Preparedness for when

nuatha

GreyQueen wrote: »

nuatha, I just look at the prices asked for wet fish these days and wonder who the heck can afford this stuff?!

I'm seriously thinking of getting my Dad's old handline out and giving it a shot (though I understand you can't leave them unattended anymore - Dad used to put them out at low tide, go to the pub, have a kip and back for the falling tide.)

greenbee, they're barstewards, aren't they? About 20+ years ago I saw a job advert for a grubbyment statistician in the Grauniad. I wished I'd saved it as it was a masterpiece of weasel-wordery which translated as The Successful Applicant Must Be Prepared to Lie Through His or Her Teeth To Use Statistics To Support the Party Line.

I can recall that in 2008, you could get a litre of veg oil for 79p, a Galaxy choc bar for 72p, an 800g loaf for about 80p and a pint of milk sold singly for 25p.

Because I am a devious little shopper, I bought 2 Galaxy bars for £1 (regular offer in F Foods) an 800g Hovis for 10p (YS on Sunday) and several bottles of veg oil reduced to 79p each a few weeks ago. But you have to work at it, bygorry.

Though would be the days when statisticians were honest - the equivalent advert now would simply require that the applicant had no scruples about inventing the required stats.
With luck, skill and determination its still possible to stretch pennies and get good prices, but it needs more of each ingredient every time.

GreyQueen wrote: »

There's an article on the Tech page of the Guardian website now about using XP without support, as there are estimated to be 240 million XP machines still running and close to 20% of operating systems in use today are still XP. People tend to like it. I've had mine since 2002 and my pooter won't run a more up-to-date system. I use Win 7 at work and can't say I'm missing out by not having it at home.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Microsarft didn't look at taking XP back into support in the next few weeks/ months. Just a hunchlette.......

I can't see Microsoft reinstating free support for XP, they're making money from it for the first time in years. Large companies and governments are now paying for XP support (and paying substantial amounts of money)

Frugalsod wrote: »

You can have a higher standard of living with falling prices as long as your wages fall more slowly. The same in reverse. Your wages need to rise faster than inflation. The government is getting nervous about deflation because it will mean ultimately that their entire policy of asset prices rising and fooling people that they are wealthier will come unstuck. If house prices are rising fast you might be wealthier but you cannot spend that wealth unless you can find a way to extract that additional wealth via equity release. The problem with that idea is that interest rates can only really go up from here and so you are looking at much lower disposable incomes once that process starts.

Though the fall in income I referenced was not due to government action. My wife's health fell apart and I had to change my work patterns to be able to care for her when necessary. I had to give up the more lucrative end of my business.

Though with fewer people actually being able to get on the housing ladder thanks to falling or stagnant wages and house prices going up so locking them out. I suspect that 125% mortgages will become acceptable again as the only way of getting buyers back into the market.

The only way a correction can be avoided is to adopt permanently low interest rates That will eventually destroy the pensions industry. They will either require a much higher level of pension contribution to cover the falling returns to ensure that your pension is adequate to cover you in retirement or your pension is so small that you can never afford to retire.

So we will continue to pay for bank bailouts for decades one way or another. The process might be so slow that no one really notices that things are continuing to deteriorate.

The pensions industry has already been destroyed, it might not realise it yet, but the Chancellors recent changes will finish what years of low interests rates and recession have started.

nuatha

ALIBOBSY wrote: »

TBH this is the way I think things will go in a post peak oil world, it will be a slow fall to the bottom not a big crash, I think the archdruid report sums it up as the "slow descent". There will be a few rises and falls as we go of course.

Already jobs are starting to come back to this country as production costs abroad as well as the transporting back here rise-partly due to oil costs also rising. I also think there will be a rise in local businesses as the cost of oil effects the ability of the big stores to undercut local production, I reckon if you have the cash now is a good time to get into local food or wood production-ideally we would love to have some land and run a market garden/copicing business.

Dramatic changes sell books and films.
If the events in the film Day After Tomorrow took 100 years, there wouldn't be a very interesting film.
Gradual decline, with some sudden drops is what I perceive as the likely outcome. Though I do wonder at the short-sightedness of politicians, and can see their actions accelerating the process.

If I had the cash (and the health) I'd be investing in your suggestion. I'd probably be looking at willow withies for the fuel wood production.

ClootiesMum

BB-I really enjoyed "1 Second After". V thought provoking

ClootiesMum

I've not had much time to keep up with the thread recently so apologies if this has been mentioned - but is anyone else getting a bit antsy about all the earthquakes & volcanic activity in N & S America?

COOLTRIKERCHICK

earthquakes??


At the moment i am getting nowhere fast with trying to get the garden ready to at least plant something

Food prices have/are going silly. Suede is more or less a pond everywhere now, and they are small, you dont seem to see the huge ones anymore.

Wonder if fruit and veg prices will take a big hike again due to the mild and wet winter

Frugalsod

nuatha wrote: »

Though the fall in income I referenced was not due to government action. My wife's health fell apart and I had to change my work patterns to be able to care for her when necessary. I had to give up the more lucrative end of my business.



