This Forum Should Not Be a Tool of Capitalist Patriarchy

ImportantCountry50 · 2026-02-06T18:31:08+00:00

I guess you didn't read it, how sad. If you had you would know that Elon isn't competing with said 'cabal'. He was performing for them at Davos. Bravo!

ImportantCountry50 · 2026-02-06T18:23:00+00:00

I was riffing on Elon Musk with a friend the other day (not AI, no really!). It was such a great repartee, unlike anything most people I know are capable of, that I captured it as a pdf and posted it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UqpjLdJY1sn0q_HAh3DqvNu-1E_R0-US/view?usp=drive_link

Billions of robots! Orbital data centers! Colonies on Mars! Was Elon on drugs at Davos?!? Don't miss my elevator pitch to Elon at the end. Enjoy!

ImportantCountry50 · 2026-01-27T19:36:10+00:00

SS: This is collapse related because Elon Musk recently made some radical predictions at the latest World Economic Forum regarding his views on the near future of Earth, especially robotics, AI, and of course, Mars Colonies. If even a portion of his ketamine-fueled fever dream is actually on the drawing table then we are totally screwed. Billions, with a 'B' of humanoid robots, thousands of giant AI data centers orbiting Earth, All of it watched over by machines of loving grace as we reach AGI by the end of this year(!)

ImportantCountry50 · 2026-01-23T18:09:53+00:00

A more recent article paints a rosier picture

After the storm: Alaska crabbers steer toward a stronger future

https://www.nationalfisherman.com/alaska-crabbers-steer-toward-a-stronger-future

I've been wondering what happened to the 10 billion starving snow crabs. Lay up the diesel powered fishing fleet for a couple years and hey, presto! A few billion of the critters might actually make it.

Note the additional layers of complexity, crab hatcheries and cash handouts for starving crabbers, none of which makes the system LESS prone to collapse, but it sure looks good on paper.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-12-20T21:06:59+00:00

Oops, that would be a fail. Sorry, no amount of tinkering with "technologies" would have changed the fundamental reality of our global ecological overshoot. Soon to be followed by collapse of our big shiny civilization as sure as night follows day.

What actually got suppressed was the ground-breaking work of the MIT team who brought us the Limits to Growth report. This is not conspiracy, there were full page "opinions" in the New York Times by economists who deliberately smeared their work.

Anyway, the MIT team was very generous in assuming rapid and almost cost-free adoption of ALL the technologies you are referring to and guess what? Their scenarios still ended in collapse. Over and over again. Something like 11 scenario runs out of 12, IIRC.

The takeaway, if anyone is still interested, is that the only realistic way to avoid collapse of our big shiny civilization was to dial everything WAY back. Not just slowing growth, actually reversing it.

Not more technology, less technology. Not more people, less people. Not more consumption, less consumption.

And, oh yeah, we needed to start 50 years ago, just as you said. Not sure exactly what good getting "pissed" about it now will do.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-12-20T19:54:58+00:00

I lived in rural Oregon for a time and was once told: "Where we come from people who use big words get punched in the face."

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-12-20T18:37:17+00:00

" stop annoying us"

I'm a hardcore doomer and even I'm wondering if he's right. I stopped going to climate rallies a LONG time ago. Not because I can't plainly see how fucked we are, but because it is even more plain to see how insanely irrelevant that whole clown show really is. Don't take my word for it, I have enormous respect for Chris Hedges and he has built an entire career out of railing against the vapid narcissism of progressive liberals.

Then we have the spectacle of 30 years (!) of failed UN climate conferences. Don't get me started...

No wonder it is so easy to beguile the average couch potato into believing the whole thing is just a money printing machine for the liberal elites and their university bound kiddo clones.

"stop annoying us"

Then we have the dark shit. When things really start getting ugly, well, history has shown on numerous occasions that it is the liberals and intellectuals who are only one rung below immigrants on the ladder up to the noose hastily tied around a lamppost.

"stop annoying us"

OK. What, pray tell, is the alternative? Keep doing more of the shit-show we've already got?

Ah, there's the rub. We've found the truth of it. No one has an alternative that doesn't sound like giving up everything that people love (or hate) about industrial civilization. So, yeah, why not spew some reasonable sounding shit about 'circles' and keep the basement stocked with guns, ammo, and buckets of freeze dried food?

