Inflation

[newfoundland]

I am shocked at the price of MrsSmith's hay!! We have put our horses onto haylage as we haven't had hay here since last summer, too dry a spring! We pay about £9 a bale which weighs 50 kilos, about 100 pounds. There has been a hay shortage in this country, but I have not heard of anyone paying anymore than about £8 a bale! Thank goodness the weather is fine and the horses can be out in the fields, only needing night nets.

 

[GarlicEater]

Quote:
I remember all too well being yelled at for eating too much when I was a kid, I was underweight and underheight for my age. When I joined the Army I drank a ton of water to make weight, it was worth it, the food in Basic was Excellent.

My parents would have done well not to have me, just my older bro and sis.

 

[fl_deb]

I know I am a little late to the meeting, but I didn't get the memo, until about an hour ago, so please forgive me for chiming in on several sub-topics here.

1) Our currency started losing it's value the moment it was no longer based on actual gold holdings of the US Treasury.

2) Unions or no union = Companies have taken advantage of employees and customers and have even decided whether their lives or limbs were worth anything for eons. Think "acceptable risks as a part and parcel of doing business".

3) When we stopped investing in the long term and demanded instant returns was when the downward spiral was excellerated, but now as we approach the bottom it doesn't look so good.

4) If you really want to face the truth about what has been happening in the world, I challege you to read, "Faces at the bottom of the well" by Bell. You will learn about yourself.

5) I too have been surprised at the calmness of the discusion.

 

[Dunkopf]

Quote:
Estimates of petroleum reserves come and go. There are so many new discoveries popping up, I am afraid to trust those estimates. We were surprised to find out that the shale deposits could be worked by lateral drilling to become so productive. Of course this takes a lot of water to fracture the wells, but can you think of a better use for processed sewage water?

Some governments withhold their information, so it is really impossible to get a good idea of what is out there to be exploited. I see where it is now thought that the Brazilian Tupi off shore field has twice the reserves that the government said it did.

Who knows how much the Bohai Bay deposits off the China coast hold? China isn't saying. Maybe they don't know.

It looks like the world will depend upon coal, oil and natural gas for a long time. The Japanese reactor problem has set the future of nuclear energy back another generation. Maybe that is for the best.

Rufus

The fracturing is what bothers me. I'm sure they say they use reclaimed sewer water. I really doubt it. You get an esteemed scientist in front of the cameras saying they truck in billions of gallons of reclaimed sewage water. Then you get a guy from an environmental group saying they use local water and that the chemicals used in the fracturing are highly toxic and go into our groundwater.

You just have to believe whoever you are more secure with. I just haven't been very impressed with the oil industries track record when it comes to the ecology. I'm not a tree hugger and certainly not a supporter of the group who's name is not allowed on this forum. However I do use well water and I am a little concerned about it. Money seems to always trump basic human values in this world. Where I live in Kiowa they are buying up peoples mineral rights for gas and shale oil extraction. If my well water starts catching on fire or killing me or my livestock I'll be a little PO'd

I just get upset that we keep getting told to go ahead and use whatever you want. There's plenty more where that came from. The only thing that slows consumption is when the price goes up. As a species we are so self destructive.

Of course the cost of oil drives our whole economy. We need some divine intervention from another galaxy before all our resources on this planet are gone. The US is still the biggest consumer of natural resources and we have 2 other huge population centers that are striving to catch up with us.

Sounds like it's a good thing GM got bailed out when they did. If they would have been allowed to collapse, the Chinese could have bought them for pennies on a dollar along with their technology. Every company that has stock holdings is subject to that possibility.

 

[Wifezilla]

We need to get down to less than a billion humans on the planet, perhaps far less.

I was steeped in over population dogma going through school in the 70's. I can honestly say that every prediction that was made back then has not panned out. Now the over population scare is being dragged out again by the same crowd. At least they are recycling.

"Almost as far back as we can trace, people have worried about increasing population. In the year 500 B.C. both Plato and Aristotle worried about over population in Greece and neighbouring countries. In the same year Confucius worried about it in China and Terullian scratched his head about it in Carthage in the second century A.D.

In 1798, Robert Malthus startled England and eventually the whole world with his theory that the growth of population always outruns the growth of production. Poverty and hunger are therefore man’s inescapable fate. Un 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb predicted that “in the 1970s the world will undergo famines- hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” And yet life goes on!

And now, in our own times, we have the Cairo Conference – a United Nations event that aimed to control the ‘population explosion’ through contraception, sterilization and abortion. I believe – though I can’t prove it – that there is an insidious plan by the worldwide financiers to bring the developing countries “to heel” in the interests of the developed countries, especially the United States."

