Way back when the government kicked off the Covid panic, smart people pointing out that shutting down the world to bend the curve was not a cost free way of addressing the problem. In fact, it was a very expensive and risky solution to a problem that was best addressed through traditional means. The world has a pandemic every 15 years and a severe one at least once a generation. Humans have figured out to tough out these naturally occurring events.
Shutting down the world and making people stay home from work is a novel invention, so there was no way to know what would happen. Human societies are tough, so it took a while for the problems to manifest. Initially, those who could work from home worked from home and those unemployed were supported with subsidies. This could never be a permanent condition, so we have been trying to transition back to normalcy for the last six months, but things are nowhere near normal.
The Brits have gasoline shortages, and they are facing a winter with spiraling natural gas prices, because the energy supply chain is a mess. Keeping people at home meant keeping people out of their cars, which collapsed fuel consumption. The trucks and truck drivers were put to other uses and now that demand is returning, they suddenly have a shortage of trucks and truck drivers. This will soon hit other parts of the supply chain as demand suddenly increases for goods and services.
In the US, ports are a mess as they face similar supply chain problems. The ports in America are weird systems. The labor is unionized, but the unions are pretty much run by the government under an array of consent decrees. Demand for labor is driven by the ships in port needing to be loaded and unloaded. The stevedoring firms hire when they need to unload a ship, but they keep few fulltime people. They simply draw from the pool of longshoremen that operate at the port.
During the shutdowns, fewer ships came into port, so fewer people were needed to unload ships and fewer trucks were needed to cart the goods out of the port. That is why ships are stacked up at the ports now. The system for unloading those ships had atrophied during the pandemic, so it is now over-capacity. This leads to shortages and price disruptions throughout the economy. For example, America has been suffering an aluminum shortage for close to a year.
A good example of how throwing wrenches into the system has unpredictable long term effects is the automobile industry. When the government shut down the country, the travel industry was flattened. The car rental firms did the prudent thing. They liquidated their car fleets. After all, if you make your money renting cars and no one is renting cars, those cars are direct hits to the bottom line. In order to weather the storm, they sold off their fleets and furloughed their staff.
The trouble is a big source of used cars is the car rental industry. They get cars on programs from the manufacturers. They can be three, six or nine month programs where the company takes the new cars for a monthly fee and then returns them to the manufacturers after the term of the program. Those cars end up in the new car dealer lots as discounted used cars. Look around the car lots in America and what you see is lots of empty spaces where cars used to sit.
Once things opened up, the car rental companies went looking for cars, so they went to the used car auctions. Other shortages have made it impossible for the manufacturers to get cars to their own dealers, much less supply program cars to the rental fleets, so that left the used car market. Used car prices are now spiking to record levels because the supply chain is a mess. It will take years for this to normalize, and the cost will be in the tens of billions.
Of course, everyone who buys food has noticed that food is suddenly much more expensive and there are weird shortages. Like everything else, the broken supply chain is the main culprit. Those trucking companies suddenly put out of business by government fiat did not sit around waiting to open up again. They fired their staff, sold off their trucks and found other ways to survive. Rebuilding the many small links of the supply chain will take years and show up in higher food prices.
In a modern liberal democracy, every event requires a response, and every response requires a response and so on. The smallest pebble tossed into the water can potentially result in a flood. In this context it means government jumping in to mitigate the consequences of their fix for something else they broke. Inflation will get calls for more spending, which will get more inflation. The central banks will then try to redirect that inflation from goods to assets.
In other words, the shutdowns have created a dynamic of chaos that will take years to settle out, assuming no further shocks. The Biden administration is promising another meteor strike with their Build Back Better nonsense. You see, they broke everything and now see it as a chance to remake the world in their image. When crazy stupid people want to try to make the world, the only thing that can follow is chaos. We may be at the cusp of an age of unimaginable economic madness.
This is a good example of something said by Will Durant. “Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”
In the fullness of time, after the West is a ruin of its own making, this age will be remembered as a gross and sustained violation of that sentiment. If over the last thirty years the people in charge had done nothing but entertain themselves with their toys, none of this would be happening. Instead, they kept trying to prove nature wrong and overturn the wisdom of ages. Reality does not take kindly to this amount of abuse, so there will be consequences.
The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!
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Sorry to be off topic here but The Z Blog seems like it might be a logical place to find the info I’m seeking. Severian, from Rotten Chestnuts blog referred to the Z Man’s commentary here on a regular basis. The Z Blog has Rotten Chestnuts as an A-List fan.
Does anyone know what happened to Rotten Chestnuts blog? It disappeared without notice several days ago and if you navigate to the site only a white, empty screen appears. Any info would be appreciated.
Temporarily moved to foundingquestions.wordpress.com. Nothing nefarious, just WordPress being WordPress and an “update” temporarily bricking it.
Thanks! Was a concerned given what’s been going on with the deplatforming….
I am noticing significant delays in payments from blue-chip companies, including technology companies. Invoices that used to be paid in less than 30 days are now stretching out to 60-90 days with no explanation. The delay in payments is generating cash flow issues in our business.
Anyone else noticing this in their businesses?
My father in his business had a remedy for “slow payers”. Once put in that classification, all future bids had an added 15% tacked on. That was in addition to the “net 30” terms. Slow payers only fool the vendors once or twice. From then on they fooled themselves.
Something similar happened at my university. I was lead interface on a number of construction projects for the department. Once I had an interesting discussion with the contractor about his bid and the work he was slated to do. He remarked off handedly that this was his first time in years working for the university as he normally does not bid university contracts.
I asked why not? He said the hassle of the effort with all the departments overseeing his work and their specifications/inspectors—State, University, City, etc. made the effort not worthwhile. So I asked, why now? He said work was slow, so he took a flyer and estimated the job, added 15% on top (a hassle tax) and sent it in. My quick arithmetic at the time indicated we’d just paid a bit less than $100k in excess costs due to our bureaucracy.
Yes. Lead times on components have also risen drastically – from 2 months to 18 months where I am. Plus, prices have gone from £2 to £50 odd.
absolutely, nobody is paying and nobody is cutting new orders.
I’m of an age (82) where the future matters a lot less than it did in the past. I lived through WW2 as a child. Was too young for Korea and had my military service obligations behind me before Body Count Bob McNamara reall got Vietnam going. I count my timing as letter perfect.
I’m 35 and I’m excited because I am going to change my country for the better. My grandkids will brag about me to their friends.
Let’s start understanding that we hold the keys to the future because we have a better understanding of the human condition and a plan to make the lives of our side better.
Up Only
Tell your many children to provide you lots of grandchildren
Another thing that is broken is general trust. I no longer trust any information made publicly available. I no longer assume the general balance of official power in our governance leans toward earnestly good-willed citizens doing the best they can in this imperfect world. I believe I have a lot of company in this outlook.
On question I have been seeking to resolve is that it seems like dissidents have accepted the excess-death figures from the CDC as accurate and therefore proof of Covid being worse than other bad flu seasons. Why? I start with the assumption that it’s a lie. I assume the gales of laughter generated by official death stats showing Covid was a miracle cure for heart disease and cancer etc begat a reaction to rework the numbers, put back normal looking numbers for the former leading causes of death and add a made up number for the coof. Is there any reason to trust the new numbers?
Exactly! My baseline is everything reported by the msm or the feds is an outright lie or seriously exaggerated.
The major media outlets–NY Times, WaPo, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR–combined, function almost identically as Pravda did in the Soviet Union. They have no interest in truth. They are ideologically aligned with the imperial government, and simply disseminate whatever nonsense the government tells them to. Lesser media outlets take their cues from the big fish and school accordingly. The media, therefore, is simply the agitprop organ of the Power Structure. And if it just so happens to tell you the truth on one issue or another, it is by accident.
“And if it just so happens to tell you the truth on one issue or another, it is by accident”.
…and will provide an immediate retraction for stating said truth.
Look at all media this way: There are two groups of people, call them A and B. The reason for the story is group A’s desire to put something over on group B, First, try to figure out who A and B are and what A wants B to do. This question is usually more interesting then the truth or falsity of the story.
The “excess deaths” number is calculated by taking an “expected deaths” of all causes. (and there’s a tell, why not counted?) away from total reported deaths. Variations from expected deaths in other causes are “normalized” because the assumption is in reporting errors other than the real one- classification as covid death. Total death numbers can thus be set to yield the required degree of panic.
There was a woman in Florida who did the actual count and compared to the reported count for (I think ) her county and discovered 2020 wasn’t particularly homicidal. I can’t recall her name, had bookmarked her site then destroyed the PC by flicking breaker switches too rapidly.
Like all of life in these times, it’s all lies.
Actually, the numbers don’t have to be screwed with that much. 2019 was an odd year of “low” total deaths. One can simply compare 2020 to 2019 (rather than some running average) to produce “scare”.
Where these total deaths comes in handy—death being hard to fake—is in follow up years, as well as specific causes, in any given year. Yes, they do break it down to specific causes of death, albeit such is more imprecise. We will see in the follow up years to 2020 and 2021 a general decrease in deaths which is predicted since Covid culled the herd of folks in their last few months of life.
We now see such indications in the decline of deaths due to more traditional causes, cancer, pneumonia, and such. Seems we are getting either healthier, or just more blame being attributable to Covid as a “primary” cause, rather than a secondary cause—or no cause at all.
