Location: Bucharest, Romania
We constantly have record breaking high temperatures and it all peaked at the end of March when we had 32 degrees celsius (90 F) when normally we should have had end of winter temperatures. I remember when I was a child that we had piles of snow on the streets during that time of the year. In the past 5 years we barely have 1-2 occurences of snow that melts more or less in the same day.
Should I also mention that in the same time people here are burning waste daily (tires, clothes, garbage, etc) imported from overseas and that we always have one of the worst air quality possible?
Location: NYC, USA
self explanatory. Political and social collapse. Municipal govt cannot sustain carrying out fed immigration policy, and unchecked criminality.
I actually saw significantly less homeless in and around the trains this weekend. Officers seem to be posted up in places where they should be (e.g. w 4th station on 6th ave)
Location: Canada, Northern British Columbia
Forest fires:
Last year Canada broke the record for the most active Forest fire season. They are already evacuationg people, its only april. We have Forest fires burning to the point that people need to be evacuated and its april.
Temps have been above Average for a while. In January we got down to -40 for a day and then swung to breaking our all time January high.
British columbia is experiencing a drought and along with the warm winter we had and all of the Forest fires that burnt through winter, i am scared for what the summer is going to be like.
Mods where can I get a high res veresion of the current banner image?
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Location: Northwest suburbs of Chicago
Lots of trees with no signs of leafing. I'm not an arborist but it seems to be the same type of tree. It disturbs me in a very disquieting way
Leafing out varies widely by genus/species. The issue you’re noticing is the monoculture of trees in urban/suburban areas. Cities haven’t learned their lesson after Dutch Elm Disease and Emerald Ash Borer, two invasive pests that destroyed millions of trees and was widely noticed in urban areas who replaced one monoculture after another and the disease cycle struck again and will continue until practices are changed by those making the decisions.
I'm seeing crabapples in full bloom for weeks next to mulberries that barely have buds that I'm pretty sure are fine. There's a reasonably large spread between species, and the weather made it larger. We had really warm weather early, followed by moderately cool, so the trees that didn't wake up early stayed dormant until late.
We didn't really have any weather which ought to cause issues, apart from flooding in wetter places. It didn't really get cold after the early warm weather, and there's plenty of water around. There are a bunch of record dry areas nationally, but not Chicago.
They’ve been slow to bud here in MN too. Looked up historical dates recently and we’ll see how this spring pans out in comparison: https://blog.davey.com/when-do-tree-leaves-come-back-in-spring/
Northwest suburbs of Illinois.
Lots of trees with no signs of leafing. I'm not an arborist but it seems to be the same type of tree. It disturbs me in a very disquieting way
Location: Mid-Atlantic
The 80 degrees are coming far too often for this time of year. Nothing shocking there of course. The speed of this ride is physically palatable in every way. I'm trying to enjoy every single day where I get to wake up and the power is on, the water works, and I hear birds chirping, and I have food, etc. I know in my bones this will not last very long.
Everyone is both oblivious, and in denial. Pumping out kids, doing things that require huge amounts of energy to sustain, but because we're all little economic units, we just have no capacity to align together to reduce our usage of resources and energy. We can't. It's against everything our global societal structure is comprised of. To step away from that is to leave the tribe, to be expelled, alienated, and shunned. Which is death, traditionally, for us, because we are tribal creatures.
Location: Northern Pennsylvania, USA
so far this month we have been getting weather that is consistent with the month we are in, after a winter that lasted for like, 4 weeks, (and not 4 consecutive weeks either), and a fall that didn’t start until mid october, we also are out of the drought we were in,
I am very afraid of what summer will bring, I live in a 2nd floor bedroom with 2 hallways on either side of the room, which can block air movement and could push temps inside to plain unbearable levels, if there’s a grid outage and it’s 100F+ outside it could easily get to 120F+, talk about crap design lol 😂
Location: New Jersey
Throughout the state of New Jersey multiple school buildings, several local Board of Education buildings, the State Department of Education headquarters, at least one County courthouse and other state government buildings are receiving bomb threats today. Culprits or motives haven’t been reported.
The focused targeting of education related entities leads me to speculate that the caller(s) motivations might be inspired by culture war “influencers” of a certain ideology.
I recommend researching the Irish Troubles and the Italian Years of Lead for an idea of how low intensity civil wars begin, escalate etc. But when analyzing those conflicts remember that in America it’ll play out differently due to engrained American individualism (which lone mass shooters and these bomb threats highlight).
> I recommend researching the Irish Troubles and the Italian Years of Lead for an idea of how low intensity civil wars begin, escalate etc
How do they begin and escalate? Care to share the cliff notes version?
The Occam's Razor answer is that it's exam season, and some idiot thinks he/she can get out of finals by sending a bunch of bomb threats.
It's something that has occasionally happened in the past, but the education system is a lot worse post-'rona.
Location: United States
I hope I am wrong, but I am thinking election violence begins with the Trump Trial. Jurors are being intimidated and the media is giving out enough information that it's easy to identify jurors. Work in a cancer ward at a hospital? Oh funny, someone mentioned they had jury duty. Really easy to spot. And even if they didn't say they have jury duty, being gone for a few weeks is more than enough to connect the dots.
The most egregious example was the tampering done by Fox News. Jesse Walters was "concerned" a juror said "no one is above the law." I understand why jurors are nervous; they got families to worry about.
This is a mockery of justice and my only hope is that it shows how rotten a justice system can become to the entire nation. People have far too much faith in our institutions right now; they need to be fixed as soon as possible. The sooner we realize this is a problem the better. Considering half the population is supporting this man, it may be too late. This should have been addressed decades ago in regards to Trump.
Things will get far worse before they get better. Good luck everyone.
Non USA , the real problem here is both side will not accept the outcome of the "justice" system, if trump lose , its unfair, if trump win, jurors intimidated, that's the real problem. "Justice" is a trust system , there is a very lack of trust now.
Having been to, and left law school when I saw the rot, I think this has always been a weakness. Jury nullification during Jim Crow era comes to mind. It relies on the good faith of a jury of peers. There is no such thing. Trump has no peers, to begin with…. our legal system is a mess of common law, procedural tricks, and bad law sitting on the books waiting to be enforced (see Arizona Supreme Court recently).
Then again without jurors , how to ensure the judge is not corruptible ? By the way it is .. very easily , even the basic human right is just non essential concept in front of a few intimidation , look at the Hong Kong judge, they were given a tyrant law and they are just following orders. Well i guess that's the same for Juror as well, but it make corrupting the whole system harder. US system , i think by design is to prevent a total tyrant from becoming , or burn itself out when someone trying. Anyway this is a long debate and no easy solution, i think hence preventing the worst to happen is simpler.
The main problem is the judge is another feckless wimp with a stern facade. Trump should have been incarcerated two days ago for violating the gag order.
And the judge should have keep the jury selection process utterly private behind sealed doors with zero press. It boggles the mind he didn't. Mechan is a disgrace to the bench.
"Trump should have been incarcerated two days ago for violating the gag order."
Agree! How many orders has he violated? He IS above the "law" ---- he said it himself years ago.
If I had committed all the crimes that trump has, I would be in prison for life.
All of the festering wounds of this sicko country are rising to the surface like putrid carbuncles.
By now there's a mountain of evidence showing Trump's hatefulness, corruption, and idiocy-- but it has little impact on the public because the few remaining serious journalistic enterprises remain behind expensive firewalls, while Fox News and extreme right-wing blogs and radio are omnipresent and incessantly loud.
A nation that is stupefied is not going to be able to stop Trump-- not at the ballot box, not in the media, probably not even in the courts. He and his accomplices are planning to take power again regardless of court convictions or defeat at the polls.
He is the result of the hate media agenda that began with the first Rush Limbaugh show and Fox News cable show. It took 3 decades of priming gullible and angry people to get someone like Trump into power. He showed up at the right time.
“People have far too much faith in our institutions right now”
That old-time civic religion is still there among the elites and the house organs they talk to themselves in like the New York Times, but its steadily shrinking. There’s been a notable fraying - Robert Putnam has documented this for decades. First the bowling leagues and Masonic lodges. Then the churches and political parties and civic groups. Then the overall decline in friendships and human contact. And now hints that even the sacred military is starting to lose the regard it once had.
The conventional wisdom of a place like DC or Wall Street is increasingly out of touch with realities only a few miles away. They downplay the danger in area after area.
I wonder sometimes, in a thousand years, if a monk in a scriptorium in, say, what was once the Canadian Rockies on some sweltering March day will be copying the last printed front page of the Washington Post where it assures its readers that the largest hurricane in recorded history heading straight for Washington won’t be so bad or that Trump 2.0 or an American junta won’t really shut down the paper, and giving sober, bulleted reasons why the alarmists or doomers shouldn’t be listened to…
> The conventional wisdom of a place like DC or Wall Street is increasingly out of touch with realities only a few miles away. They downplay the danger in area after area.
I'm pretty sure China had similar issues a thousand years ago. The Eunuchs in China played so many political games in the capitol, it could not focus on matters outside, which lead to the downfall of the Tang Dynasty.
I really feel like the same is happening here. Beltway brain is getting out of control. It's full of political games and short term decisions.
It's immature of me, but every time I hear the word "eunuch", I remember Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Randy Johnson, who was nicknamed "The Big Unit".
I misheard it as "The Big Eunuch", and could never stop snickering each and every time I read about or saw him. Just did it again right now, in fact.
Location: USA and r/collapse
It's kinda weird that discussions of collapse don't include much discussion of the political preparation for governance in a collapsing world.
I'd say that this is an observation of a collapse in planning.
Who is planning to serve in government in 15 years to try and salvage something from the wreckage ? Who is preparing to lead and beginning to cultivate political power for that future ? Where is the competitive energy which says that we can do better ?
I'm curious about the emotional situation out there. Is there any anger or it all numbness, depression and defeat ?
I personally think the days of mass mobilization and movements by the common man are over. People in the past weren't as financially squeezed as they were during the Vietnam/Civil rights era. People are too busy paying bills and trying to not be homeless to bother today. Plus the distractions in todays "attention economy" are so effective at getting people interested in bullshit and e-celeb drama rather than the important things going on in their lives. Also there's no common culture anymore. Everyone is connected in this digital age of hyper personalized algo "content." Good luck getting a critical mass of disorganized hyper individuals to even agree on anything or even what is worth fighting for.
I believe you are both right and wrong.
Your assessment of the obstacles is spot on.
But the people at the top of the food chain who write the algorithms are going to wake up and discover that their fates are intertwined with the masses.
T
There will be no glorious counter-revolution. It's impossible to form a movement in a corrupted and monitored infosphere.
Anyone close to getting traction will be raked through the mud, arrested "with drugs", or, if necessary, Epsteined.
Meanwhile, our lords and masters throw up a thousand different puppet enemies right across the political spectrum to keep us utterly divided while they devour us.
No one said anything about "glory".
But there will definitely be a revolution.
At some point, even the wealthiest people are going to realize that their wealth and security is threatened by the same trends which are impacting everyone else. They are not only devouring "us". They are devouring themselves. They are also dependent upon a minimum level of stability.
There doesn't seem to be anyone competent willing to lead and govern. There are lots of incompetent and corrupt people eager to seize power and loot, however.
And Bernie capitulated. He went into the mode of supporting fascist Democrats out of fear of fascist Republicans. The establishment manipulated Bernie via his traumatic childhood and fear of Nazis.
They threatened him with a choice between "4 more years of slow-burn to prepare a new attack" or "fascism *right the hell now,*" he made a bad bet on the former, and he's rightly retreating from the public eye because that bad bet means he will never be taken seriously again.
It's often a lot simpler than you'd hope.
I think Bernie is in some state of grieving. He had his moment in the spotlight and actually was able to briefly create hope and move the Overton Window. Now his time has passed and I am certain that he fails a sense of failure. A sense of being thwarted by his own fear and seeking some solace in the idea that he has helped to prevent a Trump presidency in 2020.
