patrick.net

The real purpose of the Fed is to keep wages low.

I read that the savings rate was way up.

Not really going to get into that old debate, they can't be all good or all bad. I have a problem with someone breaking the law to show up but when businesses want to hire them and the quota is set to 0, I don't see how it can be a surprise that they show up. It is also a national security threat to have people just coming and going but we can extend that discussion since we are mentioning Nazis. No I'm not an advocate for illegal aliens but I'm not going to demonize someone who comes here out of desperation either. More of that reverse class warfare I was just talking about, I find it distasteful.

Let's suppose the gov cranks up the printing press and pays off the $2.7 trillion owed to foreign investors.

Did that $2.7 trillion in new money make up for the $trillions lost in the stock and housing meltdown?

Let's just have the gov print a few $trillion more. Who are they going to give it to? Give each household a $1 million stimulus payment?

I'd also remind you that not all illegals are Latins. I've made some Mexican friends in my years in California but in general I don't care much for them. They are dirty, don't think twice about littering, I hate their crap music, they don't take care of business, they won't maintain anything of theirs so they are always breaking down and causing traffic jams. Their life experiences make them somewhat 'stupid' like not knowing that you can't safely cross a busy freeway. They destroy neighborhoods they live in because they don't understand the same norms of decency, like having a green yard, not having 8 cars in front of the house. All those stereotypes I find are generally true, but I just live my life as quietly as I can and if people aren't bothering me I tend to let things slide.

The Original Bankster Says:
October 11th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
"Malcolm, judging by your link there I assume you are of the Bay Area Haight-Ashbury hippie pedigree. This herd has thinned out in the past 8 years for sure."

You'd be way off. I've visited SF three times, I am from the East Coast and have lived in San Diego for 18 years. I have become very interested in environmental sustainability, not for political reasons or because I have something against capitalism, just because I find it is the right way to live.

That link is now outdated as I am just a limited partner in that company. The page and the feel are not really reflections on my personality. The founder of the company is an old cowboy from S Dakota.

TOB wrote :

The stock market in india does not represent Indian economy because India is primarily private.Company financing by going IPO is still not that mature in india and only accounts for a small number.
India is still largely a savings based economy - Good for them.
Thats one reason India survived most global financial disruptions pretty well. A precipetous drop in stock market is like a storm in US but like a fart in India.The only guys who are worried, are the hedge fund managers in US and other international fund managers.Vast majority of people in india don't believe in investing in equities. They just don't trust the company management, thier reportings and management integrity.This is primarily due to lack of regulation and enforcements in finacial markets or for that matter in general in the country.
One more thing , Rupee value is falling like a rock because all the investors in US are pulling dollars like crazy to cover thier asses here.
This is not good for us as it would hasten outsourcing. On top of it, we have bad economy here, which would force companies to oursource more, just like it happened in 2001-2005.
Ofcourse, all this would happen only if we survive the collapse.

In any case, we should worry more about US and less about other countries, unless it affects us negatively.

I already voted, and yes I voted yes on 8. BTW, I don't have a problem with gay marriage, see this is how difficult I am. I voted yes because I was outraged that again the courts overturned the will of the voters and forced their hand. My ballot is already in my mailbox.

Bapp33,

You really think Obama will lose? If your prediction is right, you take the title of "Oracle" from Duke, who accurately predicted the 8500 Dow.

They just don’t trust the company management, thier reportings and management integrity

I wonder if this attitude is affecting the current US stock market.

BAP, BTW you're right on about the housing thing. In my area there is a huge price premium if you want to have white neighbors. I have the blue collar kind, but even I couldn't afford to have engineers as neighbors, that was way out of reach. Ironically people with far less than I have tried to make it happen, now I'm watching many friends going through hard times because they couldn't really afford that premium.

At least I live close to a pier where I can fish if times get really bad. Oceanside if quite close, and I also can rent sailboats very cheaply. I also have my British citizenship, nice to be able to fall back on.

I'll be quite poor if I convert dollars to pounds though :(

I'm regretting bringing it up, I'm not hateful, but you guys are correct. It is a real problem, that is one group who thinks everyone should cater to them. I resent it, I don't want you guys to get me wrong.

Again though, I resent the government for its inaction more than I blame the 'invaders.' In fact who could blame them? What would you do?

I though we had stopped attacking minorities on this blog and blaming them for all the problems we face.
Common guys, there is a storm brewing and you guys are talking about lawn maintenance and traffic jams.
I would give these latin people a pass. Every immigrant generation takes a while before they have to reset to the new norms , expectations and decency levels. Its called change of point of reference. Thier reference is still thier host country. Don't tell me , these things didn't happen for the earlier generations of european/chinese immigrants.Things smooth out after a while. We just have to make immigration rules are more perfect, rather than bitch about people who use that failed system to sneak in.
We have to take responsibility and stop this blame game.
How many of you called thier reps to complain about immigration rules.
I know, I did.
everybody started jumping up and down as soon as the 700B bail out was proposed.
In any case, I am strongly against targeting ANY minorities on this BLOG.
No special treatment for Jews.OK.