I really wonder if you can trust any numbers that pertain to people from the US anymore. I’m not even thinking about the corruption in the CDC and other government agencies but just the general uncertainty about who is actually in the country. In a normal place a pile of dead bodies can be counted and added to the casualty count for whatever killed them. Then you divide that number by the known population and you get the death rate from that cause. Here, we have no real idea who’s in the country or where they might have contracted whatever disease ended up killing them. The numerator and denominator are both saddled with a huge error margin. It might be more useful to look at a nation with better control of its borders to get an accurate idea of how many people the Coof really kills. Perhaps a European country that hasn’t succumbed to open borders fever yet? Russia? Hungary?
One of the many discussions that the media has managed to avoid starting is the whole concept of “cause of death”. If a person had stage 4 cancer in 2015 and got the flu and died soon after with flu symptoms did we call that a flu death or a cancer death? I honestly don’t know how these things got recorded. My guess is that it went down as “flu” but does that make sense? And is that really how this used to work?
I see , actually now that you mention it I believe our host has covered this in a general way the past.
excess = expected – total_reported
or
Lie = FantasyVal – Other_Lie
where
Other_Lie = Sum( fantasy_val_cause1 + fantasy_val_cause2 + …)
CDC Kommisars freely manipulate FantasyVal and Other_Lie components as needed to produce desired Lie.
This looks much like what I find every time I dig into any climate change sirens intended to call the Eloi to feeding chambers.
Just take Social Security as an example. A large number of people, including politicians, hold the belief that there is actually money there. You cannot convince them that there are no “investments,” no surplus, it’s all a fiction and it contains only promises to pay. Or in other words, “collect the money again that we have already spent elsewhere.”
Does anyone expect these sorts of people to understand and be able to fix anything? I’d rather let a toddler play with a loaded gun, it’s probably safer. If you have no concept of reality you cannot make any rational decisions, it’s all blindfold dart throwing. Then again they might not know what darts even are.
Allen, your statement is only “somewhat” correct.
Once again, here is the situation (all I state can be confirmed on the SSI website):
SSI has a source of continuing income, i.e., payroll taxes. The so called surplus is in Treasury Bonds. Up until a while ago, this surplus was untouched/increasing as the income from payroll taxes was enough to pay out what was owed (at that time, Boomer retirement always growing). That has changed and now every month sees more and more Treasury Bonds cashed in to meet deficits.
Of course, the bonds are simple IOU’s and the Fed’s “sell” more bonds to pay for the ones SSI cashes in. This as Allen notes is bs or economic voodoo or just a plain Ponzi scheme scam. The SSI program is in a sense now simply being Federally supplemented to continue their rate of payout—not much different than any number of State pension plans which are insolvent from an actuary point of view as States can not print money as the Fed’s can.
So what is the economically sound payout given the “real” revenue. Estimates are that SSI will be able to meet 73-75% of promised retirement incomes on a continuing basis. Now, by law, when the phony “surplus” is used up—estimated perhaps by 2030–the payout must be reduced to income *across the board*! Everyone gets a haircut of say 25% or so.
Now, given the pol’s proclivity to screw the “rich” and level the playing field, one can expect Congress to act in some grand way to minimize the low end cuts to folks who get a few hundred dollars, and keep the high end cuts for folks who are topping out the benefit. Add some increases to retirement age, the pay-in amount, end exemption of income exclusion, and Congress can kick the can down the road for another 30 years or so.
Bottom line is that SSI has a source of income and will continue to pay out. Medicare is another story. That needs fixing, or the end result will be health care rationing via government take-over.
Small quibble
The debentures “held” in trust for SS are not marketable securities and are not treasury bonds.
I think the whole “lorry driver” shortage is entirely manufactured and an attempt to get the public to agree to more mass immigration. Unemployment is high all over the world. There really cannot be a labor shortage like this with high unemployment. What there is a shortage of is employers willing to pay a reasonable wage. It’s just like all the alleged shortages of farm workers in America or those chicken processing plants. There is no shortage, there is low wages.
A few weeks ago, Natural News, who even I think are pretty out there, were arguing that there is a labor shortage because a lot of people have been…moved on….from this timeline.
The other day they posted a talk by an attorney named Thomas Renz who put together a pretty damning presentation based on data dumps from whistleblowers with access to Medicare/aid databases.
YMMV.
This is possible.
If there were a really large number of death from COVID and maybe vaccine reactions you wouldn’t see anything different than we see now. They wouldn’t tell people how bad it was for fear of even essential personnel and military refusing to work and the entire system including what the elites depend on simply failing.
More likely between drug deaths, suicide, increased homicide (all of whom effect younger people) vaccine fatalities homelessness, old age death and retirements along with many part timers opting out or quitting one job for another less stressful one and living with less we may have a genuine labor shortage.
We’ve also had low fertility for a very long time and old members of the biggest generation Gen Y are hitting 40.
My guess is the shutdown was meant to allow for another round of wage arbitrage, the plebs will be so desperate to work we can pay them anything and bring in more migrants too but this seems to have failed to a high degree and now we have an increasing number of opt outs.
A lot of millennial workers have come to regard the employer/employer relationship as intrinsically hostile and predatory which is not without truth and are wisely, exactly as we taught them too looking out for number one.
The trade off between money/time/happiness never works in their favor and with the social climate and housing prices as they are, they’ll never have a family so I’d guess quite a few have decided to reduce consumerism and concentrate on happiness.
This will allow for cheaper labor for some jobs but with the nasty side effect that any job Mike Rowe would call a dirty job or that is generally unpleasant like food service will either go unfilled or be harder to get workers for,
I don’t like the effects of this , its chaotic but we as a society deserve our chickens coming home to roost.
How much of the supposed lorry driver shortage is men refusing to take the jab?
Tars, I don’t disagree in general, but can’t help thinking about what I hear and see wrt to labor supply and the ability to hire.
Look, you can pay me $100 and hour, but that won’t make me a competent surgeon, or for that matter even a good truck driver. We have a pool of potential labor that is ill equipped for employment in a 21st century technological society. This is not just a matter of people sitting on their ass collecting checks from Uncle Sugar. It’s a matter of poor intellectual ability, poor training to match that ability, and a lack of employment opportunities to fit such a result.
Its also a kind of “commie” pay system problem . if a diversity coordinator or office drone makes 60k per year and a truck driver get $60k per year anyone who can take the easier job will.
Also in all honesty most people probably don’t need to work to keep a somewhat functional economy , we laid off what half or more of all people and the economy still functioned after a point.
Personally I think the biggest lock down mistake wasn’t economic or social though they were both utter disasters but cultural.
We may have broken consumerism to some degree where people aren’t buying things just to buy them. Throw in a depression and the trend to minimalism and the modern economy may go tits up for good.
Now sure the Great Rest psychos and the rich think they’ll be fine but the luxury world they live in depends on a lot of wealth being generated and their income is basically just skim.
They may well have screwed themselves badly. And that is if they just don’t get shot by some movement or another along the way.
I have a cousin who is not particularly bright (maybe 90IQ) and he is a truck driver with a CDL and has been driving for 20 years. A bit of googling says mid 90s for a truck driver, which sounds reasonable to me. I would think a basic truck driving job is not especially taxing on the intellect (though the job is probably utterly soul crushingly boring). According to Tucker and some other people I have heard, driving is the single largest “profession” of White males or it might have been males in general in the US. If you want certifications for hazardous material, it probably bumps the IQ requirement up a bit, but I really can’t see low intelligence as being the major reason for shortages of general truck driving.
I have heard the UK got a lot of their “lorry drivers” from Eastern Europe, where the average is 100. I believe it is purely a money problem, in that the corporations don’t want to pay good wages to a British man and want to import workers who will work cheaper and are isolated from his family and dependent on the job and basically at the whims of his employer.
I know it is pretty commonplace in the US for trucking firms to hire new drivers without a CDL and give them on the job training. This is the type of work that supported the lower end of the middle class for decades. Before that it was trains or the assembly line. Now all these guys are strung out on drugs and dying of ODs every year.
If the managerial class was worthy of running the country, the drug catastrophe killing all these young White people would be front and center. But because of how evil they are, they know there is nothing they can really do to address the problem. The root cause is feminism and the outsourcing of all these jobs to Asia and importing wage slaves. They don’t want counseling or welfare or other government cheese. They want a purpose. But the managerial class just whistles and try to look busy whenever anyone brings it up.
Tars, perhaps so. But aside from truck drivers–which *is* skilled and I believe requires some partially related IQ type behaviors–conscientiousness, attention, etc., I’ve interacted with a lot of folk who could screw up a wet dream.
Seen it personally. Even at minimum wage, they are not worth the effort to employ. Which is at the worse shortage of workers here. Indeed, some restaurants are only open some days of the week and for short hours–no staff willing to work. Would paying them more, make them better workers?
Yes, I know that’s not your argument, you’d assume higher quality candidates will apply. But what happens when the standard wage is $20 per hour for the kitchen help. Indeed, that’s how high some places have gone. In and out hamburgers -> $18.
I guess it doesn’t matter, wages must rise to clear demand. But there will be some wage inflation up and down the scale, not just at the bottom. And at some point, dropping $50 to $100 for a dinner out will get old.
Its already about $50 for three here in California.
Still unless either housing prices come down a lot in any area that has high housing costs (most places) or you are willing to do without, that is the new norm.
Expecting conscientious hard work from people who can’t rent an apartment on their wages is absurd. Thinking you are entitled to cheap labor and I am NOT saying you are is parasitism
You get what you pay for.
International logistics has been my profession for decades. Zman pegged it fairly well – or as well as is possible in a few sentences. Suffice to say that in the last +/- 1 year – everything has been turned inside out. In a word FUBAR (actually 5 words). It’s so bad, I have very little time for the important work of reading / commenting here.
Oh yeah – no end in sight.
” It’s so bad, I have very little time for the important work of reading / commenting here.”