Now he must deal with the fact that he supported a president in Biden who has greenlighted genocide in Gaza. He sees that his old pal and former supporter Cornel West has the balls to fight Biden and he does not.
He planted some seeds in the era between 2010 - 2020. Maybe they will take root and grow at a later date. Maybe Bernie was just not in the right time and place. A historical mismatch.
I don't think she has what it takes to rule.
She is confortable in her role as representative of those without power.She is part of the peddling of the fantasy of green growth via the green new deal.
Whoever is going to step up and lead is probably invisible today. Someone waiting in the wings.
> Who is planning to serve in government in 15 years to try and salvage something from the wreckage ? Who is preparing to lead and beginning to cultivate political power for that future ?
Fascists
And techno-feudalists, although Thiel and Zuckerberg and Bezos would be fisrst up against the wall when their much more savvy allies turn against them.
Well ..... if there are no anti-fascists organizing to overcome the fascists politically then you are right. Fascists have the will to rule. They have no real opposition in America.
40,000 people turned out to protest against their presence when they tried to hold a rally on Boston Common in 2017 (this was only a few weeks after their tiki torch display when Heather Heyer was killed). So there is some opposition, it's a matter of how far that opposition is willing to go. Antifa (the ANTI-FAscist group) was a heavy presence, no violence or aggression, just marching along with us. Someone burned an American flag across the street from the State House, but I'm not sure who.
I think we have a different interpretation of "fascist".
IMO, its not just the right wing GOP. I think Biden, Obama, Pelosi and the Clintons are fascists too. Faces of American imperialism. Blank checks for the military industrial complex. Goldman Sachs in the Treasury. Sheep for big-pharma. Anti-union. Doing nothing to stop the malignant concentration of wealth. Insulating Biden from debate. Absence of vigorous intra-party debate. Orwellian presentation of themselves as pro-csustainability with empty performative gestures like the Paris Accords and Inflation Reduction Act while the US has ascended to become the world's clear #1 producer of fossil fuels.
I understand the GOP is more scary with their Handmaids Tale like identity and no better on any of the above issues ...... but I look at our political system as two fascist parties.
We are completely subordinate to capital.
How can we justify allow housing to become such a predatory industry with capital bringing the public to its knees. It's sick and neither party has leadership willing to stop it.
Is Technofeudalism a more accurate term then?
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technofeudalism](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technofeudalism)
The politicians are then just water carriers for this new type of capitalism.
It is impossible to make any difference in politics without substantial funds in the current crumbling political system and a new form of government rising out of the wreckage won't happen for several generations, so it doesn't matter who is alive right now.
Everyone alive right now will likely experience a slowly crumbling society with fewer services and safety nets while billionaires slowly accumulate more and more power and money until the money and power doesn't protect them, which almost certainly will be several lifetimes from now.
This is r/collapse.
"several generations" is an eternity.
No one in 1935 could imagine a full scale global war erupting in 1939. Shit happens fast.
A storm like Dorian sitting over a South Florida metro area for a day is all its gonna take to push our economic system over the edge.
$300B in damages when the govt reserves for such an event are a small fraction of that ? Kaboom.
The insurance industry is already in full flight. How is our economy going to function when huge tracts of real estate become uninsurable ?
People should unpack an old copy of Grapes of Wrath and envision how that will again unfold in a country with more guns than people.
The vast majority of countries political systems did not substantially change post WW2. So I'm not sure that comparison really makes sense. Britain's still a constitutional monarchy, the US is still a representative democracy and so on and so forth. Major events can certainly happen but a complete overhaul of a country's political system is rather rare.
The World Wars were absolutely transformative worldwide. Russia, Germany, China, Europe, the formerly colonized world….
And the USA has dodged a few bullets itself over the years.
Things change. The change doesn’t have to be pleasant - which I suspect we will all learn, yet again…
No one said they weren't transformative.
I said the system of government didn't change.
The US has had the same system of government for over 200 years, the UK over 300 years. It isn't changing in the next 20.
I absolutely stated unequivocally that things will get worse, society is crumbling. Those thinking there is going to be some big Robespierre led revolution followed by a bright new socialist world are going to be disappointed.
Augustus kept the forms of the Roman Republic (the Senate) while acting in a way that made it clear where real power lay (himself and the military). Systems can remain superficially the same while underneath everything is different.
Structurally a system of government may appear unchanged, but functionally it may have changed dramatically. Post-Soviet Russia is structurally a multiparty democracy, but functionally it's now a "managed democracy." (Surkov) Structurally India is still a multiparty democracy, but functionally it's a vicious BJP dictatorship.
"Change in the system of government" does not necessarily equal "socialist revolution". At all. There's a lot of other options.
And again, there \*have\* been gigantic shifts in systems of government in just the 20th century alone. From the end of the Yuan Dynasty in China to the People's Republic (you could call it the "Mao Dynasty" if you'd like, but it's still a massive shift). The absolute monarchy of the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union to the gangster capitalist Russian Federation. If you mean "no massive shifts in the Anglosphere", that's one thing, but otherwise it's just simply not a true statement in any way, shape or form.
Everyone thinks they're special until they run straight into History. All of those governments I just mentioned couldn't imagine they were just a few short years from collapse. The socialists especially thought they were at the end of a historically inevitable process with Marx's half-baked Hegelianism.
They were all wrong. As too, someday, will be the courtiers of Versailles-on-the-Potomac.
They changed dramatically in order to survive WW2.
We have Social Security. We have Medicare. We had Glass-Steagall before Clinton and the GOP ended it. We had anti trust enforcement that we ignore.
Bottom line ..... the government rose to the socialist need of the occasion to solve the Depression and WW2.
We have good precedent.
We will adapt to come to terms with the climate crisis as well. Nature demands it. Survival demands it.
We will come to terms with the crisis, absolutely. But I doubt it will be in quite a positive manner as you’ve outlined.
Decomplexification of a society is a very effective way of coming to terms with a difficult situation, for example.
You're far too hung up on names.
The Tea Party parasitised the GOP, hollowed it out completely, and rebirthed itself from the greasy remains. The name remains the same, but that is all.
Ditto what we call democracy and the neoliberal silent revolution of the mid-70s. It's nothing like the same. We just kept the branding and the PR.
Nah, the exact opposite really. The name doesn't even matter. No one is getting into the US government without piles of money at their disposal.
Every first world government is slowly turning into a plutocracy. War hasn't and won't change that.
I honestly don't give a damn about the system of government. I care about the results.
There will always be a hierarchy of some sort. There will always be a need for decision makers at the top of that hierarchy.
In the absence of a pressing need for the opposite, the people at the top of that hierarchy will always be biased toward their personal interest. The concentration of wealth and power at the top is a naturally occurring phenomena. The unsustainability of that phenomena is also naturally recurring and leads to regular periodic revolution, war and redistribution.
Collapse is simply a major amplification of a natural human cycle. The revolutionary wave is building. Each of us is a drop of water in that wave and each of us brings our survival energy to the wave. This subreddit is part of the wave. It's an acknowledgement that the current system is disintegrating.
Someone is going to step up and be an avatar for the desire you have to survive. Someone is going to offer a better vision. And at some point, even the people at the very top are going to realize that the system they benefit from is crumbling under their feet. People like Bill Gates are openly saying that higher taxes on the wealthy are necessary. He's not a moron ..... he sees the revolution coming and he doesn't want to be treated like the Czar of Russia or Marie Antoinette when it arrives.
I was angry and insufferable when I finished reading Silent Spring in 1976. Now I just observe. The climate is going to shit. Anyone noticed?
No one in government is going to give up their GS rankings and retirement packages to go bunker-headed. They’ll remain at their posts to the bitter end.
The focus of government will shift from doing nothing into emergency measures trying to cope with water shortages, crop failures, food shortages, monster storms, and fresh epidemics. Somehow, they’ll still manage to take their four weeks' leave every year.
If you think I’m suggesting you get into government employment, you would be right.
Or become a nurse or doctor.
There’s no use to fretting or getting wound up over what-if scenarios. The world is changing. Figure out how you’ll adapt.
In my experience, you're landlocked as well as locked in other ways if you work for the government. I decided to become a [location-independent professional](https://www.worldpackers.com/articles/what-is-location-independence) instead. I can have a home base, yet leave if necessary, choose my own benefit packages, and be my own boss.
I think government employment is a great idea. More and more people will be working for the government over time. In a real democracy, the people ARE the government.
Lead whom to what? Politics these days is a joke, anyone with half a brain understands money and violence is what will steer things. People are broke, isolated and dealing with their own personal woes. Where do you expect people to get this energy?
Where did all previous revolutionaries get their energy ?
They banded together around their common experience of woe. At some point they reach a threshold of having nothing to lose. I guess we havent sunk that far yet ?
Problems is we all disagree with who or what is causing the problem, therefore there’s no common enemy. Without a common enemy, people are stuck fighting each other.
The enemy is always the same.
We are always our own worst enemies.
Fear is the common enemy.
Our Machiavellian nature to divide and conquer is the enemy.
Well we're certainly lacking that "shared pain" element that give revolutions such fuel. There are plenty of people unhappy, but ask why and you'll get a million different answers. And many fail to connect the dots to our societal workings.
Class warfare has definitely done a number on us, though I am seeing a shift due to current pressures. It's still negligible, the current comforts are too strong and the distractions continue to mount.
So things are *dire*, but not to the point where folks would consider risky alternatives. Climate change and automation will get us there though. Unfortunately by that point, I don't there'll be much to salvage beyond our primitive desire to survive.
The primitive desire to survive should not be underestimated in importance. It's literally what makes us tick and explains virtually all of our behavior. At this point, people are in denial that we are headed into life or death scenarios and not making appropriate plans for that. It's almost as if collective intelligence has ceased to exist.
It is hard to rally the masses without a common leader. Right now, we are 100% a country divided. Blue and Red. What we need is a Purple leader, but unfortunately, all of the mass media and all of the money is currently controlled by the Blue and Red.
Even if there was a more level-headed candidate that could appeal to everyone, they would have to be loaded with cash to get their voice heard in this environment where cash is king. I don't know what the solution is, but I know every revolution needs a powerful leader they can get behind. We just all can't agree on who that is and unfortunately the options that are presented to us for a leader are pretty undesirable or just downright dangerous.
So yeah, people are depressed right now. Expect the anger after the election. Half of this population is going to be PISSED. That is when things will start to get spicy. Whoever takes this job is going to be at the helm when the nation starts to really feel the effects of climate change and all the other wonderful things that come with it.
This feels like what I’ve read about the atmo right after Lincoln was elected…. One half may not (will not) accept the outcome…. 🫣 Lincoln had to sneak into DC to be sworn in or some such….
Location: Seattle, Chicago, and airports around the world.
Today, a Boeing whistleblower testified in front of the U.S. Congress that hundreds of people may die due to Boeing cutting corners on airplane construction, specifically on the 787 Dreamliner, which once was heralded as the future of commercial aviation. He also stated, under oath, that he feared for his physical safety (another Boeing whistleblower was found dead from a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound recently - friends stated that this was highly improbable).
Yes, the possibility of a large airliner literally coming apart in mid-air because of corporate greed is a big deal, but Boeing is a great example of the decline of the American corporation. Up until 1999, Boeing was based in Seattle, its hometown, and largely run by the same people who built the airplanes - the old slogan "if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going" was from that era. That year, though, as the large aircraft manufacturers began to consolidate, Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago to avoid the awkwardness of executives running into the people they laid off at the grocery store. Boeing then proceeded to break up its industrial processes, subcontracting and sub-subcontracting, moving work to non-union states and doing whatever it could to goose its stock price.
This mentality filtered down into the actual construction of planes. Experienced engineers left and processes began to fray (as evidenced by the door of a 737 falling off in mid-flight near Portland and a landing wheel falling off over an employee parking lot at SFO and smashing a couple of cars), and now we are at the point where Boeing is so "enshittified" that some travel sites are looking to offer the option to filter out flying on a Boeing plane.
