Good thoughts. I would add 1. Youngsters are already negatively impacted by retreat from reality. The so called metaverse will massively reinforce this. 2. The current Facebook portfolio, apart from facebook per se, is a cobbled together set of acquisitions. Completely unintegrated on any level and doing huge damage to…

I agree with much you have said; the decline will happen fast but nonetheless will take many decades. A key aspect of the decline will be localization. A return to community focus, shared endeavours, generalist skills trumping specialist. A return to an almost medieval model. My view is that we will see localization happening very soon. In my post [https://medium.com/@dsprott/community-based-food-production-is-the-future-ab667c4428f ] I refer to the work of my local city council that are already looking at localization as a strategic imperative. I also share some ideas from the new book by Christiana Figueres with Tom Rivett which advocates same. I readily admit I see this in an Irish context; smaller country with advanced skills availability. But I believe this is a transferrable model. And the developing world will not see the transition as so great a change.

A cursory looks at the political, financial or business news tells us that our main aim is still growth. Last month we learnt that China has agreed not to build new coal plants abroad. Whether this means no new plans for coal plants, or cancellation of existing projects is unclear…

I’m reading a very interesting book by William Catton called Overshoot. Amazingly this was first published in 1980, yet describes where our world is today, how we arrived at the current mess and what we need to do to extricate ourselves. Catton’s primary thinking is that since the start of…

Last week Facebook announced they are planning to invest massively in what they refer to as the Metaverse — supposedly a “massive reimagining of the social network”. Now if I was cynical, I might suspect this is just a ploy to distract and divert from early stage efforts by the…

In Christiana Figueres new book [1] with Tom Rivett Carnac they explore what the world in 2050 will look like. The following is a paraphrasing of their view of the future of food production. Food production and procurement are a big part of the communal effort. Initially the revolution in…

In a talk delivered at the Poetry Center, New York, on February 16, 1970, Noam Chomsky opined, “ We have today the technical and material resources to meet man’s animal needs. …

Back in the 1960s there was an extraordinary energy among young people. It wasn’t just the Beatles and music scene, or the drugs (not that I personally ever smoked anything stronger than a woodbine), rather it was the post war era in which education and jobs were encouraged and available…

Most of us will remember the Paris 2015 UN conference on climate change. After countless meetings over nearly thirty years the delegates had reached agreement on how to limit global warming. Against all expectations, after decades of failures, the international community had finally reached consensus on what needed to be…