financial straws

Americans are going broke- in fact, most of them are broke, but rotating lines of credit allows them to still spend.

The only reason we have not faced the 1929 style crash are those ubiquitous credit cards. Meanwhile, we are still working 3 jobs just to pay the interest on those credit cards. How long will it take to break the vicious cycle of spending?
Spending makes us feel good and accomplished. We spend to hide the fact that we work ourselves to the bones just to sustain our lives and make the very few very rich.

Right now, healthcare/health insurance are major financial bloodsuckers. But most of us sally on, even though in the back of our minds we are wondering if we are going to pay the dentist or the pharmacist.

But yet the retail market is as strong as its been in 30 years.

What straw is going to break the camel's back? For many it has already been broken.

I suspect rising gas prices will impact us... but yet as oil prices rise, solar and wind and other renewables prices are dropping. So if you have the cash to switch over, it ends up being to your advantage.

Interesting puzzle . . .

Any insights?

Creative Commons and the Sharing Economy

Have you heard about Creative Commons? It is a sharing economy's way of maintaining credit for your work while allowing people to use it and share it and add to it. There are similar platforms for Live Open Science, instantly shared and connected science works. The creators of that were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. The developed software for that has been superseded with a more advanced platform called Open Hab (although this may not be the right name, as I  can not find evidence of it).

Anyways, back to Creative Commons. There are many different levels you may copyright your work at, depending upon how open you want to be with how others can share or add to it. And they have a multi layered tag attached that is instantly read by computer and humans. It is a cool interaction between the human creativity and the computer technology.

I really like concepts related to building a sharing economy and realizations that as robots/tech can replace a lot of our daily work what will we have left except our humanity/creativity? Therefore I would suggest that part of the change towards the sharing economy that we should consider is the concept of Universal Income or Basic Income. I know experiments are being tried in Finland and Norway and Washington state.

I wonder how much of a golden age we could enter as a world society if everyone had their basic needs met and were left to their creativity, especially if they were up to sharing it all?

Wow- insightful

Read this article on social change

We’re currently at the very edge of an abundant future, and the pace of change isn’t going to slow down. As Ismail put it, “…[civilization] is heading into a trough. I think it’s about a 20- or 30-year period. We need to get to abundance on the other side by creating new leaders, new projects, and new institutions.”

Not asking a lot is it?

Soul Sucking

It is always fun, in a soul sucking way, to  meet with our financial advisers. Part of the fun is the fact that we have spent (and continue to spend) the vast majority of our time and energies raising our children. Among our 7 beautiful additions to this world are 3 that have special needs. Yes, we deal with autism, ODD, spinal bifida, mood disorders, the terrible twos and the dreaded teenagers on a daily basis.

 They suggest we hire outside help for the children so we can go and get a career. (Even if we don't break even on costs of career income minus a tutor for our children). Le Sigh... Of course that often seems to be kin to a major sin to refuse to perpetuate a broken system that values your contributions out of your home more then the contributions within your home.  Of course, when you make your money out of the stock and bonds system, anything that grow the economy is good for you. So if I get a job, and have to hire my job out and then drive through on the way hone because I am too tired to cook. It all adds to the economy (as it is counted), but subtracts from what matters most to me, my family. It just doesn't seem logical to do so. When I consider this scenario, I hear a life sucking sound, where all my efforts go to building someone else's coffers and not the one things that truly matter.

Everything we do is for our children. I just wish it could make a difference in the longevity of the world. Sometimes, other times I kinda look towards heaven and wish the end of the world to hurry up. But maybe that should be part of my equation. What good is a career and investments in financial markets when the world ends?

With what time we may or may not have left on the planet, should I not also consider that the economy as we know it perpetuates the destruction of the world? Without the desires for increased wealth would we not have made better decisions as a country or world? Would we not have possibly considered that we can't breathe soot or drink liquid coal and put tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with no consequences?

Seriously folks... you are worried about my retirement plan, instead of if there will be a world to retire on?

PS- I don't plan on retiring, I plan on working and building and learning and teaching and creating as much positive in the world as I can all the days of my life. I plan to prepare for the changes ahead and to ride through them with my family.

Top 5 Things not to tell your Financal Advisors

5. That you want to add more children to your household, 6 is just not enough.

4. That you are investing in the future- that's why you gave up on birth control.

3. That the $40,000 college education is only an investment if it pays dividends and that the last person you knew who had that degree works as your sister's nanny.

2. That you don't even know what's inside the box they live in, but luckily your husband does.

1. That none of your real dreams can be realized under the current monetary paradigms, but you still have hope because you believe that the paradigms are changing.

