ahahaha now i can reply to those rednecks screaming "buy American" with "yea, write your check payable to "Korea"".

 

Well said. You can thank minimum wage my friend.

JR

 

Exactly right.

 

I did at 300/ Troy OZ

I have now made about 10k in profit over 5 years

Best high school investment ever lol

 

There is always the exception to the rule and I think this is one of them. You are seeing the future of America play out in Greece right now. Italy next year. Then Spain (18% unemployment). Expect our current $15 Trillion Dollar hole to only widen until a full scale collapse in 2030 +/- a few years. Spending cuts can't happen because those that get handouts vote, taxing everything can't work because there isn't enough to tax. The only answer is the Dollar will be replaced by something else (this has happened a few times already in our history already) because ALL FIAT (not the car) FAIL.

http://www.rapidtrends.com/examples-...s-repeat-this/
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.co...-for-fiat.html
http://www.truthistreason.net/a-look...lapse-and-fail

Yes gold. Buy all you can, as often as you can. Keep it off the grid because it will get confiscated one day by the government like in the 1930s. Hide it. Tell nobody. Cement it into your foundation. SHHHHHHHHH.

On a happier note... My compost pile is heating up nicely, the horse is doing a great job making pre-compost material for me.

Cheers.

 

THIS


Everyone understand that this is a global market? Would Japanese be pissed to see a Honda emblem that was manufactured in the US when they make the cars here??

 

I can't tell if Fishfryer is trolling most of the time...


In any event, those who tow the conservative line seem to forget some basic economic principles. If the value of the US dollar is high compared to the rest of the world, it will cost companies more money to have their goods manufactured in America, but the high value of the US dollar will allow Americans to buy more with their money. Alternatively, if the value of the US dollar is low relative to the rest of the world, then it makes good financial sense for companies to pay American workers to manufacturer goods, but the money these American workers get paid will buy less for them.

You can't have both.

Personally, I think our country needs to spend less time complaining about how we've lost manual labor jobs and spend more time shifting our workforce toward being the brain trust of the world. I legitimately feel for the middle class worker who only knows how to do manual labor but I think that we've placed these workers on a pedestal (more specifically, I think that the politicians and corporations that stand to gain the most from exploiting them have romanticized the notion of the factory worker) and we've done so much to hang on to that way of life that we're missing the forest for the trees. If you can think of something that a robot can do and it's what you currently do for a living, you may want to consider getting education or training that goes in another direction. The simple fact of the matter is that at one point in time such labor was a valued commodity to companies but technology and the global economy have made you not altogether obsolete, but at least replaceable by someone on the other side of the pond.

The irony of all of this is that the conservatives who claim to have such a steadfast and unwavering commitment to the free market are also incredibly happy to vote for measures that will in fact manipulate the economy so long as it manipulates it to the advantage of our country. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for things being awesome for America but let's call a spade a spade.

Standard disclaimer. I am by no stretch of the imagination a Democrat, nor a Republican. I just happen to be harping on the right-wing rhetoric in this particular conversation, but I also would contribute equally to a "bash the liberals" conversation, so long as the bashing of either party is deserved.

 

If you look at the number of scientists and engineers which is what my guess would constitute a brain trust, when I graduated with my first engineering degree the ratio of lawyers to engineer graduates nationwide was 15:1. My guess it is worse now. When an administration lays off many engineers and scientists working on cutting edge stuff, like the space program, you can see that this brain trust plan is a non-starter.

While I believe all men are created equal, it seems like those people that currently belong to a lower socioeconomic status than the average tend not to be able to attain brain trust level education or training due to a variety of factors.

A country cannot survive for long without balanced trade. The issue here is while we import is from China, they do not need out expertise. I read that China graduates in one year more engineers than England has alive. I don't believe this, but I do believe that even if the Chinese are less talented as engineers than a Westerner (which I DON'T believe), even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and again. When you have a 10 million blind squirrels, they can find a lot of nuts. Our brain trust has little to offer the Chinese, but even if we did, the engineer is paid once to think of something, but the consumer buys constantly. A brain trust needs to invent something constantly which is impossible. Again, not everyone can be in the brain trust, half of all people are of below average intellegence, thos people have to be put to work to reduce the trade deficit too.

All Americans want good things to happen for our country, but if your hobby is economics or history you will learn that not every empire rises and never falls, as a matter of fact they all fall. It is economics that makes them fall usually. Our downfall is the deficit. You will not hear too much about it until a republican gets in the Whitehouse and the liberal media will look for something to make the president look bad, but at $15 trillion, every person in this country is in debt $50,000.

http://www.politifact.com/virginia/s...omes-48700-pe/

Our debt to GDP ratio is approaching the same as we had in WW2, the difference is after WW2 we were the only civilized country with factories, all the others were bombed or nuked. We supplied the world. NOW it is different, the world supplies us and we have no products to offer them.


So, I am not trolling, I am venting. I worry about things because I understand them and I understand that there is nothing our country can do about it. It is a slow motion train wreck. All we can do is prepare for the slow demise. So... buy gold. Hide it. Keep buying it. Keep hiding it. When the dollare collapses and the NEW currency emerges and all your saving are 'reset to the new dollar' then your stack of Kruggerands will make you whole again.

 

Fish, I really want to take what you say seriously but all of your, "We'll never hear about the deficit because of the liberal media," comments, among others, make you sound completely nuts. I'm really not trying to be a dick, but you seriously sound off your rocker with that kind of talk.

