Banking for Beginners

I suggest you put Hope the Hippie in charge and grow questionable plants. That way you can just sit around all day, chilling out, and not worrying about money or politics.

But that’s just my opinion!
:-)

You could make a really good start by having faith in yourselves... and absolutely nothing else! ;)

Get Alan the Assasin to bump off Bert, Gus and Harry and then commit suicide in remorse.

Then all of you ordinary people who grow stuff, whatever it may be for, to specialise in the stuff you grow best. Grow lots of it! Then swap it with other people for the stuff they grow best. But when you find you have a bad year for your stuff you'll have to offer IOUs in the hope of a better year. Hang on, then we start to get in a mess.

When you have a bad year you starve. That's easier.

Ah, for Rousseau and the noble savage....

Or maybe Hobbes and life being nasty, brutish and short...

Do you a deal... my turnips and cabbages for your pot...

Why does a society on that scale need a banker or money? If its a little tribe then you can survive
well enough without Bert the Banker providing that
there's enough natural resources to go round. I'd
find some way to limit the population; less people means more for everyone.

The Money Trick is coming to an end, the rich have won the Monopoly game and the urge to play another game will see them grudgingly letting go of the folding stuff so they can start collecting it again.
Thank God for the game. Without it, we'd have to kill the bastards. Now there's an idea. No, maybe not, not good for the spirit and so old world.
Europe's about to implode and Germany won't like being wrong. Mitterand and Kohl have a lot to answer for but one's dead and the other's a pensioner.
Of course the thick-skulled mummy and daddy of Europe will blame it all on us, that it's all be our fault for not playing the game. There lies the real test of courage.
Money's useless and the high street's a graveyard. Capitalism's useless and the banks are bust.
Socialism's the answer and the people are ready.
Bring it on.
But how would well-Wisher limit the population? Sure, it's a big problem but anyone trying to do it would have to kill someone and that reminds me of Pol Pot and Hitler and all the other lovely despots.
I often wonder whether the sheer weight of seven billion people on the planet might be too much for the planet to cope with and that we'll start sliding down the cosmos, but what can we do?
It would be awful if we went with on child per family. Imagine that..a world full of only children. No thanks. Kids deserve siblings.
The Chinese tried that but they didn't want girls so alot of girls were culled and replaced with boys, but now they all want girls cos boys won't be working in la brave new world so i wonder how many boys will be culled. It's just sick.

I've always thought that the population control argument is ridiculous. Look at history - whenever society provides decent health care, jobs, housing and education then population declines. Give the people a chance and all will be well but whilst the ultra rich, now embodied by the bankers, cream off what should be shared around then we will have problems.

My opinions on population are based more on Canada than Malthus. If all I hear about Canada is true
then it seems like a really peaceful, friendly,
happy tolerant sort of nation with a low crime rate and the usual explanation is that there is alot more land and resources than people.

However, I haven't been to Canada. Perhaps I shouldn't believe all the hype.

Have any ABCtalers been to Canada and is it really as peaceful and friendly as it is portrayed?

I think where I am at the moment is peaceful and friendly. I just wish you could see it where you are! I think any other place than where we are is friendly, don't you?

Hell is other people (at least, if you believe J P Sartre), so maybe you're better off killing everybody else and living alone. You could watch yourself on TV all day, the star of your own reality show. Will you accept the fridge tucker challenge? It means getting up off the sofa and going to the kitchen. Nah, too much effort.

“I've always thought that the population control argument is ridiculous.
Look at history - whenever society provides decent health care, jobs, housing and education then population declines.” Tcook

Actually, looking at history I would say it is wars and plagues that cause population declines.

I would agree that when you make people more selfish then they tend to have less children - unless they are rich enough to farm them out to nannies and then boarding school.

I have long argued that “Inconvenient Truths” might not have been good science but it did highlight the fact that the world cannot continue to support a growing population and try to maintain the sort of life style that people in the West would not give up without a bloody struggle.

It may well be that the spread of ‘austerity programs’ might be seen as a step in the right direction but it should be fairly obvious to anyone with even half an un-washed brain that it will not solve Europe’s economic problems but simply exaggerate the gulf between the ‘haves and the have nots‘.
The European and the American economies need increased demand - Capitalism only thrives when demand exceeds supply…
how can austerity increase demand?

"Greeks have lived with austerity for much of the last two years and the country is now in its fifth straight year of recession. Unemployment is nudging 20%, businesses are closing and homelessness is increasing."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16900700

"Europe is wrong on austerity that may sink the global economy deeper into the 1930s style depression which has already begun, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman tells Reuters in an exclusive interview." *see note at end.*
http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/02/03/we-are-already-in-new-great-depr...

Of course it will help that less and less people in Europe will be able to afford to run cars - at least when the austerity programs ‘really’ kick in - because oil is one of the factors that cannot keep pace with growing demand - at least without increasing prices.