Needless to say, I think they believe my reality check bounced.

Solar Clothes Dryer

Mike and I put up a new *low cost* fancy, spangled, solar clothes dryer yesterday. It will cut our electricity bills in 2 ways. 1- saves energy costs of running the traditional tumble dryer. 2- shades the house and saves energy on a/c and fan use in cooling our house.

Isn't it a thing of beauty? I really loves all those pink and yellow baby clothes lined up in a row.

All it costs us was a grand total of $4.95 and 15 minutes in time.

world grain production has fallen short of consumption in
seven of the last eight years....

Just when it seemed that things could not get much worse,
the United States, the world’s breadbasket, is planning to double
the share of its grain harvest going to fuel ethanol—from 16
percent of the 2006 crop to 30 percent or so of the 2008 crop.
With this enormous growth in the U.S. capacity to convert grain
into fuel, the world price of grain is moving up toward its oil equivalent
value. This ill-conceived U.S. effort to reduce its oil
insecurity has helped drive world grain prices to all-time highs,

Although attention commonly focuses on energy use on the
farm, agriculture accounts for only one fifth of the energy used
in the U.S. food system. Transport, processing, packaging, marketing,
and kitchen preparation of food are responsible for the
rest. The U.S. food economy uses as much energy as the entire
economy of the United Kingdom.30

The 14 percent of energy used in the food system to move
goods from farmer to consumer is equal to two thirds of the
energy used to produce the food. And an estimated 16 percent
of food system energy use is devoted to canning, freezing, and
drying food—everything from frozen orange juice concentrate
to canned peas.3

The most energy-intensive segment of the food chain is the
kitchen. Much more energy is used to refrigerate and prepare
food in the home than is used to produce it in the first place. The
big energy user in the food system is the kitchen refrigerator, not
the farm tractor. While oil dominates the production end of the
food system, electricity dominates the consumption end. With
higher energy prices, the modern food system that evolved when
oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured.36

From an agricultural vantage point, the world’s appetite for
crop-based fuels is insatiable. The grain required to fill an SUV’s
25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a
whole year. If the entire U.S. grain harvest were to be converted
to ethanol, it would satisfy at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive
fuel needs.57

The price of grain is now keyed to the price of oil.

Although there are no alternatives to food for people, there
are alternatives to using food-based fuels. For example, the 4
percent of U.S. automotive fuel currently supplied from ethanol
could be achieved several times over—and at a fraction of the
cost—simply by raising auto fuel-efficiency standards by 20
percent

predictions or history?

as the world oil crisis deepens
and the property values of suburban homes plummet.”71
The food sector will be affected in two ways. Food will
become more costly as higher oil prices drive up production and
transport costs.

As oil costs rise, diets will be altered as people
move down the food chain and as they consume more local, seasonally
produced food. Diets will thus become more closely
attuned to local products and more seasonal in nature.

Air transport, both passenger travel and freight, will suffer
as jet fuel prices climb, simply because fuel is the biggest airline
operating expense. Although industry projections show air passenger
travel growing by some 5 percent a year for the next
decade, this seems highly unlikely. Cheap airfares may soon
become history.7

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new
economy—one that is powered largely by renewable sources of
energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and
that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to
build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain
economic progress. Can we build it fast enough to avoid a
breakdown of social systems?

The Weekend that would never end

We had a long weekend. It was MEA and school was off for Thursday and Friday. And then by Saturday both Galen and Clay caught some pink eye. The pink eye was very catchy, because we knew the their cousins had all had it and even grandpa caught it. So I knew I had to keep them home from church- which made the weekend even longer and then Galen had to miss school on Monday too. So that by last night he was so off schedule that he didn't want to sleep until almost midnight.

So it was tough getting him up this morning- however the magic of chocolate bunnies work very well and soon he was bouncing off the furniture. Amazing what a little infusion of sugar and caffeine (in chocolate bunnies??? that must be a whole lot of chocolate) can do.

Anyways, our long weekend did not seem to slow down October sales.- And I ran into a new type of customer. One who is very easily offended. Which always is interesting, because no offense was intended or even implied, but hey that doesn't make a difference if you happened to stir up some unhappy memories, I guess.

Anyways, on to life..... Have fun!

Failed States

More from Plan B

"We talk about the developing world and the developed world, but this is the deteriorating world."

(I'm skipping info on environmental refugees and lots of wonderful info about how to tell if a state is at risk of failing)

A loss of political legitimacy is an early sign of state decline. Another characteristics of failing states is a deterioration of the physical infrastructure- roads and power, water, and sewage systems. Care for natural systems is also neglected as people struggle to survive. Forests, grasslands, and croplands deteriorate, creating a downward economics spiral.

