There we were Wednesday. Gloating at having unloaded out long position Tuesday afternoon (2:31 PM Eastern) when it became apparent that the country has been overwhelmed with a new kind of mental disorder.
A strange dysfunction it it, too: People using words like Buffoon-in-Chief and “impeachment” – all very strong and polarizing emotives – verging on insane behavior. No, perhaps we have passed the verge and are full-on crazy now. Reader Mic down in Ecuador was right when he called it…America is fast becoming (criminally?) insane
Does it mean anything other than Obama sour grapes, the push for a soft coup of the proletariat by the corporate press and (as the New Yorker calls it this morning) a revenge of the DC professional class trimmed with distraction, personal attacks and other useless crap? By the time it settles, will the SMS mob (that we label Swarm War/Schwerpunkt) gift itself all the property and the means of production?
No, at least we hope not. But it IS a huge symptom of a long-time topic around here: What makes People Happy? It’s telling us loads about that.(continues)
Several people I know (oilman2, Robin Landry, others) have told me that have as much as quit watching the news. Why? “Can’t be trusted…:” Fair assessment, there. It’s the worst of self-referential ego mania and self-importance and self-righteousness ever seen. All in the name of the ad buck. Too much capacity, too little substance. But with an SMS flash mob, why not take down a sitting president?
Missed is that the media lynch mob is a result of underlying socioeconomic conditions, not leaders of change at all.
The conditions? A kind of social “sensory deprivation tank.” When deprived of meaningful inputs, the human mind will feed on itself. The same may be true at the macro social level, as well.
The underlying problem that no one wants to talk about in America these days is that we are squarely locked in a mindset the DSM-V (the medical standard for such things) could characterize as material overdose.
“Materialism Overdose: A condition wherein a population from as small as a single person (see hoarding syndrome) to a whole electronically-linked world (see collapse and war) begins to hoard THINGS and fails to grasp relationships or hold to durable personal values.”
No Sherlock, a new airtime plan will NOT fix it this time.
Let me give you a prime example of what I’m talking about – a number so you can put something in your reptilian/prehensile to ponder late at night.
“The self-storage industry is primarily a United States-based industry: of the 58,000 storage facilities worldwide in 2009, 46,000 were located in the United States.”
What’s more, they are 90% occupied and people are willing to rent space to store things they can’t presently use. Yet we keep buying and buying and…
Back in my newsing years, I covered the story of a small company called Public Storage, I think it was. Orange logo, black lettering on the logo.
Their CEO assured me in an interview that (circa 1975 when such units were virtually nonexistent in the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett corridor) there would be an eventual market for several thousand such units by the year 2,000. And by golly, they were right. A missed investment opportunity for me, but some hands-on learning, for sure.
Another source suggests modern America is overwhelmed with “stuff” in the home, too. One L.A. Times article a while back argued homes may contain upwards of 300,000 items. I’m not prepared to argue the point because we have almost every tool imaginable here and the ranch. Maybe they counted the grains of rice to hit the big number…I can’t say.
World is awash in STUFF.
All of this STUFF, however, leaves us with a terrible problem: Personal Stuff Optimization. PSO I call it. No one but minimalists are into it.
Oh, sure, we loaded up on 55″ televisions earlier this year due to my eye issues, but come on: When you can buy a UHD TV & monitor for $326 delivered? (They have since gone up, sadly.) Notice however: We have a reason for spending that kind of dough: My eyesight sucks eggs.
Most people will really never wander around their home and ask “Do I really need that [xyz thing]?” The ONLY reason we’re on that track now is that we are considering a smaller home. Who needs a tractor or both gas and electric welders in the city? Out here it makes sense.
Once upon a time, my sisters coined the now overused term “shopping therapy.” They were talking in these terms in the 1960s. Our whole famn damily tends to run a decade ahead of the jackal class.
Shopping therapy has been wrecked by online outfits like Amazon. It’s like having the Holodeck in your living room. Alexa, I was a new (anything) and it shows up.
