It's too late for questions; we'll just have to hire you.
Welcome. Glad to have you on board.
I haven't kept track of how well-documented THE BIG PICTURE is on the "read me first" messages, so let me just summarize to make sure we're all on the same page:
We're expecting long-term economic decline due to the combination of bad economic policy and depletion of strategic raw materials, including and especially petroleum. Kinda hard to run a fuel-intensive system with depleting fuel stocks.
Chris Martenson has a fairly thorough summary of the problem on his website:
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourseIt's too late, and conditions are not conducive to, society-wide solutions. There is a lot of discussion about what "we, as a society should do". Well, it is too little and too late for that. In fact, if anything, high-level folks in the know are looting the system as fast as they can, and that's their "solution". You'll hear a lot of snide remarks on the forums about the bailouts, Goldman-Sachs, et al.
Single-person and single-family solutions will not work for most people either. You can't just "buy and store away" economic security. As the system breaks down, many of us face unemployment or chronic under-employment, and we all face rising food costs as inflation accelerates, and it will. Lack of wage-negotiating leverage means that our pay raises will NOT keep up.
Organize your extended family, your friends, and start working out good relationships and deals with the neighbors. If all else fails, figure out who else on the forum lives near you and go out of your way to meet them. Time is running out.
For lack of a better estimate, we're using 2012 as our recommended "be failsafe ready" date. Of course, it depends on your own circumstances; some folks are already in serious trouble. Folks who are sinking under underwater mortgages and debt loads might want to think about turning the keys back to the bank (voluntary foreclosure), and moving in with relatives or friends somewhere where they can make their stand.
The 2012 figure comes from a couple sources, including a high-fallutin German energy thinktank, and some financial trends analysts. Gerald Celente might have pushed that figure. It is NOT necessarily the "system breakdown" date, but rather the date by which if you are not ready, you may never get ready, because by that date you might be too broke to have any options left. I keep harping on the fact that unemployment is STILL rising, and the government is lying about it. The system is not going to stabilize any time soon, and by the time the banks start lending again, they will flood the system with all the bailout money that was created "out of thin air", and cause severe inflation. I don't know if we have an estimated date for that--maybe late this year or early next year.
Separately, food prices have been rising at double-digit rates in recent years, and this year will probably be a bad one. We suggest a combination of long-term storage of relatively cheap staples like wheat flour, rice, lentils, split peas, cornmeal if you eat a lot of that, etc, and getting into the habit of using them regularly, combined with growing your own vegetables including and especially potatoes (one of the few crops that's relatively easy enough to raise enough to live on--the Irish reputedly fed 20 peasants per acre before the blight wiped out their crop) if that is an option. It is for most people; even if you don't have enough land to grow all your groceries (I don't--yet--but soon will), then you can still take a bite out of your grocery bill.
When you start seeing double-digit inflation, start accumulating and storing storable goods in bulk, and then drawing down your own supply. If you do the math, it is a strategy to deal with inflation. Start figuring out, too, what you can live without, so that you can concentrate your buying power on what you absolutely need, and inflation hedges.
It would be wise to organize your affairs to need to use as little fuel as possible, forever. I currently live in the city. Some day I will flee to already-bought agricultural land in a rural area. The suburbs are a bad choice, because they are too fuel-intensive.
It's quiet today because of some ball-games, but you'll meet the rest of us soon. We are a variety of folk: mountain-man types, free-spirit types, old hippies, bookish intellectual types who aren't very physically ready for this but saw it coming, fellow ex-military, farmers, and some fairly ordinary folk who just started noticing that something was wrong, and came here seeking confirmation that they were not crazy.
