Ha. When I first started to read Peak Oil websites and blogs I noticed that gold bug ads figured prominently. And speaking of survivalists, a few days ago I had to laugh. A lawyer named Matt Savinar jumped on the peak oil bus early. His website, Life After the Oil Crash, was publicly endorsed by Roscoe Bartlett, the conservative Republican representative from MD who has spoken out about Peak Oil over the last decade. Savinar peddled survivalist books, reposted the most dire of articles, and ran a LATOC discussion board. From time to time he would drop hints that he was preparing to move to a safe place before THSHTF. A few weeks ago he posted notices that he will no longer be updating the site.

Now, The Oil Drum has also begun changes to their site, refocussing on energy issues, but Savinar took an entirely new tack:

Last Friday's update will be the final LATOC Breaking News update. LATOC will remain as an archived resource here on the web but will no longer be updated. I'm moving on to focus on my astrological and related practices. Those of you who have asked about consultations, my standard rate is $200 for a full anaylsis of your chart in MS Word format.

Destor, you surely have given one something to chew upon today.  The first part of the blog does remind me of the situation in the logging industry.  One of the constant refrains one would hear in the attempt to prevent clearcutting and move to a more sustainable method of timber extraction was that we treehuggers were costing them their jobs.  And it was true there was a decreasing amounts of timber jobs (this was up in British Columbia).  But the "funny" thing was more timber was being extracted than in the past.  The problem was  that the timber industry was becoming more and more mechanized.  Fewer and fewer workers were needed to take down more and more trees.

Then you added that the raw timber was being exported by the multinational corporations overseas (to Asis in our case) where it was processed and value added (turned into furniture, etc).  Then that was turned around and sent back to the land of timber to be sold.  We can all see how that system was going to last very long, since there were fewer and fewer people who could afford to by the furniture. 

As British Columbia and its counterpart in the Pacific Northwest also showed, just because one wants to switch gears (we used to cut trees now lets do some other trade) through job retraining etc., it isn't that easy.  One of the things the efforts in the post-spotted owl days in the Pacific Northwest showed, even if one still buys into the whole "work" thing, a lot of people are intensely resistant to switching the kind of labor that they have grown accustomed to. 

Which kind of leads me to the rest of your blog. The facet that is kind of lurking there beneath it all is that people incorporate their labor, their work, what they "do" into their self-identity.  Any attempts to confront people's conceptions and understanding of labor inevitably leads to the necessity of confronting their concept of self, which is by extension, also confronting their understanding of the world around them. 

One last tidbit: Pew Research just came out with their latest poll on people's view of creationism and evolution. According to the results, about 4 out 10 people believe in a strict intepretation of creationism (i.e. the world is about 10,000 years old).  I have to wonder culturally speaking to what extent this particular worldview has in terms of an individual's relationship to employer (i.e. the one higher up on the hierarchy).

So bring on the robots so that more of us can be poets and sculptors!  Thing is, you have to share the productivity gains broadly for that to happen.

Yes, it's just that last part...the part about sharing productivity gains broadly that is one of the rubs with this scenario.  Because last time I checked, you have to earn money to pay for stuff, no one gives you leisure or the stuff you need just because the technology to produce it exists. 

There is a baffling loopiness to the way of thinking that says if we just invent robots to do the scut work humans don't want to do or should not do because it's too dangerous, we can all do art, hang out, etc.  I participated in an amazon exchange on this with a reviewer, one Julian Jaynes, of the Martin Ford book The Lights in the Tunnel (until I checked out of the thread because I wasn't interested in continuing a conversation with Jaynes because he was acting like a dick): http://www.amazon.com/review/R2RUPE1NWMF3FV/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1448659817&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode= 

Random thoughts: I thought it was you, Destor, who said not long ago that people like to work, an like factory jobs; and many, in fact, take pride in making things.  I think so, too, as long as the conditions are good, the pay is good, and the benefits are good.

