It’s hard to stockpile “technological advancement”. It’s much easier to stockpile clean drinking water.
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It’s even easier to stockpile purification machines. They typically take way less space than the water. The wear-prone parts that you have to stock up are much smaller.
Example:
…also:
http://www.solarspring.de/index.php?id=12
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Okay, maybe I’d buy a bunch of Bill Gates’s sewage-to-power-and-drinking-water machines.
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And I shall sell you my poop. Win/win!
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I’m reminded of a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in which he remarked that the Soviet Union, contrary to Western belief, did not have a problem growing food. It had a problem making refrigerators and trucks.
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Gold does not have a connection to the real economy. If I use it as a currency and sink it in the ground, its price goes up regardless of the economy. If I find a way to extract it cheaply from seawater, or find a big new deposit near the surface, its price falls regardless of the economy. The balance between mining, reburying and use depends on people’s opinions about the economy - and stock prices and financial instruments are also an expression of people’s opinions about the economy.
At the moment the gold price is falling for a variety of reasons - one of which is that interest rates are expected to rise, and another is that the apocalyptic financial crisis predicted by gold salesmen like Beck has failed to materialise. The economy chunters on. Commodity prices - things that are actually used in the economy - are taking a hit because Chinese growth has slowed, but gold doesn’t seem to becoupled to this.
Future value is always a matter of opinion. But the history of Western civilisation over the post-Napoleonic period shows that the people who bet on economic success and an expanding economy were right more often than they were wrong, and, as Fred Schwed pointed out in the 40s, short sellers usually have to explain their strategy to their wives after they go bankrupt.
Those bumps are there to provide a comfortable gripping surface for the thumb. The handle is tapered in the middle and bifurcated at the end to reduce unnecessary weight and save material.
I can’t help it if you perverts see naked ladies everywhere you look.
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What precisely is perverted about seeing naked ladies?
I am reminded of a comment supposedly made by a Catholic Bishop: “I’m told forty per cent of my clergy are having sex with their housekeepers. They aren’t the ones I’m worried about.”
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Also even in a small community barter tends to be unworkable as we get specialized in trade and skill, I.e. I can fix your well, but no thanks I have enough vegetables right now, do you have something else? So currency makes it easy for me to fix the well and still have the ability to trade that labor in credit/vouchers/scrip/MONEY that I can use for goods that I need.
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Beer + moment of inspiration + Alibaba = 20,000 curvy lady screwdrivers.
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One could probably buy a box of 250 units, dump them out on a floor somewhere, whip up an Artist’s Statement and sell the whole thing as Art for ten times the cost of materials.
My first thought was actually that they might be painted or engraved so as to resemble whimsical cartoon animals, but there’s probably not nearly the same amount of profit there.
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That’s was perfect. Thanks!
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Except of course for the people who live in deserts and have to buy poop water now.
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considering it long term, isn’t all poop water? just that some of it has been cleaned up more?
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If’n you wanna get all Carl Sagan about it (or Nihilist Arby’s, for that matter), every atom in every shit you ever shat was forged in the heart of a star. Then you turned those atoms into poop.
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We all make star poops and that is wonderful!
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Or, in the other point of view, the stars are full of shit.
Quite like in pop music and movies…
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Something something anuses are star-shaped something something.
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Those tools don’t seem to be working! A great ad but I wouldn’t buy any of them. She hit that nail squarely a dozen times, that hammer must be made of bubblegum!
Then the next lady was pressing on the drill with all her might, yet it couldn’t sink the bit, into wood?
I’ve also a mind to call someone about the work attire, there’s gotta be a few OSHA violations there.
