Candle at both ends. So a blissfully short column today. For both of us.
(Tacoma, WA) Say, here’s a scary one to ponder: Mega quake coming’?
George,
This morning I was awaken by a loud, deep, rumble that I initially thought was thunder, but as it persisted and stayed a consistent rumble to the point that the windows started rattling I realized it was not thunder. I then began to wonder what else could it be? A low flying jet was a possibility but I could not see anything in the sky. An earthquake?
(Tacoma, WA) Over on this side of “fly-over “ country, we are drowning in decaf trying to figure out whether the market drop of 178 Wednesday was the financial equivalent of a head cold, or whether it’s the cancer (or made up money) come like a Banshee to get us.
On the head cold side of things, we can almost make out the ebb and flow of Greece in the background.
As of this morning, the Dow as set to regain 71 of that.
Part of what’s going on is the mess in Greece. Right now there are talks going on trying to avoid a collapse.
As we’re talked about before, though, stiffing the internationalists is not a bad thing. Iceland is still a great country…and all the greater for having kicked at least some of the banker spew out of their country.
We should have such IQs and gumption. So should the Greeks, but maybe Angels Merkel will play Santa Klaus.
More than anything, yesterday smacked of currency moving and and bond whiners.
It’s fairytale time over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics…
Personal income increased $79.0 billion, or 0.5 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $65.5 billion, or 0.5 percent, in May, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $105.9 billion, or 0.9 percent.
(Tacoma, WA) I have not been able to sleep much on this trip. Reason being that we are in an unfamiliar time zone. The publishing time for UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics is the ungodly hour of 6 AM this far west.
I like to keep the time the same, because so many readers are on the East Coast. Nevertheless, it brings me to one of my favorite rant points: Why do we insist on fooling ourselves with time zones?
Every few years, the debate over Daylight Time makes the rounds, too. But again, we are so stupid and so gullible, that we believe assigning a different number will somehow influence the Sun to operate differently. It doesn’t.
Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) is how militaries operate. That’s because it makes sense, and it’s one of the few things the military has gotten right.
If we were going to do time “right” there are only two solutions. The simple (UTC) and the technologically precise.
On this last, I would suggest TLT, or true local time.
As a recovering sailor, I know how important it is to understand the Local Hour Angle (LHA) when working out the local problems with a sextant and H.O. 249 sight reduction tables.
The local hour angle is unique for every place on earth at a particular moment of sidereal time, which is to say, for a position of the Sun relative to the Earth.
Think of it like lining up a DirecTV dish. The Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are neatly positioned relative to degrees east or west of the UTC line through Greenwich. Which makes sense when you point a dish into the sky looking for, oh, Galaxy 3 at 97-degrees west.
All terribly consistent, don’t you see?
True Local Time has not been adopted yet, but since humankind is overcome with reductionism disease, and we fool ourselves into believing a lot of idiocy, I figure it’s only a matter of time (sorry) until someone builds the cell/GPS enabled True Local Time app.
The way this would work is pretty simple: Anywhere you are on earth at 6:20 AM TLT (true local time) the Sun would be in the same place in the sky.
As things are now, the local arrival of Sunrise (or Sunset) is call over the place. The way I figure, the sun should always crack the horizon at 6:30 AM, so twice a year with true local time, you’d see the Sun’s upper limb (top of the sphere) peek out at 6:30:000.000 AM TLT.
It’s hard enough to optimize human behavior and things like our circadian rhythms that attempt to keep us all sane.
But here lately, wherever I look, the propensity of people to “do stupid” seems almost overwhelming.
Logically, there are only two ways to “do” time. A correct local hour angle (sun at the same place in the sky for everyone at a given time (time being in true local time) or a completely externalized reference like UTC.
This isn’t the only area where human delusion shows through.
Another example is in how state (and other political) boundaries are built. They don’t take population into account correctly. And, just like the mish-mash of time zones, the mish-mash of political power based on population is another area of high delusion.
Let’s take California, for example.
When the lines were drawn on maps, there was no one there. But now? No only are there too many people (and did I mention not enough water) but they wield too much political power.
When the state had 5-million, or so, back in the dawn of time, there was something approaching political parity. Now? California has outsized everything. Politically speaking, Arizona is a dwarf star in comparison.
Let me show you how political boundaries should be drawn, and I will use California, as an example.
When there were these 5-million people in the whole state, it would have “original” boundaries.