Robots and other machines: Kimmel did a funny piece the other night (that's what I was looking for when I saw the Obama/robot piece) on the Chinese having developed a Service Robot: Just what the Chinese need with eleventy-billion people needing work.  More machines: loads of the stimulus money (the part that wasn't the 40% in tax breaks) went to machines.  Especially highway resurfacing and construction.  Now many said those were the only 'shovel ready projects' the administration could find after claiming there were loads of them ready, but you can't forget what a machine actually costs to do those jobs.  George Will's quote of Friedman or someone watching some of the workers with picks and shovels on WPA projects was: "Why don't you give them spoons to use?" showed the same arrogance and disdain for human work, which back then was considered 'honorable work'.  But we're supposed to howl along with George.

But machines have plenty of hidden costs beyond the original price, and we need to be rigorous comparing kinds of work and costs.  We can scoff at manual labor, and then pay dearly for wonderfully made, artisan goods that are made by hand, but well. Maybe we just started making schlock, functional but ugly crap that has zero life, and isn't worth repairing.  Which is a whole 'nother problem: importing unsafe plastic crap, or inferior crap which we throw away soon, and it becomes a huge problem for landfills and the oceans.  You know: that foating island of debris, circling around the Pacific Ocean?  Leaching hydrocarbons and killing every plant and animal life form it coats with its devilish liquid slime?

Meade: is stuff sounds a lot like the push the Clintonistas pushed when defending NAFTA: sure, tons of US workers will lose their jobs, but we'll retrain you!  then those new jobs were off-shored; more re-training, except less the second time, then the third, until some workers were too old to bec considered 'worth retraining'.   Talk about losing 'honor'.  They called it 'creative destruction', and it may have worked for some, but it's a lot easier to buy on paper, or intellectuallize than put into practice. 

Emma laughed about new ideas of progressives; well, just to name a few that would be very viable industries are retro-fitting office towers to green standards; tax breaks for building office towers or apartments that require almost zero energy, using the sun, and circulating water through the buildings to heat and cool them: the models already exist.  Painting roof-tops white: great for low-skilled labor, and energy saving.  Rail, especially high speed for metro areas.  Yet we build highways.  It's crazy.  More machines, more macadem to soak up heat in summer, more fossil fuels to run cars, which of course, has been the point all along: keeping our fossil fuel dependence from Carter to the still -secret Cheney energy task force.  and our friendship and weapons-system gifts to Saudi Arabia: control the price and flow of oil to keep it cheap enough we don't have the will to go to alternatives with any big push.  Very little ever accomplished with CAFE standards: same reasons, yet they tell us it;s the auto manufacturers balking at it.  Now would be a fine time for them,, yes?

I hope some seious people consider Meade's actual proposals when he publishes them--and not the Tom Friedmans of the world.

One more thing on factory alternatives: remember the early attempts at employee-owned factories and businesses?  There've been some successes; does anyone know why there aren't more? Too much employee turnover or something?  They couldn't compete with foreign products and Walmart discount purchasing?  Speaking of which: there seems to be no will to make Big Box Stores really be fair to employees: they kkep people working at just few enough hours to receive benefits.  What crap.

Anyway: one rant down.  ;o)  Interesting subject, Destor.

Yes, definitely. It was Star Trek and other sci-fi stories that led to my ruination as a card-carrying capitalist drone. I say ruination because the daily grind really grinds when you realize how pernicious the prevailing worldview truly is; when you cannot even question any aspect of it without being demonized and dismissed as a commie socialist. Questioning the prevailing economic theories and interpretation of capitalism is heresy but I do it anyway. I am very, very lonely. :-)

I live in a red state and work(ed) in finance where it is difficult to find anyone like-minded. It has been almost as hard looking left online. Pre-2008 financial meltdown, so many progressives identified themselves as fiscally-conservative social progressives and almost all ran screaming from the liberal label. We are or were too comfortable econmically. Like passengers on the Titanic, never imagining the ship might sink.

As painful as the financial crisis may end up being, maybe there will be a silver lining if enough are shaken out of their economic rut.

More to come (hopefully).

I've never been able to find it again but I recall reading a Woodrow Wilson address where he basically apologized for not having the means to spare people from having to work for a living.  Can you imagine a president saying anything like that today?

No. One of America's most prominent commentators already spends most of his time bleating on about Wilson being the devil incarnate.