Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Guest wrote: Sun Mar 03, 2024 2:08 am I have been reading through this thread and find it extremely interesting; however, I would like to ask what do you think life will be like for the average American in ten years (barring a nuclear war)?

I am curious what life will be like for the man on the street? Will America be just like Mexico? Or will it be like Haiti? I think both are bad outcomes (as I have been to both).

Could America breakup? That's what Martin Armstrong has said in interviews. I hope he is right.

Tell me how this gets fixed. 500 minors show up at family amusement park, brawl with each other, assault security and shoot at police when told to stop.

Reparations? After school programs? Nukes? What’s gonna fix this? I’m all ears, and I’m seriously asking.

Victoria Walcott wrote a book titled "Race, Riots and Roller Coasters", about the struggle to integrate America's amusement parks. Helen Andrews, editor of The American Conservative, shared an eye-opening thread about it on X last fall

This book about the successful struggle to integrate amusement parks ends with a discordantly sad final chapter, in which “the majority of traditional urban amusement parks closed by the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Some stories from the book: https://amazon.com/Race-Riots-Roller-Co ... 0812223284

Maybe someday, someone will write a post about why the Six Flags parks closed. Maybe they'll say they couldn't compete with virtual reality or something like that. Or maybe we'll figure out how to reverse the decline of our public spaces.

Guest wrote: Mon Mar 04, 2024 11:03 pm I think this explains the new Dark Age quite well.

The battle for Zone 6’s soul
A New Britain is being forged on London's fringes

Fred Skulthorp
MARCH 1, 2024
Where do the green suburbs of the Home Counties begin and where does the sprawl of London end? It was the question demanded by a throng of anxious young men gathered outside the Georgian facade of a reconverted 12-bedroom house in one of the city’s suburbs. A Nigerian Uber driver had vacated a mould-ridden single room, and a frantic dash down on the train from Waterloo for a last-minute flat viewing had followed. “This area was not my first choice,” muttered one international student. Another recent graduate looked slightly bemused as he surveyed the silent houses. We were no longer in Dalston, Streatham or Morden. This was Worcester Park, in north Surrey.

Travelling around the borders of London’s outer periphery, there are many scenes like this. Here is English Suburbia with its mock Tudor housing, cosy box gardens and high streets embellished with the faint traces of Victoriana. Once it dreamt of eternally sleeping between the city and the country. Now it finds itself in the throes of a quiet upheaval.

Over the past decade it has become an unlikely receptacle for one of the country’s more decisive demographic and socioeconomic changes. Record immigration into London and its surrounding areas, as well as a millennial generation unable to become home-owners, have defined an exodus that has brought London with it. Driven by the long-term trend of gentrification in the capital and the post-pandemic rental crisis, they are arriving in places such as Worcester Park, pitching up with their flat-pack furniture, overdrafts and low expectations.

And so a wave of building, hoping to mop up these emigres from the capital, has also begun to redefine these areas. Clustering around the train stations, high streets, converted libraries, churches and even hospitals are the sites of many of the country’s newest housing developments. “Have you ever been to Japan?” says one elderly resident of Harold Hill in London’s Zone 5, standing next to a dribbling fountain outside the newest set of flats. “It’s like bloody Tokyo over there in the morning,” he says, pointing to the station that marks the end of the Elizabeth Line.

“I wish we could just stay as Essex,” says Dan, a sales manager, outside the Tesco next to Harold Hill’s newest development, a stone’s throw from Amersham Road where Thatcher once did PR for her right-to-buy policy. “You have a situation now where those born here can’t afford to buy houses. They’re being pushed out of the area entirely by people wanting to live in London. It’s not right. There’s just no sense of community here anymore.” And what of the mayor, who with the recent Ulez expansion seems to be extending the capital’s political control into these areas too? “Sadiq Khan is a fucking wanker. He shouldn’t be telling us what to do out here.”

This is a growing sentiment on London’s outer periphery. In a pub down the road from the line of would-be renters in Worcester Park, those who missed out on a room come face to face with a mood that is distinctly Ballardian. Khan’s Ulez policy, perhaps symbolically, has split the area in two, half in the domain of London, half in Surrey. “Some of the best news I’ve heard all year,” says one man, when there is mention of the improvised explosive device that gutted a Ulez camera in Sidcup.

Travelling east, towards London’s Kent border, I go in search of the Sidcup vigilantes, who’ve also been caught on camera chopping down Ulez cameras with angle grinders. This used to be the land of Mondeo Man, the Thatcherite archetype that had escaped the confines of the traditional working class into a realm of propertied affluence. On the train down from London Bridge, the capital’s sprawl slowly transitions into the markers of that semi-rural home owning dream: allotments marked with Union Jacks; gardens strewn with abandoned paddling pools; the debris of family life laid out on synthetic lawns.

