MetaFilter posts tagged with economy and collapse

Thanks, Housing Collapse!

modernnomad — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:15:00 -0800

14 Year Old Buys House in Florida Meet Willow Tufano, age 14: Lady Gaga fan, animal lover, landlord. It's hard for Willow to see herself as symbolic of anything. To a 14 year-old kid in Florida, the housing collapse is basically the only world she's known. It's the landscape. It's a Craigslist hobby.

You would like us to tighten our belts. Instead, tighten your belts--or leave.

bitmage — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 06:28:24 -0800

The Soviet Collapse "The document which effectively concluded the history of the Soviet Union was a letter from the Vneshekonombank in November 1991 to the Soviet leadership, informing them that the Soviet state had not a cent in its coffers."

Writing Off Autocracy (?)

Inspector.Gadget — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:24:46 -0800

Twilight Of The Autocrats: Will the global economic downturn usher in a new era of democracy, or will things only get worse? [first link via]

Don't Panic! Reinhardt's Got Your Back.

ewagoner — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:51:49 -0800

A mysterious internet forum poster named Reinhardt has the financial conspiracy theorists abuzz this week ahead of a predicted "event" coming this Friday. He first surfaced last July by predicting to the day the bad week in September kicked off by the Lehman Brothers collapse on the 15th. Since then, he's made cryptic predictions on forums and his website (alternates between prophesy and calls for money) culminating with a prediction of a non-financial event on Monday that is followed by a market collapse this Friday. His explanations read like a conspiracy greatest hits album, with shadow governments, secret groups from the Vatican, and all your favorites (except aliens). If you see conspiracy theory as entertainment, this one's got you covered. If you take them as truth, well, you already know what to do.

What is 10 or 20 Trillion US dollars between friends?

gen — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:44:25 -0800

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the award-winning book The Black Swan, (previously), was interviewed recently by Charlie Rose: A conversation about economics with Nassim Taleb (as well as Time Magazine.) Taleb is more pessimistic than Nouriel Roubini, (previously, previously) who thinks that the total sum for this current global meltdown may be somewhere between 10-20 Trillion US dollars.

Watch out for the Holnists.

Telf — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:23:04 -0800

Russian professor and information warrior, Igor Panarin, has predicted the collapse and breakup of the USA. (Potential artists' renderings 1 2) The interview was originally reported in the Russian newspaper, Izvestia. (Google Translated) The prediction has been met with varying levels of credulity, scoffed at by some and embraced by others. The prediction, which goes so far as to speculate exactly how the US might reorganize, was posted to Drudge and has offended many bloggers who, while excited by the prospects of secession, are insulted by the insinuation that the south may go Hispanic and not Confederate.

living in a gilded cage

geos — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:09:04 -0800

America 's debtor prisons .

Somethnig for the new year

halekon — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 11:33:12 -0800

Collapse of civilization: Not necessarily a bad thing Many will no doubt find the foregoing discussion of collapse depressing or pessimistic. In “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse”, John Michael Greer hints at why this is, writing, “Even within the social sciences, the process by which complex societies give way to smaller and simpler ones has often been presented in language drawn from literary tragedy, as though the loss of sociocultural complexity necessarily warranted a negative value judgment. This is understandable, since the collapse of civilizations often involves catastrophic human mortality and the loss of priceless cultural treasures, but like any value judgment it can obscure important features of the matter at hand.” Greer goes on to characterize collapse in terms of ecological succession. …Collapse happens precisely because it improves our lives—and it happens when the alternative is no longer tolerable.