Thor found the following information about the worlds biggest debtors on CNBC’s website the other day. It is something the West really needs to have a good hard look at. In simple terms it is a list of the top debtor nation ranked as a percentage GDP. What is interesting and what grabbed Thor’s immediate attention is that with the exception of Hong Kong and we can blame British influence there, this looks like a roll call of Thor’s beer guzzling, lactose digesting, dog loving, war mongering, errant flaming Anglo Germanic children.
Ranking
Country
External debt (as % of GDP):
External debt per capita: $(USD)
Gross external debt: ($USD Bn)
Gross GDP ($USD Bn)
1
Ireland
815
549,819
2,322
285
2
United Kingdom
337
153,616
9,388
2,787
3
Belgium
327
155,362
1,618
495
4
Hong Kong
295
93,539
660
224
5
Netherlands
268
145,959
2,439
910
6
Switzerland
265
171,478
1,304
493
7
Austria
191
100,787
827
432
8
France
168
78,070
5,001
2,978
9
Denmark
159
107,026
589
370
10
Germany
138
63,767
5,250
3,818
11
Spain
137
57,091
2,313
1,683
12
Sweden
129
73,245
664
513
13
Finland
117
62,579
329
281
14
Norway
115
118,353
552
481
15
United States
95
44,258
13,627
14,330
Unranked – Included for interest
Australia
71
35,869
764
1,069
Canada
48
22,418
751
1,564
Russia
28
3,463
485
1,757
Not Happy
Take it from me your lighting wielding, chariot riding, wench loving ancestral deity who managed to pull his beard out of his mead long enough to log on to CNBC is furious. You lot are in so much shit. Not only does he find you on your hands and knee’s worshiping Semitic gods, but you are in debt!.
Let me quote “Which bit about avoiding usury at all costs did this fucking mob not understand!!” which was followed by his usual tirade about Semites, money lenders and those idiots in Rome. The bit he is really pissed about – and which you had better get your story straight about real fast is “How the fuck did this mob manage to control most of the worlds primary resources, all of it’s air space, it’s law, it’s armies, it’s medicine, it’s universities and not be able to turn a simple fucking profit!!”.
After calming down long enough to relight his ever present and omni potent stogie, pour another ale and scratch under his sporran for a while he has some “advice” for you if you get my drift.
All this social welfare, medical, legal, educational and military infrastructure that you have spent the last few thousand years developing is good stuff. But what you need to understand is that there is a cost to it. Every time government comes up with a “great idea” it has to be paid for and under your economic system that means governments recoup the cost as a tax spread across everyone. In simple terms it is an overhead that gets added to the cost of business. Whether it be a transaction tax, an income tax, company tax, a tariff, whatever. In the end it is a burden that gets spread across the economy. This means that goods produced in economies that have the burden of a welfare state are more expensive.
Now all this is fair enough, you chose to have a welfare state, which means that as individuals you have chosen to pay that burden in order to receive the benefits. What you can’t do, and this is the source of all your problems is now say you won’t buy goods that carry that burden. When you decide to buy cheaper goods from markets that are unburdened by these costs you are left with a net debt. This in turn forces up taxes because the government has to cover costs which in turn makes your goods even more expensive to the point that your businesses fail.
You can’t have it both ways. You can not have cheap goods and a welfare state. If you choose to do without the welfare state then your tax burden drops and your goods can compete. If you impose a welfare state and associated burden on external markets then you can achieve parity – but will result in a general raising of the cost of living because you are now paying the burden from external markets.
What you can not do is do nothing. Nor can you hide behind your individual “nations” try and say Ireland’s problems are not Australia’s problems. Like it or not blood is thicker than water and we sink or swim together.
Take the Irish for example, admittedly a worst case. Each and every man, woman and child in Ireland owes $USD 549k. This will take generations to repay. It is the equivalent of a good house for each person, and you are paying interest on all this.
I suggest you lot do something fast before Thor finds the keys to his chariot.
With boat loads of refugees turning up in Australian waters once again I find the situation to be a perfect example of the “Paradox Of Civilization” highlighted previously.
Now normally I would revise the definitions and try to express the issue in terms of the some concepts I have been playing with lately. Intellectual masturbation though makes for a boring read. So this time I will leave the philosophical wank for another post and just get to the point.
We have all seen the images of burning boats and bandaged people being rescued by the Australian Navy. What is not being discussed is that this whole asylum seeker issue the world over is an abuse of civilization. To force the civilized into a situation where their own moral and ethical standards are used against them is abhorrent. It is simply emotional blackmail, no different to the beggar breaking his child’s legs to get more money from passers by.
