Hristo's FI Journal

[Hristo Botev]

Thanks Alphaville. The Townsend guy seems interesting; I'll definitely check him out. For now, I'm 2 days in to the west coast IPA brew at this point and the beer seems to be fermenting well; a steady bubbling of CO2 and a healthy amount of foam. There's an inner cap for the air lock that I'd forgotten to put on initially, because I didn't realize what it was. But it's a pretty critical piece as without it the air lock is useless. I realized my mistake about 24 hours in and, after some googling around, discovered that I'm not the first person to make this mistake and that it's not really a big deal as at the beginning of the fermentation process there's much more CO2 going out than there is any real chance for air to get in. I'm debating buying a second carboy for the secondary fermentation, as opposed to just keeping the wort in the same fermentor for the whole process, so that I can go ahead and start a second 5 gallon brew this weekend. But perhaps I should wait to see how the first brew goes.

Anyway, if nothing else, as a non-STEM guy, this has been a fun chemistry-ish introduction for me (I barely, barely got a C in chemistry in high school; and my large redneck public school wasn't exactly a meritoriously challenging environment). E.g., I learned not only how to use a hydrometer, but how it works and what it's measuring; my science-y DW was very impressed as I was explaining to her gravity, and sugar concentration, and how to calculate ABV and what that calculation actually means. I also made sure to let my kids help out with the project and explain what was going on to them, as they are still at a point where they think dad's hobbies are interesting. Also, DS could end up being the coolest kid in high school if he understands how to brew beer! (Side story, I and some buddies attempted to brew beer in high school, first in someone's closet and second way back in the bayou accessible only by jon boat; neither attempt was successful.)

[Hristo Botev]

This collapsist rabbithole (John Michael Greer, etc.) is totally new to me, but it looks as if it might be fraught with land mines that are particularly difficult to identify when you can't rely on the NYT or NPR or whatever to ferret them out. For those of you who've already journeyed with Alice down this particular rabbit hole, I'd appreciate ideas/thoughts on both authors/books/blogs/sites (a) worth checking out and (b) worth avoiding.

[AxelHeyst]

JMG's white paper (?) on catabolic collapse: https://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/gr ... llapse.pdf
Pair this with Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies". The main takeaway of this book is that collapse is "normal", to understand some mechanisms for it, and that serious scholars work with it (not just nutjobs).
eta: to my mind, Tainter gives you the basic set of tools/orientation to understanding collapse that you can use to evaluate other works. If someone is saying something about collapse that seems "off" from your understanding of Tainter, that's a red flag. e.g. if someone insists that rapid and total collapse is imminent - that doesn't mesh well with Tainter, they might be a bit alarmist. (That said, we've never had to content with global climate system tipping points, so "past results are not indicative of future performance" and all that)

Dmitry Orlov's Five stages of collapse (some large grains of salt need to be added liberally here, but his perspective on the Soviet collapse is quite interesting. Perhaps it'd be familiar ground to you though.)

Overshoot, by William Catton
The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C Mann > a good hard look at the green revolution and its implications.
Daniel Quinn's books (Ishmael, story of B, etc). These lay out the mechanisms for how Quinn thinks civilization itself is fundamentally unsustainable. These are a big pill to swallow, I recommend gateway drugs/books first. Also... he's pretty rough on mainstream religion's culpability in the catastrophe of civilization, and has some interesting ideas about what the stories in Genesis "actually" are about, as a heads up. (Fascinating to me as a former protestant of the fundamentalist/biblical literalist variety).
Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner

Deep Adaptation (website/blog), by Jem Bendell
Dark Mountain (a series of volumes, Paul Kingsnorth was/is a main editor of the project). These are more exploring the emotional/grieving aspect of collapse, nothing in this project is about convincing anyone of anything.

I feel like Sapiens and Civilized to Death are relevant to this rabbit hole, but don't read them until you've spent some time with the "collapse is inevitable" material.

