Don't have the fish

Like Uncle Ken, I'm a big fan of cash but as the cashless society approaches we are dinosaurs and our days are numbered.  I read recently that there are stores in one of the Scandinavian countries that refuses to accept cash; electronic transactions only.  You can't rob a cash register when there is none.  As far as getting knocked on the head, I've never worried about it.  Muggers these days are after smart phones and expensive jewelry and I have neither.  Thieves usually go where the money is and I seldom frequent that kind of neighborhood, nor do I look like I'm carrying a lot of dough.

To me, cash money is real, quite unlike some figures in an electronic database.  When I pull a twenty out of my pocket I know I am spending twenty dollars and I don't have to review a bank statement to see how much I've spent.

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The widening gulf between the rich and poor is a tough nut to crack.  How much wealth, I wonder, is real or is it just wealth "on paper" that has no real value?   There was a Wall Street fluctuation a while back and it was reported that Warren Buffet lost three billion dollars in a single day.  You've got to be real rich to absorb that kind of hit, but he probably made it all back, and then some, a month or so later.  I don't know how our economic system really works; for me to understand it is like trying to take a bite of a whole watermelon and I can't get my jaws around it.

What I did find interesting, though, is the attached graph that shows inflation over the years in the US.  It looks pretty stable until around 1970 and then it started to rise dramatically.  But I can't figure out what happened around that time.  Any ideas?  Is our economic system a big bubble waiting to burst?

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Switching gears, I heard a recent podcast that stated that the Amazon rain forest may have been man-made.  This is due to presence of terra preta, a man-made soil (you can look that up, if interested).  Also, some scholars have found traces of sophisticated canals and lakes, indicating that much of the landscape and plant life was artificially introduced.  Apparently, terra  preta is the most fertile soil on earth, vastly exceeding the soil of our own Great Plains.  An added plus is that it is a good way to sequester carbon, for those who are concerned about the rise of atmospheric CO2.  Planting more stuff is a good way to absorb CO2, don't you think?  I wonder if there is a single plant that is best at absorbing CO2, maybe the fastest growing; bamboo perhaps?

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So, it's off to Mar-a-Lago for the chief executive, again.  It was funny to read about all the health code violations in the resort's kitchen just prior to the visit by the Chinese guy.  No wonder Trump likes his steaks well done.