Amid a worsening fiscal crisis, a crumbling economy, and the destruction of over 40% of America’s wealth in just the last few years, it should be quite clear that this is no ordinary recession. In fact, with progressively dwindling job opportunities, a long-term downward trend in real estate prices, and the near doubling of participation in emergency benefits programs like food stamps and disability, one could make the argument that the United States is smack-dab in the middle of the next Great Depression.
The notion that we are potentially facing a decades-long paradigm shift which threatens to alter the very fabric of American life is becoming a stark reality for many, especially America’s younger generations who, according to a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, are experiencing the highest jobless rates since at least World War II:
Forty years ago, a teenager leaving high school — with or without a diploma — could find a job in a local factory. Twenty years ago, even as manufacturing jobs moved offshore, young people could still gain a foothold in the workforce through neighborhood stores and restaurants. Amid the housing boom of the past decade, youth with some training could find a career track in the construction field. But today — with millions of jobs lost and experienced workers scrambling for every available position — America’s young people stand last in line for jobs.
…
Youth employment is at its lowest level since World War II; only about half of young people ages 16 to 24 held jobs in 2011. Among the teens in that group, only 1 in 4 is now employed, compared to 46 percent in 2000.
Overall, 6.5 million people ages 16 to 24 are both out of school and out of work, statistics that suggest dire consequences for financial stability and employment prospects in that population.
More and more doors are closing for these young people. Entry-level jobs at fast-food restaurants and clothing stores
that high school dropouts once could depend on to start their careers now go to older workers with better experience and credentials. It often takes a GED to get a job flipping hamburgers. Even some with college degrees are having trouble finding
work.…
The employment rate for youth ages 16 to 19 dropped precipitously — down 42 percent since 2000. More youth than ever — 2.2 million teenagers and 4.3 million young adults ages 20 to 24 — are neither in school nor working.
Additionally, 21 percent — 1.4 million — of those young people out of school and out of work are young parents who must take care of their own needs and those of their children.
…
In this report, we describe them as disconnected youth. The term encompasses diverse groups, ranging from the 16-year-old who just dropped out of high school and is not working to the 21-year-old parent who has a high school degree and has been looking for work for a long time. They live at home in urban, suburban or rural communities.
The prospects for the Millennial Generation, who once enjoyed the seemingly never ending prosperity of McMansions, high-end technology and brand name apparel provided by their debt-laden parents, are rapidly disappearing.
The most challenging jobs market since the last Great Depression, coupled with an inability to acquire an education and trade skills due to tightened student loan requirements, yields an untenable situation for America’s youth. Combine this with the fact that most of these kids have or will soon be having kids, and you have tens of millions more Americans added to already overburdened government safety nets.
Reality television shows and government education convinced many teens and young adults that they would enjoy a carefree life of riches and luxury.
Never would they have even entertained the idea they would instead be plagued with a lifetime of misery, poverty and government dependence.
It’s a hard-knocks life, and it’s about to get a whole heck of a lot worse for a lot of people.
This is NOT a recovery
This is NOT a recession
This is a DEPRESSION.
I am so done with people waiting for the “zombie apocalypse” — people, it’s already happening!
This is treason on the part of our elected (?) representatives. Remember Obama’s words: This is the new norm.
Sam; the zombies are the bottom feeders, they’ll take anything the gov’t and msm feed them. Can’t even engage them in meaningful conversation.
So what survival skill did we learn today.
SID: Lock and load. everything comes to he who waits! 🙂
See the world as it is, not as someone else on TV says it is.
You can’t prep if you don’t think
Nothing yet, but it is early. So off topic I need help with a prepper question. The whole unemployment / financial situation in this country cannot and will not be corrected for many years and it would appear that we are stuck with what we have to work with. I hate all Democratic and Republican politicians. They are all the same and they are bought and paid for by special interest. Those special interest groups are from here at home and from other countries. Shamesfull and disgracefull, all of it and all of the political traitors who have sold this countrty down the road.
There needs to be a purge of these anti-American bastards. And I don’t mean replacing the dolts with more of the same. Term limits for all, strict spending limits on campaigns and very tough laws against using thier powers for personal gain.
Anyway, here is my prepper problem. I am not very “electrical”. In fact I am probaly dangerous. I know one of my sons are buying me I think a 45 watt solar panel. My plan is to put two deep cell batterys in a vented ice chest. Attach the solar panel using a in parrarell connection to batteries? Attach a power plug and 2000 watt inverter and I should have 110 electric at my disposal. Right?
OK, so if my plan works, how much electricity do I have, for how long? Please let me know in watts per hour as that is all I can understand such as it would light a 100 watt light bulb for how long? I could run so many watts for how long? Thanks in advance for your help. BigB
You MUST have a Solar Charge Controller. The panels can put out over 20VDC, that would be fatal for the batteries.
What’s the point of the ice chest? The batteries will out-gas hydrogen, put them in a ventilated space.
Your available power depends on several things; let’s start at your “generation” capability.
If you have 8 hours of sunlight per day, you can generate a total of (8*45) 360 watts of power per day. That’s around 30 amps.
Your batteries are rated in AmpHours, based on 20-hour discharge rate. So a 40-AmpHour battery can provide 2 amps per hour for 20 hours. You cannot draw 40 amps in 1 hour. It’ll kill the battery, and you won’t actually get 40 amps.
Think of your battery as a bucket, your panels as the hose that can fill it. Your 45-watt panel can fill your bucket with 30 amps in a day. Obviously, you can’t take more from your bucket than it holds.
You have a total of 30 amps available to use until the sun comes up again. Let’s keep life easy, and say your consumption will be continuous over a 24-hour period. 30 amps divided by 24 is 1.25 amps available per hour.
1.25 amps is 15 watts at 12 volts. Ignoring the loss involved in converting 12 volts DC to 12 volts AC (this can be up to 15% loss!) to make the math easy, we have 1.25 amps at 120 volts AC, or around 150 watts.
2.5 60-watt light bulbs running 24 hours per day. That’s it.
45 watts of solar generation is fun to experiment with, to get an understanding of how it works, but it’s completely useless for real-world applications.
You can use the AGM type battery to avoid outgasing. They are also spill resistant.
On average here in California you can plan on about 6 hours sun a day so 6 times 40 watts ( you don’t receive full value of the panel) gives you about 240 watts available less line drop and from inverter so end result is about 2 hours for a 100 watt bulb. You need much more solar panel production if you are going to do more than read for 2 hours.
+1 to this. The zombies are the ones who will kick down your door and harm your family because they think they are entitled to your food and belongings. The only thing they deserve from me is lead. Simple as that. That is what you prepare for.
Stay sharp and stay safe.
sorry i can’t help my self. i accept all of the thumbs down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jZiKFLL6MI
We can only hope that these young people remember the broken promises of the corp and take action to eliminate it from the path of a successful career in the corpless future.
The plan is to make government service the only job available, especially as soldiers. What better way to gain loyalty than to indoctrinate them in their youth and leave a single path of government service as the only option.
The plan is going along for now. But I suspect that most of those unemployed young people are more likely to say screw the corp than sign me up.
Hey there GC,
As a teacher working inside the very belly of the beast, I can guarantee you that most of the kids who think at all — and they number far more than people realize — don’t believe the promises they hear. They’ve already had way too many promises made and broken from people they know, never mind those from some self-loving douche on TV.
The biggest problem is that they don’t see any way to fight against this. I do my best to help counteract this, but I still have to be careful: all it takes is one mind numbed ObamaNazi — parent or co-worker, take your pick — and I’ll be out the door again
That’s interesting, thanks for posting.
ObamaNazi!
LOL!
Thats hilarious. You should be a comedy writer.
ObamaNazis are not a joking matter: they are the most vicious, unprincipled, intolerant , cruel, heartless bastards in this nation. They define reality as being whatever they say it is, and they define a traitor as anyone who disagrees with them in even the slightest way. For an ObamaNazi, nothing trumps “fundamentally transforming America”: not the people, not the Constitution, not logic or common sense. Only an ObamaNazi could refer to “our lord and savior, Barack Obama”… does that ring a bell? They follow in his path, voting “present” to avoid being pinned down to a “yes” or “no”; but let’s not forget that how the Teleprompter In Chief managed to vote “no” to the idea that a child who survives an abortion should be given food, warmth and medical care — yes, that vote is on record in Illinois. An ObamaNazi sees no hypocrisy at all in blaming everything on Bush, while their “lord and savior” pursues the EXACT SAME POLICIES of “kill lists” drone strikes, government snooping, massive debts, sky high unemployment, “quantitative easing” and bailouts of the rich and undeserving with money from the middle class.
