4 - What We're In For (Maybe)

Out of all the noteworthy news in the month of June one of the most direct may be an article about the US Superbubble popping. What does it mean? Beats the hell out of me, since I didn’t read it. Anyone on the streets already knows that the economy is going through a tanking process, brought about by a variety of factors, one of the most obvious being the ever-rising price of gas. The super bubble probably relates to housing prices (that’s mostly what they speak of when they mention bubbles in economic articles). Anyone with half an eye out knows the real-estate market has dipped pretty far lately.

What does it all mean? Well doof-US, we’re riding out a recession. It’s pretty clear to anyone save King George that the economy is on a pretty good down swing, and while the royal cabinet is continually telling us that “everything is fine, go spend money” it’s pretty obvious to anyone living on the working class economy that things are in fact shaky.

On a personal level, I find the release of state quarters in the states to be a pretty good indicator of economic niceties. It’s not a perfect system but it works thusly - the quarters are released by our two mints, one in Denver, one in Philly. (I think.) You’ll find the mint marks D or P, and depending where you live you’re most likely to get one or the other straight out of the store register. Since I live in the Midwest, I generally get Denver minted quarters. The indicator factor for me depends on how many of the P marked quarters I happen to find. When a new mint comes out, collectors have their way and you get what you get, but after the first month or so, you begin to see the new coin mixed into circulation. The trick I find, is to watch for the opposite mint mark. If the economy is good, people are traveling, spending their money, and you find more opposites passing through your hands. The worse the economy gets, the less people you have traveling, the less of those opposites you find.

I’m not seeing many P marked quarters at all this year. (Only applicable to the newly circulated sets thank you.) I realize as an economic indicator it’s silly, but it works for me.


So what exactly are we in for? If you’re reading this (and I only know one person that is) then you already know how the job market is around this sector of North America. (Starbucks announced today they’re closing 600 US shops.) I’ve been lamenting on the state of the Internet… it’s been slower; it’s been impossible for me to play WoW.

Thing about those two is as follows: Since the dot com crash, Internet is definitely not free. You have to pay for the data-transfer; someone in turn has to pay for the servers. But there are two classes of Internet use out there - business, and personal, and thanks to the market, we’re all paying a business class price. Guess what happens when those businesses we’ve come to rely on quit hosting net connections. The way I see it going, less connections to go around, more Internet congestion, less signal, and them bam.

Limited personal access, if you get access at all. In this case, recession means regression. Maybe I’m simply reading all the wrong signs, and my particular troubles are all in the heart of my aging machine. But I’ve been seeing servers failing recently, and replacements are apparently harder to come by. When it comes down to the non-business machines hosted by those teens and twenty somethings that have long been supplementing our networks, the choice between net time and food is a no-brainer. You know who is going to lose out. And as unfortunate as that may be to me in the short term, if it really is working out this way, the majority of us home users stand to lose out on a valuable personal resource.