*sigh*, part 158621445669952
I want to go back to school.
It's a combination of this article on depleting aquifers (which doesn't just apply to California) and the current batch of speculative fiction on JM Greer's blog, and finishing off The Peripheral (and contemplating The Jackpot)…
I want a degree in "Resiliency" but I don't think such a thing exists.
Parts of it do, under different names - systems theory is the skeleton on which everything else is built, risk-modeling (at both insurance industry and .gov levels, though I could do without the latter's "elite panic" biases) is a piece of it, George Foy's nodes versus megorgs is a chunk, ecology and doughnut economics are the foundation of it, some form of sustainability is the end goal…
Let's define resiliency to be the ability to withstand shocks/disasters/disruptions. This is accomplished by various forms of redundancy - having a nest-egg set aside for a short dry-spell (or the permanent potential cessation of salary that is retirement), having alternatives and substitutes and replacements on hand. It's the exact opposite of manufacturing's darling "just-in-time" process… Ecosystems are a good model for the process end of it - the more species there are in a biome and the more ways there are to fill a niche/function, the more resilient that biome is.
In Foy's later books, one of his characters bases decisions on numbers: what percentage of goods&services a node has to produce "in-house" to be economically stable. I'd love to know if those are handwavium/pulled from thin air, or if there's academic rigor behind the numbers. If there's anything solid to it, it could be a model for imports and trade of any kind.
Risk and threat modeling is a good place to start to look at how much of what sort of process duplication and "extra" inventory to set aside just in case. Going back to Foy - we live in a hugely interdependent world, and that isn't going to change - no matter how much people cut back on frivolous tech purchases, we still need computers and those are going to continue to be manufactured and assembled overseas for the foreseeable future, and that's just one category. There is no way for a community/node to produce all the things it needs, much less everything that everybody wants...
But… how much must be locally-sourced is determined in part by risk models and community/node size (and since we're also talking about sustainability, there's going to be an upper limit to that size).
And building up that rainy-day cushion has its costs… Bay Area peeps - do you have 72 hours worth of necessities stashed? Food, water, meds, cash (in small bills)? Do you have a week's worth of it all? More? This all costs: cash outlay to acquire it, space to store it, time and organizational skillz to make sure nothing expires. And managing this sort of thing for whole communities is a nightmare...
It's a combination of this article on depleting aquifers (which doesn't just apply to California) and the current batch of speculative fiction on JM Greer's blog, and finishing off The Peripheral (and contemplating The Jackpot)…
I want a degree in "Resiliency" but I don't think such a thing exists.
Parts of it do, under different names - systems theory is the skeleton on which everything else is built, risk-modeling (at both insurance industry and .gov levels, though I could do without the latter's "elite panic" biases) is a piece of it, George Foy's nodes versus megorgs is a chunk, ecology and doughnut economics are the foundation of it, some form of sustainability is the end goal…
Let's define resiliency to be the ability to withstand shocks/disasters/disruptions. This is accomplished by various forms of redundancy - having a nest-egg set aside for a short dry-spell (or the permanent potential cessation of salary that is retirement), having alternatives and substitutes and replacements on hand. It's the exact opposite of manufacturing's darling "just-in-time" process… Ecosystems are a good model for the process end of it - the more species there are in a biome and the more ways there are to fill a niche/function, the more resilient that biome is.
In Foy's later books, one of his characters bases decisions on numbers: what percentage of goods&services a node has to produce "in-house" to be economically stable. I'd love to know if those are handwavium/pulled from thin air, or if there's academic rigor behind the numbers. If there's anything solid to it, it could be a model for imports and trade of any kind.
Risk and threat modeling is a good place to start to look at how much of what sort of process duplication and "extra" inventory to set aside just in case. Going back to Foy - we live in a hugely interdependent world, and that isn't going to change - no matter how much people cut back on frivolous tech purchases, we still need computers and those are going to continue to be manufactured and assembled overseas for the foreseeable future, and that's just one category. There is no way for a community/node to produce all the things it needs, much less everything that everybody wants...
But… how much must be locally-sourced is determined in part by risk models and community/node size (and since we're also talking about sustainability, there's going to be an upper limit to that size).
And building up that rainy-day cushion has its costs… Bay Area peeps - do you have 72 hours worth of necessities stashed? Food, water, meds, cash (in small bills)? Do you have a week's worth of it all? More? This all costs: cash outlay to acquire it, space to store it, time and organizational skillz to make sure nothing expires. And managing this sort of thing for whole communities is a nightmare...