{"id":62688,"date":"2022-05-20T06:38:22","date_gmt":"2022-05-20T11:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62688"},"modified":"2022-05-20T06:39:00","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T11:39:00","slug":"62688","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62688","title":{"rendered":"Running On Empty"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Running On Empty<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change.\u00a0 Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count on fielding at least one comment from a reader who expected the entire modern world to crash and burn in the next few months.\u00a0 I\u2019d have to patiently remind them that Rome wasn\u2019t sacked in a day\u2014that it takes years of breathtakingly moronic decisions motivated by mindless greed, vicious partisan hatred, blind ideological dogmatism, and a total unwillingness to think about the long-term consequences of short-term decisions, to bring a civilization down.<\/p>\n

Now of course all through the years while I was telling people this, decisions of the kind I\u2019ve just described, guided by motives of the sort I\u2019ve just characterized, were standard operating procedure throughout the industrial world.\u00a0 Those proceeded to have their usual effect. I still don\u2019t expect modern civilization to crash to ruin in the next few months, but it\u2019s reached the point that I no longer have to tell people that the Long Descent won\u2019t show up as soon as they think. No, at this point it\u2019s my ironic duty to suggest that they make whatever preparations they have in mind sooner rather than later, because the world shows no signs of waiting for them.<\/p>\n

<\/figcaption>As I write this, the most obvious set of problems has to do with the economies of the United States and its client states. Those of my readers who follow financial media already know that signs of economic trouble are elbowing one another out of the way to get to the front pages…<\/figure>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Running On Empty Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change.\u00a0 Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,5],"tags":[31388,150,15417,1758,31993,592,600,617,827],"class_list":["post-62688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-geopolitics","tag-civilisational-collapse","tag-collapse","tag-ecosophia","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-long-descent","tag-oil-price","tag-opec","tag-peak-oil","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62688"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62690,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62688\/revisions\/62690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}