If there is a surplus of workers then there is always someone who will do more work for less pay/conditions somewhere..
The only solution is that working class breed at less than replacement rates. When there are less workers than managers, workers get better conditions.

I recommend that people start doing what ever it takes, lie cheat steal, to get large amounts of money now while the gettin's good because that is what will determine who lives and who dies.

All of those who are in the know, (TPTB and a layer or two of minions), understand this and are doing just that as folks all over the internets like Zero Hedge and others have amply documented.

There may have been a time when humanity had the ability or at least the potential to rise above our base instincts but now we are entering into a phase of what Darwinian loves to point out as "the rapacious animal" domination. Dog eat Dog.

Deal with it...or not.

"No. I don't want to go back to that," Lfeather.

What we may "want" is not the issue. We will have to adjust to circumstances that will come with a future of less resources and contracting economy. Besides, we will not "go back" to some past period of history. We can only go forward and adjust to the realities that we will face. Life will undoubtedly become more local and far less consumptive. Nonetheless, we will be starting our adjustment from a much different base than that of ancient societies. Unfortunately, that may not be to our advantage. One thing seems certain; the population will almost certainly decline. This decline will eventually reduce unemployment, because there will be less competition for available work.

As long as we do not get rid of child labor laws, workplace safety codes, product safety regulations, etc.

Or we can have 14 year olds in the factory working 70 hour weeks, sawing their fingers off, providing us defective and/or contaminated products (Think recent incidents with certain product made in China).

And while we are justifiably chastising folks at home hiring illegals to do thewir chores, let's make sure we don't let the business owners off the hook for employing massive numbers of illegals in their packing houses, as maids for their hotel chains, as cooks in their restaurants, on the factory floor, in the fields and orchards. We certainly would never want to prosecute the folks at home while the majority of the illegal employers get to exploit their cheap labor, especially once minimum wage is abolished...would we?

+100

Cause and effect is not so simple. There are plenty of "dots" that you aren't considering - credit default swaps, wars driving federal debt, peak oil, etc. I really don't think that 70 cents on the minimum wage was a real driver of much of anything.

It's not that simple. In many scenarios higher minimum wage laws do cost jobs but the current recession is not an inventory led recession, like every other recession we've had since 1945. Instead, the current recession is a credit based recession. The last credit based recession we had was the Great Depression, from 1929 to the start of WWII. The credit recession prior to that was the Long Depression.

No amount of lowering wages right now will really stimulate employment. The problem is, quite simply, that the world is awash in debt, debt that cannot be repaid, not the interest on that debt and most likely never even the principal.

There are only three things that can happen with debt.
1. It can be repaid.
2. It can be defaulted.
3. It can be forgiven.

Options 2 and 3 result in capital loss to the lender, either directly as a venture capitalist loaning the money into some activity that he/she thought would make money or as a depositor of a financial institution whose deposits in said institution have been loaned out.

Right now there is more in outstanding debt than the total global GDP by a factor of several times. In other words, there are more claims on the pie than can ever be fulfilled without someone going home empty handed.

Credit recessions are caused by reckless bank activities. This was what the Glass–Steagall Act was designed to prevent. With the passage of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, those safeguards were removed and one congressman who voted against it prophetically said that he hoped we would not regret this action in 10 years.

Well here we are just a bit over 10 years later with a massive credit induced recession caused by horrid lending practices by the largest "investment" banks who took these actions with the full knowledge that they would fail yet that these same banks would be "rescued" with taxpayer dollars. And this criminal behavior is not confined to the US. Lehman was leveraged about 35 to 1 when it failed. Deutsche Bank is reported to be leveraged 60 to 1. The Royal Bank of Scotland was leveraged 50 to 1. So this is a global problem.

Anyway, lowering wages right now will not restore employment until the bad debt is cleared from the system. So far we have failed to clear the bad debt and instead are playing extend and pretend games by shifting the debt, renaming it, claiming to back it by national governments (the Federal Reserve for the US and the European Central Bank in Europe), etc. But that changes nothing. These bad debts will mostly never be repaid. The sooner we get on with the painful process of clearing the bad debts, the sooner the base economic system can reset.

And it is very important that we do reset the base system as soon as possible, because if fossil fuel production is at or near its peak of production, this will create a hard ceiling on economic recovery unless or until we divert some of that energy into new energy sources that must replace those same fossil fuels. I will leave the viability of alternative energy sources as replacements for fossil fuels for a separate discussion.

