This morning on the bus this lady was talking to the bus driver about how life is hard because prices are going up all over the place. She said, "Well, there's nothing I can do about it." Hopelessness infuriates me to the point of losing my appetite. I don't know her life story, maybe she's really doing all she can, but I actually don't know anybody in Lithuania besides myself and my wife who works two jobs (I'm not at the moment, but I do regulary find extra work, in small chunks or big ones). Are prices restricting your consumption? If you produce more, then you can consume more.
This brings me to a quotation from an article I read yesterday: "One thing is certain, the world has consumed more than it has produced" over the last three years, [U.N. Chief Ban] said.
That's a very interesting claim. Let's figure it out. One man cannot consume more than produced except by four ways: (1) credit from the bank or (2) charity, including government handouts, alms, help from friend and family, or (3) gambling, in which I include cashing in on insurance policies (gambling on your health), or (4) thievery. Besides these things, a man who earns $N can consume $N worth of goods, no more. A man of course has much access to those things, the proportions ranging throughout areas of the world: more credit in America, more government handouts in Europe, and more thievery elsewhere. So many people do consume more than they produce, a system I consider to be unnatural.
But how can the world consume more than it produced? The world is not getting any handouts, unless you consider solar power to be a handout, but we're not taking advantage of it anyway. We're not cashing in on insurance for sure, nor do we have the capability to gamble with or steal from (or tax) other planets or moons (yet). So what's the deal then? The only thing I can think of is that we consumed more by consuming everything we produced plus some of our saving from before three years ago. That's plausable, but entities with high savings are only goverments and only let's say 1% of people with significant savings; that's a liberal guestimate, since "currently, there are over 9 million residents around the globe classified as millionaires," which is just over 0.15% of the population. And if it's governments it only counts as "savings" if it was aquired more than three years ago: if it's from the past three years of tax revenues, then it's the producation of citizens which equals the consumtion of government handouts.
Am I missing something? Maybe I am, I haven't had a cup of coffee in ten months. If the world's been getting so much charity from governments and millionairs that we've been able to consume more than we produce for three years, we ought to be very grateful! I haven't noticed any movements, though, to celebrate and praise the rich and governments.
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i Believe what he was referring to was indeed savings, but savings of food. I don't know exactly how food stores work, except that i'm pretty sure they exist. I don't know how long rice/flour/other grains stay good if properly kept, so i don't know how big food stores could potentially be. But i think what he meant was that we used to have say a 6 month supply of grain to feed the world if all the sudden all the plants in the world died, and now we have only 3 months worth of extra grain. Which means if we continue at that rate in 3 years we will have 0 months of extra supply, and then comes shortage. If food actually becomes scarce people will start growing more potatoes. They can be grown virtually anywhere in the world and are much more productive than rice or wheat, but for some reason not as popular. I totally eat potatoes all the time, and potato bread. It's delicious.
Before that happened, if any logic went into the process at all, corn would stop being used for fuel instead of food. The only reason it's used at all is because of corrupion in govermnet: it's more of a pollutant than petrolium. And, the amount of corn it takes to fill up the gas tank on an SUV one time could feed a person for one whole year. I learned that on CNN. I leaned the first thing from the Omnivores Dilemma.
corn that's used as fuel is not the same corn that's used for food. that's why farmers are so excited about ethanol. they can grow shit corn and make as much/more money off it as they would for good corn. it's a total waste of resources and doesn't correctly address the problems associated with emissions.
that shit corn is edible too, dariau, but it needs to be processed into stuff like corn meal or tortilla chips. and it's perfectly edible for live stock, so, if you feed it to chickens, a gas tank full of that corn is enough to make enough chicken to feed a person for five weeks and one and a half days, i reckon.
i agree that it's a total waste and all that.
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