That’s a shame, as I’d like to hear you detailed take on things, selfish as I am!
Here in the UK, we have panic buying of fuel – the reason is alleged shortages. I have no idea if there is a shortage or not. If there is, then the MSM stoking the fire has definitely led to the panic buying.
Our recycling (Yeah! Go Mother Earth! Whooo!) was not picked up for over a month. A friend who works as a pickup driver for recyclables down in Devon mentioned that there was an exodus of Eastern European drivers, a shortage, due, apparently, to Brexit. That said, the wages of all remaining drivers went up considerably, as the companies needed to keep people.
Anyway, who knows? But outside my window, I can see the queue to the Shell petrol station is getting longer. People are honking their horns. So that’s a bit of verifiable news, at least.
The other day we drove thru a couple of rural towns, but big enough to have car dealerships – there was practically no inventory. Pretty disconcerting to see virtually empty lots – I’m sure there’ll be much more of this in coming months. I also read yesterday that Dollar Tree will be raising their prices, breaking the proverbial buck…
As far as international logistics / supply chain info concerned – website: gcaptain.com is a real good source of daily info.
Thanks.
Already has a gander at this:
https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-decomissioning-failed-lcs/
Who says the government does not know how to spend our cash?
Back when his ideological enemies were in power, Paul Krugman referred to our economy as “militarized Keynesianism.” Dig a hole and fill it up, but with weapons systems.
LCS is an acquisitions dumpster fire. It doesn’t work, having been built on a combination of wishful thinking & PowerPoint slides. They cost much more than advertised, they underperform, & they have little tactical utility. And that’s all before you consider their Mission Modules, which are technically different acquisitions programs (MDAPs) which are *also* dumpster fire that are nowhere near IOC. LCS is a total failure but no one above the pay grade of O-5 has had to answer for any of it. As Severian would say, it’s all Fake & Gay.
We’ve gone through “panic buying” for petrol (gas) here years ago and learned a few things vis a vis analysis after the crisis. The simple rumor of a (potential) shortage is enough to create a crisis wrt gas—and probably everything else—as there is never enough gas to fill all cars’ tanks, which average about half full. Every time a storm threatens a coastal area, gas dries up, store shelves empty, etc. The supply line simply can’t replenish such a demand.
Why does Matson not seem to be effected ? As far as I can tell west coast to Hawaii shipping remains pretty efficient and timely.
No competition (Jones Act trade). Think they operate their own terminals – and generally avoid getting stomped on by the elephants on the dance floor. Matson has been a money making machine for ages.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
“This is known as ‘bad luck.'”
~ Robert Heinlein
Perhaps this process of immiseration should be dubbed the Heinlein Maneuver…
The literal history of Africa(ns) collated into a single paragraph. Any uplift, advancement, modernization, etc. The literal Stone Age to Space Age transformation is greedily consumed, then the resentment starts, and finally the rage, blame, and finger pointing about Whitey. In short order, regression to the mean which is tribal warfare, disease, poverty, ultra-violence, basically back to the Stone Age.
Haiti, Rhodesia, South Africa, etc. etc. In a smarter world we would let nature run it’s course and She would bring these genetic aliens back to manageable levels rather than the gross inflationary numbers we see w/ Western handouts & (((help))).
The African explosion is 100% our fault. Fertility is out of control in a region that cannot produce enough food or other exports to trade for food. Western governments tax us and use that money to flood Africa with food. Meanwhile, white women are too guilty or slutty to have children while Africans are having more than 6 children per woman. In some African countries, when women are polled, they respond 13 children is the ideal number of children.
We have this same thing going on in America. Our cities are third world hell holes with high fertility welfare recipients. White people in the suburbs (and to be fair, the coasts) are taxed to support poor Africans in the cities.
One genuinely stupid idea that has come up since every budget crisis since 2012 has been having the Treasury mint a platinum coin valued at $1 Trillion, giving it to The Fed and having the Fed credit the Treasury for $1 Trillion. Every year I watch this idea get closer and closer in like the tide coming in. Just yesterday fat pig Jerry Nadler endorsed the idea. If the place is a ponzi anyway, it’s easy to say, who cares? But what this really does is impound the Fed’s balance sheet, so when inflation reaches a point where everyone throws in the towel, and interest rates finally need to be increased sky high, the Fed will have nothing to mechanistically sell into the market to increase those rates. No entity on earth is going to buy a trillion dollar coin except for some historian who wants to show future generations the gratuitous incompetence of this era. Given the craziness, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that this is actually done, and that it could be done a dozen or more times out of fiscal desperation, each time impounding the Fed’s balance sheet more and more, leading to all kinds of capital and currency controls. And if this is where we are, it’s not imprudent to be a “prepper” to some extent or another.
Why couldn’t the government just buy it back from the fed, later when it can borrow again?
Assuming a rational economy not based on FIR the real GDP would be maybe 6-7 trillion. Once of these fake coins would take a decades surplus to buy.
In the end the US will just have to suck it up and default and be done with it like every other nation.
The fact that you believe the FED to be an honest regulatory institution is funny.. Its a den of thieves that creates money from this air, and thin air is what they deserve in return. Give them the coin and merge them into the treasury – make the secret owners of this private bank responsible for the debt the owe the people!
Nadler and the raft of idiots don’t get that the Fed is still a bank. yes it’s a bank that’s a sock puppet for the government and oligarchs but they still have credits and debits like any other financial institution and to pull such a scheme (trading a $100 asset for $1T of cash) is glorified bank robbery and would bankrupt the Fed (and land it’s liabilities on it’s guarantor: Congress, oops) .
A better (“better”) idea would be for Congress to issue it’s own script/coins to force into the system if they’re that short of money. Yes, thinking about it for more than five seconds reveals it for the horror that it is, an inflation blow-out and/or a dual-currency market, but that’s where we’re at in the age of ruination.
The fed printed over 10 trillion dollars during the 07/08 crash, so I am told, which it then lent (swapped with) to various central banks.
The federal government is so over bloated that it is impossible to run it honestly with sane accounting. We have not had a year over year debt decrease since the early 60s. All those alleged surplus years or quarters during Clinton’s term was complete fantasy. You can literally watch the national debt increase every single year of Clinton’s presidency. The US has spent more than it took in with taxes every single year for the past 60 or so years.
I really don’t understand though why the trillion dollar coin is such a terrible idea given the status quo. I fully understand this behavior would be expected in a banana republic, and why it is such a bad idea for a normal country, but the US is not the same nation as it was in 1959. The treasury issues it and the fed buys it and puts it on their balance sheet. The treasury now has a trillion dollars to piss away on retarded projects. Then, after the debt ceiling bluff has been called and the GOP cucks, the government can buy back the coin with borrowed money. People act like this is completely insane and cannot be done. But I really don’t understand why. How is this really any different than a bond?
They printed and purchased assets. Now these assets were crap, but the Fed had an ace (or several) up it’s sleeve. First, it could hold assets indefinitely in case they recovered, then it could lend the government money to pay people to help the assets recover (through various stimulus schemes). Lastly, it could hold government debt regardless of it’s market value and use the money paid back in interest to offset (mask) any losses on those bailed out assets.
TDLR, that money printing was all about moving privately held debt to the government and central bank ledgers.
This is why inflation, which goes up with more debt, never really went up until they both tanked the economy (decreased the ability to service debt) and had government debt exploded higher.
So yes, left unsaid until now is that the Fed’s book is full of illiquid assets now, what would one more matter? For that I guess I don’t have a good answer apart from the fact that their current ‘book’ is in line with the current faith while the $1T coin does not.
JP Morgan:
“The global supply chain mess will require increased global vaccination and acquired immunity, semiconductor capacity expansion and the end of extraordinary housing/labor supports to resolve. We expect all three to occur over the next few months, leading to a global growth bounce in 2022”
Also, the surge in Delta deaths surge proves the boosters are returning to 90% effectiveness, because Israel
Not kidding. That’s what JPM is putting out behind the paywall. Guaranteed their in-house traders are short-selling everything including the chairs they’re sitting in.
JPM, much like the WEF, appear to be wishing in one hand and defecating in the other.
In specific areas, the techno-fascist tyranny they are dreaming of implementing will require supply chains an order of magnitude larger in scale.
Not going to happen.
Cope.
There’s no one more intelligent behind the curtain.
The world ended before you were born.
Today’s post is, once again, an excellent exposition of the seminal macro-problem we face (namely, overwhelming incompetence & corruption of the Federal Government), but it’s also a lament ending in a vague prophesy. However, we are well passed the canary-in-the-coalmine stage and it’s time to act. When food, electrical power, & fuel shortages kick in comprehensively, it will be too late for many city dwellers to save themselves.
The name of the game now is to prepare for the coming storm and survive as best you can. Yes, keep your day-to-day life as routine as possible, but your alter ego needs to be planning for & taking tangible action in support of a fallback option. That plan should include getting you & your family quickly and safely to haven stocked with enough supplies to sustain you for at least a few weeks. And you will need to protect yourself as well. It’s vitally important to remember that you cannot eat false hope or hand-wringing, and running into the street in order to scream at the sky will put you squarely in the expendable category. Don’t wait, get off the couch now while there is still food on the shelves.
“So, when they forgot what they were reminded of; We opened unto them the gates of everything until; when they rejoiced in what they were given, We seized them suddenly, and behold, they were sore confounded.” [Quran 6:44]
‘Western civilization’ has been the biggest enemy of the White race.
