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What are you going to do for a living after 1999? If the Millennium Bug bites as hard as I expect it, I know one thing: I will not be in the newsletter business any more. Not for money, anyway. I will not be sending out pieces of paper.
When I came to grips with this reality, I decided to move. I knew that I would have to find a place to live that I owned outright, and where I could do things that people used to do for a living: work! This is bad news for any writer. I plan to be in the barter business. For me, the barter forum will be my business forum. For you, this may be the place. Or maybe you'll spend more time on the nonhybrid gardening forum. I know my wife will.
I think a man with a large inventory of nonhybrid seeds will be in a position to get into the sharecropping business: a percentage of all future crops in exchange for seeds that will prtoduce a line of future crops. Hybrids won't. Sharecropping is good business: the other guy provides the land, tools, and sweat. You provide the key: seeds that produce plants that bear food whose seeds will produce more plants that will bear food.
The key idea to get planted in between your ears and reproducing for you is this: with a collapse in the division of labor will come a huge increase in ignorance. As ignorance rises, the price of accurate knowledges rises. This is another way of saying commission fees will rise. If you have information that people will want locally, you will be able to charge far more for this information in 2000 and beyond than you can charge today. Look ahead. See what kinds of information advantage you would have locally in a world without banks. That's where you want to be and what you want to be selling.
Are you a craftsman? Buy nonelectric tools. Go to the tools forum for that kind of information. On this forum, you should look for the income ideas that lead you to tools and information avialable off this site. Get a discussion going of what kinds of services will be in demand -- bartered, maybe -- if the banks close. That will be the key factor: a stream of real income that is not dependent on banks. If you can identify a stream of income that you can stick your cup into, this forum will prove to have been well worth your time to monitor.
This rules out multi-level marketing schemes. Without banks, they're dead. You don't have enough time to spend getting an MLM going, only to see it die in 1999 or 2000.
The moderator of this forum is Chuck Huckaby. He already lives where it's safe: in rural West Virginia. The economy there will not fall as far as it will where most forum participants live, because it has never been very good there. He has had to learn how to scrounge for money, spot local deals, and make the best of whatever he has. That's wh\y I asked him to be the moderator. You can contact him at:
chuckaby@ianet.net
Warning: I have told all of the moderators that I advise against answering too many questions by e-mail. Any question worth asking a moderator is worth posting on the forum.
Of course, if you want to buy a bulk order of something from a moderator at a discount, send that e-mail! Every seller wants to hear from potential buyers. But understand that these moderators serve for free. To ask them to do more than moderate for free is to be overly greedy. Don't be greedy. The post-1999 world must be built on mutually beneficial trade, not a quest for zero-price wealth at the expense of others.
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