Year: 2015

(Las Vegas, NV)  The big story this morning will be how global markets react – or don’t – to the outrage in Paris late Friday.

As you can read in the reports out this morning, the French have conducted 150-some raids and have arrested a large number of people.  And it all seems to have calmed markets a bit – with the French market about even, so far.

We do notice a few domestic oddities,  like the break-in this weekend at an Army Reserve training facility in Massachusetts.  No inventory details on what was taken but oh, my, how quickly terrorism is downplayed.  Logically, there’s no way to know that, but for the press?  They gobbled it up.

The U.S. market futures are up fractionally, so if some terrorism funding group was trying to make a killing (financially) on the killing (literal), it may not work out.

At the big picture level, we may be in a decline to lower levels to come this year, but there are times when an emotional releasing event – like Paris – can be a very interesting item to consider as we weigh what is ahead for markets.

In the large picture, we have been completing three waves up since the market lows in 2009.  From there, leg one of the rally was from 2009 to late 2011, which we can label (1).  Then we had a decline which would be the (2).  Then a hell of a run to the top of (3) until a few months back.  then we declined in a series of movements that still holds as a I, ii, iii, iv, of the larger (4) and we are likely somewhere around (5) with a I done with this possibly being a ii. 

We would expect a iii to follow, then a bounce, and lastly,. a final decline that should still get us down to the 1,860 (or so) level on the S&P.

But it will be hard to call precisely because we see so many cross-currents to this market.  The best we can do is look at the numbers as they come in a process that is very much like golf.

You go out, hit a ball (analog:  make an investment) and then swing (some time) at it.

If it lands on the fairway, it’s equivalent to beating inflation by a bit and if it lands “in the rough” then it seems you may have lost a little money.

It has little to do with the meaning of life, which is largely egoic and ambition-driven once you’ve got enough to eat and a place to call your own.

Meanwhile:  The Idiots Continue

Reports that the G20 promise to do more intelligence-sharing but that they are still not changing positions on Syria (hence refugees) is taken around here as evidence they may not be as much brains as people in the world.

At the seasonal/mind tripping margin, we have noted the G20 is in Turkey – which means an early Turkey dinner.  Yet another subtle timing matter, yet subliminally important.

Political Spillover Runneth Over

To begin with, governors of two states have decided to stand up to the Obama administration which is trying to stack Syrian refugees into the United States.  Then there is the presidential side of things…

Donald Trump approval is up to 42% – and he notes that France is very, very anti-gun and gee, don’t you suppose a few armed citizens might have reduced the body count?

Then there’s Ted Cruz who makes the point that you-know-who in the White House doesn’t seem particularly driven to defend America.

With Marco Rubio waffling on immigration policy, the GOP (lobbyist bottoms) are lining up to pimp Rubio. 

I’m thinking that we could rename the White House the Waffle House, but the brand is taken…

Meantime, on the other side of the aisle, the political money bag was non-responsive to the question “ Was Isis under-estimated?”

Let me see here:  Clinton can’t take responsibility for Benghazi, email server crimes (which the FBI is still working as an active case) and now, can’t take responsibility for a lot of the serial policy screw-ups (and mis-assessments)  that have unraveled that part of the world.

I’m doing my damnedest to look surprised, but failing miserably.

Teeing Up the Week

We have the Empire State Manufacturing Report from the NY Federal Reserve.

The November 2015 Empire State Manufacturing Survey indicates that business activity declined for a fourth consecutive month for New York manufacturers.

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(Las Vegas, NV)  While you were working on useful things in life this weekend, Elaine and I were driving out to Las Vegas where my youngest daughter is tying the knot later this morning.

I was going to suggest an early ceremony (so I could be done for the day) but since my column will be wrapped up by 6 AM no one else seemed to be interested in a 7 AM knot tying. So much for kids and respect.

On the way out, we have had three nice things happen to us.

First was a Saturday stop at an Indian casino west of Grants, NM.  We were driving along, happily minding out own business while snooze-control held us at one mile-per-hour under five-over, when suddenly nature called to Elaine.

Since a casino was at the next exit, that was a simple-enough decision.

While Elaine was doing [whatever] Ures truly stuck a $10-bill in a penny slot and on his third spin run $10 up to $20.

Being no fool (having trained myself on money management which is the most important part of slot play) I quickly cashed out and ran to the teller cage and still got back to meet Elaine who looked…uh….relieved to see me.

This was going to be a great trip.

