The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

11 posts / 0 new

Sat, 2009-03-21 00:15

Frustrated Mess Frustrated Mess's picture

Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign towers.
Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn.
Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood letting.
Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a candle, light a votive. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no fear cavalier.
Renegade steer clear!
A tournament, tournament, a tournament of lies.
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

--R.E.M.

Quote:

“Manufacturing has fallen off the cliff, and it’s certainly the biggest decline since the Second World War,” said Dirk Schumacher, senior European economist with Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt.

The pattern of manufacturing and trade ominously recalls how the financial crisis of 1929 grew into the Great Depression: tightening credit and consumer fear reduced demand for manufactured goods in one country after another, creating a downward spiral that reduced global trade.

“Plunging manufacturing suggests that as bad as things were in the fourth quarter, they are at least as bad now,” said Robert J. Barbera, chief economist at ITG, a New York research and trading business. “This is a classic adverse feedback loop. It won’t quickly correct itself.”

That means more workers can expect to lose their jobs around the world in coming months as manufacturers continue to cut production, especially as global trade contracts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/business/worldbusiness/20shrink.html?_...

Quote:
The Federal Reserve's remarkable announcement on Wednesday that it would print $1.2 trillion to buy bonds and mortgage-backed securities will yield some short-term benefits, namely lowering rates on mortgages, credit cards, and other loans.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/03/19/business/econwatch/entry4877724....

Stocking up on canned goods?

Sat, 2009-03-21 06:04

Will Hiscock

Don't see it as failure, but rather as an opportunity. We weren't going to take apart this system while things were fine, and it does have to go.

The earth demands it, community demands it, and we as people - to be really free and rational in a spirit of solidarity - need it.

The alternative is disaster, and this may in fact provide the time and resolve to address challenges which have been ignored for more then a generation, and which could not be and would not be addressed without a radical shift.

and extra foods had a sale on canned tuna

Sat, 2009-03-21 11:30

Tommy_Paine

Watch out for the mercury.

I guess the Goldman Sachs guy is right-- he'd have expertise since they have been one of the architechs of this unmittigated disaster.

The downward spiral started under Regan, with the gutting of anti-trust laws and entering into "free" trade agreements with low wage, unregulated jurisdictions.

While economists are currently trying to warn against protectionism, the only way to break the cycle is to limit trade to just nations that have similar labour, environmental, and banking/financial standards.

To make a long story short, wealth has to be redistributed. It can be slow and painfull for us, or fast and painfull to those who, when you think of it, rather deserve to feel some pain.

That's the choice currently before us.

Sun, 2009-03-22 02:36

banned

Stocking up on canned goods? Yes fool me once .....

Sun, 2009-03-22 09:30

Boom Boom

I haven't bought canned tuna in many years now. I assume canned salmon is still safe. Actually, canned salmon is the only canned meat or fish product that I've ever brought in a while.

Sun, 2009-03-22 11:51

Frustrated Mess Frustrated Mess's picture

Quote:

"Our food reserves are at a 50-year low, but by 2030 we need to be producing 50% more food. At the same time, we will need 50% more energy, and 30% more fresh water.

"There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected," Beddington said. "You can't think about dealing with one without considering the others. We must deal with all of these together."

World faces 'perfect storm' of problems by 2030, chief scientist to warn

Sun, 2009-03-22 12:44

Tommy_Paine

I wonder if the food production numbers have accounted for land gone fallow due to historically low grain prices, but would come on stream as prices elevate?

And the fresh water crisis reminds me of something I've been curious about for a while.

Desalination plants have not really taken off due to the relatively high cost of heating the water. However, in recent years we've seen solar thermal projects in the U.S., Australia and Spain go from theory to practicle application. They involve mirrors that focus the sun on a tower which heats an oil, which in turn boils water, and the steam is routed through a turbine to produce electricity.

None of which is particularly high tech. Each element seems to me to be "trailing edge technology" combined in a new way.

My curiousity is how this might be used in desert regions, where mineral laden ground water, or sea water brought in from adjacent oceans could be relatively cheaply purified, and used to irrigate previously non aerable lands.

Sun, 2009-03-22 16:20

al-Qa'bong

Will Hiscock wrote:

and extra foods had a sale on canned tuna

Be sure to carry the cans home in a convenient plastic bag.

Sun, 2009-03-22 19:51

Frustrated Mess Frustrated Mess's picture

U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar

Mon, 2009-03-23 20:59

#10

Frustrated Mess Frustrated Mess's picture

Quote:

Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor’s degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.

The values that sustain an open society have been crushed ...

This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and a press that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, one championed by ruthless capitalists (think of the brutal backstabbing and deception cheered by TV shows like “Survivor”) and Hollywood action heroes like the governor of California.

“This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong,” Adorno wrote. “The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism.”

America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

Mon, 2009-03-23 21:45

#11

Will Hiscock

An end to the dollar as a reserve currency - well now. I guess we'll see the dollar go for a good slide. Canada should have reduced its dependence on the USD a long time ago. We sold off our gold and silver for next to nothing, and now we'll sell off our USDs for a similarly low amount. Good job boys.

Inflation is going to get nasty down south (if not here as well)