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I have morphed into someone that “thinks” he would prefer the tropics on a full time basis….eventually. I do also enjoy the 4 seasons we have here in the North East, they all offer something beautiful. I also love to ski and snowboard, then getting off the mountain and into a hot tub or heated outdoor pool. Dinner by a fire….Thats how I’ll be spending this weekend.
I have really enjoyed living in the North East, from NYC we are close to so many diverse and wonderful places;beaches,mountains, summers on Cape Cod, skiing in Vermont, theater and great food in Manhattan.
That said I look forward to spending 3 months a year in Costa Rica and quite possibly retiring there in 20 years.
I know many people who would not trade the diversity of seasons for CR living full time. My sister lives in Florida, not for me, theres not much I like about that state, other than a weekend of golf in the winter.
Happy and Healthy New Year Everyone!
GPS really changed my life here in the NYC area, how did I ever get anywhere before! In CR I have often laughed at the imagined voice commands; “Turn left 300Ms past the steel church.”
Your final outcome sounds very scary and I hope you’re wrong. For now the “markets” continue to function and I have done well with select ETFs in metals/mining and emerging markets. One of the guys I follow is Dan Sullivan, been good to me.
Scott: Zerohedge is in my blog reading list along with poorrichards…not for the faint of heart! I don’t presume to know what will happen, but full collapse of all systems? I’m betting against that. Time will tell.
Warren,
I would agree with your premise our days as the shinning star are waining.But the USA has a tremendous wealth of intellectual capital as well as natural capital. To those (whom almost seem like they are looking forward to the total collapse) of the United States, I will disagree. I’m diversifying my assets accordingly in preparation for the shift. I am not hoarding gold, firearms or canned foods in my basement preparing for the onslaught of total chaos.
I have no desire to get into a protracted argument, but time will tell. For now I am minding my shop and running a tight ship.
Sprite you always seem to have the answer. But when an educated grown up with the wherewithal to become a lawyer is blaming America for her overt consumerism? Give me a break, hardly the oppressed class.
Sprite your finger must be in a cast:wink:[quote=”sprite”][quote=”*Lotus”]I have found that most expats I meet in Costa Rica are quite friendly. Scott certainly lives an affluent life style, well above the standard of 99% of Ticos, he’s seems to move well in local Tico circles. The perception of the “rich arrogant” American is more myth than fact thanks to TV, most US citizens moving or traveling to Costa Rica are certainly not rich(but most of us are rich, at least from a monetary perspective relative to a typical Tico.) In the community that I “live” in Costa Rica, we have a great expat community fully integrated in the local Tico community. We surf, work and play together. Not perfect, but nothing is.
MaxDevil, you choose to live a life based on materialism, excess and greed. certainly as an attorney you are one of the so called “rich” Americans. What are you complaining about? You want to blame America for your reckless lifestyle? Give me a break, your life, your choice you are educated enough to be responsible for your actions. It is not written into the US Constitution to be a greedy, selfish and shallow. I think excessive TV watching and advertising campaigns have more to do with creating sheeple than “America.”
You will get little argument from me on most of our foreign policy, but thats another thread:)
When individual take responsibility for their own lives we all will be better off.[/quote]
Environment molds behavior. You have to adapt to the system in which you live. If you grew up in the States, you adapted to the destructive system in place. Your behavior would reflect the warped values of that system.
I try my best not to hold individuals liable for behavior attributable to environment. The system is the cause, bad behavior is a symptom. Anyone who is trying to separate himself from that system is to be applauded, not criticized.
For example, I pity individuals who have succumbed to the false ideology which inspires them to put on uniforms and kill for it but I don;t criticize them. Instead, I attack the system and its ideology.People don’t make choices, they react to environment.[/quote]
I grew up in the states, North East. My values don’t reflect that of the “state” nor do my children’s or my friends. We can choose to be free from the inside out, the US is not North Korea and Sprite you are not the only enlightened soul in the US. The point is to make good choices regardless of ones environment, I did and I’m certainly not special. Not sure where you live, but most of the people I encounter on a day to day basis are good folks.
Here is one that a respected WLCR contributor wrote about;
http://groups.google.com/group/tomrosenbergerauthor/web/affordable-assisted-living-in-costa-rica?pli=1Also Jo Stuart who writes for amcostarica wrote an article on her experience living in an assisted living community just outside San Jose. You search the paper or perhaps email her.
