Month: October 2014

Twisted Logic School: Democrats to Retain Senate

Huh?

You mean you don’t see that?

Apparently,you missed the stern lecture I issued to Zeus the Cat Thursday afternoon. 

While chasing wadded up versions of this morning’s column that weren’t cutting it, we got to talking about how the market is likely to put in a double top before collapsing next week.

“How you figure, Fatso?”  he asked, dodging my foot that had taken offense at his surly attitude.

“Buy the rumor, sell the news, you idiot Cat!  Don ‘t you pay attention to how the world of finance works?  Everyone KNOWS that the democraps will win and the republicons will lose, but regardless of who “wins” this is a Buy the Rumor market right now.”

“LOL…so you, Tubby, are going to lose your ass on those Disney puts for December, right?”

“Keep an eye on that right foot, Zeus…it’s gets a mind of its own when you talk that way.”

Oh, sure, Zeus (nickname: Zeke) had told me to hang in with my long term call option collection on the S&P…but who listens to financial advice from a cat, right?  Especially a black one and on Halloween….

“Hand me your mouse, Tubs, I just ate mine.”

Uh…

“Thanks…now look here:  See how the Velocity of Money at M2 has failed to recover?

And you know what this all means, right?”

“No.”

“Stupid humans – we wasted our time trying to domesticate you.  No amount of imported under class, diseases, or new wars are going to fix the fact that deflation is digging in.  Watch gold’s monthly beat down.  That’s the news Tubbo…”

Crap.  I hate it when he’s right.  But markets that rally this much before an election are invariably wrong.  So while we have the predictable slew of stories this morning about how the democraps will lose badly, it seems more likely due to the price of free lunches and low information voters, that the democraps will win and the market will promptly implode.  Ergo, my puts.

Of course once this happens, the groundwork is already laid for battles over voting integrity.  I’m sure you’ve seen the stories out of Illinois and Maryland about how votes for this party went to that party.

All of which circles back to something we hold to be self-evident:  If you want to really control things, go to law school.

I should have skipped business school and gone into law…but I’ve always had difficulty passing a bar (rim shot).,

The Global Money Rip

Of course there is an alternate reality to all this:  It could be today’s massive rally to come might be attributed to Japan deciding to join the Print of the Month Club.

Maybe they yen for an economic recovery, too.  Their market was over 40,000 back in 1989…which means they have stupidly listened to the same political hack-talk for 25-years.  Japan’s ability to swallow political crap is really a prototype for guess which large nuclear-innovating country near you?

Meantime, Dow futures are up about 200.  You can fool, it seems, most of the People, most of the time.

Another Cruel Economic Joke

Bureau of Economic Analysis report out this morning on Personal Income, savings and what have you:

Personal income increased $22.7 billion, or 0.2 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $15.7 billion, or 0.1 percent, in September, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) decreased $19.0 billion, or 0.2 percent. In August, personal income increased $50.7 billion, or 0.3 percent, DPI increased $37.5 billion, or 0.3 percent, and PCE increased $58.7 billion, or 0.5 percent, based on revised estimates. Real DPI increased less than 0.1 percent in September, compared with an increase of 0.3 percent in August. Real PCE decreased 0.2 percent, in contrast to an increase of 0.5 percent.

Of course the numbers only work if you count paying down a credit card as savings and such…

Personal outlays — PCE, personal interest payments, and personal current transfer payments — decreased $14.5 billion in September, in contrast to an increase of $63.4 billion in August. PCE decreased $19.0 billion, in contrast to an increase of $58.7 billion. Personal saving — DPI less personal outlays — was $732.2 billion in September, compared with $702.0 billion in August.

The personal saving rate — personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income — was 5.6 percent in September, compared with 5.4 percent in August.

So here is the game:  You have to read through half the press release to find the REAL PCE and Disposable Personal Income – adjusted for inflation which is the only thing that matters:

Real DPI — DPI adjusted to remove price changes — increased less than 0.1 percent in September, compared with an increase of 0.3 percent in August. Real PCE — PCE adjusted to remove price changes — decreased 0.2 percent in September, in contrast to an increase of 0.5 percent in August.

Purchases of durable goods decreased 1.9 percent , in contrast to an increase of 2.3 percent.

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Coping: Blame Warren Buffett for Daylight Time?

(Study Guide: Sometimes, reality is like a good cup of hot soup and alternate reality is the fried cheese sandwich.  They sort of belong together, yet r4emain distinct. (While you reach for your required course materials from  Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, we’ll proceed.   You can catch up with the rest of the class this weekend…. Tertium Organum chapter 1 is over here if you misplaced your textbooks…)

Here I thought I was doing a legit public service yesterday by explaining how living out of synch with millions of years of natural rhythms was likely one of the reasons most people are so desperately asleep at an intellectual level.

You know – working, always feeling tired, no get up and go – all the rest of today’s symptom list from chronic fatigue.  Something which I believe, based on shreds of evidence here and there – is likely true.

But no. 

The phone rings an hour after Thursday’s column on the Great Hoax of Daylight Time and it’s my consigliore.  The multiple-degree truth detector who, in addition to fine financial planning advise (which is what tax attorneys do when they aren’t correcting UrbanSurvival columns) says don’t blame the moon….blame….who?

Before the railroads each place kept it’s own time. (except for those on the seas, which for navigational reasons of needing to know where they were, obeyed what we now call GMT or Universal Coordinated Time). Each little town had a time that was a little different from the next town over, and all was sort of geared to when the sun was highest in the ski (High Noon).