If they’re anything like Hillary’s “villagers” then I agree. Those fuckers carry pitchforks and torches. I got raked over the coals by those a-holes and I pretty much keep my conversations politics-neutral at this point.
ObamaNazi! “we are Borg we are one”
i guess if you never watched star trek that wont have any meaning
Call them ObamaNazi’s or crazy PCs. I don’t sub anymore because some special needs child said I said bad words. Another neighborhood teacher lost his position because a couple failing kids decided to get him in a position of not being asked back the following year. SonofSam said a mouthful regarding the system.
And that’s why there is no hope of saving this country intact.
There is a civil war coming. It’s unavoidable.
Thx for posting that. So the kids know we are being ripped off monetarily? I still remember using silver dimes and quarters (pre 1964) to buy things with. Now that silver quarter is worth about $9 of todays dollars. How much longer can it go on?
I’ve got very little hope that they’ll pick the right solution…..or the right people. Historically….people who have been dumbed down to the degree of people today tend to go from one demagogue to another. Like as not….they’d vote for Hitler or Stalin in a New York Minute….because most of them don’t even know who Hitler or Stalin were.
They’re dumber than a box of rocks. And SonofSam, educators like you are more rare than hen’s teeth. For the most part they’ve got Obamanazis “educating” them.
“”””The biggest problem is that they don’t see any way to fight against this.””””
That seems to be the problem for EVERYBODY.
There is only one way to win the fight. Quit paying those who are causing the problems. That includes, the banks, the corp, and all who aid and abet it.
Got credit card debt? Student “loan” debt? Tell them to F Off and keep your money. The fraud will continue only as long as the people are gullible enough to pay for it.
Withdraw your support and ignore commands that come from the corp. Enforce the Law, and disregard the law. That is, simply put, what freedom and liberty are.
God’s C, etc: Youth need to learn a trade. The high school drop outs in my day learned a trade or the ones that stayed and graduated went to trade school after school and made a decent living..repairing, installing, my father in law droppped out of 8th grade, had a successful electrical biz and farmed dairy cattle…many went to work for major companies like Lockheed, repairing aircraft. Plummers, HVAC , etc jobs are there. those on welfare able body types need to learn a trade and get a life.
And all the while the government continues to skew the unemployment numbers by charging new jobs on the nations’ credit card and adding to the debt. What did it cost, a million dollars per new job created? That means in tax revenue it will take decades to make up the difference, considering that the person continues to work at this job until they are about 80 years old. The deceit that goes on is nauseous. They want new jobs???????????? The government needs to axe free trade and stop allowing them to go over to sweat shops and slave labor camps in China, India, Bangladesh, and other poor countries. Stop the United States from supporting others countries’ economies. Start forcing everything to be made in the USA by severing the free trade toxin. When this country had little or no FREE trade the country absolutely prospered and the US dollar had the backing of precious metals behind it. Something seldom mentioned in the media and the government is that there is a lot more money in working at a good job than barely making it on welfare, lots more independence to purchase what someone wants. Of course logic like this never makes its way to congress or to any of the presidents to dismantle free trade.
We know the “official” unemployment figures are not accurate. According to Shadow Government Statistics (Shadowstats dot com), the REAL unemployment figure is much higher.
The youth and young adults are facing especially difficult times. Many youth and young adults are unemployed or underemployed. New college graduates enter a very competitive job market, often saddled with thousands of dollars of debt.
What probably will we face in the near future? Look at the youth unemployment situation in Europe. “Things are rather unsurprisingly going from worse to worserer in Europe. Perhaps it is the anecdotal evidence we see in the now weekly riot-cams from Spain and Greece but just as we warned over a year ago, the truly scariest chart in Europe remains that of youth unemployment.
The correlation (and causation) that runs from extreme levels of youth unemployment to general social unrest and anarchy is stunning throughout time.
With Greek ‘youth’ unemployment jumping to a disheartening 58% (for August) – by far its highest ever – and Spain rising inexorably at 54.2%, the under-25 populations in these nations is truly set to burst (with overall unemployment rates of 25.4% and 25.5% respectively). Euro-zone youth unemployment overall has risen to 23.3% and while Greece jumped the most, Italy was close behind with a 1.2ppt rise to 35.1%.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-08/europes-scariest-chart-hits-peak-scariness-levels-and-rising
Hi KY,
If I may add to your observations;
Quite some time ago, decades in fact, I saw a study which purported to ‘walk through history’ and examine the statistical occurance which was war in the context of the female/male ratio inferred from the historical record. The upshot was that any time it was the csase that a preponderance of the population was female the incidnece of war was slight. On the other hand, IF I remember this correctly, it was also the case that when the opposite was true – even as llittle as by 4 or 5 percentage points – then the probability went up dramatically….here think the Far East; China, India and etc. These cultures have ‘selected’ for male OVER female for so long that, well…you figure it out. What is that ratio now, dunno….but I don’t think it’s “favorable”.
As to the youth employment overall it’s always been the case that the more disenftanchiseed youth – unemployed – there are the WORSE it gets…ZeroHedge post on this almost daily, of late, more with erespect to Spain where it’s a catastrophe being ‘Way above 55% when last I looked. Taken together there can be only one outcome to this, along with the general financial malaise at hand which will do nothing but further worsen things.
In short, “Bye-Bye Civilization as we know it” the alternate paths available to avoid this are fast becoming none…
Well stated JOG,
China, has been giving away…scratch that, selling their baby girls for years at an astounding rate (there are 4 different family’s in my relatively small subdivision that have one). It has always disturbed me on a few different levels, and your post got me to thinking, all of these young Chinese males, may want to get their women back at some point.
Keeping up with the Jonese just got a little bit harder.
No, the CCP will use these bachelors to invade Viet Nam, Thailand, Laos, and Burma. Some of these young Asian chicks are pretty hot!
The Chinese girls in America, including students and those on the internet seeking to find American and European husbands will take over the world …. more than one child at a time.
Once they relocate.
You are very correct in your analysis. If you think about suicide bombers in the middle east, it become apparent that these guys kill themselves because they have no work and without work they have no hope of ever ever ever having a woman. Paradise and 72 virgins probably seem like a fair trade to their life of unemployment and loneliness.
At some point in time, these youth are going to throw themselves on the machine.
Actually nickelthrower, these eurasian suicide bombers are trained from birth by their mothers to be that way. Been there seen it, reported my findings back to command about it. It is the only way a woman can get any form of recognition as to being more then just a procreation unit. Like they say it all starts at home 🙂
China has over 20 million ‘excess’ young men. Definitely slaves, cannon fodder, or a revolution. Wonder which one the bosses will choose…
This is ALL just further PROOF that the world is headed for the proverbial SHTF scenario aka “global economic collapse”. And you know what? I think it’s necessary to start things fresh. I just hope the new economic system is not run by TPTB or Banksters.
“””I just hope the new economic system is not run by TPTB or Banksters.””””
If it were, it would be nothing new…and solve no problems.
Now, here is where it gets confusing–aren’t they causing this economic collapse??
hit the nail right on the head.
Yes they are but they are redoing the system for even more power and total control. They want it to be Elites vs Peons.
I urge you guys to read up on Agenda 21, it’s truly frightening what the UN and TPTB have in store for us.
It’s not the first time it’s happened. But maybe this time around enough people will know what is happening to make it uncomfortable for TPTB and the banksters.
JayJay, think feudalism.
One day….we’ll be hunting the banksters with dogs.
Rodstser- Yep. Agenda 21 is being implemented and the results are going to likely be brutal for ALL Americans – probably people world wide. However, after reading many of these posts tonight, it seems to me that many here think that one political party or another in power would make a difference. Way too much time spent whining and calling people names. Obamanazis? Seriously? Grow up. We need grown ups in charge if we are going to survive this.
“”””We need grown ups in charge if we are going to survive this.””
No, we need to be in charge of ourselves and no one else, with no one else feeling they are in charge of us.
It’s called liberty.
The UN Agenda 21 will not succeed against a highly armed populace. They will push the gun owners too far before it can be fully implemented against them.
People should realize the only way to keep them off their property is to update the Land Patent in their name and Post it and warnings of what will happen to trespassers every 20 feet.
