Monday, November 7, 2011

Want vs. Need

Greetings good citizen,

Markets opened ‘slightly up’ this morning for (as usual) no apparent reason. Conversely, it didn’t take me long at all to unearth this disturbing article

As you and I both know, businesses that lose money quickly go bankrupt under the ‘fuck you, pay me’ social model that is capitalism.

MANILA, Philippines — Shipping lines are losing a record $141 for each container they haul to Europe from Asia, the world’s second-largest trade route for the boxes, as slowing economies dent demand, ACM/GFI said.

Companies are losing money even at a freight rate of $649 a container because of a fuel surcharge of $790 for each box, Mels Boer and Cherry Wang, container-derivatives brokers at ACM/GFI, said in a report e-mailed Oct. 28. Losses were at the highest level last week since a tally of rates began in March 2009, Wang said.

“Current rates on the route Asia to Europe are way lower than the lows seen in 2009,” said ACM/GFI, a joint venture between London-based ACM Shipping Plc and GFI Group Inc., located in New York. Shipping companies were losing $41 for each 20-foot box in June that year, according to the report.

Not one but TWO undeniable economic trends are on display here, ‘demand exhaustion’ along with energy expenses driving costs out of reach!

It is even more interesting to see stories like this running in, er, ‘batches’

Earlier this week, the (estimated) total number of people in the world blew past 7 billion. To put that number in context, for the first 70,000-odd years of human history, the total human population was around 1 million. Then, over the course of the next ~10,000 years through 1800, the population gradually grew to 1 billion. And now the population has increased 7X in the past 200 years.

Many of the resources used to sustain this population, meanwhile, have not grown.
On the contrary, they've shrunk. Because we've used them up. Oil, for example. And metals. And potassium, which is used to make fertilizer, which is used to grow the food we eat.

Optimists laugh at the idea that we should be concerned about this — ever-growing population and ever-shrinking resources. Science and innovation will save us, they argue. They always have. ("Always," in this context, of course, means the past few hundred years, which is less than 1% of human history.)
Read more:

The goods will ultimately reach the market and be sold ‘for a profit’ even if this is done by ‘liquidators’. The ‘suppliers’ get liquidated as well because they are the ones that ultimately ‘eat’ the losses when something like this happens.

The ships themselves, along with the containers, are ‘parked’ in the middle of the ocean, where they will wait for business to, er, ‘pick-up’.

And if it doesn’t?

Oh fucking well!

We, as a species, can no longer afford the ‘luxury’ of maintaining a commerce system that exists to enrich the owners at the expense of its customer base.

The coming carnage will be staggering. Billions will die and large swaths of infrastructure will be destroyed (since all money is funny I won’t attach a ‘dollar value’ to ‘property destruction’, it’s all relative anyway.)

So, back to the beginning…we are going into the fourth year of the so-called ‘Great Recession’ and ‘consumer demand’ still hasn’t stopped falling.

What needs to be done about this, good citizen?

Our Libertarian friends (and oxymoron in itself as Libbies are so ‘self-sufficient’ they don’t need ‘friends’) subscribe to the notion that you don’t ‘need’ ANYTHING, you ‘want’ stuff…like breathing and water/food.

Somehow, bizarrely, this ‘wanting’ isn’t ‘enough’. Perhaps this is how they get to sleep at night. By turning ‘biological imperatives’ into (selfish) ‘desires’ they can, in good conscience, ignore them…and if you die as a result of their convictions, it’s not their problem, it’s yours…

Ironically, the ‘solution’ for the Libertarian problem is to give them precisely what they want, a community populated with ‘like-minded’ individuals!

But I digress, this is not ‘totally’ about the cancer that is Libertarianism, it’s about the ‘end result’ of the ‘fuck you, pay me’ mindset.

Um, losing $140 dollars per container will lead to the same thing that happened during the Great Depression when farmers couldn’t recover the cost of harvesting their crops, they abandoned them while millions of US children starved!

That’s what the ‘more for me’ capitalism get you!

Which is to point out (once again) that what passes for society is being seriously ‘mismanaged’.

I mix in the ‘Libertarian Philosophy’ lessons to provide you with a reason ‘why’ this highly improbable bullshit is going on. In a world (yes WORLD) ‘ruled’ by less than .01% of the population you don’t need to have a lot of Libertarians to fuck things up royally!

That’s when ‘scary’ hits you where you live, the realization that the few can and will fuck things up big-time for the rest of us!

In a nutshell, the plan is to push us into our own cesspool (that they conveniently had dug for us) then to let us kill each other off, only to ‘re-emerge’ in a ‘barbaric’ future to ‘rescue’ us from ourselves.

The, er, ‘ridiculous’ part of this ‘fantasy’ is the ‘honeymoon’ of living under ‘noble nobles’ usually lasts less than a single generation…then its back to the ‘us vs. them’ game.

They institute taxes (for us, not them) to make ‘social improvements’ like courthouses and jails (ironically) then they can’t understand why people are ‘unhappy’ (especially the victims of the ‘for profit’ justice system.)

As you can see good citizen, there are many factors in our civilization that desperately ‘need’ re-visiting…although a Libbie would say I merely ‘want’ to revisit these issues.

Which raises a curious question, how does a Libertarian, er, classify, their, er, ‘desire’ to be ‘free’? is it a want or is it a need?

I suspect it depends on whose freedom is being discussed, when it come to the freedom of others, it’s a ‘want’ but when it comes to their own it is suddenly a ‘need’, go figure!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

2 comments:

  1. interesting read and nice written. Hope to see more.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for my second comment/compliment of 2011!

    Stay tuned, things are just getting interesting as the OWS 'showdown' has begun!

    ReplyDelete