I can always count on you and "your pal Stan Goff" to whack me out of my comfort zone.

I leave the US at the end of December.  [expect my posting to be very sparse from now on].

Is that sparse until you resettle, or sparse for good?

.. I wish I had enjoyed the 70's more while they lasted... lately I seriously doubt that I will live to see any better days, more likely worse and worse ones.

I think with the benefit of hindsight, in another 30 years we will come to regret not having heeded the warning signs (and dire warnings, and measured warnings) that were beginning to manifest themselves. The people who had been enjoying the 60's and 70's grew up, became sensible, and embarked on plundering instead of re-engineering society for sustainability. I cannot be responsible for political decisions made before I was 10 years old, but I have to take responsability for the political decisions made now that I'm past 30.

I can envision a soft landing without the loss of all our high tech expertise, and with the recovery of at least some (many losses are already irreversible) of the wealth of knowledge that we've been throwing away.  But it is only one of a wide range of possibilities, most of which seem more likely and less palatable.

How likely do you think a soft landing is? I would be happy with mitigation of the loss of knowledge, let alone recovery of what has been thrown away.

What scares the bejeezus out of me is the prospect of a crash that wipes out the machine-tech iron lung on which a majority of the world pop now depends utterly, without sufficient time to recover/relearn the information that was scornfully tossed aside as we embraced our dependency.

In that context I have to say half the time I feel like I have a completely useless set of skills. I absolutely need a rather sophisticated culture to function in. Subsistence farming won't cut it.

Oye, vatos, dees English sink todos mi ships, chinga sus madres, so escuche: el fleet es ahora refloated, OK? — The War Nerd