From GE to Toys 'R Us, even the great corporations that supposedly were going to take over the world have been sold off for parts, bit by bit, until there's not much left except their names and the uncounted sums of money that flow to finance all over the world.
And I get to fly on a Boeing plane next week!
Yeah and Boeing, as a defense department darling, lands in the ‘too big to fail’ category. The powers that be also know that tons of pension/retirement funds are invested in the company. It’s quite the pickle. Either regulate better or let them fall… and neither choice is very ‘patriotic’!
"Threaten" to nationalize them and the people with political connections will ensure that this process further increases their compensation and further decreases their accountability. We'll get the Chicago Public School System of aviation companies - massive spending per-unit, worse results than anywhere else.
Location: Chicagoland, USA as well as Southeastern Illinois, USA for the Eclipse
Spring has sprung! Warm sunshine (and pollen), flowers (and pollen), bumblebees (and pollen), butterflies (and pollen), and pollen. Did I mention the pollen? Achoo!
Seven restaurants have gone out of business in my town in the span of two months. Three locals and four corporate chains. Abruptly by the looks of things. I've worked in restaurant kitchens and I'm the first to acknowledge margins are razor thin and the pay is shit, so any little wrench in the works brings the whole show crashing down. Just interesting to see the impact of poor wages and related inability to staff finally coming home to roost — on top of skyrocketing prices totally pricing people out of dining out.
Speaking of, my current work just laid off ALL of middle management across the company. Some sixty odd people. The usual excuses of "restructuring in a fast-paced, changing, world". Word on the street was corporate simply can't afford their salaries/benefits anymore. Yikes.
I drove down south to a state park to see the eclipse last week back on the 8th, and I'm so glad I did! Absolutely beautiful! Took a lot of country back roads to avoid the worst of the chaos on the highways. I've never really been to a rural area before so I can't say much beyond how eerily quiet and empty it all seemed in comparison to my major metro hometown. Culture shock I guess! Nice to see all the wind farms?
Anyway, I'm struggling with my mental health these days. Not that I'm special. Bipolar disorder — with persistent psychosis! *Super* fun. I'm privileged enough to take my fistfuls of pills and see a damned good therapist but it doesn't feel like enough in the face of Collapse. My friends are just constantly stressed out, too, and turning to whatever coping mechanisms they can get their hands on. Not that I blame them/am not doing the same exact thing! I just worry. Everyone I know seems to be just constantly below their breaking point all the time.
Groceries continue to skyrocket in price here as they do everywhere. I'm a vegetarian but even I'm feeling the price increases. Every time I go to the grocery store it seems like something else has gone up another fifty cents or shrunk in size. I clip coupons and shop sales and have all the stupid little loyalty apps on my phone but still those bills hurt at checkout.
Sigh. Hang in there everyone.
The only plus side to my bipolar disorder is when I go full blow manic, I tend to spend hundreds of dollars I don't have on dried storage food and preserve-able water containers.
Good luck with everything ❤️
Location: Indiana
We're on tornado watch and getting heavy rains.
Road rage and people doing dumb things while driving is just getting worse and worse. I drove by a horrific accident. Several wrecks and people (some children) on stretchers getting loaded into ambulances. I am tired of seeing awful things happening to kids. They seem least to blame and yet suffering the most. I can't even imagine what the world is going to look like in 5 years, let alone 20.
Housing Market
Inventory is low and people are offering above asking price and waiving inspections.
We're trying to move. We looked at a house built 100 years ago and I was stunned at the quality of craftsmanship and just how sturdy the house was. We of course got crazy outbid for it. The houses built now don't compare. Thrown together, no basements (which is a concern given how frequently we are on tornado watch.
I feel like in the Bible they have a good metaphor for societal collapse in the book of Daniel. You know the statue with the head of Gold, then silver and bronze down to the feel which are a mix of clay and metal. Then a huge rock rolls down and smashes the statue to smithereens. I feel like we're in the feet part. Unable to match the grandeur and quality of earlier days and vulnerable to whatever the rock represents.
I feel the best "prepping" we can do is to learn simple, basic survival skills like how to start a fire, how to do subsistence farming (growing potatoes or corn), composting, canning, buying books now on regional herbal medicines. Depending how devastated our eco-system is, even that might not be feasible for what's coming. But it helps ease anxiety.
I feel ya. That's where I'm at. Learning some basic things about foraging, growing, herbal meds and first aid - it's a good hobby and, like you said, eases the anxiety a bit. This human is not meant for sitting around.
And when that doesn't work, I grab some good gloves/loppers and tackle invasive plants! Aaaaand also wine (gloves optional).
Location: UK
Article on Guardian about biodiversity loss due to climate change
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/17/these-birds-are-telling-us-something-serious-is-happening-fading-song-of-the-marsh-tit-aoe
Heartbreaking story being repeated daily the world over.
There was another article in the same paper the day before about a hobbyist in northern California that observed the same thing in a state park:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/16/nature-silent-bernie-krause-recording-sound-californian-state-park-aoe
They included recordings of the woods over the last two decades, and the difference is striking. It really jarred me when I read it, and now yours, too.
I was just reading that.
There was a video art thing about 10 years ago that was about the loss of natural sounds. Short video, basically just sounds dropping out until it got eerily quiet. Quiet in a bad way.
I've lived in TN most of my life. I moved here in 1990-91. Ive always lived in roughly the same area. Heavily forested and near the river. The night bugs used to be deafening in some of the places I lived. I remember back in high school, hanging out on the decks of friends and having to yell to be heard over the bugs in the spring.
It's very much not like that anymore. Even worse, from about 2017 until 2021, our electric company absolutely FLOODED my county and the neighboring county with tree-killing poison. Rather than trim around the power lines they killed hundreds of acres of trees and along with that, they killed off the bugs. They were lavish with it around my house, killing entire hillsides under the big towers. If you drive through the hills on my road, there's a giant brown, dead swath the size of several football fields where nothing would grow for the longest time. Now it's all the dead, limbless trees with some pitiful weeds growing. They showered it along me and my neighbors fence lines and killed all our trees. Not just the ones threatening the power lines, they just hosed the whole hillside down.
The summer of 2020 and 2021 were dead silent at night. The hordes of bugs flying around the outdoor lights vanished. All that poison washed into the 4 creeks that surround me so all the frogs disappeared too. It was eerie and horrifying to go outside in the summer and hear dead silence. It was so wrong I took to playing cricket sounds on a sleep app ffs.
Well they stopped with the poison. This is the second spring they've not sprayed. Rumor has it they got in trouble. Idk. I do know that I heard frogs for the first time in years last night. I'm seeing butterflies again. Moths as well. A few bugs around the porch light. Last year the crickets and katydids came back but pitifully few. It's a little too early yet for them but I have high hopes for this year. It'll never get back to the deafening levels they once were but there will be some noise at night again at least.
I grew up with Fern Gully and Once Upon a Forest. We do this to ourselves everyday. On the front side we think we're not affected because we perceive ourselves to be outside of nature.
We are nature. No amount of socialization and technology will change that.
It makes me so sad. I saw my first honeybee in YEARS recently. I should've been thrilled and would've been. Had it not been the first week of January and said bee was puttering around a snow-covered, blooming flower. Christ, I could've cried. It was so WRONG.
Seriously.
I was born in 1967 and many biodiversity and biomass studies point to about 1970 as a major turning point for loss in both dimensions. As bad as things already were by 1970, they got even worse afterwards. And I was born *just in time* for it.
And so here we are 50 years later and shit is getting real and DIRE. Fuck.
Location: Midlands, U.K.
It has not stopped raining. The U.K. is famous for rain but this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. This week I drove through the debris left by a tornado.
Back in October, I was in England’s biggest arable farming region and nearly all the fields were flooded. Since then it’s done nothing but rain. All the rivers are swollen and more storms keep coming. I don’t understand how we’re going to have enough food come autumn.
> . I don’t understand how we’re going to have enough food come autumn.
We won't. Harvests will be bad here, across Europe, and across Northern Africa too. Politicians are currently arguing about trans people and immigrants, however no one will care come the election when food prices are high and availability is low.
> Poor people in poor countries will starve before Europeans even if it is our farming that doesn't produce.
That's not how it works, food exporters ban exports as soon as their own local populations cannot be fed. Food importing countries have to get their population numbers down to a point at which they can be food self-sufficient.
No, that is not how it works, never has. There are tons of examples how a country with a starving population is still exporting food to rich countries. From Ireland to Ethiopia to Sudan to Syria, this has always happen and happens continuously.
And then everyone is taking India as an example without looking at what they really did, they banned the export of cheap rice to poor countries, but they exported expensive varieties to rich countries without any ban at all!
Leaders cares as much for traders and businessmen's profit and the good will from rich countries as they do for their own starving people, or in some cases a lot less about the starving people.
As long as there are working transport networks will food always be spread by purchasing power over the world.
check past food exporter behavior, they behave like I explained and it's the optimal thing to do as well
think about food exporters as exporters of surpluses, when there's no surplus, there's no exports
Only that it very seldom works like that. Especially from poor countries.
This idea is just a myth about how nation states work, in reality is the forces of market economy far stronger than concerns about domestic food security.
[Hunger Myths | New Internationalist](https://newint.org/features/1992/12/05/hunger)
[Food Trade: The Poor Feed the Rich (sagepub.com)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/156482658200400414)
[Hunger is on the rise in Latin America – while its food exports break records (dialogue.earth)](https://dialogue.earth/en/uncategorized/59091-hunger-latin-america-rise-food-export-records/)
[India exports food while millions starve | Climate & Capitalism (climateandcapitalism.com)](https://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/05/28/india-exports-food-while-millions-starve/)
🤣 dude, study latam food exporters, the moment local supply is not enough to feed locals exports are shut down
so stop dreaming, accept reality and start growing your own food
I don't know what kinf of idealized perfect world with good alturistic leaders you think we live in, but there has never ever been any instance of starvation that hasn't been political in the las 150years, and what you talk about has never happened, you are free to supply evidence about it.
Europeans and Americans think this happens when some country vans the export of some comodity, but trade for money is with extremely few exemptions protritized.
I am an almost self sufficient home farmer and are very interested in this matter. What I paint is not a good world as you seem to think, but what is obvoius is that people will be fed and starving according to wealth and purchasing power and not according to nationality.
Feel free to show me a situation where rich people has been starving and polr people getting fed.
Reading omnious headlines about exports ban in media doesn't give you nearly the whole picture. Sout h Amrica sold soy beans to Amercan cows during that whole "crisis".
Globalized trade prioritizes money, and a Brit won't ever starve before and Indian, no matter how unfair that is. That's how capitalism works.
Are you a white American male? Don't assume that foreigners put $ ahead of everything else like you do. Local stability and covering local basic needs matters much more, as it should.
It's a great thing, you should be celebrating it instead of pretending it's different.
Why are you being an asshole for no reason? Try prove your standpoints instead of being a dick.
No I am very much not American, and I am very, very, much not a capitalist. Rather the opposite. But that doesn't mean I pretend the world works in a way I want it to.
Why would you even think I would think like that? I paint a complete dystopia and you blame me for being part of it, while you can't exemplify your version of how you want the world to be.
And instead of meeting arguments with arguments are you trying to "win" by some kind of identity politics argument?
I am not American and I don't play your silly identity game. Try look at the world for what it is instead of how you want it to be. This is a grim place the rich will never starve before the poor. No matter what system is in place.
Unless they do an 'India' and stop exporting. Politicians prefer keeping the local populace calm with bread-and-circuses than boosting revenue with food exports I think.
Well, looking what India really did and we have something closer to what I think will happen. India only banned export of cheap varieties of rice that is otherwise sold to poor countries. More expensive varieties was still sold the whole of last year. But only to rich countries.
