http://classes.hortla.wsu.edu/hort231/List04/Acer.html 🙂

I just ordered 25 sweet potato slips that are said to produce in my neck of the woods, we will see.. they are to be amazing storage and are not at full sweetness till middle of the winter..

Still Frozen here.. can't even tap yet, (risk of splitting the tree) and no syrup yet.. we are officially a month behind on the farm when it comes to spring!

I remember someone's comments about the difference between a slow crash and a fast crash. A fast crash is like dieing of a heart attack. A slow crash is like dieing of cancer.
The collapse by cancer seems far worse. Buy the end, it robs everything. Both me and Mrs C5 actually HOPE for a fast crash. Just get on with it and get it over and adapt. We know, basically, what to do. Take your punches and move on. Unfortunately, we are pretty sure we are watching a slow crash and in that scenario we can possibly have every prep chiselled away slowly before the actual post crash life even begins.

Yes I agree, and would prefer a fast crash too and am also afraid of preps whittling away much earlier than I would otherwise like. But I see only a slow crash and by the time massive world wide bank closures happen even a lot of the prepared people will likely be out of resources 😕

I remember someone's comments about the difference between a slow crash and a fast crash. A fast crash is like dieing of a heart attack. A slow crash is like dieing of cancer.
The collapse by cancer seems far worse. Buy the end, it robs everything. Both me and Mrs C5 actually HOPE for a fast crash. Just get on with it and get it over and adapt. We know, basically, what to do. Take your punches and move on. Unfortunately, we are pretty sure we are watching a slow crash and in that scenario we can possibly have every prep chiselled away slowly before the actual post crash life even begins.

Yes I agree, and would prefer a fast crash too and am also afraid of preps whittling away much earlier than I would otherwise like. But I see only a slow crash and by the time massive world wide bank closures happen even a lot of the prepared people will likely be out of resources 😕

Agreed with both of you. This is my greatest fear. In a slow burn you can't simply pack up, head to the hills and wait for the "mass die off". You instead have to get up every morning and either go to work if you're lucky, or find new work if you're not. Even as the inflation eats away at your spending power and whittles away at your stockpiles...

(p.s. I was speaking metaphorically about the hills thing. If that is your plan, you are in trouble already lol.)

I remember someone's comments about the difference between a slow crash and a fast crash. A fast crash is like dieing of a heart attack. A slow crash is like dieing of cancer.
The collapse by cancer seems far worse. Buy the end, it robs everything. Both me and Mrs C5 actually HOPE for a fast crash. Just get on with it and get it over and adapt. We know, basically, what to do. Take your punches and move on. Unfortunately, we are pretty sure we are watching a slow crash and in that scenario we can possibly have every prep chiselled away slowly before the actual post crash life even begins.

Yes I agree, and would prefer a fast crash too and am also afraid of preps whittling away much earlier than I would otherwise like. But I see only a slow crash and by the time massive world wide bank closures happen even a lot of the prepared people will likely be out of resources 😕

Agreed with both of you. This is my greatest fear. In a slow burn you can't simply pack up, head to the hills and wait for the "mass die off". You instead have to get up every morning and either go to work if you're lucky, or find new work if you're not. Even as the inflation eats away at your spending power and whittles away at your stockpiles...

(p.s. I was speaking metaphorically about the hills thing. If that is your plan, you are in trouble already lol.)

My intention in this post WAS to talk about apocalyptic fiction...But it seems people would like to talk more about the Slow Crash. Hey, Im cool with that. Lets discuss that. As far as Im concerned, its a deeply under talked about issue. It requires completely different prepping. Its psychologically more difficult.

The term, slow crash stems from Ran Priers 2005 short essay , The Slow Crash. I'll post his updated 2012 version that he edited, including his own thoughts on looking back at it after 7 years. That's almost as insightful. http://ranprieur.com/essays/slowcrash.html

My favorite lines were, "It won't be like falling off a cliff, more like rolling down a rocky hill. There won't be any clear before, during, or after."

"If every year from here to 2020 is half as eventful, we'll be living in railroad cars, eating grass, and still waiting for the big crash we've been led to expect from watching movies designed to push our emotional buttons and be over in two hours."

