Being setup for failure by society

[Julius_Seizeher]

This country was not made by people who threw in the towel, nor will it be sustained by them.

So what moves can we take now to turn it around?

1. Institute the Fairtax NOW. This movement is gaining momentum everyday, and in one swift stroke it would strengthen and embolden citizens and business alike. I strongly encourage you to check out fairtax.org and see the solution with your own eyes. The Fairtax is just, it is equitable, and above all else, CONSTITUTIONAL unlike progressive income taxes which discriminate based on income. Our current Federal tax code is a 100,000+ page quagmire of laws and statutes so confusing and contradictory that no one understands it, not even the people who are supposed to enforce it, and it breeds nothing but contempt and lack of confidence among the citizens. The Fairtax re-establishes America as the preeminent destination for foreign investment capital, it provides a simple and transparent means of funding government operations, and it makes politicians accountable by destroying their game of manipulating taxes to get votes. For the reason that it does hugely castrate the boys in all branches of federal government, it will require the masses screaming from the streets, radio, and tv to get it done. Fortunately, the Fairtax is so perfect that it is WORTH getting everyone excited about.

2. We need to do SOMETHING with Fort Knox. We either A) Go back on the Gold Standard or B) Sell the motherfukker. As it stands, we have the largest stockpile of gold in the world and the rest of the world wants it VERY BADLY, it's our Ace in the Hole yet we do nothing with it. Inflation DID NOT HAPPEN when we were on the Gold Standard, and it has been the same for other countries as well. I'm more keen on the Gold Standard, cause it would really suck to sell it off and then wish to God that we hadn't.

3. Developing a renewable substitute to fossil oil has to be a top priority, anyone seen Mad Max? We have to come together and find a sustainable source of cheap, mass-produced energy. We have discovered Algae to be the perfect base product for biodiesel and plastics, and algae fuel and plastics are being made as we write, but we are yet to develop a system capable of growing the algae on the scale that we need it to be at. Hydrogen sounds and looks really cool but we are decades away from that, we can't even store the stuff without blowing sh!t up!

 

[Scaramouche]

Render Unto Seizeher what is Seizahers......You make some really great points,hard to think which I agree with most....But your ? statement "This country was not made by people who threw in the towel, nor will it be sustained by them"I agree but the stock that created wealth out of poverty in so many lands is no longer dominant,we now have a mish mash of diverging cultures with an equally diverse set of allegiances....As an aside,you seem to disregard Fusion and anti matter let alone the potential differences in the Earths magnetic field that Tesla saw as having almost infinite potential.....some twenty or so years ago I remember attending a lecture by an American Physicist he was talking on similar lines and stated that there was enough Kerosene Shale in the US Rockies alone to fuel Americas energy needs for 135.000 years...Hyperbole maybe but during my farming years we had Ferguson tractors made in England with a Triumph wet sleeve engine and they ran perfectly well on either Petrol or Kerosene,further while working on Beef Roads in the Northern Territory many of the Graziers ran,scarcely modified, Land Rovers on Kerosene....Maybe we should also resurrect the Stanley Steamer,if Standard Oil release the Patents that they purchased and shelved, circa 1930...If my memory serves me right the Stanley Steamer held the world land speed record at the time,somewhere round 200 MPH.

 

[Plinco]

My 2 cents: buy hard assets to avoid inflation. Even a money market account that earns around 5% does not cover inflation, which is something like ~10% a year for the past eight years.

 

[Plinco]

2. We need to do SOMETHING with Fort Knox. We either A) Go back on the Gold Standard or B) Sell the motherfukker. As it stands, we have the largest stockpile of gold in the world and the rest of the world wants it VERY BADLY, it's our Ace in the Hole yet we do nothing with it. Inflation DID NOT HAPPEN when we were on the Gold Standard, and it has been the same for other countries as well. I'm more keen on the Gold Standard, cause it would really suck to sell it off and then wish to God that we hadn't.

There is actually no gold in Fort Knox. It was actually all sold off a long time ago.