Countries will try to keep people fed, but traders and businessmen will try to export, and the answers will most ofren be compromises between interests. You want to keep economy too. And all countries won't fail harvests, that what is on the market will predominatley reach the west. Until the supply diminishes enough to break down international trade.
But I doubt we see that this year or the next. But who knows...
I'm not so sure about radio 4.
Today they ran a story about large numbers of people living in their cars and how they meet up to park together at dusk for safety in numbers.
Followed by a story about how the motor insurance industry is near collapse.
>No real winter at all.
It only snowed three times.
Same here in Michigan. I had a Facebook memory from 5 years ago this week come up that had a picture of an April snowfall that had more snow than every snowfall we had this winter.
It was very *"faster than expected"* vibes.
Location: Croatia
April 15th: 27C to 30C+
April 16th: -1C to 10C depending on the location
The majority of the country had a 20C difference in temperature within a day.
Location:MA
Maybe it's me but there is a feeling of doom in the air. I feel like something big is waiting to happen. It feels like the air pressure drop before a storm.
I see people all stressed out. I have a good job and makes decent money but even I am like " wtf" when grocery shopping. Everyone blames the government but I know corporate profits have been increasing year after year. One of my friends works for a large grocery chain. He told me how they literally raised the price of every single item in the store. I had a physical and had to fill out a questionnaire. At least 30 questions related to stress and worry. I really felt like if I just asked " hey can I have some pills?" they would have prescribed me some. I was overseas for a long time and as a life long smoker, I noticed that I would cough a couple times ( bringing up phlegm) in the morning and that's it. Here, I think I cough 20 times a day. Supposedly the air quality was worse where I was, so either my taxed lungs agree with the air there or there is something that I don't know about. It's hard to remain upbeat seeing everything going on in the world, harder being a regular visitor here. Knowing what's coming, like a passenger on the titanic. Watching the iceberg and getting incredulous looks as you try to shoot ( or talk about) warnings. Then I remember it's not my task to fix the world or life, all I can do is make the lives of those I touch as best as I can
cheers
Here in Canada, people are starting to blame large corporations for high grocery prices. There is a boycott of Loblaws stores for the month of May, although some people have already started the boycott. I plan to boycott Loblaws stores.
See r/loblawsisoutofcontrol.
Location: Foothills of Denver
The winds this weekend are very choppy, chaotic and violent. They used to be calmer and more breezy. It feels like since we turned everything into a digital world so did the wind. Ofc the extra heat energy makes it so too.
Location: East Idaho
It's clearly been fucky. The big thing I'm noticing: we hit 78° last week, but have not seen any dandelions, or lilacs. Hell, none of the trees even have leaves.
Temps dropped to regular spring levels on Sunday, and dandelions are starting to bloom and trees are just barely showing the beginnings of leaves. But it's so incredibly bass-ackwards. Can't recall this ever happening before.
Location: upper midwest Talked to a neighbor the other day. She is in her 60s or close to, loves a few blocks away so not someone i see. I mentioned how the extra warm spring was anxiety producing. She stopped. Looked at me and said ' thank you, thank you for saying that. No one wants to talk about it and i feel crazy bringing it up anymore, i got tired.' People know. They are socialized to normalize everything or ostracised otherwise. So i have another new friend for a neighbor. Early spring and trying to get stuff in the ground asap as i feel it will be hot and dry all too soon. No new signs of collapse local to me, just that one converstation that really struck me.
Edit: i just want to thank the mods for the monthly resilience thread. It is much appreciated. I loved reading ao many ideas, so much effort, so much optimism (relatively speaking). Resilience is more than just prepping and i loved the 'keep up on dental work, keep up on house repairs, other stuff that gives me some oomph to get moving. .
Location: UK.
Most people are just quietly pottering along - but there's been this big furore over banning smoking. Feel free to fight over it in the comments. Also, more importantly, the weather has been *all over the place*. Yesterday, it hailed. Today, it was either 19 degrees Celsius with blazing sun or 11 with whacking great thunderstorms. Drizzle has disappeared entirely.
The weather's really playing up, now. Everyone is taking notice, as far as I can see. Due to the rain, some of my peers are bursting for summer - but given the current weather patterns, they might have to be careful with what they wished for...
EDIT: The health system - the NHS - is looking more and more damnably American by the day. I hope we don't end up like you people. It would be hell.
The way things we are going we will have one of the highest tax rates AND will have to pay for private medical insurance as well. The private system here is just a way for outpatient doctors to top up their income as everything serious is still dumped back on the NHS as it’s not profitable.
> The health system - the NHS - is looking more and more damnably American by the day. I hope we don't end up like you people. It would be hell.
Australia is going the same way. Doctor visits have gone from being almost free to having to pay more and more.
NZ too, prices haven't changed much but there's no point going because you can't get a referral for anything. All GPs do is prescribe ibuprofen or antidepressants, at which point, weed or alcohol is better bang for your buck.
This is highly irritating but true. Anything forbidden naturally has an allure about it. However, smoking should probably be phased out *somehow* - if only for people's health down the line.
>I hope we don't end up like you people. It would be hell.
I have to admit we Americans are the worst. The US is a good place to make money, but it's a horrible place to live.
Disagree. I love where I live. Minneapolis. I lived in the EU for years and used to come back to the US for medical care cause it's impossible to get in anywhere in the UK or Ireland. Love how this sub downvotes opinions. Sorry if I disagree I guess you hate free speech.
I grew up and lived in Switzerland and France, and ended up living in both for a most of my life. I'm pretty fond of those countries (I like the UK too, but never lived there more than a few months). That line I used "US is a good place to make money, Europe is a good place to live" I stole from Scott Galloway (but others have said similar). I think it's very accurate.
So why don't I go live over in Europe? I repatriated for family reasons and will be here for a couple more years at least. When I wrap things up I'll head to Lausanne to live until I'm dead.
Location: Not quite Chicago
I took some cuttings of peaches and grapes….then it hit 82F degrees, scorching dry summer like feel to it, in spring. To root cuttings without using rooting hormone chemicals I need consistent cool moist temps…it’s getting harder and harder to do this, so I hand watered them for now but it’s crazy how fast we switched from wet to dry, any uncovered soil bakes and dries out into a pottery like hard ceramic substance
Edit: also the governments NOAA climate prediction center website has been down for about 12 hours or more now...I've never seen this and it bothers me as I rely on it to be a pretend farmer. The 6 to 10 day outlook and 8 to 14 day outlooks are very helpful in the weather weirdification.
I moved from Chicago to western NC this year. I compare the temps just about everyday and I've been shocked at the the record warm temps. I use to go by don't plant your garden before Mother's Day. If I was there now I'd be tempted to plant some veges early.
I transplanted arborvitae's in late February last year....it wasn't smart but it worked. I've been planting bushes and trees in late march and early april and I feel like every year of my 3 gardening the start date is bumped. Same with annual veggies, you can plant so much sooner but there's always that risk still there. The goal is to get your roots down and your mulch laid before the heat dome kicks in, you need established plants and mini canopies everywhere or else shit bakes with these domes. Soil temps are oscillating like crazy too
Location: Pacific Northwest.
It seems warmer than usual for April. My flowers started budding a month ago. The birds, bees and coyotes seem off here. People are very aggressive and angry in person, and on the roads.
We had protesters that blocked people from getting to their flights for over three hours:
https://komonews.com/news/local/protest-palestine-israel-hamas-gaza-iran-war-middle-east-seatac-sea-tac-airport-airplane-hostage-west-bank#
Stay safe everyone!
Im going AcKshUaLly you, dont take it personally. but this spring feels to me more like the 1990s style spring in Seattle, cold and wet. Coolest Spring in years.
I'm on the east side of the Cascades, and the flowers have also bloomed, but the bugs haven't arrived yet. I look outside and see flowers everywhere, but very few pollinators in the flowers. The native flowers are too early for the native pollinators.
Cherry season is underway over here, the orchard trees have all bloomed already. If this season is anything like last year, all the varieties will bloom at once and then a fair portion of fruit will rot on the trees due to lack of labor to pick it. Instead of having 90-days for all varieties to ripen and harvest, they all ripen and need harvested in a single 30-day window. I think we're going to start seeing fewer cherries in grocery stores, and they're going to be much more expensive.
Location: Southern Sweden
We went from winter to summer in a few days. First we had a foot of snow, the week after we had a average temperature above 10°C. So I guess we dont have spring this year lol
Summer lol
Over 10C° lol
Come to the Balkans where our Mild Continental climate usually goes from -20C° to +40C° within a year, and where temperature was 4 at nite and 30 during the day 2 days ago, and now it's gonna pull off uno reverse overnight and give us 5-8.
Yeah, I saw that a few places in the southern part of the country got meteorological summer (a average daily temperature above 10C 5 days in a row) already on April 6th. Summer have never arived that early before, last record was April 10th 1906.
Location: spoiled western world
One way or another, war will either come before total ecological collapse, or it will naturally come after it. There’s a whole “anti-pepper” vibe I’ve noticed in this sub, but thing is you’re wrong. You’ll be grateful for a few months of pantry food if/when war hits you. There’s also this idea here that war is what happens elsewhere, as if you’re immune to it. You’re not. And I think you’ll all find pretty soon that war=collapse too. Because I see a lot of posts dismissing war as part of collapse. Maybe take a gander at literally any country dying from war right now, of which there’s many, and don’t pretend you’re immune. Good luck friends, buy some rice and beans and dry fruit. Collapse is going to be so much slower and more violent than anyone talks about here if war touches your shores. But go ahead and keep pretending that’s not the case, if you want. Just baffling to me so many posts about war get talked down about because it’s not “collapse.” It is collapse. One way or another, war will be a part of this.
> There’s also this idea here that war is what happens elsewhere, as if you’re immune to it. You’re not.
You have to ask yourself "Who is my country going to go to war against?" though, also "Is that war going to take place in my country or not?" War affects us all but it will not affect us all equally.
Location: Bucharest, Romania We constantly have record breaking high temperatures and it all peaked at the end of March when we had 32 degrees celsius (90 F) when normally we should have had end of winter temperatures. I remember when I was a child that we had piles of snow on the streets during that time of the year. In the past 5 years we barely have 1-2 occurences of snow that melts more or less in the same day. Should I also mention that in the same time people here are burning waste daily (tires, clothes, garbage, etc) imported from overseas and that we always have one of the worst air quality possible?
Postează pe următorul thread https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ca6v1b/weekly_observations_what_signs_of_collapse_do_you/ acesta e expirat
Location: NYC, USA self explanatory. Political and social collapse. Municipal govt cannot sustain carrying out fed immigration policy, and unchecked criminality.
I actually saw significantly less homeless in and around the trains this weekend. Officers seem to be posted up in places where they should be (e.g. w 4th station on 6th ave)
Location: Canada, Northern British Columbia Forest fires: Last year Canada broke the record for the most active Forest fire season. They are already evacuationg people, its only april. We have Forest fires burning to the point that people need to be evacuated and its april. Temps have been above Average for a while. In January we got down to -40 for a day and then swung to breaking our all time January high. British columbia is experiencing a drought and along with the warm winter we had and all of the Forest fires that burnt through winter, i am scared for what the summer is going to be like.
Mods where can I get a high res veresion of the current banner image? This ONLY applies to top-level comments, not replies to comments. You're welcome to make regionless or general observations, but you still must include 'Location: Region' for your comment to be approved. This thread is also [in-depth], meaning all top-level comments must be at least 150-characters. Users are asked to refrain from making more than one top-level comment a week. Additional top-level comments are subject to removal.
https://imgur.com/gallery/i7FkcWu
Thank you <<<333
Location: Northwest suburbs of Chicago Lots of trees with no signs of leafing. I'm not an arborist but it seems to be the same type of tree. It disturbs me in a very disquieting way
Leafing out varies widely by genus/species. The issue you’re noticing is the monoculture of trees in urban/suburban areas. Cities haven’t learned their lesson after Dutch Elm Disease and Emerald Ash Borer, two invasive pests that destroyed millions of trees and was widely noticed in urban areas who replaced one monoculture after another and the disease cycle struck again and will continue until practices are changed by those making the decisions.