Actually, it was the extreme success of the West that ultimately became it’s undoing. Extraordinary innovation & productivity begat prolonged affluence, which then killed the work ethic and begat a plague of parasitic zombies that now live their lives through a cell phone and rely exclusively on government gravy to sustain their existence. And a plague doesn’t care what race, religion, or ethnicity you were born with; it kills all equally. We are at a time of choosing. You either stand with the plague or the remedy. There will be no bystanders.
In sum, the old adage describes our current situation well. Hard times create good men. Good men create good times. Good times create soft men. Soft men create hard times. Rinse and repeat. We’re fast approaching the hard times part of the adage.
Humans have figured out how to tough out these events, but modern Americans have forgotten how to be tough. It’s cliche to talk about, but there’s so much truth to it. Modern Americans, especially whites in suburbia, have lived such safe, pampered lives, that any prospect of danger shocks their system. A good example of this: I’m an older millennial that grew up poor. A close friend of mine is petrified of the coof, and he’s not a leftist. You can present him with facts and data about how unlikely it is to kill our age group and it doesn’t matter. I tell him every time he leaves the house he can get hit by a car, etc. It shakes him that anything out there could infiltrate his bubble. He grew up in a quiet, wealthy beach town, so danger was never part of his equation. I also think part of the inability to cope with this rationally it is how godless everyone is now. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, and this is all there is, you cling to this life like a maniac.
On the left, the coof is showing conformity to the Regime.
On the rights, it’s based on being an hysterical ninny. Almost without fail, the only right-wing people I know scared of the coof and crazy about the vax are, like you say, rich pampered prep kids.
I think this is closer to the truth, Chet. Covidianism, like so many movements, is a religion to the Left, a way to show fealty to the infallible state, and to the wealthy Right it is a potential punishment for their prosperity, which is just a variation on the religion.
The West is very, very sick. Covid is the least of it.
Ah yes. Those worthless Establishment GOP who think Conservatism is money and an attitude and not actual policy.
The reality is true Conservatism is policy based, it conserves families, nation, an economy and morality.
Those pampered little dung balls are just money men and looters.
Can’t recall who said it but to a conservative the economy serves the people, to a Republican the people serve the economy
The Greek: Well said. Witness all the ‘Christians’ terrified of death, by any means at any time. Puts a lie to their public piety; they’re mere virtue-signaling churchians. I am in no rush to die, but I can think of numerous things I value and cherish more than my own individual life. And if I were to die in defense of those, then why should I fear going in judgment before The Lord?
3g4me, you know, many years ago I read a book called Europe’s Inner Demons which was about the European witch hunting business of many moons ago. The testimony of witnesses who saw men and women burn, never renouncing God were fascinating to me.
They truly seemed to be more terrified of Him that of anything on this mortal Earth. That’s belief, alright.
Nothing like a little light reading before bedtime, eh?
Philippians 1:21 a possible explanation
I was attending a Mass at my sister’s parish last year, with most of the pews blocked by masking tape, with everyone huddling in their muzzles, shuffling up to communion a good distance apart from each other. Yet there on the wall to the right of the altar is a large portrait of John Paul II with his arms raised and the inscription “Do Not Be Afraid”. I only hope that most of the parishoners shamefully avert their eyes when they chance to look up at it.
This is one of the many inversions that has produced Insane Clown World–courage is now shameful and cowardice is accounted a virtue.
He was never in any danger of being crushed by heavy equipment or stabbed by a hay bailer, I take it?
Or falling 3 stories while insulating a broiler-hot warehouse ceiling, hat tip to Saml.
I was ‘el Chango’ (the monkey), cuz I could get up in those high spaces. Almost tipped over the extended scissors jack once, hanging from the roof beam with one hand. Yeah, yeah, I know already.
“If you don’t believe in an afterlife, and this is all there is, you cling to this life like a maniac.”
Too right. Many people actually do need the guidance of a religion in their lives. There are very few people who seem to be die hard atheists or whatever who can handle it.
Hardcore non-believing is usually for the already mentally resilient. They see how shit the world is and act accordingly. But most others – tepid non-believers, tepid atheists &c – just need some guidance. And Christ is pretty much as good as it gets. It beats Powerpoint, HR, feminism and wokeism.
As an aside into the insanity, I’ve had to fill out some forms for a new job. The ‘Inclusion, Equality and Diversity’ form offers me a swathe of genders: male, female (outdated), gender queer (WTF?), agender (huh?), bi-gender (again?). Funnily enough, when it comes to forms that aren’t just jumping through government imposed hoops, like medical forms, they only have two genders… guess which ones?
Strange, it’s like they know it’s all theatre, but must persist anyhow.
But yes to Christ. Yes to Christ in a very big way. He will feature very strongly in the education of my lads. No doubt there. I think I’ll have a home schooling module called The Big Lie and riff off of some of Bruce Charlton’s teachings. Perhaps also a module based on Lawrence Auster’s amendments and extensions of Derb’s Talk.
It took me a while to realize the truth of the saying: You can not convince a man through fact, reason, and logic to abandon a position he has arrived at through emotion.
WRT the “coof”, I now approach the subject with analysis of the cost/benefit of the current “treatment/prevention” motifs. I always support any decision made, but emphasize the cost of that decision. That sounds like logic and reason—yes, but when you tell someone they run risks by adverse vexxine reaction and cite experts and studies, that’s a counter emotional argument.
Now the wife gets it. She got vexx’d and as time has gone by hears me (and others) discuss the evidence piling up wrt the long term risks and the general failure of the concept of mRNA vexxination. So much so that she basically told me to “shut up”. She was right. You can’t unring the bell—you can’t drop out of this world-wide “experiment” once enrolled—you just have to hope for the best. But damn, she had the coof and recovered almost without symptoms and threw it all away for a “passport”. Damn…
Oh, and a special thanks for today’s post, I’ve only done a bit of container drayage, mostly rail. Port freight and longshoring are yet another area I’m woefully ignorant in.
“Reality does not take kindly to this amount of abuse, so there will be consequences.”
No doubt. If I were younger—I am 68—and “kindler and gentler” than I am today, I would wish that the consequences would happen immediately so that I could do all I could to help my fellow man survive and overcome. Now I want the collapse to delay itself until I am long gone—which might be this afternoon or 30 more years.
I would rather not enter another ‘Great Depression’ as an elderly gentleman living on Teacher Retirement and Social Security. I have lots of ammo, which might mitigate things a bit.
People live on much less. Also it is not just about us older folks. We need to obviously get serious about our survival plans for our progeny and like minded younger people. If I die today I have had a full and decent life.
Screw your ammo, that’s only a cope. Good for home defense but not for all the other rot coming.
“Good for home defense but…”
Yeah, good point. Who needs to defend their home?
“Good for home defense but not for all the other rot coming.”
The Australians might disagree.
Knock, knock. “Hello, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Oh, hold on a moment, I’ll be right back… BLAM…
For my entire adult life, society has careened from one manufactured crisis to the next. I suppose ups and downs are normal, but this is ridiculous. Let’s get it over with.
To hell with the people who make a living keeping other people down, to hell with their cult, to hell with the walking dead who think they’re getting ahead by joining with these freaks.
Well said. I’m an older millennial and foolishly squandered my early youth which was the last time in modern history a man could hop on the property and career ladders with relative ease. Since 2008 it’s been a mess but I can’t complain too much because most of my classmates are doing almost as well as any genxer or boomer. Oh well, it’s much easier to fall when you’re close to the bottom.
Similar age, similar situation. My ‘successful’ friends have more stuff than me, but that means they have more to lose, which means they’re invested in keeping things going. That means sacrificing a lot of dignity to stay married to their millennial wives and feeding their children into the wood chipper as far as I can tell.
My ‘unsuccessful’ friends with humble jobs and humble wives seem happiest.
Note to self: guns are the first thing they steal.
As one Affiliated-American told me, “first I’ll take his guns, cuz then I’ll have his food, too.”
Correction: Guns are the first thing they *TRY* and steal. If you have the will to USE that gun first… well you will see the stealing reduced to the minimum.
There is a reason, after all, they used to shoot looters.
The old joke I used to use wrt prepping for the apocalypse was that I was prepared for any event…I had a rifle, ammunition, and a listing of all the Mormon households in the area! 😉
Alas for you all the LDS also have guns and are well organized
They aren’t gun crazy but they all have some useful firearms and ammo and the will to use them. Mormons generally are good folk, very weird Christians a bit soft and gullible but push them too far and they go Destroying Angel on you sorry backside and sleep well after.
Now if we get a Night of the Comet style apocalypse and most of humanity vanishes in a cloud of sweet smelling steam , well I know where I’m going.
Lock up yer daughters. He’ll need them to cook that one-year food supply.
The one and only girl I ever met I wanted to marry on sight “take to wife” in Bible parlance a very weird and specific feeling was a Sister Missionary from my old home town.
A little over weight, a bit cocky, smart as a tack and cute as a bugs ear . Like all of them,basically a spy and social engineer well trained and as dangerous in her own way as Anna Chapman.
That wasn’t going to happen for many many reasons, she was too young for me being only twenty for one and there were others but damn. The whole breed is quite impressive and if I were to marry an LDS girl its almost enough to make me embrace their very silly religion .
It begs the question ” whats a boomer with a nest egg to do”? I called my broker this morning to calm me down. It didn’t work.
Cash out of the market, buy rural acreage, gold and silver.
Drew: Slight correction: Buy tangible goods. While gold and silver hold their value and may/will be of use when/if any future economic activity grows past the scale of barter, they are not edible. Or wearable. Or reproductive.
Land, breeding pairs of animals, food, clothing, shelter, medicines, etc. The normal goods of life, all of which have expiration dates. Not “run off and live like a mountain man,” but some sober-minded assessment of what one would do when/if one couldn’t rely on the currently highly stressed means of civilization (power, water, supply chain).
