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It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
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yeah , when he mentioned italy… fucking hell. the italian ‘customs’ took my life savings (over 350 oz of gold and 1000 of silver) when i was transiting through to get back home last year. 20-plus years of toiling in high-stress IT jobs down the toilet.. and to think i had with me two decades of tax filings (in switzerland they have a ‘wealth tax’ and it was all declared every year for years and years!), reciepts for all of it, documentation out the ass, didnt matter a bit to them, they took it basically because they can. just,, gone. so much for trying to prepare for shtf.. now in middle age back to zero. fuck the whole thing, it all needs to burn to the ground.
Sorry to hear, if true. Trying to travel across a border with a million dollars in a suitcase in any denomination is bound to cause trouble anywhere.
yeah. i had gotten a false sense of security there big time. i’ve gone back and forth (between switzerland and greece) dozens and dozens of times over many years, working in switzerland, almost always went by car/ship through italy, 4, 5, 6 times a year, and never had anyone at the italian/swiss border so much as say hello to me or bother even standing around outside.. i had all the documentation for it with me and it was all legit, and i thought i wouldnt have any issues, especially with having paperwork in order.. in both switzerland (where basically nobody would seem to lift a finger over such a mundane amount of money anyway) and greece (where documentation and paperwork is the king of everything) i wouldn’t have had any problem.. and the one time i cross the border and actually have something i really cared to keep safe, with me, this happens. this was last fall.. since then ive spent quite a bit on lawyers, who i suspect are either merely useless or perhaps even anticipating getting a cut of my property once they make sure i have no hope of getting anything back.. and the outlook from the lawyers is months of waiting at a time, and then more along the lines of ‘we couldnt do anything..here’s a bill’..
one hears about the ‘civil asset forfeiture’ thing in the US and it’s a similar sounding arrangement: ‘we’re not accusing you of anything, but we’re taking this, sue us if you think you dare to, you still wont get anything back, now get lost and be glad we didnt make up some BS charges to paste on you to justify taking it’.
the lawyers tell me if it ever gets to court that one can anticipate a five to ten year timeframe for that as well, and im sure merely paying the legal costs there i’d need to take another tech job again in another country just to afford that.
i spent 5 or 6 months in a kind of mix of despair/futility/anger i’d never known before. even when i went through an ugly divorce about a decade ago and lost quite a lot there, it was always a feeling there of being at war any whatever money i lost there, well, at least it was lost in the heat of battle. this time, it was straight up highway robbery, and yet the robbers paint themselves in official colors with uniforms and claim to somehow be in the right, insult added to injury!
recently ive finally started to pull myself out of the weird funk , also realizing i need to find some work because we’re going to get hungry soon otherwise.. here in greece the only work is serving tourists for shit pay or farm/construction labor for shit pay.. sadly taking tech work from abroad, the taxes, vat, ‘contributions’, and more taxes, in greece total close to 80% and there you just say fuck that i’ll leave the country and pay taxes elsewhere instead.. so now in middle age, i find myself doing construction labor while i work on convincing the wife to be cool with me leaving abroad for work again, which i see as the realistic solution. not that at this point ill ever be able to work back a fortune like that, but at least a minimalistic humble refuge for riding out this storm already falling on our heads.
Awful. 🙁 I wish you the best of luck getting it back!
thanks man.
i must admit, the wild fantasy of getting a letter (or a phone call or email or whatever) from the lawyer telling me that theyre giving it back, that thought sneaks into the back of my mind at least every few days. it of course is to some extent a natural reaction, but i suspect it’s also one causing more harm than good. it’s the first time in my life i ever started to understand why some people will do even harmful things to themselves to ‘forget’ something.
there is also a gigantic amount of a sense of pointlessness to working hard and trying to save anything, anymore, when a lifetime of frugality went up in smoke like that. i suppose i can say at least i built a house over the years and thus have a place to stay and no debt. been trying to convince the wife for several years to relocate to the US (i’ve got dual citizenship, so it’s realistic) and now contemplating just going by myself to find work over there, greece has zero opportunity for anyone not connected to the corrupt system. switzerland was nice but it was never my country (and one can work for a dozen lifetimes there and still not be able to afford a decent homestead of one’s own).
you’re in the Big Canton to the north, right?