Failing states are of growing international concern because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons, and refugees. Not only was Afghanistan a training ground for terrorists, but it quickly became, under Allied occupation, the world's leading supplier of heroin. Refugees from Rwanda, including thousands of armed soldiers, contributed to the destabilization of the Congo. As the Economist notes, "Like a severely disturbed individual, a failed state is not just to itself, but to those around it and beyond."

Early Signs of Decline

More from Plan B

For the first time in modern era, life expectancy, a seminal indicator of development, has dropped for a large segment of humanity. For the people of sub-Saharan Africa, a failure of leadership is quite literally reversing the march of progress. Is this failure of the political system an anomaly? Or is it an early sign that the scale of emerging problems can overwhelm our political institutions?

The stresses on our early 21st century civilization takes many forms. Economically we see them in the widening income gap between the world's rich and poor. Socially they take the form of the widening gap in education and health care and a swelling flow of environmental refugees as productive lands turn to desert and as wells go dry. Politically we see them manifest in conflict over basic resources as cropland, grazing land, and water. And perhaps most fundamentally, we see the stresses the world is facing in the growing number of failed and failing states.

The social and economic gap between the world's richest 1 billion people and its poorest 1 billion has no historical precedent. Not only is this gap wide, it is widening. The poorest billion are trapped at a subsistence level and the richest billion are becoming wealthier with each passing year. The economic gap can be seen in the contrasts in nutrition, education, disease patterns, family size, and life expectancy.
....
So while roughly 1.2 billion people are undernourished, underweight and often hungry...roughly 1.2billion people are over nourished, suffering from excessive caloric intake and exercise deprivation.....

Disease patterns also reflect the widening gaps. The billion poorest suffer mostly from infectious diseases-malaria, TB, dysentery, and AIDS. Malnutrition leaved infants and small children even more vulnerable to such infectious diseases. Unsafe drinking water takes a heavier toll on those with hunger weakened immune systems, resulting in millions of fatalities each year. In contrast among the billion at the top of the global economic scale, it is diseases related to aging and lifestyle excesses, including obesity, smoking, diets rich in fat and sugar, and exercise deprivation, that cause the most deaths.
.....
Illiteracy and poverty tend to reinforce each other because illiterate women typically tend to have much larger families then literate women do and because each year each year of schooling raises earning power by 10-20 percent. In Brazil, for instance, illiterate women have more then 6 children on average and literate women only have 2.

The connection between poverty and disease is strong, but it has been broken for most of humanity by economic development. The challenge now is to break this link for that remaining minority who do not have access to safe water, vaccines, education and basic health care.
....
David Barker of Britain's university of Southampton observes soberly "that 60% of all newborns in India would be in intensive care had they been born in California."

HIV should be seen for what it is- an epidemic of epic proportions that, if not checked soon, could take more lives during this century then were claimed by all the wars of the last century.
...
Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post writes from Swaziland, "In the country side, teenage Swazi girls are selling sex- and spreading AIDS for $5 an encounter, exactly what it costs to hire oxen for a day of plowing."

While the HIV epidemic is currently concentrated in Africa, air and water pollutants are damaging the health of people everywhere. A joint study by the University of California and the Boston Medical Center shows some 200 human diseases ranging from cerebral palsy to testicular atrophy, linked to pollutants. Other diseases that can be caused by pollutants include an astounding 37 forms of cancer, plus heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, dermatitis, bronchitis, hyperactivity, deafness, sperm damage, and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Plan B

I am going to be quoting a lot of a book entitled "Plan B" on my blog in the coming days/weeks. Plan B is written by Lester R Brown and to put it simply it is about saving our planet and society from our self destructive path.

The budget to effect the changes to Eradicate Poverty, and restore the earth is only 1/3 of the US's military budget. We have all the tools and knowledge needed. All we need is mobilization. And we need it before nature's time runs out.

"We know that sustainable progress depends on restructuring the global economy to one based on renewable resources, a diverse transportation system, and a comprehensive reuse/recycle materials system. Sustaining progress also means eradicating poverty, stabilizing population, and restoring the earth's natural systems. Securing the additional public outlays needed to reach these goals depends on reordering fiscal priorities in response to the new threats to security.

In this mobilization, the scarcest resource of all is time. The temptation is to reset the clock, but we cannot. Nature is the timekeeper."

Problems

The problem with working with green people is that they tend to live in different time zones, and then to boot there office doesn't open up until 9-CA time, which means I have to wait until lunch break to call them. Or on the reverse they open at 8 MA time and then I can't call them past lunch because they've gone home. That is why I like email.