Books that to me balanced the potential doom and gloom of the above books:
Entropia, by Samuel Alexander
The Retro Future, JMG
Retrotopia, JMG


ETA as I think of them:
The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Kieth, --> "why veganism won't save the world" (hint: agriculture)
Rewild or Die, by Urban Scout (the voice is "angry but intelligent young man", which the author acknowledges in his preface to the second addition).
Can't believe I forgot to mention Derrick Jensen. Endgame might be the place to start with him (or his website).
James Lovelock (H/T Jacob)
James Howard Kunstler, particularly The Long Emergency and his World Made by Hand fiction series.
Surviving The Future (and the tome it's based on, Lean Logic) by David Fleming
Post Carbon Institute (particularly, track down stuff written by David Heinberg). https://www.postcarbon.org/the-big-picture/
Do the Math, blog by a physicist on why all the techno-fixes popular in the green media aren't going to Save Us. It's not active anymore, the correct way to read it is from the beginning. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
Limits to Growth, by Meadows et al.

[Hristo Botev]

Thanks AH!

Curious, does Wendell Berry factor into this discussion at all? I've read some of his stuff and look forward to reading much more, and although I've not seen anything collapse-y in what I've read of his, it certainly seems collapse-adjacent in some ways; at least his glorification of pre-industrial, agrarian life.

[AxelHeyst]

Wendell Berry is inexcusably absent from my reading. What little I know of him indicates you're on to something there with 'collapse-adjacent', but I need to fill that gap in my education.

[jacob]

Paul Kingsnorth was the editor on a book of Wendell Berry essays. It's generally a small world. I'd put WB in the same category as e.g. Arne Naess, Aldo Leopold, or even Mark Boyle. They don't talk about collapse as much as about what has been "lost to progress".

@AH - You forgot the latter works of James Lovelock---he pretty much think we're done for (same population predictions as Catton in his last book called Bottleneck). David Holmgren wrote a short book/website called Future Scenarios, which you can find online, which is also good.

[Hristo Botev]

So, @jacob and @AH, is the main takeaway that, for a number of reasons--peak oil perhaps being paramount, with things like declining populations and the negative side effects of globalization important as well--the world as we know it in the West is declining and will continue to do so at an expanding pace in the decades to come; so while it's not a bad idea to perhaps have some of your investments at play in the market, you shouldn't really expect to be able to live off your investments Trinity Study-style indefinitely, and you'd better invest some/a lot of that net worth into building practical, pre/post-industrial skills?

[jacob]

More like the world as we know it in the West is and will continue to stagnate on average (although within that average, some can still do well while others do badly) as we try to pay off our "technical debt" (for lack of a better word). This debt makes it harder and eventually impossible (see overshoot) to prepare for systemic shocks that will take out the weaker participants which eventually will be the majority of us.

COVID was a mild "training wheels" example of this but it illustrates how the process works. Note how some didn't notice much and others had much of their family wiped out while most took economic damage and many took health damage. Likewise some states/countries fared better than others (less "technical debt") while others have failed harder. In that sense, post-industrial skills are helpful for reasons that should be obvious. (I'm less convinced about pre-industrial skills. In that sense, I think JMG has it right. I think the return-to-the-land crowd has it wrong in that the future is not dialing things back to a simpler age. That simply won't work with 8B people. It will in many ways be more complex than ever as civilization tries to salvage the pieces.)

The way I see it is partly about how tightly one is coupled to the system and partially about how much the system depends on you (the distinction between essential vs nonessential workers is clear to everybody now). Trinity-wise, I think that expecting the economy to be 7x bigger in real terms at the end of this century is borderline insane. However, the financial markets have been detached from the real economy for at least a good 10 years. In that regard, investments might nominally serve to delineate the have-yachts from the have-nots until the point where the latter won't tolerate it anymore. This could take decades.

When in doubt, diversify and hedge.

Add: Timing is notoriously hard and could easily be off by 0-70 years. This is why I think ERE is the best approach.

