I got neither mortgage nor house that's worth less than what I owe on it.
I got no 401(k) scam.
I got no savings.
I got something like $4k in credit debt, and no other consumer debt.
I already live mostly on (damn tasty) rice & chana dal
And unlike this author (and so many of my friends), I got no student loans to pay off (THANK YOU Mom & Dad!):
Not My Financial Crisis -- I've Got Literally Nothing to Lose:So just what have I got?
Like most people I know in their 20s and 30s, it takes a stretch of the imagination to understand that I have a stake in the national economy. In terms of day-to-day life, my only ties to large financial institutions are a Bank of America checking account, a single low-limit high-fee Visa card, and a Kilimanjaro of student debt, which I have come to accept as something I will die with, not from, like a benign but grapefruit-size tumor or peaceable parasite dwelling in my large intestine. When people use scary terms like "unchartered territory" and "total meltdown," my first thought is, "Would an economic cataclysm wipe out my student debt? If so, then let's press reset and start the whole damn thing over! Burn it clean!"
I haven't heard much from or about people like me in the last month. Watching the media report on the crisis, you'd think the United States had achieved the Republican dream of becoming a full-fledged "ownership society" populated by an upwardly mobile class of home-owning day traders sitting on fat nest eggs. But it hasn't. So here's a news flash from the young-and-indebted demographic: Those of us without retirement plans or health insurance, who just barely make rent and buy food in the real economy, a lot of us aren't as scared as maybe we should be. We have our own gut take on the disappearance of $9 trillion in electronic NYSE casino chips. And that is, we could give a shit. ...
Whatever pain is in store for the poor and middle class, surely we can agree that something that rids the world of high-flying i-bankers can't be all bad. Here in New York, there is extra joy in seeing this species of professional join the endangered list. Aside from playing craps with the national economy, the bankers have been driving local rent inflation with their grotesque salaries and bonuses since the last days of disco. As Daniel Brooke noted in The Trap, his study of contemporary post-college penury, the rapid expansion of the financial sector and investment banking in particular -- the ultimate no-experience, high-pay industry -- correlates directly with the decline of affordable housing in the city. (It also correlates pretty well with the rise in popularity of the term "douche bag.") Nothing could be better for New York's low- and middle-income renters than the thinning of the overcompensated, fresh-out-of-Yale Wall Street greed herd. Finally, that day seems to be at hand.
Tell em, Ms. Simone!
Previously in O,DIKTO?:
-SHUT UP! YOU SUCK & ARE WRONG & IT'S GONNA COST MORE THAN WE CAN COMPREHEND, SO SHUT THE FUCK UP!
-Fuck Horatio Alger & his books
-Up against the wall, all of you!
-Politics-monkey class-warfare link dump
-Class-warfare: just wage it!
-Bicycles have historically been associated with womens' and workers' liberation movements
- Location:Bump City, CA
- Jammin' to:Motorhead - Eat The Rich
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Comments
We've got a long growing season here in NorCal. how much garden space you got? You can grow a whole lot of food on not a whole lot of space.
Being able to grow at least some of our own food is going to be a major priority the next time Team LexiMonkey moves the HQ.
I hear guinea fowl do well in not huge spaces.
If things pan out, Team LexiMonkey will have set up shop somewhere we can grow/raise some (if not most) of our own food (see previous reply). That's something that a great majority of Americans are going to have to turn to to feed themselves.
Maybe we end up homeless standing in a bread line.
But either way, Zen is about accepting what is, being with it, and not desiring it to be other. Because there is no "other".
Pain merely hurts. "Suffering" comes from believing that there is some alternate universe in which you are not in pain, and that you are somehow unjustly condemned to this painful reality.
"Suffering" also comes from living in the past, remembering what is was like before the pain, couldn't we go back to that.
The past and the future are illusions. Now, this moment, is all that ever exists.
Pain, like life, happens. Suffering is optional.
BTW, if you ever find the time to watch any of the peak oil videos I've posted, you'd recall that I believe the planet is heading for a massive (if gradual) energy crunch as global petroleum production goes into inexorable decline while global demand continues is upward climb.
By the time you & I hit "retirement age", the rules of the game are going to be so thoroughly rewritten... There's an old Jewish joke Julia Sweeney used to tell: How do you make God laugh?
Make plans.
Really? Who saw their retirement savings go "up in vapor"? My retirement plan (not my savings, which earn interest approximately equal to my personal rate of inflation) are worth less than I paid for them, but I don't plan on cashing them out, so I lost NOTHING. In fact, this is an excellent time to buy more, which is what I'm doing.
A majority of Americans are going to have to grow their own food? I doubt it. Your definition of Zen sounds a lot like my definition of passivity. I realize that not all plans work out, but not making any seems silly.
Just because there's a video about something doesn't make it true. How many of these people who make dire predictions ever get called on them when they turn out wrong? I'm surprised you're still going on about peak oil when oil is currently selling for half what it was selling for six months ago? And you know why? Because the higher price, along with the slowing economy, drove a decrease in demand. There is never, by definition, a shortage of anything. You just may not want (or be able) to pay the asking price. Higher oil prices = more alternative fuel research/investment. That's how the free market operates.
I drive (usually with one other person) 26 miles to work five days a week, and I can tell you there's a lot more traffic now than there was three months ago when gas prices were higher, so obviously supply and demand haven't completely gone out the window.
Okay, this may be my last effort to convince you of anything before I write this conversation off.