 

[synergy1]

3. Developing a renewable substitute to fossil oil has to be a top priority, anyone seen Mad Max? We have to come together and find a sustainable source of cheap, mass-produced energy. We have discovered Algae to be the perfect base product for biodiesel and plastics, and algae fuel and plastics are being made as we write, but we are yet to develop a system capable of growing the algae on the scale that we need it to be at. Hydrogen sounds and looks really cool but we are decades away from that, we can't even store the stuff without blowing sh!t up!

All major oil companies are exploring algae right now, Exxon put 300 million into their own development, and 300 million more into another private company. The biggest challenge? Cost. Its not cost effective right now in order to come close to competing with petrol. There is no doubt in my mind that it will be the future for our fuel needs...heck there has been a demonstration flight using algae derived biofuels on a commercial jet already...it works! There are a slew of other byproducts including beta carotine and Ataxanthin which can sell of upwards of 5,000 USD per kilogram.

Interesting you bring that topic up. I was not expecting too many folks to be keen on the algae movement. The current consensus in the academic world is that we could potentially supply our domestic transportation needs by farming algae in the U.S in a space smaller than Arizona ( forget how large, but its much smaller than any other crop like corn or soybean oil). Pretty exciting.

 

[squirrels]

I dunno what the "fairtax" is, but I've always been intrigued by the idea of a Federal sales tax in place of an income tax. In a consumer-driven country, I can't see it being a bad idea...although some would argue that the poor consume more while the rich save/invest more so it would be unfair on that angle...more of a burden on the middle-class.

Honestly...I'd really prefer the government spending less on BS projects and more on what's really important to the citizens. Some more accountability in appropriation of moneys and more personal responsibility among citizens instead of "relying on handouts" would go a long way. But you KNOW the people who vote are the ones who can get something from the government...the rest of us, the ones working for our share, could care less.

As far as the gold standard is concerned, NO ONE has ever been to explain this to me....WHERE does gold get its value from? Why is gold the choice for backing of currency?

Why does it have universal value? I mean, gold is valuable economically from a standpoint of its use as a conductor or a corrosion resistor, but that's not why it's been of-value for so long.

It's valuable because it's shiny and pretty and ancient peoples used to worship it.

Isn't it just a glorified form of fiat money, in that it only has value because governments agree that it has value??

What's the key to the "gold standard"? The notion that because the supply of gold is limited, a currency can't inflate if it's based on gold??

What happens as the population continues to explode, the global economy continues to grow? We're not finding "new gold" at an expanded rate. If every unit of currency in a country had to be backed by a FIXED amount of Gold, would there even BE enough currency to go around?? How would six BILLION people manage their day-to-day finances?

As the population and the economy continue to grow and the supply of gold can't keep up, you're talking about a currency DEflation if more money cannot be printed to keep up with the goods and services being exchanged.

The world and its respective nations are too big for the "gold standard"...that's why we went to a resource that governments could manage the supply of directly.

The problem with the "fiat standard" is that some countries play the debt-game with it. The idea behind fiat money is that a country's money supply should be kept tied to the amount of VALUE it produces to the world (GDP or whatever measure). If you print less money than the value your country is producing, you're back in the same situation where you would be with the gold standard...you DEflate...currency becomes worth much more, but so rare that people can't acquire enough to do day-to-day business, from multimillion investments to buying groceries...there just isn't enough to go around. Go the other way, print MORE than the value you produce, and you get INflation...a lot more currency in circulation, but it has a lot less value.

In order to support economies and populations that are, in fact, outgrowing the country's ability to produce VALUE to the world, what countries like the US do these days is print more money based not on CURRENT value of their country's goods and services, but based on FUTURE value of goods and services. I.e....DEBT. The money we're printing today is secured with debt to countries like China, who right now are undergoing an economic growth explosion.

The problem here is twofold:

1) America just isn't an industrial powerhouse any more. We don't crank out goods. Most of our economy is based around providing services...things like consulting...to other countries. We're very good at this. But this kind of knowledge and skill/specialty isn't exactly a TANGIBLE asset. It's very hard to value it, and I'm very concerned that services will start to LOSE value to countries abroad as those countries start figuring out how to do these things for themselves.

