Friday, July 25, 2008

More G, more D

Jim Kunstler has been having a fine old time with recent financial news. From one post this week:
We also don't have fifteen years to prop up the systems we are currently running for everyday life, including suburbia, Happy Motoring, the airline industry, Big Box Shopping, just-in-time food deliveries, air-conditioning places like Phoenix, Houston, Orlando, and Las Vegas, heating one-story sprawling centralized schools and fueling the yellow bus fleets that service them. . . . You get the picture? All this stuff is toast. And so is the economy that accompanies them.

Read the rest of this particular diatribe here. My Friday night delight is to watch the lineup on PBS -- Jim Lehrer, Ifill, McLaughlin and his lot, Nova, the money show that replaced Louis Rukeyser but isn't half as interesting, and Bill Moyers. The money show tonight was about how much money you really, truly need to retire. Bill Gates may have that much, but most of the rest of us are out of luck. Somehow, I can't worry too much about that ... we eat pretty well and digest easily what we eat, the house is OK, shrimp are still cheap, we live in a place that some people come to on vacation ... not to seem like a grasshopper, but there is a lot of gratuitous cause for concern out in the world. This may be the result of shrimp for dinner accompanied by a bottle of Portuguese white and followed by a big hunk of sweet, crisp watermelon. Summer pleasures.

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