Korean Job Discussion Forums

[legrande]

[Madigan]

It is how the World developed as well as modern society. People and families living in smaller quarters, closer to each other, near a commercial center is the natural development of human affairs. Just look at Japan and Korea or even Europe. There are even remnants along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Have you ever been to the "City Center" of Annapolis, MD? It's very quaint and amenable to how modern society developed. People often point to the car as the reason why we moved further apart. I don't feel that tells the whole story. Even after Henry Ford determined that every American should have a car, people still lived much closer together. The suburbs, as we think of them today, didn't even come into existence until after WWII.

[legrande]

[Madigan]

There would be less driving, less energy used for PMO/logistics and even energy delivery would be dramatically curtailed. Like I said, "natural scale economies." I agree that the degree of the amount of energy saved is almost impossible to quantify, but the amount of energy savings would very much be substantial.

[legrande]

[Reggie]

[OneWayTraffic]

I don't see consuming less as a possibility. It's right up there with sustainable fishing on the open ocean.

[rollo]

Well if Portugal and Spain go under this is a pipe dream. The previous Chancellor of Germany hooked the Germans up to Russian natural gas. Turned out he was on the Russian payroll, after leaving office he got a plum position with Gazprom. Follow the money trail on this one.

[Axiom]

[Kuros]

[Reggie]

If 20% of the workers who worked to clean up Chernobyl have died by the age of 40, that alone would put the figure of deaths into the tens of thousands.

Localizing production would be a huge step in reducing energy consumption. For many thousands of years, primative humans ate local food production and made pottery in their own villages. Now it's 2011 A.D. and most apples here in Tennessee are shipped all the way from Washington state and most drinking cups are shipped from China. These are just two examples among millions of examples of how large sums of energy are needlessly wasted when no sophisticated energy sources should be needed to produce or transport apples or drinking cups for consumers in Tennessee.

[OneWayTraffic]

One of the major energy inputs to food, Reggie, is the drive to the supermarket to buy it. I'm in NZ right now, and we can grow beef here, and ship it to the UK or Korea for less resources used overall than they can grow it locally. Partly due to the fact that we grass feed our cattle, rather than grain feed.

[Reggie]

But here in the USA, food is transported vast distances, sometimes repeatedly due to processing, warehousing, etc.

In the rural county in Tennessee where I live, I'm one of three farmers in the entire county and each of us only grow on a small scale. I grow less than 50 acres. The other two are elderly and probably can't do it much longer and I'll probably be back in Korea this year. Few people here have small gardens. Keep in mind that this is some of the most fertile land in the world.

Most people here are overweight from eating too much food and most of it, over 95% for sure, is grown elsewhere...Iowa, California, Mexico, China, etc. I can sell most of what I grow, but it's not easy because most people would rather buy Oreos with food stamps rather than butternut squash with cash. 30% of people here are on food stamps. Everyone here with the exception of some families in trailer parks at least has a front yard. Even the small houses in the welfare housing projects have yards where the people could grow some of their food if they weren't lazy. But almost nobody in this town will lift a finger to plant seeds, fruit bushes, fruit trees, etc. Almost nobody has any chickens. No one keeps goats to milk and some of the cattle farmers buy milk in the grocery stores instead of milking a cow for their own consumption.

Things are so beyond effed up here in the USA. If a war was to break out in Saudi Arabia or if the dollar suddenly collapsed, I swear to god millions of Americans would starve to death as a result of their laziness and the breakdown of the corporate agribusiness supply chain in a scenario where oil is several hundred US dollars per barrel. Millions of people would die despite a vast abundance of arable land. Food shelves would be empty at the grocery store and people here wouldn't know what to do. They wouldn't have a clue. They would riot and eventually starve.

[Menino80]

More economic moralizing, how lovely.

[ZIFA]

Have you ever wondered how it would feel to be the last person left alive on earth?

This haunting tour through chernobyl's dead zone by an intrepid biker provides a clue.
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-revisited/chapter1.html