Why is Everything so Expensive?

Recently I've been looking for something relatively simple: a folding canvas outdoor chair. 

Pre-pandemic, you could have picked one of these cheap chairs for less than a tenner. The going rate was about £8.

Now, you can double or treble that amount. 

But why? What is making such originally cheap goods so expensive? Is there some post-pandemic profiteering going on?

Well, sort of. The big Shipping companies saw an opportunity during the pandemic to dispose of their smaller container ships. Now, this was a logical step: the ships were laid up at anchor with crews on board, so they were being paid, but the ship wasn't earning money.

The companies then decide after a few months that this may be a good time to pay off the crews and scrap the smaller, less efficient ships. I say efficient, what I really mean is cheaper to run. Instead of a crew of 15 being in charge of 10,000 containers and earning the revenue from them, the companies could instead have a crew of 15 on a AAA container ship in charge of 50,000 containers. So the smaller container ships went off to the scrapyards of Pakistan. Where incidentally, Covid wasn't really a thing, certainly lockdowns weren't. So the ships were processed in short order.

Which is great, had the pandemic continued and the shipyards been able to produce enough AAA container ships to match the global demand.

Well, it didn't quite go to plan. The world opened up within a matter of weeks and the demand for imported goods spiked almost immediately. 

And now there weren't enough ships to move the containers. Yes there were the handful of AAA container ships available from before the pandemic, but the smaller ships were gone, scrapped, never to return. 

There simply wasn't enough capacity. So the law of supply and demand kicked in and shipping prices started to skyrocket as importers struggled to guarantee supply chains. The pre-pandemic shipping cost of moving a container from the Far East ballooned from £1500 pre-pandemic, to ten times that within weeks of the pandemic ending and the world opening up. And this was before the price of oil went up. This was just a week or two after the pandemic when oil was relatively cheap.

The going rate now is around £20,000 to £30,000 because the increased price of oil has been added into the mix. To ship a single container. Failure to pay usually ends up in severe delays as your container gets gazumped and bumped off the ship in favour of someone paying more. That's how the market works now. To guarantee supply, you have to pay dearly.

Which gets me back to the folding chair at the start of the article. How many can you get into a container? As a simple maths exercise say 10,000 chairs. 

Instantly the shipping cost per chair has gone from a negligible 15p to a pretty substantial £3. 

So along with the other increased costs like wages, local transport and energy, that £8 chair is now looking more like twice that. 

And that's the thing, these are not insubstantial increases. It's no wonder inflation is so high. The cost is in-built because that particular item is being shipped half way round the world. 

But that's the weakness in globalist theory. Yes, you maximise profits, but there is a risk. Sadly the global corporations mitigated the risk by controlling governments who handed out large sums in compensation for their losses.

During this pandemic the whole world shut down. Products made in Malaysia or Taiwan had to wait for their governments to open up and then take weeks or months to restart full production from scratch.

This should be a lesson to the globalists that their ideology is not robust. Relying on a handful of shipping companies to transport goods from places thousands of miles away is a risky practise. 

So is relying on your ideological enemy to provide the bulk of your energy needs. 

We have to get back to a more local production and supply chain. Maybe not duplicating production in every town and city, but at the very least each continent should have the facilities to produce everything that continent needs. Most continents have the majority of raw materials and workforce able to do this.

First we had "My Truth" now we have Diane Abbott's "My Racism".

 Diane Abbott has just had the Labour whip removed after an article she wrote about racism was published.

Typically far left, she dismisses racism aimed at anyone with a white skin. There is no evidence of racism towards Jews she spouts, nor is there any towards Romany Gypsies.

White people were never enslaved. In essence she reduces the racism directed towards these ethnic groups is the same prejudice that gingers get. I assume the Nazis in WW2 were only giving the Jews a good ribbing then and it was all some elaborate joke?

It seems in Diane's mind, racism is exclusively the domain of people with dark coloured skin and she wishes to exclude anyone else from the franchise.

She needs to be removed from politics forthwith and replaced with someone with a better grip on reality.

If You Don't Control the Borders, Then the Only Way to Control the Population is ID Cards.

 The British People have for a long time rejected the idea of ID cards. The last attempt to get us to accept this form of control was back during the Blair government.

We told the powers that would like to control us to rightly fuck right off.

Then the Blair political project started accepting mass immigration by rejecting the control on Eastern European immigration the majority of EU countries implemented. 

It appears there's a train of thought on the halls of power that ID cards would solve everything: from anti-social behaviour, to benefit fraud, to everything really. Apart from health tourism it seems: that appears not to be an issue in the halls of power.

Successive governments after that accepted ever increasing numbers of immigrants into the UK. So much so, that back in the noughties we started to see multiple language safety signs on certain premises.

Now we have the unabated illegal entry of people from France. I say people, because they are not refugees, they are not oppressed, they are coming here from a variety of countries, very few of which are war ravaged. Yeah, that awful war in Albania eh? The government has done very little positive action to stop people in dinghies.

Now the cynic in me thinks there is an ulterior motive for this and the motive is ID cards and control of the population.

After all, if you don't control the borders, then what option is there left than to control the population directly?

I mean, all those calls to remove illegals? "can't do it without ID cards mate".

Stopping immigrants from working without a permit? "can't do it unless we make ID card checks mandatory for employers".

Stopping Anti-Social behaviour? "Can't do it unless we can ID the people in the area so we can ban them or issue ASBOs".

Want to buy alcohol or cigarettes? "No sale with no ID card mate. Sorry, Driving licences and passports are no longer a valid ID.

I can see where this is going: ID cards will be the solution to everything.

Weeeellll, they were, until the Government had the bright idea of a Digital ID. 

Now you'd be "required" to have an app on your phone that holds all your information and be "required" to show or share that ID at any point. 

I put required in inverted comments, because initially I doubt there would be any mandatory requirement or enforcement by law, but eventually I assume there will be. Mission creep, the excuse of tyrants everywhere. Initially it's being touted to "help" you, but of course those of us that are awakened adults know what the real reason is behind digital IDs. Control. Inescapable, tyrannical, control.

With digital IDs, there's really no need to produce it for ASBOSs. They will know exactly who was where and when they were there remotely. Records will be kept and they will be able to look at historical records to pinpoint who was at the scene of a crime, or who joined a protest, or who helped a person evade the authorities. 

They will argue they are only collecting metadata, top level data that doesn't identify you. Well, a citizen ID is metadata. On it's own it does not identify you, but look that ID up and all your information: name, address, medical records, known associates (gathered from social media data and historical geographical metadata) will be available with just a few keypresses.

So, if you wonder why successive governments prefer open borders, and then come up with an idea of "not ID cards" which sound very much like an ID card but just in some other form, then wonder no more.

Conspiracy theorist? I've been proven right on multiple occasions.

Terror legislation? It's been used more often than I can remember in instances that are not terror related.

Violent Porn legislation? Ditto on that too. 

Strange that child pornography laws aren't being used as widely as they may be, but I assume that the powers that be have an ulterior motive there. Maybe too many people in power have predilections in that direction and it's useful for blackmail?