As you are reading this, a child in hospital is receiving a blood transfusion. A girl is learning how to smile again, as she recovers from leukaemia. In another ward, an old man is being treated for severe burns.

hey all rely on blood donation from healthy people like you…

You could be investing in your own future as well as saving someone’s life, Because who knows if you or one of your friends or family will need a blood transfusion one day? God forbid.

Who can become a donor?
Practically anyone, as long as you’re over 18, under 60 and in good health.

What blood groups are needed?
All groups, especially the most common which we can never have enough of.

Where can I give blood?
The main collection facility is Central Blood Bank in Jabriya, as well as its four fixed satellite branches distributed in different areas in Kuwait, Amiri Hospital, Adan hospital, Jahra hospital and the Red Crescent Society.

How long does it take?
The donation actually takes ten to fifteen minutes, but the whole process, takes about thirty five minutes from registration to the end of the rest period.

How is it done?
There are three steps:

1. First Step
We must first make sure you are fit enough to give blood, and that giving blood will cause you no harm. We also have to make sure your blood will be safe for the patient who’ll receive it. That is why we will check your blood and ask you to complete a health questionnaire with the help of one of our doctors or nurses.

2. The Questionnaire
After a few quick questions, a registered health care professional, -a doctor or a nurse will  ask about your health. Your answers will be treated in the strictest confidence. They are routine enquiries which must be made for all volunteers before their donation is accepted.

If you don’t qualify as a donor this time, we will explain why and give you all the advice you need. If you do qualify we will ask you to sign that you are happy for us to test your blood later in the laboratory, the test will tell us your blood group and will screen for any infection that may be transmitted in blood such as hepatitis viruses (which cause jaundice) and human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV); if any of these positive tests shows you cannot became a donor, we will explain why and give you all the advice you need in the strictest confidence.

3. Haemoglobin Screening
Do not worry that giving blood could affect your own health.  We will only collect blood from those who can spare it!  All volunteers are screened to ensure that a donation will not  make them anaemic. This is done by collecting a tiny drop of blood from your finger, the test may show that you cannot spare a full donation on that day. If so, we will tell you what you should do.

Honestly, does it hurt?
Giving blood is normally quick and painless. After haemoglobin screening you’ll be settled on a bed with a band wrapped around your upper arm. The skin on the inside of your elbow will then be thoroughly cleaned.

Next, the band will be tightened just enough to make the veins stand out. A sterile needle is inserted to collect your blood. Most donors are pleasantly surprised at just how soon it’s all over. In about five to ten minutes we’ll have collected 450ml (about a pint). Firm pressure is applied as the needle comes out and a light dressing is placed on the arm once bleeding has stopped.

Is there any risk?
All donations are taken by trained staff. These staff never work without the supervision of a doctor or nurse. Every piece of equipment used is sterile and never used again. There’s no risk of a donor becoming infected in any way.

A very small number of donors sometimes feel a little hot or faint after giving blood, or experience minor bruising where the needle went in, but this is rare and is not generally a cause for concern.

What will I get out of giving blood?
Health screening tests: Every donor undergoes a physical, medical and laboratory
check up, where the blood is screened for all transmittable diseases such as hepatitis B and C HTLV, HIV, malaria and syphilis.

Headache relief:  A number of donors have a higher number of red cells than the normal for natural reasons which increases the viscosity of blood and therefore creates a headache. Donating blood will relieve this symptom.

High blood pressure:  Donating blood will help to reduce the high blood pressure, providing that you do not suffer any complication such as heart diseases.

Helping others: Becoming a donor is an act that benefits many. It is a way of helping others less fortunate than ourselves in our community.

Life after all is the greatest gift that a person can give.

Heart trouble:  Research proved without any doubt that incidents of heart diseases between donors are less than non donors.

Knowing that one has helped in saving someone’s life can give the individual a great feeling of satisfaction and this is a reward in itself.

Source

Why is this fascination for the dead body? After all, everybody dies.

Death is inevitable (perhaps the only one).

So what happens when a person dies?

According to various religions, there are rituals performed to bid goodbye to that person.

Cremation, burial, burning or even leaving the body to feast upon for the vultures.

But why do we not think of utlilizing the body for the good of the other fellow human being. There are many ways in which a body can be utlilized, so as to benefit the others.

Organ donation, eye donation, giving it to colleges for students to learn.

Well the best form to live, even after your death is to donate your organs for the sake of other. This has to endorsed by you and religiously followed by your relatives in a timely manner.

No other form of donation can equal this gesture.