2) We're back into the same debt-trap that we discussed at the beginning of this thread, only on a NATIONAL scale rather than an individual one. The country just keeps borrowing more and more against its future and finding when it gets to the future, it's even more over-leveraged. This is the "national debt"...and why it keeps growing. We can't pay it back because we're so over-leveraged that all of our VALUE would just go to paying back debt and we wouldn't be able to SURVIVE. Not in our current state.

Now what happens when suddenly, the future isn't so certain. Say, when the American housing market suddenly collapses and all the value people THOUGHT they had in their houses suddenly vanishes?

What happens when we enter into a recession and all these people lose their jobs, their companies stop producing value?

What happens to the future earnings we've borrowed against?

What happens to the imagined value of American goods and services against the "fiat money" we maintain?

That's why the whole WORLD skips a beat when America has this kind of market trauma. They're worried that the metaphorical "stopper" is about to be pulled and that the entire works is going to suddenly go down the drain.

My personal belief...and this is ALL my take on it so financiers may disagree...but the CORE of the problem to me is that countries like the US are outgrowing their value. In both POPULATION (number of people) and ECONOMY (number of businesses), with respect to the REAL value of the goods and services they produce.

This is forcing us to print currency secured not by value, but by DEBT.

Solution? Stop breeding so damned much, let the population get back in line with the value it produces to the world. Stop building BS businesses, stop building BS families, stop churning out worthless people who just want a hand-out based on debt they will never pay back.

Then we won't need all this currency in circulation.

Then we won't need to print more backed by DEBT.

Then we can put some of that toward PAYING DOWN our national debt.

America needs to be downsized.

The other alternative...find something of REAL VALUE to the world, to make back up the difference between our amount of currency and our amount of REAL VALUE. That's why America was such an economic powerhouse after WWII...our industrial infrastructure was largely intact in a time where all of the European countries had been largely destroyed. The American Dollar became THE world standard in that timeframe.

Alternative energy would be a good one if we could get the jump on everyone else. I'd be all for it.

If America developed and started selling Cold Fusion reactors...imagine that.

Then there's always what the empires of the ancient world turned to when they needed more resources...CONQUEST.

The Romans were famous for this. Back when the world WAS on the "gold standard", when a Roman emperor wanted more money for a project, he needed GOLD to back it, so he went and conquered another country and took theirs.

The analogue still stands...if you want to print more fiat money, and don't want to go into debt to do it, your country needs to produce more value. If it's not producing enough value, INVADE some other country that DOES have value either in resources or in goods and services and incorporate them into your economic flow.

Some believe that's why we invaded Iraq. Problem is, it only works as long as there's people to conquer. It's the ultimate "non-renewable resource".

Again, this is my take on the whole mess. It's not gospel...it's just the way I think of things, and I'm sure some of the finance majors and financial advisors and brokers in this thread will tell me how wrong I am.

 

[squirrels]

All major oil companies are exploring algae right now, Exxon put 300 million into their own development, and 300 million more into another private company. The biggest challenge? Cost. Its not cost effective right now in order to come close to competing with petrol. There is no doubt in my mind that it will be the future for our fuel needs...heck there has been a demonstration flight using algae derived biofuels on a commercial jet already...it works! There are a slew of other byproducts including beta carotine and Ataxanthin which can sell of upwards of 5,000 USD per kilogram.

Interesting you bring that topic up. I was not expecting too many folks to be keen on the algae movement. The current consensus in the academic world is that we could potentially supply our domestic transportation needs by farming algae in the U.S in a space smaller than Arizona ( forget how large, but its much smaller than any other crop like corn or soybean oil). Pretty exciting.

Just on an aside...you know what really causes algae growth to explode?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080403140928.htm

Bust that out on your "green" buddies next time they start spewing their Al Gore crap. Just to see their expressions.

