New Zealand Hitting the Wall
June 22nd, 2008No surprises here. I can’t be arsed to find the story, but years ago, I wrote that I’d pick New Zealand in a state of collapse over Southern California any day. The theory could be put to a test here soon enough, the way things are going.
It’s funny, up here in the Far North, when I talk to people, the tone is something like, “So it’s finally the end of days. Thank Goodness. I just wish it happened twenty years ago.”
Anyway, I love the last sentence of this piece below. Let them eat spuds. HAHA
Via: Stuff:
The average Kiwi has to work until smoko time each Wednesday just to fuel up the car and buy the groceries.
Calculations by the Sunday Star-Times show that on the average Kiwi wage of $45,000 a year, a worker needs to toil away for 17 hours a week just to keep their family fed and their car fuelled. That is because food prices have gone up by 11.8 per cent in the past year, while petrol prices have jumped 34 per cent. By contrast, wages for most people have risen by only about 3 per cent.
…
A backbench MP earning $126,000 before tax needs to work about seven hours a week to cover grocery and petrol costs, while high-paying chief executives earning an average of $300,000 need to do just three hours of work a week.
For most of us, though, the pain shows no signs of abating oil prices rose nearly $US3 a barrel on Friday with international predictions of further hikes. And in Britain, householders squeezed by the credit crunch are being urged to turn to potatoes to keep them healthy, just as an earlier generation did in World War II.
Wow! Just as I am buying bins to fill will soil and grow potatoes in!!!