I was looking at a piece of land by the river and noticed a sign on one driveway that said:
NO TRESPASSING POLICE TAKE NOTICE
One of those in every driveway should suffice.
The USA does not have free trade. Look at how the government tries to subsidize some industries with tax payer money. Obama’s green jobs that went bankrupt after receiving tax payer grants? There is already a lot of protectionism. Obama wants cars that get 34mpg or better and will not allow new cars with less mpg be sold. Name a job that does not have strict licensing requirements by the government. We used to have anti-trust laws, but now government itself is the creator of trusts- giving power to one interest group to have a monopoly in a specific trade through licensing requirements that are more beaurecratic than of actual use. Making it so that consumers cannot buy imports affordably just makes it that much harder for American consumers at the benefit of potentially inefficient American companies. Let GM fail and maybe the former GM employees can create a new company that works better after learning from the past company’s mistakes. Free trade all the way.
Employees do not create companies. Entrepenuers do. Free Trade doesn’t exist and never has in the civilized world. The last time Free Trade existed, the American Indians allowed Europeans to establish Free Trade Zones on the North American Continent and populate them with additional Europeans.
Where are the American Indians now?
@Be Informed, Alaska had a 5.8, just about like you called it … Nice looking out!
http://news.yahoo.com/magnitude-5-8-quake-near-anchorage-alaska-knocks-021550607.html
@ Sixpack. I don’t like what I am seeing in Alaska, there are a lot of very dangerous volcanoes there and I have not seen it so active in many years. I will be watching this region closely.
Please do, I’m in the Pacific NW.
Look at history… few collapses happen quickly, and of those few, they only happen to smaller, more regional civilizations.
Big civilizations collapse slowly. Just how it is.
Right. The first big military setbacks for the western Roman Empire came sixty years before the last Emperor was deposed and replaced with a barbarian King.
But, decline of a large empire is never uniformly slow. Roman administration left Britain about 410, and the island was immediately subjected to invasions by Saxons and Angles. For Britons, the decline was precipitous. Ditto for some cities in Gaul. Meanwhile normal life persisted for Romans in southern Gaul and Italy for much longer.
Cities in the USA which no longer have any economic usefulness will die quickly. Detroit is a prime example. The auto industry fled Detroit city years ago. There’s nothing left there that isn’t supported by government transfer payments. The surrounding area will survive longer, because that’s where the industry is now. But it will have to defend itself against the inner-city hordes when the transfer payments dwindle or disappear.
There is, however, the possibility of key technologies being destroyed. When the Musloids over-ran Egypt in the eighth century, the supply of papyrus to Europe was cut off. That stopped virtually all record-keeping, and that precipitated a sudden drop in trade. (Try maintaining any kind of commerce without records!) The Dark Ages began with that key event. Dark, because nobody was writing anything down.
Our present dependence on the Web for commercial record-keeping leaves us even more vulnerable than the 8th century Europeans. I need not explain the consequences to any regular readers here.
If anyone seen the TV series, “Life after People” one just needs to look at Camden NJ for, “Life After Jobs”. Camden NJ predated this by 40 years. Detroit is fairly new at decay.
I used to live there in the mid-50’s. It was a nice city/suburb of Philadelphia then. Besides democratic mayors since when what happened?
FNTN
New York Ship, RCA and Campbell Soup closing for practical purposes closed Camden NJ. Government corruption did not help but the loss of good blue collar employment was the cause; the rest is just fallout.
You mean something like Vietnam and Obama??
insightful
rather entertaining that the auto industry left Detroit… i work in sterling hgts at a company that works for the big three, and most of the other companies. Auto industry is here still booming at the moment actually. Second hand tooling companies are over flowing with work since about 2010. Mostly because of the closings of alot of the smaller second hand tooling companies during the 2006-2009 time frame.
There is actually a shortage of plc programmers in the auto industry, a very very deep shortage. We have been looking for ppl to fill programmer slots for a couple years. ( Qualified people that is 🙂
A bunch of the shops here in our little sub are hiring multiple positions. shit three right next door to each other all different companies. Machinists, electricians, boring mill operators, burr hands, bench hands, CnC, Even drivers and maintenance. Out of these three shops there are i think roughly by their signage about 13 – 16 jobs total available.
For lower employment, all the fast food places are still hiring. I seen Kroger, Meijer, and target all hiring. Part and full time positions. As recently as yesterday actually for the lower employment and for the shop jobs, this morning i drove past, the signs are still up 🙂 So if your in south east MI and need a job the Mound/18 Mile area has many jobs open. Sorry if this shits on the doom and gloom but eh, fuck it ppl need to work 🙂 might as well pass the info along.
Yes some of the auto industry went out of town, but it is no where near dead, not when a small $10mil company per year over the last couple years( roughly i think it was 13mil and then 14.8mil ) became a $25mil company this year 🙂 Also no one in our plant or plants with our suppliers or other thirdhand shops we have been dealing with have had any lay offs since ppl were brought back in 2009.
Our company CEO also predicted in 2000 that it would get rough in the 2006 – 2010 area and it would pick up in 2011, which it did. At least for our plant ( which has 4 Buildings two on this street and two on the next street side by side. )
Will it last? Never does 🙂 but will ride it til it does go under.
I agree. People think they are going to wake up to chaos one day and while that could happen in the event of a natural disaster, the much more likely economic collapse will be slow with a few shockers along the way.
I’ve been without full-time employment since 2008, but being older I have resources I can use to keep working on home improvements, retreat improvements, provisioning, etc. We just found our toddler who has not gained weight in a year has a hereditary autoimmune disease so no more daycare anyway. My wife works some evenings and weekends so I hope to find a third-shift job a couple nights a week.
@Prepared Pastor
I am praying for your child. Who will join me in praying for this toddler?
Giving an Amen.
and a prayer for that toddler….
and, all of us,
here,
in the kabuki theater of the damned.
@Prepared Pastor;I’m so sorry to hear about your child and with you being a man of God,I can only say that our Lord loves and cherishes children and will not let them suffer-my prayer for you and your family:FATHER GOD,WE COME BEFORE YOU WITH GLORY,HONOR AND GRACE FOR ALL THAT YOU’VE DONE,SEEING TO OUR DAILY NEEDS,AND GIVING US AN UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR WAYS IN THAT WE MAY BE ABLE TO FURTHER WALK IN THE LIGHT OF YOUR KINGDOM. LORD BLESS THIS CHILD IN A MIGHTY WAY SO THAT HER DAYS WILL BE FILLED WITH THE JOY OF KNOWING THAT YOU EXIST. LET HER BE PURGED OF THIS ILLNESS THAT HAS OVERCOME HER SO THAT HER MOTHER AND FATHER WHOM WERE BLESSED TO HAVE HER CAN BE AT EASE WITH HER HEALTH THEREBY PROVIDING ANOTHER TESTIMONY OF YOUR WONDROUS WAYS,FOR YOU ARE THE ONLY MIRACLE WORKER WE KNOW,IN JESUS MIGHTY,MATCHLESS NAME,WE PRAY-AMEN.
I joined you as soon as I read it. Prayers and hugs to this little one.
Prepared Pastor,
Praying for your child.
Praying for your baby. Why are so many people nowadays getting these auto-immune diseases? 2 friends of ours were recently diagnosed too. Not good. Lord help us!
History does show us that the size of a civilization doesn’t matter with regards to a collapse. A civilization collapses when the glue that holds that civilization together comes apart. If your entire civilization is based on the fact that the Emperor is God and one day everyone discovers that that isn’t the case then that civilzation dies that very same day.
Our civilization currently is held together by a belief in a fiat currency. These worthless pieces of paper bring the plumber to your door, make the stripper dance, feed your family and get you that replacement hip. It is an amazing thing but only works if everyone believes. The day that belief goes away is the day that nothing works anymore.
Those without skills or something to barter will literally starve in the street. I, for one, hope that it never comes to that even if it means that I, too, have to believe in the funny green paper.
Anon, is right.
Rome collapsed at the speed of the horse…
we will go down at electronic speed,
once the tipping point of the dollar is reached,
in one hour.
I kinda agree, but I think since psychology is still the same for humans, that it’ll take about a month before everyone accepts that things are and will stay “interesting”.