I was unaware, until reading Z’s post today, that we’re suffering a shortage of aluminum. I did notice, however, that the cost of foil (which I use a lot of) was rising rapidly. Also heard from a friend with a daughter in England about the fuel shortage, but I don’t recall seeing even one headline about it anywhere else. Just from my wanderings online etc.., I think it’s going to be a very interesting ‘holiday season.’ While not as resilient as I’d like to be, we’re in a better position than we were compared to this time last year, so I’ll take that as a win. Baby steps.
That’s a great list for a prepped, but the man was asking for investment portfolio advice. Land and precious metals are the only two investment vehicles I can think of that are fairly liquid and never go to zero-value, unlike stocks and bonds. Seriously, what’s an older urban retiree going to do with breeding animals?
Silver is in freefall. Don’t touch it.
Then buy up bags of pre-1964 silver dimes at the coin gallery. It’s a fungible currency in useful amounts.
During the Great Depression, ol’ Biagi got armfuls of jewelry and gold pieces. The buyers got a basket of peaches in return. Thus was born the orchards, packing houses, and truck fleets of Biagi Farms.
Buy on the dips?
Ostei: I wouldn’t call it freefall. Besides, I believe it will go up again, so prefer to buy when it’s cheap. Gold is ridiculously overpriced.
How ironic that despite all their best efforts to provoke a real-life “insurrection” by setting social groups at each other’s throats, what will really kick it off is good ol’ supply and demand. Folks on our side have often wondered what would happen if the EBT cards stopped working for a day or two down in the ‘hood. We might well be about to find out, closely followed by whatever happens when the BoBos out in the ‘burbs can’t get fed, either. No, Snowflake, a good lecture on “intersectionality” can’t unload a ship’ nor can a few stern tweets about “privilege” get a truck from point A to point B. You can handwave away sexual dimorphism if you like, but you can’t handwave away tires on pavement… or the lack thereof.
Isn’t it ironic, dontcha think? Somewhere in the wilds of the Canadian outback, Alanis Morrisette is weeping salty tears of joy.
Math has the unfortunate characteristic of winning out over time.
Agreed, although some of these religious fanatics might not even be swayed by empty bellies. The majority no doubt will be, and per the custom, will reinterpret their faith to allow them to eat while Golden Dindu starves ’cause reasons.
Here’s the problem. The prodigal son repents when he gets tired of eating the corn husks unfit even for pigs; but the faithful son grows angrier at the profligate mercy of his father. What he hungers for is justice. So the civil war is inevitable, another Cain vs. Abel redux. Banishing the ancient wisdom from your society doesn’t make it go away; but knowing it doesn’t stop the doom. It’s as TomA preaches regularly. The wise man prepares to adapt to the doom and be one of the few who survives the chaos. What I fear is that the window of cooperation founded on trust is closing shut rapidly, and we’ve so lost the art of knowing and helping our neighbor that it’ll be everyman for himself. Many will be overwhelmed by the difficulties of going it solo. Those who’ve grown wise on the other side of sixty rarely fear death; but they often realize to their chagrin that hiking a day in the woods to harvest a deer or climbing a roof or really anything requiring strength or stamina ain’t as easy as it used to be and grows nearer to impossibility with each passing year. Hard times are coming.
Maus: Truth. And just the kick in the pants I needed to get off the computer and go to the gym again today. It is so much harder each decade, trying to lose weight/gain muscle. But since I don’t want to be helpless or bedridden, I soldier on. Pain now or more pain later – easy enough choice.
Remember a few years ago when this somewhat happened at a Walmart — EBT cards stopped working — and the resulting chimp out?
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/10/14/shoppers-trash-walmart-take-advantage-of-ebt-card-glitch-85244/
where I live the 3 large grocery stores in the areaare already having shortages and restocking issues, if the EBT cards failed to work on the 1st of the month people would just be rolling full grocery carts out to their vehicles without paying, nothing the stores could do except lock the doors and take up an armed position out front to prevent looting. The government would do everything in its power to keep the peasants from rioting so I expect just the shortages and unavailability to continue. By the way, the post office is instituting an official slower rate of delivery for first class mail and packages, which is already manifesting in longer waits for mail and things ordered online. Plus the turkey shortages next month. Maybe Christmas will come in January instead. Buy pasta in bulk-it’s cheap and filling, cooks up quick with no smell to attract two legged predators
Semi-OT:
I’m surprised this didn’t get mentioned on the, “Female Trouble,” post, but it appears that Governor Noem is reverting to type and working the Kamala plan for a VP bid:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/28/kristi-noem-shows-why-republicans-cant-have-nice-things/
To be fair, I’d probably do at least as much to be POTUS.
Not for the job (which sucks), but the perks if you do what you’re told (which are awesome).
Clintons worth $250 million, Barry O well north of $150 million last time I checked.
So yeah, we’ve established what US Presidents are, and are just negotiating a price.
Yes, indeed, lots of moola for the taking. However, the taking does have a certain finitude and it’s still true that one can’t take it with one. Everything about people like the Obamas, Clintons, Soros and the rest of the Masters of the Universe reminds me of Gollum. They all started out as innocent (not in the Biblical sense, but as in they were unsophisticated in the ways of the world) but at some point, became the horrid, twisted creatures they are today. I am comforted, nonetheless by recalling how Gollum’s quest for The Ring ended.
ProZNoV and Steve in PA: Yes, the lure of lucre is strong – for how one could provide for one’s family and friends, and for the influence it could conceivably bring. But you can’t take it with you, and it will corrupt and addict you. And the twisted degenerate you must become in single-minded pursuit of money guarantees that when the time comes to enjoy it, you will merely crave more.
Good post. However, we don’t really know that “you can’t take it with you.” Who is to say that copies of all our most prized possessions at the time of death won’t be waiting for us in the hereafter?
Now, Osteii, when you go to St. Peter’s gates, there’s a huge pile of boxes just outside.
Everything you’ve ever lost… socks, lighters, keys, pens, poodles, ex-wives… they’re all there. In the box with your name on it.
If you are of the mind, being POTUS has one great benefit, immortality. The ancients were not the only ones to understand that most of us are only 3 generations away from complete oblivion…as if we never existed…not even a memory.
Ah, the Millard Fillmore Gambit.
Well played. 🙂
1 Timothy 2:12
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
Learn it, live it, love it.
Another broken supply chain this morning:
“The CDC demands, err, recommends that all pregnant women get vaccinated.”
That’s the same brilliant logic applied to the public employees’ pension/pay crisis.
They’re union, so it seems you can’t lay them off or cut benefits, but you sure can fire them for heresy.
Now these geniuses aren’t just borrowing from the future, they’re borrowing from future payers that won’t even exist.
Alzaebo: They’ve been pushing this hard for months. I’ve shared at least a few dozen articles over the past year, from the UK and US, pushing pregnant White women to get vaxxed (or claiming those who didn’t would all die along with their babies). Of course, slipped in among all those was the admission that pregnant women who had covid provided immunity to their newborns for months – like any normal virus. So I am grateful my daughter-in-law didn’t believe the bullshite and I feel comfortable that my newborn grandson will remain healthy, despite the fact that none of us are vaxxed or masked.
Yes and no, maybe.
People forget how robust and flexible the economy is. Hate Trump all you want, but he could turn this around today. Open things up, make the market fair to invest in, and put the brakes on the Free Chit Army.
The modern economy is all about speed. Everyone has a CNC. Everyone has 3D printers, robotics, and the means to turn on the economic fire hose full blast. Most shortages will be of extremely short duration.
The big question is our meddling govt. Not gonna fedpoast today… but something has to be done about that dumpster fire in our ruling elite before anything can get done. You can’t do business with these guys in charge. The fix is actually pretty simple if you think about it…
It really is simple. Do enough of the right people and the chit stops.
I don’t understand why you have so many downboats. Is it saying the economy could turn around quick, and Trump could do it? These are both true. I’m as sour on Trump as any other disaffected trumpanzie but it’s true that the economy was WAY better under Trump and that effect would be even stronger if he hadn’t been unable/unwilling to use more power. If anyone doubts this I refer you once again to Mr. Moustache’s Moustacheland and how brilliantly it sprung forth from depression and degradation.
Trump had his chance and screwed it up. Forget about that idiot. FFS. Just go get the Trump vaccine like he says, LOL.
If Trump could have done it, would it not have been in his best interest to have done so before November of last year?
What is robust about our economy, aka “who we are”, is that real wealth creation is almost entirely a function of getting in bed with the government and/or the “private sector” elites who administer the massive regulatory capture operations.
Middlemanning, rent seeking and the regulatory capture – especially in the most durable industries of Climate Crises, Social Justice, MIC, and “Technology”, is now the only recognizable and somewhat predictable engine of commerce. All else is fake and gay, until it falls on the right side of history in the making a la “Covid”.
Three examples of current year. One, a friend making millions by turning his fledgling emergicare business into a massive “free” (Gov’t paid) testing operation as part of the PCR covid scam.
Two, a friend managing money for wealthy family turns $100k into $400MM via a magical moderna stonk buy.
Three, the clean truck program and other spin-offs of the Ports of LA/LB, which require all trucks entering the port to be 2014 or newer pushing new truck sales and finance – and the increasingly subscription-model maintenance that limits which companies can actually work on the new trucks, i.e. you don’t actually “own” that truck OS.