Something that I find insightful about this article is that it was written in 2005, before the 2008 financial crisis. At the top of the economic boom, not the bottom, yet all of the same problems were already actively in play.

For me, simply hearing the title, The Slow Crash, was an Ah Ha moment, before even reading it. It helped piece together a few figures in my head that didn't quite add up. The article was somewhat naïve (Which he admits later) but insightful all the same.

No nibbles? OK let me start off. A slow crash is not a shortage of big assed crashes, simply an accumulation of crashes and partial recoveries that become the new normal. Its not like, the power goes out in the middle of the big game and everyone decides, hey, lets all kill each other and plunder the bodies before making them into soap. No mass cannibalism, mohawks, and wondering if this mutant zombie motorcycle choice accentuates my butt cheeks in chaps. Example. A local plant just closed in our economically depressed area. 500 job losses. The local town has a quarter of the businesses already boarded up and I am sure alot more will follow. Our local roadways are in rough shape. At some point, they will stop paving it and it will be returned to gravel. There is no tax revenue to keep them going. Gas price were sitting around 1.40 the last few weeks.

I remember someone doing a youtube video during the British riots a few years back. he said, "See. This is how fast the collapse happens. People who believe in a slow crash are fools". I thought to myself, hmm, looks like a slow crash to me. Expect that to happen quite regularly here there and everywhere. The important thing to focus on...is that it was over in a week, buildings rebuilt...and life went on pretty much the same, just a little bit poorer. An entire water system was recently polluted for millions in the states. Oh well, life goes on, its bottled water from hear on in. Mass flooding in the prairies(and just about every where else) oh well. back to work in the oil fields to pay for the repairs until the next flood. I wonder what the major disaster will be this month? Hydro increases 50%. oh well. Disaster is becoming the flavour of the week.

I don't know if anyone is still interested in the subject but Dmitry Orlov put this out. He didn't say Slow Crash but its what he describes. Maybe we should start calling it "The not very sexy crash"
http://cluborlov.blogspot.ca/2014/04/business-as-usual.html#more

Here's a description from a book called "The five Stages of Collapse":

During its early stages, collapse affects the most vulnerable: the poorest, least protected, least privileged communities, families and individuals. Collapse dispossesses industrial and service personnel even while educated professionals may, for a time, do better than ever. In its early stages collapse may seem like a morality play, a story of punishing the least capable and the least prepared while rewarding the diligent and the successful, to the delight of social Darwinists dreaming that they, being the fittest, will survive. But their delight is sure to be short-lived: like a flood that inundates the lowlands first, then reaches the higher ground and washes away the hills, collapse eventually reaches everybody, and just as in a real flood, what makes survival possible is cooperation, not competition. People who see collapse as a lofty pursuit for themselves and a dire experience for all those other, unlucky persons, those who are less capable and less prepared, simply need to await their turn ¸ then they too will be humbled.

All of this makes it a rather tall order to expect most people to take any significant steps to do anything at all about collapse as families, communities, societies or nations. Social inertia is an awesome force and many people are almost genetically predisposed to not want to understand that collapse is inevitable. Many others understand this truth on some level but refuse to act on it. When they are touched by collapse, they take it personally or see it as a matter of luck. They see those who prepare for collapse as eccentrics; some may even consider them to be dangerous subversives. This is especially likely to be the case with regard to people in positions of power and authority, because they are not exactly cheered by the prospect of a future that has no place for them.

There are two distinct components to human nature: the social and the solitary. While most people are strictly social, with all of their motivations, norms, constraints and rewards deriving from their interactions with others, there are also quite a few loners, people who motivate themselves, derive their rewards directly from nature and whose only constraints are self-imposed. The solitary part of human nature is definitely the more highly evolved, and humanity has surged forward through the efforts of brilliant loners and eccentrics.

Anybody sleepy yet? Anybody gotta go potty? No....?Ok,I'll continue quoting....

When facing imminent danger, large groups of humans have a tendency to panic and stampede, and on such occasions people regularly get trampled and crushed under foot: a pinnacle of evolution indeed! And so, in fashioning a survivable future, we would do well to put our emphasis on individuals and small, cooperative groups rather than on larger entities, be they existing, pre-collapse communities, regions, nations or humanity as a whole.