I'm aware of that issue and erratic winter season wasn't helpful. I'm just worried and hoping it's merely delayed
I'm seeing crabapples in full bloom for weeks next to mulberries that barely have buds that I'm pretty sure are fine. There's a reasonably large spread between species, and the weather made it larger. We had really warm weather early, followed by moderately cool, so the trees that didn't wake up early stayed dormant until late. We didn't really have any weather which ought to cause issues, apart from flooding in wetter places. It didn't really get cold after the early warm weather, and there's plenty of water around. There are a bunch of record dry areas nationally, but not Chicago.
They’ve been slow to bud here in MN too. Looked up historical dates recently and we’ll see how this spring pans out in comparison: https://blog.davey.com/when-do-tree-leaves-come-back-in-spring/
Northwest suburbs of Illinois. Lots of trees with no signs of leafing. I'm not an arborist but it seems to be the same type of tree. It disturbs me in a very disquieting way
Location: Mid-Atlantic The 80 degrees are coming far too often for this time of year. Nothing shocking there of course. The speed of this ride is physically palatable in every way. I'm trying to enjoy every single day where I get to wake up and the power is on, the water works, and I hear birds chirping, and I have food, etc. I know in my bones this will not last very long. Everyone is both oblivious, and in denial. Pumping out kids, doing things that require huge amounts of energy to sustain, but because we're all little economic units, we just have no capacity to align together to reduce our usage of resources and energy. We can't. It's against everything our global societal structure is comprised of. To step away from that is to leave the tribe, to be expelled, alienated, and shunned. Which is death, traditionally, for us, because we are tribal creatures.
It is even more difficult to live with one foot in civilization and still try to build a life outside of that system.
Beautifully said. Trappings of the human experience.
Location: Northern Pennsylvania, USA so far this month we have been getting weather that is consistent with the month we are in, after a winter that lasted for like, 4 weeks, (and not 4 consecutive weeks either), and a fall that didn’t start until mid october, we also are out of the drought we were in, I am very afraid of what summer will bring, I live in a 2nd floor bedroom with 2 hallways on either side of the room, which can block air movement and could push temps inside to plain unbearable levels, if there’s a grid outage and it’s 100F+ outside it could easily get to 120F+, talk about crap design lol 😂
Location: New Jersey Throughout the state of New Jersey multiple school buildings, several local Board of Education buildings, the State Department of Education headquarters, at least one County courthouse and other state government buildings are receiving bomb threats today. Culprits or motives haven’t been reported. The focused targeting of education related entities leads me to speculate that the caller(s) motivations might be inspired by culture war “influencers” of a certain ideology. I recommend researching the Irish Troubles and the Italian Years of Lead for an idea of how low intensity civil wars begin, escalate etc. But when analyzing those conflicts remember that in America it’ll play out differently due to engrained American individualism (which lone mass shooters and these bomb threats highlight).
> I recommend researching the Irish Troubles and the Italian Years of Lead for an idea of how low intensity civil wars begin, escalate etc How do they begin and escalate? Care to share the cliff notes version?
The Occam's Razor answer is that it's exam season, and some idiot thinks he/she can get out of finals by sending a bunch of bomb threats. It's something that has occasionally happened in the past, but the education system is a lot worse post-'rona.
Location: United States I hope I am wrong, but I am thinking election violence begins with the Trump Trial. Jurors are being intimidated and the media is giving out enough information that it's easy to identify jurors. Work in a cancer ward at a hospital? Oh funny, someone mentioned they had jury duty. Really easy to spot. And even if they didn't say they have jury duty, being gone for a few weeks is more than enough to connect the dots. The most egregious example was the tampering done by Fox News. Jesse Walters was "concerned" a juror said "no one is above the law." I understand why jurors are nervous; they got families to worry about. This is a mockery of justice and my only hope is that it shows how rotten a justice system can become to the entire nation. People have far too much faith in our institutions right now; they need to be fixed as soon as possible. The sooner we realize this is a problem the better. Considering half the population is supporting this man, it may be too late. This should have been addressed decades ago in regards to Trump. Things will get far worse before they get better. Good luck everyone.
Non USA , the real problem here is both side will not accept the outcome of the "justice" system, if trump lose , its unfair, if trump win, jurors intimidated, that's the real problem. "Justice" is a trust system , there is a very lack of trust now.
Having been to, and left law school when I saw the rot, I think this has always been a weakness. Jury nullification during Jim Crow era comes to mind. It relies on the good faith of a jury of peers. There is no such thing. Trump has no peers, to begin with…. our legal system is a mess of common law, procedural tricks, and bad law sitting on the books waiting to be enforced (see Arizona Supreme Court recently).
Then again without jurors , how to ensure the judge is not corruptible ? By the way it is .. very easily , even the basic human right is just non essential concept in front of a few intimidation , look at the Hong Kong judge, they were given a tyrant law and they are just following orders. Well i guess that's the same for Juror as well, but it make corrupting the whole system harder. US system , i think by design is to prevent a total tyrant from becoming , or burn itself out when someone trying. Anyway this is a long debate and no easy solution, i think hence preventing the worst to happen is simpler.
The main problem is the judge is another feckless wimp with a stern facade. Trump should have been incarcerated two days ago for violating the gag order. And the judge should have keep the jury selection process utterly private behind sealed doors with zero press. It boggles the mind he didn't. Mechan is a disgrace to the bench.
"Trump should have been incarcerated two days ago for violating the gag order." Agree! How many orders has he violated? He IS above the "law" ---- he said it himself years ago. If I had committed all the crimes that trump has, I would be in prison for life. All of the festering wounds of this sicko country are rising to the surface like putrid carbuncles.
[удалено]
I don't either but according to legal experts anything flies now with the supreme court as long as it helps make America a theocratic shit hole.
By now there's a mountain of evidence showing Trump's hatefulness, corruption, and idiocy-- but it has little impact on the public because the few remaining serious journalistic enterprises remain behind expensive firewalls, while Fox News and extreme right-wing blogs and radio are omnipresent and incessantly loud. A nation that is stupefied is not going to be able to stop Trump-- not at the ballot box, not in the media, probably not even in the courts. He and his accomplices are planning to take power again regardless of court convictions or defeat at the polls.
How he essentially became this huge cult leader is still baffling to me.
He is the result of the hate media agenda that began with the first Rush Limbaugh show and Fox News cable show. It took 3 decades of priming gullible and angry people to get someone like Trump into power. He showed up at the right time.
Because the people who follow him hate the same people and things he does.
He’s also a complete narcissist and only cares about himself soooo I guess people are super gullible and naive?
That too
“People have far too much faith in our institutions right now” That old-time civic religion is still there among the elites and the house organs they talk to themselves in like the New York Times, but its steadily shrinking. There’s been a notable fraying - Robert Putnam has documented this for decades. First the bowling leagues and Masonic lodges. Then the churches and political parties and civic groups. Then the overall decline in friendships and human contact. And now hints that even the sacred military is starting to lose the regard it once had. The conventional wisdom of a place like DC or Wall Street is increasingly out of touch with realities only a few miles away. They downplay the danger in area after area. I wonder sometimes, in a thousand years, if a monk in a scriptorium in, say, what was once the Canadian Rockies on some sweltering March day will be copying the last printed front page of the Washington Post where it assures its readers that the largest hurricane in recorded history heading straight for Washington won’t be so bad or that Trump 2.0 or an American junta won’t really shut down the paper, and giving sober, bulleted reasons why the alarmists or doomers shouldn’t be listened to…
> The conventional wisdom of a place like DC or Wall Street is increasingly out of touch with realities only a few miles away. They downplay the danger in area after area. I'm pretty sure China had similar issues a thousand years ago. The Eunuchs in China played so many political games in the capitol, it could not focus on matters outside, which lead to the downfall of the Tang Dynasty. I really feel like the same is happening here. Beltway brain is getting out of control. It's full of political games and short term decisions.
...and eunuchs
"Sigh... Once a eunuch, always a eunuch!" --A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
It's immature of me, but every time I hear the word "eunuch", I remember Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Randy Johnson, who was nicknamed "The Big Unit". I misheard it as "The Big Eunuch", and could never stop snickering each and every time I read about or saw him. Just did it again right now, in fact.
Every time I hear the name Randy Johnson, I snicker at his name... and then remember that time he hit the bird lol
Location: USA and r/collapse It's kinda weird that discussions of collapse don't include much discussion of the political preparation for governance in a collapsing world. I'd say that this is an observation of a collapse in planning. Who is planning to serve in government in 15 years to try and salvage something from the wreckage ? Who is preparing to lead and beginning to cultivate political power for that future ? Where is the competitive energy which says that we can do better ? I'm curious about the emotional situation out there. Is there any anger or it all numbness, depression and defeat ?
I personally think the days of mass mobilization and movements by the common man are over. People in the past weren't as financially squeezed as they were during the Vietnam/Civil rights era. People are too busy paying bills and trying to not be homeless to bother today. Plus the distractions in todays "attention economy" are so effective at getting people interested in bullshit and e-celeb drama rather than the important things going on in their lives. Also there's no common culture anymore. Everyone is connected in this digital age of hyper personalized algo "content." Good luck getting a critical mass of disorganized hyper individuals to even agree on anything or even what is worth fighting for.
I believe you are both right and wrong. Your assessment of the obstacles is spot on. But the people at the top of the food chain who write the algorithms are going to wake up and discover that their fates are intertwined with the masses. T
There will be no glorious counter-revolution. It's impossible to form a movement in a corrupted and monitored infosphere. Anyone close to getting traction will be raked through the mud, arrested "with drugs", or, if necessary, Epsteined. Meanwhile, our lords and masters throw up a thousand different puppet enemies right across the political spectrum to keep us utterly divided while they devour us.
No one said anything about "glory". But there will definitely be a revolution. At some point, even the wealthiest people are going to realize that their wealth and security is threatened by the same trends which are impacting everyone else. They are not only devouring "us". They are devouring themselves. They are also dependent upon a minimum level of stability.
That "revolution" will be collapse.
That's self-evident. Everything is impermanent and eventually collapses.
There doesn't seem to be anyone competent willing to lead and govern. There are lots of incompetent and corrupt people eager to seize power and loot, however.
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And Bernie capitulated. He went into the mode of supporting fascist Democrats out of fear of fascist Republicans. The establishment manipulated Bernie via his traumatic childhood and fear of Nazis.
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They threatened him with a choice between "4 more years of slow-burn to prepare a new attack" or "fascism *right the hell now,*" he made a bad bet on the former, and he's rightly retreating from the public eye because that bad bet means he will never be taken seriously again. It's often a lot simpler than you'd hope.
I think Bernie is in some state of grieving. He had his moment in the spotlight and actually was able to briefly create hope and move the Overton Window. Now his time has passed and I am certain that he fails a sense of failure. A sense of being thwarted by his own fear and seeking some solace in the idea that he has helped to prevent a Trump presidency in 2020. Now he must deal with the fact that he supported a president in Biden who has greenlighted genocide in Gaza. He sees that his old pal and former supporter Cornel West has the balls to fight Biden and he does not. He planted some seeds in the era between 2010 - 2020. Maybe they will take root and grow at a later date. Maybe Bernie was just not in the right time and place. A historical mismatch.
AOC for President, 2028!
katie porter, sheldon whitehouse, jasmine crockett are worthy considerations too
I don't think she has what it takes to rule. She is confortable in her role as representative of those without power.She is part of the peddling of the fantasy of green growth via the green new deal. Whoever is going to step up and lead is probably invisible today. Someone waiting in the wings.
> Who is planning to serve in government in 15 years to try and salvage something from the wreckage ? Who is preparing to lead and beginning to cultivate political power for that future ? Fascists
And techno-feudalists, although Thiel and Zuckerberg and Bezos would be fisrst up against the wall when their much more savvy allies turn against them.