Second story:  Sunday,  at the MGM,  we decided to live thrifty and do the buffet for lunch.  After an all-you-can-eat (and drink)  (two glasses of bubbly) I was $60-bucks lighter…but we wouldn’t need to eat for several weeks, if you know what I mean.

As we came out of the casino, Elaine came to an unexpected stop.

“That one,” she said, pointing to a one-armed bandit.

In went a $20-bill and in ONE pull (I kid you not) I hit for $65…and as soon as the total $85.00 was displayed, I was hitting “Collect.”

Third story:  After dinner with the kids last night, I took the winnings and went for a walk – following behind Elaine who (it turns out) was experiencing a rising awareness of “hot machine awareness” which was incredible.

About 20-minutes of play later, we were up to a family fortune of $130 and change.

The key thing about slots (and options, too, but that would be a much longer column) is that you need to be able to recognize when you get to the top of a two-standard deviation trend channel.

If you can do that – and back it up with the discipline to actually collect your winnings and walk out of the casino – then you will have a bright future as a gambler.

It won’t let you quit your day job, but it will mean you’ll be able to afford a cup of coffee now and then, which gets me to the second lesson in money management of the day…

Travel Notes –Las Vegas/  A Tale of Two Casinos

I would like to do a quick little comparison between the two hotel-casinos that we have stayed at the past couple of nights.

In the one corner, we have the www.twinarrows.com casino which is about 25-miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona.

The other is the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, on the strip and in the middle of all the action.

The rooms are nearly comparable.  Although in fairness, the MGM room is a little bigger and has one additional chair.  But the Twin Arrows casino had a work table in addition to a computer spot.  They also had a night/closet light that would go on while toddling to the sitting room, if you know what I mean.  Not destroying the night vision, but enough light to keep a person from walking into a wall.

As for machines, yes, they have slightly different machines and the MGM has many more dining choices – it’s a bigger place.

The MGM has a bathtub with a shower curtain.  The Twin Arrows casino offers a large tile shower with glass walls.

The Twin Arrows casino was completed in 2013 at a cost of $225-million and has about 267,000 square feet of space, overall.

All of which makes it a tiny spot, compared to the MGM which, according to Wikipedia:

“ [is…] owned and operated by MGM Resorts International, the 30-floor main building is 293 ft (89 m) high.

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(Amarillo, TX)  This morning we do a little forensic accounting as we look forward to the Monday opening of global markets to see what effect the killing of nearly 120 people by crazed Muslim extremists in France will do to global markets.  A sizeable decline is possible to likely.

You see, the paradigm of the national security state is that such things can be prevented – if we just give up enough of our freedoms.  Hence, we’ve gone along with the airport pat-downs and such.

But Europe?  Their immigration policies have been even more stupid and inane than those being followed by the Obama administration which is seeking to admit even more people – many single military aged males – into these United States in coming months.

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Here I am, swilling enough coffee to fill a swimming pool, and the best I could get out of my blood pressure this morning was 131/87 pulse 76.  Let’s fix that, shall we?

The way we will start is to look at the Retail Sales debacle.  Up one tenth of one percent while the money supply has been going up many times that paltry about…so it LOOKS like retail is up.  It’s not.  UNITS are down (Peoplenomics readers know this because we actually do count container arrivals)  Ain’t really up…just takes more paper to get what you need…. 

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for October, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $447.3 billion, an increase of 0.1 percent (±0.5%)* from the previous month, and 1.7 percent (±0.7%) above October 2014.

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I’m sure that more than a few people would like to know how the launch of my new novel has gone… It will give you some insight into what goes on – the nitty-gritty of book writing. 

Lots of people harbor the dream of writing a good adventure novel, but few get around to it.  There is also a saying (though I can’t cite the source at this hour) which says everyone who has lived a worthwhile life has a good story or two inside them.

It’s generally thought to be a function of how many places you’ve been, what you’ve seen and done in life, and how well you can blend it into “scenes from a movie” and then capture that to paper.

That’s also why I am skeptical of reading young authors.  Real experiences is what makes a person interesting.

The book, by the way, which is titled “DreamOver” may be found on Amazon over here.

First, the price of the book is $3.99. 

Let’s talk about pricing, since I brought it up.  The Amazon Kindle self-publishing route is a good business model.  Authors can get up to 70% of whatever the sales price of a book happens to be.

But, the author doesn’t really make that.

First day sales of the book came to 104 units.

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It has been around here as a background topic for years. 

We’ve seen the de-emphasis of cash in Scandinavian countries.  There, almost everything is on plastic.

Elaine and I depart tomorrow morning at Oh-God-Thirty for our trip to marry off my youngest daughter and you know much of a role cash plays in trip planning these day?  Almost – but not quite – none.