“Let me into your country or I will set myself on fire….”.
The debate that must occur.
A more serious issue behind all of this is that of closing the borders. It is a debate that must occur, but which because of the Paradox of Civilization the civilized world world finds extremely difficult to do.
Unfortunately whether it occurs this year or in a hundred years it is inevitable but in a democracy where the personal desires of an immigrant population affects political policy is a debate that may be impossible in a century. The simple mathematics of an exponentially growing world population on a finite and fixed land mass mean that there will always be increasing numbers of less fortunate wanting to cross your borders and those you do bring in will always find ways around your laws to sponsor their friends and family.
The Paradox of Civilization pushes us into a position where if we don’t open our borders then we according to our own standards are behaving in an uncivilized manner, but if we do then we put stresses on our infrastructure that damages ourselves.
The pain associated with this debate does not lessen by deferring it. At some point nations will be faced with the choice of pushing their own social and physical infrastructure beyond breaking point or saying no. If they take the first option then they themselves become the “less fortunate” and will become a burden on neighboring countries resulting in the whole house of cards collapsing.
Western infrastructure is already close to breaking point. Whether it be laziness or stupidity in the West I do not know, but we are currently unable to meet our own demands for medical and engineering skills and rely on skills from the developing world to supply our own needs. We no longer are able to manufacture our own products and rely on other nations to provide them for us.
Taking skilled resources away from the countries that need them is a serious issue. An Indian doctor on Harley St filling a gap that an Anglo Saxon is unwilling or unable to fill is not helping raise India’s standard of health. An African engineer building western oil platforms is not helping to develop Africa’s infrastructure. And that in turn increases immigration pressure.
This is a key problem. The asylum seeker and refugee issue will not go away until the developing world builds enough of it’s own infrastructure to support it’s own population. That can’t occur while the skilled from the developing world turn their back on their own to seek greener pastures elsewhere.
At some point an individual has to have loyalty to their own culture and history and put their own people ahead of personal wealth and status.
From a longer term Western view we need to reduce the immigration pressure and to do that we need to take steps to ensure skills are retained within the developing world. We also need to have a real hard look at ourselves to work out why with all the education, resources and opportunity we have why our own children won’t do mathematics, science and engineering. Why is it we have a demand for skilled labor we are unable to meet? Do we think of ourselves as some “elite” ruling class for whom doing real work is somehow something for those “brown and yellow people” lower down in the international pecking order.
Many of you have arts law history – have a think about what happened to the old European ruling classes last time the “I am too good for that” attitude became popular….
Well the Dow has turned down again. Technically it was overbought so this was due to happen, but we are also seeing the rumor mill go into overdrive with everything from “leaks” of the financial stress tests over at the Turner blog, to theories of China trying to escape toxic US debt.
Underlying this is the continual blame for this mess on the credit market meltdown. Well folks you are looking at the car wreck and blaming the telegraph pole. As I began discussing back in Park Bench Mortgages the meltdown in the credit market is a symptom not a cause. You should be asking yourselves why the driver didn’t see the pole in the first place.
The financial meltdown occurred because the pressure came off the housing market resulting in a situation where the value of the assets was not rising enough to cover the loans. All those “Sub Prime” loans were perfectly good as long as the demand for housing kept up. It would not have mattered if our friend on the park bench defaulted. The lender could have sold the property and covered themselves.
The real issue is the fact that demand for housing slowed and no one saw it coming and for that I have to blame the absolutely crappy level of mathematics education amongst our business, economics, banking, financial and political leadership. How many of them have at least two years uni level mathematics – or in fact how many of them have good enough high school mathematics to even get into first year uni math….
To see where I am coming from remember back a bit to all those home improvement shows that swamped TV a few years back during the real estate boom. “Auction Squad”, “Room for Improvement” etc. We were at a period in history in which the Baby Boomers were in the family home and their children where getting married and buying their first homes. Both these groups were competing in the same housing market. Once the after boomers had their new home their minds turned to having families and the demand cooled. At the time you could see the pregnant bellies morph into new mothers turning up at work to show off their latest, which morphed into masses of prams on the sidewalk, then pushers and demand for day care centers.
All of this is was predictable to anyone with even the slightest level of mathematics. Population versus age data is obtained by all the departments of statistics across the western world. All it would have taken to work out that the real estate demand was going to cool off and to adjust lending and risk management appropriately would have been for someone to look at the data.
It would not have been hard to ask “what do people in the twenty to thirty age group do”. “What will the effect on real estate of the baby boomers children themselves settling down be”…
You could literally see it happening around you at the time.
