Solutions...

I have been known to be somewhat pessimistic at times. People often tell me that they would like to hear something positive or a solution to this mess we're in. My most typical solution is gold. Get as much of it as you can to safeguard your investment. The folks looking for condolence shake their head and say, "No, not that. Some people in this world care more about what's going on in the world and want to do their part to help." These are really good people and our world needs more of them, but I promise you that I am not even close to being one of those people. But, although I can't give you the exact solutions to the world's problems I can give you some idea to what I think is to come. We are in for a dramatic social change, and people need to really think out of the box and realize that some of the things we take for granted are just not going to be available in the future:

Cars are not the solution. We need to stop focusing on finding alternative fuels to run our cars and set up more forms of mass transportation similar to that of Europe. The obsession of keeping cars running forever might bury us as a nation.

We are going to have to produce food differently. The ADM, Monsanto, and Cargill models of industrial agribusiness will soon be disastrous. If they continue up at this pace, in order to supply ethanol, they will soon deplete the nutrients of our soil and leave us with sterile dirt. We need to farm for food and only food. I believe that in the future, farming will become a larger part of the American economic system. I also believe that it will be undertaken on a much smaller scale then what exists today.

Suburbia won't work. We will have to change the where and how we locate this nation. This gets back to the car situation. The suburbs are set up so folks can commute to the city by car. Getting kids to school is going to have to reform. The future won't have big yellow buses.

The transportation of goods will have to be partaken in a different matter. More rail roads will need to be built. Semis will prove to be the most expensive mode of transportation in existence.

We will actually have to produce and consumer American goods. It is impossible to live on exports and have a nation built strictly on our sole export of services.

The medical system definitely needs reform. No more government appealing to special groups lobbyists.

I've said some "ideas," but you really have to realize the graveness of our dependency on black gold. I don't know if specifically things are going to happen in the above mentioned ways, but I believe that things are going to start looking a lot more like Europe here in the U.S. What I'm getting at, is we really needed to start mitigating away from our oil dependency 10-20 years ago to really be prepared. I said oil prices will shoot to $100 and above this year. That's just the beginning. In the next 5-10 years we might be seeing $10 /gallon at the pump. Don't sit there and think, oh that's not bad, we can manage. That's only the beginning. What I'm getting at here is that we need a serious lifestyle change here in the U.S.