[Hristo Botev]

@jacob: "technical debt"? Clearly I'm not an engineer or software developer, but am I to understand this concept (based on Wikipedia) as the inherent problem within democratic models that the easy solution rendering short term benefits will always be chosen over a more difficult solution that would render long term benefits? So, played out in the West, we'll continue to see some stagnating "progress" in the form of doing more and more work (re-work) to try and solve the same old problems, which problems are exacerbated by the addition of residual costs from our prior easy/short-term solutions?

The way I see it is partly about how tightly one is coupled to the system and partially about how much the system depends on you (the distinction between essential vs nonessential workers is clear to everybody now).

I really like this way of framing it; with these two concepts somewhat linked--in that, e.g., by de-coupling from industrial food supply I necessarily become a food producer, making me an "essential" worker. And for de-coupling, this could be simple things like deleting the maps app on my phone, forcing myself to have to actually plan my route before I get on my bike or in my car (necessarily meaning I'm going to be more deliberate about transportation generally).

Note how some didn't notice much and others had much of their family wiped out while most took economic damage and many took health damage. Likewise some states/countries fared better than others (less "technical debt") while others have failed harder.

This caused me to reflect on how, relatively speaking, my law firm has grown and succeeded during this pandemic, often at the expense of larger, "biglaw" firms. And this has all been due to the fact that we are small with a broad skill set that is still sufficiently specialized to be of value, but not so uber-specialized that we are incapable of being agile to meet the current needs of our clients. I know quite a few people who are on their second careers (and some doing quite well) thanks to the fact that the need for lawyers specializing in "capital markets" seemed to vanish over night in 2008. The same can be said for municipal bond specialists in the 1980s, I think. I know someone who just retired after a fulfilling career in public education, which she entered into only after her extremely lucrative municipal bonds legal practice vanished in the 1980s. As I look around at the lawyers whose civil practices have thrived for decades (sometimes more than 50 years, God help them!), the one characteristic they all seem to share is a surprisingly generalist skill set, with a broad (and somewhat shallow) base of knowledge as to a whole lot of different areas of the law. It's possible to make an absolute killing in a very short amount of time by becoming an expert in whatever is the new and hot legal specialty (not a bad time to be an expert in cannabis regulatory law, for example), but that can't sustain you for the long term. In part, that's what prompted me to leave biglaw (having the student debt paid off and sufficient F you money helped): I knew I was being used as a cog in the law firm pyramid scheme financial model, to line the pockets of the senior partners; I wasn't being groomed to take over firm leadership and client responsibilities some day. That's fine, of course, as they were compensating me at ridiculous levels. Also, the truth is that the legal landscape (as with the business landscape) is changing so rapidly that the senior partners wouldn't know how to groom young associates, because they don't know what to groom them for. But I knew that, if I wanted to actually have my own practice, it was on me to develop that practice; I wasn't going to become a trusted intellectual property attorney by billing 40-60 hours a week doing grunt-level e-discovery work on large Fortune100 v. Fortune100 lawsuits that, tangentially, involved intellectual property issues. And the people at the biglaw firm whose careers I not only admired but also wanted to emulate, to some degree, were really legacy folks whose generalist practices were bygones from another era; you weren't going to make partner as a generalist. I know that, in less than 3 years at my new firm, I've developed way, way more as a lawyer than I would have had I stayed in biglaw, and I've done so working half the time. This is because I'm not only touching multiple different areas of IP practice, but I'm also touching all sorts of non-IP areas; and it's this sort of broad knowledge base and skill set that allows one to see angles (many, many of them) that my biglaw colleagues can only see when they've got multiple specialists sitting in a room or on the phone together talking through the problem (at $600-$1,200/hour, each). No doubt if you are a Fortune 100 whose got an unlimited legal budget, the biglaw model makes more sense for figuring out solutions to truly novel issues that span multiple different specialties. But let's be honest, there really aren't that many "novel" legal issues out there; and that's certainly true for your typical small or medium-sized business. And that's true for the big corporations as well, it's just that those big corporations already have in-house counsel on salary to manage those complex but not novel issues.