Not that we’re complaining out here at the “end of the wire,” mind you. In fact a couple of weeks back, Amazon customer service sent us a nice little audit note: “Congratulations! You have already saved $500 on shipping costs this year alone with your Prime membership.” Damn!
Yep – toss in the free movies and other content – a great deal.
Well, except it does bring us back to the problem on the table this morning:
We are in a world – at least here in what is quickly becoming the Useless States of America – where we have a concurrent excess of STUFF and a lack of meaningful PROBLEMS TO SOLVE – and all this has caught us unawares because we HAVE NO CORE VALUES.
Ah!! Sounds kinda like three strikes, don’t it?
This is why the global war that will follow (once we get into the depths of the coming Depression) is so necessary from a long wave economic perspective.
Do you really think the old dudes 10,000 years ago, basically running the same hardware as us but with an earlier software package onboard couldn’t have figured out the remote on the Roku box? GMAFB.
Yes, and even if their Engrish skrills (*sic) would have been weak even by declining educational metrics, they still would have been able to find some peer group in any major urban area….And maybe Neanderspeak as an ESL program could be championed?
We need a war – a HUGE WAR all over the planet – to fix all this stuff.
Let’s run through the grim rationale: (This is like the economic doctor’s prescription and it’s going to taste bad, but go with me on it…)
Stuff: Wars break things
This tills the soil and gets homes off the market. Blows up the electronics in cars, power plants, airplanes, keeping us all from moving around quite so freely. Bye-bye to the grid. Keeps us closer to home and ends the loose talk of “impeach” or even scarier ideas to the PowersthatBe (like “Tax Revolt!”)which is the modern analog to the problems president Hoover faced with the tariff and agricultural (supports) debates during the early months of his tenure.
You see, it’s well understood that “In both the tariff and agriculture debates, President Hoover demonstrated questionable political acumen. The “Great Engineer” had proven as ineffective a politician as he was an effective organizer of exploratory commissions and committees. Instead of convincing Congress that his proposals were sound, Hoover chose to limit his involvement and let Congress legislate. The result, though, was policy stalemate and political tension between the President and Republicans, especially progressives like (Idaho senator William) Borah, who might have been among Hoover’s stronger supporters..”
The Borah role today seems played by Paul Ryan or John McCain.
Does Hoover’s “Great Engineer” descriptor echo with a contemporary personality type you’ve run into lately?
It’s all part of repeating potholes on the road to Depression and thence War to follow. Too much production is dangerous. It was in the Roaring Twenties and it is today as ever before.
Deimming in excess…how do we solve it? Here’s the previous answer:
- Boom! Need a new bridge.
- Boom! Need a new steel plant while you’re at it.
- Boom! Need more humans over here to run the mill…the old batch is gone.
- Boom! Higher food prices and a reordering of political power…
Right now? The storage units are overflowing with crap we either can’t or don’t use. And when the 2nd Depression becomes more evident than yesterday’s little taste or what panic is, people will unload the useless and try to figure out how we all got this way. Look for falling prices to return in places like eBay and CL.
Problems to Solve: War rocks the category
Wars are good because they “shake up the social order.” You go back to the inventors of gunpowder – who could have led a Chinese takeover of the entire planet in lieu of the Europeans – a few thousand years back, and you ask “Why didn’t they?”
Yuval Hurari figures the Chinese society was very classist – if you were born to a mid level life, you died in the mid level life. Since then, China has figured out how to use the political process (the Party) to move up the social food chain – a fact which the owners of Washington – the K Street Law Firms and the congressoids they work – all know very well.
The NEXT war will give us a lot of problems to solve. Big ones. Where to get potable water, how to find radiation-free food, how to keep from having genetically-damaged offspring.
Right now, though? Our biggest “challenge” is which air time package to get. FMTT. That’s the sort of minutia that pins the “social concerns meter” in today’s world. It’s nuts…but it’s also self-evident.
No Core Values: War requires ’em
You will be used as human fodder in a chess game played by global elitists who frankly look at humans more for their marginal product consumption potential and economic importance than their unique, God-given gifts to humanity. You are less “what you create” than ‘what you consumer.” That will change on the backside of global war, though Elaine and I may not live long enough to see it. All depends on the speed of Depression 2.
