Preparedness for when

muffin_man_7

Starting to cool down now 76f i got meself a new thermometer for 50p and at that price a spare as well me and cezar dont like this heat it'll go hot in lr again later til around 4 am i am not leaving window open tonight big moth spooked both of us last night i zapped it with one of them zappy bat things on the prep side i git me a new flask was £4.50 down to £1.50 bargain i think

jk0

I just received a lovely winter hat in the post yesterday, all the way from Russia. I accidentally ordered a size bigger, but it fits like a glove:

http://www.ushanka.com/category/military-ushanka/

(Yeah, I know it's a bit mad to be talking about winter hats when it's so hot, but I guess that's what prepping is all about.)

Also this week I received this solar lantern which I am very pleased with. It took 3 days to charge fully with the solar panel inside my garage skylight.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Yellow-Solar-Camping-Lantern-Charger/dp/B00C691KZW/ref=pd_ybh_12

thriftwizard

jk0 wrote: »

I just received a lovely winter hat in the post yesterday, all the way from Russia. I accidentally ordered a size bigger, but it fits like a glove:

http://www.ushanka.com/category/military-ushanka/

(Yeah, I know it's a bit mad to be talking about winter hats when it's so hot, but I guess that's what prepping is all about.)

Also this week I received this solar lantern which I am very pleased with. It took 3 days to charge fully with the solar panel inside my garage skylight.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Yellow-Solar-Camping-Lantern-Charger/dp/B00C691KZW/ref=pd_ybh_12

You are not alone, jk0, I sold a (real) sheepskin hat and a big fur Russian-style hat to forward-thinking festival-goers last week! Well, when you see something like that at a good price, it's daft not to, as the lady who bought the sheepskin one said.

Mind you I only sold 3 out of 14 pure wool berets, despite Saturday being International Day - can't imagine why!

PS - am also a fan of the solar light suppliers; I used a string of their solar lights inside a set of ancient & very faded Chinese fabric lanterns on my stall & they looked fabulous, very atmospheric.

jk0

Anyone else get updates from Goldsilver.com?

Mike Maloney made an interesting point yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D96HjDbTs1s&list=UUThv5tYUVaG4ZPA3p6EXZbQ#t=56

Edit: Your stall sounds wonderful Angie. I wish I had been there.

cornishchick

Jko , I have that lantern on my wish list, let us know how you get on with it.

daz378

yes quantitive easing, the fact that the bank are only required to keep approx 8...10 % of total deposits....all depends on the trust held by the people to be an effective medium of exchange...... overlending..... runaway QE is a form of Russian roulette threatening that trust, by prepping we are trying to circumvent the dangers in the system... hoarding food if money loses value.... developing skills needed in a broken system, even councils have tried developing local currency, most councils recommend credit unions ......my next hols will concentrate on making more space for prepps, having a bit of a clear out, my fellow colleagues have hogged all the annual leave slots to near end of september.... long stretch ahead

[Deleted User]

DAZ if the system breaks the skills and knowledge to enable you to live independent of the remnants of civilisation will stand you in very good stead. I think if you know how to make a shelter to keep you warm and dry, know what is safe food to forage and what season it is available in and how to obtain safe drinking water it will mean that you don't have to fight over the scraps that are left in so called civilised areas but would enable you to escape the urban jungle and live a reasonable life until things settle down again. It may be that the disruptions are a temporary blip and there will be order again in not much time but it may be that your skills will be a very useful commodity to others who will value you for them and hopefully help to form a community and learn from you too. You can keep your skills with you whatever happens even if you can't keep your provisions and equipment for some reason. Knowing how to do things is well worth having in your portfolio.

Frugalsod

Butterfly_Brain wrote: »

Report it to paypal straight away!

[EMAIL="spoof@paypal.com"]spoof@paypal.com[/EMAIL]

I get quite a few of those and must report one attempt every month.

What you need to do is to forward it with full headers to the spoof@paypal.com address.

