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| Produce Truck on the Island of Madeira Portugal |
Soon, in May, I will be going back to Madeira on a Disney Cruise. Hurray!! This picture is from our last Disney Cruise. I'm retaking the cruise because it was the best value for the money with only one person cruising. Wanda never has the amount of vacation time I do. I have a cushy job in that respect. I'm always more relaxed the second I visit a place so I'm sure I'll enjoy every minute of it, well at least as much as is possible without my wonderful wife by my side.
Thinking about other things, I'm sure there are sports hooligans all over the world but thanks to a professor from Tuskegee, who comes into my workplace and who happens to study risk management, I see the future risk to our planet in juxtaposition to the seemingly ridiculous antics of sports fanatics. He said that water shortages would the big challenge for the future. He quoted some forecasts that were startling. He contrasted this with people who fill their lives with sports fanaticism and equally irrelevant reality shows, to him at least. He loves learning and scholarship. And I love this guy. No person who has ever come to use our computers has ever done as much extensive research as this guy has. It is always a good day when we exchange pleasantries and ideas. It is a highlight.
Here is a recent article about the current 2011 food shortage from Slate, hidden as it is from the great American thinkers who poison trees:
This coupled with a number of other related problems I have been reading about mean we will probably have an above average inflation rate coming up for this year, thinking of from an American point of view. The years to come will probably have an even higher inflation rate as we finally begin incurring the expense of the taxes we don't pay and the borrowing we do make. We'll pay these debts off by inflation, which will eat away at our debt in quite a different way. Money being worth less, we thus have less debt. Think of the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires (and other expensive problems not recognized nor acted upon) as being a missed stitch in time, as we burst our 9 other stitches with higher prices on everything.
One of the smart investors portrayed in The Big Short by Michael Lewis (my top choice so far for books on the financial crises), Michael Burry (a short seller who recognized early on the impending doom in the subprime mortgage market and had almost a 500 percent return during the years most Americans lost their shirts) is currently buying farm land with water supply on property for his next investment strategy. Hmmmm.