Those core values, being harder to evolve, have led to the removal of honest metricsfrom Education at all levels. The Lefty’s of Berkeley have become the poster kinds of Generation Brat. Get a freaking job and you shouldn’t have signed those deals with the devil for all those student loans, should you?
To them, the only value that matters, GD it is me, me, me!
And as they all prance across fictional “finish lines together” there’s a mass social failure to comprehend that there was never a race. A joke? Sure. But a real race has winners and losers. Today we do “events.” Races are bad.
Kind of like what….War? Did you say WAR MF’er?
ABSOLUTELY. War IS a race. Life and Death. Dead last, and all those terms. Not an ‘event’ for crying out loud.
People don’t wake up one morning and decide “I want to die for something today…”
…unless there are serious core values to defend. Hitler’s second book well-described his thinking on the importance of the warrior class for maintaining (and renewing) the sexual vigor and identity and machismo of the population. Otherwise the cycle runs from male dominance to demonization over the economic long wave. Where do you think Putin get’s his macho (and anti-gay) spiel? He gets it. It rolls around the long economic cycles.
The coming war on humans, though, was made possible by weapons of mass destruction – along with the weapons of mass manufacturing and over-consumptive behavior.
And as a special prosecutor attests in today’s headlines but mass media – Weapons of Mass Dissemination – even if tainted, not unlike nukes.
Since values are expensive to teach, and since the [Do we vaporize or not vaporize ’em?] decisions will be made by elites anyway, let’s go ahead and trash all forms of leadership so that when global war comes the country will be in (or on the verge of) civil war anyway. It’s what the anarchists and rad left was working toward and still is, so far as I can tell.
(My speeches on politics are under $500 and this week we have a three for $1,300 special going, drop me an email to arrange travel.)
This way, don’t you see, the consciousness of the elites will not be weighed down by feelings of remorse when a few hundred million of us that will fit into the nuclear ash tray by the time its over.
But hey, don’t mind me.
I’m just telling you what the historical reasons for war are: Conquest (thanks Islam), breaking things (which we do nicely), destruction of excess capacity (uh huh), and reducing populations (oh boy, we, the Russians, and the Chinese plus Pakistan, India, Israel, Germany, France, England and Iran plus North Korea have nailed the big hammer that one…).
Going forward into economic crisis the most salient point is that the civilian populations are held hostage by nuclear maniacs like Kid Korea (partly run by China) while we sit at home with no voice in the outcome.
We will instead be led astray once again by a disingenuous national media clown posse that can’t comprehend anything outside the psycho-bubble/babble of the Washington/New York/Baltimore core. Copernicus got the center of the solar system wrong, dear friend.
It’s the self-righteous media.
Gosh, this is all reassuring to think about, isn’t it?
People who should be prepping are wasting their time (and potentially their lives) by focusing on the (language alert!) wrong shit. Buying in as partisans rather than independently sizing up the ‘core survival issues.”
Wednesday was just a little sampler of the worse times to come. Those with “ears to hear” will grok the hint. The rest? Save a space in the nuclear ash tray.
Say, you wouldn’t happen to know how long molten glass needs to cool before you can make popcorn on it, would you? Shouldn’t be a problem for five years, maybe seven, but we like to run ahead of the pack of apes.
Besides, we’ve stockpiled popcorn.
Over-production is the core problem and we’re standing by for Act III. (with extra butter.)
Write when you break even,
George@ure.net
Solution: start bombing storage units!
I can’t think of a better way to make good use of a lot of bombs.
The recycling business would boom!
Nobody gets hurt, everybody has to go out and buy more stuff, investments in new storage units would soar!
Manufacturing would be at full steam.
Ships at sea, the Baltic Dry Index would soar too!
Might want to begin with some broken windows, just to make it all valid.
Donald Trump is the oft-beat orange-headed stepchild of the political class. Picking on Donald Trump has become a national sport.
Such knaves and fools, don’t know when to quit, don’t know when they have been had, snake oil sells, especially evil, wicked, mean and nasty snake oil to destroy Donald Trump.
