U.S. Standard of Living Has Fallen More Than 50%

Originally posted by Jordan River
Jesus christ, we need a republican right now to # up some more

Take your partisan blinders off. they are affecting your vision.

Whether you elect a Republican or a Democrat, you're still lighting the same candle, just another end of it.

When those ends both reach your fingers holding the candle in the middle, it's not THEIR fingers, neither Democrat nor Republican, that are going to get burnt for lighting it.

It makes no damn difference at all which end you light - the flame can only go one way... toward YOUR fingers.

reply to post by Another10Pin


The problem with late-life starts is that you need to have a place to start. You can go in with just a minimal base of knowledge, and build on it as you go, but you have to have a place to do that. I'm probably better situated than most for only 3 reasons -

1) I grew up in that sort of environment, although perhaps not as extreme, and my dad was ALWAYS trying to teach me something "new" to me that he's had to do as a kid. He always said "you never know when you'll need to know this", and away we'd go. I've farmed with horses instead of tractors, and moved hay shocks or brush piles with a horse and a grape vine, instead of a chain or rope.

2) I never WANTED any credit. When I got married, my first wife insisted on it, so I got credit, and built it up to a pretty good rating. When she went, the credit did, too. I didn't need it any more. I've always viewed credit as voluntarily letting someone else get a stranglehold on me, and proceeded accordingly, from that perspective, so it wasn't as hard to just dump it in a ditch and drive on. As a side note, when you just suddenly dump all your credit, and you've had a good history, creditors get spastic as hell trying to figure out why they aren't able to pick your pockets any more, and they do all sorts of acrobatics to try getting you back under their thumb. It's funny to watch, as long as you just keep saying "NO!"

3) I laid the physical groundwork for retreating from society LONG ago by making it a priority to have a place to do it. That is where most people who attempt it will hit a snag. Not to sound like a hippy, but they had a good idea - at this stage in the game, some sort of communal setup may be required for a lot of people to even begin to think about it. Spread out the cost of the land, and the work load. "Many hands make the work light" is an old saying, and the psychological support of an entire community right there on site, couldn't hurt anything. Most humans are gregarious by nature. They are herd animals for the most part, and there is strength in numbers.

You might need to look into such a setup. I know of some that are distinctly "non-hippy", but they are not to my taste, either, and I've already got my patch anyhow. You have to check 'em out and make sure they're not religion-motivated or "end-timers" just waiting for The Last War. You're not aiming for Valhalla or Heaven, you're aiming for life right here in the now. Political structure can be a problem, too. There is a fine art to sizing people up and finding the particular job matching their abilities and tastes. When one guy can do that well, he sometimes gets big headed and takes over. You ALWAYS have to guard against that sort of thing in a communal setting.

It's not the ideal setup as a final result, but it may have to do to "kick start" the project. With care and vigilance, eventually the "communes" would break up and spread out as individual setups, and only the necessary common industries would be on the site of the original community. They would be "villages" or "towns", rather than population centers, because a concentrated, centralized population cannot support itself without being reliant on outside sources, from surrounding areas or even farther afield, then you get what we have now.

What would happen if, for some reason (such as a sudden oil shortage) all of our cities, and their concentrated populations, were to suddenly be cut off from outside support - food comes to immediate mind - and had to fend for themselves?

Chaos. Death. Destruction. The very things we're trying to avoid.

Now consider this - what if the "shortage" were just a manufactured shortage by either "TPTB" or some communistic "Central Committee" as a control measure? The results would be the same, either way. Now you can see what a precarious position urbanites have allowed themselves to be steered into, myself included since I'm currently in an urbanly blighted area, at the bottom of the barrel as it were. If it all goes up, I'm right here in the middle of the fire, hoping that not all of my pre-planned escapes are blocked by the flames.

Great stuff guys.

Personally, I think we could hang on to the technology, and possibly advance even further if we turned back to our roots as a nation. Pretty much everything, except large machinery can be manufactured in a small warehouse with current tech., even microprocessors.

What most people don't realize is that for a long time now, we have been able to produce more than we can consume. Essentially we have been running as a disposable society of planned obsolescence, as wasteful as possible to keep us all chained to the system. Getting unplugged from this system is the first step.

If we abandoned suburbia and went back to communities on a much smaller scale, we would all be much better off, and enjoy far better lifestyles.