@all,
when I say ; ‘in one hour’, I mean ‘the event’, but, only ‘the merchants of the Earth’ will SEE it…
and that probably includes the prepper community, I hope. The Thing is, will we recognize it? I like to think there is sufficient wisdom here that will ring the bell.
the rest? Yeah, inertia will have its day and they will suffer in the effects of the event, as it spreads, awareness happens, panic ensues…
Yes, I agree with you OQ… great civilizations don’t just trip and fall, but, they do trip, and then the weight itself brings them down… eventually.
In our case, the primary event was probably 2008, which was nothing more than a circuit breaker tripping.
With all due respect? I’m sorry, but… Bullshit.
It takes time for people to panic (never underestimate the power of propaganda).
It takes time for supplies to dry up (trucks, trains, and ships will still initially be enroute to various destinations).
It takes time for even the most disgruntled gangsters to get it in their heads that looting would be a ‘good’ idea (note that the 1992 LA riots, it took hours before violence began, and a day before it peaked… and the gangsters were geared-up and ready to go, only awaiting the jury decision. With little-to-no warning, it would take from days to a week or more before mobs formed up of sufficient size and strength.)
It takes time before pantries empty out (most home pantries, even in big cities, can come up with enough food to feed its occupants for a week, and probably two or three).
Seriously… it isn’t like someone will flip a switch.
Yes and no.
The reason the big civilizations collapse slower has to do with one word: inertia.
You’re not going to wake up one morning and find all the food gone just because the supply chain got interrupted. You’re not going to hide out in a bunker and come out 3 months later to find a largely human-free wasteland.
Things break down slowly, in fits and starts. Hell, the Roman Empire was said to have officially collapsed in AD 410, when Rome fell to Alaric I. Certainly, Western Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages (most of it was already there), with variable results. Problem is, the Roman Empire (specifically, the Eastern Roman Empire, later called the Byzantine Empire) still remained alive, all the way up until the Ottomans finally wiped out Constantinople… in 1453. Barely 35 years before Columbus did the whole ‘New World’ voyage thing.
The only large civilization that came close to collapsing in rapid order was the the largest of all – the Mongol Empire, and even then it broke up more than collapsed.
Yes, in the past that was true. However, modern telecommunications will allow the contagion of collapse to spread rapidly. Just as modern travel allows the contagion of a pandemic to spread rapidly.
That’s what I’m saying… and if, this ‘event’ is a bank holiday and debt repudiation, open for all to see? That will put your slow motion collapse scenario’s in their grave, no pun intended.
the ‘collapse meme’, will spread like lightning. Panic buying will spread. Stores will shut their doors, by those who do get it, to preserve what they have left.
those who ‘get it’, will get it.
those who don’t, won’t.
then the knock off effects begin.
The zombie apocalypse has started already, they all voted in our current president 😀
Yes it is.
I knew all that BS I read two years ago about the Millineals being all a bunch of idealistic crusaders taht were gonna “fix” everything was just that, BS.
Fix it with what??? If you got no money you’re an Etheopian.
If anything we should all watch our backs. When the .gov safety net fully crumbles and all the Millineals realize it, they’re gong to go on a “crusade” all right. I suggest everyone over the age of 35 just hide.
read up on “the fourth turning”. it’s a generational thing
TheGuy, there are those who consider the Millennials are a blight to society.
Check this:
“Millennials Will Destroy Our Cities Coming And Going”
http://gawker.com/5965464/millennials-will-destroy-our-cities-coming-and-going
My nephew… an OBot, ‘gets it’, but, who does he blame for it?
capitalists and CHRISTIANS.
beware.
Sam: My son-in-law gets it. All four of his kids asked me for an I-Pod this year (the oldest is 12) for Christmas and he immediately climbed down all of their throats for requesting something so expensive. He told them that although Grandma and Grandpa aren’t old yet, there will be nothing from the government for us and we will have to live on what we have. Also, that HE and their mom can’t afford anything so costly and time-wasting. I’m sure the manufacture won’t miss three sales out of the millions they’ll make, but at least one 29 year old gets it!
I dare say that as this shit gets messier, a lot of people will figure out what your son in law already knows: that self indulgent and wildly over priced stuff cannot take the place of a real gift.
No it can’t.
SonofSam
Actually it’s none of the above. It’s a global shift in economic power with the intent of equalizing as much as possible the standard of living in the developing third world with that of the developed first world. There is good news and bad news. First the good news. While we are declining we’re still ahead. The bad news is we’re still declining.
Depressions, Recessions are transient. What we’re seeing is not.
The “For Ourselves and our Posterity” has been forgotten in the Preamble.
Kevin2,
almost, ‘their’ plan is simple; depopulation
for themselves and THEIR posterity.
One zombie thumbed you down bro.
Here it is… my backup plan.
Keep my great paying job. I live in a double…take the rent and buy silver and gold. At retirement… rent the entire double… with the silver and gold, buy a country place where I’ll small scale farm. The rent will pay the taxes.
Have a sweet tractor with all the attachments and my own little food processing garage with all the kitchen machinery.
Hunt deer, well water, firewood for heat.
Basically, the globalists have reduced us to the poor.
SO.. don’t spend shit…let it all crash on king obama. Get it? KO. We got knocked out. The smug fucker.
Plan well…. you’ll be glad you did.
I knew the unions were a commie plot…they drove the factories to china.
My bro a contractor is near homeless. No work.
America is fubar.
The elite are getting ready for war with the coming rebel uprising.
Sad state of things…..
Amazing how the whites are scared of the pcers.
Don’t spend a penny. You will need it as your taxes are about to go through the roof.
Right, fear is the KEY.
Whites need to unite, the coming time will be a time of TRIBES.
the Greek says it all; it was not ‘nation against nation’, it was originally;
ethnos… ‘ethnos against ethnos’…
This is what the Dark man wants. He is getting ready to blame the republicans for the fiscal cliff… that’s just the beginning…
I think we still havn’t reached the bad part.
Let’s point out the obvious here. The article fails to mention the hoards of illegals that the govt rolls out the red carpet for that have taken/stolen the very jobs teens and young adults USED to be able to get!
The only opportunities in life are those you make for yourself. Really, shit is bad, I agree 100%. However, if you want to survive in this climate and have your kids succeed; then you’re going to have to band together as a family and produce something of value. Find a niche, build on it, teach your children and fight your way through this shit. Giving up and crying foul is quite a cowardly path.
True, true.
The entrepreneurial spirit is usually the spirit that carries the day and feeds the kids – no matter what the world is doing. During the Great Depression, my grandparents (on both sides of the family) were out there fixing roofs, painting store signs, and in general doing their level best to produce things of value to sell locally. They did it without relying on employers to provide them anything… they provided for themselves. One grandfather scrounged and scrabbled as a sign-painter, joining the Army in 1941. He came back from WWII, and used the money he and his wife saved up to build and open a bowling alley – he sold it and retired in the mid-1980s. Though my maternal grandfather died in the early 1970s, he saved up and bought old houses, fixed them up, then rented them out. He had accumulated enough of them to sell en-masse and retire during the late 1960s.
Funny thing is, neither of them relied on a paycheck… they made their own.
Things have changed by quite a bit since then, but it is still possible (in spite of crushing regulations, taxes, etc). While my own path took me elsewhere, I admire them for the sheer amount of hard work they’d put into it.
Just bought some reloading stuff from a guy who has been unemployed for over two years, he says. I talked to him face to face for a good half hour. He’s a brilliant scrounger, and he sells stuff he digs up to make a few bucks here and there. Not well educated, but a real worker. Won’t find many of them in downtown Detroit. Excepting, of course, the drug dealers.
The evisceration of wealth creating industrial capacity does not just effect those woking in industry. At the very least 10 feed off the wages of every worker in industry. The methods of survival honed decades ago post WWII do not all apply. You can buy a bowling alley because the people at Smith Manufacturing have income to spend there. Take away the wealth creation from manufacturing and you have continuing and growing debt. Take away the foreign demand for those created USDs and the deck of cards comes down.
Hard work always beats lazy. Smart beats stupid. The delta will always be there. The payoff is lowering. You may bottom feed and get some luck but overall in the end you will work more and have less. Virtually omnipotent forces are behind it.
The Red Queen problem…
what I call the Treadmill of Immorality.
As money fails, you must run harder and harder to stay in place.
Many revert to immoral methods, then more, and more.
I have told many young people that if they can’t find a job, make one.
I don’t work for anyone, as in punching a clock. If someone needs a computer repaired or viruses removed, or needs audio or video put on disc, or needs genealogy done, I’m their man. I always undercharge, but people always give me extra. I did a job last week for someone. I charged $25. They gave me close to three times what I asked in money plus barter. I can work as much or as little as I want. The main thing is that I made my own job and have been doing this for years.