“We had to sell two cars, and we’ve been left out of pocket,” says Steve in a cafe on the high street when I ask about Ulez. But the policy teases out deeper emotions: this is also no longer “a place that felt leafy and green, like in the countryside”, says his wife Linda. They first moved here in 1994, and when asked about the changes, they insist it’s still a nice place to live — it’s just become a lot more “busy”. The couple now find themselves holding the line against these trends, resisting the developers who are carving “beautiful old Victorian houses” into flats to fit the cosmopolitan wave of single-owner occupancies, a trend that has seen the ONS predicting one in seven people could be living alone by 2039. They have already turned down numerous offers on their house. “It’s sad,” says Linda. “It seems like soon there won’t be any houses for families to move into left.”

Outside the café, I find some of the arrivals now living in the rented properties that are starting to redefine Sidcup. A trio of international students from Nepal studying at Ravensbourne College near Greenwich look slightly confused when I ask them whether Sidcup has met their expectations of studying in one of London’s universities. “We have just arrived and we are exploring the area,” they say. “We cannot believe how expensive it is, even to live outside of London.” Nearby I find Chloe, a self-employed painter-decorator who is also renting. My questions about the local community receive a decisive answer. “I’ve been to places where everyone’s friendly, but walking down the high street everyone has a face like a slapped arse.”

The same mood permeates the Surrey town of Sutton, where recently built apartment high-rises tower over a high street still marked with the quaint signage of an English market town. This is another area stuck between two competing visions of life on the edge of the London metropolis. Articles in local newspapers have even appeared interrogating the question: “Is Sutton in London or Surrey?” Down the road in Epsom, speculation on Reddit about plans to turn London into a mega-city of 20 million people has touched a nerve, prompting a flurry of articles expressing horror at the idea of the Surrey town losing its identity.

“It’s a bit like Blade Runner but without the science fiction,” says Richard on the high street when I ask him about life here. A reference to a hyper-technological dystopia might seem a bit far-fetched for a town whose main attraction is the National Trust property Morden Park Hall. But he is really talking about his living situation: a small room alongside two dozen strangers in a converted care home. Politicians are already trying to court this discontent, hoping to disrupt the Conservative rule in these areas. “The Surrey Shifter” has appeared on the lips of Liberal Democrat and Labour activists seeking to attract millennials who now find themselves in these Tory suburbs but are locked out of a stable home-owning contract. But even among the new arrivals who have tried to inherit London’s suburban dream, there are difficulties. “The mortgage has gone through the roof,” says Daniel in his late 30s, who recently purchased a semi-detached property near Epsom. “Moving out at this rate is not exactly off the cards.”

“It’s a bit like Blade Runner but without the science fiction”
These changes on London’s periphery touch on a more existential question about England itself. Will its future generations be able to replicate the stability of the traditional suburb, or will they inherit something entirely different, a place increasingly dictated by upheaval from the global-facing metropolis? England’s futurists, stretching as far back as H.G. Wells, have always toyed with this question. In his short story, “The Argonauts of the Air”, Wells foresaw Worcester Park as an Edwardian village which had nonetheless become the rural setting for one of the capital’s spaceports. “The London Citizen by the year 2000 a.d.”, he went on to predict in a 1902 essay on the growth of cities, “may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb”.

Today, his vision resembles something of an Anglo-Futurist fantasy. Journeying towards the end of London’s various commuting routes, it is instead the writing of the Georgian reactionary William Cobbett that touches on the local discontent. A great defender of English arcadia, in 1830 he foresaw the expansion of London as the “great wen” — nothing more than a sebaceous cyst, poised to gradually leak its urban discontents into the shires of England. And, looking at areas already conquered by London sprawl ends, this rings true. “Epsom is becoming the new Croydon,” says Matthew, one commuter in his 50s when I ask him where London ends and the Home Counties begin.

Faced with the end of the metroland dream, Labour have explicitly stated a desire to build on the green belt surrounding the city, a prospect which delights many faced with an endemic housing crisis. But further expansion into this area will inevitably rub up against an already existing sense of de-gentrification on London’s suburban periphery. In recent years it is the geographer Phil A. Neel who captures the changes to these areas best, struggling homeowners and gig-economy workers who find themselves lost in the “foothills descending from the summit of the megacity”. In Neel’s understanding, those on the edge of these urban centres are defined not by the cultural and economic stability that once came with suburbia, but instead find themselves increasingly at the whim of the global city and its “obscure machinations”. And nowhere is this more transparent than in this zone of disquiet that now orbits the capital. For here, New Britain has gone in search of a new home, bringing with them a question that seems to increasingly define these parts: where exactly does London end?

https://unherd.com/2024/03/the-battle-for-zone-6s-soul/

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2024 8:45 pm Large corporations in the US have a lot of problems and need to keep a lot of secrets.

America’s Radioactive Secret

Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and contaminating communities across America.

Rolling Stone
Justin Nobel

In the early 1970s, Exxon learned radioactivity was building up in pumps and compressors at most of its gas plants. “Almost all materials of interest and use to the petroleum industry contain measurable quantities of radionuclides,” states a never-publicly released 1982 report by the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s principal trade group, passed to Rolling Stone by a former state regulator.

