Another glimpse into the Abyss

This rather crude but informative video gives another view of the magnitude of what's happening. Remember we in Australia are but a flea on the back of this dog:

Why Foster? Why South Gippsland?

The fundamental choice I made about how my life was to be ordered was my decision to make attachment to place a priority over following a career. By making such a choice a very different set of values then follow from the ones dictated by climbing the slippery pole of career ambition. This is not to say that I haven't had any sort of career. I have, but it's been bounded and limited by a higher loyalty. I do what I need to do to live in this place, although sometimes that has involved working in other places for a while, such as in Indonesia and Thailand in order to set myself up financially, or Melbourne in the eighties when I needed more social stimulus.

By making such a fundamental choice, one's life is greatly simplified. It's easy to work out what your subsidiary values are. Because you will spend a long period of time in a local community, the kinds of artificial aids one needs to bolster one's prestige in a larger and more abstract social milieu aren't needed. What's the point of a prestige car when for better or worse, everyone knows what kind of person you are anyway? And in any case, the flash car doesn't look flash for long once your wife starts carting her goats around in the back.

Office and career politics can be a thorny issue in any job, but if everything doesn't hinge on it and you were only in it for the money and a bit of fun in the first place, if you fall off the slippery pole, it's no longer a shattering tragedy.

Of course communities can be toxic too, or just plain unlucky. It pays to back winners in this life. It may be admirable to devote your life to helping lepers in Burma, but it's not likely to be a great place to bring up the kids and you can forget the notion of participation as a full citizen in national life. Even in this wide brown land, there are places I personally would give a wide berth to. What's the point of being president of the Wittenoom Progress Association? In the same way and with the broadest and crudest brush-strokes, I would not consider anywhere inland of the Great Dividing Range. Too dry, too vulnerable to climate change and almost always too vulnerable to changes in single economic variables (export agricultural products for starters are exposed to market fluctuations, climate variations and land degradation through irrigation and dry land salinity).

I've got nothing against city or suburban living per se. There are vibrant and sustainable communities in cities and big towns, and the larger and more diverse a place is, the more reslient it is likely to be in the face of the changes which are now upon us. So small communities like Foster are liable to be less viable and more vulnerable than bigger ones.

But I'm used to living here, I've lived in a diversity of other places and looking at it with a cold objective eye it's got a lot going for it. And that's what you need: a cold clear look at the frying pan you're leaping from into which fire? What follows is Lloydy's rough guide to thinking about this sort of decision.

Sea or Tree Change? Nothing wrong with either, but think carefully about where you’re moving to. No low lying coastal properties! And if you’re thinking about a move to the tropics, consider how you’d go without air-conditioning, and the likelihood of extreme weather events such as cyclones.

Again, consider location before all else! What are you really after? Is what you’re seeking a realistic vision which you know will work, or is it just a remnant of a fantasy you had while trapped in the cube farm? You remember that weekend you and your wife had in the cabin tucked away in a rain forest a couple of years ago – that’s what you want! Whoa buddy! No it isn’t! In the end, there is a common human pattern which governs the good life. We need food, shelter, love and companionship, meaningful work and community. You move into your cabin in the woods and what happens? You’d forgotten about the mosquitoes, the leeches. You run out of firewood in the middle of a week of solid rain. Your wife gets run off the road by a logging truck and becomes too traumatised to drive herself anywhere. You find in winter you’re driving into town in the dark and home in the dark, dodging wallabies and wombats, not very successfully, and in eighteen months, the gravel roads hammer your gorgeous little European car to death. There are only two crappy TV stations. After your house warming party, you don’t see anyone for months at a time, until Christmas, when all your old friends turn up with their surly teenagers and have a holiday for free. You discover your close neighbours, who you made a big effort to befriend when you first arrived, are barking mad. They borrow your tools and never return them, and you find yourself having vague and troubling conversations with them at the mailbox involving long running feuds, guns and dark marital secrets. And all this is assuming the price of fuel still makes driving hundreds of kilometres a month, in and out of town, affordable!

Live in or very close to a town. Assume at some stage that you will need to do without a car at all. Choose your town with care. It should have a diverse population, with reasonable medical services and other professionals, and not be overly dependant on one crop or industry. Is it dependant on irrigation which may fail? Don’t live in a place surrounded by tall trees unless you want to spend every summer terrified by the smell of smoke. Don’t be sucked in by charming old buildings. And don’t buy low lying properties on the coast. Remember? Global Warming? Sea level rise? Long before the waves wash over your mansion on the beach at Mollymook, its value will have collapsed through sheer fear of sea level rise. You won’t be able to get insurance on it either. Be sensible!

