People have written me to ask a question or two. ‘When is collapse going to happen?’ Well, I do not want the economy to collapse before everyone gets a chance to purchase this book, so let us hope for the best. ‘What do I plan to do?’ Well, I am not sure. But I do [...]

A few weeks ago, the New York Regional Interconnect finally threw in the towel on their plans for a monstrous power line running from Oneida to Orange counties. This marks the end of a three-year battle by a consortium of citizens to turn back the project. EveAnn Schwartz and Chris Rossi of Stop NYRI, the [...]

A quick note on the AIG/New York State pension fund affair… in case you hadn’t heard: A two-year investigation by state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Albany County District Attorney David Soares and the federal Securities and Exchange Commission has concluded that Hevesi’s top political adviser and the pension fund’s chief investment officer raked in tens [...]

There is an element to American culture that never ceases to amuse me. Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans attempt to cast it in terms of technological or economic progress: eco-villages, sustainable development, energy efficiency and so on. Under the circumstances, such compulsive techno-optimism seems maladaptive. I love the new advances [...]

Have you thought about Rhode Island lately? Me neither. The New York Times tries to figure out why Rhode Island, of all places, has the second-highest unemployment rate in the U.S. In several dozen recent interviews, Rhode Islanders agreed on this much: Their state’s smallness has contributed to its problems, but could be its best [...]

From today’s NYT story about a once-gentrifying LA neighborhood now stagnating under the weight of the poor economy: When Emily Cook, a screenwriter, bought a house four years ago in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood on the Northeast side of Los Angeles, she fantasized what the area might look like in a year or two, with [...]

It’s hard to believe, but it’s getting on to three years since the New York Regional Interconnect project, the notorious NYRI, began to face resistance across a wide swath of Upstate New York, from Utica to Orange County. There was every reason to think that a divide-and-conquer strategy would work for the company, since the [...]

A couple months ago, I linked to an article by Dmitry Orlov called Closing the Collapse Gap: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US. For those who’d like to read a sequel to that article, here’s an extreeeeeeemely long but interesting followup from Orlov, entitled Social Collapse Best Practices. (Again, we here [...]

The apparent demise of New Process Gear, on the heels of the closing of Syracuse China, means that every company my parents or grandparents ever worked at has now closed or left the area. While I was sad/outraged about what happened with Syracuse China, my feelings about NPG are rather different. There was never a [...]