Posted on 12/24/2008 11:59:07 AM PST by george76
Fifteen years ago, I had a stupid idea. I was the co-executive producer on ..."Cheers." NBC...was faltering: Ratings were sliding, money was tight, management was nervous ...Johnny Carson...was retiring...
I was 28 then, and like all 28-year-olds, I had no idea exactly how stupid I was. So when I found myself standing next to the president of NBC ...I offered my solution to his network's crisis.
"You know what you should do?" ... "You should move the 'Tonight Show' with Jay Leno to 10 p.m. Think of all the money you'd save."
"That's a pretty stupid suggestion," he said to me.
Only, in those days, network presidents tended to be earthier types with show-business vocabularies, so he inserted a colorful Anglo-Saxon expletive between the words "pretty" and "stupid."
He then went on to explain the complicated ecosystem of broadcast television... The five hours of prime-time weeknight programming ... are immensely lucrative... Cutting them out would be suicide.
"The day we have to do that," he wound up, "is the day we have to shut the whole thing down."
Only he inserted a colorful Anglo-Saxon expletive between the words "whole" and "thing."
The Hanjin Miami is a giant, floating, diesel-powered economic indicator. In fat times, it carries 7,000 containers from China to the West Coast of the United States, each one stuffed with flat screens and polo shirts and iPods and toys and jeans and every kind of extruded plastic doodad imaginable.
Ideally, of course, we're supposed to send full containers back, filled with our stuff for them to buy, but we don't make much stuff anymore. We make complicated financial products and arcane debt instruments.
Or did.
In fact, we don't even make the ships that carry the containers.
(Excerpt) Read more at mcall.com ...
You and my husband. One guy said my husband was the guy on the street corner with the Apocolypse sign, but so far he has been right about alot of things.
I mean I have always been worried in the back of my mind, but this is the ‘just hit the iceberg’ moment and I feel like we had better hold on tight.
Thanks, I was worried about that and I feel better.
John Deere Green is my favorite color!
That’s what my husband said. Even if I do a job that is a good paycheck, learn a skill that requires no electricity, no internet, just a valuable trade for trade skill.
I chose cooking. You would be surprised how many people cannot cook from scratch. I mean bake bread, cook dried beans, etc.. from scratch. And I have made myself practice over a fire in our pit just to see how to if we ever got in a bad predicament. I know it isn’t a very good skill, but someone will need to know how to do more than open a can or microwave a Lean Cuisine if we ever DO actually get back into a real Depression. Granted, the older folks know how, but people even my age (late thirties) don’t know how to cook other than a few box recipes. I was kind of surprised.
I even had a friend ask me what I was doing when I was cutting up a chicken. Not some butchering, just taking a whole chicken and cutting it into fryer pieces like they used to do before you could buy them pre-cut. It’s cheaper to buy it that way and cut it yourself. She was shocked I knew how to do it. That seemed weird to me.
“And I have made myself practice over a fire in our pit just to see how to if we ever got in a bad predicament. I know it isn’t a very good skill...
You are wrong, it’s a very good skill. You would be welcome in my fighting position anytime.
“Not all bright kids are college material.”
You said it!!
We have this attitude of academia for everyone makes a successful country and I don’t think so! Not every person is an office dweller and thrives in that environment. But they want to make it out that a person is a failure if they don’t come out like carbon copies of each other.
Thank you! People have to eat, and raw food isn’t always healthy. Canning, pickling and jellying food to preserve it is valuable I think! I have learned that too. As I said, my husband asked me to (not told me, but asked for our family sake, to make him feel better with me knowing how and I obliged him) and also he took up learning how to garden, fish and hunt. As I said, we are modern people, but he always felt the need to make sure his family just KNEW how. Just in case. I think his grandfather got that into his head and that’s not a bad thing.
Because of a few natural disasters, and weather related problems (we live out in the country), we started to address the problems of storing nonperishable foods. We looked at the shelf life of various foods, and stocked up on dried beans, peas, pasta products, meat and other products. It's no by any means a large cache, but if the need arises, we can feed ourselves and possibly help out others.
Water might always be a problem, so we invested in a portable water filter system. I gave up hunting some years ago, but if the need was there, I can do that also. I have always fished and have fairly good gardening skills.
Your comments about canning are interesting, and I think we may need to look into that. My Grandmother was a great “canner”, and we spent many hours helping her.
Good luck, you sound like you are doing fine.
Thanks for the graph.
With oil in backwardization, refineries losing money on the gasoline crack spread, and the storage tanks on land full...super tankers are floating around with no port to land the crude.
Good luck to you too, and as I said, just knowing is the important thing.
You should try canning, it’s not as hard as you would think. Pickling is harder to me than anything because of the acid content, but others say that is easier than just plain canning. Jellies are still the easiest.
That’s what happened wholesale when 95% of formation capital went into an e-commerce bubble that popped and then was double whammied by “community organized” housing markets.
Innovation in all fundamental areas took a hike.
It will be very difficult to bring it back. And Dr. Chu claiming that he’ll create an alternative “green” economy is a dream for the politburo in Peking.
This guy nails it. In part we did this to ourselves, in part our goods have been denied markets overseas.
Make close alliances with people you would trust with your life. I fear it will be a very rough ride. There doesn't seem to be an abundance of honorable people these days. Worse yet, our leaders are idiots.
To be sure, engineering has always been a career that, after about ten years, most were compelled to become managers in order to climb the ladder.
“Truer words”, as they say.I have made a life out of being able to adapt by honing my skills.I’m working right now, when many of my friends with educations and no skills are in the unemployment line.
Fewer and fewer boys are going to college which sugests that high school and college studies have been “feminized” in subtle ways that give an advantage to girls and make classes less appealing to boys. Hopefully, these guys will find alternatives paths.
I think a majority of college students are now girls, and because a majority of public school teachers are women, it is always the case that boys are expected to behave like girls. Since they are not....
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