 

[synergy1]

Just on an aside...you know what really causes algae growth to explode?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080403140928.htm

Bust that out on your "green" buddies next time they start spewing their Al Gore crap. Just to see their expressions.

algae eat CO2, so yeah it makes sense that more CO2 = more algae. Funny you mention my buddies expressions because we see nothing but dollars here....Lots of dollars. Wish I could say more, but that's for later on!

 

[squirrels]

algae eat CO2, so yeah it makes sense that more CO2 = more algae. Funny you mention my buddies expressions because we see nothing but dollars here....Lots of dollars. Wish I could say more, but that's for later on!

Can you get me in on the IPO?

 

[Luthor Rex]

Gold standard.

Fiat money.

 

[Duffdog]

3. Developing a renewable substitute to fossil oil has to be a top priority, anyone seen Mad Max? We have to come together and find a sustainable source of cheap, mass-produced energy. We have discovered Algae to be the perfect base product for biodiesel and plastics, and algae fuel and plastics are being made as we write, but we are yet to develop a system capable of growing the algae on the scale that we need it to be at. Hydrogen sounds and looks really cool but we are decades away from that, we can't even store the stuff without blowing sh!t up!

Interesting viewpoint. It is however impossible to do what you are asking. There will be no source of "renewable" energy available for the average person to use as long as the world considers energy to be a commodity. The people who control the sale of energy will not allow anything approaching "free energy" to exist on this earth. Sorry...

The underlying idea in this discussion is that resources are scarce, and people who control resources have all the power. An astute person will immediately realize that the people who have the power do not want to let go of it, so they are not going to without a fight. Conventionally, the person who has the most resources wins the fight anyways, so trying to fight them is just an invitation to suicide. Even if there was a miracle method to create free energy, the energy barons would suppress its use by any means necessary to ensure their monopolies.

Are you aware that engineers in France have invented batteries that last 100 years? I guarantee that you have not-- this is because battery manufacturers in the US have lobbied congress to make it completely ILLEGAL to import these batteries and any information about them from france to the US. The company who makes them is called Saft.

1) America just isn't an industrial powerhouse any more. We don't crank out goods. Most of our economy is based around providing services...things like consulting...to other countries. We're very good at this. But this kind of knowledge and skill/specialty isn't exactly a TANGIBLE asset. It's very hard to value it, and I'm very concerned that services will start to LOSE value to countries abroad as those countries start figuring out how to do these things for themselves.

America does not manufacture many "goods" that you speak of. In fact, we do not need to. Everyone in the world knows that the US specializes in 2 things: 1) weapons 2) food.

This is the source of most of our power. And it has been working out great since this country started. I anticipate the day when our currency "crashes" and we simply declare that the rest of the world will have to keep "selling" us goods or suffer the wrath of our advanced weaponry until they do. So no, our marketing skills and consulting are not tangible assets, but they do not need to be as long as we keep making phlanx guns and stealth fighters...


The real solution for an individual who truly wants to be free is to simply join the ranks of the ridiculously wealthy, if they can. If they cannot, it is better to simply resign oneself to a life of mediocrity as that is the best they can hope for.

By the way, my life has broken every "rule" talked about in this entire thread. So I don't believe a word of it. I went to college and got 2 degrees. One was electronic/electrical engineering and the other was a BS marketing from a state university. I paid for it myself with 0 student loans while working a technical job and owning 2 cars and a house while still in college. When I was 25 I made $100/hr installing car alarms for dealers and owned a lexus by the time I graduated college. All this happened while running my own sound company which provided me with random extra cash when I needed it. There is a way to get ahead of the average Joe's around you. All that is required is that you do not be the average Joe.

 

[squirrels]

Gold does not get it's value because the "Government" says so. If Governments have their way, gold would have NO value. Gold has ALWAYS held value relative to paper because paper is a "Promise to pay". Gold just is. It has intrinsic value in that it does not corrode, deteriorate, rot, and is not printed at will.

Intrinsic value based on what? The fact that it's pretty?

If society as we know it collapsed, and we were all back-to-the-trees, trying to survive, what value does gold have?

