A Drop of Rain

I’ve re-organized the categories to be more straight forward.

Now all news, interviews, commentaries from outside sources, will go in the category Currents of the Peak.

All items that are general commentaries will go into A View from the Peak. This will be the main focus of the blog from now on, in other words, if it’s a story about a specific news item, it will go in Currents, if it’s a general commentary, it will go in A View…

Reviews and Moving Past the Peak: Tips and Tricks will remain unchanged.

Since we’re now entering into the decline phase of global peak oil (and many other raw materials) production, there’s no real point in pretending that an economic grind down event is separate from oil price spikes and other raw material instabilities.

Also, I’ll probably start to add more background commentary, and less posting of news items, interviews, etc, which you can find great sources for on sites like www.theoildrum.com and www.energbulletin.net which both have good news overviews in general, drumbeat is especially useful.

And of course, see the right-hand column for more useful, and specialized links.

But from now on, it’s just going to be one long downhill roller coaster ride, with occasional severe dips and bumps, so there’s no particular point in presenting overly granular breakdowns of individual news events.

I will try to present more overviews, and will try to tie things together a bit for readers who might find their way here.

Best of luck to you in the future, but don’t expect the present or past to reproduce, it’s just not in the cards, this is a new event, and the models that can help us are models of smaller scale collapses. Stay out of debt, that’s the best advice at this point, live within your means, whatever you may feel you are entitled to have, what you can afford is what you actually should have today.

This is a bit off topic for the site, but I thought I’d post how to get yourself off those eternal credit card offer letters you get bombarded with.

Go to www.optoutprescreen.com. Being a good sceptic, and trusting nothing and nobody on the internet, I gave this site a quick check to make sure it’s not a phishing or scam site:

Customers may opt-out from receiving offers for either five years or permanently. To opt-out permanently, customers must confirm their request in writing, by mailing in a Permanent Opt-Out Election form, available through the website. Customers who have opted-out will no longer be included in offer lists provided by consumer reporting agencies. Customers who have previously completed an opt-out request may request to opt back in at the website as well.
….
When first debuted, there was considerable confusion as to whether or not the site was legitimate. The website appeared to some to be an Internet phishing scam, because it does not use the logos of the consumer reporting agencies that it purports to represent, nor the FTC logo. However, the site is directly linked from official FTC webpages.
wikipedia.org

Note: you can skip the social security number, but then I assume that only your current address will get opted out, not your actual identity. That’s what I did, just because on principle I don’t like to give any site on the internet any more information than necessary. Sites can and do get hacked.

You can also call them directly: (1-888-5OPTOUT or 1-888-567-8688) to get off these lists.

In general, this will save some paper, save some trees, and create a bit less garbage for landfills, so why not do it? It’s not going to save the world, but if we cut down in enough areas, reduce our consumption of unnecessary items (probably 90% of what we consume in the United States I’d guess), well, at least we’re on the right track.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a blog, but there’s just too much fun stuff happening in the world at the moment to not write about.

It’s not every day, after all, that you can say we’ve hit the peak of human existence, in pretty much every way you can imagine. Well, ok, maybe not a cultural peak, but definitely material peaks abound.