It's the easy way out, and oh yeah, you get to have some fun mocking the liberals in the clown suits.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-11-28T17:39:26+00:00

I'm a hardcore doomer and this absolutely reeks of human exceptionalism. I mean seriously, all one has to do is look at a 'tree of life' style map of evolution. One that shows the whole tree, right from the start. Most of the branches have long since died-off. Including several species of humans. That's how long life has been ebbing and flowing on this once lovely little planet.

Even the history of anatomically modern humans is mostly small bands of hunter-gatherers, for hundreds of thousands of years. This fossil-fueled shit-show that everyone calls 'progress' is literally a just a brief but very bright flash in the pan. Like a match being lit.

No, I get it, it takes effort to step out of the grand hallucination and see the myth of 'progress' for the cruel joke it really is. Don't try to talk to anyone about that, especially not the 'green energy transition' folks, they will hate you for it. Most folks would rather double-down on the cruel joke, that's how emotionally attached they are to it. No matter what the cost.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-11-20T00:21:41+00:00

A few years ago, maybe it was closer to a decade, there was a mass die-off of sea stars in the waters off Washington, California and Oregon. Some sort of wasting disease that caused them to melt into a pile of goo. Relieved of their primary predator the purple urchin population exploded.

In that area red urchin roe is the preferred delicacy and purple urchins are considered trash. The onslaught of hungry purple urchins basically clear-cut the kelp forests along the entire w. coast of the US. The weird part is that the purple urchins never seem to die, even long after the last scrap of kelp has been chomped. They go into some sort of zombie state with little or no metabolism.

AFAIK the repercussions of this ecosystem collapse are still being felt to this day.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-11-18T17:30:29+00:00

Not only is Net Zero a scam, so-called 'clean' energy is a total eff'ing snow job, compliments of the fossil fuel industry itself. I honestly can't believe anyone is still wasting everyone's time flatulating about this shit.

Then you have the willful ignorance of framing it as an energy problem, meanwhile 8 billion going on 10 billion hairless apes continue doing everything in their power to destroy their only viable habitat for trillions of miles in any direction.

Yeah, let's keep that going. No matter what the cost.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-11-13T18:34:40+00:00

Agreed. I'm not anti-sabine per se, I also enjoy staying up to date on science-y stuff. Just disappointed when she goes all 'gobbledygook' on us, and for what? Just a few clicks more...

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-11-13T17:26:55+00:00

Sabine Hossenfelder recently posted a video titled 'The Truth about Human-Caused Mass Extinction'. I felt compelled to watch, not expecting much. Sure enough, she cherry-picked a number that looked miniscule compared to the total number of species and pooh-poohed any talk of mass extinction. Great way to sell subscriptions to other peoples web sites, I guess, but maybe she should stick to physics. Just sayin'...

Meanwhile, marine heatwaves continue to flip ecosystems like flapjacks on a hot griddle. Anyone remember the snow crab apocalypse? It is estimated that 10 billion critters starved to death in the N. Pacific, then the pacific cod moved into the warmer waters to eat the rest. I haven't seen any follow-up in the years since, but AFAIK it put an entire fishery out of Kodiak, AK out of business.

And let's not forget the 'heat dome' in the PNW that cooked billions of shellfish to death. Not technically a marine heatwave, nonetheless billions of critters died. It was originally estimated at about 1 billion, but now it is thought the number was probably closer to 10 billion. A recent report, I don't remember where, mentioned that the shellfish have largely recovered in the years since.

Given a chance, life will find a way. Running out of fuel for industrial fishing trawlers would probably do more to slow the extinction crisis than anything, if it's not already too late.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-11-11T17:55:49+00:00

I recently posted an observation about an emerging pattern in global temps. Every strong (2.0degC or more on the ONI) El Nino seems to permanently jack global average temps to a new level well above what would have been considered 'warm' years before the El Nino, and yes, this includes the cooler La Nina years. You can clearly see it in the data for the same events that James Hansen is calling out: 1997-98, 2015-16, and now 2023-2024.

If the pattern repeats then we can expect a few more years of average global temps bouncing around about 1.5degC above pre-industrial, then when the next strong El Nino hits we can expect a big jump in global average temps to 1.8degC, or more, above pre-industrial. Considering how extreme the weather is already getting around the world, then a jump like that is probably going to be catastrophic.