Look at the people. Try and gauge their feelings about the place. Is it ruled on Saturday nights by gangs of drunken louts in noisy cars, looking for someone to fight? Get the local paper and look at the police reports. What sorts of crime get reported weekly? If it’s just lost wallets and speeding fines, with the odd break in of sheds on remote properties, it should be OK. Is the shopping centre full of a lot of empty shops? Look at the demeanour of the people you see in the street. Do you see lots of people in conversation on busy days with smiles on their faces? Are the young people friendly or surly? Remember everywhere has its oddballs, so don’t focus too much on them.

Talk to school teachers if you have children who’ll be going to local schools. You may be lovely cultured people, but the wrong crowd in a small town can destroy your kid’s lives, or force you to send them to boarding school. On the other hand, the right crowd will give them a confidence, straightforwardness, lack of cynicism and ability to mix with all types which they would never get in the City. They will be big fish in a small pond, and get the kind of attention to their education which you’d need to pay serious money for anywhere else. I know some remarkable groups of people who’ve grown up together in country towns and who’ve gone on to adult life staying in close touch with each other and doing great things, in particular a bunch of people from Mallacoota in East Gippsland who I’ve worked with on many diverse projects over twenty years, and who’ve become musicians, builders, writers and film industry professionals, and with whom you could trust your life.

So you decide to make your move. You find the ideal house, you have work lined up. Good. Now you need to get some tradesmen in to do some work and you’ve struck your first problem. It takes forever to get the builder/plumber/electrician. And beware of someone who’s too available. The good tradies are always booked well ahead.

Now you will be starting to measure your dreams against the reality. Just don’t forget the locals will be doing the same to you. Everyone is very friendly, but it all comes down to one thing. Are you a good payer? If you want to discover whether it’s possible for something to travel faster than the speed of light, mess a local tradesman around over money. Every other local tradie will know instantly and they’ll never return any of your calls. Oh, they’ll nod politely to you in the street and make vague noises about coming over sometime, but you’d better call someone from out of town if you want the job done in this lifetime.

This is the reality of life in a small community. Every act outside your front door is public act, and there are no private conversations. The small acts of kindness and patience will be noticed, and so will every insult and act of deviousness. Don’t run the person you bought the business from down in conversation with your customers. Let them do that, after all, it was their brother/uncle/ daughter in law. Treat everyone with equal respect and decency and you’ll gain a reputation as a good person and it wont do you any harm.

Everyone knows who the local dope dealer is, and who made a move on the teenage baby-sitter. In the town I grew up in people still spoke of a scandalous pregnancy resulting in a broken engagement which had taken place sixty years before.

The upside is that when disaster strikes, like a serious illness, or your house burning down, the community will get behind to help in a way that will astonish you.

Where the banks have gone (down the gurgler)

Here's a nice graphic which shows what has happened to the worth of the big international banks:

A picture is worth a thousand words...

There's a good graphic illustration of the debt problem over at Global Guerrillas. It's easy to see why the current financial arrangements can't go on.

A must-read!

An excellent essay (which I got onto via Ran Prieur) on why the current policies to combat the recession world-wide are doomed to fail, because the system they are designed to protect is finished: unsustainable. And then the essay goes on to give a very clear picture of what will replace the current system. No surprises here: it will be networked small business!

Our level of pain and suffering before we emerge on the other side of this disaster will be governed by extent to which resources are poured in to try and keep the current system of centralised capital-intensive large-scale production and distribution going. In other words, the more completely governments commit to subsidising the current system, the more complete and devastating the crash will be when it fails, because the alternative will not have had a chance to grow and take up the slack.

Enough of my talk. Read the essay (pdf warning!). It's long but every paragraph is a revelation. The fact is that hardly any of us understand the economic world we are living in, and those of us who do, don't know much. Read this essay and you will have elevated yourself to near genius level!

I'm adding something here after my original post: I think he does somewhat over-romanticise the life of the small manufacturer. Having been one myself for many years, worked my butt off and gone broke, it's necessary to point out here that every way of life has its own joys and sorrows. In small business, the learning curve is steep and it can be long. And to quote Tom Wolf, it can blow at any seam!