Alas, along came that contraption called the railroad!  Soon came along the management types (if you had lived back then you would have been one!) who decided people should not only know what time the train was arriving, or departing, but that in order to keep trains from running into each other (with only one track trains running in different directions engineers needed to know when it was safe to go the direction they were going so as to not run into another train head on) they decided to make Time consistent across distance.

Alas the railroad companies BEGAN the process of bringing all of their stations into a timing synchronization, which was actually easy once the telegraph appeared (virtually simultaneously with the build out of the rail roads). VOILA every little town up and down the track suddenly was on the same time … and the MASTER CLOCK for the entire town and the surrounding area was the one at the Train Station!! (NOT the sun anymore)

I am so old I in fact remember when Western Union, the telegraph arm started by the railroads, provided the synchronization clocks for most places in the country. Our town had two hard wired Western Union clocks, clocks that were synched twice(?) each day to the Western Union master clock, where ever it was.

One was at the train station and the other was at the Court House …

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Sound Money is NOT an Option

Ah, we expect the Dow to fall a hundred, or more, before the smoke clears today.  The reason, simply enough is the Federal Reserve decision to stay the course of cheap money:

To support continued progress toward maximum employment and price stability, the Committee today reaffirmed its view that the current 0 to 1/4 percent target range for the federal funds rate remains appropriate. In determining how long to maintain this target range, the Committee will assess progress–both realized and expected–toward its objectives of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation. This assessment will take into account a wide range of information, including measures of labor market conditions, indicators of inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and readings on financial developments. The Committee anticipates, based on its current assessment, that it likely will be appropriate to maintain the 0 to 1/4 percent target range for the federal funds rate for a considerable time following the end of its asset purchase program this month, especially if projected inflation continues to run below the Committee’s 2 percent longer-run goal, and provided that longer-term inflation expectations remain well anchored. However, if incoming information indicates faster progress toward the Committee’s employment and inflation objectives than the Committee now expects, then increases in the target range for the federal funds rate are likely to occur sooner than currently anticipated. Conversely, if progress proves slower than expected, then increases in the target range are likely to occur later than currently anticipated.

When the Committee decides to begin to remove policy accommodation, it will take a balanced approach consistent with its longer-run goals of maximum employment and inflation of 2 percent. The Committee currently anticipates that, even after employment and inflation are near mandate-consistent levels, economic conditions may, for some time, warrant keeping the target federal funds rate below levels the Committee views as normal in the longer run.

The problem we have is pretty simple:  The government is doing everything it can to hold up markets going into next week’s election.

But the bigger issue is the Dual Mandate of the Federal Reserve.  You see, maintaining the quality of the US dollar is not something the Fed is really interested in.  Their “dual mandate” is maximum employment and, at the same time, a target inflation rate of 2%.

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Coping: With Made Up Time, A New Industry Proposed

There is something that strikes me as sinister – conspiratorial if you wish – about Daylight Savings Time. 

This weekend, as you know, we are “falling back” – such that on Sunday morning at 2 AM it will instantly become 1 AM and we will be back on Standard Time. 

It’s one of the few nights during the year that being a barkeeper would be a problem – and then, only in a few states.  But would you close at the first 2 AM or the second?

And might it also be a window during which police officers would be particularly diligent, as well?  “Suspect crawled out of the window carrying the stolen goods at 1:33 AM (the second one).”

Or, consider the problems of a doctor in a trauma setting having to “call it” for a time of death. 

Oh, and let’s not forget the astrological footwork for the babies born in the second 1 to 2 AM zone!  Your whole life would be spent with questions like “If I’m doing my horoscope and it says I was born at 1:15 AM – and it was on the day that Daylight Time changed…but during that year, the time change took place on…”  You see the problems.  Especially when the change falls on a different weekend some years in some place…A rare form of Vedic madness?

Like anything, there’s an economic angle to the Time Scam, too.  You know how we are around here: Follow the Money and Everything is a Business Model.  The Wikipedia quotes on point:

A 2008 study examined billing data in Indiana before and after it adopted DST in 2006, and concluded that DST increased overall residential electricity consumption by 1% to 4%, due mostly to extra afternoon cooling and extra morning heating; the main increases came in the fall. The overall annual cost of DST to Indiana households was estimated to be $9 million, with an additional $1.7–5.5 million for social costs due to increased pollution

In 1984, Fortune magazine estimated that a seven-week extension of DST would yield an additional $30 million for 7-Eleven stores, and the National Golf Foundation estimated the extension would increase golf industry revenues $200 million to $300 million…

These are just a few of the “facts” of the Time Scam.

But this morning I’d like to toss yet another log on the fire of burning public debate:  It’s the idea that people are about to have their very sense of time screwed with immediately before an election.

The way I figure it, by letting people get an “extra hour of sleep” just before elections in the US, the incumbents will get a very slight statistical edge.

In fact, I proved this (at least to my personal satisfaction) this week when I took a collection of 10 lab rats and told them I would let them sleep for an extra hour two days before voting for Chief Lab Rat.  Oh, it took a little work to figure the mechanics of it out, and a couple of pounds of cheese, but in seventeen independent trials, I documented a 0.5% advantage to an incumbent rat if elections were held within 5 days (margin of error: 13.2 months) of a particular date.