TOB : What keeps total costs low for outsourcing agencies?

snmr Says:
October 11th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
"I though we had stopped attacking minorities on this blog and blaming them for all the problems we face.
Common guys, there is a storm brewing and you guys are talking about lawn maintenance and traffic jams."

I might remind you that the modern hatred for America by Muslims stems from a cleric coming over here and being offended at the amount of effort people here spent caring for their lawns. Sorry if it is offensive, I see no reason to not bring it up as white people have just as much right to live the way they choose and BAP brought up a clear point on how it directly contributed to the housing bubble. I saw it firsthand.

TOB : What keeps total costs low for outsourcing agencies?

The sheer size of the population.Its more than a billion.

You cannot expect to connect the water tank on your home to a lake and expect the water in the lake to rise. Size does matter.

Again, I think we have to be very careful with the usage of the verbage hyperinflation. I think the US is extremely unlikely to head into that.

I heard from grandparents' generation about their lives in 1948. You got your salary as a professor at an esteemed university at the end of the week (they switched to weekly salary), the first thing you'd do is to rush to a rice wholesaler to exchange ALL that into rice, because you could always exchange into other things from rice. So on the payday, you got home with your servants with 100s bags of rice.

Anything other than grocery with a little more lasting value was quoted in gold and silver, and yet nobody wanted to let go of their gold, because a few months later, all the one-way train tickets and ferries leaving China for the free world were only quoted in the unit of gold bars. Got gold, you could escape, no gold, you'd be stuck in commie China.

We will most probably never get there. So having a double-digit inflation every year is an entirely different matter from hyperinflation. People tend to use the word hyperinflation too liberally.

TOB, you never cease to surprise me.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9323776/#storyContinued

This was mine. I'm reading yours now, I think it is the same story. I remembered seeing it on a documentary some time back. Pretty funny how something as innocent as a green lawn caused 9/11.

TOB : how exactly does that keep the costs down?

The costs are down WRT the dollar. Thier is huge difference.
The costs are not down in general in india.If that were the case, India wouldn't be still a poor country.

To bridge that gap, its would be a while due to the size of population.
Use my previous analogy.

This chick doesn't really know what she's talking about but she's hot and it's related to bailouts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgxxxCfJpxY

I didn't expect you knew that much about Sayyid Qutb. I was really expecting people to tell me I was out in left field, not for you to provide multiple links.

Deflation is never a choice. It happens despite all governments efforts to prevent it.

In the end, all fiat currencies fail. Unfortunately for Baby Boomers, this may happen in their lifetimes.

A big far afield, but since Malcolm is around and this is a survivalist thread... What do you think of a "peak shaver" DC solar system. The idea being you have a DC bus powered by solar panels that runs a baseload, therefore "shaving" the most costly marginal kWhrs. I'm thinking a refrigerator would be an ideal load. The negatives: batteries, DC refrig/freezers tend to be more expensive. Positives: no inverter cost, backup power system for when the Big One hits. Was recently reinspired by this article.

Electrocution is always a concern with electricity. I don't like DC from the stand point that once it bites, it never lets you go. With AC you at least have a chance to get off before you die.

Read the history of electricity in America. There are so many reasons AC won over DC. Edison tried and failed.

If you really want a backup source of power, pay the cost for the inverter and batteries. I am not a fan of solar, but I do like small wind turbines. The only way to get DC out of a turbine is the use of an inverter or putting a commutator on the generator part. The addition of a commutator to any Synchronous Field motor-generator for electrical generation just adds too much complexity to the machine. It will never be reliable.

@ OO,

What about the Republic of Zimbabwe?

http://allafrica.com/stories/200801180772.html

or Iceland

http://www.icenews.is/index.php/information/inflation-iceland/

"I would rather him and his faggot friends stick to hanging out in their moms basement playing video games and comparing scrotum piercings."

I have to say, you and SurferX have a talent for imagery. Such beautiful hatred. My all time favorite was SurferX telling a boomer to go to a car show. Now I can't drive through Temecula without thinking of him on Sundays when the boomers are out in force convincing each other of how underpriced their restorations are.

I agree with Nutty. I see no reason to try to pay more for a DC refrigerator. Just get a modified sine wave inverter for a few hundred bucks, then you can run appliances, even a hair dryer off of it. 200 watts of panels, 3 99amphr batteries, and a 2000 watt inverter and you could live with a few essentials if it all collapses. Your total materials cost would be under $1,500 for this type of system. I had one built in a cart to demonstrate the concept. http://www.reliablesunpower.com/reliablesunpower_002.htm
This is the company that I started when I was doing the MBA at SDSU. It's the cost of the batteries that ruin the value proposition so you're not doing it for economic reasons. I'll never suggest this type of system as cost effective verses just doing a grid tied system, which is very expensive but now very cost effective.

If you own a home....

I'm more optimistic which is why I believe in a society of grid tied solar homes, but they don't work when the grid goes down so it might make sense to have a switch to divert the DC to a bank of batteries to do what we're talking about if the big one hits. Now you can get a solar system for a net cost of $15,000, then spend a couple thousand more for a bank of batteries to do what nutty is talking about. You get a second inverter and do a feedback into the main box. Then you are really energy independent and will have the only powered house on your block if our society falls apart.

