Quote from: K-Dog on Aug 31, 2023, 02:41 PMI tried to post the TikTok, but to see the video requires logging into TikTok.

True, but there is some way of dropping on code that produces a graphic link to the TikTok page, where you can then sign in using your Google ID.  There is no paywall.  The article has this sort of link embedded, so you probably could do it here if you can figure out the code.  Not my specialty, but I would think it's right up your alley.

QuoteThe lesson I learned from family that went through the 1930s is to own your home.  One less thing to pay for and you can't get evicted.  Good I listened because getting one now is impossible.  Feudal lords are returning.

Plenty of folks who owned homes got evicted during the Great Depression for owing back taxes.  That of course was the fate of Tom Joad's family of Okies and many other poor farmers.  You have been fortunate enough to first get a job with Paul Allen that allowed you to finish paying off your McMansion, and now you have both Social Security (nonexistent until after the GD) and a pension, plus your current Slave Wage job to cover your tax bill.  I remember how close you came to falling off the cliff before you landed that miracle job with Paul that allowed you to weather the storm.  Had you not landed that job, the outcome likely would have been quite different today.

Quote* The other thing I learned from family was to stay out of debt.

Also a major reason for the Okie farmers losing family farms which had been paid for generations earlier.  In order to compete, they had been forced to take on debt to buy the new steaam, diesel and gasoline Tractors to till the soil and pull the Combines to reap the crops.  A team of quarter horses no longer were enough.  The farms were collateral for these machines, and when food prices collapsed the banks picked up the farms at tax auctions for pennies on the dollar.  Said land was purchased by Agribizness Corporations financed by Wall Street money, the farmhouses were razed and now one tractor driver could farm land that formerly supported 10 families.  Of course, that land was never good for farming to begin with, it was grazing land for buffalo.  Only irrigation made farming possible long term which required still more investment in FF powered pumps to drain water collected over millenia in the Ogalala Aquifer.  In the years since the GD, the aquifer has been drained nearly dry and the topsoil is barely thick enough to hold the roots.  Soon enough, not even tractors and pumps will grow corn and soybeans on that land and the agribiznesses will abandon it also.

Perhaps in 10,000 years when most of us are gone from the neighborhood, herds of migratory buffalo will graze those grasslands again and a few hardy members of the species Homo Survivorus Collapsentience will follow these herds for a while until the lava currently percolating and pressurizing beneath La Garita Caldera* blows once again, since it is already overdue in its regular cycle of Supervolcanic eruptions.  So it goes.

*La Garita Caldera at Fish Canyon Tuff in Colorado is the site of the 2nd most energetic event to occur on earth since an Asteroid impact wiped out the Dinosaurs 66M years ago  Its size is exceeded only by the eruption at Wah Wah Tuff in Utah, and both exceed the size of the eruptions at Yellowstone.  Big as these events were they were exceeded 420X by the asteroid impact, and probably would not be global extinction events, just local to the western half of the NA continent..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PENT_hnyO-o

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