Okay, first a definition of "peak oil": Oil extraction follows a bell-curve, from field discovery, to extraction, to eventual depletion. Oil is finite and non-renewable. The top of the curve, the peak, is when half of all the oil that will ever be recovered is gone.
What's left is lower quality, harder to get to, further away from markets, in smaller quantities, more expensive to extract, and often sits beneath countries that don't like us very much.
At "peak", oil production is at it's maximum rate. The pumps are going at top volume. But a few years after the peak is when supply starts to decline. Maybe 2-4% a year.
And that decline is permanent, inexorable, non-negotiable. Because Nature doesn't negotiate. And she only gave us so much oil.
Down the back-side of Hubbert's Peak is the end of cheap oil, not the end of oil per se. But cheap oil is what has allowed our civilization to grow and thrive in the manner it has.
Your "Oh, look at gas prices" argument is facile because we're standing on the top of the peak right now.
A majority of Americans are going to have to grow their own food? I doubt it.
Why do you doubt it? On what basis?
Industrial agriculture runs on oil. The machines that plant and harvest and process run on oil. The pesticides are made out of oil. The fertilizers are made of natural gas. Also, industrial agriculture kills the soil so that the only farming that can be done on the land is chemical. If the fertilizers and pesticides run out, you grow nothing at all.
We spend 10 fossil fuel calories for every 1 food calorie we produce. If you think American agriculture can continue like that in the face of worldwide oil depletion, your head is deeper in the sand than I thought.
How many of these people who make dire predictions ever get called on them when they turn out wrong?
Actually, MK Hubbert's analysis of oil fields and their predictable depletion patterns has been proved correct over and over since he first made them in the 1950s.
This is why I'm tempted to just stop discussing the issue with you. You don't even look closely enough to know what you're discussing.
Higher oil prices = more alternative fuel research/investment.
We're not going to convert the entire (or even a substantial portion) of our automobile fleet to run on anything other than oil. And right now, we couldn't afford it if we wanted to.
Neither are we going to start a whole new hydrogen fleet. There's no infrastructure for it, and a fleet of vehicles you can't refuel is useless.
Plus, Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's an energy carrier. Energy has to be transformed into hydrogen, at a net loss as all energy transformations require.
And with the climate disaster we're facing, we don't have the time.
There is never, by definition, a shortage of anything. You just may not want (or be able) to pay the asking price.
That's so much sophistry around a substance that is essential to how our society exists.
"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" - Kenneth Boulding
As to why you're wrong about Zen, find a teacher.
This article represents the sort of "reverse" snobbery that appears to be the most socially acceptable form of snobbery in American society. The financial markets affect everyone, rich or poor, homeowner or renter, saver or debtor. Do they affect everyone equally? Of course not. Are you fortunate not to be upside-down on a home or car loan? Sure. But if you owe anyone money, you can be fairly sure that interest rates on that debt are going to rise before they fall, and that alone will affect your well-being.
I have plenty of savings and a retirement plan, and I'm adding to my investments as rapidly as I can, as the current stock market represents bargain opportunities not seen since just after the great crash of 1929.
I have plenty of savings and a retirement plan, and I'm adding to my investments as rapidly as I can, as the current stock market represents bargain opportunities not seen since just after the great crash of 1929.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck with that. May your life savings not go up in vapor like so many of your fellow Americans. May your money and your investments be there when you hit retirement age.
Still...
When the last tree is cut,
the last river poisonded
and the last fish dead,
we will discover
we can't eat money.
-Cree Proverb
If there's no cash lying around and little in savings, though, then the "who cares?" argument stands. And if your confidence in the market is low enough that you do not think there will be a market when you retire, staying out and getting a farm makes sense.
(personally, getting a sustainable garden to provide some foodstuffs makes sense to me, but isn't feasible in my apartment)
Try around $100k in owed money per active worker, courtesy of national debt. If you don't think it has an effect, ask the people in Iceland.
They thought they could, as a nation, live off trading ones-and-zeros as opposed to producing real-world stuff. Seems they were wrong. And so bankers become fishermen.
And the Baron von Rothschild can come for his $100K right here in Oakland. His coming for it seems about as real as my owing it.
Fuck it, I still hit the reset button. Let the ruling class throw discount debutante balls for a few seasons.
Edited at 2008-10-15 10:34 pm (UTC)
True, but I worry that we did similarly. The insane expansion in this country and our world dominance and importance is entirely because some people stumbled onto good land and raped it for resources. Many aquifers are down to 1/3, and those take quite a long time to replenish. We've been living off of the gluttonous excesses.
And the Baron von Rothschild can come for his $100K right here in Oakland. His coming for it seems about as real as my owing it.
I slightly agree, in that if the world ever asks us for our money there's no way we'll pay up. I slightly disagree, in that we are suborned into this country by just living here, so incur the debts of our fathers, so to speak. It's a hard call. If society collapses, yours is definitely the way.
But if the Chinese take over Japan first and create mecha kaiju to invade us to collect on the debt, I'm paying up. ;-)
Yup. It's called the grim-meathook future. A distinct and unpleasant possibility.
But if the Chinese take over Japan first and create mecha kaiju to invade us to collect on the debt, I'm paying up. ;-)
If the Sino-Japanese Greater Prosperity Pact sends giant robots against us... Gamera will save us!
Because Gamera loves children. I mean, we're really a sovereign-state-sized Will Ferrell, but hopefully overgrown man-child is still child-enough to get the turtle on our side.
'Cause the piggy bank is empty and we're fucked for anti-mecha lightening cannons,