You need to prepare when everybody thinks you’re silly and nobody thinks it’s a good idea.
When everybody thinks it’s a good idea, this becomes your problem:
https://summit.news/2020/02/24/coronavirus-store-shelves-empty-as-panic-buying-hits-italy/
I was thinking about the current rise of gold and silver prices and trying to figure out an apparent cause, when I looked at a 2 year graph and stumbled upon this interesting thing:
There seems to be a 6 month cycle of sudden rises and subsequent slow drops, like teeth on a saw blade, and the “blade” has a 20° incline, approximately. This means that the current events have very little to do with the pattern, as tempting it may be for one to grasp at them, looking for explanations. I don’t have an explanation for the 6 months cycle, but if I had to guess, it might have something to do with financial cycles I’m not aware of.
There’s something I hear occasionally in different contexts, and it never fails to piss me off.
“I’m proud to be X”, where X is an element of a set of races, genders, sexual orientations, nations and similar, presumably immutable properties.
If you didn’t do anything to earn it, what exactly are you proud of?
By definition you didn’t deserve it. You just found yourself having those attributes and properties and you had to deal with it. Where does pride come into play, exactly?
Being proud of an immutable property makes as little sense as being ashamed of it. It makes sense to be proud or ashamed of something you did. For instance, you learned how to code in c++. Good for you, that’s something you can be proud of. But to be proud of being born a certain way? You didn’t do anything. What’s there to be proud of? You can be happy or displeased with what you got, because that’s a function of relative comparison of one’s properties against the properties of others. If you have a high IQ, or if you look good, that’s something to be happy about, but proud? I don’t get how you can be proud of looking good, as if you personally designed yourself and it turned out well. No, you just lucked out.
There is a possible counter-argument, I know. If you happen to identify as a member of a certain group, and that group as a collective did something good or bad relative to other groups, you can have emotional reactions. This can be as trivial as your national football team having done well in the world championship, or something as nefarious as your nation having committed genocide and lost the world war. Still, there’s a problem: if you didn’t actually play football in the world championship, what exactly are you proud of? Someone else did well, and you identify with the same collective entity? Someone else killed people and you live in the same country 60 years later and that somehow connects the two? Those collective identities exist, they can be felt, they are real, but that doesn’t make them any less stupid.
I can’t feel any kind of pride about being white, or being a man. Honestly, I can’t. It’s like being born a chicken and being proud of your feathers. The general situation of being a chicken is alarming and tragic, if anything, and if that happened to you, and you were proud because you’re a female chicken that can lay eggs and all the roosters want to fuck you, I can’t see that as a sign of intelligence for the life of me.
Maybe I just suck at identifying with a species of ape, or with particular territorial divisions within the species, but for the most part, I see all those identifications and divisions as most people probably see identifications and divisions between species of chickens.
The banks worldwide are preparing the legal framework for the bail-in, which means they will basically prevent their bankruptcy by adding a portion or totality of all customer funds to their balance sheet.
In plain language, the Cyprus solution set a precedent. There are several ways a bank can handle bankruptcy. It can be bought by a larger bank (bank depositors win, larger bank absorbs the cost), it can be fixed by the state using tax money (bank depositors win, tax payers lose), it can simply go bankrupt (bank depositors lose everything), or, as it happened in Cyprus, the bank can add a portion of all deposits to its own balance sheet and fix itself (bank depositors lose a third or more of their money, but the state is happy because it doesn’t have to spend tax money on fixing a broke bank, and the bank is happy because it doesn’t have to try and find a bigger bank crazy enough to pour money into a pit of doom).
In even plainer language, the banks are all in serious shit, massive bankruptcies of major players are on the horizon, and they intend to screw you over. If you have significant amounts of money in the bank, take it out and convert everything you don’t need for monthly expenses into gold bullion, because when this shitstorm strikes, anybody close will not be smelling like roses.
This also puts a different light on their recent attempts to discourage the use of cash. It’s certainly not because of “money laundering and financing terrorism”, it’s actually because if you have cash with you, they can’t steal it. If it’s on their account, they control your access to your money. If you have cash, they don’t control anything. Also, that’s the reason why the state wants you to have everything on your bank account: if it’s there, the banks can steal it and the state doesn’t have to use tax money to fix the banks, and they can also create huge amounts of digital money out of thin air without anyone actually knowing the amount of money in circulation. Makes inflation much easier and cheaper for them. So, essentially, if you own gold you must be a terrorist. 🙂
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Allow me to remind you what gold did in the last 12 months:
Yes, that’s the all time high. In plain language, if you bought a Krugerrand in 2005, it cost you around 300 EUR. Today you would pay around 1500 EUR. Either gold appreciated 5 fold in 15 years, or Euro was diluted to shit in 15 years. You tell me. In any case, if you kept your money in the bank, you can now wipe your arse with it. If you kept it in form of Krugerrands, you can now buy five times more euros. To me it doesn’t matter much because I was dirt poor 15 years ago, had neither money nor gold so yeah.
“Religious music” is usually quite terrible and cringe-worthy; usually a generic tune and text that’s a recital of someone’s cultist brainwashing. However, there are examples of tunes that were good enough to become famous hits, with the religious undertone that’s either so subtle that it flew under the radar, or so over the top that it was perceived as a joke. I’ll make a list, just to preoccupy myself with something less depressing than the news. I already giggle like a schoolgirl thinking how surprising some of the titles may be. 🙂
Desireless – Voyage Voyage
Mr. Mister – Kyrie
Mr. Mister – Broken Wings
Bobby McFerrin – Don’t worry be Happy
Boy George – Hare Krishna
The Beloved – Sweet Harmony
Ofra Haza – Im Nin’alu
These are, of course, the ones I like (ok, I don’t really like “Sweet Harmony”, it’s self-righteous propagandistic bullshit). There are at least two I profoundly hate on philosophical and theological grounds, because they reject transcendence in favor of this world; basically, they are a “fuck you” to God.
Lilly Wood and the Prick and Robin Schulz – Prayer in C
Queen – Who Wants To Live Forever