the collapse continues

[mellowtigger]

For more than a decade now, I've been warning about this particular predictor of societal collapse: the cannibalization of infrastructure. It happens when people find more value in the material of a thing than in the function of that thing, especially functions that benefit the community as a whole. Besides the examples I provided in the link above, the problem continues with people stealing catalytic converters.

Today, I saw this Ring video on a NextDoor post. It's located north of downtown Minneapolis, and the camera owner said he didn't learn until the next day that police said someone stole the copper from water/sewer pipes that night. You can see people hauling something big that looks like "hose" in the background of that video. It's not just here in the Twin Cities. Throughout the USA, people are even stealing electric cables right from the utility poles.

Cannibalization of infrastructure is a warning sign of societal collapse. I keep ringing that same warning bell, but nothing changes. I warned in the 2020 USA election that this was our last chance to elect a president who could change our course, but somebody insisted that we elect Mr. Nothing-Will-Fundamentally-Change instead.

Nothing has fundamentally changed. The collapse continues. The beginning is near.

Comments

[kathmandu]

I wonder if it's not " the materials are more valuable than their function" so much as "the function is collective, and we have some individuals who have resigned from society completely and value $20 of scrap-income to themselves above water service to a whole neighborhood that they don't personally
live in". That seems different from the whole community tearing down the infrastructure because it is no longer valued by society at large. (I guess an example of that would be the Southern whites destroying their own school systems and closing public pools rather than share with The Blacks.)