John Stossel did a segment on how the federal government largely subsidizes and backs coastal insurance. I think it started in the late 70s or early 80s. It caused a boom of building where only small beach houses existed before.

Freeloaders: The Wealthy - YouTube

The exchange rate for USD is favorable but anything you make on that gets lost with mailing overseas.  BOE and BOJ are losing the battle trying to defend their currencies against the dollar.  They could raise their rates as well however their economies are not in the best shapes either to handle them.  Raising rates hurts bonds which is where a lot of countries have their pension funds.  I have read about ex pats living in the Philippines that are making a killing with USD->PHP conversions.  The economic ride down will be extremely painful for people over the next 6 months. Layoffs, interest rates (Credit Cards), the home piggy bank under water and inflation will beat people worse than Drago vs Apollo in Rocky IV…and this is only getting started folks.  When the FED eventually pivots, things will get really interesting then.  

-SKA

Lol. BoE just jacked interest rates 0.75% and the news outlets have gone into meltdown.     That'll be a 3% Bank of England Base Rate.  
Like the average BoE base rate over the past 450 years is 5.25% and we are supposed to panic because borrowing money is on a more than 40% discount from historical norms.
The BoE actually came out today and said this will be the longest recession since the greatest depression. Most people in the UK have no idea what that means or what time frame that will cover.
But what they can't do now is say they did not know what is going to happen.
I wonder how many people will actually listen?

1300 + internment camps in the US?  Sorry, not happening.

Tszii wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:We have gone through this before, in more difficult political circumstances. Its could be horrid, and will take a few years, but I would like to think we could get through this.

The 1970's had high inflation. We tried wage and price controls. That made it worse and created gas lines. Then they deregulated interstate trucking and commerce, deregulated the air lines, telecom, broke up the monopolies they created like Ma'Bell and got rid of all the wage and price controls and even deregulated banking - which did give us the S&L crisis...

But anyway, we transferred the excess into a more efficient market and it solved inflation. I wasn't just Volcker. The 70s and early 80s were hardly an anti-union, free market, low tax era. Large elimination of current excess are the only way I can envision new highs.

Yeah, but do you think anyone who's been to 'university' has really got the ability to learn from anything that happenned in the past and do anything different?
I reckon (racoon lol.) they'll just use the same old playbook and repeat all the errors of the past. They'll print money and had it out like candy and pretend like everything is just fine and dandy, and fuck anyone who hasn't got the wherewithall and foresight to anticipate what is coming and protect themselves.
Wait until the economists on the TV start saying 'it's different this time'. Then you know you're fucked.
What we need is a good war to explain away all the misery and suffering. It will happen anyways, but at least if you can blame it on a war, people will not blame the Government for it.
That's the rhetoric that's being rolled out in the UK.

The one thing I notice in the US that I don't see in the UK is that all the news channels use the exact same words. Like they've all been given a script that they have to follow and most are too dumb to not just do it verbatim. How do the masses who watch their tellies not notice?

mbassoc2003 wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:Why did FEMA build all the camps across the USA?
We don't have a FEMA in the UK so I don't get what its all about, but anyone we stuck in some sort of camp would just burn them down and riot until we move them into hotels.

The US government, and many others, do not need a reason to waste money. Its been a while, but there was an inspector general report that said the US government had millions of square feet of unoccupied office space for decades, and it continues to grow. Add this to the list?

The 100 million coffin liners? Thats an urban legend that goes back to the first gulf war. I think it was a million body bags at the time. If you need a 100 million graves, you only build one grave.

The UK general populus have just discovered that blackouts are real and that the UK have been planning for them for years.
There is genuine hysteria at the idea that the Government would ever consider planning for times of emergency, and that people may have to go without television or lighting.
It's hilarious that people cannot conceive of the idea that they may need to learn to play games with their children and listen to a radio or read a book.
This is on the back of the public discovering that they may have to buy jumpers and socks for Xmas. It's all getting too much for the pampered middle classes.

Tszii wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:The US government, and many others, do not need a reason to waste money. Its been a while, but there was an inspector general report that said the US government had millions of square feet of unoccupied office space for decades, and it continues to grow. Add this to the list?

The 100 million coffin liners? Thats an urban legend that goes back to the first gulf war. I think it was a million body bags at the time. If you need a 100 million graves, you only build one grave.

So the camps that the US built over the past decade don't exist anymore?
Have they now been flattened again, or were they not built in the first place?
The 'coffin liners' that were shown in the media were not single person. The procurement documents were supposedly from some sort of government procirement website where they openly tender manufacture/supply from private industry, but I don't imagine the US publicly solicits contractors to build FEMA camps, supply coffin liners, and recruit staff for such things. Is anyone really that stupid? So I imagine the documentation is fake. But I don't imagine the video footage of the installations were all created on Holywood film sets, and I believe Google have mapped at least five hundred of them and not been asked to remove the info from Google maps.
As with everything, no explanation for what contingency they were planning for, and a goodly portion of assumption and mental stretching when a Government will not confim its intent.