It’s funny because as a small business owner up until 2008 I always thought I was at a disadvantage trying to earn a living. Now it’s the other way around. If it weren’t for my small business i’d probably be scavenging garbage cans looking for food.
I so petty the youth of today. It’s only going to get worse for that generation. 🙁
Rodster
BIG BUSINESS made the US “The Place To Be”.
Small business is what is left. Business that functions locally does not compete with the game plan of developing the world (at our expense).
The only opportunities in life are those you make for yourself. Really, shit is bad, I agree 100%. However, if you want to survive in this climate and have your kids succeed; then you’re going to have to band together as a family and produce something of value. Find a niche, build on it, teach your children and fight your way through this shit. Giving up and crying foul is quite a cowardly path.
Yes it is going to get a lot worse as time goes on. I was asked the other day on my take of what time we got before “The Crash”. I don’t know if there is going to be a crash like a “kaboom” or just a slow sloughing off of remaining productive employment. I think maybe like five years or so. Kinda hard to describe it. Maybe we’ll be just like the cat in Alice in Wonderland whereas we’ll just fade away until all that’s left is the smile.
it is said that man will destroy its self in one of 2 ways, either in a boom or a whimper… my thought is, is that will will be somewhere in between and then in retrospect we will look back and say that didnt take long.. we could have stopped it…. if you look at it as noise, then the boom is a boom and the whimper being silent, i think it may be a heavy drone of a sound thats irritating for a period of time but the sheeple wont hear it
Hi PO’d,
Yeah, it’s always, “That question” isn’t it. Truth is it’ll happen when it happens. I think about it as the “Big Flush”, a long, slow spiral at first circling the drain, till right at the end, “WHOOSH”. The question everyone keeps asking is when is the “WHOOSH” part….no one knows that, but we’re all seeing the same things circling around and around and around aren’t we? And it just keeps getting deeper…..
Just as long as it ain’t musical turds. I don’t wanna have to latch on one of em when the music stops.
When will the collapse happen??
It is like watching a magician–we don’t know how many handkerchiefs he has, but we know with each one pulled, the trick is nearer the end!!
I say that its already happened — the “magic show” is designed to distract us from that fact
@ jayjay,
THAT girl gets the $64,000 ‘answer to the question’! 🙂
“CYBER-PRESSION”
Two-thirds of all new jobs go to immigrants, according to the Pew Hispanic Research. Several 100,000 people fell off of unemployment rolls since October. On Jan 1, 2013, 2 million more will fall off the unemployment rolls. Most of the Christmas hires at department stores will be laid off in January. Let the games begin!
Of course this is no ordinary recession because it’s a D-E-P-R-E-S-S-I-O-N and it was always a depression. It started back in 2008 with the meltdown of the financial markets. Things have not gotten better today, to the contrary things continue to get worse.
And just for ObummerCare in 2014. That should make the economy roar…[insert sarcasm]. 😛
Another way to look at it is, it would be a Depression if there was a Republican in the White House.
Because we have a Statist occupying the WH it’s a recession. Don’t you just love the government-media complex?
so many times i think to myself , i wish they would just let everything collaspe and then we could start over.. i know this will be wishfull thinking, we talk about TPTB on this site and yet do many of us really understand who they are?… i dont think so.. we can all blame the government on the problems when it comes to the money going elsewhere, but yet the government is just a pawn to the evil greed of those who really pull the strings…
i watch the kids these days at tacobell, pizzahut, and all the other fast food places.. these kids dont know any better then what they are living today, how can they? there is no referance to better times (15-20yrs ago) or what it took for their parents to give them a good life.. now these same kids are loosing hope or being discouraged because the harder they work the less thats getting accomplished.. the kids who are not working have been cut down before they even get started..
with the things i put above, its no wonder that some of these companies wont hire the kids if for no other reason the attitudeand the way they are presenting themselves with the head hung low.. (this is not the case everytime, but it is what i am seeing) these companies are so squeezed to keep the profits up because if they dont continue to appease the stock holders and in turn the stock holders please the elite and the elite profit the filthy rich and the filthy rich contribute TPTB, then that company begins to fight a loosing battle because of the unability to grow bigger and when they cant grow bigger then they go away, creating a bigger unemployment vaccume making all things worse then they are now
what we see going on now is NEVER going to get any better, just worse.. so look and watch, and see the world fall apart before our very eyes
I keep hearing all this stuff about how “we could start over”.
Um. How exactly. We have no manufacturing base. We DO have some resources so it isn’t totally hopeless but I mean, it seems like everyone things “we crash, we pay our pennance to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for three years, and bam, it’s 1950 again, weren’t we good children to take our punishment and own up”.
If we crash, baby, it’s a rather permanent condition. I’m not so sure I’d be wishing for that.
@ TheGuy,
We are so HIGH now, IF we fall….it might be that there is no return. Einstein once said “I don’t know what weapons WWIII will be fought with…but WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones…” I’m afraid that, on too many levels, regardless of if there’s a war or not, there’s not enough of a path back from ‘down there, in the dark’, to come back from. This might be mankind’s “Last Hurrah” whether anyone believes it or not……
Where is Bo going on vacation and how much will it cost?
I could point at some locations where teens don’t WANT to be at work or in school, but then I’d be called a racist.
My wife is a retired teacher, we have talked exensively about the dumbing down of Amicas children and youth. The children of middle America have been pawns in a education system controlled by unions and liberal educators. Public education has become an experiment in social engineering. You think it is bad now, just wait.
LC
I must disagree to a certain point with you. The problems start within the families. Here in Norway we have a rather socialist school system and society. Society will protect you is the agenda. On the other hand me and some of the neighbor kids were told values and ethics by our parents and elder siblings and cousins. For example not to go to the jobcentre, which is really generous here, but find a job. Even some youngsters have that attitude. Other people love that “I am entitled attitude”, and make great use of it. They, and not school, teach their kids were to get benefits and tell them to become reliant on the state and the community.
School today and what it does to children is not right, especially in these political correct and gender mainstreamed times, but it starts at home. When parents act like kids and all is about what you are entitled too, values are gone, and independence isn`t taught and no rules (or idiot rules) at home exist, because mum and dad are sitting in front of their plasma tv instead of taking care of the family, then there is a good chance that their kids become stupid and disgusting.
It comes down to the families.
Here’s a song I wrote, you can thumb down the singing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX8MqoNkbWI
Anytime I here someone say that free trade and cheep foreign made goods are good for our economy, I want to kick them in the nuts and spit in their face and say “thats must be good for our economy too”.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2241525/The-Boeing-blitzing-drone-cripple-nations-electronics.html
maybe they can knock out my lap top, but my shot gun will still work
9_9
Once again, great idea, military contractors. I know. Let’s kill the grid right by a nuclear reactor.
Why do you think so many countries want reactors? Screw “human” shields, this is better.
Guys. I got bad news for you. You’re not going to fight your way out of this either.
lol the first drone will take your computer away the second drone will drop a bomb on you and take you away the shotgun will still be there .
One reason that teens/young adults can’t get jobs is that the retired people have to work to survive because their retirement is gone or doesn’t meet needs in this economy…!
Every time I go to WalMart it’s full of old ladies at the registers, stocking merchandise and walking around looking like they are ready to collapse under the strain of the work.
Very soon three and four generations will be living together just to survive!
I see exactly that at my own local Wally World. I’d bet that many of them are already on social security pensions, but with the increasing prices for everything they can’t do without 20 hours or so a week of work at Walmart. I make it a point to be as nice to them as I possibly can. I truly respect Walmart for hiring them. They’d be living under bridges, otherwise. And I thank God that He allowed me to accumulate enough that I could pay cash for my BOL, marginal as it is, and don’t have to pay rent.
Just a little social engineering to create cannon fodder for world war III why would young educated adults in stable well paying jobs want to go fight. On the other hand blame their misarable situation on a new enemy they will for a bed and three square meals kill for any tyrant. Mugabe’s veteran militia were mostly in their twenties
Good point. Whether by accident or by design, large numbers of unemployed males does make for wars. China has this problem in a big was due to their one-child policy. Couples have aborted girls at a high rate, not willing to be without a male offspring to support them in old age.