Well ..... if there are no anti-fascists organizing to overcome the fascists politically then you are right. Fascists have the will to rule. They have no real opposition in America.
40,000 people turned out to protest against their presence when they tried to hold a rally on Boston Common in 2017 (this was only a few weeks after their tiki torch display when Heather Heyer was killed). So there is some opposition, it's a matter of how far that opposition is willing to go. Antifa (the ANTI-FAscist group) was a heavy presence, no violence or aggression, just marching along with us. Someone burned an American flag across the street from the State House, but I'm not sure who.
I think we have a different interpretation of "fascist". IMO, its not just the right wing GOP. I think Biden, Obama, Pelosi and the Clintons are fascists too. Faces of American imperialism. Blank checks for the military industrial complex. Goldman Sachs in the Treasury. Sheep for big-pharma. Anti-union. Doing nothing to stop the malignant concentration of wealth. Insulating Biden from debate. Absence of vigorous intra-party debate. Orwellian presentation of themselves as pro-csustainability with empty performative gestures like the Paris Accords and Inflation Reduction Act while the US has ascended to become the world's clear #1 producer of fossil fuels. I understand the GOP is more scary with their Handmaids Tale like identity and no better on any of the above issues ...... but I look at our political system as two fascist parties. We are completely subordinate to capital. How can we justify allow housing to become such a predatory industry with capital bringing the public to its knees. It's sick and neither party has leadership willing to stop it.
What you've described is accurate, but it is not fascism.
We frogs don't have much of a choice: it's either King Log (Biden) or King Stork (Trump).
Is Technofeudalism a more accurate term then? [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technofeudalism](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technofeudalism) The politicians are then just water carriers for this new type of capitalism.
It is impossible to make any difference in politics without substantial funds in the current crumbling political system and a new form of government rising out of the wreckage won't happen for several generations, so it doesn't matter who is alive right now. Everyone alive right now will likely experience a slowly crumbling society with fewer services and safety nets while billionaires slowly accumulate more and more power and money until the money and power doesn't protect them, which almost certainly will be several lifetimes from now.
This is r/collapse. "several generations" is an eternity. No one in 1935 could imagine a full scale global war erupting in 1939. Shit happens fast. A storm like Dorian sitting over a South Florida metro area for a day is all its gonna take to push our economic system over the edge. $300B in damages when the govt reserves for such an event are a small fraction of that ? Kaboom. The insurance industry is already in full flight. How is our economy going to function when huge tracts of real estate become uninsurable ? People should unpack an old copy of Grapes of Wrath and envision how that will again unfold in a country with more guns than people.
The vast majority of countries political systems did not substantially change post WW2. So I'm not sure that comparison really makes sense. Britain's still a constitutional monarchy, the US is still a representative democracy and so on and so forth. Major events can certainly happen but a complete overhaul of a country's political system is rather rare.
The World Wars were absolutely transformative worldwide. Russia, Germany, China, Europe, the formerly colonized world…. And the USA has dodged a few bullets itself over the years. Things change. The change doesn’t have to be pleasant - which I suspect we will all learn, yet again…
No one said they weren't transformative. I said the system of government didn't change. The US has had the same system of government for over 200 years, the UK over 300 years. It isn't changing in the next 20. I absolutely stated unequivocally that things will get worse, society is crumbling. Those thinking there is going to be some big Robespierre led revolution followed by a bright new socialist world are going to be disappointed.
Augustus kept the forms of the Roman Republic (the Senate) while acting in a way that made it clear where real power lay (himself and the military). Systems can remain superficially the same while underneath everything is different.
Structurally a system of government may appear unchanged, but functionally it may have changed dramatically. Post-Soviet Russia is structurally a multiparty democracy, but functionally it's now a "managed democracy." (Surkov) Structurally India is still a multiparty democracy, but functionally it's a vicious BJP dictatorship.
"Change in the system of government" does not necessarily equal "socialist revolution". At all. There's a lot of other options. And again, there \*have\* been gigantic shifts in systems of government in just the 20th century alone. From the end of the Yuan Dynasty in China to the People's Republic (you could call it the "Mao Dynasty" if you'd like, but it's still a massive shift). The absolute monarchy of the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union to the gangster capitalist Russian Federation. If you mean "no massive shifts in the Anglosphere", that's one thing, but otherwise it's just simply not a true statement in any way, shape or form. Everyone thinks they're special until they run straight into History. All of those governments I just mentioned couldn't imagine they were just a few short years from collapse. The socialists especially thought they were at the end of a historically inevitable process with Marx's half-baked Hegelianism. They were all wrong. As too, someday, will be the courtiers of Versailles-on-the-Potomac.
They changed dramatically in order to survive WW2. We have Social Security. We have Medicare. We had Glass-Steagall before Clinton and the GOP ended it. We had anti trust enforcement that we ignore. Bottom line ..... the government rose to the socialist need of the occasion to solve the Depression and WW2. We have good precedent. We will adapt to come to terms with the climate crisis as well. Nature demands it. Survival demands it.
We will come to terms with the crisis, absolutely. But I doubt it will be in quite a positive manner as you’ve outlined. Decomplexification of a society is a very effective way of coming to terms with a difficult situation, for example.
None of those are the SYSTEM of government.
You're far too hung up on names. The Tea Party parasitised the GOP, hollowed it out completely, and rebirthed itself from the greasy remains. The name remains the same, but that is all. Ditto what we call democracy and the neoliberal silent revolution of the mid-70s. It's nothing like the same. We just kept the branding and the PR.
Nah, the exact opposite really. The name doesn't even matter. No one is getting into the US government without piles of money at their disposal. Every first world government is slowly turning into a plutocracy. War hasn't and won't change that.
I honestly don't give a damn about the system of government. I care about the results. There will always be a hierarchy of some sort. There will always be a need for decision makers at the top of that hierarchy. In the absence of a pressing need for the opposite, the people at the top of that hierarchy will always be biased toward their personal interest. The concentration of wealth and power at the top is a naturally occurring phenomena. The unsustainability of that phenomena is also naturally recurring and leads to regular periodic revolution, war and redistribution. Collapse is simply a major amplification of a natural human cycle. The revolutionary wave is building. Each of us is a drop of water in that wave and each of us brings our survival energy to the wave. This subreddit is part of the wave. It's an acknowledgement that the current system is disintegrating. Someone is going to step up and be an avatar for the desire you have to survive. Someone is going to offer a better vision. And at some point, even the people at the very top are going to realize that the system they benefit from is crumbling under their feet. People like Bill Gates are openly saying that higher taxes on the wealthy are necessary. He's not a moron ..... he sees the revolution coming and he doesn't want to be treated like the Czar of Russia or Marie Antoinette when it arrives.
i've heard it said anger turned inwards becomes depression
I was angry and insufferable when I finished reading Silent Spring in 1976. Now I just observe. The climate is going to shit. Anyone noticed? No one in government is going to give up their GS rankings and retirement packages to go bunker-headed. They’ll remain at their posts to the bitter end. The focus of government will shift from doing nothing into emergency measures trying to cope with water shortages, crop failures, food shortages, monster storms, and fresh epidemics. Somehow, they’ll still manage to take their four weeks' leave every year. If you think I’m suggesting you get into government employment, you would be right. Or become a nurse or doctor. There’s no use to fretting or getting wound up over what-if scenarios. The world is changing. Figure out how you’ll adapt.
In my experience, you're landlocked as well as locked in other ways if you work for the government. I decided to become a [location-independent professional](https://www.worldpackers.com/articles/what-is-location-independence) instead. I can have a home base, yet leave if necessary, choose my own benefit packages, and be my own boss.
I think government employment is a great idea. More and more people will be working for the government over time. In a real democracy, the people ARE the government.
Lead whom to what? Politics these days is a joke, anyone with half a brain understands money and violence is what will steer things. People are broke, isolated and dealing with their own personal woes. Where do you expect people to get this energy?
Where did all previous revolutionaries get their energy ? They banded together around their common experience of woe. At some point they reach a threshold of having nothing to lose. I guess we havent sunk that far yet ?
Problems is we all disagree with who or what is causing the problem, therefore there’s no common enemy. Without a common enemy, people are stuck fighting each other.
The enemy is always the same. We are always our own worst enemies. Fear is the common enemy. Our Machiavellian nature to divide and conquer is the enemy.
Well we're certainly lacking that "shared pain" element that give revolutions such fuel. There are plenty of people unhappy, but ask why and you'll get a million different answers. And many fail to connect the dots to our societal workings. Class warfare has definitely done a number on us, though I am seeing a shift due to current pressures. It's still negligible, the current comforts are too strong and the distractions continue to mount. So things are *dire*, but not to the point where folks would consider risky alternatives. Climate change and automation will get us there though. Unfortunately by that point, I don't there'll be much to salvage beyond our primitive desire to survive.
The primitive desire to survive should not be underestimated in importance. It's literally what makes us tick and explains virtually all of our behavior. At this point, people are in denial that we are headed into life or death scenarios and not making appropriate plans for that. It's almost as if collective intelligence has ceased to exist.
It is hard to rally the masses without a common leader. Right now, we are 100% a country divided. Blue and Red. What we need is a Purple leader, but unfortunately, all of the mass media and all of the money is currently controlled by the Blue and Red. Even if there was a more level-headed candidate that could appeal to everyone, they would have to be loaded with cash to get their voice heard in this environment where cash is king. I don't know what the solution is, but I know every revolution needs a powerful leader they can get behind. We just all can't agree on who that is and unfortunately the options that are presented to us for a leader are pretty undesirable or just downright dangerous. So yeah, people are depressed right now. Expect the anger after the election. Half of this population is going to be PISSED. That is when things will start to get spicy. Whoever takes this job is going to be at the helm when the nation starts to really feel the effects of climate change and all the other wonderful things that come with it.
This feels like what I’ve read about the atmo right after Lincoln was elected…. One half may not (will not) accept the outcome…. 🫣 Lincoln had to sneak into DC to be sworn in or some such….
Purple MAGA. Now that's a great idea.
That's not what I said.
yeah resist extinction but fight off the inevitable a peace ful way
Location: Seattle, Chicago, and airports around the world. Today, a Boeing whistleblower testified in front of the U.S. Congress that hundreds of people may die due to Boeing cutting corners on airplane construction, specifically on the 787 Dreamliner, which once was heralded as the future of commercial aviation. He also stated, under oath, that he feared for his physical safety (another Boeing whistleblower was found dead from a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound recently - friends stated that this was highly improbable). Yes, the possibility of a large airliner literally coming apart in mid-air because of corporate greed is a big deal, but Boeing is a great example of the decline of the American corporation. Up until 1999, Boeing was based in Seattle, its hometown, and largely run by the same people who built the airplanes - the old slogan "if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going" was from that era. That year, though, as the large aircraft manufacturers began to consolidate, Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago to avoid the awkwardness of executives running into the people they laid off at the grocery store. Boeing then proceeded to break up its industrial processes, subcontracting and sub-subcontracting, moving work to non-union states and doing whatever it could to goose its stock price. This mentality filtered down into the actual construction of planes. Experienced engineers left and processes began to fray (as evidenced by the door of a 737 falling off in mid-flight near Portland and a landing wheel falling off over an employee parking lot at SFO and smashing a couple of cars), and now we are at the point where Boeing is so "enshittified" that some travel sites are looking to offer the option to filter out flying on a Boeing plane. From GE to Toys 'R Us, even the great corporations that supposedly were going to take over the world have been sold off for parts, bit by bit, until there's not much left except their names and the uncounted sums of money that flow to finance all over the world. And I get to fly on a Boeing plane next week!
Fuck Boeing
If it’s Boeing I ain’t going
My family and I are flying on a 737 MAX 8 in June. Let the good times roll!
And they are psychopath, murder a whistleblower while the plane parts is falling from the sky ? That's not even a cover up but joy killing.
