Hillmarsh

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

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

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