Neither Crowdfunding, Nor Oxi, Nor Anything Else Can Stave Off Greece's Systemic Collapse

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In case you missed the media hubbub, a one-week Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign was started back on June 29th with the goal of raising €1.6 billion to pay off Greece's most recent debt repayment and set it back on the road to prosperity. The campaign of course came nowhere near the repayment amount, and although it amassed a massive reaction across the Internet, it barely made it past the 0.1% mark of its goal – €1,930,366. But seeing how it had no realistic chance of achieving its goal in the first place, it's inherent that its failure isn't its biggest disappointment. That mark of distinction goes straight to its existence in the first place, and in particular the dumbing down it has foisted upon a very serious situation.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://ff2f.com/neither-crowdfunding-nor-oxi-nor-anything-else-can-stave-off-greeces-systemic-collapse/
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Great post!

Greece will be one of the first big tests of the ‘developed’ world to see whether resources can be willingly shared during their inevitable decline. My guess is that they will be in this case, albeit grudgingly. After one or two more countries go under, it will be every country for itself.

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Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought about that at all, and what you say makes sense. Nothing to look forward to, but it sounds about right.

…then again, perhaps the attempt will be to withhold money from Greece and starve them out – although to what effect I can’t say.

We’ll see.

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Nice work

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Cheers!

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Neither a borrow nor lender be. Grandma knew this, you would think that the Greeks could have at least talked to her, or those of her generation, to not get themselves into their current mess.

Good to see that their collapse hasn’t bothered their oil production rates at all, peakers are always making a fuss about 6-7% declines per annum and collapse and everything else hasn’t bothered the Greeks in this regard in the least. No domestically produced oil declines for them at all…how dare they make peak oilers look as oil ignorant as they actually are!!

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From the looks of it, you should look a bit more closer into fractional-reserve banking and interest-bearing debt. Somebody must inevitably be the “loser” in that game of musical chairs, and this time that loser goes by the name of “Greeks.”

And Johnny, I think you’re unfortunately getting this peak oil thing entirely wrong. Peak oil doesn’t necessarily imply an inherent reduction in your oil production levels, but does occur one country at a time, and eventually results in an over-all peak. I don’t have the right papers with me here, but I think Greece’s oil production peaked many years ago. Regardless, if you take a look at the two graphs and correlate them, you’ll see that Greece’s import levels (which are dropping) dwarf it’s production levels. To make up for that and other deficits, and to maintain the European industrial way of life (which is on its way out), Greece must borrow money. (As well, if the rest of Europe truly wants to maintain the charade, it must continue to prop up Greece to try and make everything look hunky dory.)

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Peak oil is certainly about production levels, be it one country, or many. “terminal decline” being used to describe what happens next, the pesky part of that being all the times it has been claimed…and then reversed, and worse yet, another peak created.

Greek’s production certainly might have peaked previously. And like other places might one day peak again. Certainly multiple peaks decades apart aren’t just the purview of Russia, Venezuela, the US, Hubbert’s examples of Ohio in his 1956 work, North Dakota, Mexico, or even the entire world. Pesky things, peaks that aren’t really peaks.

Greek “must” not do anything, they can choose, back when it was time to borrow money, to NOT borrow money. Borrowing was a choice, they made it, and just like those who choose to not brush their teeth, own more house then they can afford, or drink themselves into cirrhosis of the liver, don’t now get to pretend it is someone else’s fault.

Others will do that pretending for them of course, right now it is all the rage in the blogosphere…very similar to the angles presented by the Occupy folks…when faced with the consequences of their poor decisions…I would want my student loans forgiven also, if I had been so stupid as to borrowed in the 6 figures for a degree that was nothing more than an exercise in PRETENDING that I would be educated upon receiving it, and this decision having zero value in the marketplace.

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“Peaks that aren’t really peaks.” Okay. And what about peaks that really are peaks?

