Mustnt Grumble eh!

In the interest of fairness here is Johnny ! CHAPTER 1 Population, Resources, Environment: Dimensions of the Human Predicament It is clear that the future course of history will be determined by the rates at which people breed and die, by the rapidity with which nonrenewable resources are consumed, by the extent and speed with which agricultural production can be improved, by the rate at which the underdeveloped areas can industrialize, by the rapidity with which we are able to develop new resources, as well as by the extent to which we succeed in avoiding future wars. All of these factors are interlocked. --Harrison Brown, 1954 Providing people with the ingredients of material wellbeing requires physical resources - land, water, energy, and minerals -- and the supporting contributions of environmental processes. Technology and social organization are the tools with which society transforms physical resources and human labor into distributed goods and services. These cultural tools...

Mad as a hatter this one !

THE SOCIETIES OF THE BARDI AND THE PERUZZI AND THEIR DEALINGS WITH EDWARD III, 1327-45 At the beginning of the fourteenth century Florence was a city state, with a dependent territory somewhat less in extent than the county of York Its merchant companies or societies had their agents in every important centre of population throughout Western Europe, and finding ample opportunity for the negotiation of loans, they had extensive dealings with the Papacy, the Plantagenets, the Valois, and the Angevins of Southern Italy. In fact, most of the business of Europe of this particular type was in their hands, and in many places their remarkable success procured for them cordial hatred (fn. 1) Everybody in Florence, from its merchant nobles downwards, is said to have been more or less engaged in the production of wealth The mainstays of its prosperity were the extensive transactions in banking and moneylending already mentioned, and a flourishing cloth industry embracing manu...