Worth checking this paper out: Rethinking Easter Island’s ecological catastrophe (pdf – 2 column, sorry).

While the entire collapse discussion tends to occupy a dismally low intellectual plane, it’s useful to track some of the main points and samples just to keep up on the latest best understanding.

At some point I’ll post a review of Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, which is frequently cited as a key work, but which I’m finding to be a somewhat depressing display of typically second, possibly third, rate pseudo-intellectualism. Oh, whoops, did I give away the core of the coming review? never mind, then.

Personally I found Jared Diamond’s book Collapse to be pretty decent, not perfect, but far better than Tainter’s tainted work. Some people seem to believe that making errors when you are basing your work off of best available information is somehow proof the work is bad, but that’s not the case, the work is bad when it starts with bad premises, bad logic, and bad methods, ala Tainter…

Google has a nice tool I just discovered, global population totals, the graphs run from 1960 to 2010, and you can select different countries, and compare them.

I was curious about just how much various countries had grown, now I know, and it’s quite intuitively designed and constructed as a tool.

For more precise information you can always use the CIA World Factbook site, which gives you easy access to CIA public information on each country listed. I always feel odd using this resource, the concept of ‘open’ and ‘CIA’ do not fit well together in my brain, but it’s still a very decently done resource.

I haven’t been tracking the financial stuff too much lately because… well honestly because it’s getting boring, we’re in the waiting period now before the next major bubble disruption occurs, which will be government debt/currency inflation.

But I’ve found some good articles lately anyway.

The financial system is fundamentally unsound because it depends critically on large connected financial institutions who have scaled up in a way that magnifies any localized financial problem into a systemic problem.
Edward Harrison, Why I’m Now Less Optimistic About Credit Crisis (SeekingAlpha.com)

This is a good read, well linked to other sources, one of the more interesting ones being The recession is over but the depression has just begun. I’d say that’s fairly self-explanatory. I liked this guy enough to add him to my links just on the basis of those two articles.

Then moving over to the old standby, PrudentBear.com, there was a slightly odd article, basically about how capitalism has to be controlled, regulated, and in some sectors, largely dismantled (finance for example). Weird stuff.
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Check out this nice overview, I think pretty accurate except for Jeff Rubin’s constant reasoning failure: ie, oil rises > 150, economies collapse, so I’m not sure where he gets the idea that the world will ever pay super high prices for oil, like > $200, that doesn’t follow at all from his analysis, unless you are promoting a long oil position I guess.

Lots of points here I’d guess most rabid denialists simply have never thought about, like bringing jobs back home, and so on.