"Jay Hason's list from the Society of Sloth piece is what needs to happen"

So Bob Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius to the rescue?

A new paradigm is exactly what we need but I'm not sure if that will ever happen and I mourn that inevitability. As the employment situation grows more dire people will give less a shit about appreciation of the natural world and just about living. That means year round hunting/fishing season and will only crash the naturals systems faster. I would expect increased burglaries as people break in for food and/or things they can resell for food.

Jay Hason's list from the Society of Sloth piece is what needs to happen but if there was actual strong top-down leadership, as say in Cuba, people in the US would freakout and I figure you'd see more domestic terrorism. Beside that I fear global/regional wars as some others have said. There's too many people with too many guns not to get hot and bothered when things aren't as easy to come by as they used to be. Sometimes I think about moving to a third world place that won't be in the fray but I figured a foreigner could be marked as a target.

Yeah, this was about employment but I think employment is just a factor of agricultural civilizations. If we lived in harmony with the Earth then every one would be born with the same profession and have access to all the resources they needed. Of course this would mean a drastic reduction in population but I expect that to happen anyway as immediate and skillful healthcare goes into decline.

I will regret that any pleasantries of no longer having to punch a clock will be replaced be hardcore fear of famine and or road agents during the collapse period.

great way to start a civil uprising that will be best put down under the boot of a tyrant who is not afraid to take "hard measures". Perhaps a Final Solution would be in order! Hmmmm

Daxr states "If I were unemployed I would fall back on family ties,".

Neglecting his other actions I have to say that AFAICS the 'family' unit no longer exists in any meaningful form. Not the same as say it was in the 50s and 60s.

Most families have become mixmaster types. I know many children not living with their natural parents any longer.

Face it. The whole society we used to know has undergone a tremendous alteration to something different and therefore what once were considered 'family ties' are rather just very very loosely tied and gnarled messes of twine.

No real cohesion and little feeling of actual responsibility.

In my case my daughter stole, lied and resorted to all types of schemes. Has been married,divorced, living with guys she met on the internet, and doing a very poor job of raising my granddaughter,,to the point of her uncle attempting to sexually assault her own daughter as she lived in a house he owned.

My wife's father is on his fourth wife and cut my wife completely out of his estate, where she once had JT-WROS over most of it, all so that he could promise it all to a stupid bimbo to marry himn while leaving his last wife(3rd) to die in a nursing home. His son, the uncle whotried the depraved acts with my young grandaughter of 12, is on his third wife after leaving children all over the landscape from his previous two marriages. He once kicked his first wife in the stomach causing her to miscarry.

So far as I can see this is pretty normal for most quote'families'unquote.

And the dirty secrets exist hidden from public view.

So where is the strength of what some call laughingly "The Family Unit"?
It simply does NOT exist anymore except to a very slight degree and for those who reply to this Post saying "ohhhh mine is not like that, mine is a GOOD family"....

Yeah,,,sure. If so then distinctly in the minority.

The sinews of this country once revolved around family bonds. Not so anymore.

We will test this area very very strongly and I am sure it will be found wanting in the extreme, as we drift closer and closer to that point when all hell breaks loose and it will mano a mano.

The only real cohesion will be found in very small enclave out in the rural areas. Areas small enough that most everyone knows everyone else. Knows who to trust and who to not trust. Even then some kin are druggies and worthless BUT at least they are a known quality and can be dealt with.

Who are you going to trust as a few people walk up your lane to your farm house? Complete total strangers who wish to either kill and take or beg and con you?
Or people you have went to school with, who you have known intimately, fished and hunted with and shared experiences with?

I'm sure the choice is obvious. Yet how else to deal with a situation that will for sure happen. If you live on some land and have some resources. Like stored food and firewood, water and other essentials?

Are you going to trust just anyone?

This then is how and where I live. This then will be my choices. This then is surely how much of this will play out as the cities shut down and the suburbs empty out.

Many vagabonds on the roads and byways. Many either to take and kill or starve and die.

How to assign values? How to assign trust? The family? Gone long ago in most cases and widely separated over large distances. Even widely separated by value systems.

Values thrown out the window and on the ash heaps. Values that we needed but no longer have.

When are we ever going to actually live with the culture and society we have evolved to? The total wastelands of greed and ego driven lives? The government that is nonfunctional, corporations who mostly control peoples lives from the time the TV is turned on in the morning until you reach the grave.