Anyway, that's a long, windy screed really having more to do with me realizing that I should probably be focusing ERE principles, at least partly, to my career; as opposed to just thinking of how to use those principles to escape from my career. And that could mean figuring out alternative billing arrangements that do more to encourage efficiency--where doing something in 30 minutes that would normally take an hour would be rewarded, and not penalized.

[AxelHeyst]

Oh, pff, how could I forget: Limits to Growth, by Meadows et al.

Was reminded as I'm just catching up on JMG's last post where he revisits his Long Descent material. https://www.ecosophia.net/the-arc-of-our-future/
(In that post he doesn't treat the models (aka *not* predictions*) of the world3 model with the care and subtlety the authors would, who go to great pains in the book to point out they aren't predicting anything; rather, they're building a mathematical model to represent the world system at a certain level of fidelity, and running a variety of scenarios in order to better understand the inter-relational dynamics of the world system...)

[Hristo Botev]

Was reminded as I'm just catching up on JMG's last post where he revisits his Long Descent material. https://www.ecosophia.net/the-arc-of-our-future/

That graph is frightening.

[AxelHeyst]

That graph is frightening.

What his post leaves out, is the fact that the book has something like 10 scenarios graphed out, all running different sets of inputs and assumptions about the relationships (i.e. does society react slowly or quickly to rising pollution levels; how quickly does technological innovation lead to increased crop yields and dematerialization; etc). Some show more rapid descent, some less so, some with a lower resultant human welfare level at the end of century, some with higher. That said, the last version of the book was 2002, and I'm pretty sure we've already blown well past any hope of achieving their most optimistic scenarios.

But yes, on the whole, a read of that book isn't exactly a sleep aid. It *will* head off panic one might feel if they're inclined towards the collapse-as-a-cliff-we're-about-to-fall-off narrative - as JMG points out, the graphs taper off somewhat gradually.

[jacob]

Also see Randers 2052 book for a more "regionalized" prediction that came out in 2012. The biggest challenge in predicting adaptive systems is the timing. As humans become aware of impending problems, they take counter-actions that push the shift out in time. Humans tend to focus on fixing whatever particular shortcoming of the system AFTER it becomes critical. This makes it hard to predict what issue will be the critical one. Randers has the "shitshow" commencing (in the first world) around 2050-70. This is in line with the more hard-nosed climate scientists. Note that Randers is more optimistic about green tech than LTG and so doesn't see the same resource constraint. Ugo Bardi has some critique of this.

Note to HB ... keep in mind that this can be a pretty depressing rabbit hole to enter. Like people literally get depressed from this. You might also feel like you're being continually gaslighted as the signs are not obviously unequivocal. There won't be a general announcement of the commencement and initially impacts will be very unevenly distributed. Rather, it's something that will only be clear in retrospect.

[classical_Liberal]

Like people literally get depressed from this.

Raising hand as one of these people. @HB has a motivation to care about this more than me, he has kids he wants to protect. I only have "humanity" as a general notion and it still hit me pretty hard over a period of years. My only advice here is to remember to focus on what you can control, nothing else. Second, do not forget the present. Just because you realize the current order will eventually fall, doesn't mean it's worthless to put effort into helping yourself and others live in this order. While techno/green optimism is overblown, there is some hope in it, and should be supported when it's logical. Lastly, remember how adaptable humans (including your kids) really are. We tend to compare everything to unadaptable modern Americans, this is an anomaly in humans, we're tougher than we think. Just because things will be "harder" or "different" in the future doesn't mean worse lives. Many things about the conveniences cheap energy brings actually makes life worse, IMO.

[Hristo Botev]

@jacob and @CL, re depression and how to cope with the concept of civilizational decline, thank you both, very much.