The only places where I plan to use cash are down to tipping and casino use.

Tipping because there is no other way to pay the people who get things done (try putting a valet tip on plastic…which I will – we like that kind of research).  Casino use of cash is also a no-brainer.  My whole “stake” is $100 and that begins each day of play – when it’s gone, that’s time to leave the casino.

It’s going to get a lot worse.

Over here, in this article, Apple’s Tim Cook is predicting a generation that won’t know what cash is.

Cash has been slowly getting hammered.  Since it is stock and trade in the drug world, police have been making assumptions that have led to a lot of innocent people having their cash seized under civil asset forfeiture laws, which are an abomination and affront to Constitutional law.

Now, looks like the Apple folks are upping their game in the cash-replacement world.

It seems to us that government may have “dirty hands” or “sticky fingers” in all this.  Rather than be a country where a presumption of innocence was a foundational cornerstone of law, we have quickly moved into a world of presumed guilt.  Unless you have money, in which case, there’s always court shopping…

Who am I to question a bright fellow like Tim Cook, right?  So I did some research on how much coin in being produced by the U.S. mint:

If Cook is right about disappearing cash, we should see much smaller numbers if we pull the data from 10-years ago, right?

Turns out, in the easy data retrieval we can only get as far as 2011 data:

Hmmm…lots and lots more coin is around…

It may seem a bit quirky of us, but things like the U.S. Mint Annual Report (here) make for interesting reading.  There, for example you can look at longer timeframes for  coin production, but if you’re not careful, your thinking can be skewed.

In other words it may look in this chart like there is a lot of “noise” to coin production, but in reality – because so much of the Mint’s output is numismatic (collectable) coins – the demand varies a lot with disposable income.    Notice how the chart above looks for 2008-2009 when we were making a good attempt at economic collapse.

The actual “cash” used involves a lot of paper, but that comes from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, not the Mint.  And it’s NOT U.S.

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Finally!

It’s done.

$3.99 on Amazon.

DreamOver: An Action-Adventure on the Frontiers of Reality

Here’s the plot summary:

“Commander David Shannon is an electronics whiz aboard a black-ops submarine that has just finished testing under south Puget Sound. Waking from a dream, he realizes that some kind of “presence” was with him in his dreams.

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REMINDER:  Banks are closed today, markets are open.  Futures are near neutral and we expect a slow day.

This may sound like a trivial sort of thing to be talking about, but the problem is – trust me on this – far from trivial.

We all know robots are coming.  They will be here any minute to about 20-years from now for most everything humans do.  Already there are sex machines and sex robots so it stands to reason that most other human functions will be replaced, too.

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It has not been particularly difficult to figure that the economy doesn’t have much of anywhere to go.

The market fell 200 points for a while yesterday, although it wasn’t that bad by the close.  So for that reason, if nothing else, we expect to see a further dump in today’s action.

From a longwave perspective, this is till a Tuesday morning in 1928 and the Fed is still caught between a rock and a hard place.  Consequently, a one year view of the bond market (10-year note) is less than encouraging.

I suppose one could look at the first two blips in the bond chart and argue that we are going to the 2.6% area on the 10-year.  But I sense some resistance around 2.441% and honestly, that would be a dandy place for things to turn back down again.

You know, a lot of information is contained in how market’s move – its just people would rather ask their friends instead of learning to make reasonable projections on their own.

Laziness will cost you.  Just remember, the financial markets are not there to may you rich. That’s one of the big lies.  They are really there to make the rich richer and the poor…well, that’d be you.

Meaningless Data?  Deflation on the Waterfront!

No:  Absolutely not.  Because this gets to the heart of price deflation which I have been going on about (*almost) endlessly.

Import and export prices are hot off a press release – key point is in yellow:

“U.S. import prices declined 0.5 percent in October, after falling 0.6 percent the previous month, the U.S.

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At last!  There are some benefits to getting old.

Not that 66.8 is old…but it’s not in the ‘spring chicken range’ either.

Still, when it comes to travel, a lifetime of mistakes and paying full-price for travel eventually pays off.  You get old, you get discounts.  Having made every travel mistake in the book, getting things right eventually becomes automatic.

This morning, I thought we could run  through some of the “head work” that goes into a decent cross-country trip.

Planning for the trip usually begins a month ahead of time – as soon as the date of the trip becomes firm and (to put it in military terms) the “mission becomes clear.”

In this case, the “mission” is my youngest daughter’s wedding in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand a week from yesterday.