Should be ashamed of themselves. They’re not, they’ll keep on keeping on making fools of themselves.
Can’t blame Donald Trump for what he inherited, a mess.
It will probably continue to be a mess.
George,
I, too, have not watched any TV News, except the local weather, since Megan Kelly’s question of Trump.
The mass media has not been credible, for me, since 9-12-09 DC, when I read the papers and heard the news after the event.
What we needed was a crash into reality in 2008. It was staved off, as you know, George. I can add little to all you have contributed. Hank Paulson and the Goldman Sachs crowd propped us up, artificially. (What he said to Congress made no sense.) We have moved nowhere. The appreciation in the stock market looks wonderful and nice. We feel good looking at it, but it’s not real.
God help us avoid a war. I hate war. Bush “1” restarted war for us. It has gone on non-stop, weakening us. Such a huge error. NAFTA, Patriot Act, Obamacare deepened the fantasy. Took away our gift. Individual liberty.
You had to have gone to the former Soviet Union in 1992, as I was fortunate to have, to see how bad things could and have become. Touch of irony here. We celebrated our victory over them, became them. Now, we blame them. This is classic serious mental illness. That’s where our country rests. In a grand delusion. It’s denial. Very basic stuff.
Our recovery, as in mental illness, will come with realization and acceptance. Small community isolates, in my opinion, are the best antidotes. A longtime Gerald Celente theme. Tribes: Seth Godin. And, a theme of yours, I believe.
I am in the process of building a community now that we call Hope Family Village. Not physical yet. Does not need to be. It’s doing something. George, you have done things.
The Swamp is no place to be. DC’ers will realize this in time. It could be painful for them. It won’t last. It’s Rome. The same collapse of the Soviet Union is coming their way.
People would help themselves and each other by turning off their TV news. All they do is fuel an emotional cycle. Turn on a broke record. We’re addicted to our emotions, as Freud once said. News is irrelevant. They should sample you. Your wisdom. They should sample their own, in a quiet reflective moment.
This is America. We will come back. There is no other place like here. No other soil as rich as ours. It’s not the material stuff, as you say, it’s the right stuff that we all are.
Oh there is going to be a correction.. when it does.. we won’t know what hit us..
usually the really bad ones come after a crop failure..
to prep for the worst case scenario.. is tough which scenario.. what horizon event.. We have never seen war in our country.. some countries it looks devastating.. kind of like Detroit or Philadelphia does now that we have taken industry away from there. those having lived through the dirty thirties and the depression all kept food on hand and usable skills..
Really how many computer geeks can you need if there aren’t any computers.. and how many massage therapists do you want.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd9fcPeE3RU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofNdWTHcIeQ
Having read about the outcomes of A bombs on Japan as high school freshman, I decided during the Cuban missile crisis that I did not want to survive a nuke war, and still don’t. At age 71, my meter time is running low anyway, so no prepping for me. What I do have is a small semi-auto with the last round saved for me.
Humanity is a self-doomed species anyway. Rats in mazes prove wiser than us.
I agree heartily. I have always told my son, a computer geek from the word go, (he is 21, that all the tech is good but learn a skill that is at least 200 years old and that will support you when times change. He hasn’t listened…yet.
“Several people I know (oilman2, Robin Landry, others) have told me that have as much as quit watching the news. Why? “Can’t be trusted…:”
Boy.. I wrote a huge book again.. but in essence all it said is watching what is going on in the USA reminds me of the Keystone cop movies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m53jnZQP32g
we have the battle from within.. refugee’s entering a country taking jobs that the people who live in the country need to survive then making those same people pay the price to make sure they are comfortable. all the while those entering don’t have any desire to live by the laws of the host country.. it is a mess in other countries.. crimes are on the rise big time..
We have legislators that let the money and gifts of the puppet masters sway their opinions and decisions.. the puppet masters write the laws then influence a group through money and sex to pass them..
