One of your readers, Ken, has a pretty snazzy way of explaining how something as complicated as economics works:
“The story I used to describe how the economy works to my grandkids is this.. the economy is like a table with a puddle of water on it.. if you place a noodle on it..( money) and buying and selling is equal (the water) then you can push the noodle back and forth..
Now take a wet noodle..( printing more money) and put it on the table.. as long as there is plenty of water for the cooked noodle to float in you can push it back and forth .. a little bunching here and there but it will move.
Now the economy starts to dry up.. ( increase of fuel prices, reduction of home and car sales, loss of durable goods sales, etc.. and people start shifting their money to another avenue like from buying durable goods to buying fuel or food..( double insert here.. decrease the amount of money being allocated for food stamps.. rich don’t spend poor people with children spend so if they have to take away from other purchases to buy food.. well you know what happened in the thirties.)
Once the water starts to dry up then it gets to the point where the noodle that once flowed freely back and forth across the table now bunches up and starts to break apart eventually you end up with mush.
That is the example I gave to my grandkids when they were asking me about the economy and depressions.
The thought then goes how far can you extend the QE money printing.
I think they went to far already and should have let the correction happen back in 2001 or before. What I see now is the wealthy has let their unending greed take over and thinking they can withstand and they probably will by getting rid of stocks stockpiling money and buying durable goods to barter with when it does fold in..
The rest of us will just have to wallow in the pit. Now taking away food stamp money from the poorest of the poor and the poor lower paid working families with children.. sure it is five billion and it would help but then why spend more on international assistance..that doesn’t make any sense.. to me rebuilding the infrastructure and taking care of ones own community is much more important. How can you really help someone else if you are weak yourself?”
Well, wouldn’t you know it? I happened to have a glass of water, a level table, and some leftover spaghetti noodles from the fridge. So I got it all together and set about noodle-watching for a good several hours.
I was doing fine up until the part where the noodle was supposed to bunch up and end up with mush. What happened to my noodle was that it simply dried up…shriveled down to this small worm-sized thing.
Still, the analogy is pretty good. In fact, I expect we’ll be spending most of next year in the “shriveling up” mode thanks to markets later on this year. With all the talk about “terrorism” we note that hyper-inflated markets don’t do well with exogenous shocks.
Lines in the Sky
We posted something of a mystery for Peoplenomics readers over the weekend – a phenomena of “black lines in the sky” along with a link to several pictures. Turns out, if you Google it and hit images only, you can find a number of them.
Not just on Google, either, but right there in plain sight of reader Deborah in the Midwest:
“Hi George,
Saw one of these in Iowa City on Friday. It was really black, then sudden turned fluffy white and continued in a straight line. And still people think it’s normal contrails. How mind controlled are Americans??? Difficult to comprehend. “
After studying a few, I have to admit to being stumped. Usual jet smoke isn’t that dark so I have no idea what other phenomena may be in play…
Murder or SHC?
When we saw the story about a third woman being found dead in Detroit with burns involved, the natural thing to do is assume it’s another nutjob out killing women and setting the bodies ablaze.
Still, we can’t help but wonder when the next case of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) will show up in headlines. Been a while…
Website Change Discussion
As you may (or may not, hopefully) be able to notice, we got the website converted over to our fancy new software this weekend. I’d like to help SurvivalWoman and reader’s Yohan and Kerry for helpful feedback on-the-fly during the development process which is ongoing.
A couple of things to note:
- There is link at the upper right of the page marked “Emergency IP Adr.” which is designed to get you to our fixed numeric Internet protocol address. Please bookmark this. Reason? I think there’s a chance if/when terrorism comes along again, as I have long suggested, the Internet will somehow be tied in to whatever comes and that will give government an excuse to implement an internet licensing program in order to assure “security.”
- More to the point, we will be implementing our SSL layer again. That’s the “Security Socket Layer” which may be another way government could selectively turn off the net. If you have a business, therefore, the suite of anti-disruption moves might include setting your site up for additional prefixes like our www2.urbansurvival.com address or out www3 prefix, which also works.
- Both of those will land on the numeric IP instead of the regular http://
- If you’re a business owners, having the fixed IP address, the SSL layer, and the WWW2 and WWW3 presets may completely insulate you from disruptions in the event of internet attacks/faults. But they aren’t that expensive to implement.
One last item – up for discussion and don’t be shy about sending in comments on this: I have broken the daily report into two pieces: One is the “harder” news which includes the financial stories, main non-financial stories of the day, climate and so on.
The “Coping” section is now on its own because a number of readers have asked for that. Clicking ain’t that tough (compared to scrolling) and a lot of people drop by for the off-the-wall and wujo stories. Click here to send a note.
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More tomorrow…same time and mostly the same website…
Write when you get rich.
George (george@ure.net)