The offshoot of the enviro regulations (because port pollution disparate impact on pox – just ignore upstream in China, india, vietnam, etc.) is that the independent truck operator can either double his carry on a new truck or find another haul business. Or just retire. So we need moar truckers should read more debt slaves to the enviro-fascists and globocorps. And then our precious things sit on tankers. Solution: more Afghani truckers.
Sure there are many exceptions. A guy can still start a business doing something real. But the bandwidth is shrinking, not expanding. And in an economy that is in essence a ponzi of perpetual growth, this bodes poorly.
When an economy rewards tit sucking and punishes self-determination it is not long for this world. If an economy is indeed “who we are”, well there you have it. Get on the tit or get f&cked. Subsistence or wage slavery or drink from the chalice and hope you get skinned last. The great divide of which we often speak is not just in our ideas of the world; it is coming for us all.
Oh gods. You had to mention the clean truck program.
So there I was, middle aged, deep in debt, driving an old rustbucket literally held together with bailing wire, bungee cords, and duct tape.
No useful skills or education.
I was sitting in an abandoned parking lot in Hartford. I’d been fired with ten minutes warning after 16 ticket-free years because some guy nailed my blindside in Baton Rouge.
Insurance, registration voided on the spot. I was 3000 miles from home, and hadn’t seen my front door in 14 months because those clean air laws had exiled me from my own state.
So what’s a schnook to do?
How am I going to get home?
Oof, drive and pray for 3000 miles?
Much hilarity ensued. I was’t done being a genius genius. Finally got home 3 months later, just as winter began, thank the gods.
You’re right, though, I just started driving. Made it to St. Louis…
Ran ‘illegal’ for nearly 4 more years.
Fuq ’em.
Traumatizing, really, as I was still trying to overcome the Mortgage Meltdown damage.
The problem is that the economy will be affected by the current laws/programs that are now being enacted—not just the $$$ spent. And of course, we’ve not even been able to get rid of Obamacare, so the likelihood of repair is small.
Just a couple of days ago, one of our House Rep’s, whom I respect said point blank…”If this bill becomes law it will be the inflection point that historians will point to as to when the US turned socialist.”
He is on the Ways and Means Committee and not a screaming loony.
Build Back Better may be the key to understanding all of this. Various high-profile figures around the globe keep repeating that creepy mantra. Did all these top puppets just suddenly come up with the same slogan? No. It was supplied to them by the World Economic Forum. What do widespread invocations of BBB signify? That there is a well-coordinated global plot afoot. The most visible puppets in the world appear to be on the same page with one another.
What if economic madness and decline constitute a feature rather than a bug? What if one of several purposes behind the scamdemic campaign of endless fear porn propaganda is to capsize The West? What if the leading bankers, big tech players, and other globalist billionaires are intentionally pulling the plug on our civilization so as to further enrich and empower themselves?
Build Back Better, the Great Reset, Agenda 21…..what amazes me is how open the global elites are about this stuff. The Great Reset was the cover story in Time magazine back in November. “You will own nothing, and be happy.” And then BlackRock has been buying thousands of houses. When they openly say what their plan is, maybe we should take them seriously?
The only reason I still subscribe to the NY Times is it is the announcements page for the evil schemes of The People in Charge. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
Wolf Barney: Spot on. I think they love openly promoting their plans, knowing that those who take them at their word will be labeled kooks and conspiracy theorists. I may not believe every theory that comes down the pipe nowadays, but I no longer reject any of them either. Too many ‘crazy ideas’ have been vindicated, and I won’t even bother to say “I told you so” to those who still harbor doubts about the elites’ hatred and ultimate plans for White people and their culture.
The reason they’re open about it is wishcasting, mixed with a little status-preening for fun of course.
You can’t just decree, “Lo, and there shall be a Great Reset, verily, etc.” A lot of dominoes have to touch each other and not flop over to the side from a wobbly corner; the wave isn’t real but an artifact of the components’ statistical grouping of points in contact. So you promise one thing in public and keep an eye on “restructuring this according to our priorities” (-James Clyburn).
Elites enjoy bragging about grand schemes but it’s useful for the narrower purpose of bluffing each other. “If you don’t know who the dumb money in the market is, it’s probably you” is the apocryphal Warren Buffett rendition of it.
Wolf-
The theory I’ve heard is that the evil ones see these public pronouncements of their nefarious plans as some sort of confessional that absolves them of sin in the eyes of Lucifer, Baal, Moloch, Baphomet, etc.
You’ll own nothing and probably be dead.
Unless you are a supervillain that’s lives on an uncharted island under an extinct volcano… very risky play by the 1%. When worlds burn, the former elite often burns with them.
An esteemed blog of 17 years was immediately and completely wiped from the Web several years before the cancel era. It had innocently showed pics of the bunker tunnels beneath every Costco.
Their flunkies have a holdout nearby in every city. They’re prepared for the Transition.
(Such tunnels were once a common thing. My friend discovered the unused ones under his high school, to many a sophomore girl’s delight.)
That’s an expensive, complicated, and, in the end, crappy plan. If they can find Saddam in his spider hole under a friend’s shack in hostile territory then those “secret” tunnels will be found, if for no other reason than “that’s where the money is at”.
Complicated? Showing your pass? It should do in a pinch, until the soldiers show up.
Those soldiers will be raiding your house and arresting you for hoarding.
I’ve been in the Caves in Kansas City.
There’s an entire, stocked, self sufficient survival city under Camp David to the Executive Office.
The WEF has people everywhere in politics, media, and academia around the world. It’s not even secret.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TG6R36bkgs
What if economic madness and decline constitute a feature rather than a bug?
Yes. If you want to create a new world order, you have to smash the old one first.
I see no possible innocent explanation for all these assaults on the Western economies, no insanity defense. Britain sits on at least a thousand trillion cubic feet of natural gas, but every time there’s a cold winter, their geezers die like flies because they can’t afford heating their homes.
a thousand trillion cubic feet of natural gas
Enough to power Britain for a century.
Old people have to freeze NOW, so that global warming might not make the planet a little warmer in 100 years.
It’s for the children, you see.
By that logic, though, we should freeze out the children, with their longer life expectancy… Hmm… it’s almost as if “future generations” is a reliable rhetorical tell for someone with a depopulation agenda (“Too Many of You, Not Enough of Me” was the chapter subtitle in P.J. O’Rourke’s “All the Trouble in the World” collection). I wonder if there’s a technical Viennese term for the tendency going with this, uh, project?
If people don’t fight, they get what is coming to them. Its not more complicated, weakness breeds predators and we all are guilty of it.
This is the flaw of Democracy, the illusion that you can vote your way out of someones schemes. I mean the US was decent enough at a Republic and ours lasted 15 years (till the Whiskey Rebellion) or if you are generous 85 which is basically one longish lifetime.
Th real trust is power is truth , nothing more nothing less. Get power, use power or be a slave to those who do
“What if the leading bankers, big tech players, and other globalist billionaires are intentionally pulling the plug on our civilization so as to further enrich and empower themselves?”
It would be akin to demolishing your factory so you can be richer than your workers. The BBB crowd has two types of members: bad-faith actors who hate humanity, and dupes. Most are dupes. That the modern economy is based on financial exploitation rather than innovation proves that our leaders unimaginative dullards of the sort that are easily swayed by misanthropic conmen.
Headline: “Democrats Slip Plans For $700,000 Vaccine Compliance Fines Under U.S. Code Section 666 Into Budget Bill”
BBB = 666
They’re mind-f**king us. And they think it’s funny.
Story here, with further links in the precis:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/29/house-democrats-quietly-insert-a-ten-fold-increase-in-osha-violations-into-3-5-trillion-human-infrastructure-reconciliation-bill/
Sundance over at The Conservative Treehouse has been all over supply chain disruption issues for quite a while. He’s a practically-inclined fellow; he is heavily involved in disaster relief activities, and that leads you to think on these things, downed communications and power, transport issues, food and water supplies, emergency medical triage, etc.
They hate us, and they want us dead. Any questions?
To the extent that the Powers are pulling the plug on the West, they are doing so primarily because they hate the white race. Financial gain is just a side dividend.
In primis [sorry Derb]: “Humans have figured out to tough out these naturally occurring events.” Very true, but the feminization of society today has eradicated the noun “toughness” from the working vocabulary and practice.
Secundo loco, Durant’s maxim is further proof–if any were needed–that the 80 for the 20 innovations in supply and demand were worked out many generations ago. All of our tinkering with those well-established “institutions and customs” comes at high cost and increasingly marginal returns. Another shock to the system, likely engineered by our masters as a fix to the damage they’ve wrought, might be enough to collapse the house of cards back to something more manageable. That process will not be pretty.
The microprocessor revolution ushered in a genuine revolution in the supply chain. Not only do goods and service flow much faster, they flow more accurately and adjust more quickly. One reason we did not have riots last year over the lock downs is people got food and entertainments. Fifty years ago lockdowns would have meant hungry mobs burning state capitols and hanging the politicians.
There are limits and we are bumping up against those limits.
Just-in-time supply theory doesn’t work too well under such scenarios. Also, the relative tranquility during the Great Depression would seem to militate against your position that hunger and a dearth of entertainments inevitably causes riots and civil unrest. Many were too busy scrambling to survive and didn’t have the wherewithal to engage in street politics. There was still faith in government solving social problems. Even now, as the scales fall from the eyes of many, that misplaced faith might be even stronger than it was in the 30s. We shall see.
3 Pipe Problem: Even considering the enormous percentage of the population represented by the 1880-1920 immigrants and their progeny, we were a ca 90% White nation in the 1930s. Consider the Depression as West Virginia writ large. White people then found a means to survive and they didn’t resort to massive violence to do so.