It seems we all agree on this. I think more and more people are starting to realize this.

IMO, economic realities are going to make this happen anyway, those who plan in advance will be better off as these things develop.

reply to post by JanAmosComenius


I'm not very well versed in pneumatics or hydraulics, and it looks like I need to repair that deficiency!

I've never been to the Czech republic, but my dad was on the Czech border for a couple of years in the early 50's. I'm not sure where, but it was near where West Germany, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia all came together. I recall him talking about a tall mountain with a river at the bottom of it, and the Russians patrolling the river on white horses. He said it was a beautiful place where a man could make a go of it alone, if the governments would leave him be, and that resources for that were fairly abundant for someone who could extract enough to get by on.

He was so impressed that he tried to stay when he was discharged, and the Army wouldn't allow it - said he had to come back here to be discharged, THEN he could go back if he wanted to. If he had that opinion of it, then you are set. Dear old dad was a survivor's survivor, and if he thought it was a good place to make a go, then there's no doubt in my mind that a native can do it, and with style!

It's good to hear that the younger generation is moving in that direction. There may be hope for humans yet!

reply to post by nenothtu


If you can rebuild computers and are fairly decent as a mechanic, you will be fine with pneumatics and hydraulics.

With basic schedule 40 PVC there are great many possibilities for light weight designs, sch80 for bigger projects. Only imagination limits the possibilities.

Originally posted by poet1b

Great stuff guys.

Personally, I think we could hang on to the technology, and possibly advance even further if we turned back to our roots as a nation. Pretty much everything, except large machinery can be manufactured in a small warehouse with current tech., even microprocessors.

Yup. I'm not saying to eliminate tech, but instead to dial it back a notch and make it more durable. A lot of things are used now redundantly, so one or the other can go. Multi-purpose tech would be a plus, I think, like computers. They can be used for everything from entertainment - watching movies and tv and the like, playing games, or just tinkering with "stuff" ( I use mine for rendernig 3D landscapes, making topographic maps of areas of interest and the like for recreation) to communicating across the face of the planet, like now.

There are several different gadgets sitting in this house, eating up electricity, when one would do - a laptop burning about 7 1/2 volts. Even one per family member (which we have) would use less than one per family member AND all the other gadgetry.

Our power went out once for several days after a storm. the kids were lost without their gadgets, but they were REALLY scared because there was no power for my coffee pot. "My God! What's dad gonna do without coffee!" The answer was: I wasn't. I broke into my old web gear, dug out a canteen cup and a stove for it, a couple of trioxane bars, some instant coffee, and I was good to go. they were shocked. "What's WRONG with you, dad?"

"Nothin' " says I as I sipped my coffee. "I got my coffee, what else do I need?"

After that, my son took an inordinate interest in learning how to live with only sticks and rocks.

What most people don't realize is that for a long time now, we have been able to produce more than we can consume. Essentially we have been running as a disposable society of planned obsolescence, as wasteful as possible to keep us all chained to the system. Getting unplugged from this system is the first step.

Planned obsolescence has been a problem for a long time. If people insist on durability or nothing, they'll provide it eventually - or go under from dropping sales when people refuse to buy junk. Even back when I was a kid, people were complaining about how warranties were timed to end just before a product died completely. It's been a problem for a LONG time.

If we abandoned suburbia and went back to communities on a much smaller scale, we would all be much better off, and enjoy far better lifestyles.

It seems we all agree on this. I think more and more people are starting to realize this.

People connect with people in new and interesting ways (new to this age of computer communications, anyhow) in that sort of environment. Neighbors learn to rely on neighbors rather than externals like a government miles away, or a banker even further away.

IMO, economic realities are going to make this happen anyway, those who plan in advance will be better off as these things develop.

I believe your right. My dad did, too. He saw it coming years ago, when he was insisting that I learn all this "useless" stuff. Another of his gems was that "anything you can make or fix for yourself is one less thing you'll have to pay someone else to make or fix."

reply to post by nenothtu


Replying because I want to get back to this and not lose my place. Have stuff to do and will be a couple of days. Will reply in full at that time.

Originally posted by poet1b
reply to post by nenothtu

 

If you can rebuild computers and are fairly decent as a mechanic, you will be fine with pneumatics and hydraulics.

