Topic: Kunstler put his foot in his mouth... (Read 1364 times)

Well said.

Methinks he nutcase.

To understand the REALITY of economic collapse, just study history of nations that have undergone economic collapse.  There are over a hundred examples in the last century.  Reality is not as Kunstler theorizes, this can be said in other words "he just makes things up."

I have had the full Wikipedia on my phones and gadgets since maybe 2006.  My first purchase of a 1gb SD card (then prices, $180usd) was to enable putting Wikipedia on my cell phone.

There are two versions I use today.

Android - Wikipock.  (~5gb) Plain Text.

Android/Iphone/Ipad/windows/os x - Kiwix.

Text with markup; correctly displays charts, some graphs and math formulas.

http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_all_languages

english - 10gb, no pics; spanish - 15 gb, with all pics, complete

Since man has a lot to do and wrote a lot of things we can consider, although I agree with some of your statements listed above ....

Same. 

That said though, he had a lot of good information in that work, and similarly in his more modern stuff.  The issue is that you need to also do your own due diligence and substantially doubt most of what he says, particularly his conclusions.  The facts on which he bases them are often reasonably accurate. 

The guy IS a bigoted, raving lunatic, and definitely no oracle.  But he's not all wrong all the time.  He is however all self-aggrandizing all the time, and he often makes timelined predictions that are pretty arbitrary.  My biggest issue with him is that he offers the geopolitical equivalent of a Nine Inch Nails song - all problems, rarely any functional solutions.  I am very much for community gardens, self-sufficiency, etc.   Yet, the option of regressing from all modern society now and rolling back the clocks to 18th century tech and semi-feudal "villages" with oracles like Kunstler for leaders in order to stave off one of his many possible doomsday scenarios is strangely unappealing to me.

If you have to read just one thing from him, I recommend hist monthly post "the eyesore of the month".  Great stuff  

I didn't claim that he was some kind of oracle.  You have the right to disagree, and to be wrong in any other number of ways.

I disagree.  I read Kunster from 2003 - 2005.  Conclusion:  He's a bigoted buffoon.

If you have time, go read his material from that period proclaiming how we would all be burning our furniture to stay warm and eating our cats within two years due to Global Warming and Peak Oil.

I have a large kindle library, and one of the very first books I put on there I hope never to have to use: a survival manual.

Kunstler is one of those interesting cross-over channels between Libertarians (apparently) and whatever I am.  I've read and enjoyed his stuff in the past, but I don't feel like doing so right this moment.  I would not have been surprised if his take on Bitcoin was either positive or negative.

Yes, I do; and much more.  No, 10 watts per person isn't enough to maintain anything near current standards.  It is enough to maintain current standards for 10K+ households, however.  Alternatively, it's enough to keep a million cell phones charged and the local infrastructure running.  More likely, however; one quarter that number of cell phones and refrigeration for foodstuff is where the dust settles.  Communications and hygiene are two high priorities for our society, and there is no form of mass communication more effective than the Internet.  People will make special efforts to make sure that their cell phones work and the refrigerator is cold.  Which of those two things is more important depends upon the generation of the person you are asking, but there is no doubt that those two are most important.  In places where the flow of water requires power input, that would be high on the list of priorities for rationed hydropower as well, but in the long run people simply move out of such areas.  In addition to the hydroplant, Louisville also sits right on top of the largest self-replenishing aquifier in the United States, and it covers more than the county.  As I sit here at home, the water table is no more than 26' below the grass, which is why I can't have a basement.  I have considered, in the past, buying a driven wellpoint and a hand operated well pump just to keep around should I ever need it, but I have never gotten around to it.

EDIT:  My kindle uses a tenth the power that my android cell phone uses, and both can run for a long time with their transceivers off.  Did you know that there are apps that permit you to download the most commonly accessed Wikipedia articles in English, and save them to your phone for offline use?  And the long term educational and survival value of an e-ink based e-reader cannot be overstated.  Literally a one-pound library that can be maintained with a 2.5 watt solar cell, and still not take too much sun time to prevent you from charging your other devices.

Ten megawatts for a million people?  Got your candles ready?

"Collapse" is in the eye of the beholder anyway.  There is a minority of peoples and sub-cultures in the United States that Kunstler's version of collapse would have near zero effect upon anyway.  And there is a much larger sub-set of the population that collapse would have relatively minor effects upon.  The city of Louisville, Kentucky (where I grew up) is a city of just about one million people with it's own 10 Megawatt hydroelectric plant less than a mile from the downtown district.  Some sub-cultures and some locales are better suited for the coming "collapse" than others.

Kunstler is basically the guy I think of who is so close to getting it, but for some reason just doesn't.  I think this is because everything he says is New York-centric, he can't step out of that mindset, and New York is going to eat it, hard, from economic collapse.


Let's put it this way:  Civilizations with firearms won't regress to the state of having no electricity.


Ugh.

Ironically, Bitcoin has only one major exchange because regulations promoted by a bunch of New York bankers prevent a US based competitor from arising, for now.  Bitcoin would benefit from collapse.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/smack-down-time.html

Normally, this guy is very intuitive.  But apparently all of the media hype about Bitcoin came at him, and he felt the need to comment on it without his usual due diligence.  I've been trying to comment about that on this blog since Monday, but I just can't manage it for whatever reason.  Maybe I'm banned, but it doesn't say that.  Let's see if some of you guys can manage it.  Amazingly, none of the regular commentors ever came around to challenging his take on Bitcoin.

Do what you will, gentleman; but remember that this guy is an another fellow traveler despite his lack of understanding.