, I wouldn't be looking forward to my long term odds. Food and water has to be shipped in, infrastructure is limited, and politics plays a much bigger role in day to day activities there. How on earth can a die-off be avoided in a place like that? It's super crowded.

We have it good here, we really do, and still know that preparing for hard times is wise. We are almost infinitely richer than a significant portion of the world population. Folks that have no options if things head south.

I scramble and worry and work and plan to try to attain a degree of stability in my future, come what may. In a very crowded environment, doing so is effectively impossible. There are a great many very crowded environments.

I'm of the camp that the world has too many people, and that poor planning and fecklessness results in suffering and death for millions on a regular basis. Some of us think it can happen to billions of us instead of just millions in the future. I would be happy to believe otherwise, but how can I? I'd be grateful to be convinced.

 

[MagDump]

Too much for me to comment on all of it since time is valuable and we could talk for hours on the population subject. Africa is the lowest common denominator for habitable land. Vegas is similar to Africa, little water but thousands of people live there. Most of the earth is habitable.
On the water thing, water does not disappear from existence. Water can be cleaned and in it self can do the do the cleaning for us. The water in the oceans clean themselves. I don't have time to back all this up but it has been studied extensively. The millions of gallons of oil spilled in the gulf by BP did not just appear by accident. The oceans cleaned (microbes ate it) it and are still doing it. California oceans clean the oil that naturally oozes out of the ground underneath them and have been doing it since who knows when. Nature is actually very prolific at cleaning itself. The Russian Chernobyl site has shown that the half-life of nuclear waste is not infinite. They now give tours of it.
Here is how I view earth. It was designed and engineered by someone way smarter than us and there is a cycle of life to it. Be smart and use moderation and it will take care of itself.

The water shortage problem is dreamt up by Bill Gates/Government types that want to charge and control us for it. Controlling someone it power.
"The air is running out" is the next big sale. Coal is evil! But we put it in our water filters. Everything in moderation...You can smoke a cigar every once in a while and you are not going to died from cancer.
If there are 6 billion people on earth now it could handle 60 billion in 200 years from now.
I'm not worried about the populations levels.
How people on earth treat each other a much bigger problem. We now have a Nazi type thing going on in Iraq (ISIS). History is repeating itself. As I an writing this, the New York police are welding the storm drains shut in the streets of NY. The FBI is on high alert across the U.S.

 

[erudne]

Need to invent another conspiracy. We have to have some sort of doom and gloom out there. What will people do without the end of the world coming.

It's a known conspiracy that the SS Trust was moved into Al Gore's "Lock Box" and squandered on other social programs

 

[rick benjamin]

Is the world over-populated and under-fed? Maybe...
Are we who live in America have skewed perceptions? Maybe...
Are global elites blaming the US for it all? Maybe...
Is there another agenda driving this "cat roundup"? Maybe...

What shall I do about these issues?
I will stay out of debt
Live frugally, unobtrusively.
I suggest that discussions such as the above and others like them are unproductive time wasters.
No more money, no more time will I invest to "potty train" the world.
I've written, spoken, given money to my government representatives local and national.
Today's email from OFF hit like a ton of bricks.
I expect the next law passed will be compulsory registration like in Cali and Mass.
Then, what's after that? Collection maybe? By force?

"But, people are dying!" True that.
My question to you is what are you doing about it right now?
Turning food grains into denatured alcohol for motor vehicles? Real smart. Makes me hungry.

I have a sneaking suspicion difficult choices will need to be made.

 

[The Heretic]

The idea that the world is over populated is wrong. Next time you get on an airplane and fly across the country look down at all the land with no homes, building, etc. Humans occupy a very small part of the earth. Also note how a lot of land is not agriculture. It is idle land and could be occupied by humans. When your plane takes off and lands you pay attention to all the houses, buildings and human activity that pass underneath the plane for say 15 minutes as the plan gains altitude. You then sit back and ignore the next 3 to 5 hours of flight. Land with no houses or buildings (cities) pass by for hours and hours. Then you start paying attention as the pilot says prepare for landing. You look out the window and see human activity everywhere (cities). Think about if you flew around for days, not going to any specific city. You would get a better perspective on the size of United States. Now go do the same in Canada which is several times bigger than U.S. and a fraction of the population.
Over-population is dreamt up by people that live in cities surrounded by concrete. Its like cabin fever that cause delusions of reality. Then again it may be dreamt up by people to control other people.

