[theluckycountry]

Today I made/bought/learnt (for a post oil world) 5
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=64507&p=1198732&view=show#p1198732

A locked thread but interesting to read. I was in that camp once, growing veggies and hoarding old shovels. Then I realized that for every hour I spent working in my business I could buy a weeks worth of food. That was food for thought. "But when the system collapses" they all said, "Then you'll only have what you can grow, you'll starve!" So I researched that, and found that in all places and at all times people with wealth could buy food, because people that grow food always have an excess that is useless to them. Of course to avail yourself of this you have be living out where they are typically, so I moved out country into a farming region.

This home farming/permiculture/Doomstead model they all followed had one fatal flaw. If it ever got as bad as they said it would, they would be overrun by hungry hoards, their crops stripped like as by a plague of locusts. This is well recorded in history too! It happens every time. In the German hyperinflation, in the french Revolution. Millions of hungry city people traveling out to get food for themselves and their children. And they find a way. They always do. So these hopeful simple souls who think they are going to weather the collapse of the industrial world tell all their neighbors and encourage them to grow food and stockpile things of value. And in so doing they make themselves a Huge target for the future. "Go down to Tom's, he has lots of food stored, medicines too and everything you could want."

[Tanada]

no sharing needed. Just own less, consume less, produce less, waste less.

All true, but not for bezos, musk, Paris Hilton, or Me. We all go to the max, the max of our available resources or abilities, and even then some with debt. That's why nothing works to control the human appetite besides collapse. We all talk about giving up stuff but we never do until we lose our job or otherwise run out of money. Give the average person a million dollars and they'll be straight out the door shopping for a new car and a boat and a new home too in many cases.

Apparently 80% of plastics are not recycled, 40% or so go into landfills, 20% into the ocean, 20% is burnt into the atmosphere. So do we, as consumers, stop buying plastic? Never! Cheese comes in plastic, so do potato chips and wide screen TV's. None of us want to miss out on those products, none aside from the 1:1000,000 eco-nuts living in a yurt growing their own vegetables. But even they have a plastic coated cell phone that will go into a landfill, else how would we ever know they were out there living in the dirt if they didn't post up the saga on youtube.

I've OVER talking about "Saving" the planet and all that. All I want to save is my own lifestyle, and everyone is the same, pretending otherwise is just mental masturbation. The coming PeakOil collapse will settle all these accounts and reign in over-consumption. It will reduce population and pollution and all the BS the oil age has given us. But technology "Stuff" is like Heroin and as long as you can maintain your access to it, modern processed foods, and climate control and mobility etc, you won't give it up. It's what I like about this forum! Here all the dangers and pitfalls to modern life are shown, even in the majority reality-contrarian mindset that believes we can solve the unsolvable. It allows the rest to learn and adapt, to protect their wealth, to ensure their future happiness. To live like it's 1999.

Not really an argument but i am old enough that we got our meat from the butcher shop wrapped in white paper and I can remember getting potato chips in wax paper bags. Everything doesn't have top be wrapped and displayed in plastic, it is just how things have developed.

[theluckycountry]

Not really an argument but i am old enough that we got our meat from the butcher shop wrapped in white paper and I can remember getting potato chips in wax paper bags. Everything doesn't have top be wrapped and displayed in plastic, it is just how things have developed.

Yes Tanada, it is the rational profit maximizer at work. The plastic comes as a byproduct of gas liquids and has little use outside of plastic baggies so the market has been flooded by it. It's cheap, and trees are scarce in a sense and more costly to turn into paper equivalents.

I still see chips in paper bags, but they are more expensive, and it's a bit of a con anyway since they are plastic lined for freshness. Supermarket sales are a special case in the sense that those products are right in the consumers face and they get to hold them and make choices. When you order a Flat screen TV it comes in a cardboard box and inside a big plastic bag but no one challenges that because they don't see it at the point of sale.

It's a constant tug of war between the consumers who want cheap prices and the corporate bosses who want as much money as they can get. The plastic issue is just a small piece of the overall hunt for profit, and unfortunately, one that is causing untold ecological damage..

A profit maximizer is any technique used to increase your customers' average order value and hence instant profit. Marketing every product separately is great and still makes plenty of money in its own right. But if you want to really upscale your game, creating multiple offers for your customers is an excellent way to rake in more money faster.

