Hillmarsh

It's actually scary that most of the world's potash comes from 4 countries and 3 of those are currently in hostilities with the USA.

I doubt we will ever see complete shortages even if there are embargoes because they will just sell potash to us via third parties but still... not an antifragile situation at all. And you have to wonder how much is left/how sustainable is the current production.

The piece is generally good, although I'd take issue with the statement that there's no historical precedent for decline such as we are about to see. The main difference is in the global scale and population numbers in civilization now as versus previous known collapses, e.g. the Roman Empire, the Lowland Mayans, the "Bronze Age Collapse" and so on. But in all those cases, very high population densities were achieved that pushed the limits of their carrying capacity as much as ours do now. And other trends not unlike our context, cultural decadence, mass migration, falling birth rates, etc all made their appearance as well.

Also the "life expectancy not exceeding thirty" claim is commonly repeated but is mistaken. The number was obtained because they did not omit infant mortality from the statistics, whether out of an intention to mislead or simple error I'm not sure, which was much higher in premodern times. Once that is accounted for, Europeans of the so-called "Dark Ages" lived to between their 40s-50s and occasionally 60s. It did represent a falloff of life span but not quite so drastic as is claimed here.

In America I see complacency continuing, because I've learned from experience that as long as an oil boom is in progress, you cannot get Americans to accept energy descent as a concept. It will take another Great American Oil Bust like in 2015-20 to wake them up a bit. Even then I don't know whether Americans can accept the reality of limits, because they have a natural optimism that is hard to pierce.

Observing American health care firsthand thanks to ill relatives, I can say that it still functions but it is probably a few years at most to collapse. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services budget is about 15% funded and getting worse each year. Wait times for specialty appointments are months, surgery a half-year at least (unless urgent/life-threatening), care impossible to access -- many people have to go to the ED just for diagnosis. Life expectancy down significantly in the last 10 years. We won't escape Canada's fate.

The homeless population increasing in a geometric ratio is something I have also seen in the USA. Luckily it has been a very mild winter or we would likely have large numbers of people freezing to death here as well.

I used to live in MN and there was a while there when the insect population had dropped critically low. Certain species like the native ladybirds appeared to disappear completely, replaced by the Eurasian invasive ones. And the monarch butterflies almost disappeared as well, but the practice of leaving prairie buffers on the edges of farms in the western part of the state seems to have helped their numbers recover. By the time I left, you would see monarchs in the summertime again. I still have grave concerns about biota in America though, as I suspect there will be major abuse of wild habitat as energy descent takes hold.

In the Upper Midwestern USA, we have had an unprecedented warm spell this winter, with almost no snow in December, and the mildest winter on record thus far. The only blip was a minor cold snap of below-zero wind chills for just over a week, and that just ended in the past couple of days. Now we are in a January thaw that looks to cause an entire melting off of the snow cover, which I don't recall ever happening before during January in my life. This pattern is the result of a combination of overall warming and a "Super El Nino" pattern in the Pacific this year.

That's fine as long as people can admit to themselves that energy throughput with renewables is going to be a fraction of what it was in the age of abundant fossil fuels. And the problem I see is that most people touting green energy are either unrealistic or mendacious about this. We still haven't got past the phase of people thinking they will keep their consumer and commuter friendly lifestyles in the coming decades.

The corporate price gouging and death by 1000 cuts fees have gotten out of control since the COVID era. Not just for Amazon either, though they are a very strong case in point. I am trying to do as little business as possible with these globocorps anymore.

It's not just nazis on substack. There were plenty of other people who joined it thanks to the willy-nilly censorship that was happening on the large platforms in the past few years. The problem is that it's hard to avoid some parasitic free-riders like the nazis if you want to have a genuine free speech platform, which none of the major platforms are any longer.

Personally I think it's a good trend that more people are blogging and not all of the money is getting funneled away from creators to platforms owned by billionaire sociopaths like Musk and Zuck.

Sorry to practice thread necromancy to respond, but what the internet is really good for at this point is aggregating the previous output of culture. Social media has gotten way past the point of "too much noise" but sites like archive dot org are gems, and there are a bunch of private curated libraries like that as well. So in other words, the internet is good for learning if you are a self-directed person. But that's about it, and so that's what I use it for at this point.

It's also an interesting question to ask what will happen to the web in a declining net energy world, over the next 1-2 decades. Probably a slower, text-only internet could be preserved well into the future. But the question is will it be? The corporate stewardship of the internet has been very poor.

I'm not surprised. An instance of this would be the monarch butterfly which was abundant when I was a child. Then there were years where no one saw them and they even were presumed extinct in our area. Finally in 2016 I saw them again in a different part of the same state I was living at the time, and slowly they returned. But the overall volume of insect life in general is down. I would guess a large part of it is owing to both destruction of habitat and excessive use of pesticides. Suburbanization in my region has accelerated this process.

I actually think that Android has gone downhill in a big way, but I still won't go to Apple's closed ecosystem, and I don't care what teenagers think.

Yes, that makes sense. There used to be this place called Tower Records in London, which I visited the one time I actually stayed in London (I'm from the USA). And this was, at the time, probably the biggest and best-stocked record store I had seen, so I bought a bunch of stuff. Hawkwind albums were among them. In those days there was an "old rock revival" ongoing and also that was the heyday of the first wave stoner rock/metal as well. Very interesting to reminisce on those days which seem like a lifetime ago.