Why the mathematics? Quite simply because the leadership of the western world are mathematically challenged. They can not think in terms of data that is represented by anything more complex than . They don’t think first to look at the data and try to understand cause and effect. Statistics to them is a tool to highlight their opinion rather than a tool that should be used to form the opinion in the first place.
This is all compounded by the fact that all these guys have MBA’s. They all have masters level degrees implying a higher level of education. Did they learn anything or was it simply a case of paying their $20k for a ticket to senior management that the universities were happy to take…..
I don’t know about you, but I have known a lot of these guys. They are not smart. Well connected, well spoken and aggressive yes. Some of them are canny and street smart, but you wouldn’t want them in control of anything more complicated than a profit and loss statement for a fish and chip shop.
These guys aren’t good enough. Your lives depend upon their decisions. They make a mistake you get hurt.
Been a while since I did a recipe, so try this one for Texas Chilli. A work in progress.
Base
500g Diced Beef
500g Ground Beef
4 or 5 cloves Garlic
1 Large Onion
1 Tablespoon Oregano
2 Bay Leaves
1 Tablespoon Paprika
2 Tablespoons Hot Chili Powder
1 Tablespoon Chicken Stock Powder
1 Cup of water (or stock)
Spice Dump.
1 Tablespoon Hot Chili Powder
1 Teaspoon Black Pepper
1 Teaspoon White Pepper
1 Teaspoon Cayenne Pepper
2 Teaspoons Cumin
1 Tablespoon Tabasco
What we want to do is cook up some meat in onions with a base of chili and paprika until we have a sort of chili tasting thing. Then we will amp it up with additional spices until we have lift off.
Lightly fry the onions and garlic in some oil, throw in the meat and brown it. Add the stock, the oregano, paprika and 2 tablespoons of chilli powder. Add the cup of water and bay leaves and stir. Reduce heat to low so that it just bubbles. Leave for an hour stirring occasionally.
Now make the spice dump.
Mix up the chili powder, cayenne pepper, cumin, white pepper and black pepper in a small bowl. Taste the base – which should be reasonable – but certainly not hot. Add a teaspoon or so of the spice mix and some of the tabasco and re-taste. Is it hot enough – or are the spices starting to be too overpowering – Yes? then you are done. No? then in about 10 minutes time repeat the previous tasting and adding more of the spice mix.
It’s cooked when you are.
Serve on corn chips, with cheese and I add sour cream – although purists will consider the previous to be the sacrilegious work of a big woos – they eat it straight.
Notes.
It really needs Jalapeños but hard to find at the moment – although I may try the bottled ones.
Care with the cumin – I previously tried a tablespoon rather than 2 teaspoons and it overpowered the chili.
You could double up on the spice dump mix if you like it really hot. I found this to be okay – slight nose dribbles and chilli sweat – but certainly not blow your head off. So if you really like it HOT – double up this mix and you can push it further up the decibel scale – a couple of teaspoons at a time. CARE!! as you amp up the heat you can easily destroy the whole pot with too much spice. Not in the sense of too hot – just that the underlying taste of spice will dominate. Eat a teaspoon of the raw spice mix to see what you will end up with if you use too much. Blechhhh!
Also needs Masa Harina flour, but trying to get that in Australia is non trivial – BTW if you want to try something else apart from Masa Harina flour – which is a sort of South American flour that has been specially prepared, don’t use what Australians call corn flour – because that is what the rest of the world calls corn starch and is better used in non newtonian fluid experiments than actually being eaten. Also don’t use maize flour – because yes Masa Harina flour uses maize but that is about it. So either get the real thing – or serve with corn ships – which are made of Masa Harina flour.
Taste Test: F’ing wonderful – tastes great with a nice after taste that goes on pumping capsaicin and various other capsaicinoids into your system a long time after your last mouthful.
As you dig into your chocolate rabbits and eggs at this time of year spare a thought for our missing history. All those tales and stories of European oral history that were destroyed over the centuries. The stories that accompany the eggs and rabbit your children are demolishing. The tales of your ancestors migrations across Europe, through the UK and now across the world. All gone.
Ignore the christian idols that have been pasted on top of the traditional spring festival. They have had their day. Like the winter past, after two thousand years of ignorance and darkness, the lies and deceits of the church are finally falling from the minds of our children.
We now live in a world where foolishness of the church is plain to see. Condom’s cause HIV eh? Let’s file that one alongside the “World is Flat”, papal infallibility and Rome being the gateway to the afterlife.