So why is religion coming in the way of the benevolent gesture? Is it not the duty of the religiious leaders to to advocate this practice. After all, you are giving away something that is no longer useful to you.

The religious preachers, rather than ridicule it in the name of religion, should rather preach on this life giving gesture.

Let better sense prevail. AMEN !!!

The Arabtimes, Kuwait, today reported:

“The Criminal Evidence Department has submitted a report to the Cassation Court, stating that a certain brand of mayonnaise available at a cooperative society contains three percent alcohol, reports Annahar daily.
The company which imported the mayonnaise has been charged with endangering the lives of citizens and residents as it did not properly examine the ingredients of the product. Sources say the cooperative society which sold the product too has been charged in the case.”

Well, if 3% alcohol can endanger the lives of the citizens of Kuwait, maybe the investigation report should be sent across to UAE, Oman, Qatar & Bahrain; so that their brothers from the other GCC citizens can learn from it and take effective measures to stop alcohol sale.

Wonder what a detrimental effect ‘it’ must be having on the citizens of other countries?

I pledge not to waste food this Ramadan. Will you join me is this pledge?

Ramadan is the period when people fast during the day. Naturally, when they break their fast at iftar and during dinner, people tend tend to hog on. First by cooking more than necessasry and then by taking onto their plates (more than what the stomach can take). This ends up as waste, which does down the sewage.

This holy month is a time to show courtesy to our brethen, wherein people donate money to those needy. By limiting our food consumotion, we are doing a greater charity.

The famine that has affected Africa, is well known. People there are starving to death. Those images on the TV are pitifully moving.

So this Ramadan, join me (by putting “I PLEDGE NOT TO WASTE FOOD” in the comments). This is the least that we can do to help those starving.

Since, charity begins from home; lets start from our house.

I PLEDGE NOT TO WASTE FOOD.

Fellow bloggers can put this link on their blog, to support this cause.

Time to patch-up
Time to let go of your egos
Time to smile
Time to celebrate
Time to fast
Time to binge
Time for everything…

The head of the Dubai Police has said that courtesy and discretion will be the watchword as his department gears up to enforce Ramadan regulations across the emirate.
“We train our officers how to deal with different nationalities and to respect non-Muslims who may inadvertently offend Muslims during Ramadan by eating, drinking or smoking in public places during the day,” Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim told Arabian Business.
“We show them that these things happen, and they are to deal with it in a courteous way so that they would refrain from doing it again.”

Can the non-Muslims expect a similar courtesy in Kuwait, specially considerting that it is summer time and temperatures cross 50 deg and that not everyone’s body can sustain such abstinence for long?

Do the world top personalities do thier own signatures in hand on every document? Did you ever receive an autograph of a celebrity by post?

Well it seems that, one can put his signature onto a document, even if he is miles away from it.

Apparantly thats what President Obama did.

Well, President Barack Obama has been in Europe for the annual G-8 summit and Congress was racing to pass legislation extending the authorization of key surveillance methods used to try to thwart attacks on the United States, which were due to expire Thursday night at midnight. Congress came through just hours before midnight but Obama was in France.

According to a White House spokesperson, Obama used a device called an autopen, which mechanically reproduces a human signature.

That prompted at least one lawmaker, Georgia Republican Representative Tom Graves, to question whether that was legal or not, writing Obama a letter seeking clarification.

“I thought it was a joke at first, but the President did, in fact, authorize an autopen to sign the Patriot Act extension into law. Consider the dangerous precedent this sets.  Any number of circumstances could arise in the future where the public could question whether or not the president authorized the use of an autopen,” Graves said in a statement.

Well, for those who may question the use of the auto-pen, there is a legal opinion issued during the Bush administration that gave the green-light to using it.

“We conclude that the President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill to sign it within the meaning of Article I, Section 7″ of the U.S. Constitution, the 29-page opinion said.

“We emphasize that we are not suggesting that the President may delegate the decision to approve and sign a bill, only that, having made this decision, he may direct a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to the bill,” it said.

Smarter Task-Transfers Use Mobile Cameras

MIT and Google have devised a method of transferring tasks between your smartphone and your computer by merely pointing the cell-phone camera at your PC’s screen.

How many times have you found a Web page on your smartphone that you want open on your desktop computer? Or perhaps you were viewing your destination on Google Maps and want to transfer that to your smartphone. Using an experimental app called Deep Shot, you can do these things by merely aiming your smartphone’s camera at your computer.

Deep Shot was developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Google for a paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on Computer-Human Interaction. The app was created by MIT doctoral candidate Tsung-Hsiang Chang in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Google’s Yang Li.

