So, we sold or gave away half our stuff, loaded the rest in a 16 ft truck towing my car, and headed from CT to SF a few days ago, with the escrow for the sale of our home supposed to close tomorrow.
Imagine our surprise when we heard earlier today the buyer’s bank appeared to be balking. Yikes. Much gnashing of teeth. However, it now appears that the problem has been resolved and we should close escrow by Fri. or Mon.
Yes, Sue and I are both fried…
We are in Winnemucca NV tonight, home of many casinos and serious gold mining.
“What is disturbing here is that things seem to get worse, not better,” an analyst at Goldman Sachs, David Greely, said. “These high prices are not attracting meaningful new supplies.”
That’s because there isn’t any extra supply waiting for higher prices in order to become profitable. Demand is way ahead of supply, and this is made much worse by massive speculation and manipulation in the futures markets. It’s a classic bubble.
And like any bubble, it will eventually pop. However, were $200 a barrel oil to become a reality, world markets would be in disarray and it’s a given there would be serious social unrest, if not actual riots.
Live. 1990. From their seminal 1967 album of which Lou Reed famously said, our first album only sold 40,000 copies but everyone who bought it started a band.
Yesterday was another long day of driving, through much of Nebraska (which 500 miles across) and stopped in Green River WY, a small mining town. Nebraska was quite flat, Wyoming started flat, but now the foothills of the Rockies are in sight, with mesas and spectacular scenery nearby.
Canadian researchers at the University of Western Ontario have studied the evolution of food deserts in urban areas. Food deserts are areas where people have low or no access to food shops. In other words, they are neighborhoods with low average home incomes and poor access to healthy food. As said the lead researcher, Poor people with no car can be severely adversely affected by living in food deserts and are more likely to suffer from bad health and low quality of life with diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer.’ But what is the major cause of food desertification? Supermarkets, because they are built in new suburbs while smaller food shops are disappearing from city centers.
Plus, food prices in such urban food deserts are always much higher than in the prosperous suburbs, which makes things even worse for those living in them.
We did over 500 miles on Monday, driving through Illinois, Iowa, then part of Nebraska.
Iowa gets a special mention because their rest stops on I-80 have free wi-fi! We stayed at a rather bizarre Ramada Inn in Kearny NE. Apparently built in the 70’s it has a huge interior area with an odd, meandring swimming pool / wading pool. Next to it is a tiki hut on stilts with a bar on top. This tropical motif is repeated throughout the hotel, which is smack dab in the middle of feed lot country. Some say this is the smell of money, but it still smells like cowsh*t to me.
The wi-fi was free but didn’t work and no one had a clue how to fix it. Grrr. When we checked out in the morning, I turned the interior door handle and it fell off in my hand. Almost couldn’t get the door opened. A very odd hotel indeed.
Bob called me this morning. He hasn’t had access to his blog because he’s on the road to San Francisco. Last night, he stayed at a motel in Nebraska that offered free high speed internet. It may have been free, but there was no access.
Today, he’s traveling across Wyoming, and expects to be back online soon.
A strike over vanishing pensions brought upon by massive corporate debt has shut down most of the North Sea oil pipeline.
This a symptom of the Anglo Disease, ie the wholesale domination of our economies by reckless financial capitalism:
On commodity prices soaring
Rapid market movement in a tightly coupled global economic system can suck a country dry of a commodity (the typical mechanism is push, this is pull). No resource wars (which is a foolish concept), just market-induced disruption.
Much of the current run up in commodity prices is fueled by speculation and by gaming the system. That the poor of the world suffer even more because of this is irrelevant to them.
Hawaii was one of the last areas to get hit by subprime, but it appears prices there are now sharply down. Which means bargains for Canadians, as their currency is strong against the dollar.
We made 550 miles today and are west of Chicago tonight. Pennsylvania and Ohio were a nice drive on I-80 with well maintained roads and state-run restaurant and fuel areas. By contrast, Indiana had way too many potholes and bumps. Their infrastructure seems to be crumbling, as witness the transition overpass from I-80/90 West to I-80 West. It was ancient and decrepit to the point of being dangerous. judging from the amount of smashed areas on the concrete block guardrails, lots of accidents have already happened on it.
Having an iPod is great. We’ve been listening to music and podcasts all day, and I just loaded it up with more podcasts for tomorrow.