And for the record, I’m not a fan of Occupy.

p.s. Please feel free to back up your statement that “peakers are always making a fuss about 6-7% declines per annum,” as I am not aware of a single one, never mind that they “always” do.

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Peak rates of a finite commodity are a given. But price is really what matters to the consumers, and that is the intersection of a cost of supply and demand curve. Those only interested in absolute volume are solving for only a single variable in two variable equation. What matters is the intersection of those two curves, regardless of absolute volume. So real peaks are interesting as historical fact, but meaningless without the context of demand.

And here is the world’s first peak oil PhD, as proclaimed by the head of ASPO himself I believe (otherwise known as the supervising academic true believer), discussing those declines that aren’t working out as he once hoped.

http://www.postpeakliving.com/files/shared/Hook-GOF_decline_Article.pdf

Or perhaps you prefer the claims of the Oil Drum “experts”?

But take heed, they did go ***** up for a reason, and probably not the one they claimed.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3236

Interesting that Johnny has been blocked from posting for days, isn’t it?

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Good point you make about peak oil being about more than just absolute volume. But when we speak about demand, I think we also need to speak about demand destruction. At some point, when prices get too high, businesses and other consumers simply can’t afford it anymore and consume less.

Thanks for those links. I never got a chance to chime in on the whole Oil Drum thing though as I think my five-year Internet hiatus overlapped with its heyday. On top of that, I think the first time I ever went to the site was upon the announcement of its termination. When it comes to peak oil, I’ve pretty much been confined to books, and only for the past year or so have I started perusing the peak oil blogs a little bit.

To be honest I don’t place much interest on predictions. From what I’m hearing and reading, while the peak was reached for conventional supplies some ten years or so ago, we’re getting pretty close to the peak of overall supplies (conventional plus unconventional). In fact, oilprice.com just put up an article the other day called EIA Confirms: Oil Production Peaked, which says that supplies of US oil peaked back in April (call it a second, smaller peak though, in comparison to the US’ 1970 peak). That being said, check out the first line: “U.S. oil production has peaked…at least for now.” So really, predictions are to a certain degree baseless, and as many say, we won’t really know for sure until we can see it in the rear view mirror. On top of that, cherry picking a few articles which may have turned out to be incorrect seems to miss the bigger picture here. Oil will peak, and it may very well be soon.

Nonetheless, I do follow Ron Patterson’s site Peak Oil Barrel, and from what he gathers, it seems we’re getting pretty close.

Which website are you talking about Johnny being blocked from, because he’s not being blocked from this one. I’ll digress.

Due to spam, posts with links require my approval as set by the spam filter. That being said, I’ve tried streamlining things a bit and started clicking the “spam” button on those spam comments so that they automatically get lopped off in the future. Having been doing that for a while, just a few minutes ago I deactivated the link-flagger as I think the spam filter should now catch enough of the junk. For future reference, just be sure to not start linking to sites selling Gucci bags or Viagra pills and all should be good.

That all being said, I’ve noticed that this open-source commenting script I use lists the dates that spam was filtered out, but it doesn’t display their content or the names of who posted them. I dislike that because I can’t verify whether or not blocked messages are actually spam or not. On top of that, a couple of messages have recently been blocked with the notification that they come from a source that had “No security key” (I’m not sure what that means exactly), and again, although the dates are given, the content, title, etc. of the comments are not. Annoying. I’ll see what I can do on my end.

Regardless, supposing those “No security key” instances were Johnny (which I’m guessing were not), perhaps you can ask him if he was trying to access the site through some proxy or something. Just a guess. That being said, once a commenter has had a comment with a link approved, all their following comments (with links) go through pre-approved (on the condition that they use the same email address as previous, I believe). Regardless, if Johnny is having problems, you can tell him to contact me through the email address down at the bottom of this screen.

Having said all that, Johnny is the only one who has ever been blocked before, which occurred in a comment he made which just happened to be the first time he left a link and so required approval. His comment? Congratulating me for not putting a bullet in my head. He’s apparently smartened up since and has yet to behave so callously again.