The app works by taking a photo of your computer’s screen, and, using pattern recognition algorithms, it ascertains what program you are currently running and the document you have open. It then transfers that information from the desktop computer to your smartphone. And in the case you want to reverse the direction, the pattern recognition will ascertain which desktop computer it is pointed at and then transfer the currently open file on the smartphone to the desktop computer after opening the appropriate program there.

Google’s Deep Shot, developed with MIT, transfers tasks from the desktop to a smartphone, or vice versa, by merely pointing the phone’s camera at the PC screen. (Source: MIT)
Deep Shot works by encoding the currently running program and open file using an extended version of a standard universal resource identifier (URI, of which the more familiar universal resource locator, or URL, is a subset). After identifying the desktop computer (when transferring from a smartphone) or the application running on the desktop (when transferring to a smartphone), Deep Shot encodes the software’s state and sends the URI wirelessly to its companion.

Do not look to download the app just yet. This work is still in the proof-of-concept stage. To that end, the team has adapted several popular applications, including Google Maps and Yelp (the social networking and peer review site), to work with the app. But in order to use Deep Shot with other programs besides Yelp and Google Maps, application developers will have to build-in the ability to read and write URI’s. If commercialized by Google, an application programmer’s interface (API) would have to be published by Google and adopted by other application developers.

“I find it a really compelling use case, so I would really hope that companies like Microsoft would really consider adding it,” says Jeffrey Nichols, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden research center who specializes in mobile devices. “I see it being much more likely to happen with Websites than with desktop applications. On the other hand, to some extent, we’re moving away from desktop applications and moving more and more to the Web, so it’s not clear to me how important it is that we really bring all the native application developers into the fold.”

What’s a FabFi?

FabFi is an open-source, FabLab-grown system using common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles. With Fabfi, communities can build their own wireless networks to gain high-speed internet connectivity—thus enabling them to access online educational, medical, and other resources.

Overview

FabFi is a user-extensible long range point-to-point and mesh hybrid-wireless broadband transmission infrastructure. It is based on the simple idea that a network of simple, intelligent, interconnected devices can create reliable networks in unstable environments. We use simple physics to make low-cost devices communicate directionally for very long distances (physics is cool!), and flexible configurations to adapt to a large variety of conditions.

For extreme conditions, we mount commercial wireless routers on fabbed RF (Radio Frequency) reflectors with a wire mesh surface that redirects the RF energy. Reflector gain depends on the materials used and the size of the reflector, but has been measured as high as 15dBi with some of the current designs.

A single wireless link in the FabFi system consists of two reflectors with attached wireless routers. Similarly, two routers can be linked with a wired connection. A single router can be linked to both wired and wireless connections at the same time. The system is configured for individual links to be combined in numerous ways, creating links that cover very long distances or service many users in a small area. A key component of this linking is called “meshing”. A mesh network is one where any device can be connected to one or more other neighbor devices in an unstructured (ad-hoc) manner. Mesh networks are robust and simple to configure because the software determines the routing of data automatically in real-time based on sensing the network topology. Traditional mesh networks are limited in scale because they rely on single radio, wireless-only connections and omni-directional antennas. By using directed wireless links and wired transfers whenever possible, the Fabfi system is optimized for building very large-scale static (as opposed to mobile) mesh networks. With Scale comes the potential for robust digital communities within a region without dependence on high-bandwidth local uplinks, which are expensive and unavailable in many places. Check out the animation for a little more detail (2MB, might take a while to load):

How Reflectors work

FabFi reflectors use the property of parabolic shapes (Y=cX^2) that a when a vector travelling perpendicular to a parabola’s directrix hits the surface of the parabola it is reflected to the parabola’s focal point. (see Mathworld for more on this…) By attaching a RF reflective material such as window screen or chicken wire to a frame that forms the shape of a parabola in three dimensions and then attaching our wireless router to the reflector at the focal point we can precisely concentrate and direct the RF energy coming from the router in transmission and efficiently collect RF energy from the paired router in reception.

Building Reflectors

An essential component of the FabFi system is it’s flexibility to be implemented with whatever materials are locally available. All that’s required is the ability to print out a 2D design file and create the pieces out of whater material you can find. If you have a Fab Lab, you can use a laser cutter or CNC wood router to create reflectors directly from wood, metal or acrylic, but there’s no reason they can’t be molded from clay, carved from stone or chiseled out of a block of ice as long as there’s a way to attach a metallic RF reflective surface to the front.

