Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Format Change

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

I’ve re-organized the categories to be more straight forward.

Now all news, interviews, commentaries from outside sources, will go in the category Our World.

All items that are general commentaries will go into Reflections. If it’s a story about a specific news item, it will go in Our World, if it’s a general commentary, it will go in Reflections.

Since we’re now entering into the decline phase of many key global commodities, there’s no real point in pretending that an economic grind down event is separate from oil price spikes and other raw material instabilities.

But mostly I’ll be writing about things I like to do, like backpacking, being out in nature, and so on.

I will try to present more overviews now and then, and will try to tie things together a bit for readers who might find their way here.

Best of luck to you in the future, but don’t expect the present or past to reproduce, it’s just not in the cards. Stay out of debt, that’s the best advice at this point, live within your means, whatever you may feel you are entitled to have, what you can afford is what you actually should have today.

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Opt Out of Credit Card Offers

Friday, May 16th, 2008

This is a bit off topic for the site, but I thought I’d post how to get yourself off those eternal credit card offer letters you get bombarded with.

Go to www.optoutprescreen.com. Being a good sceptic, and trusting nothing and nobody on the internet, I gave this site a quick check to make sure it’s not a phishing or scam site:

Customers may opt-out from receiving offers for either five years or permanently. To opt-out permanently, customers must confirm their request in writing, by mailing in a Permanent Opt-Out Election form, available through the website. Customers who have opted-out will no longer be included in offer lists provided by consumer reporting agencies. Customers who have previously completed an opt-out request may request to opt back in at the website as well.
….
When first debuted, there was considerable confusion as to whether or not the site was legitimate. The website appeared to some to be an Internet phishing scam, because it does not use the logos of the consumer reporting agencies that it purports to represent, nor the FTC logo. However, the site is directly linked from official FTC webpages.
wikipedia.org

Note: you can skip the social security number, but then I assume that only your current address will get opted out, not your actual identity. That’s what I did, just because on principle I don’t like to give any site on the internet any more information than necessary. Sites can and do get hacked.

You can also call them directly: (1-888-5OPTOUT or 1-888-567-8688) to get off these lists.

In general, this will save some paper, save some trees, and create a bit less garbage for landfills, so why not do it? It’s not going to save the world, but if we cut down in enough areas, reduce our consumption of unnecessary items (probably 90% of what we consume in the United States I’d guess), well, at least we’re on the right track.

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Welcome to A Drop of Rain

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

What’s going on? Things are getting confusing, and changes are going to be coming faster and faster. Peak commodities/population are going to translate to into ongoing patterns of extreme volatility globally, while locally we’ll see how things adapt and evolve. Nature will struggle to adapt, but it will be hard going. Get out there on the trails and see for yourselves how things change during the coming years.

Now and then, when affairs / free time warrant it, a drop of rain will try to make sense of it all, or at least of a piece or two, here or there. Probably won’t succeed, but it’s worth a try, you just never know what will happen, or how.

Maybe a drop will fall, at just the right time, to let something or other grow that might not have done so otherwise, or maybe it will just fall on dead earth, with nobody the wiser.

It’s not every day, after all, that you can say we’ve hit the peak of human existence, in pretty much every way you can imagine, water, oil, raw materials, population, food, soil, you name it. Well, ok, maybe not a cultural peak.

We’ve certainly gotten away from pretty much everything that actually matters in any larger sense. That sorry situation will hopefully change at some point, but again, only time will tell.

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