Other countries see us weakening our defenses to the point where we are everywhere trying to fix everything so that the puppet masters can get control of the resources they desire.
we cannot compete with other countries.. our legislators in their greed have weakened our own country so badly that we don’t even manufacture the weapons we could us for defense of our country..
they no longer write the laws or read them they aren’t there but thirty days a year.. it is a keystone cop movie .. in my opinion it is a mess..They hate TRUMP because he is change.. he is trying to get the platform of change in place to protect the citizens of the USA from the puppet masters.. and historically it hasn’t been healthy for an administration to go against them.
I quit listening to MSM almost a year ago now.. it is all the same thing.. they say it enough and people will believe it..
the stuff that snowden or wiki leaks have brought out are all known by everyone we have read about it before.. they gave the rumors and tabloid newspapers stories legitimacy that scares them.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brawJsSUtxk
A bookmarked missive indeed. Thank you George for your continued insight, much appreciated.
Not to add to your list but thought “Old Man Labs” may give it the good ole’ college try…
https://www.google.com/patents/US6974110
US 6974110 B2
Abstract
A new method is described to produce useful electrical energy from DC electrostatic fields using a pyramid-shaped capacitor. The system uses no moving parts and no mechanical energy is introduced. Also, when a pyramid-shaped electrode is charged with DC high voltage, a propulsive force is generated. This will allow the manufacture of vehicles capable of levitation and flight.
“Did you say WAR MF’er?” YOU ‘hit the proverbial ball right out of the park,’ again! However, most everyone wants to get laid, and therein lays the problem (not necessarily in that order). Wasn’t Herod already faced with a similar problem? Today it’ll be more efficient.
Have ya ever thunk that a lot of storage units are being filled by preppers? Personally I know people who have enough food and water stored along with other survival items for a year long siege. Not everyone can store their prep stuff “on premise”, just their small lead, silver and gold items:-)
When discussing Big Boy War with my friends, I use the older Elizabethan spelling..”Warre”; to distingish it from the various sport wars we’ve been involved in.
“Solution: start bombing storage units!”
I love this solution! Best line I’ve seen in a long time. Keep up the great humor.
Oops! This was a reply to Ron and should have been under his comment.
George,
Your piece this morning was right on. Well done. Here is my two Cents.
• I am sore afraid for the fate of our country. Never in all my years (I am 70) have I seen a level of biased vituperative speech/writing in the media as I have recently. It is also in comments to your columns. Like many of your contributors I have given up on MSM. Murrow et am must surely be weeping
• “Self government without self discipline won’t work” Paul Harvey.
• Just a couple of hours ago the wife finished a series of phones calls that must have frustrating because she told me that no one is interested in doing their jobs any more. “When you take a man’s money you ride for the brand” Louis L’Amour. I wish I could say it like Sam Elliott.
• Common values are no longer possible because they are sexist, racist, discriminatory, demeaning, judgemental …. (another symptom of our sick society)
• The war meme. Everyone, let’s all go back and read Malthus Essay on Population. Oops its sexist and racist, but free from Amazon. At my age I am more concerned with the condition of my soul than prepping. Atheists won’t have this problem. I do weep for my grandchildren as I can not control the world they will inherit, if any.
DC is an organism with an infection it’s trying desperately to expel known as Trumpitis. Things were going so well until this non-politician that wants things to go according to logical, sustainable, business-like guidelines entered the Oval Office and started attempting to disassemble the route to oblivion his predecessors have contrived. The problem is the only cure is death and rebirth with the usual high body count. (The one problem that will be solved is that huge hole I spoke of several weeks or more ago to hold all the bodies. Nukes take care of that problem quite handily.) It’s the same choice that a few deep thinkers faced some 241 years ago. Many people didn’t think it could be done or succeed for any extended length of time but here we are, a country so wealthy and over-educated we’ve forgotten the work and self-sacrificing principles it took to get us here.
You’ve voiced so much of what this wild-eyed rancher has said in your web post today George. Every grand human endeavor, like civilization, seems to have an expiration date and a cursory look at the social foibles that have been allowed to proceed to their most illogical extremes, even to the point that they’re championed by the liberal lefties and their “presstitutes”, say “we’re done, stick a fork in us and toss us in the waste bin of history”. The basic unit of this endeavor, the Homo Sapiens, is a very flawed organism that narcissisticly believes itself to be perfect.
