Is Money A Terrible Thing

if not money, then what? Money is a clever way of porting your bart, is it not?

 

Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay
And your O.K.

Money, it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands
And make a stash

New car, caviar, four star daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team

Money get back
I'm all right Jack
Keep your hands off my stack

Money, it's a hit
Don't give me that
Do goody good bullshit

I'm in the hi-fidelity
First class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet

Money, it's a crime
Share it fairly
But don't take a slice of my pie

Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil
Today

But if you ask for a rise
It's no surprise that they're
Giving none away
Away
Away
Away
Away..

Sorry Pink Floyd just is going through my head right now and so is "Imagine" by John Lennon....there's your sign

 

Money is convenient. In my perspective money is still used as required, but for attaining value in life, it is cruel to everyone. By monies standards, the majority of the earths population is poor, completely ignoring human capital.

The offender here is not money itself but the idea of variable exchange rates.

 

Compound interest- FINANCIAL WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION
http://www.alislam.org/egazette/articles/Compund-Interest-200903.pdf

 

Is being rich important? No.

Does having so little money that you're struggling to feed and house yourself suck? Yes.

There is a happy middle-ground here. Here is my 10 second guide to money and life happiness: do a job you find meaningful, preferably one you also find personally satisfying. mix it up so you aren't bored. live simply so that the size of your income isn't particularly important. spend excess money and time on personally meaningful activities, whatever those are (expensive guitars, traveling, charity, animals, building houses in the sticks, whatever).

As soon as you take the status out of money, the rest of the problems just kind of fade away.

 

I Always wondered what makes people who are rich better then me and you ???

 

Money is cool. They did a study that showed money does in fact buy happiness, but only up to $80,000 a year, past there the amount of money being made had a negligible effect on happiness.

 

happiness ??? you mean more greed

 

Greed is good

 

Financial weapons of mass destruction 2

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/10/the-real-financial-wmd-2/

 

Spoken like someone who has it, to some the status of money is they do not have it. Money is, they say, as money does.

 

i think the problem has to do with the discrepancy between money and value. money takes the place of bartering items, which is convenient, but items you purchase have different values to different people, especially if they don't have a lot to spend. how much is your time worth to you? how much is it worth to your boss? when you have free time do you use it in a way that reduces the amount you have to work for your boss? you can bake bread, cook from scratch, make your own cereal (i have gingerbread cereal in my cabinet right now, its awesome!) and all it takes is a bit of time. people dont know how to judge value in their lives anymore. i will spend $30-60 on a good piece of cast iron cookware, because i value it. i will give up a lesser want to get what is of greater value. most people cant prioritize with ease, everything is 'needed' and its not.
for example, in making jams and jellies, most people today use store bought powdered pectin, which requires a LOT of sugar to work, so your jam tastes like sugar. but you dont NEED to use pectin and drown in sugar. all it allows you to do is make jam by the clock, instead of the old fashioned way, which requires a skill, knowing when the jam sheets off a spoon. thats the point where it will set up properly. i used maybe 2 cups of sugar, no added pectin in my raspberry jam, and you know what it tastes like? fucking raspberries. delicious.
bread is the same way. we buy bread in the store, to avoid a skill. you have to know when the dough feels right. you have to know to let the dough rest. you have to know how altitude effects you (im 8,000+ feet up, i use less yeast and my dough STILL rises twice as fast. but my first attempts at yeast breads did not work out so well, and were discouraging, because i didn't know about the altitude thing.)

i have made french bread, and french onion soup from scratch. it just takes a little time, and most people truly have no grasp of the value of their time. if you could live on part time wages, then more people could work part time instead of full time, and there would be more jobs. i know its not that easy, but if you didnt have to buy as much stuff to survive you wouldnt have to work as many hours. and people in the past have lived with so much less. i know an old lady, she was raised on a farm in nebraska, one of like 13 kids or so, in a small house. i learn the old ways of doing things because they require more skills and less stuff. stuff costs money, bogs you down.

i think my train of thought ran out of track.
a conclusion is just the place where someone got tired of thinking.

 

I've never really self evaluated my financial situation to the degree that I should have - maybe you're right.

Maybe I feel poorer (financially) than I actually am. I'll think about it and get back to you.

 

Life is like a shit sandwhich, the more bread you got the less shit you have to eat.

Thats the shortest answer i could come up with

 

absolutely nothing.