Rolling Stone discovered a handful of other industry reports and articles that raised concerns about liability for workers’ health. A 1950 document from Shell Oil warned of a potential connection between radioactive substances and cancer of the “bone and bone marrow.” In a 1991 paper, scientists with Chevron said, “Issues such as risk to workers or the general public…must be addressed.”

“They’ve known about this since the development of the gamma-ray log back in the 1930s,” says Stuart Smith, referencing a method of measuring gamma radiation. A New Orleans-based lawyer, Smith has been trying cases pertaining to oil-and-gas radioactivity for 30 years and is the author of the 2015 book Crude Justice. In Smith’s first case, in 1986, a six-month-pregnant Mississippi woman was sitting on the edge of her bathtub and her hip cracked in half. Tests showed the soil in her vegetable garden had become contaminated with radium from oil-field pipes her husband had cleaned in their yard. “They know,” Smith says. “All of the big majors have done tests to determine exactly what risks workers are exposed to.”

“There is a massive liability that has been lying silently below the surface for all these years,” says Allan Kanner, one of the nation’s foremost environmental class-action lawyers, whose recent cases have included PFAS contamination and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “The pieces haven’t all really been put together, because the industry has not really been telling the story and regulators haven’t been telling the story and local doctors aren’t informed, but at some point I expect you will see appropriate and reasonable litigation emerge on this.”

If so, it could have a devastating impact on the fossil-fuel industry, especially if tighter regulations were put in place and oil-and-gas waste was no longer exempted by the EPA from being defined as hazardous waste. “The critical component of the profit margin for these companies is that they can get rid of the waste so cheaply,” says Auch of FracTracker Alliance. “If they ever had to pay fair-market value, they wouldn’t be able to exist.”

“It has been argued,” says Liz Moran, with the New York Public Interest Research Group, “that if you close the loophole, you would put the industry out of business.” When asked what would happen to the industry if the EPA exemption were removed, University of Cincinnati legal scholar Jim O’Reilly, author of 53 textbooks on energy development and other topics, replied with a single word: “Disaster.”

Radioactivity “is the way into the Death Star,” says Melissa Troutman, an analyst with the environmental group Earthworks. The industry is afraid of two things, she says, “losing money, and losing their social license.” The high cost of drilling relies on a continual infusion of capital, and “the number of operational risks and bottlenecks continues to grow,” states a 2018 article by the energy consultancy group Wood Mackenzie. But while the industry is continuously supported by Wall Street cash, social license may be a more difficult coffer to refill.

Paul Templet, the former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the first state official to tackle oil’s radioactivity issue, is now 79 years old and lives with his wife in an adobe house in New Mexico. But he has to return to Louisiana once every couple of months to serve as an expert in lawsuits over oil-field contamination. In recent years, a growing group of landowners has discovered that the oil-and-gas wells that brought them riches also tarnished their property with heavy metals and radioactivity. “Almost everywhere we test we find contamination,” says Templet. There are now more than 350 of these legacy lawsuits moving forward in the state. Proceedings are sealed, and it is difficult to tally sums across all cases, but Templet says it’s fair to say that what began as a little nibble on the industry’s pocketbook has turned into a forceful tug. “They’ve known for 110 years, but they haven’t done anything about it,” says Templet. “It’s the secret of the century.”

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2024 8:45 pm Large corporations in the US have a lot of problems and need to keep a lot of secrets.

The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy
Private equity has made one-fifth of the market effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators.

By Rogé Karma

October 30, 2023

The publicly traded company is disappearing. In 1996, about 8,000 firms were listed in the U.S. stock market. Since then, the national economy has grown by nearly $20 trillion. The population has increased by 70 million people. And yet, today, the number of American public companies stands at fewer than 4,000. How can that be?

One answer is that the private-equity industry is devouring them. When a private-equity fund buys a publicly traded company, it takes the company private—hence the name. (If the company has not yet gone public, the acquisition keeps that from happening.) This gives the fund total control, which in theory allows it to find ways to boost profits so that it can sell the company for a big payday a few years later. In practice, going private can have more troubling consequences. The thing about public companies is that they’re, well, public. By law, they have to disclose information about their finances, operations, business risks, and legal liabilities. Taking a company private exempts it from those requirements.

That may not have been such a big deal when private equity was a niche industry. Today, however, it’s anything but. In 2000, private-equity firms managed about 4 percent of total U.S. corporate equity. By 2021, that number was closer to 20 percent. In other words, private equity has been growing nearly five times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole.

Elisabeth de Fontenay, a law professor at Duke University who studies corporate finance, told me that if current trends continue, “we could end up with a completely opaque economy.”

This should alarm you even if you’ve never bought a stock in your life. One-fifth of the market has been made effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators. Information as basic as who actually owns a company, how it makes its money, or whether it is profitable is “disappearing indefinitely into private equity darkness,” as the Harvard Law professor John Coates writes in his book The Problem of Twelve. This is not a recipe for corporate responsibility or economic stability. A private economy is one in which companies can more easily get away with wrongdoing and an economic crisis can take everyone by surprise. And to a startling degree, a private economy is what we already have.