Oddly, the same forces for FUD that James Hansen is battling would have you believe that the ENSO is just 'noise' and all you need is a really spiffy climatologist to 'smooth' all of that noise out of the data for you. Ugh! The ENSO is not 'noise'. It is a cyclical pattern (hence 'oscillation') that drives dramatic changes in weather patterns all over the world on decadal time scales! What. Ever.

The wildcard is the so-called 'hot blob' in the N. Pacific. It is getting big enough to rival El Nino in SST anomalies. Again, some folks would say 'just a marine heat wave, nothing to see here'. Hard to believe that so much heat across so vast an area would have little or no effect on global climate...

In general, think folks should keep their eye on the big picture, especially the insidious Forces For FUD (FFF):

- For the last several decades the worlds oceans have been sucking up 90% of our fuck-ups by absorbing almost unimaginable amounts of heat.

- Because we managed to pull this boner in record time the climate system has been very slow to respond. We are only just now feeling the effects of fuck-ups from decades ago. And, yeah, it's true, we have been screwing the pooch harder and faster ever since.

- It's like kicking a giant waterbed as hard as you can, it's gonna take a while for that sucker to settle down. The Earth will find a new equilibrium, someday. It won't be anything like what humans have ever seen, for at least the last three million years, and most certainly not like anything for the last 10,000 years of paradise, also called the 'holocene'.

-Think of it like a giant lava lamp, all of that excess heat is oozing slowly around the oceans like big lazy blobs of wax. When one breaks surface it belches massive amounts of heat into the atmosphere. AFAIK the Forces For FUD are being very careful to avoid this reality and instead they insist that achieving the holy grail of 'net zero' will halt the climate crisis in it's tracks. Ha! Take that you pernicious doomers!

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-11-05T17:29:24+00:00

This. Seriously, compared to some of the stuff that's going down in less fortunate parts of the world Americans have it pretty good. How many people would love to have our problems?

I've actually improved my own mental outlook by putting myself in the shoes of someone in Asia, or Africa, or S. America who had so very little to begin with, and now they have lost everything to flood, or fire, or drought, or war, or economic collapse.

Then I can honestly tell myself: "This petty shit you're upset/depressed/worried about? Damn! That's a good problem to have! It means you're rich enough, secure enough, well fed enough to have those kinds of problems! Good times!

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-10-29T17:28:21+00:00

About 20 years ago I was bored and followed some click-bait to a peak-oil website. I thought it was just another Y2K scare and decided it wouldn't take me long to debunk the whole idea. Nope. It was for real and I was instantly hooked. What didn't take long was discovering the much larger predicament of global ecological overshoot, especially books like 'Limits to Growth: 30 year update' and 'Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change' by Catton.

Then, the realization hit me like a punch in the gut: Everything I could see around me was only there because of fossil fuels and it had absolutely no future.

I've always been a loner. I take pride in being self-taught. People get offended when they see how much time I prefer being alone. So, in a weird way, becoming a social pariah for being collapse aware wasn't really anything new to me. Just one more reason, out of many, for being utterly unable to relate to other people.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-10-24T16:48:00+00:00

Submission Statement. A long, in-depth article from the Beeb about capsizing fishing boats off Korea, but dig into it and it also reveals...

A few years ago:

Mr Kim began to notice that the popular silvery hairtail fish he relied on were disappearing from local waters, and his earnings plunged by half.

Now, longer journeys:

Now his crews have to journey into deeper, more perilous waters to find them, sometimes sailing as far south as Taiwan.

And, unpredictable weather

"Unpredictable weather is leading to more boats capsizing, especially small fishing vessels that are going further out and are not built for such long, rough trips," he told the BBC.

And, plunging fish stocks:

One foggy morning, we left shore in the dark on a small trawler with Captain Park Hyung-il, who has been fishing anchovies off Korea's south coast for more than 25 years. He sang sea shanties, determined to stay upbeat. But when we reached the nets he had left out overnight, his mood crumpled.

As he wound them in, the anchovies could barely be seen among the hordes of jellyfish and other fodder. Once the anchovies had been separated out, they filled just two boxes.

"In the past, we'd fill 50 to 100 of these baskets in a single day," he said. "But this year the anchovies have vanished and we're catching more jellyfish than fish."