The reason gold and silver had "value" back then is because if you had gold or silver, you could MAKE more money, because that's what money was made from. Again, look at the ancient Roman emperors. When they wanted money to build some huge public works project, they would go conquer another country and take THEIR stockpile of gold, melt it down, and make Roman coins to pay for the resources they needed...and probably some of the labor (though much of it was done by slaves).

Essentially, you needed gold to "print money", so gold acted as a "check" on inflation. Those emperors and governments of old, if they could get away with printing money, they would've printed it whenever they wanted something. The amount of gold, for them, was tied directly to the opulence and strength of their civilization...whoever had more of the shiny stuff was held in high regard. Thus the empire never outgrew its supply of gold.

When we were on the gold standard, our economy was growing faster than our supply of gold, thus the need to continually inflate our currency with respect to gold. If you don't have enough currency in circulation to cover all of the business transactions, then it's essentially a "choke point" for the growth of not only your economy, but your population as well.

In an economy engineered for constant growth (and you can argue whether THAT is even a good idea), the gold standard just didn't work. With our massive industrialization in the late 19th and 20th centuries, our economy's value became MUCH more than that of the gold we held. If we were kept from printing more money just because we didn't have more gold, we would not be able to properly represent our value on both national and international markets.

Is this abused? HELL YES. For the most part, the government is responsible with the printing of money. But lately, they circulate liquidity based on DEBT (future value) instead of PRESENT VALUE.

No one's ever been able to answer me why "gold has intrinsic value". Its value in ancient times was based on that it was shiny, rare, and people were like, "Oooooooh!". I don't see that as being sufficient to establish permanent value.

My point is that we tried our damnedest to stay on the gold standard and as we were forced to grow the currency to support economic growth and rebuilding, inflation threatened to overrun us. Thus, we established the modern "floating standard".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

This is a common misperception. Imagine for a moment, that we did not print up any more money, ever. You are correct in that the ratio of people to dollars would increase, bringing on very slight deflation. The question to ask yourself is, why is this bad? Is it really bad if your dollar that you have today could buy $1.02 worth of goods next year? We already deal with inflation which is in the opposite direction.

The problem with deflation isn't the increased buying power, it's that currency is not as readily available.

Look at this most recent "market crash". The big problem that everyone was worried about wasn't the unemployment or the economic contraction. It was that with all the debt-backed securities suddenly losing value, banks did NOT want to lend. Banks treat debt like currency, so the big concern was that there would not be enough "liquidity" in the market to sustain business between large corporations, especially the financial ones.

The big focus, if you remember what happened right after the real-estate crash, wasn't how to get people to keep their homes or how to spark consumer confidence, it was, "how do we get the banks lending again??".

Now, as I said above, you can argue that maybe our economy needs to STOP growing for a little while. Maybe our POPULATION as well could stand to stop growing for a little while. I won't refute that...in fact, I probably agree with you there. Then the amount of currency in circulation could probably stay about the same and maybe even re-fix for a period of time. Our economy has been driven by financial institutions toward a somewhat unnatural continued growth by the management of liquidity. (Greenspan and his interest rate manipulation, for example) Maybe that needs to be re-evaluated.

But there are politics involved here. No President wants to reside over a stagnant or a contracting economy. Plus, how are you going to tell people to "lay off the American dream"? Don't start that business. Don't have that big family. People do what they want, and it's only when people start dying and the system starts failing do they stop and think about what it means to THEMSELVES.

At least to this time, we've been responsible enough to secure that currency with debt. But it's getting to the point where we're in debt so far into the future, that I'm afraid some of our "lenders" may second-guess our ability to repay.

When and if that happens, it really WILL be time to panic.

We went to a resource that the Goverments could manage because it provided CONTROL. Make no mistake, Governments are all about control. When you control a currency, you may as well control everything else.

Once Governments have this control, now they can tax us invisibly and not one person in 1000 will know what is going on. They blame unions, corporations or any other entitiy. Not realizing that for every dollar the Government prints, they are stealing directly out of your pocket. They just are not raising your tax payments while they do it.

