Tiny House #8

Alternate Universe

An Alternate Universe

In an alternate universe up maybe down and lies may be the truth but in the world we live in some concocted theory is not a basis in fact. In the world we live in there is no such thing as an economic fact (too many variables dependent on perception) which is why economics is based in economic theory, which in turn is why we are in so much economic trouble. From here this post could take a bunch of different directions so I will guide the prose down the path I believe will identify the biggest problem we face today.

Now remember this is coming from an old redneck that knows a couple big words but operates in a world of common sense where lofty ideology and advanced degrees don’t mean a hill of beans. It doesn’t take an Ivy League education to know that you can’t spend more than you make and if you do it will have to be paid back at some point with interest. A concept our elected representatives can’t seem to understand, a concept that is miscomprehended by the population. Pay the interest on the debt but never pay the debt. The government is a service organization, we pay for protection and for public services, we hire representatives to look out for our interests because we are paying a lot for those services and the propensity for corruption is high. This is the same corruption we fought a Revolutionary War to get away from. Yet here we are cornered by the very people we pay to protect us and involuntarily forced to pay more for ideological social change we don’t want. I was once told by a group of Spanish speaking illegal’s that there was no need for them to learn English because the U.S. would soon be a Spanish speaking country. Are we weak or stupid? The answer is, we are both.

I can’t believe the idiocy I hear and read these days. The days of me trying to explain the truth about economics and politics is coming to an end. I’ve warned and given the signals that indicate a change is taking place. Maybe a monarchy or a socialist nation is what you want, it certainly appears that way.

The biggest problem we face today is a population that lives in an alternative universe where stupid is smart and weak is strong.

Paint on the Tiny House

You folks seem to like the video at the beginning of the blog posts - so here we go.

Now on to more serious matters, namely indications of economic conditions. There has been a lot of bad news in Europe and the Middle East and of course we have our own domestic problems but on a more fundamental level we are seeing an economic trend worldwide toward more financial manipulation. We of course know we are the trend setters in manipulation of every kind and now we have France wanting to debase their monetary supply by printing more currency to be more competitive in the world market place. The same country that proclaimed last month that 60% of their debt was illegal. Doesn't it seem a little coincidental that the head of the IMF is French. How about Germany - the driving force of the EU - looking for more bail outs because half of their country is bankrupt. Here in the U.S. we have the president asking for 4.2 billion to deal with the illegal children coming over the Mexican border when it would only cost 100 million to fly them back home - could that money be for funding a bunch of other things ? He won't say.

I read an article recently by Dr. Rickards about how important the next policy statement of the Fed is to the direction of our economy. If they continue the tapper on QE 3 it will drive us further into recession and if they pause on the tapper or reverse the tapper it will cause international loss of confidence in the our financial system. I don't know but it sounds like there is no way out that isn't going to cause us pain. Exactly how sure are you that our government will do the right thing ?

Building a tiny house 4

Conformity

I've borrowed a passage from Barbs new book for my blog post this week - I hope she doesn't sue me.

"I am overwhelmed by all the things that are going on around us, and I bet you are, too. What 

can you do about it? Hang on and hope for the best? The U.S. has changed so much that it can never go 

back to the "good old days" – and were they so good anyway? But the encroachment of bigger and 

bigger government in this country means that many of our personal freedoms have been curtailed or, in 

some cases, eliminated completely. 

 

So what do we do when we don't know what to do? We look at what other people are doing 

and take our cues from them. In 1951, Solomon Asch, a pioneer in the field of social psychology, wanted 

to see how far people would conform to the opinions of others. Previous research had shown that, 

when a situation is ambiguous, in that there is no right or wrong answer, people tend to go along with 

what others do. Asch set up a situation in which the answers were completely unambiguous. He had 

research participants judge the lengths of lines, showing them a line to compare to three other lines. 

The question was very simple: Which of the three lines is this one most like? The answer was always 

very clear. If I were to show you those comparisons, you'd think I was crazy to ask you. But what Asch 

did was have each research participant sitting at a table with other people. The participant believed 

that the others at the table were also participants but, in fact, they were confederates who had been 

told how to respond on certain critical trials. On the first few trials the confederates gave the obvious, 

correct answer, as did the real participant. But on the critical trials, the confederates gave an incorrect 

answer; in the original experiment, all the confederates gave the same incorrect answer. When the 

participant's turn to respond came, he (the participants were all male) faced a dilemma. It was clear 

what the answer was, but all these other guys gave the incorrect answer. What did the real participant 

do? 

 

Asch believed that, because the answer was so clear, participants would ignore what the others 

said and give the correct answer. However, what he found was that, averaging across all participants, 

one-third of the responses on critical trials were incorrect. Overall, 75% of the participants gave at least 

one incorrect answer. In a control condition, with no confederates, the error rate was less than 1%. 

 I should point out that the conforming responses of the real participants decreased if one of the 

confederates gave an answer different from the rest of the group, especially if he gave the correct 

answer. 

Social psychologists have studied conformity ever since and have concluded that the tendency 

to conform is strong. 

 

The reason I brought this up is that we look at others to find out what to do. If it seems that no 

one is doing anything to alleviate the problems, we think that doing nothing is the thing to do. The 

problem is that we have very little information about what others might be doing. I doubt anyone who 

sees me in the grocery store thinks that Ray and I are preparing the best we can for what might be 

coming. 

 

We are accumulating three-month's-worth of food. There are a number of firms who will sell 

you what I call "apocalypse" supplies; they are expensive and I see no need to buy that stuff. We will 

soon have enough canned vegetables and meat, dried beans, rice, and other relatively nonperishable 

staples to last us three months. Don't buy it all at once, at the same place; Ray says it's like making 

moonshine. You don't buy 200 pounds of sugar at one store. Someone will know that you are up to 

something. And it is relatively inexpensive to do it a little bit at a time by buying a small package of beans or rice or a couple of extra cans of tuna each week. Unless you have a big family, you don't need 

to buy the biggest packages; the food could spoil and go to waste before you use it all. You don't want 

to have 50-pound bags of flour around to get weevil-ridden."