Make that “thanks Fraulein”. (In case your German language skills are lacking …. Svarga is a fine lady).
.
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So true. So true!! It’s called hopelessness. It helps explain the raging drug epidemic in this country.
haha, i know german passably well, though i must also admit speaking is much weaker than reading or understanding other peoples speech.. and much of what i would say is easier to say in zuuuerideutz than in formal german (swiss german in general is much more accomodating to sloppy grammar, which is convenient for a non-native-speaker 🙂 but did not know that svarga was a schoeni fraulein 🙂
yeah, i have seen the ghetto in the states – it’s not exactly poverty that has those people trapped in a hopeless and pointless existence, so much as the enforced inaction, the whole system that pays them specifically to be and remain useless parasites, and penalizes them for trying to stand on their own two feet – most people sadly give in to that and just slip into multigenerational parasite existence – and this destroys their souls. their whole life is entirely pointless and they know it, and they act accordingly. ive seen much poorer people who yet managed to have a sense of purpose and dignity about themselves , because they were entirely on their own about their survival.
while i dont ever see it working, the whole point of the ‘universal basic income’ bullshit to me clearly is a dream to convert almost the whole population of the western world into the same kind of ghetto. you have enough chemical garbage to eat to keep you barely alive, you have plenty of free electronic crap to keep you wired up and zoned out, your soul withers into nothingness…
praying for a fast and hard crash.
At one time in Tenaha , Texas a man was carrying $10k cash and evidently caused trouble for himself with the help corrupt individuals among the elected and certain law enforcement personnel
Supposedly on his way to help fund a new church, the reason he was stopped, your guess as good as mine. Drug sniffing dogs evidently can sniff cash too, don’t know, all I know is the man went through all kinds of hell simply because he had cash. Maybe it was cash from a drug deal. We will just assume that was it. Guilty until proven innocent. Wait, isn’t that innocent until proven guilty?
The story of Tenaha and the corrupt people conducting searches on vehicles passing through is easily searchable.
”Drug sniffing dogs evidently can sniff cash too”
Back a few years when the powder cocaine trade was so big much of the cash in circulation was tainted with the drug, therefore the dogs could sniff it. People would snort it through impromptu tubes made of rolled up bills, usually the bigger in value the better because of status. A lot of money was seized because of this, or so they said.
A chip in one’s hand would solve anything accidentally happening like this, unless some Haitian chopped your hand off and walked around buying stuff.
I continuously rotate our canned food that we keep on the shelves at home and use the cans with the soonest expiration date first. In order to make identification of expiration dates easier, I put a small piece of masking tape on the front label and write the expiration month on it with a sharpie (i.e. 05/24). Thus, I can easily keep track of expiration dates of what I buy. I also shop mostly at the same store, so I can recognize trends of inventory and expiration dates. Call me obsessive compulsive if you like.
Today, I noticed something:
I bought a few glasses of sauerkraut yesterday, and the expiration date was 08/23. I had bought the exact same product a few months ago with expiration date 01/25.
For months, canned mandarins in lights syrup were absent, unavailable. So when I found it in the store yesterday, I bought a few cans. I noticed something unusual: Not only did the cans have the expiration date written on them, they also had the date of manufacture, which is not normally provided. They all had a date of manufacture 01/21 and an expiration date of 01/24.
Where were the mandarins for all these last few months? Of interest, they are a product of China. They must have been in a warehouse somewhere. Was it in China? Or was it in the US? Who is deciding to hold back these cans for months and then how do they decide when to release them?
Similarly for the sauerkraut, are they releasing older food items now, which had been sitting in a warehouse for the last few months?
Why, to what end, and what does it all mean?
Funny, here in Central Europe I was realizing the same over the past days, although it’s just on a few items so far.
It doesn’t make much sense. Why would some company have excess storage, not properly rotated, in the first place? That they are exchanging across stores/chains (i.e. grocery chain X finds it has too much of Y, and cross-sells it to other chain Z who has too few) seems unlikely.
Either they’re shortening printed-on expiration dates for nefarious purposes, or I don’t know why.
