free hit counters Right you are, Chris. I have dumped untold sums of money into derivative stocks and bonds and instead of a payback or reward, the effort has simply become a hole some moneychanger sits at the bottom of and uses to fill his pockets. Suddenly the mortgages for homes worldwide, your hovel or cave, your domicile, have become part of the gamble. If you are young and have a mortgage for a condo a real home or property, that value for which you were loaned money is being mined for the good of the speculators. In this country (USA)and other developed countries, where income generating jobs have been purposely moved away from those who use those jobs to pay for their mortgages, suddenly there is no way to pay for the "now overvalued" house they (you)were loaned money to purchase. But really, how can your cave be a 'commodity' for some speculator? Well they sold the loan to someone. The got money for it. Then the whole system sent your job away. Who makes a bundle on this? That's right, it is not you. The commodity (Your Cave) could NOT be swapped for the amount of money you borrowed,(and OWE)the mortgage payment is slightly reduced so their rate of return, their skim, is reduced a bit. However, instead of a really reduced mortgage and an honest fixed rate that that reflects the full devaluation of what you bought -- the mortgage companies try to string you along so you do not default. How could they sell your home if you can't? They "lower your payment" on an adjustable rate mortgage or line of credit, but not enough for the par value of the commodity (your home, the planet itself) to equilibrate. The schill and scam of "future value" is not connected to "real" growth in value. It is connected only to the idea of an unending population growth which can be skimmed. (The lottery players baled out by us are the ones who win.) A stable population, a place of no wars, a steady state entropic-maintenance kind of world -- is a no-winner for the moneychangers and the skimmers, the George Bush groupies and friends, the oil based moneychangers. When you end, when you die, entropy has finally succeeded in claiming what was once an anti-entropic condition -- that is, your life. All life, yours mine, the carrot in the garden or the boardroom, is an exploiter of the energy available in the environment, a "skimmer" itself, (skimmers ourselves) directing the pathway energy takes as it degrades itself toward heat-death (tapioca) of a uniform equilibrium universal state. The entropic end of all things where there is not enough energy left to exploit. Or the range of highs to lows reaches below the planck energy. (I'm being poetic in that, but below the least energy level nothing can happen or change. Dull dull dull dull. . . That is, energy degrades from high state to lower state -- as a law of Nature, one of God's Laws, which we call the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (The can't get something for nothing law.) Do you want to see real value? It is all around you. It is partly you. Life, at most generally, benefits or "consumes for it's own functions" 2% of the energy that streams through it, into and out of it, so the amount of energy that can still be exploited after life has sucked it's share is 98%. From the energy available, 2% is used by living things for their living functions. About the only thing that can be assembled that can work the other direction in this scheme God built into the universe is information. Information, knowledge, if you will, can be built by extracting a bit of the 2% and shaping it into a structure that maintains itself by directing the flow of energy into more refined structures. Humans think they are the "chosen," that they are above instincts or ingrained built-in knowledges. We are not. Our genetic codes are filled with knowledges that are fundamental to our existence -- including the means of reproduction, despite the fact that we do not really have to be taught anything about the motions we go through to accomplish it. REAL VALUE? Study "ecologies" as described by Howard and Eugene Odom -- where the real value of the environment is the real value being exploited. The scale of this exploitation is incredible. 4%, 5%, 10% return? Or more? Life can't do that. The pathways do not exist in nature. Why would a banker or mortgage company think you could render an exorbitant fee for the "money" it lent you, a fee far in excess of what can be repaid without damage coming to some part of the planetary system? The Banking skimmers try to exploit you at an exorbitant percentage; you, billions of you, must rape the environment or steal vast energies and "order" from it to pay Mrs. Grundy . We are to the point, or beyond it, where we can no longer simply "exploit the environment" stealing from it and destroying it's developed structure, it "order", with nothing going back to it, the "it" being planet's environment. How did it get to this point? Oh you know that. Population growth beyond what the environment can render. Who propels it? Yes, the bankers sure do, and the speculators and all of us who try to get something for nothing. Is knowledge of value? Science, the Latin word for knowledge, is the only thing that can grow infinitely. I refer to Mrs Grundy. Which if you have read James Lovelock and about Gaia, and any of his recent published work (last 30 years or so) you would see where he uses Mrs Grundy to illustrate how belief and reality interface. I do too. But Mrs. Grundy is the one to whom you really pay the rent. Lovelock used Mrs Grundy as the naysayer scientist's as Drs Grundy. I use Mrs. Grundy as the reality you can deny. I really do not care if you go to some organized church and tithe to it, a make you feel better religion. And neither does nature. I apologize for enlarging it a little. . . They lie, they scheme, they cheat and steal and go church on Sunday And while its true that some fear God They all fear Mrs Grundy. Jesus was right to want to get the Moneychangers out of the Temple of God. Can they buy their way into heaven? No. But heaven on Earth? Not even that with greed and exploitation. The whole system must be changed. These scammers and skimmers will fight hard against the change -- but it must be done. What change? Read Howard and Eugene Odom. Then help formulate a society that can sustain itself without a big die-off to stimulate the cycle again. Clean it up once and for all. Sustainable does not mean greedy exploitation, but a balance. Want growth? do knowledge. Do science. Use science to improve things. That is enough for this comment.