Do you own a TV? Mine must be different than yours because every single time I turn it on every single news program talks about the national deficit all the time. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Fox News is telling you that they're the only station that is reporting on the national deficit and you haven't bothered to change channels and find out.

Not to mention that conservative presidents, including Jesus Christ himself, Ronald Reagan, have contributed to our national deficit. You guys all like to sit around and lambast Obama for the auto bailouts, etc. yet you don't seem to recognize or care that it was the Bush Administration that started the auto/ bank bail outs and that McCain (whom I wouldn't have hated to see in the White House) made it abundantly clear that he wasn't going to stop the bailouts either.

I don't think Obama is even a particularly good president but let's not lose sight of the facts here. You guys have contributed handily to the deficit, just in your own way. Remember that $10 trillion war you guys had such a raging hard on for? My point is not that the war is right, wrong, or in between. My point is that conservatives are happy to deficit spend when it suits their purposes. So, no, our deficit woes are not borne of some liberal agenda. Both parties intend to ride this thing til the fvkking wheels come off, they just can't decide precisely what they should piss all of our money away on.

What this really all boils down to (this among other things) is not some idealistic notion about being for or against government spending, it's about being pissed that your enemies are spending it on stuff you disagree with.

Lastly, I'm not sure how accurate your lawyers:engineers figure is because in Texas it looks we have about somewhere in the neighborhood of 60K professional engineers and about 70K lawyers. Lawyers are facing the same woes that factory workers have had to deal with and that is that big law firms no longer need an army of research monkeys to look up case law since everything is now digitized. As such, an absurdly large number of attorneys who have graduated in the past five years are flipping burgers because there simply are no jobs available for unskilled lawyers. I see competitors fall by the wayside on a daily basis (good riddance haha). In addition to that, you've got an ever tightening legislature and other outside pressures, all of which culminates in less demand for lawyers in general, and more specifically, less demand for lawyers that don't yet know how to practice law.

Texas may be the exception and not the rule, but your hatred for lawyers can be dialed back a bit since you can take my word for it that the wave is cresting/ has crested and soon there will be a 1:1 ratio between engineers and lawyers in Texas.

All considered, I'm sure you and I can find some common ground and I probably agree with a good deal of your opinions (I agree that getting rid of NASA was crazy, but UH OH, that's gobern'ment spendin' so...), you you really do seem to latch onto crazy talk and paranoia, and it just completely undermines the validity of your position. In short, you're a smart guy, too bad you seem to be a more on the tinfoil hat side of the ledger.

 

You're 100% right, my number was way off. I did research the number of lawyers versus professional engineers and it is about 2.5 to 1 nationwide. While I am not putting down the law profession at all, I think it would be good to have more technical people out there when it comes to international competetive advantage.

This is the statistics I read with respect to chinese engineers.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz...212_623922.htm

While that number is misleading, the gap isn't really like that because I believe the Chinese count 'tech-level' education as 'engineers', the trend is definitely not in the favor of a brain trust. Given the number of Chinese people and the amount of cash reserves China has, I expect that trend to go go parabolic.


I am a registered independent. I really don't care who is president as long as I can figure out how to make money under their regime. I vote conservative usually, but not always. But the media tends to be liberal. The reason why I say this is that right brain people tend to be artsy. Artsy people tend to be liberal. Artsy people tend to be entertainers. Entertainment is the function of television. Television is where we get much of our news. Therefore, the news media tends towards the liberal. The point I was trying to make is that things are worse now then they ever were. I am not blaming Obama, I am mearly pointing out the trend and that I believe there is no concievable outcome besides collapse.



I cannot see where there will be an event that will spur the U.S. economic machine to produce GDP like we did after WW2 or conversely reduce spending to where the ratio become serviceable. As a species we tend to think horrible things that take us out of our comfort zones are unlikely or even unimaginable. This is the case here. I believe the term is cognitive dissonence.

http://psychology.about.com/od/cogni...dissonance.htm

I own 7 with one as a spare. I have a 32" flat screen in the garage and a 26" in the bathroom. 90% of what I watch is CNBC or Bloomberg. There is a place in my house I call 'the perfect storm', I can see 3 separate TVs from that spot.

It doesn't matter if you take me seriously or not. I take me seriously and I am prepoaring for the future. But what I expect every person to do out there is think about how things could get better. Can you think of a plan that would make this countries situation better? My guess is that you cannot. I know I can't. You may be smarter than me, many people are. But I think the answer is simple, the math just can't work for much longer. Remember cognitive dissonence?

The difference was that under Reagan we had GDP growth, that made the GDP to deficit ratio not go berserk. It is the ability to service the debt that is important, not the actual size of the debt. Example: a person with a high income but a large mortgage is more stable then a low income person with the same mortgage. Like I said, try and think of how a collapse can be averted, write it down and play devil's advocate. My guess is that you will start sounding like me, tin foil hat and all.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/prospern...r-of-collapse/

Marc Faber is a genius (2:25 into the video), so is Jimmy Rogers. Of course, what they say isn't gospel, but they can't figure out how it will get better for our country. While it's not saying much these guys are definitely smarter than me but YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM. Avoid cognitive dissonence my friend. Buy gold.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd1WCcoDsvM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH5iacAmGqE