Thanks TOB, that was an interesting link. Not sure I agree that this is a war of conservatives vs muslims but it is interesting to see the evolution of both ideologies on their own.

How would you like a real solution for electrical power? You take money, which we don't have, to build a massive network of base load nuclear power plants. These babies run for 2 years straight at 100% power before they need to be taken down for an outage for refueling and work. In the process you can get free fresh water from the waste heat that has to thrown away because of entropy.

Imagine a world where electricity is made for a fair price and all the water you can ever use. We even have the technology to use different fuel cycles and end up with more fuel than we started with. The whole concern over proliferation is way overblown. If terrorist wanted to make trouble, they would not bother with any thing nuclear. It is self protecting because it would kill you with acute radiation poisoning before they could do anything with it. I am more scared of a chemical or biological type attack because it is cheaper and could be as effective.

Waste is not much of an issue either. If you let us reprocess the waste, we would recover most of the nasty stuff anyway to be reburned. The real waste is the light elements that mostly have short half lives and can't be reused.

To best explain this, where I work we have a spent fuel pool that contains all of the fuel assemblies at the bottom of a pool of water. All of the waste ever made is still onsite in storage. This is 30+ years of waste! I challenge any other power generation to store all of its waste in a pool of water that is smaller than an Olympic swimming pool.

To make this all happen we must get some kind of industrialization back. We currently cannot make the steel vessels/ major parts for ANY large power plant in the United States. We need to get a Steel industry that can make these parts, an education system that can train the people with the skills needed to build/operate these plants, and people to accept the old ways are gone. I have always believed that productivity will keep reducing the number of people needed for manufacturing. I want a world where robots build all the stuff we use and people act more like supervisors of the machines. The occasional repair and maintenance of the machines would have to be performed by educated humans. Once we can get all this worked out and replace human labor with technology, we can once again reclaim the title of strongest economy.

One last thing is needed. We must rid ourselves of financial alchemy. Stop all of the bailout and let the market figure it all out. Give the collateral to the bond holders when people can’t pay the bills. I want the banks to get creative on the solution to their problem. Let them work it out with the FB. Maybe they can take the home back and rent it back to the previous FB owners. Only if the banks are forced to work things out or fail will the best solutions come.

I agree with Peter P to let these people fail and discover the down side of capitalism. This will not occur and I accept it. As angry and bitter as I get over the bailout, my anger won’t change a thing. Because my money has now been used to bailout people that by all measures should be destitute, I want heavy regulation of the banks. They used our money, they now have to play by the rules that we set down. I want all of the stock holders wiped out.

Bring Glass-Stegall back and require all future loans from the current banks to have 20% down. There are no exceptions to this rule for the commercial banks. If you are caught making loans without the 20% collateral, you are going to federal pounding in the ass prison!

The only way out of this would be private money that is not connected to the commercial banks. If you want to gamble, use your own money and not mine. It is funny how Glass-Stegall was taken out by people that thought they were smarter than our wise ancestors from the 1930’s. Gee we were so smart that we did the exact same thing. The great depression was caused by the same thing that we our in now. Easy credit and stupid people were not invented by us. They also existed 100 years ago.

Well said, and I am for nuclear to offset any shortage from the renewables. 700B was more than enough to fix our energy shortage more than twice over no matter which solution you choose, and I like the desalinization benefit ontop of that. Think of the real job creation that we could have had with that investment with a definite payback. Screw all that paper crap going on, we would have real strength and real value. You have every right to be pissed off. I have never felt such a personal rage towards this country in my life. I'm fucking pissed.

Add the plug in hybrid concept for our vehicles and we can let the middle east decay back into obscurity. We'd also have nice quiet streets and clean air. I am not just a dreamer, this stuff is real. I'm not a hippie running my mouth, I am living this and getting incrementally closer each year. My Aptera www.aptera.com is going to be made for me within a couple of years.

Don't get pissed off. Just channel that anger into your imagination.

Imagine all those old people on their rascals wielding pitchforks marching on Washington after SS, medicare, and welfare is scrapped becasue we can't afford it anymore. Now imagine charged firehoses, tear gas, rubber bullets and billy clubs being used to disperse the crowd of old fuckers. We will find out fast just how quick those rascals can be :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXgW7e86nw

God I love the imagery. Instead of the old days when they had the paddy wagons to take rioters to jail, now they will string all the Rascals in a line and tow them all to the jail parking lot. I knew wheelchair ramps were a control mechanism, in order to stop a mob marching on the capitol building, all you have to do is block off the ramps. Those stairs are just there because they look nice on the postcard.

"Screw all that paper crap going on, we would have real strength and real value."

not to mention if we invested in our energy dependence, we could start pulling our troops back from the middle east much quicker, thereby saving money, and increasing the strength of our armed forces.

Trying to fix that part of the world just for their oil has proven itself to be far more expensive than just developing energy independence ourselves.

whoops, dependence=independence