Nazi Germany may be an exception. World War One killed off a great many men, after all. Interesting that it took almost exactly one full generation for Round Two to start.
falsely accused of a gun crime
12 things you should know
http://www.ammoland.com/2012/11/28/bogus-allegations/#axzz2DbhWnZ8H
OQ: I still can’t download your book. Is it still available? Are the sites just too busy?
I just received my hardcopy of the book from Amazon and I LOVE it – its a pretty hefty book, you are going to want to print it out – probably cheaper to just buy it, honestly.
I finished reading Rawles’ book “Patriots” a few weeks back. I am close to finishing “Survivors.” I know these books are not exactly a “how to” in the realm of survival, but it’s hard not to give plausibility to the scenarios laid out in both books. Just from how Rawles illustrates rifle use, I saw enough value in his presentations to go buy one.
I’ve read those two books. I don’t mean to discredit them but they don’t really show the impacts on “real people” as the Rawles characters are the best prepared ever. Reading them does help you prepare though so again I don’t want to discredit them, but affording their level of prepardness is beyond many peoples’ means – mine included – and I’ve been prepping for 3 years. (all while unemployed)
Dear Mr Bernanke,
As you know, there are a lot of unemployed kids. Since the banksters are making record profits, maybe you could let these kids borrow $100K each and allow them to lend it at 5% to 20% interest and see if they can make money on it? Oh yeah, you’d have to lobby CONgress to ensure they are backed by the government (just in case their bets go bad like they did for the banksters in 2008 and on). Consider how this would reflect on the Fed’s stated goal of full employment (rather than their real goal of bolstering bankster profits).
Your friend,
A Helpful Serf
Nothing a good ground war wouldn’t fix. /sarc
A few thoughts:-
1. “We” raised a generation on MTV & reality TV instant success, thinking they were “worth it” & “could have it all”. Their state education deliberately and systematically removed their natural born ability to think for themselves, instead training them to be perfect servants.
2. Their parents were too busy keeping up with Jone’s & sneering at the Greatest generation with a couple of tins of spam in the pantry “just in case”. Those skills were lost. Their parents took their eyes off the ball while jobs, products and education got outsourced to China – as they were too excited by the latest igadget to notice.
3. Anyone who showed too many signs of independence was quickly taken to a shrink and “labelled” by the system, most often medicated before they hit their teens. Many of those who didn’t were encoraged by their elders to try illegal drugs such as meths or cannabis any time they looked in danger of spotting the reality of the matrix.
4. Anyone a little older who joined “occupy” or any of the other protest groups that sprang up found themselves ridiculed & sneered at by their peers & parents.
5. Don’t get me started on how the traditional “good girl” with morals, and sense of right from wrong gets treated in todays schools. At best she’ll be sneered at for being a lesbian, at worst sexually assaulted by her peers. Her parents most likely aren’t home to talk to about it when she tries, and even if they are, she’s gotta dodge that dodgy step dad/uncle just coming through Mum’s revolving front door. Families are broken & strong families = economic units of production when they set their backs to it.
The elite have shown the young it’s OK to loot a nations resources via the bank catasrophe and then we wonder why that 15 year old lad doesn’t understand that it’s not OK to steal that new pair of sneakers he’s seen on TV from “the corp?”
6. Here in the UK parental rights have been systematically eroded. It’s noone’s job but mine to decide whether or not I should vaccinate my child or what lunch I should feed him, or how I should discipline him but the state just won’t but out of the average family’s living room. Many parents are too scared to raise their kids as they wish to, for fear of falling foul of the authorities. Then we act shocked when these undisciplined brats go off the rails.
Most young people aged 20 or so have been FAILED by the society that raised em. Yet I still hear babyboomers in total denial of this fact. We do need to prepared to teach those who have never been given the opportunity to learn skills like scratch cooking, gardening etc that we just took for granted.
It’s not enough to complain. As an example I showed several younger women that cloth nappies are not just a convenient method, but fun and money saving too. I’ve also shown more than I can count how to meal plan and prep simple nutritious meals. It’s never gonna win me a Nobel prize, but by taking baby steps to teach whenever the opportunity arises we can all help these young people mitigate some of the damage done to them, before their ignorance costs them their lives. We do not have to risk our own OPSEC to show a ten year old how to replace his bicycle chain.
I also meet many young people who have the get up and go to create their own income via self-employment & entrepreneurship, but they seem to be constantly thwarted at every turn by out of control over regulation, red tape, complex accounting rules etc that make it almost impossible for them to gain a foothold in their chosen area of interest. Is this a common occurence in the US too?
In the US you still have the advantage of larger homes and vast swathes of cheap land. “Country Codger” is a blogger who has written some really good articles on building your own rural home in the US. If I had a 18 year old in the US right now, I think instead of handing over my meagre savings for college I’d buy an acre of land & the building materials and tell the young person to get to it. It would probably take a year or two to build a simple cabin with a woodburning stove and get it to habitable standards for a total novice – but the skills learnt would last that young person a lifetime. You’d also know that kid had the basics for post shtf survival.
For us in the UK the above isn’t a realistic proposition as the red tape of our planning laws is totally insane and legal and land prices are so costly. My step son has emigrated.
You forgot the part about being shocked when the undisciplined monsters eat us for what we’ve done to them.
for those preaching to make your own opportunity, coudnt agree more. Recently my wife, a stay at home mom, started a home business. 8 months later, she’s running a business that is bringing in enough money to pay all of our bills and then some (and yes I work as well) I couldn’t be more proud, she set her mind to it and busts her butt, but she loves doing it and is still home for my kids too. We need more people with her mentality!!
My Dad had proverbs 31 pinned up on my bedroom wall when I was a child. I had to learn it by heart. I had to write it out one year in calligraphy as a gift for my Mum & Gran on Valentines day too. It’s funny but that verse STILL goes through my mind, anytime times are hard.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+31%3A10-31&version=KJV
Sounds as if your wife has internalised being a “virtuous woman”. I wish her every continued success in her endevours.
It’s just so lovely to hear a man sound appreciative of his wife’s efforts to help the family. In this current climate I’m often shocked at how many men get envious of their own wife’s success (yet another symtom of the moral rot so common today).
Just curious … what kind of home business? Specifics not necessary, but interested as so many seem to think there are “no” opportunities.
Funny but its a direct sales business, something like Mary Kay or Avon, but its a great idea and the company is relatively young, so she got in early. I know when folks hear direct sales, they think of crazy stuff, but I am truly impressed how fast the company as a whole has grown and how the product truly sells itself.
But my wife can work at it, still be home with our kids and that was a big selling point for us (plus there was $0 up front which I liked).
That’s cool. Maybe I shouldn’t have opted out of Amway all those years ago…
When is taking “prepping” too far?
I saw this question on another website and it got me to thinking can you take prepping too far? After thought and consideration I believe the answer is yes you can.
If so, that begs the question where is the line? As I contemplate my own personal journey from Y2K to the present, I think about the roller coaster ride of emotion I have put myself (and my family) on.
Early on, once the blinders came off and I understood “the normalcy bias”, I was almost in panic mode.
I like to think I am a fairly intelligent guy, yet I find myself looking back and saying “wow, am I an idiot”.
As I look for the word to best describe how to live a lifestyles that lends itself to the “self sufficiency desires” that run deep in my bones, and keep the family and few friends I have, from thinking “Wally has gone off the deep end”, I come up with “BALANCE”.
This is the word I often repeat to myself as I ponder a new purchase or decision as it relates to the “what if” category, and man is it a big category to cover.
If you try to live by the precept two is one and one is none, well let’s say people look at you very funny if you don’t strategically buy.
I once got caught by a buddy’s wife with 2 cheap “Chinese” chainsaws on my cart (loaners so they don’t ask to use one of my 2 Echo’s) and man did she give me the 3rd degree, I told her, they were gifts, and she dropped it. My point is it’s easy to make yourself look “crazy” in the eyes of the Sheeple.
I have gone through the entire range of ups and downs, and I think for now I am at peace. I have reached the point of other than tweaking and refining, we as a family are on track. I have spent a considerable amount of emotional and financial capital to achieve this level of peace.
Cashing in the 401K, moving my family from outside a small city to a more remote 60 acre irrigated farm, adding animal husbandry, to an already challenging full time job. Building a new home, adding the ability to go “off grid” with solar (pv and water), from food to fuel to security to medical, tractor, implements, tools, wells, buildings, fence, blah, blah, blah, etc, etc, etc, etc …
Hundreds of thousands of dollars later.
