On Survival Systems

This post is brief and lazy, so please complain in the comments if you like.

Over the course of some thousand of years, hunter gatherers transitioned to farmers, who transitioned to specialists, and now we have mass production - I'm calling these "survival systems". I tend to hold with the Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) folks for why the transitions have happened. EROEI predicts a reversal as the returns decrease which, imo, we're seeing now as increased divergence from (geo) libertarianism.

Rant: One of the problems with neofeudal corporatism/mass production is that it treats humans as robots. If we can create and fuel robots, we don't need as many robot-humans. But with fewer robot-humans working we have lower demand for the things we're mass producing. Further, humans don't make particularly good robots and neofeudalism sucks for the serfs, so when EROEI allows they will want to return to their more liberated state. But the feudal lords like their setup - and have corporate welfare to keep otherwise impractical survival systems running. You also have money creation that replaces savings for initial capital investment which hides the actual cost of creating the feudal mass production system, and then you have legacy infrastructure in the way that precludes hunting and farming land: something needs to be done to revert the land.

See societal collapse: runaway train

personal note: geo-libertarianism with atom taxation