But as the population grew, the borders of Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon would be expanded. This would be done to equalize population between the states. It would “level the playing field” for all kinds of problems, including return to the states of a portion of Federal income tax.
Right now, when funds are divided up, we first have to do advanced mathematics in order to figure out who should get how much in the way of Free Lunch.
Under Ure’s State Flex Lines, all states would be created equal, at least in terms of human capital.
You see what has happened along the Mexico border?
If we were using Flex Boundaries, as the number of people in San Diego went UP, the borders around the city (city limits) would compress in. So that Rancho Mirage, or wherever, would still have the same population power.
What we have seen happen so often is that city empire builders gobble up land as fast as they can because the more people they can shove under their political wing, the more workers and income (empire) they can accrue.
In terms of Congressional districts, picture a system where the power of both rural and urban would be equalized better: When city pop went up, the districts would shrink effectively, so that the balance between common sense rural folks and runaway lunatics in big cities would be more balanced.
As is, we see that cities, congressional districts, and states run over policy land mines all the time because they are not held in check by flexible borders.
Hence, in terms of national political influence, the State of California would be expected to (at some level) support illegal immigration because it supports more money from the central government and justifies more power.
On the other hand, under my plan, the boundary with Arizona, over the years, would have moved from west of Phoenix, first down to Thermal and Palm Springs. And then as illegals poured in and so forth, we should how have the Arizona border just east of Alhambra and Pasadena-Glendale.
What would happen is that Arizona’s influence would have kept pace.
What’s more, it would be a marvelous make-work to put people to work. For example, thousands of people would be employed with the biannual adjustment to signs. City Limits and state naming signs would all have to be changed.
On the other hand, the populations would always be similar. Population of Arizona might swell to 40-million (or whatever) but the size of California would shrink.
States that have small political influence now, like New Mexico, would expand dramatically, and it would make more sense economically, since the calculations on dividing up budget spoils would be totally simplified.
Give each state 1/50th of the pie and that’s that. And then (in the interest of stability) hand out government projects (like defense) on the same basis.
This may seem like a hollow whine, but without a radical rethink, California will quickly become a bi-lingual state (not that it isn’t already) and the tearing down of American by ending our common language will be well underway.
Just as political divisions should be drawn on maps so that populations are equal, at a country level, they should be drawn based on language. Under this common sense approach, San Diego and San Antonio would have already been ceded to Mexico.
And then there’s the matter of how Russia’s move in the Crimea was somewhat harmonized with the languages spoken in Ukraine.
I suppose we shouldn’t get too worked up over the ill results that are happening. But as I see it, after not enough local hour angle of sleep, many of our root problems as a country c an be traced back to making poor compromises of a political nature.
Absent some “hard line thinking” compromise just means too many cooks are ruining the stew.
One nation, divisible by language, divided by time zones, and victims of “flex money” can’t have a happy outcome.
As Ure sees it, the Constitution didn’t say we would teach ESL to whoever showed up. Short-term programs to transition into Engrish? Fine with me. We are an inclusive country. But language frames how we think (or don’t).
We’ll soon have Yemeni as a Second Language. The runaway do-gooders are determined to blow up the population of the US before they blow up the population of the US, if that makes any sense. Along the way, look for terrible “brand confusion” to totally eff with your mind as everyone knew that previously YSL was Yves St. Laurent but soon come: Yemeni as a Second Language.
Pending massive Syria Immigration will screw up IT Departments since they thing SSL means one thing, but it will soon be Syrian as a Second Language (SSL).
I’m not particularly sympathetic to global refugees, I suppose. When global humanitarian efforts take place on a grand scale, what they really do is encourage future despots to “go for it” and it’s like do-overs for bad children. They stop the whining now, but you end up with implacable spoiled brats.
And that’s how the world is looking…
It is, according to my clock, later than we think. Unless we stand up for a little Ameri-Glue, we’re hosed. And three key ingredients of the glue to rebind us are a single time zone, equalization of political entity size to reduce intergovernmental empiring, and, oh yeah, a common language.
Hard stuff, this logical hard-headed thinking. But when we’re over-run with people who hate us, and who will crumple America as the melting pot, creating an incomprehensible potpourri of everything from languages to their own forms of law, to remembers this chat: When we could still save the “glue that binds us”.
(Tacoma, WA) After spending much of the past five days in a slightly depressurized space, with not much to do but spot the odd airplane here and there, and remembering to breath deeply at 8,500 feet, things just sort of started falling into place. The future.