Elaine and I keep planning to go somewhere in the old airplane…and thankfully, the skies are safe even on weekends when grounded people are cleverly manipulated.  Be reassured the laws of physics won’t be broken because pilots live and fly by Greenwich Mean Time.  Greenwich doesn’t get “saved.”  (Except in Connecticut, but to every rule there are…)

I’m perplexed what time to publish my column come Monday of next week.  We always try to have it up around 7:55 AM and occasionally we have been as late as 7:59 AM.  But Monday?  That column could appear just damn near any old time.

Obviously, some of this is tongue in cheek.  But not all.  We come to the serious part:

Imagine a fine new industry that would make sense for the whole world to adopt, post haste.

I call it simply Modern Time.

It throws away Daylight Time and some of Old Time, and evolves a new Modern Time.

Here’s the way it works:

We all know that the 24-hour day is not particularly good idea to live by. 

The reason?  Lots of medical studies have documented the importance of living your life in a manner that is in concert with your body’s circadian rhythms.

My late father noted that if you look at all the High Cultures around the world they almost always happened in temperate zones.  The people at the equator – where life was pretty easy and abundant until we screwed it up with 6.5-billion too many people – did not evolve high cultures..

Those tended to band from 20 to 60-degrees north of the equator.

Pappy’s theory was that this had something to do with seasons.  “If you have four distinct seasons, you tend to hustle more.  You have to get ready for a long winter, and so on,” he explained.  And that is absolutely true.

But it turns out there is even more to the equation:  These people (prior to Bad Clocks and Bad Timekeeping) used to rise with the dawn and sleep when  darkness fell.

And it didn’t fall the same way all the time (so to speak).  People would get lots of sleep in the winter and less sleep in the summer.

If we step out of The Ruling Paradigm, we can see how this was absolutely the healthiest way to live:  In winter, when many people got 12-hours of sleep (depending on latitude, of course) the medical effect would be their bodies were well rested.  This increased their immune system response to disease.  But in summertime, when work was abundant to prep for the following winter, what was there?  Plenty of light.

Although my personal heritage is Danish/Scottish, if I had to pick a nation of naturally “smart people” it would be Ukrainians.  Recent events aside, every Ukrainian I have ever met was exceptionally smart.  And it may have something to do with living an agrarian lifestyle and living by the Natural Time  rather than by clocks.

Ukraine residents who live rural, keep to the old ways, and eat yogurt and a high fiber diet, are also some of the longest-lived people in the world, too.

What ends up happening – as a result of the invention of clocks – is that we are living on Fake Time when people who live the longest live on what is scientifically called Sidereal Time.  In other words “Sun Time.,”  Wiki it and you’ll find me (as always) telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but (except for the occasional rat story):

Sidereal time /sa??d??ri?l/ is a time-keeping system astronomers use to keep track of the direction to point their telescopes to view a given star in the night sky. Briefly, sidereal time is a “time scale that is based on the Earth’s rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars.”[1]

From a given observation point, a star found at one location in the sky will be found at nearly the same location on another night at the same sidereal time. This is similar to how the time kept by a sundial can be used to find the location of the Sun. Just as the Sun and Moon appear to rise in the east and set in the west due to the rotation of the Earth, so do the stars. Both solar time and sidereal time make use of the regularity of the Earth’s rotation about its polar axis, solar time following the Sun while sidereal time roughly follows the stars. More exactly, sidereal time is the angle, measured from the observer’s meridian, along the celestial equator, to the great circle that passes through the March equinox and both poles, and is usually expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds.[2] Common time on a typical clock measures a slightly longer cycle, accounting not only for the Earth’s axial rotation but also for the Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun of slightly less than 1 degree per day (in fact to the nearest arc-second, it takes 365.2422 days to revolve therefore 360 degrees/365.2422 days = 0.9856 degrees or 59 arc-minutes, 8 arc-seconds per day, i.e., slightly less than 1 degree per day).

A mean sidereal day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds (23.9344699 hours or 0.99726958 mean solar days), the time it takes the Earth to make one rotation relative to the vernal equinox.[clarification needed] (Due to nutation, an actual sidereal day is not quite so constant.) The vernal equinox itself precesses slowly westward relative to the fixed stars, completing one revolution in about 26,000 years, so the misnamed sidereal day (“sidereal” is derived from the Latin sidus meaning “star”) is some 0.0084 seconds shorter than the Earth’s period of rotation relative to the fixed stars.

The longer “true” sidereal period is called a stellar day by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS).

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If America Ran Like a Business

Happy Fed Day.

The advertising and the positioning of America is wonderful.  Come to our shores (cross our border while we’re asleep) and you’ll be in the land of milk and hand-outs.  (True) You’ll be in the land of unlimited opportunity.  (Maybe not…)  And you’ll be in a land run like a business on behalf of the people!  (no way…)

If only we lived up to the messages we convey to the world about this once-Great nation of ours.  So this morning, in a moment of pre-election madness, I decided to dissect how we delude ourselves by skewing data and setting up elections so that not all the most current and useful facts are yet on the table.

After coffee, headlines, and a thoughtful look ahead at what markets hold in store for us…

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Big Depression Marker! Free Money!

Yeah, I’ve been writing about the Second Depression since 1997 here, and one of the hardest parts of economics is figuring out just how this time’s rhyme will play.

As you remember, from my rambling discourses, what happens in a global depression is that you have consumers begin to tighten up all at once.  They stop spending money on the frivolous and useless, right? 

And so, in one of the worst economic timing debacles of all time, still unfolding on us, America has gone from one of the looser tax deals to something much, much tighter.  Not only have we bumped up rates (the Senate is democrats and so’s Obama as least on paper) so you’re not only going to pay a LOT more income tax this year, but on top of it, you’ll also being paying more for healthcare.

