Tuesday, March 22, 2005

in your backyard

Lately, the US economy is cause for tremedous concern and by implication the world economy. A meltdown is revving up. Not some little foo foo recession, but a full on spilled milk depression. This year. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in December, but the pressure is building.

Oil markets and the declining dollar are each applying nails to the coffin.

Here is what Mogumbo Sez this week (just a taste, actually) :
In fact, the wags at the DailyReckoning.com site looked at the employment numbers and wrote "The fastest growing categories are administration, health care, construction, real estate, and restaurants. Many of the new jobs, in other words, involve building houses for people and serving them dinner. Nearly all of them are related to consumption... and practically none of them help ease America's trade deficit. Nor do they help Americans out of their holes of debt. Just the contrary - it is as if Americans had been put to work digging themselves deeper!" Hahahaha!
(...)
The Fed's Beige Book noted that inflation is still "well-behaved" and then, abruptly changing lanes without signaling, goes right on to say that manufacturers in a number of districts are "finding it increasingly easy to pass along price increases", including increasing costs of higher oil and other commodity prices. The Beige Book also noted that retailers say that while prices were "generally flat or up modestly", but that businesses are getting hit with "rising input costs", of which one is, of course, labor, and the report said that more and more businesses were, indeed, seeing "Sharp increases in benefit costs, particularly health insurance."

Mobjectivist is on point - I guess they got the memo (as if we peak oil types were as organized as Karl Rove and friends) :
From what I have read about corporate bureaucracies that start to head south, the first thing workers detect in their environment is a huge increase in paperwork. In essence, this meaningless paperwork amounts to shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic; ultimately telegraphing the action of suits in the head office as they get increasingly nervous over trying to justify their existence. I sometimes wonder if the same effect exists at the federal government level as we get deeper in the doo.

So, when the pig finally dies, where shall it be buried?

In your backyard.

4 Comments:

At 7:03 PM, March 22, 2005, Blogger Big Gav said...

So what are you going to do when the pig dies ?

 
At 8:26 PM, March 22, 2005, Blogger JMS said...

Besides a barbecue?

Well...

Facing a depression is depressing for a software guy such as myself.

My dainty hands, adept at clicking mouse buttons, will be pressed into new tasks, like foraging for mushrooms, and picking off cannibobbles with a 12 gauge.

Really, the outcomes are quite unpredictable. Maybe it will be less of a grapes of wrath buzzkill then I imagine.

 
At 10:39 PM, March 22, 2005, Blogger @whut said...

M.G.

Bytesmiths, a former SW guy and contributor to the PeakOil forum, is working on a Wiki for this interesting self-sustaining island community experiment in B.C. called SEED Check out the interesting graphics he's got going here:
http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic2072-0-asc-0.html

 
At 12:55 AM, March 23, 2005, Blogger JMS said...

Thanks - that is a great link. Looks like a field trip is in order.

http://www.islandseeds.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.islandseeds.org/wiki/Test:Graphviz

The way the graph tool is set up on the wiki ensures it will be used more and more over time. Great interface.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home