When I lived in subdivisions it was rare to even know the name of the people two houses down. And most just remained anonymous and preferred it that way. I had a neighbor whose son would place a 10 ft diameter cattle tank , used as a swimming pool , on the chain link fence between us, and bang it with a baseball bat. Like a huge metal drum and laugh as he ran when I came out the door. Later threw mudballs at the front door when we were gone on vacation. Also neighbor hood toughs, teenagers, who robbed the guy next door to me as I watched them cavorting around his house. They threatened to beat his young daughter up if he brought charges against them. I lived in several subdivisions in my life and most were like this. Ugly, depraved and worthless places to reside.

In one my next door neighbor parked his clunker in front of my house instead of his and let it leak oil all over the concrete. He would empty his lawn mower bags over the fence on my yard. His wife would scream at his children at the top of her lungs.

One guy kept a pony in his two car garage. Had 20 cats that defected all over my gravel driveway by digging little pits and covering them up. I could go on and on about such events. Even now I have to shoot cats from the next farm whose children raise them by the dozens. Last month I observed about 30 cats eating out of the dogs food bowl in his yard. As they come to my place they tend to hide in the barn and drive my dogs nuts. Finally my dogs catch one and I have to go put it out of its misery. And we are separated by a couple thousand feet at that. Why I do not know. Why do kids run around knocking down mailboxes just after Sunday Services and you saw them singing in the choir?

Family? I just don't see that as working out.

I agree. To me the real danger is that the mass unemployed will get so desperate that they will take down the entire political system, only to discover that the result is even worse than before, if more equitable.

Actually, the transition to new sources of energy started when Roseveldt signed the executive order for the Manhatan Project.

A shotrage of wood led to the use of fossil fuels which turned out to be much more compact and effective energy sources, a shortage of fossil fuels will(IMO)lead to an even more compact and efficient source of energy - nuclear power presently and eventually fusion power.

The only question is: will the US be the country sitting in the dark while the countries that invested in nuclear power prosper?

...people certainly vary in their skills!

When I went back to college a few years ago I had to take the SAT's. I bought two big study guides with practice exams and found that I did fine with English, but that the math - algebra in particular - had become like a foreign language. I spent two months buried in math study and ignored the rest, ending up with an 800 on the English section and a respectable 650 in math.

1. Obama's plan is just subsidies for the insurance industry. I'm talking about the real thing like they have in Germany or France.
2. Let 'em look. There are also a lot of people who won't, as well; believe me, I live in Austin.
3. Apply the same deal to legal immigrants; fine the illegals the equivalent tax to pay for their malfeasance. (immigration is a whole nother can of worms)

Yeah, and that's what they say about sociable security too. It's a b*tch when the expansion that was supposed to go on forever collides with the edges of the petri dish.

It's inevitable now, the future is going to be harder than the past. Only question is, how will the remaining resources be divided up? (and history would suggest that an unequal distribution is likely)

The Mrs. and I run a small business.
We do website design and hosting.

That part has been static for the last year, no new customers.

We have a contract with a local ISP for tech support.
(Hi Bob, seems you've messed up your email again, let's take a look at it)

That has been bringing home the bacon for the last few years.

The way I see it right now if you don't have a job you probably won't get one as there are none to be found.

If you have one, hang on to it as tight as you can.

My garage needs to be reroofed but I can't afford to hire anyone to do it because even though we have jobs we can barely make ends meet.

What to do about the unemployed that fall off the edge?

That happened to me in 1990 and I bid on a USDA timber contract and became a 'Tree Feller'. That saved our bacon.

Now I'm a MacGyver type of guy being a Boy Scout and spending a soggy decade in the NAVY I tend to think out of the box.

Give me a paperclip, a screwdriver, vice grips and an MP-5 and I can fix anything or destroy it.

I had a Sthil 380 so I went for it.

These people that have lost their jobs and are at the end of their ropes need to sit down and think because I'm not for having my taxes go to pay for them to watch HBO all day long.

I'd like to mention that when I had the timber business there was someone stealing my split wood.

I spent a day and a half hid in the brush until they showed up.

I put a 7.62 in their [sexual action verb] radiator from 100 yards away and then slunk out the same way I came in.

That timber cut paid the mortgage as I cutting lodgepole pine and was selling it at 1$ per foot to a company that was using it to build log cabins.

4300 trees were killed by me.

I digress.

Activated, did you get my apology? I had also recently watched Heartbreak Ridge. Last sorry, I will refrain from the killer references.
TinFoil

Not everyone would agree with your belief that nuclear power is the "low risk" approach.

Even if it were, how does that address the problems of over-consumption, poor distribution of resources and lack of employment?

