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Trump says US to start blockading the Strait of Hormuz immediately (www.reuters.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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"Effective immediately, the ​United States Navy, the Finest in ​the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING ‌any ⁠and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz," said Trump

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[–] 6 points 6 months ago (11 children)

I keep seeing posts like this and they make a lot of sense. Do you have any recommendations on where someone might read up on this or should I just start googling stuff like "what happens when countries collapse?" "German economy after WW1" "currency collapse of ancient Rome" etc etc

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    Not op, and as far from an economist as possible. But I think there has never been a situation like this, ever, in the entire human race.

    I have no clue what will happen but I deeply feel most will have wrong predictions

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    I mean, yes and no. Rome didn't have military bases around the world when it collapsed and Germany didn't have reserve currency status. But their currency DID become worthless. Stories like people burning money cuz it was cheaper than buying firewood.

    I know that it won't be "exactly the same" but maybe we could glean some valuable insight. Like physical items held value way better than currency. What did people do? Did families all return home and live with their parents/siblings since costs were too high alone?

    Having an idea of where things might go or what could happen just makes me feel better about it I guess? Like I know if the dollar collapses no amount of prep will really make it better and society as we know it in the U.S. will not exist for a bit.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    The global economy is new, so much has changed

    4 generations ago most of the food that people ate grew within 20 miles, now a good chuck of my food is grown on four continents in dozens of countries.

    This and every single thing in my house and car has supply lines stretching over a million miles when the travel of every single item, and their materials are added up. Literally, tens of millions of people helped make my items

    Banking is literally hundreds or thousands of times more complex than in my grandfather’s time.

    And my entire career is based on technology and infrastructure I read only hints about in science fiction books as a kid.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    Back in the early XX century - when Germany had hyperinflation and America had the Great Depression - most people still lived in the countryside.

    You can weather a lot of shit if you can grow your own food.

    Nowadays, at least in the West, most people live in cities and food is something they HAVE to buy and in order to be able to buy food they HAVE to have jobs - most people can't simple shrink their lives down to a point were they're pretty much independent of the rest of society, farming their little plot of land and raising some chickens using traditional techniques to just keep on going.

    If shit properly hits the fan, I suspect things are going to be way more desperate.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    If shit properly hits the fan, I suspect things are going to be way more desperate.

    To be a little more precise, people have studied this question carefully at a planetary scale.

    The total agricultural production possible in the absense of artificial inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, diesel tractors, cold storage and refrigerated supply chains etc is around no more than 3billion people running off solar inputs and natures nutrient cycles and the amount of land and water available.

    Pretty shocking number if you don't have the context, but here is a place to get started on the information this is based on.

    So for example, in the green revolution, land and agriculture technology increased a modest amount, but artificial fossil inputs into the existing technology system increased 90-fold. Most of the gains in food production are because it's now based on fossil energy and nutrients rather than natural sources.

    Currently, today ~40% of all the human food supply molecules come from fossil fuels and are incorporated into the plants and animals we eat.

    So it's not "just" a land management issue, or urbanization. Humanity is literally on artificial life support. There is no simple, survivable way out of this commitment. Fundamentally this is far, far from penciling out any other way we know how to survive. Humanity population passed some threshold for change around 3-4 generations ago.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    I am worried about food in the countryside too, if anything breaks down too far. Most rural people in the USA have lost the skills to grow their own food. And most farms in the USA ( that are not owned by companies) are now owned by families that inherited them, and they don’t have as much knowledge as their grandparents, and would have difficulties .

    So, yea, food insecurity if many parts of those very convoluted supply chains have trouble

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    Many of the super wealthy obviously want to create company towns again (I think Musk is already in the process). Child labor laws are being rolled back. Wouldn't be surprised if stuff like debtor prisons come back. We are in the process of building concentration (and likely labor) camps for the homeless. We have and are building concentration camps for the undocumented. People are openly talking about denaturalization. I think it's clear where the "elite" want to see things go. Open question is how far we collectively will let them.

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  • [+] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago*

    I'm thinking the problem this time around is that countries are far more urbanized and thus fewer people can simply subsist by farming their own little plot of land just for food.

    For most people food has to be bought, so they're dependent not just on the entire structure for producing and selling food keeping on working well enough that food prices don't go through the roof, but also on still having a job so that they can buy the food (a problem made worse because of how shallow most people's savings buffers have become).

    So whilst I doubt that in terms of Economics "this time is different", I suspect the impact will be a lot more painful.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago*

    https://lemmy.zip/c/collapse

    In the collapse community people have been aware of a "thermodynamic" collapse of energy supplies for quite a while.

    So for example, to mainstream people and the investors, there is something called 'oil' which seems like a commodity item.

    In the collapse community, worldwide supplies of diesel and heavy oil energy products (shipping, trucking, agriculture, mining and gasoline refining among many other applications) has been in a 10-year long period of decline with major implications for our global civilization.

    (Diesel / heavy crude comes from several places globally. The USA has run out but Venezuela and Iran are two heavy hitters for the molecules needed.)

    The blockade on the strait is only having any impact because it's a zero sum game now that nobody can raise production any higher. Like you don't see Norway and Canada suddenly ramping up and filling demand, right?

    I consider this the most parsimonious and cogent world view.

    In a short summary: the blockade is an artificial shortage that is designed to collapse and bankrupt the most dependent and vulnerable nations in the global periphery, which is a "triage" that preserves oil supplies for the wealthy nations in the long run. Like this triggers collapse, and then as a second order effect global demand will fall for energy which is in an irreversible depletion event. This is the only way the most developed nations extend their existence through the crash.

    This is all an open secret, you can dig into technical papers and agency reports and academic publications, everything will say the same thing. However, this is not really a "mainstream" consciousness.

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