The delusion is yours.

First, over-population is not about how many people you can fit in a given space - that is horribly simplistic, very naive and indicative of shallow thinking.

It is like saying we should be able to have a lot more deer and elk, just look at all of that land out there - it should hold billions of animals.

The problem is one of carrying capacity.

First there is the problem of arable land and water to grow things. Even ignoring the problems of drought (which we are in the middle of), we have been drawing down the rivers, reservoirs and aquifers. Even ignoring the issue of pollution, e are using fresh water faster than we can replenish it. This is visible in the reservoirs, and especially the rivers that have ceased flowing all the way to the ocean (yet another river in Calif. stopped flowing to the ocean this weekend).

The aquifers may not be so visible to the naked eye, but their levels have dropped over the last 50 years by hundreds of feet in Oregon (my neighbor had have his well pump dropped down because his static water level dropped 30 feet in the last 20 years and his is a mountain aquifer). Aquifers took thousands of years to fill up, we have used all that water in about 150 to 200 years and we are using it at a faster and faster rate. In some parts of the world and the USA, we are seeing sinkholes increasingly appearing because the water tables are dropping severely.

With arable land and water becoming more scarce (per person), food is becoming more expensive. You would have to be blind to not see how much the cost of food has increased in the last five to ten years.

Then there is the issue of energy. Energy needed to grow the food. Energy needed to transport the food. Energy needed to get to your job, to run the factories, to light the offices. The cost of energy has increased too, and this impacts the cost of everything else.

In the USA, the cost of energy, especially that based on petroleum, is subsidized. The cost of food is subsidized also. By taxes. Despite propaganda to the contrary, we are running the largest deficits in history now.

There is a simple math to the problem that is inescapable; the more people there are on the planet, the less land, water, food, energy and even clean air there is per person. The land, air, potable water, natural resources like minerals and fossil fuels, are finite in amount - so the more people there are, the less there is per person.

You can't just go put people on land just because it is empty. They need food, water, shelter, energy and jobs. There is a reason most of that land isn't occupied - because living there isn't sustainable. Sure a human can live almost anywhere - we even put people on the moon, at a huge cost for a very short time, almost solely as a PR stunt.

 

[The Heretic]

View attachment 245304
It's a known conspiracy that the SS Trust was moved into Al Gore's "Lock Box" and squandered on other social programs

One of the main reasons for the sharp increase in the number of SSI beneficiaries is that states are moving people off the unemployment roles onto SSI disability by finding them ways to say they are disabled. It takes them off the state UI programs and puts them on SSI where they are hidden by the much larger federal budget and the states don't have to pay for it.

It also artificially lowers the unemployment rates.

 

[The Heretic]

It is always a bit dismaying and ironic to me when I see preppers use the same arguments as non-preppers do when the subject of environment carrying capacity comes up.

Preppers talk about "sheeple" who refuse to prep because they can always just go to the store for more food. Yet when you talk about the simple fact that more people equals less food/land/energy/water - they come up with these simplistic responses; "oh look! there is plenty of land out there! plenty of water - oceans of it!".

It's like Palin's recent observation about the drought in Calif.; "just build more reservoirs", like they come pre-filled with water.

 

[rick benjamin]

You can't just go put people on land just because it is empty. They need food, water, shelter, energy and jobs. There is a reason most of that land isn't occupied - because living there isn't sustainable. Sure a human can live almost anywhere - we even put people on the moon, at a huge cost for a very short time, almost solely as a PR stunt.

