The Recession - Off Topic

[mudskipper]

*You* can *believe* the moon is made of green cheese if you want to. *I* trust evidence.

You have evidence the moon is not made of green cheese? I challenge you to publish your evidence and open it up to a full and frank peer review.

[Lizzie_Claymore]

*You* can *believe* the moon is made of green cheese if you want to. *I* trust evidence.

You have evidence the moon is not made of green cheese? I challenge you to publish your evidence and open it up to a full and frank peer review.

Hmmmm. This could be tougher to defend that I originally thought!



OK, I concede that it might just be Gorgonzola!

[Essexgungefan]

I thought it was Wensleydale or Stilton, but Gromit said otherwise!!!

[wampony]

You had better believe this recession is real.
I won't bore you with my personal situation, but I have been out of work now for too many months. First it was an occasional getting sent home from work early, then a cut in hours, and finally redundancy with no prior warning.
Actually where we live we could see it coming a few months before anyone in the government or media said anything at all, with freinds in construction and farming noticing changes, local shops vanishing overnight, and a noticable rise in the price of scrap metals. (don't ask me what this has to do with recessions, but apparantly it is what happens).
Not being pessimistic, but I can't see it coming to an end soon either.


As for global warming, I will now tell you a tale I was told about five years ago by a retired man who I was delivering a parcel to on a cold day in the summer.
I remarked "so much for global warming", to which he told me this.

"I used to work for a research company before I retired. We were told by the then government to come up with a reason to justify closing the coal mines down. The reason was the government didn't want the country being held to ransom by the miners (miners strike in the 80's), and a repeat of the trouble in the 70's with power cuts etc.
The government decided to end the miners strike by closing the mines down. The outcome was our company came up with the fact that British coal contained excessive sulphur which was causing global warming when it was burnt in power stations, and investment should be made available for alternative power generation. The reason that foreign coal contains less sulphur was used to justify buying in coal from abroad, thus rendering our coal mines redundant, and nicely removing the problems of the miners from the government. Alternative methods of generation were proposed at the time, but never really came to anything.
However, once the global warming thing had been started, it quickly grew out of all proportions, and was irreversible as the government had used it as an excuse to make thousands of men redundant. It is now used an an excuse to tax everyone all over the world."
He then finished off by saying "you can choose to believe me or not, but that is how it happened."

Something for you all to think about anyway.

[Phantom]

Climate change is very real. Watch 'An Inconvenient Truth'. Or the news.

[Lizzie_Claymore]

Sulphur doesn't cause global warming (which is caused by carbon dioxide, methane and fluorocarbons depleting the ozone layer). It does, however, cause acid rain (sulphuric acid), which would have made such a decision more credible to try to reduce the effects of that. Ironically, the sulphur in acid rain actually helps to *reduce* global warming - one of the many proposed solutions to global warming is to create an artificial 'sun screen' by firing sulphur into the stratosphere (above the height at which it could then cause acid rain) so your retired bloke's ideas are way short of the mark.

In any case, it still doesn't alter the fact that viable sources of oil and gas are already running out regardless of whether global warming is occurring (which the hard facts have proved) and what is causing that, so burying one's head in the sand and trying to ignore the problem is the sort of childishly ludicrous response that we've come to expect from the Republicans and Tea Party people in the states who are allied to the oil producers.

As I said before, don't believe those who have vested interests (on either side). Look at independent scientific evidence. If you were in a court of law and up for murder, you'd rely on hard facts and evidence, not someone else's "beliefs".

[wampony]

I'm not saying I believe in what he told me, just repeating what I can remember from the conversation five years ago, but this man seemed determined to prove he was right. Not what you need when you still had half a van load of parcels to deliver in about three hours, if I remember rightly I was already behind on my delivery times due to not knowing that area well.
So I am still not sure if there is any truth at all in what he was telling me, or if he was one of life's make-believers, or just anti-government.

[Lizzie_Claymore]

...or more likely what is known in the trade as "a nutter"!

[muckypup]

...or more likely what is known in the trade as "a nutter"!

I think you might be right! I don't want to hijack this thread as a global warming one, but even though I'm somewhat sceptical I saw this today and thought it was pretty cool.

[sweetnpied]

the idea that the recession was created by governments and the media is ludicrously naive. The problem was created by banks lending people money they could never afford to pay back simply so that the bankers could get their performance-related pay. It was 'pass the parcel' time and then the music stopped. I had been warning people about this several years before it happened and most simply didn't want to know.