I have found that most expats I meet in Costa Rica are quite friendly. Scott certainly lives an affluent life style, well above the standard of 99% of Ticos, he’s seems to move well in local Tico circles. The perception of the “rich arrogant” American is more myth than fact thanks to TV, most US citizens moving or traveling to Costa Rica are certainly not rich(but most of us are rich, at least from a monetary perspective relative to a typical Tico.) In the community that I “live” in Costa Rica, we have a great expat community fully integrated in the local Tico community. We surf, work and play together. Not perfect, but nothing is.
MaxDevil, you choose to live a life based on materialism, excess and greed. certainly as an attorney you are one of the so called “rich” Americans. What are you complaining about? You want to blame America for your reckless lifestyle? Give me a break, your life, your choice you are educated enough to be responsible for your actions. It is not written into the US Constitution to be a greedy, selfish and shallow. I think excessive TV watching and advertising campaigns have more to do with creating sheeple than “America.”
You will get little argument from me on most of our foreign policy, but thats another thread:)
When individual take responsibility for their own lives we all will be better off.
while we remember the killers, let’s also rember their civilian victims. War today kills more civilians than assasin soldiers .[/quote]
That’s just down right nasty Sprite. Attack the governments and their policies, but leave the working men and women of the armed services alone…some day you may need them.
I don’t believe we will see such a collapse of civilization, but believe what you will (please no comparisons to the Romans:wink:) I don’t have the desire for that debate. But in such an event I’m not so sure how “gringos” will fair in CR when Ticos will look at “you” as the cause of this collapse. Certainly if as a few of you believe this cataclysmic event happens, Costa Rica as we know it will also collapse. Whether or not you will be able to live off the land and protect yourselves and family is highly suspect.
For now life is good here in NJ. Gold has been a great trade for the last 12 months and business has been steadily improving. No $24 dollar a loaf bread to be found and don’t write off the US dollar yet, especially for the Euro, certainly not for the colones. Pura Vida.
adsense ( I have friends that live here and make $15 to 20 grand a month on adsense alone)
affiliate marketing
ecommerce
membership model.
you get the picture
just stay away from brick and morter businesses here
just mis dos colones
i[/quote]
How do they generate this kind of cash flow with adsense?
Sprite,
FYI: this was not my critique of Zeitgeist, it was that of G. Edward Griffin who wrote “The Creature from Jekyll Island.” I found his book quite interesting, hence I respect his opinion.Sprite you’re quite a character, but at least read my post before ranting about how “deeply immersed I am in right wing propaganda.” Again Zeitgeist: Take it with a grain of salt, it’s vastly unsubstantiated propaganda film, neither the left nor right will control me via their media. I’m just living in the moment, peacefully and compassionately.
Zeitgeist is just more media that needs critical analysis just as any news source. Here is an interesting piece written by G. Edward Griffin, the author of “The Creature From Jekyll Island.”
I don’t like to criticize anything that is helping to spread the truth about the Federal Reserve and 9/11 but I must agree with the substance of what you have said about this video. I watched it two nights ago and was deeply disturbed by its message. At first, I thought it would be best to just let it play itself out in expectation that most viewers would cross it off as whacky. However, the production value is high, the effects and sound score are compelling, and there is enough truth embedded in the beginning to capture the attention and possibly the trust of many within the freedom
movement. So here are my comments on a few items of concern:1. The information about the Federal Reserve is, for the most part, right on target. However, I practically fell out of my chair when the program repeated that old, silly argument about the Fed not creating enough money to cover the cost of interest on debt; and, therefore, the world must forever be in debt. I knew right there that the writer did not read The Creature from Jekyll Island or, if he did, he forgot my analysis of this common myth. For those who are interested in that topic, it is fund on pages 191-192 of The Creature.