Three different reflector designs were implemented in Jalalabad during the inital deployment in January 2009: a large 4′ wooden version, a 2′ wooden version and an 18″ acrylic version. Reflective surface materials included chicken wire, woven stainless steel mesh and window screen.

Needs in the field subsequently drove the development of modified reflector designs with integrated weatherproofing and and fastner-less assembly. These new designs debuted in the summer of 2010.

It was not long afterward, however, that network users began designing and building their own reflectors out of locally sourced scrap materials. While still in need of significant refinement, these reflectors are clear physical signs of technology transfer and local human-capital development in the technology domain. They also cost less than $3US!

Routers and Firmware

FabFi uses an open source 3rd party firmware called OpenWRT on all of its routers. Taking advantage of OpenWRT’s linux-based flexibility, FabFi devices can run a wide range of network monitoring and self-diagnostic tools. The current system supports real-time network monitoring, local web caching centralized access control, user management and usage tracking (for billing). All of this is performed on devices costing $50-$100USD. Automated configuration has been steadily improving since the bygone days of the FabFi 1.0 release. We now support multiple routers across multiple fabfi distributions, and have the ability to configure networks with 802.11n speeds.

Power

In developing places, reliable power is an ongoing challenge. Conveniently, all of our currently supported devices will run on 12VDC, and can be easily powered directly from a car or small engine battery. A car battery and a couple of inexpensive chargers function as reliable UPS devices on two major distribution hubs in the Jalalabad network, powering a bank of routers for nearly two days without city power. In Kenya, we have designed a “node in a box” that provides UPS, mounting and weatherproofing to every node in the network, supporting mains or solar power. Future development is planned for a bare-bones 12V-12V UPS that can be integrated into installations by plugging the provided 100-240VAC switching power brick into the fabbed UPS and the UPS into the router. Wind and other locally harvested powered charging circuits are a parallel FabLab project.

The Fab Future Despite te cobbled-together aesthetic, Fabfi has proven incredibly reliable in Afghanistan’s harsh climate (it reaches 130degF in Jalalabad in the summer with regular sandstorms). Beginning in the summer of 2010, we have expanded the fabfi system to provide direct wireless access to client devices and have been running a community-scale wifi ISP. In more than two years of deployment, we can still count the hardware failures on one hand. To our surprise, the biggest challenge so far has been uplink bandwidth. While many countries tout “mobile broadband” as the solution to universal access problems, the ground truth in most places is that mobile devices alone do not provide sufficient performance (or affordable enough prices) to be viable without some help. In Kenya, fabfi provides a value added service to communities where mobile connectivity is the only means of access by decreasing the data throughput per user and making it possible for providers to buy bandwidth in bulk.

More here

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren’t sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. “Lose 5 pounds” is a better goal than “lose some weight,” because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you’ll “eat less” or “sleep more” is too vague — be clear and precise. “I’ll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights” leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you’ve actually done it.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Given how busy most of us are, and how many goals we are juggling at once, it’s not surprising that we routinely miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice them. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., “If it’s Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I’ll work out for 30 minutes before work.”) Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don’t know how well you are doing, you can’t adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won’t improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren’t particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don’t have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking …. well, there’s no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control “muscle” is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn’t get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you’d honestly rather not do. Give up high-fat snacks, do 100 sit-ups a day, stand up straight when you catch yourself slouching, try to learn a new skill. When you find yourself wanting to give in, give up, or just not bother — don’t. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur (“If I have a craving for a snack, I will eat one piece of fresh or three pieces of dried fruit.”) It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier, and that’s the whole point. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don’t tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it’s important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don’t try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it (like quitting smoking and dieting at the same time). And don’t put yourself in harm’s way — many people are overly-confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as a result they put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do. Do you want to successfully lose weight, quit smoking, or put a lid on your bad temper? Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., “Don’t think about white bears!”) has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.
If you want change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead? For example, if you are trying to gain control of your temper and stop flying off the handle, you might make a plan like “If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down.” By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit will get worn away over time until it disappears completely.

