Diegetics

I think it is time to discuss Tinker's forum motto based on discussions in the fleabagger thread.

So the world ends and you're still here, whaddya do.

I don't have a manifesto, but here are some points to get the ball rolling.

1) The consensus seems to be envisioning two options, the status quo and Mad Max. I think this is wrong. The much more likely option is another Great Depression.

This is bad and good. Bad because that will be bad. But good in that you can study it and see what works, what doesn't.

My Dad lived through the depression a state over from here in smalltown, USA, and the single most valuable thing according to him was gardening. Gardening kept hunger at bay. Lots of people went hungry during the depression, they did not go to the woods and feast on the moss and whatnot, that did not happen. If you gardened you were going to make it. We can look into that more, but that's good for now.

So I'm gardening, a little late to the game, but my experience is that to get food independent it takes probably 3 years. There are so many things to deal with. Selecting foods you can actually eat all the time, establishing your plot, learning when to plant each vegetable, fertilizing/compost, plant rotation, irrigation (it is a big deal), dealing with disease and pests specific to your area, dealing with weather and seasonal climate issues specific to your area, processing food and long term storage. Just for starters. It will take you years if you start from scratch to learn all that and make it efficient. If you aren't ready when it hits you will be in trouble. Or if you believe in the moss theory, if you aren't fully proficient in it when the time comes it will be a painful transition.

2) The Survival community. There is much discussion about looters and whatnot, will there be money, what sorts of thing will be employable, etc.

All I can say is this. You need to be valuable, and you need to have a community. A commune if you will. Communism.

In my case for a number of reasons, I am more valuable alive than dead, and my resources produce more in my hands than in other hands. My main although not sole survival community is in actuality my church. I'm telling you right now half of my church is growing gardens. Outside of what is being taught in Sunday School, self reliance is the number one topic of conversation in our congregation. Everybody is talking about it. Ham radio, who is a nurse, who can do this or that, is anybody buying gold yet, etc. It's the number one conversation piece. Based on my Dad's oral history, our little group will be fine.

One should add the Jamestown pilgrims tried real communism and they almost died. When they started trading they flourished. The key piece of making a commune work is participation by choice. But even then everyone in our group speaks of trading with each other as the normal course of doing things, and charity for people falling behind or in a rough patch. So not really a commune, more of a trade assocatiation. With a strict membership board. Along these lines.

3) Crime. The concern appears to be that if you have too much you're going to get wiped out. I think there are real problems with that, but would be interested in hearing how people think they are going to game out that situation. If it involves just joining up in the biggest mob I think I'd rather follow the MG proscription and make sure I leave one final bullet.

The mob thing just ain't my style.

Plumbing doesn't work, what do I do?

I don't think it'll really break down the way people think so. It won't be status quo, but it won't be the end of global civilization either.

Out of necessity alternative currency structures will arise very rapidly. These will take many forms, like online commodities markets where the traded wealth is representative of some kind of commodity. Think Craigslist meets Etrade. It will take the shape of sophisticated trust networks, where a gift economy will work based upon trust. Like you don't need to give me a gift, you can give crashtech a gift, but because crashtech reports that you gave him a gift I will trust you more and think it's worthwhile to share my resources with you because you shared resources with someone in my circle.

The advent of 3D printers will completely alter our notion of global trade. The fact is, most of the things that we trade on the global market can be replaced by 3D printers. Machined parts are probably a huge proportion of international trade. If it becomes no longer feasible to get things from China, then we won't really need to.

The hardest hit industries will be the energy sector and all of those industries dependent upon the free flow of oil. The economy will stop being an oil based economy. A combination of a willingness to use electricity less and the rise of solar power will keep the lights on, but we won't drive as much. People will do less long travel, thus things like skype or gtalk will become far more important or I should say, an open-source version of the same. Online conferencing will take over a lot of the travel arrangements.

Companies like Google will move over to a system of online arbitrage to manage the distribution of resources. On a large scale, people will donate resources into a pool of resources in order to be able to put in requests to pull out of those resources. So matching need to provision will largely become a valuable industry.

We will all get used to having a larger number of currencies in our lives as private currencies will arise. This will lead to a constant and unstable boom/bust cycle as the Mr. Perfects of the world all get into local banking.