Economic reality check”:  You don’t add healthcare coverage for 30-million people and do it free.  So the middle class gets the bill.  The rich will buy or deduct out of it.

Now – without getting bitter about this stuff – it is what it is. 

But this leaves policyfakers (sic) with a lot of problems:  When an economy is trying to collapse, about the only hiring that can be done is governmental.  We have 21-million people working in government for round numbers.

Now we need to hire more – Ebola and such.

So the higher tax part makes sense.

As a CONSEQUENCE though, between O-care and higher withholding, guess what happens to real disposable income?  Toilet.

People stop discretionary spending.  Look at the restaurant stocks.  A lot of them are reporting fewer people going out to eat.  People are trying to save money – and with little success.

What then happens is the money the one percenters have tied up in banks doesn’t have anything to do because people are not borrowing money and because of that, we are about to begin the second leg down which should test the lows of 2009 and if we hold there, we’ll be lucky.  Bank rates continue to collapse.

Watch the 10-year Treasury futures  Horrible.

Now let’s turn back to the policyfakers:  How do they respond? 

Simple!  They try to push money out into the economy but it will be too little, too late because as we’ve been screaming all along, if the Velocity of Money is imploding, the effort to push money out is like pushing on a wet noodle.

How wet?

In Sweden this morning, Reuters and Bloomberg report the rates just went to zero.  Not for us little guys, but for the big guys.  The thinking is that if money gets cheap enough, someone is going to borrow and that will create jobs.

Dream on.,

The fairytale world is about to come crashing down because reality operate differently than economics. 

To my point about Elon Musk being one of the most honest business leaders out there when it comes to thinking about the dangers of artificial intelligence.  Well, guess what?  Robots and AI ABSOLUTELY ENSURE A 30% unemployment rate in the next 10-years.

There simply are not going to be enough jobs to keep 7-billion people working and fed because machines will take the jobs, there will be no job income to tax, or if there is, government will claim a right to all of it, and that’s what leads downstream to a global revolution.

And I’m sure the jihadists are planning to fan the fires and play the old game of divide and conquer, and for details reread the Moorish Conquests.

The Collapse Won’t Start for a Day or Three

This despite the Durable Goods disaster this morning:

New Orders
New orders for manufactured durable goods in
September decreased $3.2 billion or 1.3 percent to
$241.6 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced
today. This decrease, down two consecutive months,
followed an 18.3 percent August decrease. Excluding
transportation, new orders decreased 0.2 percent.
Excluding defense, new orders decreased 1.5 percent.
Transportation equipment, also down two consecutive
months, led the decrease, $2.8 billion or 3.7 percent to
$73.4 billion.
Shipments
Shipments of manufactured durable goods in
September, up three of the last four months, increased
$0.1 billion or 0.1 percent to $245.6 billion. This
followed a 1.8 percent August decrease.
Fabricated metal products, up eight of the last nine
months, drove the increase, $0.2 billion or 0.6 percent to
$30.5 billion.
Unfilled Orders
Unfilled orders for manufactured durable goods in
September, up seventeen of the last eighteen months,
increased $3.8 billion or 0.3 percent to $1,168.7 billion.

The Dow is presently looking to open up 50, but that’s because the dollar is weaker (so it takes more of them to buy the Dow) and then as a consequence of THAT we see gold climbing back…

Now About the Housing Picture

Once upon a time, owning a home was the smartest thing you could do. Since 2009?  Let’s roll with this morning’s Case Shiller/S&P/Dow Jones (and whoever) as they lay out housing reality:

New York, October 28, 2014 – Data through August 2014, released today by S&P Dow Jones Indices for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, continue to show a deceleration in home price gains.

The 10-City Composite gained 5.5% year-over-year and the 20-City 5.6%, both down from the 6.7% reported for July. The National Index gained 5.1% annually in August compared to 5.6% in July.
On a monthly basis, the National Index and Composite Indices showed a slight increase of 0.2% for the month of August. Detroit led the cities with the gain of 0.8%, followed by Dallas, Denver and Las Vegas at 0.5%.

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Coping: How I Learned to Understand Healthcare

Thanks to HIPPA (which stands for lawyers are watching if personal healthcare information is released) I can’t be specific with names in this report, but I’ll relate the pertinent medical facts and assure you that every aspect of what I am going to tell you is true.

The story begins last week when a woman, age 70, goes to take out the garbage at her suburban home.  She’s done this hundreds if not thousands of times since she’s lived in the house for about 40-years.

Well, this trip didn’t go as planned.  As she turned to wheel the garbage container out to the street, she slipped and fell on the driveway.

Unable to get up, she flagged down a passing car…which summoned the local EMS team and they suspected a broken hip.  So off to suburban Hospital A.

There, while her kids figured out what went on and came from work to see her, the Big Wheels of Healthcare began to roll.  Turns out Hospital A didn’t do the kind of surgery needed, so she was moved to big urban Hospital B.  Apparently, there is some kind of bidding/buying process for surgery time…but she goes to Hospital B.

Once there, she is MRI’ed and prepped for surgery.  The Doc is first rate and the surgery is done in 2-hours and all is well.

This was on Thursday or Friday and by Sunday the woman is back at home, one of her children with her for the first week since (with a new hip to get used to_) because she’s considered a secondary falling risk…and all this makes sense.  The woman is fit and I gotta say, down just 2-days for a hip replacement, is pretty damn good – at any age.