I don't see a boots-on-the-ground invasion of the US.
No idea what your elected officials are planning for.
There are of course other mass cassualty situations where the powers that be may wish to herd their useless eaters into camps 'for their own protection' and clense the neighbourhood of the fallen so that they do not contaminate fertile soil or the water table.
Maybe they plan on rounding up all the resident 'pick your enemy nation' and storing them in camps. It's not like they havent done it before.
No idea what they foresaw coming when they started building the camps, but they appear to still exist, and they are all over the country according to Google Maps.
Maybe someone lives close to one and can confirm or deny the existence of these FEMA camps. I'd hazard a guess if one or more of them are proven not to exist then the likelyhood is that the majority of them do not exist.

Didn't Texas have a major electricity outage last year? Like weeks without electriciy in the middle of winter?
In the UK people are apoplectic over the possibility of losing electicity in the winter for 3 hours in a day on a roling blackout.
Our snowflake population would not survive a winter without electricity for two straight weeks. We are that soft and coddled in the UK that if our Government doesn't give us cuddles we'll die of neglect. We need a brutal winter to wake our population up and help them reconnect with their backbones.
I'd rather people found their balls as a result of a few weeks with no electricity than as a result of another Europe wide war.

Tszii wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:I admit, the energy challenges in the UK were foreseeable. I dont think there is anything the average person could have done to stop it.

Well, they could have started with learning basic math at school and applying it to the would around them as adults.
They could have paid off their debts.
They could have reduced their reliance on energy.
They could have not lobbied the Government for infinite money printing.
The value of energy and food is only fluctuating within normal parameters. It is the depreciation of the currency that people are interpretting as 'increased prices'. They are exchanging something that is being produced for free and in greater and greater abundance (the GBP) for something that required time and effort to produce, refine and transprot around the world. And they are too stupid to understand someone who manufactured something with real time and effort wants more in exchange when what they are exchanging it for is is printed for free and in infinite quantities.
So yes, it was eminently predicatble and everyone could have anticipated it and taken steps to protect themselves.
Buy most people just couldn't give a F, and even now prefer to whine and complain and play the blame the government for not giving us enough cuddles, rather than learn basic math and apply it to the world around them.
This is happenning in every country in the world, to one degreee or other, and it is accellerating. This is basic cyclical economics. Governments can do nothing about this.
What the Government should have done (and this would only have happenned as a single worldwide policy) is stand back pre-Covid and tell people to learn to wash their hands and not pick their noses, and leave everyone to go to work and cared only for those who needed medical care. If people chose not to work, that would be between them and their employer. No free money for anyone, and therefor only minimal inflation because the trillions of GBP/USD would never have been printed and handed out.
But again, our population here in the UK, for the most part, don't have the balls to take responsibility for themselves or support their families.

Tszii wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:As far as the USA stuff? We have all lived through enough conspiracies for multiple lifetimes. Then covid doubled that number. My brother's brother-in-law has now pushed out the negative effects of the vaccine to 20 years. He wont even acknowledge his comments about the lock down and all that came with it. Oh My God he had the whole end of the nation figured out with different events over 2020 and 2021. Of course, all that came out of it was wasted money.

At the end of the day, the underlying narrative and the extent to which any of it is truthful is irrelevant. We dont get to control the narrative. We don't get to control what other people thing is true or false. Those who do know things to be true do not get to validate that truth, and those who for whatever reason knowingly lie do not have to account for their actions. It's all smoke and mirrors. It's part of the game and it is irrelevant to everyone who understand that all the hyperbole and drama are just that.

Most people only see what their TVwanchor of choice tells them and they are fine with that adopted world view. They have neither the inclination or ability to ask themselves if what they believe is true. But along with that, they also have neither the desire not functioning mental accuity to thing 5 years ahead and work out what may or may not happen in that timeframe and what they could do now to preempt those possibilities.

I live in a country where the vast majority of people do not have cellars. We have very little storage in our homes here in the UK. For the most part we do not have large expances of land along with out properties. It never occurs to most people to buy food in cans and jars, grow vegetables, store water, etc. Maybe 1 in 1000 households have a fire extinguisher to had. Maybe 1 in 100 have a medical kit. Most people under the age of 40 have never heard of wool blankets let alone own one. Anyone who is not an active outdoorsman wouldn't dream of owning a sleeping bag. These are all basic staples in life that are not wasted that the UK population ignore en mass.

My impression is that outside of major metropolitain areas, and certain woke generations, the US population as a whole is far more resiliant and prepared for a little difficulty along the road. Be that bad weather, wobbly ground conditions, random evacuations to make way for forest clearances, whatever. It got a little warm here and the grass turned yellow instead of green, and people were on the new crying about it and explaining the this was a sign of the end of the world. Like, it only hit 40C! Huge swathes of the population of this planet livemost of their lives between 40C and 50C and they take a month off of eating and drinking water all day every day at the hottest time for Ramadan. Spending 10-12 hours a day in 40+C with no food or water isn't that hard. One just needs to move less and cover up more.

The news in the UK is just an echo chamber of fear porn for the masses. None of it tells them the truth about what is liklely to happen and what they should about it.

Tszii wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:If the government really was researching and building an interstellar ship, the goal would be to waste money. No one would actually have any intent to get on the thing.

It'd be really funny if the Govt came out and said, "Oh by the way, we've been in contact with aliens since Roswell."   That'd be a good distraction. Better than AH pretending to be homeless, M&H being offensive narcissists, or people getting hammered with their lovers.