Frugalsod

daz378 wrote: »

yes quantitive easing, the fact that the bank are only required to keep approx 8...10 % of total deposits....all depends on the trust held by the people to be an effective medium of exchange...... overlending..... runaway QE is a form of Russian roulette threatening that trust, by prepping we are trying to circumvent the dangers in the system... hoarding food if money loses value.... developing skills needed in a broken system, even councils have tried developing local currency, most councils recommend credit unions ......my next hols will concentrate on making more space for prepps, having a bit of a clear out, my fellow colleagues have hogged all the annual leave slots to near end of september.... long stretch ahead

They used to keep 8 to 12% of deposits as cash it is now much closer to 1%. The change happened during the 1980's when they deregulated the banks. In fact the banks core capital hold is still less than 8%. Then when you consider that they can have multiples of that outstanding as potential liability so a mere few percent fall in the value combined with a failure of a major counter party will mean that they will be insolvent overnight. This government are not fixing the problem so it is only a matter of when things crumble. So good reasons to prep.

As for a medium of exchange it all depends on whether we get hyper inflation, which I think is very unlikely. What we are more at risk of is deflation, because most peoples incomes are not keeping up with expenses. All the extra liquidity created by QE is not entering the real economy except via banks speculating in food commodities driving up food prices.

Look at the retail figures for the main supermarkets, they are struggling. With the exception of high end retailers like Waitrose, the pound stores and the german discounters all the big supermarket chains have reported stagnant or falling sales.

The housing market is overvalued but when it pops the Coalition cannot blame the previous government. When that will happen is anyones guess.

GreyQueen

Very true. I feel frustrated that so many people have an 'economic history memory' which expires about 3 years in the past, even people who were well into adulthood at the time they need to recall. I know the meeja works extremely hard to convince us that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but I wish people paid a bit more attention and weren't so liable to get bushwacked by events they hadn't prepared for.

I was a new graduate in the late 1980s at the height of what was a manic property bubble. Every conversation, it seemed, was about getting on the housing ladder. People were feverish with the need to buy NOW, and evangelical that everyone else needed to buy NOW, or else.

The intimation wasn't that you'd be left on the wrong side of surging property prices and have to pay more later, it was that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which, if missed, would condemn you to cardboard-box dwelling under a bridge forever. People were manic, there is no other word for it, I have seen nothing like that since.

I thank my lucky stars that I wasn't in any kind of position to get a mortgage, because of those of my peers who did, a lot of them lost their homes to repossession when interest rates went into double-digits. A fair few lost their marriages/ relationships at the same time, and some had breakdowns.

What happened to some who weathered the high interest rates was almost as instructive; they were stuck in negative equity until the early years of this century, and constrained about selling and moving, even when they needed to for their work.

I have some concerns that the market for housing won't automatically correct for the benefit of the pent-up demand to buy at prices which bear some realistic relationship to earnings multiples, but that large scale BTL landlords will leverage their portfolios even larger, and scoop up the more modest homes. I'm not having a dig; I know least two of our regular friends here who do rent property out on a modest scale, btw, I'm seeing a wider picture which involves tens of thousands of large-scale landlords, and their decisions.

In my city there are a couple of invidiuals who have property empires, mainly of ex-council stock, running into the high hundreds, and some of them are frankly not the standard we would want from our own landlords, should we rent, and their decisions and those of others like them with deep pockets have a profound affect on the housing choices of a lot of other people.

I feel a lot of people are kidding themselves about their financial security. They own a home which is almost certainly overvalued and whose value may well go down. Most of their biggest ticket items are on credit, and they have nothing behind them, in form of income-generating assets or even non-fiat savings, which would have lasting value in an economic crisis.

As most wealth isn't real, it is noughts and ones in a computer, it can disappear at a keystoke. And our banks aren't properly capitalised and our governments, having seen that the Cypriots didn't lynch bankers and politicians last spring, have a creative idea about what to do when the next bank wobbles.

We live in interesting times, as the alleged Chinese curse has it.