The one thing apparently “normal” from hip replacements is that there are quite a few meds involved.  Serious antibiotics, tissues this’s and pain killer that’s.

All of which leads (indelicately) to having to use the bathroom every couple of hours where thins are decidedly are “loose” to put it as delicately as I can.

So the daughter on shift decides to call the on-duty consulting nurse.  She wonders if this loose condition is normal?

“Oh, sure…not unusual at all…” she is reassured by the nurse.

“OK, thank you,  bye… “  says the on-duty daughter.

“Wait!  Before you go, I need to ask you some questions.”

“Oh…OK…what?”

“Has you mom been to Sierra Leone in the last 21 –days?”

“No.”

“Has she traveled to Liberia or Nigeria in the last 21-days?”

“No…she hasn’t left (city name) in several years.”

“OK.  Has she traveled to Mali in the last 21-days?”

“No.”

“Have any contact with anyone just back from West Africa”

“Not that we know of….”

This went on a bit longer, the consulting nurse explaining along the way that these were  new Health Department required questions as part of Ebola operations.

It takes over a month to get the administrative wheels going and even then, people are still coming in from West Africa, crews are rotating in from the oil patch back and forth, yet this woman aged 70 who hasn’t left a 25-mile circle in several years, who has understandable G.I. tract follow-up from a hip replacement…

I shake my head in wonder, sometimes, as how the world really works.

I talk to my consigliore about it.  Although he’s double-degreed in Accounting and Law, he has been fascinated with how bureaucracies work and almost went the Public Administration route.

Because of all his degrees, we’ve been following his projections on Ebola cases and seems pretty close to the mark so far.  Especially the part where he forecast lying would be the biggest problem because people do what?  (Go look at any political site, go on!):  They LIE!

But when we were chatting about Ebola this week, he also mentioned that big bureaucracies have a problem with flexibility.  Yes, yes, I’m beginning to see that. 

As the showdown over the Maine nurse’s quarantine showed, sometimes we get treated to the real-life version of the old physics problem:  “What happens when two irresistible forces collide?”

One State figures IT is the irresistible force.  You can damn-sure bet the Obama Administration believes IT is irresistible, too.

The facts of the case  ultimately yield the definitive  answer the physics problem thusly:

If irresistible Force A is the stationary driveway and irresistible Force B is gravity, the result in Today’s World is a Recent Travel Quiz.  The broken hip is ancillary to the discussion, though we wish the recipient a speedy recovery.

The broken hip has added tremendously to our understanding of modern healthcare. Rack ‘em & stack ‘em, bid ‘em, and fix ‘em, and push ‘em out the door.  And then quiz them on stuff that was in the patient H&I (history and information) from the get-go.

Take this new-found knowledge, along with two aspirin,  a law degree, plus three box-tops from political connections and you too might qualify to be the next Ebola Czar.

Just don’t spend too much time in the bathroom, even if you’ve had your hip replaced.

A Word from the Wiz

A reader of ours (The Wizard) is not surprised that my wife scored higher on an IQ test than I did.  Come to think of it – and this is disconcerting – seems no one was surprised by the outcome except, uh, ME…hmmm…

Well, anyway, the Wiz has a sure-fire method to turn things around:

Saw your paragraphs on the IQ test today (Elaine’s is the same as my MBA daughter’s by the way).

I remember that last week (?) at some point you said that, while Elaine was trim & eats more healthfully and gets regular exercise, you could stand to lose 30 pounds and get off your butt now & then.  That sounds a lot like The Lovely Mrs Wizard and me.

Coming back to the IQ thing, I have found a way to prove to my wife that I am smarter than her – and she can’t argue with it!! And you can use it too.

It’s quite simple – First you tell her that you can prove it – she will say something like ‘How do you figure?’, and you say “Well, I married you <big grin> and look what I got!!  You married me <disgusted face> and look what you got.”

First time I did it, The Lovely Mrs Wizard’s jaw flapped open & closed silently a couple times, then it was just “DAMN!!!!”

Enjoy!

Wizard

Dear Wiz: 

You may wish to get some pictures and maybe a video of the silently moving mouth.  This will change over time.  Trust me on this.

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Elections: One Week and One Day to Go

We begin with a reminder that it is just one week and one day to go before we have elections for congressoids and others to deal with.

I like to remind people, when elections are coming, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result.

Sending the same people back to join the Washington Cartel who got us into the current state of affairs (I get Obamacare horror stories emailed in readers several times a week) are at best unlikely to get us out of our sad predicament.  And yes,m Benghazi still matters.

Here in Texas, there is a hot contest for governor is underway between Wendy Davis and Gregg Abbott.  The Abbott attack ads came out this weekend on radio and make the point that a “Vote for Davis is a vote for Obama…”

I won’t argue for one side or the other in this.  But I will point you to Sharyl Attkisson’s new book is due election day morning.  Remember, she’s the former CBS reporter who’s won ooodles of good journalism awards (something like 5 Emmy’s).  So when her book comes out, please read it.

“Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.” 

Why is her book out a week later than maximum usefulness? Or is that a coinky-dink, too?

The upshot of it is that there’s a cadre at the top of the corporate media food chain that wants the whole country to think like they do.  And frankly, that should scare the hell out of you. It does me…and even after my meds.

That, along with the weasel wording, sleazy, question-dodging PR flacks who are called out in the book. 

