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6. Radical Self-Reliance

7. Reciprocity

8. Diffusion of power and the means of wealth/income creation

9. Base Decisions on an Integrated Understanding

10. Leverage Existing Capital, Assets and Skills

11. ESSA: Eliminate, Simplify, Standardize and Automate

12. Generate Value and Surplus (working capital)

13. Secure/Produce/Innovate the FEW Resources (food, energy, water)

14. Think, Plan and Act with integrity

15. Pare complexity to simplicity

Tailoring Education to Future Practicalities

Our concept of education will have to revamped to meet future practicalities, not just conceptually but at the community level. Since the State, municipalities and school districts alike will be sliding into insolvency, then the hope that there will be "free" money to "throw at the problem" will likely meet with disappointment.

"The problem" will not be the Federal government's, or the "educators" but the community's and the parents' problem: how to educate our children for the emerging world on a limited budget.

In the "industrial fantasy" world, factories are staffed by thousands of well-paid union employees. In the real world, factories are "staffed" by robots and machines with a few dozen human "handlers" on hand to keep watch. Each largely automated factory can produce enough for an entire small nation. All scalable production will be scaled up and automated (the scalability trap).

The entire industrial paradigm of factories filled with thousands of people had its last incarnation in China. As wages rise and production costs drop, then even factories in China are automating to lower costs and minimize defects.

In the post-industrial fantasy world, "knowledge workers" scurry about cubicle-segmented office buildings performing FIRE economy paper-shuffling (finance, insurance and real estate) or back-office functions (integrated data bases and "business intelligence" data mining, tracking RFID tags and inventory, etc.) for a vast consumer economy based on endlessly rising credit and debt and a keenly insatiable "demand" for cheap goods and "prestige" services.

In the real world, demand was not organic, it was spurred by "free money" disguised as low-cost, abundant consumer credit. As debt levels rose, "consumers" were transformed into "debt-serfs." Now that interest rates are rising, incomes are dropping and prices are deflating, the relative burdens of servicing all that debt are rising, further crimping "consumer" spending.

As for the FIRE economy, it was all a bubble created by the fantasy of "financial innovation" which was simply an exponential increase in credit and debt instruments. There is no need for millions more new homes, condos and commercial buildings, and no need for millions of "service sector" jobs based on credit bubbles in construction, real estate, financing and insurance.

As for back-office work: the low-hanging fruit of office automation is gone and gains from here are increasingly marginal. As revenues and profits fall, enterprises are realizing huge expenditures in new software, computer/Internet equipment and "knowledge workers" are yielding fewer returns.

A few laggards such as healthcare may yet benefit from software automation, but since the healthcare "industry" is heading for insolvency then back-office "productivity" will take a back burner to reinventing overstaffed organizations to function in a "cash-only" healthcare model.

National, state and local government is also heading for massive reductions in staffing, so "expansion" of any sort is not possible. There will be less of everything as every enterprise has to re-size to fit its revenues.

In essence, the entire system of inefficiencies and spending built upon cheap, abundant credit and endlessly expanding money supply will shrink to match the nation's net income and surplus capital. That means less of everything: paid positions, software sold, etc.

In the high-tech R&D (research and development) fantasy world, millions of jobs will be created in high-tech fields like bioengineering, nanotechnology, life extension