But whatever it is, it ain't boring. And we don't have a choice here, in the end. Unless we are prepared to go to some sort of neo-Feudal system. Or have it forced on us. I'll be publishing a novel dealing with a lot of these issues on this site some time in the next couple of months. It's set towards the end of this century, and while it's basically an entertainment I'm teasing out a few ideas in it about how a very different world could arise from elements which are present right now. Cheers!

Care

How much of our world do we really care about? What could be gone tomorrow without causing us any pain (putting aside anything that we currently depend on to make a living). I drove through Melbourne yesterday, and had to make a big arc from the inner suburbs through the arid north-west along the Western Ring Road, then to a few stops in West Footscray, then to Spotswood on the banks of the river, then to Yarraville and into the city along New Footscray Road and Docklands, and then to Dandenong and Lynbrook in the far south-east before the two hour drive back to Foster.

So much of Melbourne, new Melbourne, built since nineteen-fifty and especially since nineteen-ninety is just plain awful. Docklands is a miserably ugly and pathetic joke and its apartment buildings monuments to greed, social isolation and a culture that needs to spend as much time as possible looking at entertainment on screens to avoid seeing where and how it actually lives. The new and incredibly expensive ferris wheel there has all the aesthetic appeal of a safety cover on a drain, only on a grotesque scale. It gives its riders a wonderful view of what can only be described as the most inhuman unlovely semi-industrial landscape that the devil himself could have devised in co-operation with Australia's finest property developers, civil engineers, thuggish politicians, ethics-free architects, planners and an army of concretors, scaffolders, crane drivers and plumbers whose last aesthetic impulses had been beaten out of them at primary school or through a steady diet of crap TV and junk food. And it's all cost an absolutely staggering amount of money: ie lifetimes of work and natural resources. And how many people give a damn about any of it, would feel it carries great spiritual meaning for them? Not too many I would be sure. And how much will be of any utility at all without lashings of cheap fuel? Hah!

Many parts of Melbourne, generally those built before eighteen-ninety, are beautiful. And people feel strongly about them and will fight to preserve them. Yes I know there were lots of unlovely inner suburbs which might be full of madly-renovating young professionals now, but which were pretty much unloved until the seventies. Tastes change. But who will give a damn now or in the future if Jeff's Shed, or Dockland Stadium, or the Bolte Bridge, or any of the huge retail complexes in the City, or the nightmarish ones at Southland or Chadstone, Knox or Northland were to be demolished.

I see pretty much eye-to-eye with Jim Kunstler when it comes to modern architecture and the tragedy of suburban sprawl. None of us will care enough to save it when its hour comes, and that hour is soon. Then the best that will be said about it is that it will serve as a convenient mine of building materials for the generations, much diminished I fear from our present swollen numbers, who will come after us.

From Mish: Social Mood Will Define The Future

Boomers have known only inflationary or reflationary conditions for most, if not all of their conscious lives. Here is the pattern: Want, work, borrow, spend, enjoy, and worry about the bills tomorrow, as if tomorrow would never come.

Now tomorrow is dawning, the bills are due, and boomers are now entering end of life with a need to consume what they perceived would be a treasure chest of accumulated wealth that would allow them to sustain their inflationary lifestyles to life's end.

However, that wealth has now vanished in a giant deflationary two-step of collapsing home prices and a collapsing stock market. Note that those are symptoms of deflation not proof of it.

However, 15 out of 15 things one might expect to see happen during deflation are happening now, as detailed in Humpty Dumpty on Inflation.

Material living standards and associated expectations among even the lower working class and poor in the western nations have been raised to levels that will not likely be maintained during a secular deflationary crisis, let alone permit the lifestyles of the upper working class, professional middle class, and wealthy to remain intact.

A good post from Mish and a must read for those of us running a business. Check it out.

Trust

Just because something can't be measured doesn't mean it's not vital. I'm going to talk about trust, for which there is no unit of measurement. But like the air we breath, trust is usually most noticeable when it is absent. We have just been through a long period where trust has been present at many different levels in our society in sufficient strength to allow very elaborate and abstract structures to arise. Now we are passing out of that epoch, and this will force us into different set of social arrangements. How thoroughgoing this change will be and how pleasant or unpleasant life will be afterwards depends to a large extent upon which parts of our society experience a loss of trust and how deep this loss goes.