Computers are pretty easy. If you know what's wrong with it, which board controls that, and what the board looks like, you just open the case, pull that out, and replace the whole board with a new one. Same for a new build. you figure out what you want it to do, determine what it will take to do that, then plug everything together like electronic Legos. Now that you mention it, though, EVERYTHING consists of "components", and the key is only knowing what those components do for the whole, then plugging them in or replacing them to make it go!

With basic schedule 40 PVC there are great many possibilities for light weight designs, sch80 for bigger projects. Only imagination limits the possibilities.

PVC is great - you can make anything from lawn furniture to blowguns with it. I'm presuming schedule 80 would be a better choice for pnuematics and hydraulics, because of the pressures involved over mere transport of water from a main to a faucet. My hideaway has a spring which is uphill from the housing, so the plan for mere water transport is gravity feed from a lined cinder block box around the spring through progressively smaller pipe to the house to increase the pressure at the tap. Higher pressure systems for underground air tanks will need beefier infrastructure, but I'm thinking high perssure hose may do as well for at least the above ground parts, and maybe run through buried PVC for the underground parts so that it's easier to replace - just yank it out of the PVC sleeve and pop a new section in. Schedule 40 would probably work fine as that shielding.

With trends like this in some of America's biggest and most respected companies, looks like things are going to get worse before they get better:

IBM's internal Plan to Grow Earnings-Per-Share to $20 by 2015: Fire Most U.S. Employees

The direct impetus for this column is IBM’s internal plan to grow earnings-per-share (EPS) to $20 by 2015. The primary method for accomplishing this feat, according to the plan, will be by reducing US employee head count by 78 percent in that time frame.

Reducing employees by more than three quarters in three years is a bold and difficult task. What will it leave behind? Who, under this plan, will still be a US IBM employee in 2015? Top management will remain, the sales organization will endure, as will employees working on US government contracts that require workers to be US citizens. Everyone else will be gone. Everyone.

reply to post by nenothtu


Yeah, you won't have any problems. Just remember PVC doesn't do well in the sun.

I have a few more years, and then I am definitely going to make the push to get out of suburbia. I want a nice large garage.

reply to post by Leftist


IMO, tech innovation is slowly crawling to a halt. All these new gadgets are nothing but improvements to 1960ties tech. Science seems to have been taken over by priests, and biggest problems is that there is no incentive for corporate execs to look out for the long term for their business, as they only need to pump up profits long enough to get their big bonus paychecks.

reply to post by nenothtu


Sir, you gained my respect in this thread. You understand world and people. You are not blind.

Your dad was near Elbe shore. It is beautiful country. Vast sandstone karst with many springs and creeks. Ruins of medieval castles, places where nobody was for years. Almost no people there. Now it is national park on both sides of boarder. With some ID (driving license is enough) you can freely cross boarder where you want.

Here is link to touristic map. Here is link to orto map. By clicking on symbols you can reach some photos.

reply to post by JanAmosComenius


Now that you mention it, he DID mention old castles. Your description goes a long way in explaining his assessment of and affinity for the area - we come from an area of limestone karst, rather than predominantly sandstone, but the lay of the land must have reminded him a lot of home. looking at the forests in the links you provided strengthens that similarity.

It's a beautiful country you have there!

reply to post by Germanicus


In reference to your link... Isn't it like America to pay to send these kids to school only to have them leave and benefit their home country while people like me struggle to get the money to pay for school...

When are we going to start giving the benefits to our citizens born here and stop paying to educate other nations kids, some who have come back to kill the same Americans who put their butts through school...

That, to me is the definition of sad...

Let's hope that all changes when Dr. Paul takes over... I can dream can't I?

Originally posted by poet1b
reply to post by Leftist

 

...and biggest problems is that there is no incentive for corporate execs to look out for the long term for their business, as they only need to pump up profits long enough to get their big bonus paychecks.

That is exactly what happens. There is more motivation for capitalists to make a quick profit for themselves than think about the long term health of the economy and the fact that for people to survive under capitalism they need 'jobs'. If a company is laying off workers to make more profit, they are killing the working class.

There is no morality in capitalism. We will never have a fair stable economy while private owners control, and manipulate it, for themselves at the expense of the majority.

The price of 5 axis router machines has been dropping rapidly. Some people build their own for $800 - do a google search. You can make anything out of wood or aluminum. Steel still requires a milling machine. You can make guns (but not the barrel), you can make engines, you can make wind turbines.