The pensions industry has already been destroyed, it might not realise it yet, but the Chancellors recent changes will finish what years of low interests rates and recession have started.

My comment about falling disposable incomes when interest rates rise would apply even if nothing else happened in your life. The loss of a job or even a promotion would also have some impact on your disposable income. My comment was assuming that nothing else changed, just interest rates. If interest rates rose then you would have less for everything else.

Longer term I suspect that deflation of house prices will mean that while first time buyers can get on the ladder they could be facing decades of falling prices and the fact that they may need to constantly over pay their mortgage to stay ahead of negative equity. This is what has happened in Japan for the last two decades. Where prices have fallen more than 70%. Now prices here are also overvalued but I doubt that they will fall that much. Look at Spain and Ireland where prices have fallen close to half their value only a few years ago, and downward pressure is still present. When prices fall what will be the impact on peoples income?

I agree about the pensions industry, but it will be the pensioners to be that will suffer most.

ClootiesMum

Re earthquakes - there were a couple in California about 7 pointers, a couple in Chile one 7 & one 8 if I remember correctly. A 7 pointer in Mexico today and people have been evacuated near a volcano in Peru. I also think there were a couple of big earthquakes in Nicaragua and the govt advised people to sleep outside (although I may have wrong country here, it was def S America)

nuatha

ClootiesMum wrote: »

I've not had much time to keep up with the thread recently so apologies if this has been mentioned - but is anyone else getting a bit antsy about all the earthquakes & volcanic activity in N & S America?

I don't think the level of Earthquake activity is any higher than normal. 585 earthquakes above 4.5 in the last 30 days.
Possibly more unusual is the doubles, repeated earthquake within 24 hours in the same vicinity of the same magnitude.
A more local example would be Oakham in Rutland where the second quake was actually larger than the first (3.5 against 3.2) (Friday and Thursday of this week).
What I haven't seen make the news was the 20 quakes in 48 hours in the Philippines this week.

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote: »

earthquakes??


At the moment i am getting nowhere fast with trying to get the garden ready to at least plant something

Food prices have/are going silly. Suede is more or less a pond everywhere now, and they are small, you dont seem to see the huge ones anymore.

Wonder if fruit and veg prices will take a big hike again due to the mild and wet winter

I can't see any fruit or veg prices being stable this year. Anything UK grown will have been hit by the very wet winter and the flooding of the Levels.
I haven't seen decent size swede in the shops or on markets for 3-4 years. I'm assuming the supermarkets have decided they'd rather have smaller sizes so they are harvested younger.

Frugalsod wrote: »

My comment about falling disposable incomes when interest rates rise would apply even if nothing else happened in your life. The loss of a job or even a promotion would also have some impact on your disposable income. My comment was assuming that nothing else changed, just interest rates. If interest rates rose then you would have less for everything else.

Sorry, we may be at cross purposes here, I wasn't disagreeing that the general trend left individuals worse off, but trying to push the idea that SHTF scenarios are real and imminent threats to your standard of living over and above what is the general trend, and would be even in a sound economy (if there ever has been such a thing)
Interests rates will rise, the only question is when.
Those people who bought at their maximum repayment level or counted on pay rises and bonuses happening before the interest rate rise are looking at loosing their houses.
When we planned our house purchase we took the pessimistic view that interest rates where unlikely to hit 15% in the next 15 years. So we planned to repay our 25 year mortgage in that 15 years. (Currently we'll be 2 years late, if finances improve we'll aim to be even earlier). This was only possible because we decided to buy well within what was considered to be our budget.
If my forecast on interest rates is wrong, then we're screwed.

Longer term I suspect that deflation of house prices will mean that while first time buyers can get on the ladder they could be facing decades of falling prices and the fact that they may need to constantly over pay their mortgage to stay ahead of negative equity. This is what has happened in Japan for the last two decades. Where prices have fallen more than 70%. Now prices here are also overvalued but I doubt that they will fall that much. Look at Spain and Ireland where prices have fallen close to half their value only a few years ago, and downward pressure is still present. When prices fall what will be the impact on peoples income?

I agree about the pensions industry, but it will be the pensioners to be that will suffer most.

When prices fall, more people will think they can afford to be on the housing ladder - just because prices have halved once doesn't mean they can't do it again.
We bought, because it was cheaper to pay a mortgage on a three bedroom house than it was to rent a two bedroom flat. Unfortunately that is still the case in this area, but that doesn't make mortgages affordable, just housing stupidly expensive.

I agree that those who further from retirement will be the worst off pension wise.

DawnW

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote: »

thanks for the heads up BB about the marbles in ££land.. they are fab for putting into shallow bowls/ cut down bottoms of milk bottles, to use for water drinkers for quail/chicks etc.. the marbles will stop the chicks from drowning..

I always put a big stone in the bowl, so they can scramble out

[Deleted User]

Anyone seem the film?

It's very far fetched, in that the main character wakes up one morning, to find the entire population has disappeared, despite the world being completely undamaged :huh:

It does, however, pose one very interesting question, namely, how long can a human being live, in total isolation, before losing his/her marbles?