At the moment the world financial system is suffering a credit crisis. The word credit comes from the Latin credere, whose meanings include to believe, confide and entrust. Because banks don't trust each other or any institutions holding assets of doubtful value, the free flow of finance which is essential for big business and world trade has dried up. The banks don't trust each other because each knows of its own dire capitalisation problems due to holding doubtful assets. How has this problem of doubtful assets arisen? Because the people giving loans thought they could avoid the risk of defaulting debtors by passing the loan on and simply skimming a commission for setting up the loan. The economists and advisors from rating agencies who oversaw the trade in these loans made major errors of judgement: in other words, they were trusted and that trust has turned out to be misplaced. So we now have a loss of trust in the banks and in the experts who advise banks and other institutions. Talking of which, here's Shaun Micallef's interview with Tony Froth of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

But loss of trust in and between banks is just part of a general loss of trust in many of the higher levels of our system. The Chinese milk contamination scandal might be dismissed as symptomatic of a system which hides its endemic corruption, but what about the ramming of GM foods down the throats of consumers in Australia in the face of widespread public disquiet about the safety of GM products, where GM advocates so often engage in ad hominem attacks instead of addressing public's legitimate concerns? And when it comes to sources of objective information, more journalists are employed in public relations now than in conventional news outlets, which in any case are dominated world-wide by a few major players such as our Rupert, who are very obviously playing political games of their own.

At a personal level, many of us have had unpleasant experiences dealing with large institutions in everyday life. Dealing with our two largest phone providers is a case in point. Whatever the personal virtues of the human being one deals with over the phone, you know that they are prisoners of an amoral, sociopathic corporate culture which has as it's raison d'être the provision of the least possible service for the maximum possible return and powerful players in this corporate culture will use whatever resources are at their disposal to bend the public and legislators to their will.

And speaking of legislators, what about John Winston Howard, Australia's former Prime Minister, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from outgoing President Bush? When reality gives us such theatre, no place is left for satire. But it also an excellent example of how the currency of trust has become debased at the political level. Two of the architects of a failed aggressive war which was launched on lying premises and who have each worked assiduously to undermine basic democratic freedoms in their respective countries in a quest for untrammelled power play a cynical game of mutual congratulation. Each leaves a legacy of weakened respect for the institutions of which they were a part. My attitude to Kevin Rudd, John Howard's successor as Prime Minister is held by many of my friends who voted for him, which is we hold little real hope for him doing any good, just as long as he is not as bad as Howard. And as for President Bush, his legacy is likely to be a greatly diminished respect for the Presidency which will translate into an important loss of legitimacy and power for successive presidents.

Loss of trust in the financial industry, in big business and in politics are necessary precursors for collapses in these systems. If the collapse is not to go further it is necessary that we act in ethical and moral ways in community, family and personal life. To the extent that we have become ensnared in immoral or unethical conduct in the pursuit of a career, we are complicit in the collapse of the current system at a higher level. But societies can survive and rebuild after collapses in the economy and in political systems. They cannot survive a corrupted community, family and personal life.

Hammering the economists

Sorry, I just can't let it rest. I know the recession hasn't really started to bite here but it will. Then we will wonder why we weren't warned earlier — a lot earlier. Economic commentators are one thing — I know some people might find this disturbing but very often commentators are just pimps for the industry, or naive, wild-eyed boosters. But economists, professionals advising banks and governments, should have a handle on the real world. And have they? IMHO with very few exceptions, no. This is shown by the chorus those who want to stimulate us out of the recession ie. shovel more coal into the Titanic's boiler after it's hit the iceberg.

Anyway there's an interesting article at Naked Capitalism discussing the teflon conscience of the economics profession.

"...that elusive American dream of having a country, rather than a country club..."

Ah, Dmitri Orlov! Even when he rambles he raises a laugh. Plus I love it when he lashes the economists (luckily I don't have any in my family: Christmas would be very difficult!)

"...and then there are the additional problems of poor advice and lack of authority. To build support for his plans, Mr. Obama must rely on the consensus advice of mainstream American economists. These astrologers to the wealthy, with their fancy astrolabes they call "models," may be popular during flush times, in spite of the feeble predictive abilities of their "science," but they start to seem down right foolish and feckless once the economy starts to implode. Still, these pseudo-scientists, with their pseudo-Nobel prizes and their tenured faculty positions, are quite entrenched, and will be difficult to dismiss, because the fiction they spin is so much more cheerful than the physical reality it is designed to obscure.

Add to this the fact that the financial and economic levers ofcontrol that are available to Mr.Obama are no longer connected to anything real..."