Profit maximizers enable you to squeeze out more value from your current customers and potentially save much more that you would have spent marketing and advertising to get new customers as well as distribution to more customers. This means that even without changing ad spend or increasing product prices, you can generate more income with the same customers you already have.

https://www.localdigital.com.au/blog/wh ... 5-examples

So you sell them cloth bags or paper bags if they want to go Green, but all your actual food must be in airtight plastic to ensure longevity and hence greater profits due to less waste. My supermarket imports all it's cakes and most of it's bread from 2000km away where it's made cheaply in huge complexes. It arrives in huge trucks, frozen stiff, nice and fresh so they say. Just don't refreeze it of course.

[AdamB]

Not really an argument but i am old enough that we got our meat from the butcher shop wrapped in white paper and I can remember getting potato chips in wax paper bags. Everything doesn't have top be wrapped and displayed in plastic, it is just how things have developed.

Same here for the meat. And addiionally we wrapped our venison in that white paper as well. Never even saw potato chips that I can remember until college. Same with mass produced pizza, mom and grandma made ours, it was a treat. The first time Dominos delivered pizza to my dorm room...shit it was like amazing, living in the "big city" (county seat, maybe a population of 10,000), pizzas delivered.

[Newfie]

Tanada,

Like you old enough to have seen different.

But everyone grows up to to expect their adolescent/young adult hood experience to be the norm.

I really dislike muck of American consumerism. All kinds of needless waste. But younger folks just take it as natural, the way the world is supposed to be.

I believe that is part of my attraction to leas developed areas, remind me of my youth.

[theluckycountry]

I believe that is part of my attraction to leas developed areas, remind me of my youth.

Yes, an era when people paid off their home and didn't go into debt to rebuild it year after year lol. The amount of money wasted, even out where I am, new arrivals, is phenomenal. New fences, new driveways, to replace ones that are still ok, but just look old. Big decks they never use, walls knocked out internally to have the "open plan" living. Great until you have to air condition that! Am I critical? Damn right. These people are near retirement in many cases, the debt they take on to "Add value" will be crippling when they retire.

In the street I grew up in no one modified anything, ever! They just enjoyed life and used their homes as homes, not magazine show houses. It's a sickness almost, the result of consumer marketing especially evident in TV renovation shows, the shows themselves that is. It doesn't happen a lot out here, like I say, only when some city folk move out. They buy the cheapest house in the street, a dump, then spend a fortune transforming it, all in line with the TV wisdom. If they had just looked around in the beginning for a really nice place and spent the money on that they'd have come out far ahead. What's the first thing you do when you buy a dilapidated old timber home? You raise and re stump it of course, so you have a level structure to begin with. This is often the last thing these fools do, if they do it at all!

It's women mostly, building little dream homes, little dolls houses as I call them. I got that saying from an older woman near retirement, "this is my dolls house" she told me

[Shaved Monkey]

I believe that is part of my attraction to leas developed areas, remind me of my youth.

Yes, an era when people paid off their home and didn't go into debt to rebuild it year after year lol. The amount of money wasted, even out where I am, new arrivals, is phenomenal. New fences, new driveways, to replace ones that are still ok, but just look old. Big decks they never use, walls knocked out internally to have the "open plan" living. Great until you have to air condition that! Am I critical? Damn right. These people are near retirement in many cases, the debt they take on to "Add value" will be crippling when they retire.

Australian retirement system rewards you for being in the sweet spot.
"Alliance for a Fairer Retirement System pointed to a super sweet spot of around $400,000, which can see a pensioner (home-owning) couple “earning $1,000 a month more than a couple with $800,000 in savings.”
https://www.canstar.com.au/superannuati ... weet-spot/

So if you have more than $400 G in Super you can only spend it on your house as your house isnt counted as an asset for Pension/Super.
Having more than $400 and less than 1mill will see you worse off than having $400 G and the Pension.

Im looking at up-sizing or putting in a pool and a gym and or more travel...I still have a few years to make a decision and you dont get any younger and you do spend more time at home.

[theluckycountry]

Australian retirement system rewards you for being in the sweet spot.
"Alliance for a Fairer Retirement System pointed to a super sweet spot of around $400,000...
Im looking at up-sizing or putting in a pool and a gym and or more travel...I still have a few years to make a decision and you dont get any younger and you do spend more time at home.

pull the money out as cash and buy gold coins from dealers "cash", while you still can!

