I'm finding this discussion fascinating and am in the middle of reading the above article. However, I stopped and burst out laughing when I read this line.....

"So, we need something more graphical, easier to understand, especially if we have to show these things to politicians."

Now back to the article. LOL....

Edit: Oh! There is this a little further......

"There remains a problem with politicians. Their attention span is more of the order of thirty seconds or less. But that is another problem." Just too funny.

Ironically, the nail in the coffin of the Roman Empire came when they allowed hordes of refugees to settle in the Italian peninsula. When promised handouts were regarded as unsatisfactory, said refugees overran Rome, took what they wanted, and effectively killed the Roman goose that had been laying the golden eggs they had been subsisting on. The U.S. seems to be headed the same direction. Multiculturalism is a fatal disease.

I do think all should just accept the simple fact that our country, way of life is as it has been for quite some time is being destroyed and those in power will not ever step down. They are the lemmings leading the pack over the edge. It is and has been very obvious that they just don't get it nor do they want too. It makes no difference to them that a major part of the population is supporting trump as a show of defiance against the establishment. I unfortunately can see h winning because the d machine would never attempt to support a candidate that might be different. You can suggest all the potential cures you want but we are ailing so bad that nothing can cure it.

Mike:

I have always thought that the ability to place into their proper context, when "filling in" the endless "blanks-of-knowledge" in the crossword puzzle of life, to be the hallmark of both intelligence and wisdom.

The failure to properly do so precipitates a perspective that, by endless variability, produces a mental reality that invariably is proven to be "out-of-context."

As a personal example of this, I have concluded that had I been alive in 1933, with the knowledge and values I possessed just a few years ago, I would have concluded, in response to FDR's "gold raid" of 1933, that it (the country) would be quickly(??) finished!

Another example is the very idea of "peak oil" itself. While is it certain that there is a finite amount of hydrocarbons to be found in the earth's crust, the proper context to understand such a postulate, as a practical matter, is determined by Science, Economics, and Politics.

Knowledge is, of course, always primary, but all knowledge is contextual. Reason is, after all, Man's only absolute.

I with Merlin';s insight would simply tell Marcus Aurelius: "Step down from your throne and restore the republic from the dark side. Cut spending along with taxes and allow free trade to go to work unfettered."
Then I would run and hide to avoid crucifixion.

Liberty and free markets without the corrupt, parasitical central political machine killing the natural miracle of human productivity.

there is none

I can see that just in my relatively short life that it is much harder to do business now in the USA than it was in the early 70's when I started. Between regulations that keep you from doing essentially anything without a business license granted by some increasingly bureaucratic system (it took them an hour to figure out what category I belonged in to make simple LED off road lights), and initial taxation and the myriad of agencies that one must register with just to get a bank account- fewer people will DO business and that in itself will cause a certain degree of collapse.

In addition, there is the psychological effects of socialism in terms of reducing the amount of work that people want to do (since so much of what is done gets squandered by the government).

I am about ready to shrug myself. I am tired of it all.

"Consider the story that the Roman Empire collapsed because the Romans used to drink wine in lead goblets; and so they died of lead poisoning. That has some truth: there is evidence of lead poisoning in ancient Roman skeletons; there are descriptions of lead poisoning in ancient Roman texts. Surely it was a problem, probably even a serious one. But you can't see this story of lead poisoning in isolation; otherwise you neglect everything else: the Roman Empire was not just people drinking wine in lead goblets. Think of a historian of the future who describes the fall of the American Empire as the result of Americans eating hamburgers. That would have some truth and for sure the kind of food that most Americans eat today is - well - we know that it is doing a lot of damage to Americans in general. But you wouldn't say that hamburgers can be the cause of the fall of the American Empire. There is much more to that.

"The same kind of reasoning holds for other "causes" that have been singled out for the fall of Rome. Think, for instance, of climatic change. Also here, there is evidence that the fall of the Roman Empire was accompanied by droughts. That may surely have been a problem for the Romans. But, again, we might fall in the same mistake of a future historian who might attribute the fall of the American Empire - say - to hurricane Katrina. (I have nothing special against the American Empire, it is just that it is the current empire)

"The point that Tainter makes, quite correctly, in his book is that it is hard to see the fall of such a complex thing as an empire as due to a single cause. A complex entity should fall in a complex manner, and I think it is correct. In Tainter's view, societies always face crisis and challenges of various kinds. The answer to these crisis and challenges is to build up structures - say, bureaucratic or military - in response. Each time a crisis is faced and solved, society finds itself with an extra layer of complexity. Now, Tainter says, as complexity increases, the benefit of this extra complexity starts going down - he calls it "the marginal benefit of complexity". That is because complexity has a cost - it costs energy to maintain complex systems. As you keep increasing complexity, this benefit become negative. The cost of complexity overtakes its benefit. At some moment, the burden of these complex structures is so great that the whole society crashes down - it is collapse."

Sorry, Michael. I fixed the link and reposted it. The right parenthesis ) made it a different URL target. The new link takes you to Ugo Bardi's article. BTW congratulations on your personal energy system. Being cost-effective is important, but being satisfying is probably primary.

Also, in 2006, I had an undergraduate class in macroeconomics. Also in the class was another patroller from campus safety. She later went federal. We were given a list of topics for term papers and she chose "Federal Energy Policy." Her paper was about the Federal Energy Policy of the Civil War which raised the taxes on alcohol, killed alcohol lamps, and brought in kerosene lamps. How a nation of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers producing their own fuel would have evolved is an interesting question. The federal roads projects enabled the automobile which was powered by petroleum. I think of the ending of Roger Rabbit: ... a city of freeways and fast food drive throughs? Only a toon would think of that...

The funny thing about the arithmetic is that it always looks like there is a little bit more until it is all gone all at once.

On the other hand, there is a theory that petroleum is constantly produced as a geophysical phenomenon. See http://www.livescience.com/9404-myste...
and see also
http://www.wnd.com/2008/02/45838/

But petroleum is just one factor. Culture is more important than "stuff." We adapt too easily, and we Americans too easily forget the past. Arab/Islamic terrorism must be pegged to the 1972 Munich Olympics. This is not today's news or yesterday's headlines. It is a significant trend, that, of necessity cannot continue, any more than the Mongol Golden Hoard could conquer Eurasia to the Atlantic Ocean. Even so, in the process, much was destroyed.