Have we crossed a line?…I don’t know….I guess it’s up to each individual to decide where their line is.
This, our chosen lifestyle, is now our retirement plan. Our plan is to work hard for 15 more years and stack up piles of pm.
If the economy truly falls apart, and I do have my doubts, we will gather the kids and close associates, lock the front gates, deploy the parameter security measures, lock n load, and hunker down.
If nothing eventful ever happens, then we plan on spending the rest of our days raising small critters, spending time at the farmers market selling the excess produce we grow, hunting, fishing, trapping and going “old school hermit”
Remember develop a long term plan, intelligently work the plan, but try to balance the emotions and enjoy the ride.
After all, this is it folks, there are no do over’s, you get one shot at life, make it count!
Stay thirsty my friends….
I’ve hired a few youth in my time and will continue to do so into the future. Entry level tech support work that has a good career path. The problem is I get no resumes or any attempt by the youth to apply for these types of positions. When I do, I always call them in just to give them experience of getting an interview. I look back at my career and my discussions with younger interviewees and employees and what I always see is younger people don’t know how to find jobs. Sure they’ll go apply at restaurants, and local places, but thats what everyone does. I ask how they found my opportunities at my company and they had to search hard which is frustrating for me. The online job sites are a waste of time as are job fairs. It really is difficult to actually connect eager people wanting to work and the actual jobs available. The jobs are there but the experience isn’t. I think there are expectations that the corporate ladder can skip a few steps. Unfortunately that isn’t the case and the generation tends to not want to hear it. The ones who do get it, I hire. I do pity the youth out there, but rather than sitting around getting English Lit majors and finding yourself by studying abroad. I’d suggest with all that downtime, learning a trade or taking computer courses. The liberal arts degree is a thing of the past. A useless piece of paper that people shouldn’t waste their time on. Sad but true. I’ll take a kid out of high school with mad computer skills than a college grad that can debate Plato with me.
+1 to that last paragraph! Exactly how I looked for people to hire, prior to my retirement. My mantra was that I wanted to find the kid with a jacked-up Chevy which he had built himself, and which would run low 16s at the strip, rather than a self-absorbed U of Mich grad who expected $70K a year to start, and had never turned a wrench in his life. I got productivity, and loyalty, from those kids.
One factor most people overlook is that there’s less and less room in our manufacturing sector for unskilled labor. I’ve watched, (and promoted), this through my career, which was machine tools and process control. Automating the processes makes for much better product, and at much less per-unit cost, but it requires just a few smart people to run it, and in fact must exclude low intelligence workers, because they actively screw it up by their ignorance. The days when a guy could get $40.00 an hour for driving a forklift around a plant all day are going, going, gone. How we resolve this I do not pretend to know, except for the appalling prospect of a real big war, using lots and lots of infantry, to reduce the surplus. The present generation won’t work in the fields, which is where low-skill labor still has a place. (Don’t let me get started on that subject!)
plarvo – i feel your pain , try to find a carpenters helper these days or a young guy who wants to work on a farm .
these are fast becoming lost arts .
There are plenty of jobs out there for the youths.
hooking, drug running, piss bucket boy/girl for the rich, ,blog writer othree fab.
This is a generation of kids that
~ played sports and got trophies just for showing up.
~ all get an award at the end-of-year school assembly so that everyone “feels successful”
~ no one kept score in t-ball because it might make the other kids feel badly
~ are discouraged from being competitive because it’s “rude”
~ have no winners because it might damage the self esteem of the losers
~ are “allowed” to win when playing games with adults
When there are no winners and losers and people are rewarded just for getting out of bed and showing up, then kids don’t learn the lessons that will get them through life. They don’t learn to strive to achieve more this way. They learn that all they have to do is be present and they’ll get stuff.
The workplace is an enormous shock to them when they are expected to hit certain targets or quotas, someone is the top salesperson, and employers don’t constantly give them kudos for no apparent reason.
They don’t learn to fight for anything and I think that is done deliberately. Acquiescence is being bred into them.
Bring back honest competition and we’ll see kids that grow up to achieve things instead of kids who grow up with a sense of entitlement. We’ll see kids who grow up to be free thinkers and fighters instead of placid worker bees.
Daisy
my friend i think the day is fast approaching for them to get tough or die,,because they dont have a choice,,,,you just dont stop do you???
snake
Ignorance can be corrected by kindly instruction. A bad heart CANNOT. Know the difference. Most of the youngsters I meet KNOW they are being shafted at every turn – they just have NO clue where to find guidance. They have VERY good hearts though, once you pierce the outer layers.
It can take 5 mins out of your day to gently show a youngster how to count back change, change a bike chain, ask them a question that forces them to THINK for once. Bake a cake with your grandchild or give them a set of interesting books or weblinks for Xmas. At present I seem to spend 30 mins every day showing the “yoof dem” in my neck of the woods how to train their dogs at the moment ( admittedly it’s safer & easier for me to do this while the dogs are pups than wait till they attack me as untrained adult chav dogs lol!).
We need to quietly be the change we want to see in the world. This starts with seeing our young as a collective responsibility and taking the time to help them a little to reignite the critical thinking, and problem solving skills that have been systematically stolen from them. It takes a village to raise a child. Be that catalyst, whenever you see the opportunity.
I have a friend whose 18 y.o. son came home and told his dad “Rob said I was fired. Can he do that?”
His dad said “Sounds like he already did.”
Jewish Talmud / Torah – Jewish Scripture Religious Law
*penetration of a 3 year old goyim gentile boy or girl goyim gentile child is permitted .
*rape of a goyim gentile woman female is permitted .
For they are only un-pure animals beasts .
Remember this as you go to sleep tonight : “AmeriKa is Israels Bitch !”
~N.O. ;0P
Britain, too. The pedos just LOVE the isle of Jersey.
if obama and his ilk have their way, young men and women (even the well educated) will not even have military service to fall back on in tough times.
WW 3 coming,
Sorry I don’t feel outrage about 4 Americans being murdered….most of us would of done the same thing to them had they been in our country screwing around doing things they had no business doing
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/51470
I knew it would be ‘Six Million’. Everything is always ‘Six Million’.
(Not) Humor … Jackpot In Italian Lottery: Supermarket Job … With the Italian economy in its fourth recession in the last ten years and unemployment soaring, a supermarket has come up with a novel way of hiring. According to Germany’s Mittelstands Nachrichten, customers who spend over EUR30 will receive a lottery ticket and the grand prize winners will be given “temporary part-time assistant jobs” at the supermarket. We are not really sure where to go with this – but somewhere in this odd arrangement is a sad reflection of the European society’s deterioration … http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-04/tuesday-not-humor-jackpot-italian-lottery-supermarket-job
Proverbs 22:6
Train up a child in the way he should go,
And when he is old he will not depart from it.
Senate Dems defend administration’s right to take guns away from veterans
Senator Tom Coburn (Oklahoma) instead “wants veterans who have been deemed “mentally incompetent” to have their cases adjudicated by a judge — rather than the VA, as happens currently — and argued that veterans who simply cannot support themselves financially are needlessly given the label and, as such, cannot buy or possess firearms.”
Sen. Coburn said, “We’re just saying that if you’re going to take away the Second Amendment rights … they ought to have it adjudicated, rather than mandated by someone who’s unqualified to state that they should lose their rights.”
The Washington Times (also posted on Drudge Report)
I saw this too. There’s an email out there being shared by vets warning them NOT to visit the VA hospitals because if you say anything that they think smells remotely of a) hurting yourself or b) hurting others, they instantly label you as ‘mentally disturbed’ and you suddenly find your 2nd amendment rights are gone. And HAH! Just try dealing with the VA to get them back. It’s probably the most dysfunctional agency in the federal government… and that’s saying something.
The VA is also asking every vet during a visit if they own any guns. And I’ve heard they can be quite aggressive about it. (I work about five miles from a rather large VA hospital).
Cheers,
Mal
I stated this before; deserves a repeat.
My dh received a questionnaire from our darling VA last month.
I filled it out and lied a
littlelot, but there were no gun questions!! I started reading the letter attached informing him the appointment he would make for an office visit would only last 20 minutes–in and out—just for a blood ‘sample’.Rip…rip more…and rip more. -( Straight to trash.
Might I add, this is what I try to drill in his precious head:
1) I don’t own any weapons, firearms, guns; the one registered was lost in a canoeing accident 2) I am not depressed or on any drugs 3) I am not suicidal or have suicidal thoughts
See, he isn’t at the level of distrust I’m at —yet.
outrageous!