Merely because some aspect of the economy is succeeding beyond someone’s wildest dreams doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. If an industry provides nothing more than another way to waste one’s time then it’s carrying the seeds of its own demise. I shake my head in derisive wonder at those that celebrate the increased efficiency of technology while destroying the jobs of the very people whose lives it’s supposed to improve. Very few are going to go back to school to acquire a new skill that will enjoy only a fleeting moment of popularity before it becomes obsolete. I used to make my living doing that and saw it for what it was back then. It only creates more people and families on the government dole and that only leads to more deficits and eventual destruction of an already worthless fiat currency.
Wow, Bill. Great exposition.
I agree Bill that was a great explanation..
I only disagree with one point..
“here we are, a country so wealthy and over-educated”
at this point in our country the status of your birth pretty much determines the outcome of your life.
Education has become an institution that is discouraged to the average parents child. and over 76 percent of the wealth is distributed to the top twenty five percent of the population and of that 38 percent of that figure is owned by four hundred of the richest people in the usa.
With manufacturing having been exported to other countries to and tax incentives given to companies to export these jobs piled all that expense on the bottom 75 percent of the working population.
this trend in my opinion reduces the same thing I argued with a small group I belonged to years ago the OPPORTUNITY TO SUCCEED even with a sheet of paper hanging on the wall a person has little or no chance of true success..
It isn’t what you know.. from the eighties till now one of the biggest mistakes in history has been made by allowing the puppet masters to control the outcome of the USA write the laws that govern a society and outsource labor and piling those expenses on what little chance of success those at the bottom had and making it harder to find any job of true value.
Causing the Opportunity of future success to slip away from the grasp of the average wage earner making it almost impossible for them to feel that they might have a chance to obtain the american dream.. We have always had the wealthy but until the Nafta law the common laborer had the belief that anyone willing to work hard and had some talent could penetrate that social class and become as wealthy as the elite.
“Ability is nothing without opportunity. Napoleon Bonaparte”
Take the opportunity away and the ability to afford an education to compete we opened ourselves up for defeat by the countries that oppose us.
Thanks. Keeping up with posts here is a bit like Twitter. Had no idea you’d responded to that ‘way back there.
While I do have an appreciation for education it depends heavily on exactly the type of education one has and the philosophy behind it. That quote you cited above could be explained by my personal dismay of those who get “educated” simply because they don’t like getting their hands dirty. It’s perceived as unseemly and its roots are in my parents’ generation and probably much farther back than that. I have always, like George, enjoyed building things from computer networks to the remodeling of the bathroom at the ranch house last year and fence work. Either way I wind up with callouses on my hands and I enjoy it. The imperative I grew up with, though, was to avoid such occupations. The extreme lack of job skills in today’s workforce has become so egregious that Mike Rowe has made a personal career and crusade out of it.
Anyway, I could obviously go on but this is George’s site and he’s touched on this in his own way so no reason to revisit old territory.
You star in tomorrow AM’s column Jon
Speaking of liars …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeDZIyGkGNM
“He is having difficulties convincing Congress to pass his initiatives”
Hmm.. I think the puppet masters already have them in their pockets.. It is hard for legislators to turn against the ones that have been influencing legislators for a few decades now.. Trump will be gone on his way of life in a few years.
George, I appreciate your comments regarding materialism overdose; that’s right where I am! What I wish I had taught my daughter, and failed, is that anything that you bring into your life costs more energy at the other end, when you want to get rid of it, so choose carefully, and not too many things… So much sorting time and emotional energy is spent letting go, it almost cancels out the pleasure of ownership at the beginning. And since the world is drowning in crap, am I really doing anyone a favor by donating to the thrift store?
There I disagree, a wee bit.
Elaine and I recently switched to these HUGE UHD eye-friendly monitors.
We donated the old monitors (there were six or seven in all) to relatives and what they don’t use was recycled into their church where some families don’t have monitors coming out their ears.
Here’s the point, I think: When you have more than you NEED, the coolest thing in the world is to be able to use and then SHARE on the back end.