So this morning some reflections of a possible future – and one that has at least some circumstantial support.
But, before we get into this, we’ll have our usual dose of mid-week headlines and an update on our Trading Model, which continues to astound readers with its incredible accuracy predicting the market.
From 8,500 feet,. just turning southwest over Stampede Pass (south of Snoqualmie Summit) east of Seattle. Touched down a few minutes before 11 AM. Beer and sandwiches were administered and we revived.
This first one of the North Cascades on the right (Mt.
(Spokane, WA) Hardly robust would be a nice way of “narrating” the latest Durable Goods report out this morning:
New Orders
New orders for manufactured durable goods in May
decreased $4.1 billion or 1.8 percent to $228.9 billion,
the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This
decrease, down three of the last four months, followed a
1.5 percent April decrease.
The weather was absolutely amazing. In fact, it was really spectacular flying over places like Wallace, ID and looking down at a picturesque town on a summer morning. Nestled mostly south of Interstate 90 and in a set of deep valleys, because that’s about all there is west of the Mullan Pass, ID navigation beacon.
(Missoula, MT) In long wave economics, the idea is that there not only are certain periods of finance that tend to report, but that these are driven by social mood.
So in some ways, American can be seen (socially) as back in the 1950s.
Here’s how:
We know that with the failure of the Greek Tragedy to cause a full on market rout, the market was set earlier this morning to rally at the open. Reason?
Well, to paraphrase a line from this column last week, doggone world didn’t end.
But the hype which has rolled out now is that the Greek situation could drive that country into the arms of socialists..
The problem is that the last time this happened was back in the middle 1950s. The Greeks were having a love affair with Russian economics and socialists had made their way into government, key labor unions and more.
Go look up the “International Socialist Tendency” in Wikipedia:
Through the 1950s the SRG had a loose relationship with the US Independent Socialist League (ISL) led by Max Shachtman until it dissolved in 1958. It then retained links with comrades coming out of that group and with other individuals in the international Trotskyist movement. But there was no significant growth in support for its ideas until the late 1960s.
As mentioned last week, Elaine and I are off on another one of our not-perfectly-planned adventures to the Pacific Northwest. This morning’s report is somewhat abbreviated due to the travels which got underway early Friday “scud-running” from East Texas up to Ardmore, OK, and through some of the leftovers of tropical news item Bill. That ride was hot, bumpy, and the main highlight of it was the Book Hill Casino.
This morning the Focus section on the bubble that will kill us all, and the charts. Sunday morning (once we get up to Gillette, WY this afternoon) I will update the news and comment part of this weekend’s report. More for Subscribers ||| SUBSCRIBE NOW!
My brother-in-law who holds down the fort when we travel, can hardly wait for us to leave. As Ures truly predicted, the Fed did not raise rates and got the lingo just right, so the Dow flipped up 180 points Thursday and will hang on to that gain today. Amazingly, both our Peoplenomics™ Trading Model, and our Replay of 1921 to 1929 blow-off top scenario is still holding together.
Unusually short columns today and Monday because Elaine and I will be going down to the old Beechcrate in a few minutes and loading ‘er up for a treck to the northlands.
Our route of flight this morning will take us from Palestine, Texas, up over Athens, TX, then on to Ardmore, OK. From there it will be Dodge City, direct.
Dodge City is an interesting stop because it has the Boot Hill Casino and there’s also a pretty interesting museum and shopping district. Good steaks are available at several places.
Saturday morning’s Peoplenomics report will be posted extremely early (like 5 AM) tomorrow so we can “get outta Dodge” and be on our way up to Gillette, Wyoming. (Do I know how to show a girl the hot spots, or what?)
We had planned to fly into Sheridan, Wyoming, but come to find out there’s a Toby Keith (and maybe Keith Urban band) show in there tomorrow night and there’s not a hotel room to be had within 50-miles. So that’s why Gillette.
Sunday morning, depending on weather, we will leave Gillette and mosey over to Billings, then follow I-90 up to Livingston, past one of my favorite airspace markers (ZUBLI) and then down into Bozeman.
Here, a decision will be made of fuel. Depending on fuel we will either stop or keep going on up (and around the corner to the left) into Missoula. No hotel reservations there, yet. Depends on how the weather and winds are playing.
With live weather in the plane (ADS-B in) it’s very much like playing a video game, except no do-overs.
