“What we see as stagflation looming on the horizon in our side-view mirror today, may be full-blown deflation up-close as dollars are hoarded to pay down excessive debt and reduce, reduce, reduce.”

As I’ve posted here before, I have a background in emergency preparedness, as well having been through my own experiences with both natural disasters and economic hard times (and, by the way, I’ve used food storage far more during the latter than the former). Some years back, I prepared a one-page checklist for getting started on personal and family preparedness. I recently updated that sheet (PDF, 23KB); feel free to download and distribute it.

UPDATE: Subterranean Instalanche™ in progress; Glenn linked directly to the one-page sheet (instead of this post), so my server is feeling the load even though the hits aren’t showing up over on my Sitemeter gauge; Glenn’s now linked directly to this post. If the site and/or the sheet takes a while to download, that’s why.

UPDATE: Typo in sheet corrected, thanks to feedback from Tim Elliott.  ..bruce w..

Something to keep in mind as the economy struggles and the government bungles.  ..bruce w..

…ponder the state we’re in, and what’s likely to hit the fan over the remaining seven months of 2010.

Then start working on your emergency preparedness.  ..bruce w..

Eric S. Raymond, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“, has a thoughtful post on his blog this morning on how the current recession is impacting his circle of friends, two in particular. Here are the key paragraphs:

When I look at these guys, though, I can’t buy the explanation most people would jump for, which is that they simply fell behind in an increasingly skill-intensive job market. Thing is, they’re not uneducated; they’re not the stranded fruit-picker or construction worker that narrative would fit. Nor does offshoring explain what’s happened to these guys, because their jobs were the relatively hard-to-export kind.

No. What I think is: These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

In other words, established ‘liberal’ policies actually hurt those whom the liberals would most like to protect. Read the whole thing.

Wayne Holder, a high school friend and my boss at Oasis Systems/FTL Games nearly 30 years ago, talked once about how he was a radical liberal through college, then turned hard-core conservative once he started his own business and had to hire people. He complained about the increased costs and legal/regulatory consequences of each new person he hired — and this was back in the 1980s! I can only imagine what it’s like today.  ..bruce w..

Not so well, as it turns out (details over at Big Government). In the meantime, the Obama Administration continues to play games on “jobs created or saved”. ..bruce w..

How it looks in the planners' minds.

One fundamental economic problem with mass transit is that it rarely, if ever, is financially self-sufficient. This is usually explained away with something like, “Well, if we get enough people riding it, the benefit to the environment will be worth it.” Besides the fact that this generally isn’t true, there’s the additional problem that when (a) fuel prices go up and/or (b) economic times get tough, mass transit fares go up and services face cutbacks — right at the time when mass transit would might make more sense.

(Another fundamental problem is that mass transit, like most ‘alternative energy’ sources, lacks the density, carrying capacity, and convenience to make it worthwhile. But that’s another discussion.)

California, which never saw a green idea it didn’t like (and totally screw up), is facing this problem with mass transit right now (hat tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit):

For three years, Veronique Selgado took BART from the East Bay to her job working for an airline at San Francisco International Airport. But she recently switched to driving because BART raised fares and upped its SFO round-trip surcharge from $3 to $8, boosting her daily trip cost to nearly $20.

“It’s outrageous,” Selgado said. “At what point do they stop raising the prices,  when it’s $50 a day to go round-trip to work? At what point does BART stand back and say, ‘People can’t pay that much to commute’?”

One of the comments to the article points to this Onion classic:

WASHINGTON, DC–A study released Monday by the American Public Transportation Association reveals that 98 percent of Americans support the use of mass transit by others.

“With traffic congestion, pollution, and oil shortages all getting worse, now is the time to shift to affordable, efficient public transportation,” APTA director Howard Collier said. “Fortunately, as this report shows, Americans have finally recognized the need for everyone else to do exactly that.”

Of the study’s 5,200 participants, 44 percent cited faster commutes as the primary reason to expand public transportation, followed closely by shorter lines at the gas station. Environmental and energy concerns ranked a distant third and fourth, respectively.

Note that I lived in and around Washington DC for eight years and was a great fan of the Metro system — but I still have to admit it’s poorly run, poorly maintained, and heavily subsidized.  ..bruce..

…they’d probably look something like the one above. Hat tip to Steven Hayward over at NRO. ..bruce w..

Companies are born, live, thrive, dwindle, and then often die or are absorbed by other firms. Being 56 years old, I’ve seen a lot of that first-hand and have worked for several firms that no longer exist. Over at 24/7 Wall Street, Jon Ogg and Douglas McIntyre have picked ten brands that they think will go away one way or another in 2010. Here’s their list:

• Newsweek
• Motorola
• Palm
• Borders
• Blockbuster
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
• Ambac
• Eastman Kodak
• Sun Microsystems
• E*Trade

I worked (on a consulting/contract basis) at two of the companies above — Sun and Fannie Mae. I enjoyed my time at both locations, but I’m not surprised at the struggles that either firm is having. In fact, I’m not surprised at any  of the firms on the list, though some are doing worse than I thought. The whole article is worth reading.  ..bruce w..

(Hat tip to Blue Crab Boulevard.) I certainly remember Democrats and the mainstream media (the same thing, really) ranting about the millions of jobs lost under Bush, not to mention the climbing deficits. Funny how quiet they are now. I’m not sure we will see unemployment under Obama get back down to the highest point it reached under Bush (a little over 6%), nor will we ever see the deficit get back down to the highest point it reached under Bush, to wit (via the Heritage Foundation):

Things have gone so well since the Democrats took over Congress (starting in 2006, remember) and the White House. ..bruce w..