I think it was one of the Rockefellers who summed it up along these lines: Money comes through our hands, even when we have a LOT of it. But what our job is (the people with money) is to RECYCLE OUR WEALTH – spreading it around so there is more benefit to it.
One of the key numbers we follow around here is called the Velocity of Money (I need to put that into this morning’s column).
Basically, despite whatever the monetarists believe with their fanatical belief in the omniscience of Money Supply figures, the turnover of money is key, as well.
I like to compare money with product in a warehouse. You measure business efficiency in one way by considering
“inventory turns.” If you have 100 units in a warehouse and sell 100 units in a year, your inventory turnover is one.
Sell twice as much and the turns improve.
Years back I wrote a Peoplenomics piece on the analogy between money and electricity.
We know that in electricity, Power (in watts) is equal to the product of Voltage times Current.
So a one-amp motor plugged into the wall socket (at 120VAC) will do 110 WATTS worth of work.
A motor of twice the power (2 amps) will do exactly 220 WATTS worth of work.
So it’s not JUST the supply of electrical pressure (voltage ion electronics, but it’s analog in economics is Money Supply), it is also the “work” being done by the money.
In electricity, Ameperes (current) tells us a great deal. But watts is what does Work.
The analog to Watts in economics is Velocity of Money. it’s like the turnover rate (think of it as current) that is being done by money.
Thus, if you have infinite money supply, you don’t nercessily have inflation. Just as a 100,000 volt Vandegraff generator (static electricity) may not kill you because there is no current/ameperage follow and thus no work is done.
So, we can look at money as something we “turn over” in our lives.
And thanks to buying long lasting products, when possible, we can share our “finished with” items with others who may not have the same fortune.
Example: I just ordered a new jig saw this morning for the shop. The old one will be offered (still in fair, but not perfect) working condition to the young man who should be up this weekend to do some field work.
So I get a new unit with the latest bells and whistles I need (specifically? a LASSER GUIDE because of the eyes). And he gets a working unit he can use around his place.
When this all bogs down is when people don’t share/recycle, repurpose generously. Then you have hoader syndroime and let me give you my sister’s number: She has worked on those kinds of problems professionally.
Use it or give it away. Teach that, not hoarding.
You’re absolutely right; I’m just grumbling because, as you’ve mentioned, as you’re in the role of the Bank of Dad, I find myself the Mini-Storage of Mom – she’s in the process of moving into more space than we have, so maybe things will change! I do feel that her things are hers to deal with. I know that the people with money do recycle their wealth; as a long-time thrift store shopper, I’ve found many treasures. Just hope my donations have had some value to others, as well.
Karen Traviss wrote some interesting science fiction, the “City of Pearl” books, with an alien culture based around a community center called “the exchange of surplus things” which made money unnecessary. Of course, it had to be an alien concept, humans would never make that work, even in a hypothetical future!
Jon, you should sit back and pay attention to “American Justice…”
Mr. Comey told a Congressional inquiry, under oath, on May 3rd, that no one, including Mr. Trump, had ever pressured himself or his Agency to halt any investigation for political purposes.
The grist of the day, today, is that Mr. Comey “believes Mr. Trump was trying to influence him” (although the timeline of the Flynn investigation – itself a felony – belies this.)
Applying physical or political pressure to an investigation is “Obstruction of Justice” and must be immediately reported to the Attorney General’s office. Failure to do so is a felony.
Lying to Congress under oath is “Perjury,” which is also a felony.
Mr. Comey has boxed himself into admitting he committed a felony, since he had to have either lied or failed to report.
He is a “dirty cop,” has proven by his own admission that he’s not credible, and should do 5-14 at Leavenworth. Because of “American Justice” however, he will be neither tried nor disbarred, will land a cush nightly gig at Comcast or Disney, and quietly slip into the Administration of the first Democrat to be elected President, after the 2020 cycle.
THIS is “the swamp” so many Americans find intolerable, and which needs to go away. It is also the principal reason Mr. Trump won the Election.
BTW, Mr. Nixon was not impeached.