get a grip

"economic and technological optimists have an unrealistic faith in human-kind's ability to unravel and manage the myriad processes of nature. there is no a priori reason to expect scientific and technical ingenuity can overcome all types of scarcity...(one reason is)human cognitive limits. humans do not have infinite ability to understand and manage the nonlinear, multivariate, and often chaotic processes of ecological-social systems." thomas homer-dixon. "environment, scarcity, and violence.__________________so...we live on a finite planet with finite resources and a growing number of people to feed, clothe, and shelter...what "resource substitution" basically boils down to is replacing dwindling resources with processes dependent on increasing amounts of complexity and high quality energy...humans can handle only so much complexity before the cognitive dissonance becomes too much to handle and the returns on that increasing complexity bear a cost too high to pay in both intellectual and economic terms..in the end resources will continue to dwindle and as they do they will become rival and exclusive...there will be keen competition among groups for remaining stocks as they try to maintain a bankrupt system...since the world has been converted to a market which values everything by its monetary cost ( which discount present and future social costs because economists are apologists for greed ) wealth will be the vehicle that allows a small minority to trap vital resources for their own use leaving the rest to suffer ever more sever shortages...there is a lot of contentious violence going on in the world and if you look deeply enough the cause is rivalry for resources...israelis and palestiniand bicker and kill one another over the "west bank"...west bank of what? the jordan river...water...the arab spring started as a rising protest over surging food prices...it has widened into a factional war of haves against have nots...isis is about resources, not religion...that's just the vehicle...wealth has always had a stranglehold on the political process here...it is in the process of finishing the job of overtly converting it to a wealth-protection system base on the broad mass carrying as much of the economic burden as it possibly can...there is every possibility of collapse as the periphery looks somewhere else for a better deal...this is papered over by a distorted media in denial or owned outright as well as mouthpiece politicians...the times ahead will be interesting..especially when the current "recovery" is exposed for the smoke and mirrors paper game it is...who benefits from this "recovery" look at stock prices...look at legislation...then you tell me.