I just stumbled on this Dmitry Orlov's blog, thanks to Paul Brodie's Zspace page.

Dmitry Orlov is a hilarious guy with good advice on making pick up trucks fuel efficient, and riding out economic woes. He's not the only guy saying we're doing a USSR-type collapse in slow motion, but he seems to be the funniest. If you like to be serious while channeling REM "It's the end of the world as we know it" try Chalmers Johnson.

I had never thought of this approach to fuel efficiency, didn't Ivan Illych explain the benefits of walking in a similar kind of way?

I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws. First, you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines. Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn’t be safe with so many people in the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in this area, with excellent results.

Oh, and women seem to handle social collapse comparatively well. But human trafficking and violence issues don't make it into his facetious, informative tone..

I consider what I am doing a kind of community service. So, if you don't like my talk, don't worry about me. There are plenty of other things I can do. But I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become very tedious company. My hope is that some amount of preparation, psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and a bit more useful, and generally less of a burden.

Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful, while the men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it is that they lost. And when they do that, they become very tedious company. And so, without a bit of mental preparation, the men are all liable to end up very lonely and very drunk. So that's my little intervention.

The part about guys getting very drunk chimes well with figures in Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. High Alcoholism rates were pointed to as a blotch on 'communist' Russia, then they skyrocketed further with free markets...