You should look at where people were being employed. It was mainly low paying service sector jobs. How will these jobs exist say, 20 years in the future?

we will become a nation of shopkeepers, much like the Brits

It was some twisted global economic shenanigans that even allowed for a nation of people to apparently thrive by simply providing services to each other, and reselling domestically goods from elsewhere. Those days are gone.

...if the real crisis is "the inability of US employers to compete on world markets", to fix it we would need to look at why that is.

For the most part, it is because of how their employees choose to live. If you look at why we are out-competed by China and India for labor, it is because of how their employees live. From our perspective, it is easy to say they are poor and exploited and can't possibly be happy - big families in small houses, women at home cooking and gardening and making things, adults walking or bicycling to work etc. From their perspective, perhaps they think we live the most wasteful, unhappy and isolated lives imaginable - kicking our kids out as soon as they are grown, a car for every adult, motorized toys of every variety, racing around doing pointless things alone, everyone compulsively addicted to something, like kids trapped in adult bodies, requiring ridiculous amounts of income to keep the whole thing afloat...

The _real_ crisis is the inability of US employers to compete on the world markets.

4 of the top 10 most profitable corporations are US.

http://www.billshrink.com/blog/6715/the-worlds-most-profitable-companies/

29 out of the top 100 corporations are US.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_list/

What you probably mean is that US workers can't compete with $1 a day Chindians in countries without environmental laws or worker rights.

Right.
US workers need preferential treatment over slave labor.

We agree on that, right?

The _real_ crisis is the inability of US employers to compete on the world markets.

As Stoneleigh points out, all empires go through this stage. They become too rich in the their later life and the menial work is outsourced to other countries who are willing to climb the wealth later (subsistence agriculture -> small manufacturing -> factory manufacturing -> office work and services). The U.S. (and Western nations in general) are simply following a well described maturation process.

It ends in collapse, every time, because the empire is eventually hollowed out.

You can delay it a little but you can't fight trends of this size and nature.

On a higher level, Greer does a good job of distinguishing the larger trend that recent, fossil energy-fueled empires fit within:

We are just now entering the Scarcity Economy (Scarcity Industrialism above) but there will be quite a bit of salvage occurring, too. We will be fully in the Salvage Economy when we start dismantling skyscrapers for their steel because it takes less energy to do that than mine more ore.

Greer and I guessed with the 150 year time periods but it was just a guess. We could easily enter the Salvage Economy by mid-century, in my view.

The only option now left to most people is, "How do I prepare for this?' The more ambitious might ask, "How can I and my community not just survive, but thrive?"

Greyzone, perhaps there are multiple solutions to encourage corporations to bring jobs back from offshore. How about requiring all imported goods be certified (and thoroughly audited for compliance) to be produced by suppliers (countries and corporations) meeting advanced world standards for environmental and safety matters. The corporations would then either have to force their overseas suppliers to meet these standards or move production to countries with these standards. US workers would have a more level playing field

they don't just let old reactors sit there. They tear them down and decommission them.

please built hybrid fission and fusion reactors. fusion to bred the u233 from the thorium fuel.

Well, we need to choose our courses of action.

Coal-fired power plants come with many environmental downsides. Americans get way more exposure to heavy metals, including radionuclides, from coal mining and burning. I grew up in PA Appalachia, and I have seen plenty of streams colored with minerals discharging from abandoned deep shaft coal mines. Then there is mountaintop removal mining. Leachate dams breaking. Acid rain. Mercury in our food chain. After saying all this, I realize that we will need coal-fired electric generation for quite some time.

However, I think that we can build and operate fission rector power plants safely. As for jobs, numerous highly skilled engineers would be needed to design these reactors, along with many highly skilled craftsmen to build and maintain them, as well as decommission and dispose/recycle them. Jobs for inspectors, evaluators, regulators, and plenty of jobs for security personnel.

AT some point we have to accept some risk. We have had people here lament that solar PV panels covering an area of 200 square kilometers (to provide U.S. electricity needs...see Campfire tonight)would be some kind of environmental horror. I call shenanigans on all that...that amount of area is trivial...and the desert life such as creosote bushes, Russian sage,other plants, road runners and other birds, desert hares, insects, etc, will likely be just fine in the heavy partial shade of these non-pollution-emitting PV panels (yes, I know that the manufacture and transportation and other life-cycle activities will involve resource use and waste streams...got it...everything we humans do involves that).

