CHICAGO (CBS) – A new state law requires those who buy industrial drain cleaners and other caustic substances to provide photo identification and sign a log.

The law does not apply to most drain cleaners that consumers typically buy at grocery stores, but only to high-grade industrial cleaners that are normally only sold at hardware stores. Even so, it’s getting a rough reception from customers and merchants alike although perhaps none more than a cashier at Schroeder’s True Value Hardware in Lombard.

Non-compliance results in fines: $150 for the first offense, $500 for the second and up to $1,500 for the third and subsequent violations.

Schroeder estimated that there are “easily” 30 or more products in the store that must be reported when sold.

This will continue to quietly spread.

Iran and Russia have replaced US Dollar with their own currencies in their trade ties, a senior Iranian diplomat announced on Saturday.

Speaking to FNA, Tehran’s Ambassador to Moscow Seyed Reza Sajjadi said that the proposal for replacing US Dollar with Ruble and Rial was raised by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in a meeting with his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Astana on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting. (Read more)

Wow!

Very cool descriptions of all the gold in the world here.

The best estimate at the end of 2011 is that around 165,000 metric tons (or tonnes) have been mined in all of human history. That’s about 181,881 ordinary tones . . . or 5,820,203,717 ordinary ounces . . . .

3.42 Olympic-sized swimming pools could contain all the gold . . . Another way to imagine this is to think of all the gold in the world ever mined as a single cube. That would be a cube with each side just over 20 meters, or 67 feet in length. . . .

[The] annual production of gold would fit in a cube whose sides were 5 meters.

Main stream writer “discovers” what libertarians have been saying all along:

The public is in a foul mood over increasing college costs and student debt burdens. Talk of a “higher education bubble” is common on the contrarian right, while the Occupy Wall Street crowd is calling for a strike in which in which ex-students refuse to pay off their loans.

This week, President Barack Obama held a summit with a dozen higher-education leaders “to discuss rising college costs and strategies to reduce these costs while improving quality.” The administration plans to introduce some policy proposals in the run-up to the presidential campaign.

Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound.

As veteran education-policy consultant Arthur M. Hauptman notes in a recent essay: “There is a strong correlation over time between student and parent loan availability and rapidly rising tuitions. Common sense suggests that growing availability of student loans at reasonable rates has made it easier for many institutions to raise their prices, just as the mortgage interest deduction contributes to higher housing prices.” (Read more)

Perhaps the illustrious author encountered Peter Schiff’s videos, one of which I posted and summarized here.

He tears down the house of European regulation. Love his irreverence.

or is it more likely that with less government we’d see less corporate power?

Many more economic memes at http://geke.us/.

A Seattle woman who is receiving welfare assistance from Washington state also happens to live in a waterfront house on Lake Washington worth more than a million dollars.

Federal agents raided the home this weekend but have not released the woman or her husband’s name because they have not officially been charged with a crime.

However, federal documents obtained by KING 5 News show the couple currently receives more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus state and government disability checks and food stamps. They have been receiving the benefits since 2003.

The 2,500 square-foot home, which includes gardens and a boat dock, is valued at $1.2 million. (Read more)

* “you had to face up to the fact that you couldn’t let these people collapse”

* “it’s very easy to have regulation, but you have to have the regulation supervised”

I don’t think this article reaches the right conclusion, namely, to let markets do the regulating, but it does point out the absurdity of government regulation:

Government oversight of day care seems like a good idea—you wouldn’t want children cooped up in an airless basement—but this proposal went far beyond basic health and safety.

The new rules would dictate exactly how to do just about everything: how many block sets (“at least two (2) … with a minimum of ten (10) blocks per set”), where the children can play with the blocks (on “a flat building surface” that is “not in the main traffic area”) and when caregivers must wash their hands (before “eating food,” “after wiping a child’s nose,” etc.).

This is the way regulation works in America: Regulators try to imagine every possible mistake and then dictate a solution. The complexity is astounding.

Under a recent federal directive, the number of health-care reimbursement categories will soon increase from 18,000 to 140,000, including 21 separate categories for “spacecraft accidents” and 12 for bee stings. There are over 140 million words of binding federal statutes and regulations, and states and municipalities add several billion more.

. . . .

Consider our federal special-education laws, passed in the mid-1970s to end the shameful neglect of the small percentage of students with special needs. Special ed has now grown to consume 20% of the total K-12 budget in the U.S. Programs for gifted children, by contrast, get less than half of 1%.

Is this the correct balance? No one is even asking the question, because the regulations dictate the outcome.

