shoddy inflation

SHODDY INFLATION

Oh My God!!!  Nova, the American Apocalypse novels guy, has chosen yours truely to publish original fiction with.  I feel like a little school girl.  The first installement was just posted this morning.  Scroll down after this article.
Our master economist Smith over at Of Two Minds Blog put out a great Friday article ( okay, it could have been Thursday-I read it on Friday and didn’t look at the posted date ) on the Forever Deficit we have achieved by lowering interest rates to near zero. I’ve always said that deficits hardly matter since the national debt is incapable of ever being paid back. I hate the waste of the interest being paid to the bankers, but that ship sailed long ago. The bankers have owned the economy for a century, and if you wonder where most of the surplus wealth ended up after the continent was paved over to provide it easier for us to sell ourselves into debt slavery ( it’s hard to go into debt if all you can do is buy locally ), they have it all. Just like an idiot that owes twice his yearly salary on personal credit cards and six more years on a mortgage and an addition year on a car, and averaged out pays ten percent interest, there is no way the debt every gets paid. All that matters is how high the interest payment is. And the banks don’t care if you file bankruptcy. As long as not too many do so, the system keeps functioning. And the system is about inventing fictitious money which is loaned out for interest paid back with real growth. Which was made possible with the surplus oil that was at one time so great that we were desperately inventing ways to waste it. Which is why you should shed absolutely no tears for the bankers. Jingle mail the house keys, file bankruptcy with the credit cards. The bankers bribed Congress to usurp the Constitutional way of coining money and have been debasing our currency ever since. Inflation is a tax, and an unconstitutional one. Money you are lent is NOT real wealth but a fictitious computer entry. Stiffing the bankers is just like stiffing a criminal. They are immoral, and by playing by the old rules on honor is playing right into their hands. When they get into trouble, through their own greed, they cry for the taxpayer to bail them out. When you get into trouble financially, usually through nothing more than being optimistic you won’t get pink slipped, legally screw the bankers! Don’t waste your life trying to “fulfill your contractual obligation” or “doing the right thing”. If the bankers loaned you gold, that’s one thing. When they loan you fictional money based on coercing your fellow citizens, that is another.

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Anyway, by emulating Japan, who survived nearly three decades after their real estate bubble burst by lowering interest rates to nearly zero, we can keep borrowing indefinitely. Not to say something else will crash our system, it will, and soon. But in the meantime there is little reason to sweat the deficit of the federal government. Now, I could be wrong, and you have my iron glad guarantee of a subscription refund if I am, but to me this just underlines the inevitability of a heck of a lot more inflation. When the federals can continue to grow borrowing at an increased amount of twenty or more percent a year, because their cost is nearly free, a heck of a lot more money is created. I know a lot of extra paper cash being created is just a drop in the bucket compared to credit creating and derivatives creation ( every time the idiots change the design, or use a fiction such as “Y2K will create increased ATM withdraws” you can bet they are increasing the paper supply ), but it all adds up. Add that money inflation to inflation caused by material shortfalls ( oil, ore, etc. ), and I simply can’t see the case for deflation. The only way to borrow more and to pay off Medicare and Social Security and The Forever Wars, is to inflate. Read the above mentioned article, I think you’ll agree that this latest “buy more time as the Titanic sinks” strategy is just another eventual nail in our coffin.

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Now, I bring up all the above both because it is, marginally, an interesting reminder to you that you are a Gott-damned fool to rely on any paper wealth ( both me and Rawles can link arms, become the best bosom buddies and worst case scenario even swap spit on this issue, regardless of what else we don’t see eye to eye on ), because inflation will chew it up and eliminate it in a bloody discharge. And because it almost, if we stretch it enough, link up to my main cause of blathering which is my latest and greatest 12 volt electrical system outrage, trial and tribulation. I thought my inverter had sucked eggs, tripping itself off even on a fully charged battery. So I went and got another one. The first one was a Wal-Mart buy, another way to cost you inflation wise. You buy the same item for the same money, but the quality has dropped so it is in effect another price increase. Alas, the new inverter did the same thing. So rather than using my trailer batteries I tested both inverters on a spare car battery ( pretty new and kept charged by the genie ), and both inverters were fine. Which just left the batteries as the problem. Only used two years. My old batteries lasted five and only failed because I pretty much forgot about them ( most of that time being grid hooked in the trailer park ) and they boiled dry. But the new ones I religiously checked for fluid level died after two years. I don’t know if it is just the Wal-Mart brand or if a major redesign of batteries has sliced off years of useful life. Or, it could have been partial freezing in the winter killed them, or the fact I used two low amp batteries and they kept draining too much. Not knowing which of those factors is responsible, I just have to resign myself to a lower lifespan product.

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This time I only bought one battery rather than two. The old pair were 150 amps ( 400 amp cold crank each, according to the battery label this translated to 75 amp useable ). Since I only wanted to drain half way, optimally, that left me with 75 amps total before recharge. Which would be normally over two weeks use of four amps a day. The norm here is a week of clouds before the next sunny spell. The new single battery is 600 cold crank amps. Using the same division as the old batteries, this leaves 110 useable amps. Halve that and you have almost two weeks use. Not a huge difference between the single and the pair. Time will tell if I’m a dumbass, but I think one larger battery will suffice. My wallet can handle half the price of the battery replacement. If it only lasts two years, I’ll go buy from another supplier. But I am just spitballing here, making this crap up as I go along. Also, the trip home on the bike hauling the battery wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. I’m missing the truck less every day.

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