It has been very hard to criticise the "Housing boom". A nice house is a nice thing. Whats so bad about having a low paid migrant in to clean your house once a week, another to mow your lawn? Big clean rooms are nice. I havnt had the courage to criticise this system. Hard to campaign for small old dark crowded housing.
In the 60s&70s central city housing was abandoned for the suburbs. These places had started as housing for the rich, then progressed to housing for the poor.
The CulturalRev ('counter culture we called ourselves) piled into these houses (weatherboard drafty cottages called 'villas' in Freemans bay
Great days, crammed with 16-45 year olds, LP records, ganja, lamentable. lack of career development.
Not many infants, 1970 was a low point for births. No old folks.
The wheel turned, inner city became fashionable again, the 80s arrived that great age of money and 'there is no such thing as society'
A subset of the crowd, with family money, or an actual career, bought up the 'villas' and booted the crowds out.
Auckland villas and Haight-Ashbury Villas, both made from Northland Kauri Such wide sarking beneath that old hessian scrim. Chilly places, fireplaces a necessity, and a delight.
Soon it became 'self-evident' that these inner-city house|mortgage holders were the 'natural' elite of the world. Jetsetters, labrador walkers, home-espresso pumpers. Impossible to criticise without revealing oneself as a tragic loser.
It became commonplace to expect a good person to have half-a-million in the house, and half a mill in the pension. The really big bankers got into 400²mcMansions out in those out-moded burbs.
What seems to have happened next, Toxic loans,were made to actual poor people, last on board..
I missed out from sheer cussedness - every time I got a decent job, I quit after a year or 2. Cant escape the blame. Dumb or uneducated folk are free of blame, but I couldve stuck at one of those desks for my own million. Wouldve ended up with a whole different set of worries. Probably wouldve sunk most of the cash in the Stock Market and not got out in time.
[Hint: If youre in the market, you oughta watch it every day, and be prepared to get out in 24 hours after bad news]
Whod have thought that toxic loans could trigger the crash of WesternCivilization. Peak oil predictions lead to downturn, lead to low oil prices.
All obvious in hindsight.
My prediction: this dead cat will bounce. Obama mania and NewNiceness will actually produce a recovery for a couple years.
Then around 2012, or possibly after another bounce, the big collapse will Really happen.
Were talking nuclear wars [Iraq already has more uranium fission tracks than Hiroshima], tribalism [Trips outside Kabul already need armoured vehicles], starvation [China has lost most of its wheat this year, South Australia is too burnt to export much].
Looks like de-globalization. Morning trips on truck-back to labour camps pouring sewage on root crops. We should be so lucky.
How great would a Trillion dollars have been back when oil was cheap. But who could have sold the plan? Jimmy Carter got dumped because he wore a sweater and put solar panels on his white house.
So whats the ideal?
say a 60m² house with a big family, a 30kW electric buggy - hard to campaign for smaller, less, little capital in the building, so pinched after such exuberance.
Happiness, oddly you cant choose it, it arrives per force. Like, loneliness cant be cured by looking, only by being obliged by necessity to live in a crowd.
I built my 60m² house in a slum. Where its hard to live if you've got money, the neighbours need.
The whole Western success enterprise thing is based on keeping your money to yourself, ignoring poverty and suffering - hard to do unless you migrate to a homogeneous suburb.
But 120,000 protesters in Dublin must have some idea about what they think is wrong today.
The Celtic tiger, The Baltic tiger, Nordic tiger(Iceland) tigers going out of fashion. Every person in Iceland owes $300k
Wellington just has a Carnival, not a protest, and the right|pragmatic govt is popular in the polls.
Previous Lesbian|Labour regime bumped civil service up by 20,000. People writing endless reports on policy administration.... Nice women, who wont immediately march when their pay is cut soon.
Private prisons are the go in NZ,... nobody minds. Come the crash this prison-lead recovery vanishes, its just a State-financed fantasy of control, against minorities whether indigenous or former slaves. California is now dumping heaps of their inmates, big prisons are just a luxury.
The future (via Orlov) is private guards, via gangs, ex prisoners, ex military. Best to make deals with them now.
High Standards:
any company wanting to list its shares or sell its bonds in London, New York, or Frankfurt would have to make it clear that it was engaged in a real business, not the collection of artificial rents; that its property was not stolen; and that its ownership was clear and truly private. Gazprom and [the Russian oil company] Rosneft, along with most big Russian companies, would be immediately disqualified.The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West
by Edward Lucas
nybooks
How far can these demands for decency, regulation and popular control go? My guess is not very far at all.
If 100M Russian males lost 10 years of life-expectancy is that the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century"
iht
Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.
Something is terribly wrong when parsimony and cabbage soup is a vice...
Pat Buchanan, plain talking
antiwar
Robert Pape of the University of Chicago writes in The National Interest:
"America's relative decline since 2000 of some 30 percent represents a far greater loss of relative power in a shorter time than any power shift among European great powers roughly from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War II.
nationalinterest
Since Thucydides, scholars of international politics have famously argued that a declining hegemon and rising challenger must necessarily face such intense security competition that hegemonic war to retain dominance over the international system is almost a foregone conclusion.
Orlov. A Russian with experience of collapse.
The idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars is sheer folly. I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws. First, you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines. Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn’t be safe with so many people in the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in this area, with excellent results.blogspot
another 50 year climate event: (is someone keeping a list?)
BUENOS AIRES — Cows are dying by the thousands in the baking sun, and crops are being lost before their seeds even break the soil.
Argentina’s worst drought in more than 50 years
theoildrum
fossil fuels used for winter heat in the United States equates to over 7,000 Trillion BTU’s. (2001/2, a much colder winter, was 13% higher).
...532 Trillion BTUs that could be generated annually from forest growth, approximately 55% or 297 Trillion BTUs would end up as ‘actual heat’. Natural Gas and Heating Oils collectively generated 5,074 Trillion BTUs of ‘actual heat’.
USA you cant get the wood you know (pace, goon show)
an iron ore mining venture backed by Gabon’s president is threatening to destroy a huge waterfall known as Kongou Falls by damming the Ivindo River
- Thank God economic collapse arrived before the last jungles were raped - in Gabon they say you can see Gorillas on the beach - now that would be far preferable to seeing Russians on the beach at Pattaya
Slum Dogs
Irony: If I was still living in my slum, I would undoubtedly have seen the movie already. The best bootlegs come from AcademyOMP previews.
racialicious
racialicious
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