Metaverse
RE Metaverse: Silicon Valley provides the Circuses. And the Dem’s will provide the Bread.
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Needing Each Other
I do remember farm communities in the 50’s where people needed each other. Poor farmers couldn’t afford labor saving equipment, so one person in the community had the machine and then the entire community went from one farm helping each other with harvests. Even children helped.
Children have a much stronger sense of efficacy and resilience when they are an integral part of community survival from a young age. Life is NOT expected to be easy AND that’s OK, we together can survive and hopefully thrive.
You’re right. If you don’t cooperate, your farm is not in the harvest rotation. Not good.
Unique skills were important too. Who was a good carpenter? Who could fix an engine with chewing gum and bailing wire? (Yes bailing wire used to be a real thing.)
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Brother Printer Ink Issue
Hey Chris! Thank you for everything!! Re: Brother Printer - I’m sure you’ve already heard/ tried this but just in case this is new info - there are certain button combos in a particular order to override the out of ink issue. I had a similar problem with an HP Laser Printer and, at least for HP, the bypass codes seemed work. Search Brother Printer -model if you have it - and Bypass or hack and you may come up with something. No guarantee but might be worth a try. Good luck! - Chris
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Predator Class
I refer to them as the Avaricious Class, and sometimes the Political Class as a subclass of the Avaricious Class.
Arlene
I met Arlene at a Rowe conference years ago.
2 questions:
Why is Arlene now calling herself Grace O’Malley, assumably after Ireland’s pirate queen?
What qualifications selected her for this program? What is she an expert of?
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good questions. i dunno either
A Happy Potato Story
Chris and Grace well done! I listened to this first episode of Informed Consent while scrambling around freeing some very neglected fruit trees. Your relaxed and chatty exchange was good company (your part two however I would have to call explosive company - though in a grounding and gratefully received, orienting sort of a way).
To the potatoes…
I loved that comment of yours Chris about the massive difference between growing three percent of your food vs zero percent when needs must you later have to ramp it up.
I had never thought of it before but it is so true.
I also smiled at your enthusiastic potato growing encouragement.
Potatoes are the ace to grow.
Late last year I got caught overseas in nz’s ridiculous lockdown then spent two more weeks locked away in ‘managed’ isolation on my return and I missed the seed potato boat in the shops.
One day, having given up on the possibility of potato planting, I stumbled across one manky bag of about 30 shrunken, some smelly, agria seed potatoes a local shop had dumped outside in its give away box.
I spread them to air on a tray but it was four more weeks till they were planted.
My enthusiastic other half dug trenches deep enough to bury the dead and i thought if we were lucky we might see one unrotted potato eventually emerge.
To make a woeful situation marginally better i laid comfrey leaves in the base of the trenching as I’d read somewhere that potatoes do well with comfrey (I’d purloined a small root of the stuff from a friend’s garden about a year ago and this was my first use of it).
We gently covered our sad little offering with soil then watched in wonderment as those potatoes, every single one of them, first sprouted then grew like triffids. A bit of water and maybe one sprinkling of “potato fertilizer” was our only contribution ( that and the gradual mounding up of the soil as the leaves emerged).
It’s now Autumn here. Yesterday i convinced myself the green had ‘died off’ enough for me to ‘check’ my potatoes (much more fun than checking my privilege).
So I gingerly scraped away the soil round the base of the most shrivelled stalk i could find ( ie a few of its leaves were maybe a little less green) and Voila!
A centimetre under the dirt I found this enormous potato.
I couldn’t stop laughing. I called The Beloved and we debated the chances of it being a freak so i scrabbled under a second stalk and Voila! Another one even bigger! - Oh Happy Day.
There is a thrill to growing your own food that surpasses expectations.
The trick, as you say, is to just get on with it. Learn from your losses (and there will be many, that is in the nature of gardening) and celebrate your successes. And if for part of the journey one has the company of you Chris and your team, then, in those moments, life is truly good…
…And I’ll deal with how I’m going to store 30 plants worth of potatoes through Winter another day. ( a whole other topic!!!)
Isn’t it funny how we are all around the world and yet we are one tribe.
I really like that.
Thanks again for all you are doing.
It is invaluable.
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I’ll add a few ideas here,
First up you can still buy gold with dollars at something like $1900 US. Its a floating ‘market’ price and they manipulate this price so you could call it a really dirty peg.
It seems to be a similar story for other commodities.
A currency is also backed by the ability a person has to use that currency to save for big ticket items like houses, cars, factories etc. For example: If a working person believes they can save dollars in the bank and eventually have enough for a deposit on a loan so they can buy a house. then there is demand for that currency (say USD). That person is working for dollars, saving dollars and they need dollars (deposit) to take out a loan in dollars. When/ If they get the loan they must also repay in dollars. If the majority act this way it creates demand for dollars and the flow of dollars (people working for dollars currency moving around the system at some rate, velocity)
Based on this, my thought is as long as you can reasonably save in dollars and buy what you need (house, car, boat, uni degree etc) there can be strength in the dollar. I assume the average person doesn’t look too deep into this they just want to save/ borrow for what they want.
Of course as you get the effects of inflation - rising prices; both in assets and cost of living prices. And particularly as the speed of the price increases outstrips a workers ability to save for what they want/ need (eg. a deposit on a house). Then the system giving dollars value I described above stops working. It unwinds. In addition, more and more people start looking at this system,(because its not working) they see the money printing, the corruption, the incompetence. Most importantly they see the unfairness. Then they start jumping off the mouse wheel so to speak.
As a young person myself, saving for a house in Australia. (Our situation over here is slightly different as property is the biggest bubble, not stocks) I had the realization quite a while ago that there was no point saving in AUD. Also the prospect of having a million dollar loan is pretty bleak. So I abandon currency for the most part. As more and more people do this it creates a very nasty feedback loop.
In summary, It partly has to do with the fact that if nobody wants it because nobody can use it, it has no value.
Sorry if this is long winded, corrections welcome.
Tom
Really, it is only backed by someone else’s faith in its ability to hold purchasing power and recently, it is being exposed as being incapable of doing so by the US government led sanctions and confiscation (aka, theft) of USD foreign reserves of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Other countries are quickly waking up to the reality that they’ve been duped for the past 50 years and are making plans to divest themselves of any and all USD instruments and transactions.
Gardening
I’ve been thinking about growing peanuts. There is a story about my father. He tried to grow peanuts, but they never produced anything. He didn’t know that they grew underground!
I tried the cardboard mulch method to grow tomatoes and zucchini. The fruits all rotted. I think it was because the cardboard leeches nutrients from the soil as it breaks down. If you are going to do that, make sure to add plenty of calcium to help balance it out.