Where's your sense of adventure? In the grand panorama of history a man's life takes up a microdot. 90 million microdots don't make a hair on a ticks bottom. Stalin and Hitler made the Ukraine wheat fields the best producing in the world. In all of recorded history only three made it out alive, Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus. The rest of us will be good for the soil.

 

[The Heretic]

Where's your sense of adventure? In the grand panorama of history a man's life takes up a microdot. 90 million microdots don't make a hair on a ticks bottom. Stalin and Hitler made the Ukraine wheat fields the best producing in the world. In all of recorded history only three made it out alive, Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus. The rest of us will be good for the soil.

You go have some "adventure" - I've already been there and done that - multiple times I've been through some "adventure" where I should have come out the other side dead.

I want to survive, and moreover, I want my children to survive.

That is the purpose of preparation for survival - not sticking my head in the sand and hoping nothing bad will happen.

 

[JRuby]

I will prepare for the worst but I am not going to go looking for it. I dont have the time or the energy to be that paranoid. Any bets I dont die of old age before the sky starts falling? I have maybe thirty years left on this planet if I am lucky I plan to live it better than the first fifty.

 

[rick benjamin]

You go have some "adventure" - I've already been there and done that - multiple times I've been through some "adventure" where I should have come out the other side dead.

I want to survive, and moreover, I want my children to survive.

That is the purpose of preparation for survival - not sticking my head in the sand and hoping nothing bad will happen.

Are your thoughts a hurricane of unpleasant flashbacks? Had some adventure myself.
I hope to continue to to thrive, and my family to thrive after I die.
I am as prepared as I can plan to be.
Water collection and sanitation.
Long term food supply.
Defense from marauders.
A shovel to bury the stinkers.

It is always a bit dismaying and ironic to me when I see preppers use the same arguments as non-preppers do when the subject of environment carrying capacity comes up.

Preppers talk about "sheeple" who refuse to prep because they can always just go to the store for more food. Yet when you talk about the simple fact that more people equals less food/land/energy/water - they come up with these simplistic responses; "oh look! there is plenty of land out there! plenty of water - oceans of it!".

It's like Palin's recent observation about the drought in Calif.; "just build more reservoirs", like they come pre-filled with water.

Part of my plan:
Help those wanting a hand up.
Dismiss those wanting a hand out.

All my hard-earned money poured into Iraq and Stan, received with thanks by crooks.
Families sick from bad water and bad food. Murdered in thousands by crooks.

Gov Palin has a sharp sense of humor. The latest complaint was "Drought!" her earlier response was evict illegals (welfare). Sounds like my kids when I suggest they cut-back spending and start saving. Didn't do it then, so Gov Palin suggested something they wouldn't do anyway. A drought, bankruptcy, crisis and CALI builds a bullet train! Very smart!

I reached a personal tipping point, "what can I do"?
Wrote them down, planned for and worked to reduce the issues.
Very few of my concerns made it past "plan".
My list of concerns...I couldn't fix them...I let them go.

UN...crooks
NGOs...crooks
REMFs...mostly crooks
GovReps...mostly crooks
Sheep...stupids doing sheeple stuff

 

[The Heretic]

<broken link removed>

 

[erudne]

Greece to run out of essential food and medicine in days - The Telegraph


Daily allowance of cash from many ATMs has dropped from €60 to €50...http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/e...dum-polls.html

 

[erudne]

Let's see…China nearing 1929 style crash; US deficit beyond recovery – spending like a drunken sailor – US political landscape tilting hard left and leaving our Founding Principles behind; Greece & the European Union…what's more to say on that one? Oil prices dropping like a stone (which means production will drop as well because there's a tipping point that revolves around the oil not bringing in the revenue it costs to pump & transport it). Our currency's buying power is garbage. Prices are climbing, especially for food and necessary tangibles. Added to that, there's a steady trend of articles throughout various news sources and punditry that indicate this coming September will be memorable in one way or another. Who's to say what the ninth month will bring?

You still have a window to get some training in Neighborhood Protection Skills. You still can get yourself equipped. You can still build a network.

 

[JRuby]

So September you say.