Israel has now cut off fuel to Gaza and forced the UN to stop distributing food.
This Israeli government action is an unvarnished war crime. It is known as collective punishment. There was already hunger and malnutrition among Palestinian children, which will now be worsened
Let’s make war just for the combatants. Why should the innocent, women and children, have to suffer? This includes Israeli women and children killed by suicide bombers just as much as their counterpart Palestinians. There’s lots of collective punishment being done by all sides here.
Live from a TV show. One of the most amazing of the 60’s psychedelic bands. After some hard decades, lead singer Roky Erikson is currently performing again and getting good reviews.
Most are in the Mojave desert. The biggest project, eSolar, is partly funded by Google and will product a whopping 1 GW when completed. They bill themselves as “utility-scale solar power.”
Bandos are squatters who live in foreclosed homes, which often still have the lights and water on. Vandos like to party in such places, trashing them as they go.
What happens to neighborhoods after several months (or several years) of this? Will they ever come back? Or just become wastelands?
We got started about noon today, took a while to get the house completely cleaned up. Made it about 300 miles to Clearfield PA where we’re staying in a nice Holiday Inn Express. Tell me, why is it that smaller hotels tend to have better internet connections than larger ones, plus they’re usually free. The net here is free, rock-solid, open wireless with a no-hassle connection that took maybe 15 seconds to get on. Contrast this with big city hotels that charge $10 a day and have complicated log on procedures and often have flaky service.
Had a nice dinner at Dutch Pantry, a local Pennsylvania Dutch style restaurant that features excellent home-style cooked food. Dinner for two was $20.
We hope to make 500 miles tomorrow. Driving the 16 foot truck with my car on a car carrier turned out to be easy enough on I-80. Haven’t quite mastered backing up with it, so we’re careful to park where we can get out easy!
Fuel cell technology for railways is becoming a reality. As railroads become increasingly important as a mans of transporting goods, imagine a nationwide grid of fuel cell locomotives powered by hydrogen with no GHG output. Let’s hope it happens.
Hydrail has having their 4th conference and their site features fuel cell efforts for rail worldwide.
As election fever rises throughout the United States and the contest for the White House becomes more fierce, the masses will clamor for a new Commander in Chief to assume the seat of American power. This year, it seems as if the game has changed as a female candidate appears to fulfill feminist dreams and a viable Black candidate raises hopes for Black freedom and signals the weakening of racism. But is this really the case? For those who follow the One who confronted the powers and embrace the One who came as a Suffering Servant, these changes are not enough to leave
this political system unchallenged. For those who envision an egalitarian world in which order and organization do not rely on the ever-present threat of state violence, bowing before the ballot box will not be an option.
Friends and allies can sometimes be found in seemingly the most unlikely of places.
Solar thermal takes the heat of the sun and uses it directly to power steam turbines to create power. The heat can also be stored in molten salt and other materials so the turbines can be powered at night, when the sun isn’t shining.
EcoWorldly details the biggest planned and existing projects, many of which will be in the Mojave Desert.
We leave today, moving to San Francisco. The past couple weeks have been a whirlwind. (We moved to CT fifteen months ago from Los Angeles.)
Blogging may be erratic at times, although I do have lots of posts stacked up and waiting. We’ll be heading out I-84 to I-80, then a straight shot across to S.F, with a loaded rental truck with my car on a car carrier. (I’ve never done a trip like this, Sue has done it lots of times.)
Will blog the trip as I go, will also send tweets out on Twitter via my cell.
Haven’t done any stock trading for the past few weeks, as we’ve been busy packing and getting ready to move. Also, the market has been irrationally exuberant of late, staging big rallies on bad or nonexistent news. So, I’ll wait until it looks like a top, then buy more puts on financials, as I think there will be at least one more big downdraft.
Not being absorbed in the daily minutiae of the market does bring perspective and helps one to perhaps view the general trends better. Less trees. More forests.
So this break from the market is welcome. Once we get moved, I’ll be back into it again. However, we’ll be on the West Coast where the market opens at 6:30 am, not 9:30 am. Ugh. (Did i mention I’m not a morning person?)
Live streaming video from 150+ news and weather outlets worldwide. Just launched. Click a stream to watch it live. Also has a separate video screen with announcers who alert you to breaking news. This could become an entirely new way to view news.