In the beginning the United States Government will in all likelihood become the socialist military state of everyone's fears. They will lock down all oil based resources and funnel the oil economy to the military, the rest of us will be left to ration what is left-over. We'll ride bikes a lot more than we do now.

A far higher proportion of the economy will be small farmers. This ultimately will be a good thing. Not all of us will have backyard gardens, but a lot of small farms will have room to hire more people since the economic collapse will completely alter people's standards.

Medical knowledge will be at a premium. This is one of the reasons I learned massage. Many of people's daily aches and pains can be cured by massage, so giving a couple hours worth of massage will be worth a couple of heads of romaine lettuce. My next foray into that kind of field will be taking a First Responder course, which I am contemplating in January. I should probably stop contemplating it and just do it. Being able to keep someone from bleeding to death will be of high value. Being able to teach people these skills will be of an even higher value. If everyone in the country were to learn these skills it would destroy their value as a trade, but then, it wouldn't matter because anyone you were near would be anatomically literate.

We'd all probably eat a whole lot healthier.

I don't particularly care how the economy sorts itself out. If you have an economy, there isn't a problem, and you don't need me.

My concern is unwitting interdependence and the psychological impacts that can fray those pathways to unrecognizability. The important thing in contention isn't the physical elements, it is the moral/ psychic aspect. Things can be objectively salvable and yet all parties may find it absolutely impossible to do so. Living in the thing makes the reason of it, more often than not, fly right out the window.

As such, I put a higher priority to preparing for a true break in lines of trust and support. Past a certain point, all bets are off and I believe there is a spoiled and death seeking element that will throw in the towel far too early over far too little, precisely because they grew up rich( globally speaking) and simply don't know how to suffer. This makes everything more fragile; it doesn't matter how well your community plans on converting to rough water purification methods if the idiots down at the trailer park, that probably didnt like you anyway, decide it's the end of everything and act accordingly.

I can take care of every need I and mine will have with what I carry on me when I walk out the door on a daily basis. We have had a guy working on family land for about four years now, doing all the experimenting and ways of producing with virtually no store-bought input. He already grows more than we use Next week I go out to set up a plan to quadruple plot size and talk about further diversification and probably expand on the chicken starts he's made, possibly getting rabbits. We're like that on a number of levels.

My primary concern in that circumstance is the neighbors- two trailer parks. If it gets ragged for even a little while, I'm going to have to either take care of them/ find something productive to do with them, or kill/ run them off. I fear the latter. There will be( already is) a regional security consensus of people that will not be starving( unapproved hunters will be prosecuted with a rope). We know they will have to be dealt with. Mostly depends on them.

If the civilized lot can keep it off the walls, then I'll be more than happy to be completely unnoticed by the turning of the world. But if they burn it down, I got a hose, a shovel and a bucket. Barring that, a flamethrower to backburn.

And then there's the preparation for if it gets Biblically bad.

I'm totally open to nuts and bolts. Just watch. But I was making sort of an opening statement. I am a security guy; if SHTF then I will immediately have physical responsibility in whole or part to 25+ people. If it goes back to tribes, we will one day build a monument to those we had to eat to make it through the hard years. Should it come to that. If zombies rise, I'll hunt down every last one of them and build the space where smart people live long enough to make a difference. Whatever it takes, baby; how bad do you want it? I'm not big on hope for humanity exactly, but I am big on loving my vices. Like staying alive.

And just to address something Capt Murphy mentioned, about Americans being influenced by movies. First, he is right. Second, there is wisdom in the quote made by Steve Martin's character from " Grand Canyon". All life's great themes have been dealt with in the movies. They were the literature of the 20th century.

As a minute defense of this line of reasoning, the zombie fad has gained popular recognition( again, I was around for the second and third generation as a kid). I am on record as reviling the douchebags that put zombie faces on their weapons and drive cars like the asshole wagon 4Runner I saw a few weeks back. Flat black,zombie hunter stickers, roof racks, firing points, the whole spoiled jackass shorebird routine, a man we locally say had more money than sense. We buy their practically unused high end stuff for half price when they go into model trains or baseball cards next year. Can't stand 'em.