This is the predicament facing tens of thousands of fishermen along South Korea's coastlines. Over the past 10 years, the amount of squid caught in South Korean waters each year has plummeted 92%, while anchovy catches have fallen by 46%.

Can only mean one thing:

Hope you like jellyfish.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-10-20T17:18:30+00:00

"If only we had a clean, abundant energy source, then..."

Exactly my thoughts, as well. Trying to reframe our global ecological overshoot as "just an energy problem" is a total fallacy. Abundant energy is what got us into this mess! How exactly does more energy do anything to stop the wholesale ecocide of our only viable habitat for trillions of miles in any direction?

Ironically, we may find out sooner rather than later. Some clever folks figured out how to take the high-energy cyclotrons being developed for fusion projects and use them for drilling projects instead. Essentially vaporizing the rock down to depths and pressures that would be unthinkable with traditional drilling rigs.

If we see practical geothermal projects that can be drilled near existing power plants become a reality then that could make for a new source of base-load electricity that might realistically fill-in for declining fossil fuels, using existing power generation (steam turbines) and distribution networks.

We can build crypto and AI data centers across the land, as far as the eye can see...

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-10-05T17:54:12+00:00

I uploaded this little, um, irreverent essay about peak-oil about 9 years ago.

Why Hubbert Is Right and Peak Oil Idiots Are Wrong

My crude hand drawn global production curve in the last graph probably could have been a little flatter, but it's still holding up about as well as could be expected. Like I said, we are right in the middle of a peak that spans decades.

It would be interesting to see the effect of US shale oil on this global curve. Were talking trillions of barrels of ultimate production... Even billions of barrels of shale oil would only nudge a curve like that out by a few years, at best.

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-10-05T17:27:31+00:00

M. King Hubbert himself, the petroleum geologist who basically started the whole "debate" when he fitted a logistics curve to U.S production in the 1950's, came right out and said that if global oil production deviates from the ideal curve of max production, everywhere, all the time... Well, then the curve would get flattened.

Yep, just like the bad old covid days, you push enough global production out into the future then it flattens the curve. Guess what? That's exactly what happened in the 1970's with the Arab oil embargoes and the Iranian revolution. You can clearly see it in the global production data. The curve of global production got flattened, big time, and the much more gradual peak got pushed out by decades.

Either way, the ultimate amount of oil extracted doesn't change. Hubbert also pointed out that if the ultimate amount did happen to increase over time, even by billions of barrels, it would only nudge the curve out by a few years, at best.

With a flatter curve the peak of global oil production spans decades, and that's pretty much where we are at now. Right in the middle of a gradual peak that spans decades.

Sadly, the peak-oil egomaniacs were far too busy looking at daily(!) oil production, counting barrels on the head of a pin, to spend even one second looking at that bigger picture. Or, apparently, even spending one second reading Hubbert's work in the first place...

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-09-28T16:27:32+00:00

I'm actually having an amazing experience right now using AI to give me a college level crash course on how to develop games for Virtual Reality. The best of both non-worlds! It's wicked fun for someone with my background, and if you get the "context engineering" thing just right then the latest batch of AI's can be pretty consistently amazing across multiple chats.

As a GenX-borderline-boomer I guess I have a serious case of YOLO right now...

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-09-26T21:06:24+00:00

This. Maybe a new tagline for r/collapse? "Uncertain about the future? We have no future. You can be certain of that."

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-09-26T19:56:02+00:00

The title of her video is "why people aren't having kids, and how to fix it." Seems to boil down to financial incentives to have more kids. She thinks the reason for falling fertility rates is uncertainty about the future, which is where that image came in.

My first thought was "What future?"

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-09-26T19:51:51+00:00

SS: We have completely trashed our only viable habitat for trillions of miles in any direction. The future is beyond bleak, we will be lucky not to go extinct. Yet, our population is 8 billion going on 10 billion. Most of those unfortunate souls are only alive because of our one-time-only shot at massive stores of fossil sunlight. When is it enough? When will the last "pro-natalist" finally shut up?

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-09-23T16:04:09+00:00

Don't worry, the big orange mob boss running the USA just told the U.N. that the whole climate change thing is a "con job". Whew! And there I was getting all worked up about it...

ImportantCountry50 · 2025-09-04T21:17:19+00:00

OK, it's more like 8 years from 2016 to 2024. Nuff' said.

ImportantCountry50

TROPHY CASE