What you propose is what everyone is doing and as history shows, the majority always gets fleeced. 2008 proved that! An anomaly? No, a test case to see how the masses would react to having their retirement stolen. But that money is already gone actually, it is mostly invested in overpriced commercial RE and in the stock market, which every serious analyst admits is an overpriced casino now. Every generation has it's promise of happy retirement and every generation gets dudded.

If you want security you have to go outside the system. Silver is still cheap.

[AgentR11]

What you propose is what everyone is doing and as history shows, the majority always gets fleeced. 2008 proved that!

No one forced people to sell on the drop, other than very unwise margin traders maybe. Lots of folks bought at the bottom, earlier 2009 was blue light special time if there ever was one. (I think I'm remembering the timing right, I ain't lookin it up). Stuff that fell to $5 is now going for $70; many higher than they were before the crash.

If you're going to sell after a crash, do not buy stocks. Simple as that. When all the analysts are moaning and whining, when the things are looking "grim"; that's when you go shopping.

[theluckycountry]

If you're going to sell after a crash, do not buy stocks. Simple as that.

It's not as simple as that I'm afraid. 2008 was a crash by any standards, but the powers that be poured a trillion new bucks into the system and it all came back. It has convinced the average person that A/ stock markets will always come right back after a beating, and B/ that the system can and will be propped up at all cost. Neither of these assumptions are true. If you look at the period before the 1929 collapse you'll see many "recessions" where the markets tanked but quickly came back. Indeed between 29 and 33 there was a major recovery, but it fell apart and we had the depression. Stocks never recovered until the 1950's and many of the former stars were gone, pushed out of the index and replaced with rising stars.

Most pension funds buy individual stocks, not the index itself, and they like to buy the growth stocks like Tesla and Nvidea. In other words the risky ones. What was the problem in 29? Debt. What's the problem today? Debt again. So we've had a good run since 1980 but it won't last. Have a look at this chart below, imagine you were near retirement and held a bunch of stocks in 1960 when the index was 7000. It fell thereafter and didn't come back to that price until 1990. You'd have to wait 30 years, half of it through falling prices. "Sell after a crash". If you need the money to live you have to sell, simple as that. It was a shitshow for that 30 years but the average Joe wasn't in stocks then, they were on SS or company pensions. Now they are all in stocks through their private pension funds. It's a classic setup! It's no wonder they introduced private pensions in 1980. Been a dream run since then.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jo ... ical-chart

Stocks are not just some investment choice we take of leave, they are one of the fundamental pillars of the capitalist economy, when they collapse the economy collapses.

[Newfie]

The current rapid reaction yo-yo of the market makes me thing we have not learned much iver the decades.

[theluckycountry]

The current rapid reaction yo-yo of the market makes me thing we have not learned much iver the decades.

Well those that manipulate it have. They have learned to maximize profits across all sectors. I read an article a decade and more ago that explained (and documented) how major corporations, within their financial departments, own vast stocks in other companies, often their competitors. This was an Australian based study and it basically showed the inter-ownership between them all. A major Bank held large holdings in Coke, Rio Tinto mining, other banks and other leading corporations. Coke held a big block of shares in that bank and others. Rio stock in all of them. That sort of information was easily accessible in the early days of the web, now it's invisible, expunged by the search engines. Try searching "corporate inter-ownership"

"Corporate inter-ownership" refers to a situation where one company owns shares in another company, creating a complex web of ownership relationships between different corporations. This interconnectedness can lead to significant power and influence over industries and potentially impact market dynamics and competition.

The bones of one site https://ruk.ca/content/opencorporations ... porate-web
https://web.archive.org/web/20240526074 ... whyclosed/

The major corps are like one big cartel and it's why you see CEOs moving from one to another, even after presiding over a collapse of one. Just because a corp collapses doesn't mean it failed naturally, they are often set up to fail, those in control stripping them of assets and selling and walking away. How much Google stock is held by major corporations? Certainly enough to guarantee seats on the board. And once there you can dictate any amount of censorship you like. Good conspiracies are well covered up and these are a few of them. The biggest conspiracies, such as the large banks controlling FED policy (rates) are out in the open. They hold all the stock in the Federal Reserve Bank, how could they not control rates to maximize their profits.

Sheep for the Fleecing.