The only thing wrong with the book I can see is that it didn’t out in advance of next Tuesday’s voting.  It’s a damn shame people like me will be reading it on their Kindles on election day morning before voting late in the day after the worst of our suspicions are confirmed.  But, at least, I can maybe see who from Texas got named…

In the meantime, I’m still asking who will have the goanies to start up the campaign to limit election email.  One per candidate per week ought to be more than enough.

There should also be a national “Do Not Email” list.  Because the next time someone sends me an email asking for money to sign president-to-be-Hillary’s birthday card, I might just be tempted to send back a rather insulting reply…to ALL.

Unproductive Monday

Before we get to the rest of this morning’s jetsam, the good news is that male productivity may suffer a bit nationally today.  Sears Tool Club has a new email out and thousands of male “tool sluts” (like me) may be planning their own Christmas presents….

See you in the power tools aisle…although it will give us Type A males a little less time on task of screwing up the world.  Gotta have our priorities…which we work weekends on in the caves.

Markets Mixed

At least for now, futures were indicating down a tad.  But that may pick up speed later on since there are some changes in the wind:  Brazil politics and the Shanghai losing streak.

Big data morning tomorrow with Durable Goods and Housing data…but for this morning the Dow looks to drop 50 near the open.

Add to Your Ebola Notes

This from a reader:

George,

“Weatherford Bill” here.

Here is the email I received at “11:53 p.m.” canceling my order for Antiviral Face Masks.

Shortages caused by the Ebola virus are here…

Hello,
Due to the Ebola virus issue, the manufacturer of this product has reserved all remaining stock for government agencies.
We were also not able to find the product from other sources. 
This means we will not be able to provide you with this product at this time.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.
We have refunded your order.
Please contact us with any questions.

The Peoplenomics shopping list was our three weeks ago…just sayin…  Food worries are still months out, but planning ahead never hurts, does it?

ComputerWorld  Goes Partisan

Hate to break it down to you this way, but did you see what ComputerWorld headlined about Tesla boss Elon Musk’s comments about artificial intelligence being dangerous?  “Is Elon Musk obsessed or POSSESSED with Artificial Intelligence?”

A simple thought question always works to sort out the wheat from the electric chair, so here goes:

“Imagine that everything in the world was done by artificial intelligence and their human interfaces – the robots.

Now, where are the jobs?”

You see?  Musk gets it.  ComputerWorld?  Well, since their whole income picture is computerly people and their associated interests (and ad revenues) it looks to me like they have gone partisan in the debate over whether AI is good, or bad.  They are obviously on the side that will make and benefit from AI – many of their readers presumably are on the invention side of things, after all.

But the other side has something to say…and Musk gave voice to it.

I’d like to be the first to welcome Elon Musk to my Luddite Division of the Future. 

Ned Ludd has been made fun of ever since the British Factory Owner Class seized power (which they still hold, and we have a division of them here in the USA). 

The problem is, we Luddites will be shown right, over time.  The evidence will pile up as resource depletion, energy shortages, peak oil, mass pollution, or The Machine vs. Samaritan if you follow Person of Interest.

When I see someone write “Obsessed” or POSSESSED  I think “Aha!  Partisans.” 

It’s really a hallelujah moment around here that someone, besides me and a few friends, groks dead-end economics when the growth model eventually kills all jobs or kills off all workers…. ain’t no other way out of that maze visible, yet.

Musk is a damn smart fellow…as most of us “Luddites will be right in the End” types are.

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Coping: Hints of WoWW – Flashes and Time Slips

It has been a good while since we’ve had anything big to report from the World of Woo-Woo – that place past Rod Serling’s “sign post up ahead.” 

It may be that WoWW is a consequence of natural forces we don’t understand.  Like right now, for example.  We’re in a “Michael K. Lee window” awaiting major earthquakes from the recent eclipse.  As we noted last week, the Hawaiian Kahunas were reportedly credited by Lee with noticing that quakes seemed to follow the Moon’s passage between Earth and Sun. 

The other item I’d propose is something I’d call the thermopoint.  No, I don’t think it is in any science books (yet) as it’s an idea which has only recently evolved.  Like in the last three  minutes, to be exact.

The idea is that Earth has semi-regular expansions and contractions.  the Northern Hemisphere ought to shrink its land masses ever so slightly when the Sun is providing the Southern Hemisphere with its Summer.   Down below the equator, the land would expand slightly. 

When the Sun is at it’s northern-most spot over the northern hemisphere, conditions would reverse.

In between would lay this thermopoint where the semi-polar expansion and contraction rates would be highest.

We would therefore expect (based on this whacky thought) that there would be less volcanism around the equator and more in the middle latitudes because these would be where maximal ground movement might occur due to having real summers and real winters, the result of which would be land mass expansion and contraction.

See how easy it is to come up with “nutter theories” like this one?

But there’s more to it than that.  It is entirely possible that other, larger, and perhaps unseen events drive Life as we know it.

One philosophical outlook, for example, holds that there are multiple Universes and that consciousness travels between them in ways not quite documented. 

Experientially, the Death process seems like dying, but it is simply a transit (through a door) and off to another reality which will be as complete as this one, yet dimensioned differently.  As some turn-of-the-last-century fellows called this:  another Universe orthogonal to this one.

There’s a fair bit to support the hypothesis…but it’s not our track this morning.

It’s the “coming and goings” of the breadcrumbs.  The little events of the “My, ain’t that strange?” variety.  The kind of thing which, after reading, you find yourself saying “Well, I’ll be damned…”

Sometimes they are small…other times big.  Sometimes explainable, sometimes not.

Reader Tom has a small one…small but interesting…

George,

I don’t know if this has relevance, but was wondering if you had received any other messages like this.

