This is directed at investors. I was wondering why Rick cares about peak oil. He had said that some of his family were stuck in the situation of driving too far to go to a job, and not being able to afford the high prices of gas, while also being in debt for all the usual things, if I understand correctly - college, car, house, and whatever else. So that is one reason why peak oil is important to him, because he knows people who are in danger partly from the high gas prices, as even if they go bankrupt, they still might get their wages garnished when the government collects their college debt from them.
I'm resisting the urge to go to the forum and talk to him again. I did send an email and am not sure whether to believe him when he says that he is filtering his email (the way I described) so that he doesn't see my letters. For now I'm respecting his space, but this is temporary: it will last until I have another 'crazy attack' or am forced to do something when 'they' give me the idea to do it. It is a fragile space that will quickly vanish as soon as I get the irresistible urge to contact him and get a response from him again. So for now, I'm just telling myself that he wants to talk about peak oil and be left alone, and he wants to talk about it for his own reasons that are meaningful to him, and he wants to talk about it with other people who mostly agree, and some who disagree, but who aren't directly, persistently attacking the ideas in an aggressive way. When I see that he's posted another reply to the thread and it's this link to Jeremy Grantham, it gives me the urge to respond to it; I can see from reading the little bit of this that I've seen so far, it's almost exactly the classic argument that Julian Simon was talking about.
I could actually go through this pdf file and comment about various ideas that I recognize, but I feel that my point of view is not really valued or needed, and I also feel that it sort of doesn't matter, in a way. I love his lifestyle choices even if I disagree with some of his reasons or justifications for doing them. I just have to tell myself that he's going to the forum and talking to everyone else on earth except me, and it's not about me and has nothing to do with me. (As I said above, this is a tense and fragile state of mind which would crumble instantly if anything happened to urge me to get a response from him again. I don't know what or when, but I'll be bothering him again sometime.)
Every word that Jeremy Grantham writes is pushing the Julian Simon recognition button. 'Carrying capacity?' 'Malthus?' This was all covered in the book.
If I am right in this assumption, then when our fi nite resources are on their downward slope,
the hydrocarbon-fed population will be left far above its sustainable level; that is, far beyond the Earth’s carrying
capacity. How we deal with this unsustainable surge in demand and not just “peak oil,” but “peak everything,” is
going to be the greatest challenge facing our species. But whether we rise to the occasion or not, there will be some
great fortunes made along the way in fi nite resources and resource effi ciency, and it would be sensible to participate.
Whoa, bad formatting. I copied it from a pdf file. Anyway I had a sort of obnoxious or sarcastic response to this, which was a joke, but I've decided that my jokes are usually not funny, but the idea was, if we're all going to get rich by investing in finite resources, where will we find the paper to print all our money? Not that that's helpful or that it changes anyone's mind.
There's something that happens to me when I am reading a lot about money and gold and silver. I get very excited and I feel as though I'm with a group of people who are all feeling the same thing. It's a sense of camaraderie that I can't get anywhere else. There is that same feeling of 'all of us together, watching the world collapse.' We are all wondering when this or that big change or disaster will happen. But I don't get that from peak oil, I get it from reading the comments in the forum at kitco.com and other places (where I've never posted, I just lurk).
And I might have learned while reading Antal Fekete during the time period in 2008 when we were having the real estate bubble collapse. Some of the things he was predicting didn't happen. I get the impression from that that the government finds a way to patch together their corrupt systems more easily than we might wish. It adds to my belief that this is a fantasy, wishful thinking - that we WISH the world would fall apart and the bad people would lose their power. But it doesn't happen very easily. (I'm typing on a library computer, so this is more awkward than usual, as I keep forgetting what I was about to say when I get distracted by the people around me, and I've been having some mild drug reactions that are making my short term memory malfunction.)
The concept of 'sudden collapse' is another mistaken idea in this. There is this belief that humans behave like bacteria. Supposedly when you have a whole bunch of bacteria in a little container, they will eat up all the food and then suddenly die all at once. People took this image and wrongly applied it to human beings.
People do not move mindlessly and automatically. They make choices.
I'm not fighting this with much effort, I'm just noting a few things while I read. I didn't care that much about peak oil anyway. It was just something to talk about with a particular person who gave me the opportunity to talk about that by writing in a forum. If he would answer my emails, I wouldn't need to talk in the forum.
I skimmed the rest of the pdf but don't have time to look at it thoroughly, as I have to go eat something and then get ready for work.
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This morning when I woke up, they were talking through something with me - imagine either an individual, or a group of people, with the LSI spirit, who felt that rules as such were the ultimate good, and the way to enforce them was by using physical force, and that all other needs were to be subordinated to rules, that all other functions (this was all a 'socionics' thought process) were less important than the rules. And imagine this person or group was using electronic mind control weapons and systems on the entire world. Or else, using it on particular individuals, but not everybody.
I always want to warn people, when I talk about this, that I DON'T mean we live inside a holographic computer-generated 'matrix' system which is completely fake. I also DON'T mean we live in an Inception-style dream that we have to wake up from. It is more mundane than that. We live in the real physical world, but we are being attacked and controlled by weapons and systems, some of which are actually not very high-tech or advanced. Some of the systems are actually old, familiar systems that have other purposes - for instance, one of my theories to describe what I experience is, I think that cell phone towers are broadcasting a signal that is disturbing to human beings, and it causes a feeling of background noise, everywhere we go. It may or may not be intentionally done. But it doesn't have to be super-secret ultra-advanced technology to get results. I'm about to leave so I won't go into detail, but I'd recommend googling 'electromagnetic sensitivity' for information about how electromagnetic fields interact with people. I'll talk about it later...
Anyway, they were saying, what would it be like to live in that world where someone felt that rules-as-such were the ultimate good, and everything else must be subordinated to that?
The idea, this morning, was: give them a better set of rules to follow.
I do have to go now. I feel somewhat optimistic as I will be working on the bookkeeper job thing next week, going through a bunch of receipts and figuring out what's tax deductible. I'll be learning about his filing system. I'll find out whether or not I have a bad reaction to his herbicides and anything else he might possibly have in the house that he's using for the lawnmowing and landscaping. But I'm not going to his house just yet, we're just meeting at the library first.
Yeah, the Rick obsession is still there. I'm just not having a severe enough drug reaction to prompt me to 'overstep my bounds' in any way as I had done before with the emails and the forum and comments.
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