2 Thessalonians 3: 10
For even when we were with you, we commanded you this;”If anyone will not work, neither will they eat”.
I came to America on a home made boat my father built in secret in Cuba.
For all 4 years of High School I got up at 2:am and went to my brother-in law’s bakery to fry donuts and frost danish for the morning business. By 6a I was done, went to school smelling like grease, and purchased a brand new car my senior year with cash. Some how I was also able to letter in wrestling too my senior year.
Much later I sold Medical supplies and learned that 2/3’s of the business is brought in by the top 1/3 of the sales force.
THE HUNGERY ONES ALWAYS FIND A WAY!
If Ocrapper didn’t have millions of unemployed/underemployed youth where would he get enough young people to create his Civilian Corp; which is slated to be bigger than out military…
Nailbender
i just read an article about the first class of students graduating,,,dang where was it,,,the picture looked like a street gang of thugs
snake
The American Holodomor. If our so-called leaders are not going to change the system that pillaged US taxpayers, prosecute the bankers for the toxic mortgage fraud that destroyed the middle class, made everybody unemployed and homeless, unsustainable budget deficits to fight the so-called “war on terror” (9/11 inside job), hyperinflation through Quantitative Easing to infinity that destroyed the US Dollar, pensions, paychecks of people and, in turn, destroy the social safety net; then the future is obvious: a contrived police state, detention without trial, FEMA camps, radiation pills and 1.5 billion hollow-point bullets.
good news for those living in Cali
some Berkey filters can now be shipped there
http://www.directive21.com/why-berkey-products-cannot-be-shipped-to-california/
Don’t forget extra spigots with those extra filters, folks. 🙂
Off subject alert:
Prep and make a cold rainy day meal at the same time.
I’ll hit up the local produce market and buy some fresh vegetables for canning. I’ll get corn, green beans, bell peppers, turnips, carrots, celery and bok choy. This last time I cheated and bought organic frozen corn kernels. Fresh corn is now out of season.
Cut up all the veggies and put them in a 15 qt pot (about 3/4 of vegetables). Fill the pot with water. Bring to a boil and cook for about 10 minutes. Ladle the veggies into qt size canning jars, add hot water from the pot and a teaspoon of salt to each jar. Process in a pressure cooker, 12# for 100 min. I do 7 qt jars per batch.
Left over in the pot is about 7 qts of veggies and water. Now is when I make the meal. I season up the vegetables, add a whole chicken and make soup. When the chicken is done (about 2 hours on simmer) I take the meat off the bird and put the meat back in the pot.
So you end up with 7 qt jars of vegetables for the pantry and a large pot of chicken vegetable soup that you can eat on for a few days. Make a fresh loaf of bread for the soup and you’re living like a king. It’s a fun project for a rainy Saturday and it’s the rainy season in Oregon.
Rick
first of all i`m teasing you,,,but i`m glad i dontb have to feed you if you eat 7qts of soup and a loaf of bread at one time,,,
snake
Hey snake eater, I can take the tease.
If it’s snake soup, 7 qts may not be enough.
I have a 28 year old living at home, he and his buddies see to it that none of it will go to waist.
Well, at least my mother does not think I am nuts anymore. Come to think of it, my wife no longer says I am too pissed.
Kunstler on a roll today
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/homeless.html
things will NEVER be the same again
we blew it big time
and the scary thing is
much of the developing world wants to emulate our “life style”
that would be funny if it wasn’t so very very tragic
the era of cheap energy is OVER
that is what made our profligate way of life possible
we had PLENTY of warning of what was to come
“America’s high growth and prosperity is gone foreverWhat’s ahead? InvestmentNews’s Dan Jamieson sums up Grantham’s “most depressing forecast ever:” America’s long-term 3.4% annual GDP growth is ancient history. Grantham is blunt: “The U.S. GDP growth rate that we have become accustomed to for over a hundred years … is not just hiding behind temporary setbacks. It is gone forever.”
http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=44792
Daisy, unfortunately you are so correct. In my day, kids were taught how to think for themselves and inquiring minds were not only encouraged, but expected of everyone. Nowadays, it’s the exact opposite. Inquiring minds are not only frowned upon and discouraged, but in some cases kids get forcibly medicated simply for questioning something regardless of what it is. The kids are taught to be mindless robots and never question anything, just accept everything you see as is. used to be you had to wait and join a police academy or the milirtary to become a mindless robot; not anymore. It’s so bad the kids aren’t even taught that they have rights! Their minds have been shaped and molded to serve a police state and nothing else. In any post-SHTF scenario, it’s possible I may have a confrontation with any of those kids and I dread what I may have to do in order to survive it. Especially if they are “Obamanistas”; that’s a spin-off of the old term “Clintonistas” used back in the 90s to describe supporters of Bill Clinton. I feel this economy is already collapsing, but in stages. Only a matter of time until REAL SHTF. Best wishes to all. Braveheart
Seems we’re missing an important part of this thread. Has anyone been subject to these 16 to 24 y.o.s in the work force? Although not true for all at least the majority of theses agers that I’ve either run into or had the displeasure of working with/around have the work ethic of a sparrow, the motivation of a sloth and the IQ of a dorito. If the unemployment rate of this age group is staggering I can only imagine their turnover rate. Perhaps dropping the minimum wage to $1 might clear some heads. “Paid for what you’re really worth plan.” Need a laugh? Watch a 17yo try to figure out how to operate a broom.
good point
a couple of weeks ago I was grabbing a burger and Coke
the cash register quit working
and the teenage clerk had to call over the supervisor,who was only a little older to help the figure out the correct change to give me
he had to use a calculator to figure it out
I was taught how to ‘count the change’ when I was 12… helping out an uncle in a country store.
My teenage nephew didn’t know how to operate a yardstick to measure a wall!
Archivist
can i use that one please?????
snake
But he can hack the Pentagon on his iPhone.
I bet he couldn’t find the buttons!!
nargon
YYYYUUUUUUUUPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!! been there done that too,,the ones i`m dealing with are up all night playing games on play station plus smoking dope like smoke stack,,,just sent the last one down the road,,seems its better to go out at night and steal to make money than work for it,,that is untill he got caught
snake
snake
The result of government borrowing from private banking cartels, there is a reason they call it ‘bonds’. It is the financial short cut for bondage and ever country selling them is enslaved to bankers who very conveniently are ‘too big to fail’.
Wake up people, unite and kick the banksters out, let the government print the money interest free and spend it into the economy and watch the incredible turn around. In five years, any and all countries that would do this would be thriving! It has happened in the past and could happen now. But alas, the dumbed down and cowardly populations of the world just will not make it happen. Billions will suffer the consequences.
People just don’t get it, don’t care to understand the power of mathematics and corrupt financial systems, and if they do are too coward to do something about it.
GOOD !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
52% of college grads weren’t getting jobs BEFORE the election, and they still voted against America ANYWAYS !!! So GOOD !! Welcome to your designated FEMA camp, here’s your daily slice of gov’t bread and cheese, and forget healthcare, anyone with ability quit the field long ago. THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR SO SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES YOU F***ING IDIOTS !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Troy
Many want a job in what they’re interested in and not what the market wants. Get a degree in Interior Decorating, Film Editing and a host of other waste your time endeavors and then flaunt that your “College Educated”. All that was accomplished is wasting valuable time and money.
Parents that worked hard in what paid at the time wanted better for their kids not realizing things we’re going to get worse. Unfortunately this strategy poor in relatively good times is a recipe for absolute failure in difficult times.
Troy,
This is exactly what my college student who is surrounded by liberals said just recently! They hate Republicans so much that they don’t consider much else. Can’t see past their nose and are perfectly willing to cut off their nose to spite their face! Many of her friends in the medical field are moving their plans from becoming MD’s to becoming PA’s which costs less in time and money.
in my Early 20’s, veteran & unemployed. I am part of the broke generation.
This does not bode well for America’s future, not at all.
Our young people can’t find jobs. Our middle aged people can’t find jobs. The elderly are past their working years (if they’re not self-employed), but they’ve already lost their retirement pensions and savings wiped out in the current, ongoing Depression.
We are on the brink of seeing masses of people (from age 19 to age 89) get extremely angry and very possibly become violent. Think Greece on steroids.
Communism is the only way out. Rule of the people.