Last night, about 11:45 P.m. I had just gone to bed. The lights were off for about five minutes.  All of a sudden there was an instantaneous flash that couldn’t have lasted more than 1/1000 of a second I thought, out of the corner of my left eye. It was so brief I thought I was imagining it. The only thing is that my partner saw it also. She asked me “did I see that flash?” I told her I did, and had never seen anything like it.

I got up, looked around the house, looked outside to see if any of my security lights were on, they weren’t and went back to bed.

Has any of your other clients reported something like this.

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Depression Hedging: The Home FixIt Shop

Want a part-time job that can earn you $20-$25 per hour?  This morning not only do we deliver the goods on one, but we also show you the method to research many more potential money-making ideas that will be worth their weight when times turn down.,

Before we go “back to the future” however, we’ll first have some notes on major news stories and update our Trading Model. And many cups of coffee to warm up a fall morning…

[ May take longer than usual to load due to large number of graphics.

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Markets: How High is Up?

The difference between a fundamental analyst and a technical analyst is pretty simple. The fundamental analyst looks to the news flow going into markets, and today they might be wondering about the financial future of the European Union. The reason would be that the EU has just tried to stick Britain with a 1.7-billion Euro bill to keep the mishmash of bad governance in power. That’s like getting stuck for $2.

Coping: With Workshop Time and a Magic Lesson

The glorious thing about weekends is that it gives people plenty of opportunity to use the workshop – when the weather is just right.  Not too hot for outside work, and not too cold.

Summers – at least here in the East Texas Outback – at OK for shop work, but anything outside in the sunshine tends to be put on hold as soon as the temp gets over 83F, or so.   Similarly, during the coldest days of winter, the shop only sees use in the afternoons.  When a shop is much below 55F it’s just too cold to enjoy things.  One of these days I may hook up the old wood stove I picked up.

Thursday, Panama dropped by the office looking for ideas on how to build a display rack for his lady-friend.  She’s quite good of crocheting at they’ll be doing a small booth at a nearby town street fair.  The problem was, they just got a table, buy nothing to put up the crocheted bedspreads and such.  Wanted a right-proper display and was looking for ideas.

It wasn’t a hard problem to solve:  An hour later we’d whacked off a couple of hunks of 4X4, about 16-inches long.  Leftover scrap from some past endeavor.  On each end of these, a 20” hunk of 3/4” plywood was centered, cut down to the same width, and these were the stabilizing legs.

As I was running this stuff through the belt sander, Panama got out the metal-cutting chop saw and sliced off a couple of 70” pieces of 5/8-rebar.  That’s the reinforcing steel that’s used on construction sites for concrete pours and the like.  Useful stuff to have around.

With a metal-chopping saw and a small welding set, you can jury-rig just about anything.  Make metal furniture, tables, even chairs if you’re patient enough.  I’m not that guy. So the welder stayed parked. 

Besides, Panama wanted something that would break-down into  pieces. Something that wouldn’t blow out of the back of the pickup truck.  So before the 4X4 bases were drilled, we punched =3” deep holes in them with a Fortner bit.

Not every home handybastard has one, but I’m always anxious to step up to the drill press to use Fortner bits.

The main difference between them and a regular twist drill, is that they drill a very smooth hole and the hole has a nice, flat bottom to it.

They’re not free; you’ll only get three-cents change back from a $50 bill for a set of PORTER-CABLE PC1014 Forstner Bit Set, 14-Piece bits at Amazon.  They are not general purpose drills, only for doweling and – in this case – rebar holes.. 

The reason you might want to pick up a set is that they work extremely well for any project that has round rod, doweling, or rebar in it.  If there’s one drawback, though, it’s that they are not set with really long shafts.  So drilling all the way though a 4X4 (3/12” roughly) will involve double-marking, turning the work piece and so forth. 

Which is why we didn’t through drill the base.

With the two masts of 5/8” rebar, all that was left was to find some more shop scrap – two pieces of 2X4. trim off the ends and round well on the belt sander, then drill two more holes about 2 /1” deep and slip these over the top of the rebar.  Now we have something we could screw and glue  a 2X2 “display bar to.

In  use, the top bar will have tissue paper on it to really show off the handiwork.  The 2X4s look pretty nice, and Panama highlighted them with a coat of “Safety Yellow” spray paint.

The whole process, including the drying time for the vertical rebar (painted with some black wrinkle-finish) took about 90-minutes from start to finish.

And that’s why fall in a workshop is so much fun:  You can walk into the shop with a problem and be having coffee two hours later with the glowing sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing a problem magically appear in the physical world as a “solved” whatchamacallit.

I’ve read a lot on how the Magus, Magik, Magi, or Alchemists worked.

They have a very interesting notion about how the “creation” process works.  To them, there were “veils” in the mind.  And what workshop dwellers are doing when they “work from the head and heart” (not from a set of plans – boring rote stuff like that ) is they “birth” the stuff that humans do on their way to be junior parts of a larger Creator.

It’s the ring-not-pass parts that are particularly instructive.

You begin with a problem and as you think about it, an ember of an idea comes into your head.  You gently blow on the idea, twisting it around this way and that, and next thing you know it bursts into the flame of a “hot idea.”  End of ring-not-pass or Veil #1.

The next step is to stand back (mentally) from your idea and see what it looks like.  This is the putting tinder on it.  More and more detail is added to the mental picture.  Ring-not-pass or Veil 2.  You can’t build the sketch.  You need the clarified vision.