I'm not going to debate this because I can't disprove it. All I'll say is that there are other explanations just as likely, if not more likely, as the Alex Jones illuminati theories that you're leading this conversation toward right now. I doubt there's any Skull-n-Bones conspiracy to tax the little man dry. There's a lot of personal greed, but I don't think there's this coordinated malicious intent that a lot of people seem to think there is.

 

[synergy1]

Even if there was a miracle method to create free energy, the energy barons would suppress its use by any means necessary to ensure their monopolies

There won't be free energy, oil was the best we got and its running out. Big oil knows this which is why they are investing small stakes into other technologies just to keep their feet wet. To startups, the millions that these oil companies provide are vital to get operations off the ground, but to them its a roundoff error in their EBIT numbers. At the end of the day, big oil will have licensing rights to 4th gen fuel technologies without giving up that much!

Those who have the power will probably keep it. In the industry I am involved in, its already happening.

The result? People started trading in their paper dollars for something tangible, something that held value. Gold

Gold is a silly method to hold value today as well. With an increasing population, tying the value of all monetary units to a non increasing storage makes no sense. The problem with our system now is that it grows based upon what we think the future will hold. Humans have been shown to have a poor ability at realizing the future today. An interesting solution has been proposed on a blog I read and it is to tie the money expansion based upon the domestic energy we are able to grow in that year. The basic idea is that if you use less coal/foreign oil in FY 11 when compared to FY10, the money system is allowed to expand by a predictable amount. This introduces new money into a system that has more means to sustain itself.

I know I pretty much bastardized that description, just read the idea on 'sudden debt''s blog. Its outlined better there.

As a closing note here, I don't think people are being set up to fail. I think that were simply isn't enough to go around; there are too many people and too few resources. Its easier to share 1 pizza with a class of 10 instead of a class of 10 million.

 

[synergy1]

I pose the same question to you as I did above.

Why does the money supply need to keep pace with the population? What are the costs of it not happening?

Right now money supply growth FAR outpaces population growth.....does that give problems as well?

Both sides of the coin pose potential issues. By keeping a static money supply, additional members of the workforce will be forced to deal with less resources available to them. If you think about it like an engineer, you basically spread the same money over a larger population - people have less. By increasing the money supply, one could theoretically accommodate the new workforce by keeping the money in each persons pocket equal. However since there is more total money in the system, its value decreases anyway.

Its a lose/ lose situation. Thus the root cause might not be the monetary system, but the people within that system ( since that is the only variable that changes with a result that does not change).

Honestly man I don't know how we could fix it. I am just an observer trying to understand how things work. I still maintain that we are not disadvantaged so much as we are all fighting for limited resources.

 

[synergy1]

I wouldn't call what I posted an argument for one system or another as much as a thought experiment.

We have all this talk about the matrix and being plugged in, and by far the biggest thing we are all sold is the concept of a universal method to value goods and services. I suppose this is necessary in order to drive economies and provide goods and services to a large spectrum of people. However, fundamentally moneys value is derived from how we perceive it, nothing more. 20 bucks for water might seem ridiculous to you right now, but if you dehydrated and are in the Sahara where there is no water for miles, that 20 bucks is of infinitesimally small value compared to that water. Thus the idea of value or wealth has a lot to do about environment. To this end I maintain that limited resources and a growing population are possibly the root cause for these issues.

Its an interesting topic that probably doesn't belong in mature man, let alone the DJ forums all together. At our level its mostly academic though. Something interesting to ponder, but nothing to take too seriously as none of us are experts. alas I digress

 

[Mr.Positive]

A couple of points regarding gold, and it's intrinsic value. First, by questioning this, there is some validity, however it should be noted that this is primarily a western view and disregards that many cultures have a very stong mindset that can often be very hard to change. Even with good reason.

There's countries for example, like Poland, that completey disappeared for hundreds of years...yet their culture remained because of strong minded values and traditions.

It's these traditions and values that have carried gold for over 5000 years. And in many cultures, it's how wealth is passed down through the gerenations.