Wind turbines will kill some birds, cause sun flicker, throw some ice, emit sound sounds, and some people will not like looking at them. Everything has its issues...people have to make their choices or live in a cave...even then, their wood fires will denude the land in relatively short order, given our population, even with some die-off.

When it comes down to it, I see solar PV as having fewer issues than the rest: No flicker, no noise, no bird and bat kill, no ice throws, no towers sticking up hundreds of feet, no moving parts, no emissions, and little maintenance, with useful lifespans perhaps greater than 30 years.

Yes, the panels will have to be cleaned periodically. Yes, many panels will be in desert areas where water is scarce. Yes, cisterns can collect and store the occasional rain water, and very efficient water squeegee spray and water recovery systems could be devised and used.

Yes, the electricity is only generated during the day...people, go to bed earlier and get some good nights sleep...turn off/remover 80% of the street lights and lighted bill boards and garishly lighted store signs. With the exception of hospitals and power plants and some other processes, end second and third tricks at factories and businesses....go to sleep and wake with the sun. There have been places in the World where there are people with modern conveniences where the power goes off at midnight and comes back on at 0500.

Do not take my advocacy for PV as a 'total solution': PV, wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear fission, NG, coal, oil, etc...and efficiency and reducing our lifestyles...we will need the system solution...there is not one magic bullet.

Our lives, and most likely our descendants' lives, will be different...but different does not have to mean stone-age. Risks and benefits will have to be weighed, and choices made...but we do not have the luxury of taking too much time to do it.

Nuke work pays well. It is very clean work and not overly strenuous. Good benefits. Many, many jobs out there that are much harder on the workers re health impact, re self respect, re the unending drudgery that is the lot of many in the work force (smile while you ask every customer if they want to supersize it - & don't forget to clean the fryolater at shift end,by the way we need you for an hour and a half on Sunday (don't worry, you'll clear $12.00 for coming in, can't expect to own your weekends if you want a job).
By the way, everything in your post is inaccurate - building nukes has a major impact where it occurs within the building trades - laborers are assigned to each piece of equipment along with the equipment operator. Oilers lube the heavy equipment. An on site heavy equipment mechanic sets up shop. Many iron workers come in. Many highly paid pipefitters and boilermakers come in. Well paid inspectors of many varieties are present in abundance. Concrete workers are abundant. Staging crews and carpenters come in. I'm just scratching the surface. The same tradesmen are needed for decommissioning work. The civilian plants have already paid for decommissioning - no radioactive rusting hulks that kill for millennia - there's a serious disconnect here. We have a small amount of spent rods in dry cask storage - essentially fuel for the future. Dangerous for a few hundred years however I am sure it will be used much sooner than that. I'll accept dry casks in my back yard - no problem. I'd feel a lot more comfortable with them than say a coal power plant, a copper or aluminum smelter, a paper mill, a trash incinerater, an oil refinery, a pesticide plant, a paint factory, etc.
You need to understand that nuclear power in the medium and long run is a very important, necessary part of the answer to the energy problem. If society hasn't sufficient surplus energy you can be sure that the common working person will get the short end of the stick, as will such niceties as control of climate change etc.

My guess is building fission plants will do a lot for employment stats. To start with if you compare the number of workers required to just run a fission plant versus a coal or natural gas plant you will find a fission plant requires more manhours per megawatt output. If the fission plant displaces any amount of imported energy then you are replacing exporting money by employing local labor.
At some point the rusting radioactive hunks have to be decommissioned and it is a very labor intensive process. Currently in the US most lower level radioactive scrap is buried in the desert in marine containers but in Canada every effort is made to recycle as much as possible which requires more manual labor.
Also unlike coal and natural gas plants that vent the results of energy production into the environment fission plants contain most of their products and store the used fuel on site. Most of the energy remains in the used fuel and will eventually be reprocessed requiring more manual labor.
As it stands right now, fission plants are not being built because they are more expensive than coal or gas. The extra expense comes from the labor intense requirements from design, licencing, construction, operation and final decommissioning.

Please don't put it on the moon. We might need it here in future as nuclear technology changes.

If you put it on the moon, I shall insist you retrieve it.
And while you are there would you mind bringing back lots of that nice deuterium that is in the top of the regolith?

I have always wondered why we couldn't get rid of nuclear waste, and old bombs too, by incinerating them in the sun. I would think the sun wouldn't even notice the stuff since it's essentially an enormous fusion reactor.

Also, I think the only way sustained fusion reactions work in a steady, stable and predictable manner is at star-scale, that's why all those billions of dollars spent on fusion have resulted in zip. We already have a fusion reactor. It's name is Sol.