Our system is so intrisically built around money and economy that this is really a non-issue because we'll never free ourselves of the idea of money. Even before the use of paper money, gold and other items were bartered.

Its all based on an exchange system. Money buys things. Some things are unncessary and are bought because of greed, envy, and desire. Other things are neccessary, such as food, clothing, and shelter. I agree with the statement "money is the root of all evil," but I also need clothes, food, and shelter so money is a neccessary evil. Without money we would all still be making huts out of sticks, killing our own food, and constructing clothing out of leaves. There are many people in parts of the world that still do these things. To them, money has no value. To us, money represents the things they obtain through other means.

The most basically corrupt thing about our particular monetary system is that it truly has absolutely no value. Its all paper money and its not backed by gold. The only thing that gives it value is our faith that it has value. Without that faith, we would face a complete economic collapse. What would we do then? Go back to the bartering system? Construct huts out of sticks, become hunters, and make clothing out of leaves?

Chances are you're wealthier than a large percentage of the world's population. I'm about as poor as they come by American standards, but I feel very wealthy because I know I still have more than a lot of people in the world.

 

People always say this, but there is no fundamental difference between fiat currency and gold (ie: neither is intrinsically valuable) except that there are strict limits on the amount of gold available (versus fiat currency, which can be created) to limit inflation. That is it.

 

The law of supply and demand essentially gives anything in this world its value. Gold is limited and man cannot create more. The demand is high while the supply is low, thus giving it value. The fact that we can create paper money out of thin air will render it completey worthless sometime in the not so distant future, i predict.

 

...without doubt, I'm in the same boat. And I'm not particularly wealthy - I make about 40k a year (in the 4 months of summer), but a significant amount of that goes to pay for my schooling.

I think what takes the stress out of my money situation is that I never really worry about money - and that is more access to credit (from the bank and as a very worst case scenario, my parents). That is the kicker, I think.

 

You are very correct. One thing that I learned when I went on my Homesteading stint is just how lazy we have grown to be as a society. And I mean, you can't blame us. When you have two things, and one's easier and gives pretty much the same results, it seems clear that you'll choose the easier over the harder practically all of the time.

The only problem with your method of thinking is that most people don't have access to the wonderful mothers and fathers and grandparents and neighbors who can teach them how to do things. Most are raised in an environment where they're left with a babysitter or thrown into a daycare until they're old enough to go to school. When Mom & Dad get home from work, they're too tired or too busy to be able to spend time teaching their children about all of these little skills.

Eloquently phrased. ;D

This is one good thing about money. It forces competition and rapid development. If everyone is at the same level, and living in a stick house, things aren't going to change very much. But if people are competing to make more of something than everyone else (in our case, money), then all advancements are going to happen at an exponentially higher rate.

This is why when you look at these people that haven't adopted a system of currency, they're almost always worlds behind us in living conditions and such.

Our paper money is backed by gold. I actually don't think that the U.S. Government is allowed to print money unless they have solid gold to back it up. This doesn't account for counterfeit money, but most of the cash floating around out there is legit. Our problems really started when we let credit leak in to the system. People started taking out loans, and realized how easy it was to get things, and then found out after it was too late that it's very hard to pay for things. So much of the money is completely digital, meaning that there is no paper or gold backing for it. It's nothing more than another number on a computer.

As for when the system collapses (and it will, because it can only remain unstable for so long. Eventually something's got to give), I predict that we'll just develop some new monetary system and start all over again. There are some smart smart people in the world today, and I'd like to think that if they could start from scratch, they could develop a relatively safe & sound bartering system that doesn't allow as much room for greed and credit problems as our current one does.

What do you do where you only work during the summer?

And what are you going to school for? It must be fairly expensive if a significant portion of 40k is going to it. It doesn't seem like you should lose more than half of that to schooling, though I guess if you're going to a bigger university, it very well could.

Knowing that you have something to fall back upon definitely makes a huge huge difference. It's like, if you're driving your car through a desert and you know that there won't be a gas station for 50 miles, and you're almost on empty. You're going to absolutely freaking out. However, if you're 50 miles away from the nearest station and on empty, but you know that you have a container of gas in the trunk of your car, you're going to be seeing things in a far better light.

 

...except governments realize printing too much money devalues it (in worst case scenarios leading to hyperinflation), so stable governments try to not create too much (limiting supply).

I'm less familiar with the Federal Reserve system in the US, but this is the whole purpose of the Bank of Canada - limiting inflation to an acceptable 1-3 percent. And they control the currency.