But for now dig in. For those still in the North. Winter and Winterfest is a memory, the snows are receding, the streams are running again, the fowl are laying and rabbits can be found in the fields. The darkness of winter has been pushed back and finally after three long months the kids are no longer underfoot and there is fresh food on the table.
Happily the festival of the spring equinox is much as it has always been, a time for family, friends, eggs and rabbit – albeit chocolate ones in this day and age.
Eat and enjoy. Another year begins and there is much work to be done before the darkness and the cold returns.
I found this YouTube video that is worth thinking about. The author goes a bit over the top at the end trying to whip up support for his YouTube channel, but I think his heart is in the right place.
In NSW over the last weeks there have been well reported crackdowns on “Outlaw” biker gangs. What is interesting about all this is that these crackdowns have not occurred under the anti association laws that were passed through the state parliament without any debate. The crackdown has occurred under existing criminal law.
The police correctly have been raiding biker premises where drugs, firearms and other criminal activity has taken place. They have been pulling over armed bikers etc etc. Things they could have done at any time over the last five years.
So now we find our civil liberties have been taken away by the “saviours” in state parliament. The state opposition provided no opposition as usual and we find that we didn’t need these laws in the first place.
All we needed was for the NSW police to do their bloody job instead of crying out for more and greater powers.
If they knew these guys were manufacturing drugs and had piles of illegal firearms, and they knew not only what these guys were doing, but the addresses that the drug factories and weapons stockpiles were located at, what the fuck were they doing.
So the police for whatever reason turn a blind eye to the activities of these guys until it became so popular that all the Middle Eastern crime gangs that were targeted by police, morphed into “Biker Gangs” that were left alone by police, the whole thing hits a crisis point with bombings, bashings and shootings becoming the norm and everyone else in the state looses their Liberty as a consequence.
Remember these laws will be on the books for a long long time after the last Middle Eastern Hells Angel and his bomb making associates enter a retirement home.
A knee jerk reaction by a struggling and unpopular government to protect us from hobgoblins that they created by having the police allow these guys to get out of control and the concept of personal liberty is pushed even further from the grasp of the average Australian.
New South Wales. The unemployment capital of Australia and now an even less pleasant place to live. Last one out turn off the light methinks.
(Middle Eastern Bikers? believe it or not. Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander actually, many apparently don’t even ride bikes. A consequence of changing demographics, there are simply not enough Anglo Saxons left to recruit from.)
Most of you probably have never met a biker and to be honest the last time I was in the vicinity of them was quarter of a century ago in South Australia when the Barbarians were still a recent memory and the October long weekend if I remember correctly meant three days of madness at the Ponde music festival and another year to get the taste of diesel chook out of your mouth. (Recipe: Pile up twenty or so of chickens in take away foil bags, cover with diesel, add a match – sell to party goers with the munchies).
While you justifying the anti biker actions when people being arrested are apparently committing an illegal act on the higher end of the scale what are you going to do about this guy:
He is a stereotype biker. Rides a somewhat street legal Harley, wears a patch, owns some guns, smokes some weed. He runs a custom bike shop or works in one. A blokes bloke rather than a metrosexual he is an outlaw because he isn’t main stream.
In fact he is probably no different in many ways to the ferals up at Byron and thereabouts who perhaps eshew the guns and bikes, but also wear scruffy cloths, bath occasionally, have long hair, tatoos, partake in various substances and also have no time for the rat race. He has analogs in the surfer crowd who have long hair, scruffy clothes, partake in various substances, may own a surf shop and is somewhat less than reliable when the surfs up.
He doesn’t sell drugs – too much hassle, but probably knows where to get them. He, like our feral from Byron and surfer from Bells beach isn’t exactly law abiding when it comes to the state dictating his moral behavior, but he – like the junk yard dog isn’t dangerous unless provoked.
With a wife and a couple of kids you are going to lock him up for years because he talks to someone.
Have a serious serious think about this.
Do the ‘Bra boys and surfer associates down at Maroubra and our ferals up at Byron have anything to worry about. What happens when the religious right of the NSW Liberals control the state parliament.
Is it possible to control the organized crime aspects that have crept into the biker scene using existing laws? Have you talked to our gun toting, pot smoking, patched up custom bike shop owner to find out his opinion of the new breed, addidas wearing, thinks a knuckle head is his silly mate and a shovel head is a road worker wannabe in a patch who really should be hanging out at Hip Hop bars with his “Crew from da Hood”.
. They don’t think first to look at the data and try to understand cause and effect. Statistics to them is a tool to highlight their opinion rather than a tool that should be used to form the opinion in the first place.