Hasn't anyone here considered that, whatever else may come to pass, death is just around the corner for everyone of us. That is it. Not looking will not make it go away.

We will not live forever and be served by robots.

Lots of us will lose our jobs, lots of our lives will descend into hunger and misery and violence. People will find ways to keep themselves and their children fed.

But the four horsemen are on the horizon, and we will not magick ourselves out of this one.

I cannot stand people who incontinently spout rosy predictions and bullish prognostications.

Excepting some happy few, the last 5000 years were mostly misery for us, and I expect that trend to continue.

lukitas

shoulders back and balls front : don't lose your dignity in the face of death.

You were directing your post at me?

You seem angry TFHG.

TFHG, See my post above. I've got work at excellent pay for you.

Sorry to disappoint Zoose in this matter. I often wonder why people can't solve this very common problem.

Here's a simple problem for anyone to try; where do I find work ?

Hint; what needs doing in your neighborhood? Don't focus, step back a bit and view your talents. Who needs them ? Solving problems is a talent.

Dave

TinFoilHayGuy-

There is a danger in the school thing. I did the school thing. Doctorate. In a good field, health care related. I would be pulling down big bucks now...

But I got sick. With $100,000 in student loans.

You can't go bankrupt on student loans.

There is no disability discharge on student loans.

Be careful. Be sure, mighty sure, that there is a job on the other end of your student loans. Good luck, hang in there.

I have a grown son, 22. Like most young folk he was eager to get out on his own. Sharing a house with three other guys, and still barely making rent between the four of them. First one out of work, then another. Then get another job, part time...then get laid off...First they had to shut off the cable; then the phone; then the power.

He managed to get on with the census, but that's over next month.

He's coming home next month. All of them are headed back to their parents. I am not planning for him ever to leave again. I haven't told him that. He still thinks he will be getting the American Dream. The young folk, they don't want to know the Dream is over.

The Dream has been over for quite some time, actually. My grandparents (all born around 1910-1915) did better than their parents, by far, and without too hard a struggle either, had serene and dignified retirements with paid off homes. My parents (born about 1935) did as well as my grandparents at times, but not consistently, and only with a fair amount of struggle and working harder, had worrisome and marginal-income retirements with still-mortgaged homes. My siblings and I (spread out from 1950 to 1964) have managed to reach a level close to our parents, but only with much hardship and heavy debt. My older siblings still expect to retire, but I (the youngest) am quite doubtful about the state of the world by then. As the last of the Boomers, my "expected" date was 2032. Riiiggghhht...

Comments noted and I didn't attack anyone.

Hey I'm 62 and doing fine.

FMagyar:

No.

Read my post about my timber business.

Since you hired yourself, I hope you are doing well.

Your story sounds similar to mine. I got so pissed off with the stupidity and arrogance of Labour I emigrated. Now have a much higher standard of living in Germany, am much happier and now actively considering the requirements to become a German citizen.

I might be tempted back for family reasons (I have elderly parents still in UK) or if Cameron turns into a second Thatcher but right now I am unlikely to ever return, and would advise my kids against choosing UK. The next decade in UK will be tough and jobs I think are going to be hard to come by. A great many of the middle class have made or are planning to make the move, I know my cohort of good mates are now scattered permanently in France, the U.S., Oz, New Zealand, Dubai, and South Africa. Some moved their businesses with them. A massive loss of jobs and tax, but some days it seemed Labour would rather see the Taliban take over London than a UK business succeed.

Breastmilk. Is momma still feeding? Try goat or rice too.

Congrats

When men went to the moon they left a mirror. We bounce a laser beam off of it and catch the return. This has allowed us to measure the distance from the earth to the moon to the micrometer. I also studied EME Earth-Moon-Earth communications when I was a amateur radio operator. Hope that helped.

"On finishing O'Neil's Book High Frontiers, I am puzzled as to how they propose to aim their accelerator at L5 on a rotating moon."

The moon does not rotate relative to an observer on earths surface. The gravity of the earth has caused the moons rotational period to exactly equal its orbital period - the effect being that moon is locked so that the same face/hemisphere is always towards the earth.

So the problem is reduced to a pretty simple one, aiming the transmitter/receiver to track the motion of the moon across the sky.

I am puzzled as to how they propose to aim their accelerator at L5 on a rotating moon.

You must not have read the right parts.