Boy, where have I heard THIS story before. Oh yes, it was me saying the EXACT same thing in the universal health care off-topic topic. And it's exactly what happened here in the States. And on top of that, the amount of mortgage fraud and straw buyers purchasing homes with no intent of ever living there, and turning the properties over immediately for a ridiculous profit, all so that everyone could line their pockets with the monies spent on getting a new mortgage. It turns my stomach sour to think about it. Bush's plan to get us out of the recession that was coming after 9/11 was to deregulate the banks, thinking they would monitor themselves. Laissez-faire capitalism may be lazy on the part of the government doing it's job to watch the robber-barons, but it's certainly not fair. Unfettered capitalists need regulation or the rich will steal the poor blind every time. (Should we mention Getty & Rockefeller?)

people in the public sector, providing much-needed services for everyone (and many of those being on lower than average salaries) are the ones paying for the unfettered rampant capitalism that stems back to Margaret Thatcher's de-regulation of The City on 27th October 1986 and the idea that a country can exist on service sector alone without any manufacturing. "Let the markets decide", she said. Well, they have - and look where it's got us! The rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. I'm certainly not against private enterprise but there have to be limits on the banks. There is still a risk that they'll do it again at the moment as the regulation is still not properly in place. We also need a proper mixed economy - you can't create wealth if the entire nation just cuts each other's hair and takes in each other's washing!

Again, something I said in the health care topic. (Not saying you're stealing my ideas, Claymore, just saying I'm not simply agreeing with yours just to agree with you.) I read somewhere that economies need about 20% manufacturing to prosper and America is reaching below 10%. Very dangerous, indeed!

The next thing to watch out for is inflation rising over the next few years as the effect of all the money 'created' by the Bank of England starts to be felt. If that happens, interest rates will rise sharply from their historic lows, which could in itself trigger lower growth - so we might see a return to stagflation. I hope not, however!

Amen, Claymore. Amen! America's not helping in this area either. Don't get me wrong. I recognize Obama and his people are a million times smarter than I. And I honestly do think they're doing just about as good a job as they can, considering the circumstances. And, for the short term, his plan to infuse government money into the economy may have temporarily righted the ship. But I'm still very concerned. Yes, FDR used the same basic concept to try to get us out of the Great Depression, but no two economic cycles are ever the same. First, a great amount of the gov't money in the 30s went into building useful things to give the manufacturing end of the economy a boost, road construction, dam building, etc. Second, a little thing like WWII presented a shitload of manufacturing opportunities. And there's no sense hoping for WWIII because we won't be manufacturing anything for that one. We'll be plowing out the snow from the nuclear winter. At least for as long as we're able.

(Okay. So I'm being a LITTLE fatalistic here, and maybe the last three sentences of the previous paragraph were a little over-the-top, a little overly dramatic. But I'm being perfectly honest with you about this -- these times frighten the shit out of me. I wonder if that's why, suddenly, I've become such a wamaholic once again? Thinking I'd better get it in now while I have a chance? And guys, you might want to avoid pointing out the obvious double-entendre in the previous sentence!)

[Hayley]

I am too scientifically ignorant to comment on global warming so have no idea if it is real or not, but David Attenborough says so and he has no reason to lie about it! I do know the recession is real cos it has completely changed my job (for the worse) in the last year or so, and I hate it.

I know that compared to people who have lost their jobs I am lucky so please don't think I am moaning but when I became PA to the man I work for he was the publisher of a series of successful hobby magazines and owner of a couple of sets of villas he sold/rented in Spain. My job was to go around congratulating/kicking arse in the magazines, all of which were full of happy staff writing about what they loved - or to sit in the sun in Spain helping people enjoy their holidays in their bought/rented villa by making sure they had everything they wanted. Now the market for hobby magazines has gone to the wall, the info they contained being freely available on the internet, and the relative collapse of the Euro means nobody can afford to rent, let alone buy a villa.

The result? I have spent a year having to tell dedicated magazine staff (many of whom have been working on the same mag for 20 years) they are being made redundant or listen to well-off folk wingeing and wanting to sell their bloody villas, treating me as if I was somehow responsible for their situation. At the same time, my boss takes his economic frustrations out on me and tries to get me to impose 'stealth cuts' at both the mags and the villas - for which I take the blame from the staff or owners. In short I get grief from both sides. Where once I was greeted with a smile, now everyone hates my guts.

I know that this is nothing compared to losing your job (with the added joy that any 'new' govt will cut down on benefits just when they are most needed), but it goes a long way to explaining why I just want to tell my boss to stuff it and become a full time splosher instead!

Hayley

[sweetnpied]

but it goes a long way to explaining why I just want to tell my boss to stuff it and become a full time splosher instead!

LOL! Hayley and I are both blaming how we feel about the current eco-political environment as justification for more sploshing! Thank god I'm not the only one with that take on how to resolve the current trouble we're all in!