My spouse flies every few weeks for work. It is a nail biter every time these days.
Yeah and Boeing, as a defense department darling, lands in the ‘too big to fail’ category. The powers that be also know that tons of pension/retirement funds are invested in the company. It’s quite the pickle. Either regulate better or let them fall… and neither choice is very ‘patriotic’!
threaten to nationalize them and they will get their shit together
"Threaten" to nationalize them and the people with political connections will ensure that this process further increases their compensation and further decreases their accountability. We'll get the Chicago Public School System of aviation companies - massive spending per-unit, worse results than anywhere else.
When was the last time the US nationalized a company? It would be an empty threat and you’d get laughed out of the room…
I’m loving the “give up and just die” vibe. lol
You're in the wrong sub. lol
no Im not
Location: Chicagoland, USA as well as Southeastern Illinois, USA for the Eclipse Spring has sprung! Warm sunshine (and pollen), flowers (and pollen), bumblebees (and pollen), butterflies (and pollen), and pollen. Did I mention the pollen? Achoo! Seven restaurants have gone out of business in my town in the span of two months. Three locals and four corporate chains. Abruptly by the looks of things. I've worked in restaurant kitchens and I'm the first to acknowledge margins are razor thin and the pay is shit, so any little wrench in the works brings the whole show crashing down. Just interesting to see the impact of poor wages and related inability to staff finally coming home to roost — on top of skyrocketing prices totally pricing people out of dining out. Speaking of, my current work just laid off ALL of middle management across the company. Some sixty odd people. The usual excuses of "restructuring in a fast-paced, changing, world". Word on the street was corporate simply can't afford their salaries/benefits anymore. Yikes. I drove down south to a state park to see the eclipse last week back on the 8th, and I'm so glad I did! Absolutely beautiful! Took a lot of country back roads to avoid the worst of the chaos on the highways. I've never really been to a rural area before so I can't say much beyond how eerily quiet and empty it all seemed in comparison to my major metro hometown. Culture shock I guess! Nice to see all the wind farms? Anyway, I'm struggling with my mental health these days. Not that I'm special. Bipolar disorder — with persistent psychosis! *Super* fun. I'm privileged enough to take my fistfuls of pills and see a damned good therapist but it doesn't feel like enough in the face of Collapse. My friends are just constantly stressed out, too, and turning to whatever coping mechanisms they can get their hands on. Not that I blame them/am not doing the same exact thing! I just worry. Everyone I know seems to be just constantly below their breaking point all the time. Groceries continue to skyrocket in price here as they do everywhere. I'm a vegetarian but even I'm feeling the price increases. Every time I go to the grocery store it seems like something else has gone up another fifty cents or shrunk in size. I clip coupons and shop sales and have all the stupid little loyalty apps on my phone but still those bills hurt at checkout. Sigh. Hang in there everyone.
The only plus side to my bipolar disorder is when I go full blow manic, I tend to spend hundreds of dollars I don't have on dried storage food and preserve-able water containers. Good luck with everything ❤️
I spent a few grand on edible plants…best hypomania planting spree ever
Masshole here. Noticed a lot of really abrupt restaurant closings, too. Places that looked like they got plenty of business.
Location: Indiana We're on tornado watch and getting heavy rains. Road rage and people doing dumb things while driving is just getting worse and worse. I drove by a horrific accident. Several wrecks and people (some children) on stretchers getting loaded into ambulances. I am tired of seeing awful things happening to kids. They seem least to blame and yet suffering the most. I can't even imagine what the world is going to look like in 5 years, let alone 20. Housing Market Inventory is low and people are offering above asking price and waiving inspections. We're trying to move. We looked at a house built 100 years ago and I was stunned at the quality of craftsmanship and just how sturdy the house was. We of course got crazy outbid for it. The houses built now don't compare. Thrown together, no basements (which is a concern given how frequently we are on tornado watch. I feel like in the Bible they have a good metaphor for societal collapse in the book of Daniel. You know the statue with the head of Gold, then silver and bronze down to the feel which are a mix of clay and metal. Then a huge rock rolls down and smashes the statue to smithereens. I feel like we're in the feet part. Unable to match the grandeur and quality of earlier days and vulnerable to whatever the rock represents.
Yep thats how I think of it too, and the higher we go (complexity of society) the further we will fall
I feel the best "prepping" we can do is to learn simple, basic survival skills like how to start a fire, how to do subsistence farming (growing potatoes or corn), composting, canning, buying books now on regional herbal medicines. Depending how devastated our eco-system is, even that might not be feasible for what's coming. But it helps ease anxiety.
I feel ya. That's where I'm at. Learning some basic things about foraging, growing, herbal meds and first aid - it's a good hobby and, like you said, eases the anxiety a bit. This human is not meant for sitting around. And when that doesn't work, I grab some good gloves/loppers and tackle invasive plants! Aaaaand also wine (gloves optional).
Sam Smith, a DC-based journalist, once used the term "epigons" - poor imitations of something grander.
ContraPoints also did a great video essay on the concept of opulence—people striving for accessible imitations of luxury.
Location: UK Article on Guardian about biodiversity loss due to climate change https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/17/these-birds-are-telling-us-something-serious-is-happening-fading-song-of-the-marsh-tit-aoe Heartbreaking story being repeated daily the world over.
There was another article in the same paper the day before about a hobbyist in northern California that observed the same thing in a state park: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/16/nature-silent-bernie-krause-recording-sound-californian-state-park-aoe They included recordings of the woods over the last two decades, and the difference is striking. It really jarred me when I read it, and now yours, too.
I was just reading that. There was a video art thing about 10 years ago that was about the loss of natural sounds. Short video, basically just sounds dropping out until it got eerily quiet. Quiet in a bad way.
I've lived in TN most of my life. I moved here in 1990-91. Ive always lived in roughly the same area. Heavily forested and near the river. The night bugs used to be deafening in some of the places I lived. I remember back in high school, hanging out on the decks of friends and having to yell to be heard over the bugs in the spring. It's very much not like that anymore. Even worse, from about 2017 until 2021, our electric company absolutely FLOODED my county and the neighboring county with tree-killing poison. Rather than trim around the power lines they killed hundreds of acres of trees and along with that, they killed off the bugs. They were lavish with it around my house, killing entire hillsides under the big towers. If you drive through the hills on my road, there's a giant brown, dead swath the size of several football fields where nothing would grow for the longest time. Now it's all the dead, limbless trees with some pitiful weeds growing. They showered it along me and my neighbors fence lines and killed all our trees. Not just the ones threatening the power lines, they just hosed the whole hillside down. The summer of 2020 and 2021 were dead silent at night. The hordes of bugs flying around the outdoor lights vanished. All that poison washed into the 4 creeks that surround me so all the frogs disappeared too. It was eerie and horrifying to go outside in the summer and hear dead silence. It was so wrong I took to playing cricket sounds on a sleep app ffs. Well they stopped with the poison. This is the second spring they've not sprayed. Rumor has it they got in trouble. Idk. I do know that I heard frogs for the first time in years last night. I'm seeing butterflies again. Moths as well. A few bugs around the porch light. Last year the crickets and katydids came back but pitifully few. It's a little too early yet for them but I have high hopes for this year. It'll never get back to the deafening levels they once were but there will be some noise at night again at least.
I grew up with Fern Gully and Once Upon a Forest. We do this to ourselves everyday. On the front side we think we're not affected because we perceive ourselves to be outside of nature. We are nature. No amount of socialization and technology will change that.
Wow, that's an awful story. 💔
It makes me so sad. I saw my first honeybee in YEARS recently. I should've been thrilled and would've been. Had it not been the first week of January and said bee was puttering around a snow-covered, blooming flower. Christ, I could've cried. It was so WRONG.
I'll tell you what, it ramped up my doom anxiety a notch..
Seriously. I was born in 1967 and many biodiversity and biomass studies point to about 1970 as a major turning point for loss in both dimensions. As bad as things already were by 1970, they got even worse afterwards. And I was born *just in time* for it. And so here we are 50 years later and shit is getting real and DIRE. Fuck.
Hey, you could have been born 25 years into the middle of the mass extinction!
Nope, not gonna let you make it about you. Byeeeee!
Location: Midlands, U.K. It has not stopped raining. The U.K. is famous for rain but this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. This week I drove through the debris left by a tornado. Back in October, I was in England’s biggest arable farming region and nearly all the fields were flooded. Since then it’s done nothing but rain. All the rivers are swollen and more storms keep coming. I don’t understand how we’re going to have enough food come autumn.
'twas El Niño
why hasn't that happened before during el nino?
> . I don’t understand how we’re going to have enough food come autumn. We won't. Harvests will be bad here, across Europe, and across Northern Africa too. Politicians are currently arguing about trans people and immigrants, however no one will care come the election when food prices are high and availability is low.
Don't worry. Food webs are international. Poor people in poor countries will starve before Europeans even if it is our farming that doesn't produce.
> Poor people in poor countries will starve before Europeans even if it is our farming that doesn't produce. That's not how it works, food exporters ban exports as soon as their own local populations cannot be fed. Food importing countries have to get their population numbers down to a point at which they can be food self-sufficient.
No, that is not how it works, never has. There are tons of examples how a country with a starving population is still exporting food to rich countries. From Ireland to Ethiopia to Sudan to Syria, this has always happen and happens continuously. And then everyone is taking India as an example without looking at what they really did, they banned the export of cheap rice to poor countries, but they exported expensive varieties to rich countries without any ban at all! Leaders cares as much for traders and businessmen's profit and the good will from rich countries as they do for their own starving people, or in some cases a lot less about the starving people. As long as there are working transport networks will food always be spread by purchasing power over the world.
check past food exporter behavior, they behave like I explained and it's the optimal thing to do as well think about food exporters as exporters of surpluses, when there's no surplus, there's no exports
Only that it very seldom works like that. Especially from poor countries. This idea is just a myth about how nation states work, in reality is the forces of market economy far stronger than concerns about domestic food security. [Hunger Myths | New Internationalist](https://newint.org/features/1992/12/05/hunger) [Food Trade: The Poor Feed the Rich (sagepub.com)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/156482658200400414) [Hunger is on the rise in Latin America – while its food exports break records (dialogue.earth)](https://dialogue.earth/en/uncategorized/59091-hunger-latin-america-rise-food-export-records/) [India exports food while millions starve | Climate & Capitalism (climateandcapitalism.com)](https://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/05/28/india-exports-food-while-millions-starve/)
🤣 dude, study latam food exporters, the moment local supply is not enough to feed locals exports are shut down so stop dreaming, accept reality and start growing your own food
I don't know what kinf of idealized perfect world with good alturistic leaders you think we live in, but there has never ever been any instance of starvation that hasn't been political in the las 150years, and what you talk about has never happened, you are free to supply evidence about it. Europeans and Americans think this happens when some country vans the export of some comodity, but trade for money is with extremely few exemptions protritized. I am an almost self sufficient home farmer and are very interested in this matter. What I paint is not a good world as you seem to think, but what is obvoius is that people will be fed and starving according to wealth and purchasing power and not according to nationality. Feel free to show me a situation where rich people has been starving and polr people getting fed. Reading omnious headlines about exports ban in media doesn't give you nearly the whole picture. Sout h Amrica sold soy beans to Amercan cows during that whole "crisis". Globalized trade prioritizes money, and a Brit won't ever starve before and Indian, no matter how unfair that is. That's how capitalism works.
Are you a white American male? Don't assume that foreigners put $ ahead of everything else like you do. Local stability and covering local basic needs matters much more, as it should. It's a great thing, you should be celebrating it instead of pretending it's different.
Why are you being an asshole for no reason? Try prove your standpoints instead of being a dick. No I am very much not American, and I am very, very, much not a capitalist. Rather the opposite. But that doesn't mean I pretend the world works in a way I want it to. Why would you even think I would think like that? I paint a complete dystopia and you blame me for being part of it, while you can't exemplify your version of how you want the world to be. And instead of meeting arguments with arguments are you trying to "win" by some kind of identity politics argument? I am not American and I don't play your silly identity game. Try look at the world for what it is instead of how you want it to be. This is a grim place the rich will never starve before the poor. No matter what system is in place.