Interesting theory about shortening printed-on expiration dates. That had not occured to me. It is either that, or these canned items have been sitting somewhere, either a warehouse at the site of manufacture, in transit (shipping container etc.), a warehouse owned by the grocery store, or a national food repository or something.
One more theory that just occurred to me:
Maybe the otherwise properly rotated stock was not rotated anymore, due to shortages and/or transportation bottlenecks forcing the companies to ship incoming stuff as fast as they can, i.e. more or less directly, to the next entity down the supply chain – in other words there was no time for rotating stuff. And now either that bottleneck is over, or companies realizing they now must rotate before stuff expires.
Could very well be that. I bet that the bottleneck is not over and you are right that they have to ship things to the end consumer before stuff expires. But are they restocking the warehouse? I doubt it. In any case, I will make sure to check expiration dates more closely when I buy things. In general, I try to buy at least 2 years out. I also eat the food a long time past the expiration date as long as it smells ok.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I also almost wanted to add I regularly eat stuff well past the expiration, except anything seafood.
If the lid aint bulging, looks right, smells right, and if in slight doubt a taste with the tip of the tongue tastes right (spit out otherwise), I’ll eat it.
Best to you.
Remember all those ships stuck at the ports unable to offload because, you know, “Covid”?
Anything that wasn’t perishable or hasn’t yet expired will eventually make its way into the market. That’s probably what you are seeing. And it’s not a linear process. The ships and warehouses won’t necessarily be unloaded in reverse chronological order, things will ship to consumers when they get picked and as a result you’ll see a variety of random expiration dates that don’t make sense as the end user.
And all those ships that finally got offloaded went on to find themselves stuck again off the coast of Shanghai waiting to get reloaded. So when those lockdowns finally end and those ships all start frantically taking on cargo that’s been sitting in warehouses for months, we will end up with a repeat here on this side of the Pacific with bottlenecks and logjams in the supply chain.
Almost like it was all planned.
Yes, I have also noticed the sauerkraut thing, which is totally bizarre. There were also no cans or jars of it in stock in my local grocery, but they did have one brand in a pouch, which I bought — and when I made it for dinner the following night (in a crock, with some kielbasa) discovered it was really good — but then realized I paid a premium price for less product.
I think a more likely explanation for this is that stores are having to use up a lot of their own stored stock, and replacing it is taking months, if ever in the case of a small chain store, which is all according to someone’s plan. I was talking with a friend of mine who manages a BBQ restaurant (Bodacious, a small chain here), and he told me his costs are astronomical now compared to just last year; and it isn’t only the meat which has gone ridiculous, it’s the styrofoam (polystyrene) cups he’s paying $60 more for, for example, so he’s had to let over half his staff go, which means reduced hours of operation, but higher energy costs still makes it seem like he’s paying the same as if everyone were still there. He also doesn’t have the luxury of a large stock, as one would expect with perishable items, so he is beholden to food deliveries… which have also cut back from 3x to only twice per week.
More than anything, however, I believe the meaning of this is just to show us how much control they do have over our food. Does that make anybody else uncomfortable, in the very least?
uncomfortable in the short term, but these nimrods also do not understand nonlinear dynamics. they have a lot of control, but using that control to blow up almost-random parts of an interdependent structure will hasten the collapse of the whole shebang. and then, they will have zero control. so bring it the fuck on already!
Rotation is good but don’t just accept the ‘expiration’ date. It is not that. It is the arbitrary ‘best before’ date. Things don’t just go bad the day after the expiration date.
I have been doing test for decades with canned goods and their shelf life. Always bought crates of canned goods during close outs or big sales.
Some canned salmon I have is from a sale back in 2004. Every couple of years I open one up, give it a sniff and then eat it. No problems so far.
The only can of anything that has gone bad was one small can of Jalapenos. It was obvious because the can had swelled. Tossed that one.
Again, good to rotate, but don’t toss stuff just because it passes some arbitrary date on the can. If you open a can and it smells fine, it probably is.
Just be careful with high acid canned goods. Long term, the content can eat through the can.
The most corrupt government in the World is the one using Ukrainian freedom as a pretense to attack Russia, consolidate power, risk global war, crash the global economy, and plan a pandemic and risk millions with faulty untested vaxxes then try pandemic 2.0.