But I digress. The point is that the zombie thing, as has been tirelessly schlepped about by every dolt writer for every yuppie magazine out there, is that this iteration of zombie fever is a reflection of our moment. It has become a path for us to share anxieties about fragility of sustainability, of fear for our continued first world, top dog status. It has become a more legitimized way for people afraid of the reality of these attendant issues to deal with them. It has opened up channels for independent minded, security conscious people to take stock of where they stand without the outrageous benefits we have enjoyed.

Now, fuck all that. When I was a kid I watched all the movies and could conceiveably have been imbrued by the taint of Capt Murphys charge, except for two things. One, the people that raised me when I was raised at all spent considerable periods of their lives risking same in shitholes all over the country and the world, for often dubious reasons. The table stories, as a result, were of a nature that precluded much fantasy about the face of man. Second, my own adult experiences have served to show me that life is indeed stranger than any fiction, and that should one but seek the opportunity, the proof of that can easily be borne out on your very flesh, or your tombstone, depending.

I'm not seeking. My problem is that my calculations are adding up too well, and I think it may be seeking instead of being sought. I am wrapping up phone based composition. In the morning when I have use of a PC, I will start throwing all the nuts and bolts at you that you can eat. Links are easier with a mouse.

On movies.

I may or may not have insight on this (I watch like 1 movie a year, my heyday of watching a movie a week was in the 1980's, so in some ways I am out of touch).

My Dad way back growing up said we watched too much TV and movies. This was a number of decades ago.

I don't have figures off hand but I think the amount of media consumed from that day to this has to have increased by a thousand percent or two.

So what is that cultural impact. People have been complaining about bread and circuses for some time, but with the new electronica of the last 15 years I think we have a generation or two on our hands who not only think they are in a movie but may be in danger of going insane without constant streaming media product. I think we're past a culture that lives in fantasy land to a culture that is developmentally disabled. A developmentally disable culture on the verge of Lord of the Flies. I think a lot of those people just would not make it.

There may be something to this Darwin thing.

When I was a kid growing up, there was a big red book in the house published in the late 1980's called 'Wars of the 20th Century', with photos of decaying bodies in WWI trenches and piles of Holocaust victims. It must have been a thousand pages. It's still on the bookshelf at my parents' house.

I used to thumb through it in horrified amazement, listen to my parents' recollections of their parents' stories, and that's what passed for entertainment in my household. Some movies, but we never went to the theater as a family, and no sports.

Some links. I have shamelessly stolen at will from survivalblog and reddit/r/survival, among other places. No apologies.

http://www.reddit.com/r/EcoEvents/

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/140/pg1/srtpages

http://www.whenshtf.com/forum.php

Oh, and your plumbing problem?

http://library.enlisted.info/field-manu ... 1/APPG.PDF

I found early on that military FMs, when you are completely clueless on this sort of thing, are a good place to start. The info will be thorough enough, easy to digest, and normally have pictures for those troops from Jersey. From there, you will at least learn enough to start asking good questions.

More on this later.

Everybody needs to see this



Probably nobody is a stranger to the series, but this makes good points.

Reports from Detroit say that people are already operating in a cashless economy there.

Oh, you bunch of drama queens, it 's not the end of you, or the world. It may be the end of the West, but even then I doubt it.
Global GDP growth is still set to be around 3% overall for the world this year, not bad and certainly not recession, but that is a mix of 6-10% in China, India etc. and sod all in the more devastated parts of the Eurozone and the US.

In the Great Depression the economies affected were the only ones that mattered; now the fastest growing part of global trade is between developing countries. The left should be pleased, as the world is becoming more equal; and the right, as China and India only took off after ditching stupid socialism. China and India have issues - the former needs to rebalance to consumption, the latter to inevstment - but they are tackling it, good article.

Of course there are ways to make money out of this and keep a job - get in an export oriented business ( as I am, and our firm has more than we can handle, but as a private company you cannot buy shares in it). The trade gaps are slowly closing, but it will need a full decade of depressed domestic consumption and return to consistent Western trade surpluses, as the Chinese one declines. Their costs are rising, and with depressed currencies Western manufacturing and tradeable services become competitive again. The problem is that so much capacity and skills have been lost in the past two decades.

Its going to be business as usual everywhere in the world, except that Western Europe and North America are going to get a helping of what everybody else deals with all the time. The boom is over, so its back to class war and the cycle of exploitation and reprisal.

The most independent living people I ever met were armed hippies.