That was then. Things are rather different now, and so, too, will be the consequences.
So true. I live in West Virginia and I have not eaten in three years.
“The microprocessor revolution ushered in a genuine revolution in the supply chain. Not only do goods and service flow much faster, they flow more accurately and adjust more quickly.”
My experience as of late, regarding big box chains and their websites has been as follows. They show something in inventory. You order it. It fails to arrive because it never was in inventory. You get some lame apology email.
Not from mom and pops, either. Advance Auto Parts is a major culprit. They now stock a whopping ONE of many parts once common. Worse, their website states “perfect fit” for your car, then … it is not a fit at all. Turns out the one that fits is not in stock, or is much more expensive. I manage a small fleet and can tell you large chain auto parts are a mess and their counter people are apathetic, knowing how bad things are.
Whatever “revolution” took place seems to be Covidover.
Just in time inventory, taken to its logical limit, makes the system fragile. This is why we have so many problems and will have many more problems. The logic of the system was not built to handle a lock down and a restart.
I didn’t know before, but chips are the 4th largest traded commodity in the world.
That’s why I just laugh when people think this will magically turn around really fast. You can have infinite capacity to run factories and machines, but you need material and people to feed them. The economy is a giant system, with many smaller systems that are intertwined with each other. It takes time to build buffers and capacity again.
We have record orders, but we cannot fill them because we cannot get material.
I am well-versed on just in time inventory. The issue I was speaking on included the role of the microprocessor, via software (which comes down to people) and the rampant “perfect fit” errors at places like Advance Auto Parts.
Incorrectly stating a part is in inventory, worsened by steering the customer, the DIY mechanic to the wrong part is a disaster. What else does a big box retailer like Advance provide? They don’t make anything. They don’t fix anything.
They fail at their core mission. Now say you need to have your car back on the road to pick up your government check— you know the typical POC single mother shown on the commercials.
Then, counter person go “oops, wrong part, that happens a lot, I can get it in a day…”
All the advances of the microprocessor and they serve you the equivalent of cold fries at an empty McDonalds.
“The logic of the system was not built to handle a lock down and a restart.”
Which is what I posted in early 2020. There really isn’t an instruction manual for startup, is there? However, we have one advantage: a large distributed system with lots of independent controllers who can attempt to restart their little pieces of the puzzle. The system if it does restart will do so organically.
Our only hope is that the Fed’s stay the hell out of the process as much as possible.
But the most important thing in the world is the assault on “Our Democracy” ™ by these evil rioters at the Capitol, our sacred shrine of “Our Democracy” ™.
Chesterton’s Fence
The hubris and stupidity of today’s leaders (actually, most of our leaders since the 1960s) is stunning. On every issue, but, especially race and culture, they simply assume that the generations that came before them were either idiots or evil. It never dawns on rulers that maybe, just maybe, those who came before them set up the rules for good reasons based on lessons learned over hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Our rulers have the self-awareness and thoughtfulness of a teenager.
Teenager?
They are more like psychotic toddlers.
That’s the boomer demographic for you. They grew up thinking their parents were idiots. As kids we were not allowed to notice that the boomers were idiots too.
And so it goes, we fail to see it in ourselves too.
Thank gawd the millennials were raised right and will save us all.
😉
You made me choke on my coffee…..
Read any modern history book taught in schools and you’ll see a pretty simple theme:
American Settlers – Morons
Medieval People – Morons
American Indians – Victims
American Blacks – Victims
Enlightenment Philosophers – Smart, because they believed in Universalism
Civil rights activists – Even smarter than enlightenment philosophers
Note they are incorporating less literature from these bad times, largely because modern students are less and less capable of understanding it, but trust us, they were morons.
It’s a concerted general push, along with credentialism, to think in terms of Whig history where the next generation is always more enlightened than the previous.
I’d add these groups to the list:
Ancient Romans – Morons
Ancient Greeks – Morons
Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs, etc – Delicate and thoughtful mathematicians and astronomers
According to our 6th grade Seton Catholic homeschool world history book,
The Greeks were good: democracy (yeah!).
However, the Greeks were BAD: slaves & women couldn’t vote (boo!).
As Orangefrog and Chinese engineers say, “it is so tiresome”.
Even Seton is awful in civics.
I want a homeschool curriculum written by Curtis Yarvin. Sure, the second grade book would be 1500 pages, but my kids can handle it.
“I want a homeschool curriculum written by Curtis Yarvin. Sure, the second grade book would be 1500 pages, but my kids can handle it.”
Five pages after cursory editing.
I’ve never really been impressed with Yarvin. I find him tiresome.
Don’t forget the individual heroes like Martin Luther King, Sacajawea, and Harriet Tubman.
I remember reading a biography of Harriet Tubman for black history month only to realize in adulthood 80% of the stories were bogus.
Same happened for George Washington Carver.
Those were the first baby steps in realizing most everything I was taught in civics and history classes were a lie.
A black dude told me, “Damn, we were sick of reading about Harriet Tubman in school.”
My boy got after school detention for noting Harriet Tubman lived up to her namesake too literally – “she had an man ass built like a tub”. Paraphrasing since the teacher’s note was more vulgar. Yes, kids, you used to be able to make jokes like that, in school, and not be branded a heretic the rest of your life.
Most people realized that the significance of “historical figures” like Harriet Tubman was probably overstated. It’s the typical first-black-to do-something-that-whites-did-a-million-times-already scenario. Either that, or make a big deal out of something fairly trivial that would not even merit mention if a White had done it.
But, it’s not just that the significance of these people was overstated. Most of the stuff we have been told is not even true. We thought it was just advertising. But really it’s lies.
As long as we are told the truth about the important stuff, most people will tolerate a little polite fawning over some of these questionable accomplishments. But when we are being misled about objective truth, that’s when the credibility of the system collapses.
Even the Enlightenment philosophers will be condemned as morons, or what’s worse, white supremacists, if they haven’t been already. Everything white prior to 1965 is implicated in the totalizing evil known as racism.
Remember this:
The ONLY purpose of a 3.6 TRILLION dollar “Anything Bill” is to siphon 1-2% of it off for kickbacks from union workers to fund future political campaigns.
That’s it. That’s all it ever is. It would be infinitely more efficient to establish the current Congress for life, pay them a couple of million a year, and just forbid them from ever passing another law.
Big fees for NGOs to shovel wealth up the melanin gradient.
Back in Thee Olden Tymes, they had a name for it: Arrested Development. It nicely defines the problem with those currently in charge. They govern as if their intellectual and moral development was arrested somewhere in early puberty, that time when you start having urges and have no clue how to properly deal with them.
“Tradition is the democracy of the dead”
That’s right. It’s the last three generations versus the whole of human history preceding 1965. Foucault and Marcuse trump everything from Democritus to Solzhenitsyn.
The damage to the supply chains, as bad as it is, is at least measurable, and shows up within a year or so of the dumb, crazy action by the rulers. What are the long-term effects on children who’ve spent now decent chunk of their childhood wearing masks and being told to be six feet apart from each other or (Elisabeth Warren voice) “people will die!” How about the hit to what’s left of our social capital after Fauci got caught financing this insanity? Who would listen to the CDC now if a real pandemic or crisis came along, as it very well could? Small business owners have committed suicide, businesses that have existed for generations have tanked. The best our rulers can come up with right now is to point and splutter, “Didn’t Trump suck? Look at how crazy he was!” Pointing and spluttering at republicans usually works (they got good mileage out of Palin), but they really can’t distract people with that technique anymore.
Sure they can. They do it every day.
Elsewhere herein I opined that during the Great Depression, folks put their faith in the government [e.g. FDRs idiocy got him elected 4x]. I don’t think that naivete has diminished one iota since then, if anything, Blind Faith is not just a band but the modus operandi of the true believers.
There were immigration caps, functioning institutions, and social capital in FDR’s day, little things like beat cops and actual infrastructure going up (you can criticize the TVA or WPA, but there are literal buildings and dams you can still point to that are the result of that, as opposed to something like the Green New Deal, which will produce nothing but graft). Even idiots who want to watch TV all day notice when stray bullets tear through their walls or someone forces their child to cover their face before they go outside.
“(you can criticize the TVA or WPA, but there are literal buildings and dams you can still point to that are the result of that, as opposed to something like the Green New Deal, which will produce nothing but graft).”
Great point and great rhetoric.
I’ve pointed it out before, as have many here and elsewhere, but the looting is accelerating at a rapid pace. There is economic totalitarianism just as there is cultural and political totalitarianism, and it is even more painful. Pronoun you won’t hear: WE will own nothing and be happy. CivNats aren’t the only ones with preposterous delusions about the military and law enforcement.
What is the Derb paraphrase of the Orwell quote? “If there is hope, it lies in the comments section.” Reading comments and looking at upvote-downvote ratios on YouTube videos isn’t exactly a science, but it’s a hell of a lot more accurate than what a lot of polling outfits put out. And there is a lot of restlessness/disgruntled energy from people who are usually well-pacified. People who considered a toady like Colbert a comedian only a couple of months ago are rediscovering their gag reflex, and that’s just one example. It’s everywhere, even in MSNBC.
Broken people at two extreme parts of the spectrum will form, Permanent terrified sheep on one side and murderous psychopaths on the other.
My favorite was when the American Association of Pediatrics tried saying with a straight face that there’s no evidence wearing a mask around children inhibits language development.
Mine was (recently) some general (Centcom?) defending the evacuation of Afghanistan as “The greatest military evacuation in history!” I believe he stated that we got 140K out and further, no other army in the world could have done this.