Many Norwegians who live close to Sweden do their grocery shopping across the border where prices are lower, but to import butter has proven more difficult.

“They (Norway) have, as we see it, very restrictive trading politics, borderline protectionist,” Jonas Carlberg at the Swedish Dairy Association (Svensk Mjölk) told daily Dagens Nyheter, adding that the high custom duty is a way to protect domestic production in Norway.

But the shortage has made people turn to desperate measures, according to news agency TT.

A Russian man was caught on Friday trying to bring 90 kilogrammes of butter over the Swedish border to Norway without paying the custom duty. (Read more)

Prices spike as butter shortage spreads through Norway (Read more)

A comment from reddit:

In Norway, all milk and butter production is ruled over by an old and state-sanctioned cartel/corporation called TINE. The goal of TINE is to raise the prices on dairy products as high as humanly possible; with this, they have great success. For example: Currently, one litre of milk costs 14 Norwegian kroner = 2.431184 US$. Keep in mind that 1 US gallon = 3.78541178 litres and you can calculate the price/gallon for yourself…

As a result of this huge overprice, the result is the same as it always have been: overproduction. More is being produced, than sold. So what happens?

TINE implements quotas; each farmer is only allowed to produce x amounts of milk each year. This year, however, the production was smaller than otherwise due to the weather. So what does TINE do?

Nothing. Every grain of their being is geared towards reducing production, so they have no ideological idea that they can even do anything else. In spite of this shortage having been advertised from months and months away, they never increased the quotas for the farmers that could produce more.

I would also like to point out a couple of dirty tricks the TINE corporation uses to shut down any and all competition:

They have invented the Jarlsberg cheese, a cheese that was made exclusively to use much milk; they also lobbied for export subsidies for said cheese. We use milk worth 90 NOK to produce Jarlsberg, then it is exported for around 35-40 NOK; the other 50 NOK, around 8-9$, are subsidized by the state. This way we pay the Americans to eat our surplus milk storage and keep prices high.

Oh, and they have also blocked our enjoyment of Edamer. You see, some time ago dutch edamer cheese got popular in Norway. TINE lobbied the department of agriculture and had a tariff put up, then started producing their own shitty copies.

Same story with feta cheese. Around the early 2000′s, Arla corporation that operates in Denmark/Sweden started marketing and creating a market for feta cheese in Norway. They made great success with this. What happened then was that TINE sent a little letter to the agricultural ministry, which was, as per custom, precided over by a previous TINE CEO, and had them reinterpret the rules creatively. Previously imported cheese was judged based on the weight of the cheese itself; feta cheese on the other hand is lying in an oil solution to give it taste. Now the rules were suddenly interpreted so that the oil solution is counted as part of the cheese, thus doubling the import tolls on feta cheese. Oh and suddenly TINE launched their own shitty feta rip offs on the market as well.

tl;dr: The “butter crisis” is a result of a centrally planned Soviet-system of milk production, coupled with a rush for profit by the TINE corporation. As a result the consumer is sucked dry by the unscrupulous monopolist cunts.

Gold broke below $1,600 an ounce for the first time since early October, as a sharply weaker euro and losses in other markets prompted investors to raise cash by selling precious-metals holdings.

Gold, which has tarnished its image as a haven in recent months by moving in step with riskier assets like stocks and other commodities, tumbled 5% Wednesday as a broad-market rout saw investors shed holdings in favor of cash. (Read more)

Zero Hedge: Gold “Rehypothecation” Unwind Begins: HSBC Sues MF Global Over Disputed Ownership of Physical Gold.
physical gold in the hands of the very same insolvent financial syndicate of daisy-chained underfunded organizations, where the premature (or overdue) end of one now means the end of all, is also just as unsafe, if not more. Which is why we read with great distress a just broken story by Bloomberg according to which HSBC, that other great gold “depository” after JP Morgan (and the custodian of none other than GLD) is suing MG Global “to establish whether he or another person is the rightful owner of gold worth about $850,000 and silver bars underlying contracts between the brokerage and a client.” The notional amount is irrelevant: it could have been $0.01 or $1 trillion: what is very much relevant however, is whether or not MF Global was rehypothecating (there is that word again), or lending, or repoing, or whatever you want to call it, that one physical asset that it should not have been transferring ownership rights to under any circumstances. Essentially, this is at the heart of the whole commingling situation: was MF Global using rehypothecated client gold to satisfy liabilities? The thought alone should send shivers up the spine of all those gold “bugs” who have been warning about precisely this for years. Because the implications could be staggering.