Worse, many places, where cars were once essentially aspirational, have managed to manufacture cheap, affordable cars and hence Asia needs substantially more fuel and has longer traffic jams than the West...

Not only does the increase in motor vehicles put a strain on the supply of oil but it also puts a strain on the planet’s ability to deal with the poisonous emissions that, used to be handled by trees but, with increasing urbanisation turns into a kind of toxic haze.

"Nitrous oxide comes out of the car's exhaust and combines with nitrous dioxide.
The oxygen atoms then react in the sunlight to produce ozone.
Ozone then reacts in the sunlight to create other, even more dangerous pollutants called PAMS, which are especially dangerous, especially to the respiratory system"
http://www.wthitv.com/dpp/weather/kevin_orpurt/toxic-haze

However, food and water are both set to become far more expensive as the number of people grows and the amount of food and water shrinks due to the increasingly wild weather. Almost counter-intuitively floods usually reduce the supply of drinking water because the water becomes polluted from various sources and therefore unfit to drink, if not downright toxic, or infected with water borne diseases.

Floods also tend to destroy crops and if areas are flooded for a prolonged period even trees will die.
The other side of the coin is droughts, which have similar results to floods albeit for entirely different reasons.

I could go on and on but I’m sure that those who are not convinced of the dangers of Climate Change by now probably never will be.

For those who do not rely on other people - mostly so called ‘experts’ - to do their thinking for them it should be obvious that the world cannot continue to carry on regardless because the result would not be a comedy.

In 1903, there were approximately 1 billion people inhabiting the Earth.
In 2003, that number was well over 6 billion and more than 1 billion people in the world were chronically starving and malnourished while 3 billion were without decent sanitation.
As you will probably know some time last year (2010) the number of people on the planet exceeded 7 billion and although there have been some slight improvements since 2003 things are starting to deteriorate again…

“2-3 million children die each year from hunger while another 5-8 million die of hunger assisted diseases.”
The human species faces a new threat to its health - perhaps to its survival.
Our burgeoning numbers, the spread of technology, and our conspicuous consumption are overloading Earth's capacity to replenish and repair itself.
Taking a unique perspective, Planetary Overload forcefully points out the consequences to human health of ongoing degradation of Earth's ecosystems.
‘Planetary Overload' by Anthony J. McMichael

Ending world hunger and global starvation is probably an impossible task.
If the global military budget of over 2 trillion dollars ($2,157,172,000,000) were to be re-directed towards creating organic, largely vegetarian, lifestyles then maybe the planet could feed everyone.
But how could you make people accept such a cosmic change when the only way to force people to change their light bulbs was to stop manufacturing the old style bulbs?

The planet needs less people not more and it is difficult to see any reason that people should argue with the idea that - seven billion people is more than enough!
Maybe all those people who disagree would be willing to live in Newt Gingrich’s lunar lodgings but I somehow doubt it.
The Earth is our home and it is already over crowded - yes,
we could continue on until we are the only remaining life form on the planet...
but then you might as well live on the moon!

*Note* Interesting that the report came from Moscow particularly in light of the news that the rights to Julian Assange's chat show has been bought by Russian TV...
it may well be that only Russian or Chinese banks will actually still deal with Wikileaks or Assange.

I caught a bit of Al Jazzera news today which seemed to be belittling Assange for his Russian connection and it struck me how much Al Jazzera has changed since Bush allegedly wanted to bomb it during the Iraq War!

As ever, Mangone has missed the point.

"Actually, looking at history I would say it is wars and plagues that cause population declines."

Tony is talking about the consequences of a good social infrastructure; Mangone is listing things that cause population decline. Because the two have some words in common, Mangone thinks they're one and the same.

“I often wonder whether the sheer weight of seven billion people on the planet might be too much for the planet to cope with and that we'll start sliding down the cosmos, but what can we do?” blighters

“I've always thought that the population control argument is ridiculous. Look at history - whenever society provides decent health care, jobs, housing and education then population declines.” Tcook

“Actually, looking at history I would say it is wars and plagues that cause population declines.” Mangone

I took it that Tcook was addressing blighters question... I certainly was.

Full moon tonight FTSE? ;O)

Is this what we used to call thread hijacking?

Sorry FTSE!
Talking of banking for beginners...

"'Bristol Pound' currency to boost independent traders."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-16852326

A quick glance at the new notes suggested to me that Bristol might find itself getting a currency boost alright...

"Short on cash? Then why not make your own. There's no law against it, so long as you don't try to pass it off as sterling."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8245276.stm

I bought that house from Harry, 100 pounds down and the rest to pay later. I'm a bit broke just now but I expect something will turn up. Borrowed the rest from Bert. He didn't have that much cash, of course, to pay Harry, but that was Ok 'cause he got IOUs from a bunch of the other residents. So that meant he could manufacture some more money to give to Harry, in return for which he promised to give them each a percentage of my repayments. So we're all sorted. I mean, what could go wrong?

You bought a house from Harry, eh?
You should have gone for Tom or Dick...