David Bottomley's Blog

We are living in a world that, only in the last few years, since roughly 2008, there are now more people living in urban environments rather than rural ones.  In my view this is alarming because it means that the population is becoming even more disconnected from the reality of existence than has historically been the case.  We as a society have now become more dependent upon one another than ever before in history.  As recently as a couple hundred years ago, or just a handful of generations, if you wanted to eat chicken, you raised them, grew them, slaughtered them, cooked them and ate them.  Your chickens laid eggs, you milked your cows, you hunted and raised a garden.  You chopped firewood to provide for your own heat, and you grew cotton, dried it, spun it, and wove it to create clothing.  You built your home out of trees and logs that you cut and fashioned with basic tools and your own bare hands.  You might gain the help of your family or your ch...

There is a grave threat to our survival that is very rarely mentioned by the media, and thus far has garnered very little action by the government or private actors.  A Commission to Congress has said that it is likely to kill 90% of the US population within a year of it happening.  NASA says that it is inevitable and that it will very likely happen in our lifetimes. This threat can be natural, in the form of a large solar flare or coronal mass ejection (CME), or it can be man-made, in the form of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).  These occur when a large electromagnetic field impacts the Earth’s atmosphere.  Energetic particles, such as gamma rays interact with the atmosphere, creating positive ions and Compton electrons which generates a geomagnetic storm, or a disruption in the Earth’s magnetic field. In 1859, a massive CME called the Carrington Event occured.  The sun ejected plasma, and its associated magnetic field which was hurled directly at the ...

It is critical that we understand the basic economic mechanisms that dictate our daily lives so that we understand what is really going on around us, and why we are standing on a house of cards.  Let's start out with some very basic definitions.   Wealth is the accumulated value of the sum of your time and freedom.  In other words, when you decide to sacrifice some of your time and/or freedom to benefit others in society, you are rewarded with money, which you can then use to purchase time and freedom from others, i.e. goods or services.  Those goods were produced through the expenditure of someone's time to obtain or refine resources.  For example, mining ore takes someone's time.  Refining that ore into stronger materials takes someone else's time.  Refining that into something useful, such as a sword, takes yet more time and skills.  When you trade your money for a good such as a sword, you are paying for all of the time that went into the ...