STARTERS

Thanks

Thank you very much for the feedback on the ideas/methods I floated.  It helped a lot.  

BOOK: Visualizing Breakdowns

Here's a small slice of a scenario I built for the new book (still in process):

In a little more than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, the steady hum of portable generators was a common feature of most cities and suburbs in the formerly prosperous nations of the G8. They usually kicked on shortly after lunch, when the central power systems shut down. In some built up areas, particularly in the favelas that had sprung up around many of the major cities, complete multi-megawatt electricity grids had been built with bailing wire and twine. 

 The arrival of the generators and ad hoc power networks arrived not long after the second financial collapse. In that crisis, many of the less financially able power companies went bankrupt, caught the crossfire between high commodity prices (oil, natural gas, and coal), customers unable to pay, and a global financial market unwilling to extend credit or facilitate transactions. The loss of power only lasted a couple of months, but people remembered, and those able to afford it began buying generators in bulk. Fortunately, the temperatures that summer only reached the mid nineties in most of the country, and the deaths due to heat exhaustion were limited to just over ten thousand, mostly elderly, citizens.

...

On Plans

Question:  Does this resonate?  Or does it fall flat?

_______

Before you were born, your life was planned out for you.  You would go to school all the way through college.  Get a job with a good company that would take care of you.  Start a family and have a couple of kids.  Work hard and loyally for forty years for that company and earn increases in income and status.  Finally, you would retire on your pension, move to a warm climate and golf the rest of your life away.

Sorry it didn’t work out.

The real world intervened along the way.  

The college you attended put you deeply into debt, if you finished it at all.  The job with the good company didn’t materialize.  Instead you bounced between whatever jobs you could find or stitched together multiple jobs to assemble a livable income.  Despite the difficulties, you did eventually start a family.  However, families are expensive, and you fell deeper into debt when you hit a rough patch.  When it came time to retire, you found that you didn’t have much of a nest egg.  The home you spent so much money on isn’t worth that much, your savings were meager or a casualty of the global gambling system we call stock markets, and the pension you thought you had was raided by the CEO of the company you worked for to provide for his mistress.  In the end, you live with your kids, if they like you, and if you're lucky you might end up in a rest home that doesn’t feature cockroaches on the menu.