Don't you want to be rich for the quality of life?
Clearly you can buy more stuff if you have money, and there are thousands of big box stores that have worked incredibly hard to offer you stuff that can make you happy.
Why look. Sears has a beach for sale, 40% off.
Oh there are different solutions to various problems popping up in various forms as of recent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dignity_Village
The Village now features dedicated land near Portland International Airport, elected community officials and crude but functional cooking, social, electric, and sanitary facilities,[1] Dignity Village got its start as a collection of tents and campers "squatting" illegally on unused public land near Downtown Portland.
First Lady Michelle Obama Promotes $400 Million Initiative to Increase Access to Healthy, Affordable Food Nationwide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeganism
Freeganism is the practice of reclaiming and eating food that has been discarded. Freegans and freeganism are often seen as part of a wider "anti-consumerist" ideology, and freegans often employ a range of alternative living strategies based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
The book describes the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control.[1] The essay uses various examples from history and philosophy, all of which suggest that the best way to create a non-hierarchical system of social relationships is to concentrate on the present and on releasing one's own mind from the controlling mechanisms that have been imposed on it.
http://www.reddit.com/r/simpleliving/comments/1d195l/want_to_live_in_ecovillagehippie_commune_help/
Looking to leave and go be part of something rather than this twisted society. Ready to grow my own food and live a new lifestyle. I need help finding hippie communes, eco villages, etc.
anyways, any info on any? Have you ever lived in one? I want to know anything :)
If I can find a descent spot this spring/summer, I plan to try giving one of these a go near a stream, as opposed to wind power. It's the copper cabling to my knowledge that is the real expensive part. Magnets are pretty tough to come by too, but they are out there. I might make it a summer a project with my nephew if they are interested in trying to scrap one together. His dads an engineer, so...
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-1000-watt-wind-turbine/
Fuck, I know where +$100,000 worth of farm gear is sitting and rotting a field next to an abandoned house which has been that way for at least 5 years. The farmer is dead. Would I ever steal that? If I don't someone else will. However, I am not at that stage yet.
An interesting statistic.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/16/poverty-household-income_n_5828974.html
Despite five years of economic recovery, poverty is still stubbornly high in America.
More than 45 million people, or 14.5 percent of all Americans, lived below the poverty line last year, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday.
So clearly economic recovery has nothing to do with economic equality.
In the sixties there was more economic equality (whoops, sorry, less), however now you can see that while more people are in poverty than ever before due to population numbers the equality is shifting towards what if you ask me is long term trend into large class divisions (pockets of disparity as opposed to widespread cultural employment trends, for lacks of dumping out pages of stuff on the ever changing job markets).
If that theory is somewhat true, we should see pockets in the USA where poverty and crime rise significantly, and potentially unnoticed against new national "medians" or averages.
A new era of ghettos if you will.
If this is accurate it will hint that the cost of living is also playing a significant role in poverty levels. Those with jobs simply cannot meet the rising costs to live.
That seems to be the truth, with the rising consumer price index.
Now that I've gotten the hard facts out of the way, I can offer some interesting paranoid delusional perspectives on the declining birth rates, due to the very well known costs of raising a family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_baby_boom
Who commits suicide more than anyone else? The unspoken truth. Men raising families.
http://www.bcmj.org/articles/silent-epidemic-male-suicide
• The male suicide rate increases fairly steadily with age, peaking in the late 40s, then falling significantly and rising again in the 80s.
How do I know? Because the very few men I have known to commit suicide, have been family men. It's like catching the tail end off the epidemic. No co-incidences, sort of thing, after you narrow down other possibilities.
What does this mean for those fully aware that the apocalypse is inevitable and will only continue with time? It means there will be tons of worthless properties out there that real estate agents cannot sell or afford to upkeep. So I highly suggest you get out there this summer and keep it underground. Get to know your real estate laws, and screw the sign that says, "we own this".
Any real estate people truly understand how people who hold properties have really done nothing except buy debt at a reduced rate costing them essentially nothing? That is my current working theory. I mean the properties I am seeing snatched up are so high risk, nobody in their right mind would that investment. More often than not, I am seeing properties demolished even after scouting the properties and fully understand the damage and cost to repair them is. I mean people are demolishing houses that simply need a new roof. Maybe there are property tax laws that come into play? Perhaps it is cheaper to keep a piece of property with no building on the premises, than it is to repair a roof?
I am only starting to understand the real estate market.
Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- A U.S. housing-market revival may prove illusory and the threat of further weakness remains, said Robert Shiller, a professor at Yale University and co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values.
“The housing market has been declining for something like six years now, it could go on, that’s my worry,†Shiller told Tom Keene in a Bloomberg Television interview today in Davos, Switzerland. “The short-term indicators are up now, it definitely looks better, but we saw that in 2009.â€
Now before you assume I am talking about stealing properties. No. I am talking about people who put up a sign 10 years ago, and genuinely do not own the property anymore. Again that is grey area with who owns what and whether government reclaim that or whether it is public domain so to speak. Last summer I noticed property developer signs that were nearing 15 years old, and not a single scrap of evidence anywhere supports that they've moved forward on any of their claims. They file something at city hall for like 50.00 bucks, the cost off the application. The city puts up hundred dollars signs, and everything rots. Imagine multi millionaires losing their fortunes, or people dying, or getting sick long term irreversibly and so on. Occasionally when the property is hot, the government will put up notices in the newspapers asking for defunct owners to come forth before they reclaim the property.
Let's put it this way. If there are no jobs in the area, then nobody is going to move into a house in that area with declining property values. Or very few people will, and when there are no commercial booms in the area, tearing down a property, does not mean a rental complex will be going up to take it's place. Property developers tend to think big, and they will not invest heavily into properties where people have no urban job market support to pay rent or mortgage. Only an opinion. I've seen a few properties out there (which are not advertised on your typical abandoned property websites), where if I had gotten to them 5-10 years ago, they wouldn't have fallen that far into total disrepair due to molds, etc...
This is 3 years after the recession.
Any thoughts?
Well, we're fucked, I guess??? Things probably will get worse and there's nothing we can do to stop it.
Edit: It'll be awesome once the world has finally consumed all the oil available. The implications will be awful!!! Everything we know will disappear and civilization itself will collapse.
It's a complex issue. We should be thankful with some transnationals as well.