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Of course, this isn't taking into consideration the time and infrastructure costs. Jars are an initial outlay, but aside from lids are reusable many, many times (the ones below have been used at least ten times each). And a pressure canner is expensive, but can be used for decades worth of frugality. And if you're in the right community/family/group of friends, the costs of a canner can be shared.

Lastly, the time - overnight soaking of the beans, 30 minutes simmering, then bottling and 75 minutes under pressure, not so bad at all. You can be doing other things for the majority of that time.

Without fail, every time there's a major conflict in the media, the chatter starts here about the upcoming nuclear war. Russia invades Ukraine, we're all gonna die. Russia invades Georgia for a weekend, we're all gonna die. Israel says Iran will have nukes within a year for every year in the last decade, we're all gonna die. Pakistan and India are shooting artillery across their borders, we're all gonna die.

Take a Valium, people. Ask any sane older collapsnick around here about the cold war and you'll hear some stories that, were they to be in tomorrow's headlines, would have you whimpering under the bed.

How about Russia shooting down a US military jet on a training flight over Germany k

One of the more interesting sideshows of the oil price crash is that while slowing demand growth and steady supply has driven the price down, the situation would have been far worse without China.

China has been hoarding oil like crazy, most likely to take advantage of the lowered price to boost its strategic reserve supply. Doing so has artificially kept global supply lower than it would otherwise be. That's right, the price of oil would have fallen even further without the extra amounts imported by China, if that can be believed.

So, how much have they hoarded? Like most other Chinese state-kept figures, they ain't telling. In June,[ JPMorgan Chase & Co.](https://www.bloomberg.com/n

In general, major military actions are predicated on gain of some kind. For this reason, I wouldn't be overly worried about global war breaking out in a time of economic contraction. Wars have to pay for themselves in some way; anything else is a new economic drain.

While Russia seems to be saber-rattling a lot these days, I think much of it is posturing. There really aren't that many territorial conquests to be made that would pay for the invasion and the following occupation.

Here's a decent article about Russia's tough talk and possible reasons for it (tl;dr - maintaining

We had a 2017 predictions thread at the beginning of the month, but that was much too early. And if you made predictions in the 2016 thread (found here), let's see your analysis of how you think they turned out.

And for fun, here's the 2015 prediction thread.