There's a spot on the far side of the Moon, L1, which is metastable.  It's also where loads shot from the Earth side of the Moon tend to wind up if they have exactly the right speed.  You put a craft there with a mesh of steel cables in front of a Kevlar bag to break up and catch the incoming loads of regolith.

When you let something depart the L1 point naturally, it tends to fall into a 2:1 synchronous Earth-Moon orbit.  That's the natural orbit for a space factory using lunar materials.  Unfortunately, "The 2:1 Earth-Moon Synchronous Society" is an extremely clumsy name, so you'll have to forgive the 1970's for not changing the "L5 Society" label.

What is your geography's (county's) recycle rate? We recycle 35% of what our citizens throw out. I am part a group trying to raise that number to 65%.
TinFoil

That is the point. Land is expensive because we made a serious error in thinking we had the right to draw imaginary lines on the earth and buy and sell it.

Land should not be expensive because private ownership of it is ridiculous.

All of our ancestors were "socialist", if they weren't we would not have survived as a species.

How about some human views? Every person born on this planet has the right to feed and shelter himself with the bounty of nature. No person has more right to that or the right to deny another the opportunity to do so.

Was Ghengis Khan a socialist? He had strong views about fences and cities.

LOL!

I now imagine you huddled in the corner of your commune wondering if Joseph McCarthy will get wind of your subversive inclinations.

So now I have to worry about zombies as well?

Funny! I actually had a girlfriend who was a member of the Communist Party, (still legal in the US of A last time I checked.) Was a couple of years back. Since I've never been a big fan of any "ISMS" we ended up going our separate ways.

Imagine if Zoose gets wind of the fact that I'm closer philosophically to non ideological anarchism (also legal) and no I'm not actually affiliated with any party...

My previous statement with regards "ISMS" applies to that as well.

http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/DISCUSSIONS/N55_TEXTS/AB_ideologies.html

Because subjective opinions, social conventions and habitual conceptions are not necessarily in compliance with conditions for description, religious and ideological assertions are often a mixture of right assertions and wrong assertions.

This is a fundamental problem that is shared by for example ideologies like representative democracy, anarchism, neo-liberalism, communism, capitalism, nazism, and religions like christianity, hinduism, judaism, islam, etc.

Experience tells us that religions and ideologies usually don’t first and foremost aim to respect conditions for description and hereby the logical relation between persons and persons’ rights.

However, I'm not sure if logic helps with certain people...

Disclaimer: My ancestry is part Danish but Denmark isn't the only place where something is rotten.

I used to be an employed computer scientist. A PhD with thirty years of systems programming experience at all sizes of companies, from self-employment to the kernel of one of worlds largest programs.

Then my health collapsed, and now I'm just barely surviving on SS disability (I lost my savings to divorce and the housing crash.) When my COBRA subsidy goes away next month I might not be surviving at all, though perhaps I will then qualify for food stamps. Even with subsidized COBRA my medical expenses ran to $10,000 last year. I qualify for a Section 8 subsidy on the 40-year-old trailer I rent, but there is a 2-year waiting list.

I live way out in the country, with few choices of vendors within, say, 50 miles. I buy clothes (jeans & t-shirts) at the local Alco. My newest jeans are three years old, and I just last week replaced my five-year-old t-shirts. I buy most of my food from the local City Market, which buys some produce from local farmers in season. I also buy meat from a local butcher who buys cows from local ranchers. I might start keeping chickens if my landlord agrees.

Given the above, I have no patience for commenters who revile the welfare state, as I would be a dead man without it.

Two tiny problemettes with that:
1) The Mexican economy is almost entirely natural resource driven and it isn't going to double, it's going to decline;
2) Our regulations are specifically designed to only accept mega-agri-gmo-biz products and exclude anything "local".

So there's that and then there's the fact that yesterday's criminal gangs are today's mainstream political organizations. If we go cruising down main street Oaxaca with machine guns blazing we are just going to breed another generation of blood enemies.

I don't know. I would look funny too. I did not even keep one.

I remember well the 1990's when the Federal budget was balanced on the backs of the soldiers. I remember our unit's manauver budget being 5 miles per year per tank. I remember 'passing the hat' around the unit so we could get paper for the printer.

I also remember the fact that the decision was made not to buy IBA because of budget pressures and that our troops would continue to wear the old 1980's PASGT body armor.

I also remember Bush being blamed because we did not have enough IBA when war came.

I remember all of the vehicles that literally disintegrated on us in Iraq and Afghanistan because they were an average of 15 years old. (The reason we had to replace every vehicle that wen to Iraq and Afghanistan was not combat damage - it was the fact that they were past their design life and literally began falling apart.)