Now we get along to the material selection and cutting.  It’s not to difficult:  You simple look closely at your detailed image in the mind and translate it into dimensions that you can cut and materials you have on hand.  Veil #3.

Once step 3 (translation into measurements) is done, Step 4 is the actual cutting of material to the right size.  As Panama and I were tossing the idea around (steps 1 and 2) we got agreement on what the general look of the thing should be.  Rebar is strong stuff, but it comes in 20-foot lengths and that would have been absurdly high and the small base wouldn’t have held it up.  So the dimensioning in step 3 is important.  We agreed the right height would be about 70-inches.

Step 5 was the “test and assemble” stage.  The rebar went into the bases, the 2X4s were slipped over the tops, and a couple of quick clamps pretended to hold the top bar in place.  This wasn’t particularly difficult, just takes a bit of time going from step 3 (dimensioning) through step 4 (cut and prep) to set up for the real Veil of interest…Step 5.

Feedback comes along as Step 6.  This is where the Magician tweaks the Great Work this way or that.  Panama had the machinery yellow safety paint on his version – I’d missed that in my visioning.

Last, but not least, once the tweaks are done, you get to the final step in the Magic Process:  Beholding.  This is the delicious moment when you sit back, look at what you’ve built and enjoy the “use case” (to borrow a software term).

To recap:  The “Magic of Creation” is what?

  1. Loving the problem and seeing it as a Junior “Creator in Training” moment.
  2. Envisioning the Perfected Solution
  3. Translation into measurements
  4. Cutting the cloth or material
  5. Test assembly
  6. Tweaks to it’s really the Perfect Solution
  7. Beholding and enjoying the work.

A while back, I told you we were going to turn what was a simple tin-roof covered porch into a sunroom using left over materials from our house remodeling.

It came out nice enough; The space is 8-feet square, but it there’s something about having a front porch protected from rain, wind, snow, heat, cold, and bugs that’s very comforting. 

Toss in a couple of old director chairs, carpet, and Elaine’s decorative painting and now you have something that’s really nice and eclectic and functional.

And cheap.  Our total cost for the room was a new glass storm door ($139), 5-sheets of sheetrock, and the flooring.  Maybe another $150.

Now, on weekend mornings, we sit out there, have coffee, read, and watch the deer wander by.  Eventually, we’d like to get chairs that recline, so we can drift from coffee to book to snooze, but one thing at a time.

The most important part of this morning’s note, though, really comes down to this:  Average people – when the weekend shows up – sit around and do “average things.”  Keeps them nice and…well….average!

On the other hand, following the well-defined steps of “magic” one can seize on any part of their environment and begin to mold parts of it to become expressions of their own unlimited creative power.

There may be a Creator out there who organizes things like yesterday’s eclipse.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t each be Junior Creators in Training.  No matter where you are, there’s plenty of raw material for it…even if it’s something as subtle as rearranging the furniture.

It’s also a nice way of looking at people.  Since you can pretty much judge people by their fruits you can get an idea of class standings by looking around you.  Money isn’t everything…it’s just one kind of “creating” and not a particularly honest one at that. More like “”trying to “buy a grade” in school, oftentimes.

But people who make money and create? Tons to be learned from the study of them. 

I could wax on about this endlessly, but my bottom line is what?

Weekends are Magic.

Sunday Special

I just haven’t had time yet to distill down all the comments on the “Reproduction of the Gods?” piece, so I will try and get a special report on that up early Sunday morning in time for coffee.

Don’t get used to me doing this, but the topic seems to be of broad interest – and since the emerging global mass consciousness seems to be “awaring” itself on the ‘net,  it’s brain-fueling to  consider some of the possibilities…. so maybe Sunday morning.

A Web Insight into People’s Behavior

Thursday I mentioned that the two most recent posts from UrbanSurvival now show up on our home page – so people don’t have to click as much.  I attributed that to people’s inherent laziness.  But reader Drew explains that it isn’t laziness as I had presupposed:

George –

I quit reading when you went to the click format, happened to stop by today and was pleasantly surprised to find the old format back.

For me it was not a matter of not wanting to click, it’s because it doesn’t flow well with all the clicking back and forth. When I read it in the one page format, it just flows on as I read down, but when I start clicking I’m more likely to get distracted and go to another page and maybe come back to what I clicked, or maybe not. The clicking disrupts the train of thought.

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OMG: What if the Weather Stopped?

[Reader Note: We have decided to put the whole daily report on a single page in our efforts to more effectively recycle electrons.  Details in the “Coping” section.  Comments on this reorganized presentation are welcome…We now continue on to Bowling with Reality…]

No, this is not a joke.

The WaPo has an interesting story about how satellite data issues are causing some problems with forecast quality for the NOAA Weather folks.

The good news is that the data is starting to come back online:

NCEP IS NOW RECEIVING THE FOLLOWING NESDIS SATELLITE DATA FOR 00Z MODEL INGEST.. NPP – CRiS AND ATMS DATA GOES SATELLITE DERIVED WINDS GOES RADIANCES GOES SOUNDING PRODUCTS THE FOLLOWING DATA TYPES CONTINUE TO BE UNAVAILABLE FOR THE MODELS.. MODIS IR AND WV WINDS OMI OZONE DATA AIRS HYPERSPECTRAL SOUNDER DATA COSMIC GPS-RADIO OCCULTATION DATA NESDIS CONTINUES TO WORK ON RESTORING ALL THEIR SATELLITE DATA PRODUCTS..

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