Stages of Collapse

Stage 1: Financial collapse.
Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse.
Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political collapse.
Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social collapse.
Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse.
Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.” Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I can die tomorrow.”

Well, that should add to one's paranoid state of mind....now tuck yourself in and I'll turn out the lights!

Please take no offense to any of my sarcasms you'll read along the way. I try to make light of the many issues that common folk misinterpret on a daily basis. I hope that prepper's continue to prep and that more(not less) time remains so that we can better prepare. My wife preys for " the end of this wicked system of things" but likely because she better spiritually prepared than I. Economic Collapse is the most prevalent threat and creating a war as a cure leaves a bad taste in the mouth of decent folk. Yet if her's is the proper answer, city folk have to accept that the must return to a simpler existence to survive this coming event to avoid breaking the "thou shall not kill" rule in every believer's book.

Sarcasm is not allowed. Its rude. I am highly offended. You are clearly working for the new world order, a sleeper agent and your opinions are giving me apoplexy and a painful rectal itch.
If this is not clear...I am a big fan of carefully crafted sarcasm.

Great... I acquired a fan...sorta! 😆

If you haven't guessed by now , I am definitely a believer that a slow crash will occur. We will likely not experience social economic collapse until many of us first face personal economic collapse. That will come from hyperinflation making our income less than our expenses until each of us become a burden on society instead. At this point you can only rely on the system or family. Not a pleasant prospect for any of us!

Well, D Orlov who wrote " The Five Stages Of..." has got that dry Russian sarcasm but Howard Kunstler is a definite Master of it. I was amazed in "Too Much Magic". Every line, and I mean Every Line was just dripping in contemptuous sarcasm. That takes obsessive staying power to work every line like that. It took two thirds of the book for him to begin tiring himself out and only infuse sarcasm every second or third sentence. After it, I realised I am not worthy and am being far too generous of others sensibilities. Sarcasm is natural adaption to suburban fools that shit where they eat.

I have not been responding but I have found the reading interesting. Please continue.

As for sarcasm, I was listening to literary scholar a few months back on cbc who proposed that Machiavelli's entire novel, "the prince" was actually one long piece of sarcasm and should have never been taken literally. I find that ironic (correct word?) as that novel has been been the Standard Operating Procedures for every capitalist for the last 50 years or more...

Dante's hell should have also had another layer just for hedge fund managers, insurance company executives and investment bankers. IMHO

Dante's hell should have also had another layer just for hedge fund managers, insurance company executives and investment bankers. IMHO

😀 Too funny 😆 . Dante most definitely had to be a scarred Catholic to have created his work! Wonder what level these child molesting priests would attain?

well, back to prepping. Im down with an eye injury so I will make this short and get back to it in a few days. I asked this question in a previous post on the subject. What preps would be slow crash specific as aposed to a fastcrash. Garden is obvious. The potencial for homelessness will be a constant threat. A van, maybe, so you can sleep at your worksight, or nearby,only coming home for the weekend, or if you have to go further away for seasonal temporary work. A bicycle , of course, incase you can no longer afford the gas or insurance. Divorces will skyrocket. That's all I can focus at the moment. What thoughts do you have for slowcrash specific prepping.

In regards to prepping, all that you can afford with your present situation. Say that you can forsee losing your home as economics are going that way in your area. Moving is a definite consideration. Yet to sell low and by high is also a losing proposition. A fall back would be to purchase a trailer before you lose the house. Now you need a gaspig truck to pull it or buy a motorhome. The motorhome costs far less today(check and see) and you get more for your money....too funny! Insurance cost more though. Insure it, move and cancel or take temporary insurance for 10 days.

A van is ok if there is just you! Having spent 1 1/2 tears living in a 38' bus, it is small enough! Landry and emptying the holding tank are seperate issues one has to consider. I parked in friends yards and offered repair services as payment and used their facilities mostly. And I was single then!

Gardens are a good bet if you are still there at harvest!

Being debt free is likely your best hope of dealing with whatever is to come!