One advantage of being Catholic is that I'm starting off with a pretty dim view of humanity--the concept of original sin (God gives us the Garden of Eve and we shit all over it and commit fraticide as soon as we start to expand as a species) is built right into the theology. Catholicism is inherently anti-progressive, at least to the extent that "progressive" means humans and society are perfectable, or that things will always improve. If anything, the next rabbithole I'll likely go down is getting a handle as to what the Catholic Church has had to say on collapsism, etc. in the past. No doubt St. Benedict will be a great place to start, as the person probably more responsible than anyone else for preserving what was worth preserving of Western Civilization as Rome was in the death throes of its own collapse.

Looking back at the last 4-5 years or so, I realize that DW and I have in fact been de-coupling ourselves, bit by bit, from the predominant modern, secular, consumerist society around us. As religious conservatives this has had a lot more to do with what we see as a deteriorating culture--e.g., Rod Dreher's Benedict Option was rather influential--than the need to ready ourselves and our children for a world in which we can't necessarily rely on 3% GDP growth or whatever. But whatever the reason, it's all about running for the hills (figuratively) to some extent. Dreher's book was about building a tight-nit community with folks whose core beliefs and values are the same as--or at least not diametrically opposed to--your own. I'll also note that another social conservative whose writings I follow, Ross Douthat, was writing about the exact same thing in his Decadent Society book; it's just that these guys are coming at the issue from a cultural/moral/religious lens, as opposed to an economic one. But they are essentially talking about the same thing--the evidence that we are on the decline is all around us, and here are a few things we can do to slow the decline. But as a Catholic steeped in detachment, none of this is really upsetting at any sort of fundamental level.

[Alphaville]

I only have "humanity" as a general notion and it still hit me pretty hard over a period of years.

the ape empire has been a poor steward of the planet. maybe it’s okay if the roaches take over the next century?

compassion is good, but too much compassion can make you sick. and a little gallows humor goes a long way.

from what i hear from people working in difficult environments, a dark sense of humor is what lets you keep going—otherwise you become overwhelmed and collapse. you need to get some distance from those emotions,

[Hristo Botev]

But as a Catholic steeped in detachment, none of this is really upsetting at any sort of fundamental level.

Actually, it's kind of comforting. DW and I are both growing tired of looking at the world around us and screaming, WTF?!?!? And peak oil etc. if nothing else provides you with a bit of an explanation as to why the wheels seem to just be coming off, a little more each day.

[classical_Liberal]

@alphaville
Yeah, I have my dark humor side. Not letting it slip from my mind into my typing finger tips is often a struggle. These days it's not wise to put something on the interweb that can be taken out of context.

@HB
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household. My mom and her new husband still are, so I certainly understand these thoughts of moral decline. I think the difference here is that previously, the type of decline you speak of was cyclical. @jacob wrote a great blog post about different types of personalities dominating different eras of civilizations. Maybe he'll pop in and link it.

Anyway, this decline is different in that there is very little chance to recover. After Rome fell, the resources to rebuild their roads and aqueducts were always there. Humans just needed to get their proverbial ducks in a row to get it done. The resources to rebuild what we have today just doesn't exist anymore. From a moral and ethical standpoint, this worries me that some of the greatest strides this latest incarnation of western civilization has made may go away for good. Off the top of my head, the elimination of human slavery and freedom to practice any religion seem like two that will be very vulnerable once we need human labor again and we need to organize/motivate that labor to meet communal survival goals.

[Alphaville]

@alphaville
Yeah, I have my dark humor side. Not letting it slip from my mind into my typing finger tips is often a struggle. These days it's not wise to put something on the interweb that can be taken out of context.

don’t worry, the interweb too will die in the end

[Hristo Botev]

I wanted to suggest a book for you, The Circle by Dave Eggers.

About halfway through this book and this is one of the best book recommendations I've ever received. It couldn't be more of a right book, right time for me. Thanks!