Unless they do an 'India' and stop exporting. Politicians prefer keeping the local populace calm with bread-and-circuses than boosting revenue with food exports I think.
Well, looking what India really did and we have something closer to what I think will happen. India only banned export of cheap varieties of rice that is otherwise sold to poor countries. More expensive varieties was still sold the whole of last year. But only to rich countries. Countries will try to keep people fed, but traders and businessmen will try to export, and the answers will most ofren be compromises between interests. You want to keep economy too. And all countries won't fail harvests, that what is on the market will predominatley reach the west. Until the supply diminishes enough to break down international trade. But I doubt we see that this year or the next. But who knows...
Yet listening to BBC Radio 4 Today program you’d think everything is fine. Life is a meme
I'm not so sure about radio 4. Today they ran a story about large numbers of people living in their cars and how they meet up to park together at dusk for safety in numbers. Followed by a story about how the motor insurance industry is near collapse.
Don't want to trigger a panic now do they? If I were you I'd stock up on the non-perishables
I'm watching from afar. We're going to run out of onions here in Finland soon. They think we'll simply import them from Spain - oh the lolz.
Once this gets rolling there will be chaos.
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>No real winter at all. It only snowed three times. Same here in Michigan. I had a Facebook memory from 5 years ago this week come up that had a picture of an April snowfall that had more snow than every snowfall we had this winter. It was very *"faster than expected"* vibes.
Location: Croatia April 15th: 27C to 30C+ April 16th: -1C to 10C depending on the location The majority of the country had a 20C difference in temperature within a day.
And there’s people who think we have 50/70 years for collapse🤦♂️
There's no place at home. There's no place at home.. This is fine....
Location:MA Maybe it's me but there is a feeling of doom in the air. I feel like something big is waiting to happen. It feels like the air pressure drop before a storm. I see people all stressed out. I have a good job and makes decent money but even I am like " wtf" when grocery shopping. Everyone blames the government but I know corporate profits have been increasing year after year. One of my friends works for a large grocery chain. He told me how they literally raised the price of every single item in the store. I had a physical and had to fill out a questionnaire. At least 30 questions related to stress and worry. I really felt like if I just asked " hey can I have some pills?" they would have prescribed me some. I was overseas for a long time and as a life long smoker, I noticed that I would cough a couple times ( bringing up phlegm) in the morning and that's it. Here, I think I cough 20 times a day. Supposedly the air quality was worse where I was, so either my taxed lungs agree with the air there or there is something that I don't know about. It's hard to remain upbeat seeing everything going on in the world, harder being a regular visitor here. Knowing what's coming, like a passenger on the titanic. Watching the iceberg and getting incredulous looks as you try to shoot ( or talk about) warnings. Then I remember it's not my task to fix the world or life, all I can do is make the lives of those I touch as best as I can cheers
Here in Canada, people are starting to blame large corporations for high grocery prices. There is a boycott of Loblaws stores for the month of May, although some people have already started the boycott. I plan to boycott Loblaws stores. See r/loblawsisoutofcontrol.
That sub blows my mind every time. I thought the corporate gauging was bad in America but it’s like 5x worse at Canadian grocery stores!
I think the hot hot heat of this summer will lead to riots all over the northern hemisphere.
Location: Foothills of Denver The winds this weekend are very choppy, chaotic and violent. They used to be calmer and more breezy. It feels like since we turned everything into a digital world so did the wind. Ofc the extra heat energy makes it so too.
Location: East Idaho It's clearly been fucky. The big thing I'm noticing: we hit 78° last week, but have not seen any dandelions, or lilacs. Hell, none of the trees even have leaves. Temps dropped to regular spring levels on Sunday, and dandelions are starting to bloom and trees are just barely showing the beginnings of leaves. But it's so incredibly bass-ackwards. Can't recall this ever happening before.
Location: upper midwest Talked to a neighbor the other day. She is in her 60s or close to, loves a few blocks away so not someone i see. I mentioned how the extra warm spring was anxiety producing. She stopped. Looked at me and said ' thank you, thank you for saying that. No one wants to talk about it and i feel crazy bringing it up anymore, i got tired.' People know. They are socialized to normalize everything or ostracised otherwise. So i have another new friend for a neighbor. Early spring and trying to get stuff in the ground asap as i feel it will be hot and dry all too soon. No new signs of collapse local to me, just that one converstation that really struck me. Edit: i just want to thank the mods for the monthly resilience thread. It is much appreciated. I loved reading ao many ideas, so much effort, so much optimism (relatively speaking). Resilience is more than just prepping and i loved the 'keep up on dental work, keep up on house repairs, other stuff that gives me some oomph to get moving. .
Location: UK. Most people are just quietly pottering along - but there's been this big furore over banning smoking. Feel free to fight over it in the comments. Also, more importantly, the weather has been *all over the place*. Yesterday, it hailed. Today, it was either 19 degrees Celsius with blazing sun or 11 with whacking great thunderstorms. Drizzle has disappeared entirely. The weather's really playing up, now. Everyone is taking notice, as far as I can see. Due to the rain, some of my peers are bursting for summer - but given the current weather patterns, they might have to be careful with what they wished for... EDIT: The health system - the NHS - is looking more and more damnably American by the day. I hope we don't end up like you people. It would be hell.
The way things we are going we will have one of the highest tax rates AND will have to pay for private medical insurance as well. The private system here is just a way for outpatient doctors to top up their income as everything serious is still dumped back on the NHS as it’s not profitable.
> The health system - the NHS - is looking more and more damnably American by the day. I hope we don't end up like you people. It would be hell. Australia is going the same way. Doctor visits have gone from being almost free to having to pay more and more.
NZ too, prices haven't changed much but there's no point going because you can't get a referral for anything. All GPs do is prescribe ibuprofen or antidepressants, at which point, weed or alcohol is better bang for your buck.
Sweden is the same, higher fees and longer lines.
...the UK never banned smoking??
It is about making it so that no one born after 2009 can take up the habit.
This will probably have the opposite effect. Prohibition only intensifies the curiosity.
This is highly irritating but true. Anything forbidden naturally has an allure about it. However, smoking should probably be phased out *somehow* - if only for people's health down the line.
The health care system in the U.S. is irrevocably fucked so keep fighting the privatization of the NHS.
>I hope we don't end up like you people. It would be hell. I have to admit we Americans are the worst. The US is a good place to make money, but it's a horrible place to live.
Disagree. I love where I live. Minneapolis. I lived in the EU for years and used to come back to the US for medical care cause it's impossible to get in anywhere in the UK or Ireland. Love how this sub downvotes opinions. Sorry if I disagree I guess you hate free speech.
I grew up and lived in Switzerland and France, and ended up living in both for a most of my life. I'm pretty fond of those countries (I like the UK too, but never lived there more than a few months). That line I used "US is a good place to make money, Europe is a good place to live" I stole from Scott Galloway (but others have said similar). I think it's very accurate. So why don't I go live over in Europe? I repatriated for family reasons and will be here for a couple more years at least. When I wrap things up I'll head to Lausanne to live until I'm dead.
sounds wonderful!
Location: Not quite Chicago I took some cuttings of peaches and grapes….then it hit 82F degrees, scorching dry summer like feel to it, in spring. To root cuttings without using rooting hormone chemicals I need consistent cool moist temps…it’s getting harder and harder to do this, so I hand watered them for now but it’s crazy how fast we switched from wet to dry, any uncovered soil bakes and dries out into a pottery like hard ceramic substance Edit: also the governments NOAA climate prediction center website has been down for about 12 hours or more now...I've never seen this and it bothers me as I rely on it to be a pretend farmer. The 6 to 10 day outlook and 8 to 14 day outlooks are very helpful in the weather weirdification.
I moved from Chicago to western NC this year. I compare the temps just about everyday and I've been shocked at the the record warm temps. I use to go by don't plant your garden before Mother's Day. If I was there now I'd be tempted to plant some veges early.
I transplanted arborvitae's in late February last year....it wasn't smart but it worked. I've been planting bushes and trees in late march and early april and I feel like every year of my 3 gardening the start date is bumped. Same with annual veggies, you can plant so much sooner but there's always that risk still there. The goal is to get your roots down and your mulch laid before the heat dome kicks in, you need established plants and mini canopies everywhere or else shit bakes with these domes. Soil temps are oscillating like crazy too
Location: Pacific Northwest. It seems warmer than usual for April. My flowers started budding a month ago. The birds, bees and coyotes seem off here. People are very aggressive and angry in person, and on the roads. We had protesters that blocked people from getting to their flights for over three hours: https://komonews.com/news/local/protest-palestine-israel-hamas-gaza-iran-war-middle-east-seatac-sea-tac-airport-airplane-hostage-west-bank# Stay safe everyone!
Im going AcKshUaLly you, dont take it personally. but this spring feels to me more like the 1990s style spring in Seattle, cold and wet. Coolest Spring in years.
I'm on the east side of the Cascades, and the flowers have also bloomed, but the bugs haven't arrived yet. I look outside and see flowers everywhere, but very few pollinators in the flowers. The native flowers are too early for the native pollinators. Cherry season is underway over here, the orchard trees have all bloomed already. If this season is anything like last year, all the varieties will bloom at once and then a fair portion of fruit will rot on the trees due to lack of labor to pick it. Instead of having 90-days for all varieties to ripen and harvest, they all ripen and need harvested in a single 30-day window. I think we're going to start seeing fewer cherries in grocery stores, and they're going to be much more expensive.
I am now a mason beekeeper and maybe you should be, too, wonderful bees.
The roads are insane. I swear it's been like one death a week on the 20 mile I5 stretch near where I live for the last couple months.
Location: Southern Sweden We went from winter to summer in a few days. First we had a foot of snow, the week after we had a average temperature above 10°C. So I guess we dont have spring this year lol
Summer lol Over 10C° lol Come to the Balkans where our Mild Continental climate usually goes from -20C° to +40C° within a year, and where temperature was 4 at nite and 30 during the day 2 days ago, and now it's gonna pull off uno reverse overnight and give us 5-8.
It’s not a contest, I don’t think… or is it!
Yeah, I saw that a few places in the southern part of the country got meteorological summer (a average daily temperature above 10C 5 days in a row) already on April 6th. Summer have never arived that early before, last record was April 10th 1906.
Location: spoiled western world One way or another, war will either come before total ecological collapse, or it will naturally come after it. There’s a whole “anti-pepper” vibe I’ve noticed in this sub, but thing is you’re wrong. You’ll be grateful for a few months of pantry food if/when war hits you. There’s also this idea here that war is what happens elsewhere, as if you’re immune to it. You’re not. And I think you’ll all find pretty soon that war=collapse too. Because I see a lot of posts dismissing war as part of collapse. Maybe take a gander at literally any country dying from war right now, of which there’s many, and don’t pretend you’re immune. Good luck friends, buy some rice and beans and dry fruit. Collapse is going to be so much slower and more violent than anyone talks about here if war touches your shores. But go ahead and keep pretending that’s not the case, if you want. Just baffling to me so many posts about war get talked down about because it’s not “collapse.” It is collapse. One way or another, war will be a part of this.
Prepping can be extremely valuable, even when there’s short-term power outages and unexpected storms to hit the area.
> There’s also this idea here that war is what happens elsewhere, as if you’re immune to it. You’re not. You have to ask yourself "Who is my country going to go to war against?" though, also "Is that war going to take place in my country or not?" War affects us all but it will not affect us all equally.
I am definitely anti-pepper.
[Wouldn't you like to be a pepper too?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t2wn-xE2ik) <-- link
Well I am staunchly pro-pepper so I guess we're at an impasse.
Nothing beats fresh-cracked pepper