How many lives will this next round of penny-pinching cost us the next time our troops have to go in harms way?

Sure.

Right up until we invade Iran and annex Mexico and Canada.

You could 100% shut down the US Department of Defense and it would not halt the geometric progression of debt and interest. We've passed the knee in the curve. All that would do is slow it down briefly.

What no one, neither Democrat nor Republican, wishes to discuss is that entitlement payments are not sustainable. They must end soon voluntarily or they will end not long after that involuntarily.

Don't worry. Rangel's annual political statement is about to come to an end.

I'm with Stuart and it's not even a close call so I'm surprised Greer considers that a possibility. The number of jobless can't possibly be absorbed by the renewables sector. How many people does it take to manufacture and install renewables?

Here is a back-of-the-envelope guess for just the U.S.:

The mines are largely already producing, maybe add back shifts that will be cut as the contraction continues. No net new employment there.

The factories can add shifts but new factories will be required, too. These are highly automated places. Perhaps 150 people per factory, add 50 factories and you're still only talking about 7500 people.

Installation of a PV or CSP plant (for example) probably doesn't take more than 75 people between the earth moving, concrete pouring, erecting aluminum frames and so on. Add another 200 simultaneous projects just doing installation and you've now employed 15,000 more people.

Then there are associated support jobs, from office work to suppliers who make subcomponents (boilers, etc.), add perhaps another 25,000 people.

All told, I'm having trouble even getting to 50,000 people never mind replacing the millions that have already lost their jobs. Even if I'm wrong by an order of magnitude (which is possible but unlikely), it's still only 0.5 million people. Double that for wind and add a bit more to increase rooftop solar installations and we're at about a million people.

Not nothing but still peanuts when compared to the unemployment problem we are facing.

daxr...it does'nt need to be hard and miserable work and it can be solar powered. http://maddelinternational.com/wordpress/?page_id=19

This would be the point where the system fails. Before this I would expect the agricultural and transport sectors to be top priority on receiving fuel rationing. When these two sectors can no longer be supported with the correct fuel/energy inputs then there will have to be a demographic shift to try and offset the problem, but hard manual work 40 hours a week pretty much requires that you have worked so since your teens or early 20s otherwise your just not conditioned enough to keep up.

I took note of the fact that there was a big river running down the valley which had about 10,000 vertical feet of descent from the high Himalayas to the plains, and that you could build a string of 1000 megawatt power plants down the valley if you had the money (which Nepal does not), and realized there might be an ulterior motive.

Great idea! Lend money and build them ASAP togeather with a local grid and high tension lines to richer neighbours that can pay cash to repay the loan.

Tell me about it. I have more stories than I can mention. The last position we filled was through a temp agency. They sent us a worker who was on unemployment and we only offered 20 hr/wk to start. He proved to be punctual, intelligent and became well like by his co workers. When the job became full time permanent we offered it to him. His age 55.
My wife works at a silicon foundry. She can't get away from overtime (tons of it). It's not that her company isn't hiring. Her company offers full benefits with a generous vacation policy and an overall good working environment. With each batch of people they hire she is amazed how many are given walking papers within 60 days or just plain quit. The reasons are the usual tardiness, excessive days missed, refusal to do certain jobs etc. The last person they walked was a guy who had been out of work for 2 yrs. in the first 30 days on the job he missed work 8 days and was tardy (>1hr. 10 times) that left only 2days when he worked as expected. Add to the mix employees who are let go for doing drugs or having sex on the premises and it becomes a joke.Their HR is thinking seriously about closing off the hiring and the company is considering farming some of the work overseas where there is a more reliable labor force.

There is a definite problem with the US labor force in that the educational system does not prepare them for the type of jobs they are likely to encounter. Companies do not employ factory workers with the skills (or lack of them) that they used to require. The entry bar is higher.

Nowadays, workers have to be able to operate numerically controlled machines rather than turn screwdrivers, and this in turn requires that they be able to read technical manuals and do basic mathematics. There are an awful lot of young people who do not meet these qualifications. In fact, a lot of people graduate from high school without having learned anything useful at all, and their future prospects for employment are not good.

In addition, they need a good work ethic to enjoy continued employment, and the schools don't teach them to work hard, either. Nobody smacks them across the hand with a ruler when they don't do their homework because that would be considered child abuse, whereas in the olden days it was considered the right way to instill discipline in children. "Spare the rod and spoil the child", the saying went. Those days are long gone.