Subscriber Wanda yesterday gave some good recommendations for reading about climate change. I wanted to point to my own reviews, but of course they weren’t there. Thanks again, Bezos. You SOB.
I uploaded about half of my climate related reviews here. Fortunately, I was able to find most of the more important ones. The best of them is the one entitled Paleoclimate. It took me about an hour. With this experience, I expect that I will be uploading some of my other reviews.
An advantage of posting these on my own site is that besides dodging the blue noses at Amazon, I can make a review as long as I want, and I can include diagrams.
As well as reviews, I uploaded this humorous video sent to me by a subscriber. It is our Congress answering a very simple question, the answer to which even my son Edward would know. How much CO2 is there in the air? They make laws about things that they totally do not understand.
On a more serious note, subscriber Bethany sent me a link to this video entitled “The Great Taking” about how the powers that be, mainly the central banks and the plutocrats behind them, are going to take your money. I’m quite sure most of you have seen similar videos. The question is what to do about it. This is how I answered her.
Interesting. The question for an individual remains where to put your money? The alternatives I see include:
Cash
Demand deposits / money market funds
Brokerage accounts
Stocks
ETFs
Metals ETFs
Individually held certificates for the above
Metals in vaults in Canada, Singapore, Switzerland etc.
Individually held metals - bar or coin
Crypto
Bitcoin - with no issuer
All others
Real estate
US
Overseas
I'm sure I overlooked something. There are inconveniences, costs and risks associated with each of these alternatives. No need to quantify them. Most of us can enumerate them, and nobody can accurately assess the level of risk associated with each. Said risks include loss of access (viz, no Internet for Bitcoin, can't get to where your gold is buried), government confiscation, fraud by private individuals, and loss of market value.
My assessment is that an individual needs to maintain a portfolio including most of these asset classes. It should be weighted towards inflation-resistant assets: metals and Bitcoin first. Real property not so much. Demand is a function of perceived scarcity. Population growth is cratering and the newcomers - illegal aliens - just don’t have money. The huge landlords are mortgaged to the hilt. When it collapses, I expect real estate prices will fall as they did during the Depression.
There is a question of timeframe. Most of you have completed raising families. Your focus is on income for your retirement - a couple of decades. Mine is on raising young kids and preserving enough capital to help them start families. I assume I will be gone, and they can take care of their mother.
All that said, this movie, and many other commentators, are probably right in their prognostications. I still don't see anything I should be doing differently.
And that’s where it stands. We are standing on the railroad tracks, and we can see the locomotive coming. There are many voices shouting which way to jump. Who should we listen to?
We cannot afford analysis paralysis. We have to be confident we have given reasonable thought to the matter and simply get on with our lives. Through the major crises of our era – Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, the various sex and gender crises – we haven’t been very good at predicting how things would unwind. We have to do what every other generation has done. Raise our kids on the assumption that they will somehow survive. What choice do we have?
We all love confirmation bias. Here’s a video posted by the admittedly biased Kyiv Post of a guy who sees the war more or less the way I do. That which cannot go on forever will not go on forever.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where there is a childhood music lesson going on downstairs and we have the half Canadian family coming over later in the day.
An inevitable economic crash is on the way, so how do we invest to be best prepared for when the time comes? Most people seem to be trying to figure out the safest place to put their "money": cash, gold, crypto, land, food, etc. etc. etc.
But I think an investment in community seems like a better focus, at least in the US:
-Are there families, farms or homesteads that need options for paying off their mortgages before the crash? Getting out of all debt seems to be the most obvious take-home message
-Are there older couples or individuals that want to invest in a multi-generational living scenario that have no family to do this with and need to collaborate with community members?
-Are there people that would pay off a mortgage in exchange for a CSA type agreement for food security in the future: meat, milk, vegetables, candles, bread, honey, syrup, animal skins and products, beans, herbs and medicines, soaps...our communities are producing an amazing array of products and instead of trying to accumulate gold or crypto to purchase these things in the future, we need to help ensure our community members have the ability to continue to produce these things that we will need in the future
-Is there a need for an off-system elderly care home? I have a friend that is looking to collaborate for her mother and can offer in-home care/support for individuals or couples that would want to share a home or living situation.