Well, grocery prices are up...

[Deja Q]

My ground turkey was the same, and so was tuna (tuna has bene on sale for 50 cents per tin for the last consecutive 7 years!) but everything else is up from a dime to a quarter.

Meanwhile, more houses are being built to room a population that ultimately can't afford them due to increasing prices, inflation, and interest rates while removing land, in some cases farming land that can't be reconditioned, to make the houses on. Add the dairy farmers selling out because "it's more profitable" and you've got a guy who now hates money AND housing. What the devil is wrong with an apartment? I'll trade a big-ass house for the fucking ability to eat. Who the hell wouldn't? Yes, I am mad enough to say the real profanity!

MONEY is the root of all evil. It's costing us our milk and our farmland. And in case the corporate repuke businessmen haven't realized it yet, we need food to do a little something called "live".

Heh. America: Land of luxury homes and no food to feed the homeowners with!

A fortune cookie once told me "Some habits are hard to break. Especially if you like them." Well, to me, living is habitual. And it's one I'm not going to easily break.

</rant>

[HornBuckler]

1. Amen

It's A Bitch Out There - In Portland With Gas At $2.33 A Gallon Milk At 3.50 A Gallon And Jack Daniels At $20 A Fifth - It's A Real Bitch

[Sirveri]

2. Money is not the root of all evil

And here is why.

Money is merely a tool, and like any tool, be it a rifle or a car or a wrench, it can be abused. And that is exactly what is happening.

What I see as the root of all evil is the excesses of capitalism repeatedly driving a deeper wedge in the rich-poor divide. Seperating ever further the haves and have-nots. Money is simply a indication of how much energy you currently have access to. The Rich-Poor divide is what happens when you give 'money', which represents a stored energy resource, to people who don't actually do anything to earn it. Or not nearly as much as the people that they're earning their money off of. Couple that with the fact that our society is in actuality a closed energy system (we only get energy from the sun) and suddenly you have a greater population of people fighting over energy stockpiles which are being gathered by the select few. Couple that with the fact that we're digging up money or energy in the form of oil and add that into the mix and you can see that the rich aren't just hoarding the natural energy produced by the sun. But they're also hoarding the energy that the planet has managed to store in its own hydrocarbon fuel cell!

Fortuantly for all of us, there is a solution to this problem. That is that Capitalism requires perpetual growth. When capitalism can not grow it goes into cardiac arrest and violently stops working. See years circa 1880 and 1929 and 1969. At this point we are rapidly reaching peak oil capacity, what with Saudi Reserves tapping out and China and India coming online simultaneously. Expect capitalism to go into arrest again in the near future, sparking off global resource wars over Coal, Steel, and Oil, before finally sputtering out and flat lining. Maybe if there's anything left afterwards we'll do it right the second time around.

[salvorhardin]

4. I'd disagree slightly

I'm not sure it is a closed system. Maybe, it is an effectively closed system as we're not yet able to exploit extraterrestrial resources (the off-planet kind not the little green man kind). Even then I'm not so sure.

Also, I would say that there are other ways of getting energy other than those derived from the sun. For instance, nuclear energy which one could say is energy derived by actually converting a small fraction of our planet's mass into energy, even if fission is a very inefficient conversion. Other forms such as geothermal I'd say were a combination of energy from the sun stored in the earth and (heat) energy from nuclear decay.

Unless, you are thinking in terms of the earth (and all planets in our system) forming from gasses spun off in the creation of our sun.1

On the whole though I like your idea of money as a measure of personal energy. Does this hold up to money acquired through the sale of intellectual property though? For example, say I invent an automatic widget nullifier, patent it and IBM buys the rights to manufacture and market my invention.

Perhaps what I like most about this view of money is that it completely divorces it from the Victorian notion of wealth as moral goodness. This seems similar to the eco-economics idea in the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy.

[Sirveri]

5. We have the same reading habits!

I read the Mars Trilogy as well, I struggled my way all the way thru Green and somehow managed to slog thru blue, but in the end I triumphed! I think they made a purple as well, but I didn't read that, anyhow onto other items.

If you invent something that allows people to do things more efficiently, thus saving them energy, then you should be compensated by gaining a portion of that energy. So yes, in this case, if someone invents a computer, or a computer program that is more efficient and is a genuine improvement then people would buy it and you would in turn make money off of the intellectual property. I have no problem with royalties.

Onto Nuclear Energy, we only have so much fissiable material in the earth, once we dig all of that up what do we do? Go to Luna and take all the Helium-3 and use that in He3-Li Fusion reactors? What happens when we use up all of that?

In any event, I don't have a real problem with the ideas behind our economic systems. If you lend someone money, you are providing a service, a needed service. And you should make money off of that. But when you suddenly begin to make so much 'money' that you're starting to create a inequitable divide that causes strafe you begin to become a threat to society at large. Lets jump around to limited energy supply since this ties into that subject.

When I said that we're in a limited energy system, I meant that once we discover all the energy resources, those resources are not renewable and do not come back. Furthermore with the law of thermodynamics energy is always degrading slowly and spreading throught the universe. So when somebody hoards a large ammount of wealth, they have effectivly taken that wealth out of the system and retained it for themselves. Since there is only so much energy left in the system, if we can not discover additional energy resources then those resources are basically stuck with those people, they consume less resources than they produce from interest and loans, and thus take wealth repeatedly from the system.

Here's the problem with this in story format. Lets say you were a corporate CEO in 1980. Well every year since then you've been getting a average raise of 192%, whereas inflation has increased at a rate of only 4%. now scale this up 24 years. The operator of the NYSE a nonprofit group, is being sued because he was going to be paid a wage of 188 Million Dollars, that's once a year. You can obviously see where I'm going with this. How can I possibly compete when all the energy resources of the system are presently being used by others? I'm trying to leach off of other people to gain energy for myself, but they will never feed me more energy than I produce.

Ehhh... I'm starting to lose it now, but you can see where I'm going with this. We do not have the same ability to succeed that our forebearers did because the energy is being ever tightened by the rich and the population that requires it to survive continue to expand at a feverish pace.

Yet I don't advocate Socialism, funny that. I advocate something differant. In socialism there is no drive to work hard, because you will not benefit from it. In Capitalism you have to work hard, or you will die, because without continuously expanding your energy resources you will collapse in upon yourself and die starving in the street. The obvious answer would be to find the best of both worlds.

Unfortuantly, I will never be able to do that, because I can't afford to go to even a local community college. Thus I can not invest the energy into something that would enable me to become more profitable. Hence my dreamy desire for Peak Oil. It is the surefire death of capitalism and complete transformation of the world economy. It will rectify the rich-poor divide and actually give me a chance to gain access to those once hoarded energy resources.

[brokensymmetry]

3. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

We consumers have just begun to see the effect of inflation as it propagates through the markets. Take a look at any chart of commodity prices and, with very few exceptions, they're all up by substantial percentages.

I suspect we'll be nostalgic for the "low" prices of May by the time December gets here.

And, as a fellow poster noted, Peak Oil is here. You don't want to think about what that will do to food prices. Do you like fresh fruit in the winter? Get ready to pay millionaire prices....