I immediately lamented at the ignorance of the news media questioning him. No one seemed to remember a military evacuation now known simply as “Dunkirk”. 🙁
(To save you time, 340K soldiers evacuated in 8 days. Thereby saving basically the entire English army at the time.)
Listen. You promised me WW3 with Iran, a pandemic, ADE and now economic collapse.
Stop blueballing me already.
With the sky rocketing natural gas and electrical prices here and especially in Europe we may see a cascade of events unfold the elites will have no answer for. They have set events into motion they have no understanding of and no way to control. Interesting times we live in.
They’ll never get this right, they’re just “firemen” running around either burning crap down that they don’t understand or, like with the UK CO2 imbroglio, trying to put out their fires before the flames consume them as well.
More like sorcerer’s apprentices, flaunting how powerful they are then wondering why they aren’t appreciated. Do the dirt people not realize, it is power that matters! Not wisdom! There shall be monuments to the name of BloJo the Magnificent!
And not because he was smart!
Interesting to see how the sportsball heroes will react to the NBA telling them, no jab, no pay. Hopefully some of them will stand tall.
The NBA has already caved on the vaccine. They are requiring it for everyone but the players because the players union wouldn’t agree to it. Several players have made comments saying, “why would I take a vaccine with even a small risk of side effects when I already had Covid and recovered quickly?”
You mean after they are done kneeling to all the racisms flags?
I’ve been sent those twitters of some “smart” basketball americans talking about why they don’t want the jab by some of my friends who are now red pilled because covid. Some hard hitting facts I tell ya.
The impulse to unilaterally ally a poc or strongwoman being ever so slightly reasonable is an affliction that is apparently timeless for the civnat disposition.
Funny the goldfish memory. Chinese paymasters, BLM down the throat, nooses and cancel culture – and because a black doesn’t want some shot we are all suddenly united against the covid “tyranny!” which is apparently totally unrelated to the decades of anti-white/Christian/Male/natural/heritage American tyranny by those same forces.
Eating white guys’ lunch is just too easy.
Screwtape: You said it far better than I ever could. Even Counter-Currents was pushing that black/pajeet woman re the vaxx as ‘based.’ Puleeese. What is it that makes most White people desperate for validation by a non-White? Why do people – even those who claim to be DR – fall victim to this time and again? So that they’ll be the last to be stabbed in the back? So that they can clutch their threadbare ‘unity’ and ‘equality’ fantasies tightly until the end?
Some of that is aggravating, but on the other hand I don’t really care about the race of the perp flushing a sock full of cement down the toilet of the elites if someone thought to do it; and if it’s one of their “pets” it is a little more delicious to be sure.
I get it. I resist pu nchig right. But the otherism approval fetish is a massive blind spot that will come home to roost. I dont want guys prone to that sorta risk in my camp, personally.
That nog with the sock cement won’t stop at city hall shitters either. Certainly we have learned that much.
City hall is an extension of white power. We can sort the cloud from the dirt; they see only white.
When they are done breaking what our people built they will come for us. That is their programming.
So good they break what we want broken too – for now. But lets be real about their part in why we need those things broken to begin with.
Screwtape-
I’m convinced a pat on the head and, “Dat a gud boy!” from a vibrant is the raison d’etre of most civnat normies.
it would appear that everything done to date was solely to get trump out of office so the grift and corruption could continue unabated.
They are much more ambitious than that.
There are a bunch of threads being interwoven, some pop up then vanish for a while, others are top of mind for quite a continuous time.
In no particular order,.
Universal basic income.
Central bank digital currency.
Abolition of cash
Universal ID’s
(I had links to all of these but comment was then deemed to be spam and couldn’t be posted)
Where we are.
Corona leads to vaccine leads to vaccine passport.
What’s next (may be introduced in this order)
Central bank digital currency is used to distribute universal basic income.
UBI can be accessed/spent via universal digital passport (phone app) requires user to be full vaxxed.
Central bank can control spending in real time. In Sydney Australia, for example you can only travel within 5 km of your home.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/interactive-map-what-is-5km-from-your-sydney-home/1ac39682-81c7-4ccb-ba0a-a705895c9d40
Central bank could prevent all spending outside that limit.
So where it goes.
You are a serf, owned by the state, travel where you are allowed. Can purchase only approved items.
You can be financially terminated at will.
You will own nothing. You will be happy.
http://www.shipspotting.com/ais/index.php
a global map showing the real-time position of nearly every boat & ship
Unsurprisingly, all the yachts appear to be piled up in Miami and Monaco.
With carts on their map tables directing them to their safehouses in New Zealand, no doubt.
A poster I follow is a very aware guy, highly technologically-competent fellow. He was observing the direction things were trending, and decided to move with his family to the best place he could to be out from under what was coming. And so, he landed in New Zealand. Jacinda Ahern head of government, head lunatic in charge.
As Alanis Morisette might observe, “How ironic”. The very reason that it looked safe was because all of the big sociopaths were lining it up as their bolt hole. For them that might be sorta true; but for everybody else in NZ forced to live under Jacinda’s glaze-eyed gaze, a bit less true. I really feel for the guy, as his heart is clearly in the right place, judging by the news he makes it his business to aggregate.
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”
“No reason to get excited”, the thief, he kindly spoke,
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”.
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
Robin Trower, Jimi, or even Dylan? Enquiring minds wanna know/
Three Pipe Problem,
It’s a Dylan song, but the version with which I am most familiar, and the one I had in mind, was the version by Jimi Hendrix found on his Electric Ladyland LP from back in the day. I still have it in that form. Check out House Burning Down, too. Well, the whole thing, actually.
Sorry that Jimi went back to Spiritland so soon, but where we are today would have saddened him had he lived long enough to see it.
Just wait until those poor Australians are finally allowed to get back in their cars after they’ve been sitting idle for 18 months. The batteries will be dead and the fuel lines will be clogged. Mice will be all over the engine compartment chewing away at any and everything. Bird nests will show up in the grill. Then the repair garages will be overwhelmed with business and who knows how long that will take to straighten out.
I am in the automotive business and Z is correct regarding the used car market. We have no inventory. All of my friends in the business are reporting the same thing happening at their dealerships. I am warning everyone I know to avoid buying used right now as many/most are selling at prices just below new models.
The past year we have seen all of the repairs described in the above post (well no bird nests, yet) Rusted brakes, dead batteries and MICE! Tons of mouse damaged cars. I have personally totalled several this year. In most cases these are repaired or replaced under insurance claims. So, again, the costs have been socialized.
Alone in the northeast: Even before covid the supply of used cars was thin – partially a result of ‘cash for clunkers’ and partially because of the cost and technical complexity of new vehicles. I personally hate new (or 1-3 year old) vehicles because of the obscene safety and remote features. Periodically the ignition in my 2020 RAV 4 will lock up (no discernable reason) and I can spend 10 minutes trying to turn the steering wheel or shift gears before I can turn the key. My husband has had the exact same experience. It could be the powers-that-be targeting us remotely (not as farfetched as it sounds) or it could be whatever, but with newer cars you are not in charge even if you’re in the driver’s seat.
We are not mechanics (although son has friends who are) and I am determined to buy a used 4wd something in the next 1-2 years. I expect to pay a premium, but will not be forced to buy one of their tin-can surveillance boxes on wheels. Those with the knowledge and tools to really retool an older-looking beater and who can scavenge spare parts at them dump will be Kings of the Road.
3g4me, agreed the used car market has been a mess for awhile. However it was noticably worse the two years prior to Covid. Now it’s completely insane. Just last weekend my dealership sold a 3 year old Dodge Charger with 40,000 miles on it for $1600 less than a brand new one would cost. None of us can figure out why people are buying used. Everyone can’t be that ignorant?
I’m a middle aged X’er so I find myself, well, in the middle of most arguments. There’s always older folks complaining that they can’t repair their own vehicles anymore. They’ll blame it on conspiracy, forcing you to bring it back to the stealership. It’s true to some extent. Under the hood is waaaay more complex than in the past, but the rest of the vehicle hasn’t changed all that much. People can still replace there own brakes, do maintainance etc. What often gets overlooked is how much better cars have gotten from a longevity perspective. It’s used to be a used car with 100k on the clock was destined for the boneyard. Now it’s common to see multiple hundreds of thousands of miles. They are a lot more efficient and safer. All that being said, I 100% agree the ridiculous safety standards have made cars ugly, homogeneous and overly expensive at the lower end of the market.
Regarding your Rav 4, first it sounds new enough that Toyota should be warranty’ing some repairs for you. Second, try to get in the habit of ensuring the steering wheel is centered (straight ahead) when you park the car. In this case the column should never lock, and you should be never have to fight with they key again.
“one of their tin-can surveillance boxes on wheels”
Keep you eyes peeled for OBD3, in the business (service end) we’ve been expecting this for years. The industry has all of the infrastructure in place already. It’s just a matter of time for the government to switch it on. The new standards will include real time emissions testing etc. This will be accomplished through the telematics systems already going into most newer vehicles. (If they can force silly tire sensors and backup cameras they can force this too) This will enable real time tracking of the vehicles. Check engine light came on? Big brother knows. Wanna charge peasants by the mile? No problem.
local dealer was advertising the used cars he had in stock?! wait until the Ida damaged cars hit the market…
But wait, no scrupulous car dealer would….oh wait.
Disregard.
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With regards to the supply chain, there is an app called “MarineTraffic” available. There is a free version, so if you’re so inclined, you can see where every vessel on the water is, around the globe. Let’s just say there are more ships sitting on their hands on the west and east coast, than are being unloaded. For 0.99, you can get complete descriptions of every ship, tug and yacht. It’s amazing to see just how much activity there is in the chain.