Gold has intrinsic value, because mankind can not create gold, nor destroy it. All the gold ever mined, is still there. It's timeless, just does not disappear. You can bury a gold coin out back, dig it up 50 years later, and it will look identical to when you buried it.

For this reason, gold has been corruption proof. If you have it in your possession, you own it. That simple.

Also, as pointed out, it's small, easily transferrable, and all countries recognize it, and will accept it.

It's the only 'true' international currency.

Our government hates gold, and is the main reason why we've lost some of our traditional mindset towards it.

However, to understand this, we must look internationally and it's quite apparent actually.

Intrinsically, our dollar paper currency has the same value as a roll of toilet paper. Just something to think about..

 

[backbreaker]

algae eat CO2, so yeah it makes sense that more CO2 = more algae. Funny you mention my buddies expressions because we see nothing but dollars here....Lots of dollars. Wish I could say more, but that's for later on!

Somewhat..somewhat.. on topic... my algae game is top notch. My son has this facaiation with fish. he will just sit there and looka t them for hours on end. so i got the bight idea to buy him a nice tank for christmas.. you know..goldfish or something like that.. no. my GF gets the bright idea to get a sal****er tank and all these exotic fish and ****, and promises me she is going to take care of them for him..

of course, she has done 1 partial water change in 3 months and a half ass job at that. so it's basically my fish tank. it is nice, i'm glad I got it.. very nice to look at and I like fish myself.. but still.

my fiancee picks my son up and lets him "feed the fishiess" and he jsut takes fish food and "makes it rain" in the fish tank, which does nothing but speed up algae growth in the fish tank cycle and i'm left trying to go to war with these damn things.




yes algae eat ****.

 

[sodbuster]

I just finished reading Super Freakonomics, the sequel to Freakonomics, where they debunk popular myths of the mainstream media. They solved global warming for 250 million and 100 million per year after start up.

**** Morris recent book describes the payoffs politicians are getting by lobbyists.

While these books have nothing in common,the theme is the same. Government is trying to "solve" problems in a way that gives the government and politicians MORE power over the rest of us. The gold standard got in the way of printing money to buy votes,so it had to go. When Roosevelt confiscated it, it was $35 per oz. NOW $1100? So what happens to the savers? Killed by inflation. If you had disobeyed the law and held gold and given it to your grandkids-it would have held it's value.

Apologizefor the rambling post.

 

[Mr.Positive]

When Roosevelt confiscated it, it was $35 per oz. NOW $1100? So what happens to the savers? Killed by inflation. If you had disobeyed the law and held gold and given it to your grandkids-it would have held it's value..

Good post sodbuster, however one correction. When Roosevelt confiscated the gold, it was $20 per oz. He gave $20 for each ounce turned in. Overnight, he devalued the dollar and priced gold at $35. After the confiscation of the gold. Overnight.

This was the biggest theft by our government, and transfer of wealth in our history.

 

[Mr.Positive]

Nixon did it the second time when he refused to supply gold to those foreigners who chose to redeem their ever-increasing US dollars with something tangible.

The US has defaulted twice in the last 100 years alone..

That's right, another good one..the end of the Brenton-Woods agreement. I believe Nixon ended that when France tried to redeem their dollars for gold.

Haha..:crackup: This **** really cracks me up actually. When you think about it, we really are the financial bullies of the world.

Also, and this is just speculation with some hard evidence supporting it, but it may seem that we also sold China a bunch of fake gold bars from the Clinton era. The media would never let that out though.

We owe so many countries trillions because of all the things we've consumed over the years, and many countries have their currencies pegged to ours. We're also the world's reserve curency. The fed can do whatever they want, they've got the whole world by the balls.

Particularly, we bully China. They produce, we consume. China could collapse the dollar overnight if they wanted to, just dump all their dollars on the open market. But they won't, because we wouldn't be able to buy all their worthless crap.

So, we'll just keep on consuming, let the world support us. God help us all if THAT stops. The US consumes 50% of the worlds resources. :crackup: