This is apparently not true, but a good anecdote nonetheless.
Railroad tracks. This is fascinating.
Be sure to read the final paragraph; your understanding of it will depend on the earlier part of the content.
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England , and English expatriates built the US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge theyused.
Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England , because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England ) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification/ procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the r ear ends of two war horses. (Two horse's asses.) Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRB's would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB's had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything... and
CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling the rest.
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To get you quickly back up to speed here at the two dynamics to keep firmly in mind when making any financial decisions today:
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In the first Depression, the economic losses were immediate and personal in the wake of the crash in 1929. In that event, the losses in the banking industry ($3.6-billion in less than the first three years) amounted on a constant-dollar basis to about $481-per capita. This time, we're going well north of that: presently in the range of $650 per capita (and that's only looking at the $200-billion for banks). But what's different about Depression 2 is that we haven't really seen what I call the "Pocketbook Effect" of Depression 2 yet, since the loss on the backside will be through higher marginal tax rates. This BOHICA later than sooner means that Americans are going to slowly ramp up their personal savings rate, but remember this will only apply to the 11-people who will still have jobs when we get into double-digit unemployment later this year or early next, or as the global 'take-it-to-the-street' mode starts to appear late this month or early next and then rolls us into the 'summer of hell' since MSM continues to pump the unsustainable lifestyle imagery into the global mass consciousness. (Glad you asked?)
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The second dynamic is that inflation impacts stock prices, but will likely only do so as long as the perception is about that there's a chance companies can struggle back to their 'old ways' which includes owning large 'market share' in this vertical (market) or that. The problem is, of course, that since I expect that consumers will keep on pulling in their horns - not to mention things like doubling up on housing for economic reasons, which will push commercial real estate further over the edge - in order to get their personal savings rate up to something near what's required to reform capital, which in turn is a years-long process itself and distinguished from 'papering over' which is the present effort.
Sorry for the five-lines-long sentence, but sometimes we have to deal with big concepts, even if it's Monday. You can almost take this to the bank IMHO: The same inflation that saves banksters after they foreclose on folks will also drive up 'asset prices' in a phony sort of way on Wall Street until someone wakes up and says "Hey! Milk's up to $7.50 a gallon - WTF?" But, by then it will be too late and the only place I see worth hiding is by investing in non-paper assets and things which can in and of themselves make economic sense. Buying solar panels which have done down quite a bit on a cost-per-watt basis seem to make sense. (More on that in the 'coping' section.)
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You did see where the head of the World Bank says the stimulus ideas coming out of Washington are nothing more than a 'sugar high' for the economy? Don't need to convince me.
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