It is my hope that, after reading about the nine things successful people do differently, you have gained some insight into all the things you have been doing right all along. Even more important, I hope are able to identify the mistakes that have derailed you, and use that knowledge to your advantage from now on. Remember, you don’t need to become a different person to become a more successful one. It’s never what you are, but what you do.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist, and author of the new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). She is also an expert blogger on motivation and leadership for Fast Company and Psychology Today. Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at http://www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson

The Austrian Business Cycle Theory was developed by the economist Ludwig von Mises to explain the phenomenon of business cycles. It provides crucial insight for understanding the cause of cyclical boom/bust cycles and their connection to the government’s manipulation of the economy. To understand the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, an analogy is helpful:

Imagine an economy with just one actor: Robinson Crusoe on an island. Crusoe loves fish, so he spends half of each day fishing so he can enjoy fish in the evenings. Additionally, Crusoe spends Friday mornings maintaining his fishing dinghy and nets. In order to have fish on Friday, he must fish for an extra hour every other day of the week. In economic terms, Crusoe has a savings rate of one hour per day. His savings rate is also his investment rate, or the percentage of present income he sets aside to maintain or increase future consumption.¹

Crusoe doesn’t have a fridge, so he preserves his catch by throwing it in a small, dark pond. He can’t see how many fish are in the pond, so he keeps a stack of small rocks near it. Every time he adds a fish, he adds a rock, and every time he eats one, he removes one. The rocks are his money supply.

Suppose that Crusoe shares the island with some mischievous monkeys, who see Crusoe adding rocks to his pile. They decide to imitate him, so every time Crusoe ads a rock, they sneak in and add one as well. The monkeys are inflating the money supply by injecting currency into Crusoe’s investment fund.²

One day, Crusoe suddenly notices that his “savings rate” of fish is double the usual. He decides to compensate by eating some of the fish he catches during the “savings hour.” This is the consumption-side of the boom phase of the business cycle. Crusoe also decides to take some extra time each day to start building himself a new hut. This is the investment-side of the boom phase of the business cycle.

Crusoe now believes that the cost of saving fish is half the usual, while in fact his savings rate is too low for the investments he is planning.

Before long, Friday comes around. When it comes time to eat his midday meal, Crusoe suddenly realizes that he’s out of fish – despite having a surplus of rocks. He’s exhausted his investment capital because the additional currency snuck into his money supply did not represent a real increase in his productivity or savings rate. He doesn’t have the capital (fish) to maintain his previous consumption rate, much less increase it. He is forced to cut his investment rate (he must spend some of his Friday fishing) just to have some fish for Friday’s dinner. He must also abandon his incomplete hut because he does not have the time to finish it. The abandoned hut is an extravagant expenditure that represents a loss of capital.³ This is the bust phase of the business cycle.

To review, here’s the overall impact of the monkey’s trickery: Sunday-Friday, Crusoe catches the same number of fish, but consumes more, and therefore saves less. That’s the boom period. Friday, Crusoe consumes less fish, and spends less time for maintaining his nets (capital). Some of his investment/consumption time must now be spent in production. That’s the bust period. If Crusoe’s initial savings rate allows him to just break even each week ⁴, his nets will gradually get worse and worse and he will eventually go hungry.⁵

Notes

1. Crusoe prefers to enjoy his fish sooner rather than later, but he is willing to put aside some of his catch to get more fish later. The discount he gives to eating a fish Friday is his time preference, or his originary interest rate. (To that, he adds the risk that the fish will spoil by Friday to get the market or “real” interest rate.)
2. As long as the monkeys keep contributing one stone for every fish, Crusoe can account for their trickery. But if the monkeys are unpredictable, it will be impossible for Crusoe to set the proper savings rate. In the real world, the originary interest rate reflects the average time preference of all savers. If someone starts monkeying around with the interest rates, it becomes impossible for investors (or the monkeys at the Fed) to know what the real rate of savings is even if they know that the rate is being manipulated.
3. That abandoned hut represents investments which exceed the ability of the actual savings rate to complete. The resources it takes to build compete with worthwhile investments (such as repairing the fishing nets) by raising the prices for all capital. Ridiculous business models and sky-high salaries during the dot-com boom, as well as over-extended sub-prime mortgages likewise compete with legitimate business models, salaries, and mortgages. Manipulating the money supply makes it difficult to distinguish bad investments from good ones, so no one can escape the inevitable crunch.
4. That is, zero net profit, an equilibrium rate of savings, or “the evenly rotating economy” in Mises’ terminology.
5. Suppose Crusoe decides to ignore his hunger and work on his nets all Friday. In other words, he trades current production (and therefore consumption) for higher future consumption (that is, economic growth). If he does so voluntarily, there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s nothing inherently more desirable or efficient in spending some of one’s time starving just to increase future production (that is, in valuing economic growth over present consumption.) Note that the longer Crusoe delays the shift back to production, the more severe the mis-allocation of resources (and his hunger) becomes. The monkey’s trickery does not actually make Crusoe to become a better saver – he is more likely to start saving less because of uncertainty over the future.