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onlooker wrote:I am starting to think a financial Armageddon may be the catalyst to really get collapse going. The situation with Debt is dire and at some point you have to believe the Stock Markets and such will have do deal with some dose of reality in figuring out the current economic status of everything and everyone. Warren Buffet said Derivatives are economic WMD

Exactly, want to help?

1. Get out of debt
2. Avoid Banks whenever possible
3. Use cash whenever feasible
4. Buy local
5. Buy used, barter, gift
6. Produce something
7. grow some food
8. Learn to cook
9. Teach a skill
10. Don't fly

Yep and by doing so your helping yourself and simultaneously the wider community

vtsnowedin wrote: Please think before you post.

yeah did you see that link I posted from the dark web!
wikipedia!
shh

Google "metcalf transformers" and get all sorts of subversive sites like money.com, WSJ & LA Times.

Maybe even PO.com

I hadn't heard of the Metcalf transformers before it was posted here. It is interesting that the perps were never caught. If this had been some drunk yahoos, someone would have ratted. A 250k reward is still out there. The mystery remains on what group perpetrated this. Some group doing a test run? Doesn't sound much like Islamic type terrorists.

Cog wrote:I hadn't heard of the Metcalf transformers before it was posted here. It is interesting that the perps were never caught. If this had been some drunk yahoos, someone would have ratted. A 250k reward is still out there. The mystery remains on what group perpetrated this. Some group doing a test run? Doesn't sound much like Islamic type terrorists.

There are plenty of Luddite Anarchists out there without having to invoke Islam as the cause, unfortunately crazy comes in many many flavors.

pstarr wrote:Stupidity is the most immediate threat to these here United States. I just came from the Metcalf thread where I learned that a simple act of vandalism can and should be ginned up into a Green Hippie Conspiracy upon our god-given right to drive around in circles and buy stuff.

Agree with that one. The pincers of Stupidity, Climate disruption and Resource depletion have us surrounded.

"Climate Change And The Next Genocide"

http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2015/10/13/ ... -holocaust

Tanada wrote:

Cog wrote:I hadn't heard of the Metcalf transformers before it was posted here. It is interesting that the perps were never caught. If this had been some drunk yahoos, someone would have ratted. A 250k reward is still out there. The mystery remains on what group perpetrated this. Some group doing a test run? Doesn't sound much like Islamic type terrorists.

There are plenty of Luddite Anarchists out there without having to invoke Islam as the cause, unfortunately crazy comes in many many flavors.

Hey I'm an Anarchist but not a Luddite. Does that make me "Not half bad"?

From the sound of some here we should add another selection

Donald Trump.

Newfie wrote:From the sound of some here we should add another selection

Donald Trump.

Around these parts the economy is better than it has been in years. What was your other pick?

Hah! Exactly one year ago today.

No my pick has not changed, it’s the economy that is our most emergent threat.

My pick has not changed either, a major nuclear war could still happen with the current instability in the Middle East easing but a long way from calm. None of the other options will destroy the infrastructure anything like the large scale devastation such a war would cause to happen.

For those of us more prone to see danger around the corner. I think we can pretty assuredly see that the high oil price translating to high gas prices has the potential of setting off geopolitical and economic mayhem. We saw some of that the the Recession of 2008, when the very high oil price triggered high gas prices.

I think we in the US and other rich countries sometimes fail to fully grasp how much on the edge people around the world are living. Gas prices affect key consumer goods like food and medicine. When the gas price goes up this sets off a dominoe effect of rising prices as the price rise is passed on. So, it will be interesting to see how the next few months unfold.

dolanbaker wrote:My pick has not changed either, a major nuclear war could still happen with the current instability in the Middle East easing but a long way from calm. None of the other options will destroy the infrastructure anything like the large scale devastation such a war would cause to happen.

Certainly not in the short term, anyway. (And I disagree with the Cassandra notion that an economic crash must mean "collapse" of the system with no recovery). Now, the real question is how likely is such an event?

I worry longer term about some terrorist event re a dirty bomb set off in a large city during a time of geopolitical crisis or even just high stress, tipping over a domino and possibly starting a chain reaction that wouldn't occur under normal circumstances.

When diplomacy is evolving toward threats, insults, accusations, and things like secret spying on supposed allies, that doesn't seem helpful either re quickly preventing such a domino from tipping re a "please trust me until we can sort out what is happening" context.

So I still think it's long odds, but I don't like the way the odds tend to be drifting in the world of the tech (and resulting social) changes of the past couple decades or so.

onlooker wrote:For those of us more prone to see danger around the corner. I think we can pretty assuredly see that the high oil price translating to high gas prices has the potential of setting off geopolitical and economic mayhem. We saw some of that the the Recession of 2008, when the very high oil price triggered high gas prices.

Except that for the umpteenth time, the economic community (i.e. the professional economists who know what they're talking about) overwhelmingly agree that high gas prices were most assuredly NOT the primary cause of the great recession. The primary cause was the real estate bubble collapsing.

So we don't know how bad very high gas prices would be re causing a big financial event, by themselves. We DO know, however, that as time goes on and the world economy becomes LESS energy intensive, that the impact of high gasoline prices of "X" diminishes.

And we know that $100ish prices for four years from mid 2010 to mid 2014 wasn't a big issue for the US or global economy, both of which maintained GDP growth just fine.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032

Driving smaller cars, less dining out, less shopping, lower home prices, etc. might be inconvenient. But they are most certainly NOT economic armageddon.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-risi ... omy-2017-3

That is why I posted this in the Geo forums. The Arab spring as well as countless uprisings around the world did correlate with higher commodity prices. And, I didn't say what caused the Great Recession, just that it coincided with the higher oil/gas price.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... 09.00032.x
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2 ... ice_crisis

Here is a good article about the fragile state of US economy and most other rich countries. Note the grievous Debt situation

The catch is “free money” is never actually free. Creating trillions out of thin air reduces the purchasing power of all existing currency, and pretty soon you’re following Venezuela into “our money has lost all its value” territory.

Borrow trillions into existence and at some point even ludicrously low rates of interest start piling up serious sums of interest due, and the system eventually collapses under the weight of defaults and interest payments that stripmine the economy’s productive capacity.

https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2 ... y-day.html

onlooker wrote:Here is a good article about the fragile state of US economy and most other rich countries. Note the grievous Debt situation

The catch is “free money” is never actually free. Creating trillions out of thin air reduces the purchasing power of all existing currency, and pretty soon you’re following Venezuela into “our money has lost all its value” territory.

Borrow trillions into existence and at some point even ludicrously low rates of interest start piling up serious sums of interest due, and the system eventually collapses under the weight of defaults and interest payments that stripmine the economy’s productive capacity.

https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2 ... y-day.html

The dreaded "grevious debt". Same thing I've seeen by the fast crash economic doomers since 1985ish. Today it's whining about low interest rates. Back then it was whining about high interest rates due to high inflation (the bugaboo back then due to the 60's, 70's, and early 80's).

The US government "defaulting" on the debt any time and coming "hyperinflation" were the meme then. Since then, the Cassandras change their tune like the weather vane reacts to wind, based on the current stories they can spread FUD about.

And yet, meantime, there has been LOTS of real economic growth, LOTS of great new technological progress, etc.

Saying "lots of debt" endlessly is the opposite of compelling until and unless the debt gets so big that it becomes hard to pay the interest on it. All the credible projections I've seen don't show that being a problem in the US until generations from now -- and that's accepting the gloomiest estimates at face value.