Day: November 19, 2021

Preparedness Notes for Friday — November 19, 2021

On this day in 1863, U.S. President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, at the dedication service for the National Cemetery in Pennsylvania. — Less than two weeks left!  Get your entries in for Round 97 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. More than $725,000 worth of prizes have been awarded since we started running this contest. Round 97 ends on November 30th, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how-to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.


The Curse of The Cult of Kanban

In 2007, I began warning SurvivalBlog readers about global over-reliance on Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory management. This system — also called lean inventory management or kanban — was first developed by Toyota in Japan, in the 1950s. There, with largely internal chains of supply that were all clustered around the major cities on Japan’s largest island, Honshu, the kanban system worked with wonderful efficiency. Kanban soon branched out to the other three primary islands: Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku. Manufacturers were able to cut costs by keeping their parts inventory small, and placing frequent orders to their supplying wholesalers and component parts …


Economics & Investing For Preppers

Here are the latest news items and commentary on current economics news, market trends, stocks, investing opportunities, and the precious metals markets. We also cover hedges, derivatives, and obscura. Most of these items are from the “tangibles heavy” contrarian perspective of SurvivalBlog’s Founder and Senior Editor, JWR. Today, we look at the strengthening U.S. Dollar. (See the Forex & Cryptos section.) Precious Metals: Gold gains as inflation worries offset strong dollar. o  o  o Gold Is Back in Vogue With Bulls Loving Faster Inflation Again. Here is an excerpt from the Yahoo article: “While bullion is often bought as a …


The Editors’ Quote of the Day:

“These observations bring out the fact that, whenever liberty is regarded merely as the power to do something which it is desired to do, the tyrant need only base himself on the desires of the masses to suppress the liberties cherished by a few. But can anyone fail to see that the very concrete problem here posed is the problem of the sation of satisfactions, and not the problem of liberty at all? How, then, has it come about that we have drifted away from what we were discussing? This is the very definition of liberty which we allowed as …