long slow infrastructure

LONG SLOW INFRASTRUCTURE
I'd like to officially register my disappointment that I didn't make the list of all time favorite survival books over at Rawles site from his recent survey. That said, a pretty good article on silver today. Before you get too excited about the increased purchasing power in silver terms however, you need to keep two things in mind. First, as he acknowledges as a topic for another day, the silver market has been manipulated recently. That means the metal should be selling a lot higher than it is. Secondly, two things are artificially keeping food prices down. Well, perhaps three if you factor in cheaper food imports. But, the basic two are factory farms and subsidized oil. Centralizing food production has artificially kept prices lower. If we had kept production decentralized our future would not be so bleak. A family farm takes care of the soil, as family future generations are handed down a legacy. Corporate farms rape the land as if it were a mine. Short term since the eighties is cheap food. Long term we all starve. And since oil made those corporate farms work, the corporations used militarily subsidized cheap oil.
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We are still on track for a smidge over eight percent oil import declines for this year. That is three years in a row, as I recently covered in my article "8%". The 70's oil shock recovery was easily solved by a flood of oil imports, from the Alaskan oil fields, the North Sea field, Russian, eventually Saudi, etc. There are no new super fields now as there were then. No new ones in forty years, and not for lack of trying. Those were the last of the clean and abundant fields. Canadian tar sands are nothing more than using natural gas to create liquid fuel for the last of Detroit's SUV's. Okay, I'll stop now with the Peak Oil. But my point is that real prices continue up because fuel supply is falling. At this moment, it isn't as bad as it could be because of centralized food and stolen oil. But that will not last much longer. Everybody wants a long slow collapse, myself included. That is actually the best possible news. But you need to plan on a quicker collapse, even as you hope for a slow one. Infrastructure will continue to suffer, and regardless of long or short collapse, localized effects could hurt you.
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Oil imports fall. Fuel prices rise. Transportation costs rise. Oil prices rising raise asphalt prices. Local governments seeing revenue free falls ( Nevada, even with gambling and mining-hindered by precious metals being held down, granted- saw tax revenue fall by 45% in a year ) can't buy as much of that more expensive asphalt and roads fall apart more. Insurance companies, already suffering from policy cancellations from vacated homes and having lost money from derivatives ( those bad boys will raise Cain until the bitter end ), now see increased claims from cars vibrating apart on poorly maintained roads. The companies use that as last straw excuse to go bankrupt and screw you out of premiums. Insurance cost rise, putting more pressure on private companies such as ambulance services ( do municipal companies have insurance? I don't know ). They jack up prices or go out of business. The city ambulance would have been on the way but they hit a rather large pothole and suffered a mechanical failure.
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Oil imports fall. Artificial fertilizer prices rise. Food goes up much faster than the twenty percent we've seen the last few years. When you only spend 10% of your budget on food, those kinds of increases are easily absorbed. Twelve percent one year, fourteen the next. You bitch, but can carry on easy enough. But after a certain period, it starts to become very noticeable. You have to start cutting back quite a bit. In time ( and remember, it starts at 20% food inflation and just gets worse ), we become Third World peasants with the real prospect of malnutrition and starvation. This is all directly traced back to oil, but remember all the other inputs also effected and thus compounding the problem. Increased inflation due to skyrocketing government costs. Credit contraction due to decades of financial bubbles tearing the system apart. Business closing because of inflation jacking up wages, no operating capital due to no credit, and all costs rising because of energy and inflation. Less jobs is less tax revenue is increased local government failure is that ambulance driver laid off even if the vehicle doesn't crash into a pothole. Or, police laid off ( Oakland, CA, recently hired a private firm at half the cost per person, but even they won't last long ), so the ambulance driver is mugged after the vehicle crashed in the pothole.
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Even before the Super Duper Depression started, emergency rooms were closing their doors due to finances. Unstated in these politically correct times, a large part of the cause was undocumented workers sucking free services. Not that I blame them. Pop a kid for free and it's a citizen! What a deal. If Mexico had been offering that, I would have been down there with a prego in one hand and a sombrero in the other. And, if you think either health care reform or global warming solutions are anything other than smoke up your ass and an increased cost to you personally, you are a zombie. A shrinking pie doesn't expand. Inflation and increased energy costs effect health care also. There will be even more uninsured, as prices skyrocket.
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Retirement? I laugh uproariously. Ha! You and your pipe dreams. Home equity? I laugh harder. Twenty million vacant houses equal falling values even as inflation takes off. And, as public services are cut back, your suburban castle is no longer tied to its life lines of fire protection, clean water, reliable sewer, grid power, etc. Your thirty grand SUV remaining on the road? Stop it, I'm splitting a side here. See the insurance companies and road repair and oil imports above. I'm not making up anything new here. I have preached to you for years to consult the bible of the future, The Great Reckoning. They only focused on finances and didn't factor in oil, but their social disintegration thesis was right on ( even if they were twenty years early ). A long slow collapse, even as it is the best case scenario, still leaves a lot to be desired.
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