"Political tyranny, not people, is the problem. War, political despotism and socialism are the great destroyers of food in Africa and everywhere else, not climate or natural agriculture.”
http://www.theinterim.com/issues/overpopulation-scare-tactics-nothing-new/

"Newspapers have become overpopulated, so to speak, with warnings about human overpopulation. Such warnings have been issued regularly for decades - even centuries - with consistently incorrect predictions. On the first Earth Day, Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, was widely quoted. He predicted that by 1985, the "population explosion" would lead to world famine, the death of the oceans, a reduction in life expectancy to 42 years, and the wasting of the Midwest into a vast desert. He was about as accurate as Malthus himself, the Englishman who, in 1798, predicted catastrophic food shortages that never came.

The population doomsayers usually offer the solution of global government - BIG government - to determine, in Gaylord Nelson's words, "the optimum number of people." Ironically, where there is famine, the problem usually is not an excess of people but an excess of government, which leads to gross misallocation and misuse of resources as corrupt bureaucrats or dictators seek power more than the welfare their subjects."
http://www.jefflindsay.com/Overpop.shtml​

 

[Dunkopf]

Quote:
I was steeped in over population dogma going through school in the 70's. I can honestly say that every prediction that was made back then has not panned out. Now the over population scare is being dragged out again by the same crowd. At least they are recycling.

"Almost as far back as we can trace, people have worried about increasing population. In the year 500 B.C. both Plato and Aristotle worried about over population in Greece and neighbouring countries. In the same year Confucius worried about it in China and Terullian scratched his head about it in Carthage in the second century A.D.

In 1798, Robert Malthus startled England and eventually the whole world with his theory that the growth of population always outruns the growth of production. Poverty and hunger are therefore man’s inescapable fate. Un 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb predicted that “in the 1970s the world will undergo famines- hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” And yet life goes on!

And now, in our own times, we have the Cairo Conference – a United Nations event that aimed to control the ‘population explosion’ through contraception, sterilization and abortion. I believe – though I can’t prove it – that there is an insidious plan by the worldwide financiers to bring the developing countries “to heel” in the interests of the developed countries, especially the United States."

"Political tyranny, not people, is the problem. War, political despotism and socialism are the great destroyers of food in Africa and everywhere else, not climate or natural agriculture.”
http://www.theinterim.com/issues/overpopulation-scare-tactics-nothing-new/

"Newspapers have become overpopulated, so to speak, with warnings about human overpopulation. Such warnings have been issued regularly for decades - even centuries - with consistently incorrect predictions. On the first Earth Day, Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, was widely quoted. He predicted that by 1985, the "population explosion" would lead to world famine, the death of the oceans, a reduction in life expectancy to 42 years, and the wasting of the Midwest into a vast desert. He was about as accurate as Malthus himself, the Englishman who, in 1798, predicted catastrophic food shortages that never came.

The population doomsayers usually offer the solution of global government - BIG government - to determine, in Gaylord Nelson's words, "the optimum number of people." Ironically, where there is famine, the problem usually is not an excess of people but an excess of government, which leads to gross misallocation and misuse of resources as corrupt bureaucrats or dictators seek power more than the welfare their subjects."
http://www.jefflindsay.com/Overpop.shtml

Soylent Green is the answer. You can never have too much Soylent Green.

 

[Wifezilla]

 

[Dunkopf]

I like that.

 

[chickened]

Just a thought here as I read, what is China going to with all the males? they have a horribly lop-sided population. I suppose we could adopt a lifestyle that does not reproduce.

Population control? any volunteers? Actually we have that so does China, cannot discuss that topic though.

I think L.A. is doing the sewage water recycle thing. Personally, when the Browns go to the Superbowl that is the last time I really want to use that water. Until natural purification happens.

The planet is covered with water(3/5 I think) science will catch up we just need to make desalinization a profitable business someone will step up to the table.

 

[GarlicEater]

Well, I'm still steeped in that overpopulation stuff, I just don't think big government is the answer. I think humans collectively, like they've always done, will lack the ability to do anything about it and famine, disease, war, etc., the usual population-decreasors, will take care of it. If the MZBs*
start appearing and marauding** then it's time to start plinking them***, just like any pest, possums, etc.



*"Mutant Zombie Bikers", a joking term used by preppers for anyone "foraging" who's not of one's tribe and thus to be considered the undead to make undeader, or something akin to the baddies in a computer shoot-em-up game.

** Marauding won't be how they see it, they'll see it as getting food to eat, providing for *their* families etc., but then possums see it that way too. It won't matter, all that will matter is the bigger hole needed to bury 'em. Not Of My Tribe means, you're a pest, like a mouse.

*** Wartime is full of euphamisms! The famous sniper Carlos Hathcock referred to the Viet Cong as "Hamburgers" and "Hotdogs", their first names were always "Homer". When I shot prairie dogs with a friend, we referred to shooting one as "taking their picture".