After that, about the time you’re reading Monday morning’s column, we will skedaddle up to Mullan Pass, Idaho, and from there’s it’s all down hill to Spokane.
Tuesday morning, around 9 AM , or shortly thereafter, we will go wheels up out of Spokane and into Gig Harbor, the Tacoma Narrows airport where we have friends and Tacoma where we have kids and a grandchild to visit.
The return in a couple of weeks will be back more or less the same route, but only as far as Missoula. From there, no telling.
We plan to hop up to Edmonton to visit Grady of the www.nostracodeus.com project as well as pop in on my older sister. Elaine’s never seen West Edmonton Mall, either, so we will sample that.
Besides the obvious business/technology angle with Grady and the family chit-chat, there’s a theme hotel in Edmonton.
The www.fantasylandhotel.com site makes it look pretty cool (although not particularly fast loading). It’s spendy, but since our whole house is a kind of fantasy land kind of place (each room is sort of like a movie set), this may (or may not) be worth checking out. Spendy, but this is Canada, after all.
Crossing the border will be an experience, too. No idea what to expect, except that I’ve studied up one side and down the other of how to file flight plans in and out and how to deal with the eAPIS passenger manifest deal.
Getting charts for Canada is a whole other dissertation: they don’t have conveniently updated vector charts like we pump wirelessly into the hi-ef GPS on the American side of the line. Paper charts and a chart for air traffic control services…Canadian paper charts are $19-bucks a throw so we only ordered the three we need.
A fellow flyer/reader recommended Miles City on the way south for a great turn of the century hotel and steak hanging over the edge of the plate. So I’m curious to find out if that’s either big cow or small plate.
Spendy? Not really – this is one of our big outings of the year.
Still, it’s a few cents cheaper than a motor home.
Admittedly, sleeping in an airplane is no joy, if it comes to that. Elaine would never stand for that. But the other side is the mileage is 3-4 times better than a pusher. And the travel time is less than half what a car is. No speed traps. Just weather traps, but you build in a weather day into most long trips.
Or week, as happened to us during the Monsoon Summer in the northeast a couple of years back. We looked like a couple of drown rats walking through Macy’s. That much rain up there.
If the airplane so much as sputters on run-up this morning, I don’t have any qualms about shoving everything back in the car and going that way. It’s marginally cheaper, but the butt time is a killer. 16 hours of flying or 44-hours of sitting….it’s not a hard choice for us.
There’s always a backup plan. Over at www.flightaware.com you can follow N7912L to see our progress (or lack of it).
We will go out “heavy” this morning. Before every flight, we do something called a “weight and balance” because the airplane has to be loaded, just so.
When we get up into the high country, we will ease back to something like 40-gallons of fuel per leg and we will be planning morning takeoffs because the plane has more lift when it’s cold out.
The pilot and passenger weights are on the scale this morning, loaded down. For me, that means heavy street shoes, a flight bag, GPS, camera, GoPro (for our documentary on all this), binoculars, and a sandwich. Elaine’s weight is her, clothed, and a purse that weighs 8 pounds.
The clothing part is only 32 pounds including the two lightweight rollarounds. The computer and oxygen rig add 35 pounds, but we don’t technically need the O2 until 12,500 feet and we will be well under that. Still, a couple of hits of O2 when coming down into a crowded airspace (Seattle, for instance) does clear out some of the mental cobwebs.
Slower rate of climb or mental acuity. Pick one.
Preflight aspirin, no DVT, thanks.
Compared to an RV, the airplane is tiny, but faster. There are no speed limits, except under 250 knots below 10,000 feet. The only was the ‘Crate will see 250 knots would be straight down and I don’t plan to have that happen.
Unlike RV parks, there’s no overnight charge at most airports. The fuel bill is punishing enough. Most of the trip the fuel will be around $4.50-$5.50 per gallon. And despite adventure/romance in the books about a sleeping bag, under the wing, looking up at the stars? Poppycock. Elaine wants a hotel and I prefer something with a restaurant attached. With bar is better. Slots? I’ve landed in heaven.
I saw an ad on teevee t’other day for a new diesel pusher RV for “just” $189,000. We have probably $35k, including the upgrades and maybe another $10K of super maintenance updates to the old airplane. And they hold their value OK, at least until the economy stalls.
We figure to sell it next year, but looking back on all the adventures (transcontinental wanderings) I have to say it really has been worth it. Meandering south along the backside of the southern Cascades to Mt.