2. The next jolt came when the program praised Civil War Greenbacks, calling them debt-free. Actually, Greenbacks were contrary to the U.S. Constitution and, although they were not fiat money issued by the
banks, they were fiat money issued by the government. That was better than paying interest on nothing to bankers, but they still wiped out the purchasing power of American money through massive inflation. They
can not correctly be called debt-free, either, because they represented debt on the shoulders of the government, which means, of course, on the shoulders of the taxpayers. It never ceases to amaze me how people think
that the solution to money created out of nothing by those big, bad bankers is to have money created out of nothing by those nice, trustworthy politicians. Yet, that is what this program supports.3. There is a lengthy segment in which the author of I Was an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins, tells the story of how propagandists in the U.S. manipulated public opinion to support military action against several Latin American countries. Then Perkins says that these propagandists scared Americans by telling them that the leaders of these countries were Marxists who were aligned with the Soviets. This, of course, is a half truth that is just as dangerous as a total lie. It is true about the propagandists and
their strategy to scare the public into supporting military intervention in those countries, but it is false to portray those dictators as great humanitarians who cared only for the well being of their people. That is total bunk. They WERE aligned with the Soviet Union and they WERE part of a Marxist/Leninist strategy to dominate Latin America; a strategy that continues to this day.There was plenty not to like on both sides of that struggle, but objective historians would never depict the Rhodesians (the CFR crowd in the U.S.) as bad guys but depict the Soviet puppets as good guys. In his book, Perkins reveals this same slant. He exposes the foul tactics of international corporations, the IMF, and World Bank, but he never mentions a Leftist dictator, such as Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez without praising them. Perkins is a collectivist aligned with the Left, and that strongly influences his telling of this story. Yet the producers of the video make no mention of this bias and give him an inordinate amount of time to present his slanted view without challenge.
4. Perhaps the biggest insult to our intelligence is the main theme of the program. It is that profits are the root of all our problems today. That being the case, we must change mankind to reject profit and we must work together on some other basis. It is never quite clear what that basis is, but, whatever it is, it will be administered and directed by an elite group, at least in the beginning. I was stunned by the fact that this is pure Marxism. Mark theorized that people had to be re-educated (in labor camps, if necessary) to cleanse their minds of the profit motive. He and his disciples, such as Lenin and Stalin and Khruschev, said that, eventually, the character of man would be purged of greed, and then the state would wither away because it no longer would be needed. Sure! We saw that in the Soviet Union and China, right? Yet this Marxist nonsense is exactly what is offered in this video program. It is Communism without using the name.
The profit motive is neither good nor bad. It can be applied either way depending on social and political factors. The desire for profit is merely the desire to be compensated for our labor, our creativity, our knowledge, or even for our risk. Without profit, very little would be accomplished in the world – not even if everyone spent a few years in labor camps to be re-educated. It is a basic part of man’s nature and is the mainspring of human progress, as Henry Grady Weaver described it in his book by that same title. Throughout history, whenever man lived in a system that allows him to be rewarded for his work, there has been great productivity and abundance. By contrast, where social engineers gained control of the state and restricted people from receiving the fruits of their labor, productivity fell, and scarcity was the norm.
The profit motive functions differently in different political systems. In a free system where government does not intervene in the market place, the profit motive always will manifest itself as competition, each person or each company trying to deliver better quality products and services at lower prices. That was how it used to be in the early days of America, and that is what led to the greatest outpouring of productivity and abundance the world has ever seen. However, in a collectivist system where government controls every conceivable aspect of economic and commercial activity (the system that now exists in America), the profit motive always manifests itself as a quest for political influence and laws to favor one group over another. The net effect is to eliminate competition in the market place. Under collectivism, success is achieved, not by creating better products and services for less cost, but by controlling legislators and government agencies. It is a system of legalized plunder, as Frederic Bastiat called it in his famous treatise, The Law. Unfortunately, it is the system that dominates most of the world today.
Zeitgeist Addendum ignores this reality. At one point the narrator even says that the greatest evil in the world today is “the free enterprise system.” That’s an incredible statement, especially inasmuch as the free enterprise system has been dead for several decades. It lives in name only. The whole world now is in the grips of non-competitive monopolies and cartels that have forged partnerships with governments. All of the evils to which this program alludes are the result, not of the free enterprise system, but of
the abandonment of free enterprise and the adoption of collectivism. This program creates a mythological boogeyman and then advocates more of the very thing that has brought us to the mess we are in today.The enemy of mankind is not profit. It is a political system of big government. Yet, this program is supportive of some of the most notable big-government collectivist on the planet. Marxist/Leninists may be enemies of collectivists in Washington, DC, but they are collectivists in their own right. The Communist model is no better than the Nazi model.
There is much more that could be said about other program topics such as technology supposedly being our salvation, about the a future world in which no one has to work, and about common ownership of land, oceans, natural resources, etc. but, for the most part, these merely are sub issues to the ones already described, so I will spare my readers the pain of further discourse.
In summary, this program does NOT offer a cure. It offers a mega dose of the disease itself.
Ed Griffin, 2008 Oct 9