This is really the only “fixed point” in the trip.  Everything else is gravy.  Which means we can then “run numbers” to see if we a) fly commercial, b) fly our own plane, or c) drive it in the old Lexumobile.

This is where we “Blue Sky” the trip. It’s when we wonder “Since we will be in Las Vegas, what ELSE might we knock off on this trip?”

There are lots of options:  I’d like to pick up a Teppan-style Benihana-like meal in Amarillo, so that goes on the list.

There are a couple of casinos I would like to do a little gambling at.  One is Twin Arrows up east of Flagstaff, AZ and on the return trip, there is one south of Albuquerque, NM where we haven’t stayed, either.

As you may know from past columns, we both like casinos when traveling.  The reason?  Well, not to offend Hilton, or any of the other Big Chains, they just don’t hold a visual candle to the activity in a moderately-sized casino/hotel.  For one, there’s a choice of food. A good quiet upscale place, a buffet joint, and a burger bar…so a wide range of choices there.  Plus usually a good watering hole can be found.  Probably because it helps people forget the laws of statistics which argue there shouldn’t even BE such places as Casinos.  Then let’s not forget that people talk to other people in casinos – around the bars, around the machines, at the blackjack table, and so on.

Remember, I probably  “get off the ranch” fewer than a two dozen times a year.

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Dow futures down.  Oil is Up….the Deflation Wobble-Boogie is on again.  It should be a song, really.

To accompany the dance (as in “song and…”) from the Fed on this whole business of whether to raise rates – and when – are a host of conflicted economic indicators.  10-year note creeping up, gold going down last week.  Copper sliding…ocean shipping sliding…all which employment goes up?  Vapes and ViseGrips for all hands!

The problem is, this week is unlikely (at least today) to see much clarification of matters.

Honestly, no one – including the Fed knows what to do – and as a result, a “lost in the wilderness” way of thinking has set in.   But we are far from “lost” around here.  We know that so far – since 2009 – the stock market has been doing a Jim Dandy replay of the lead-in to the last Depression.

As you can see here, we should have at least a year to run before the crap really begins to hit the fan so we still have time to prepare.  Our airplane is going on the market,. and I expect it will sell by April or May of next year.  That’s because there is a finite number of people who are ready to spend $25,000 on an airplane.  Not everyone is capable to learning to operate in three-dimensions and frankly, there are a lot of two-dimensional people who really should stay on the ground.

No doubt, there are people around with brightly colored projections and those whose tea leaf-reading skills are not as reliable as our sanguine looking at real data for 15-years.  But that doesn’t make getting up on Monday any more enjoyable.  It’s a grind and I hate it, too.

Except for the odd missile test (tell me was one of ours please), it doesn’t shape up as much of a week.

On the economic front,. we have some bond auctions today – which is good because the fixed income people have to go to work, too. 

Tomorrow there is import price data.  But, like the bond auction unless you’re a player, this is a terrible bore.

Things will not improve Wednesday, either.  Because it is a pseudo-Holiday.  Here’s an area where the pretenders in Washington could actually do something:  Since Wednesday is Veterans Day, could we all just take the day off and pay respects to Veterans.

The way things work out now is pretty simple – and I suppose it tells us more about the holiday than we would care to admit.  Here’s my short list:

1.  Private industry is almost universally being forced to work Wednesday.  Lose someone in the family?  In war?  Just, or otherwise?  Well, tough shit for you.  Come in and work for the factory owners.

2.  If you are a stockbroker, sure,.

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This morning’s column will take “some nerve” to read – because it is about precisely that – how our nerves operate.

The conventional wisdom is that all “thinking” happens in the head.  Logically, this must be so because that’s where the nominal central processor for the body is located.

However, there are some simple sensory tricks that call this notion into question.

Think about your consciousness for a moment – that point of being within the body.

Now pick up any of our weapons of precision thinking.  A hammer will do.

Give your thumb a fair – but not injuring whack!

As you do this, there are two ways of experiencing the event.

One is to remain brain-centered.  In this case, your point of view is fixed (and quite painful, I would add) and your “out there in the body somewhere” pain is perceived.

The second  and more problematic notion is that your consciousness is – for however brief a time – actually existing somewhere other than inside head, behind eyes.

This is the most important question in science right now:  On the one hand, our “being-ness” is in a fixed location.  Somewhere behind the eyes.

On the other hand, if our consciousness can flit around up and down nerves in the body – to extreme points of pain – such that we assemble reality there, instead of behind the eyes…well, that is a different kettle of fish completely.

The first instance argues that moving consciousness from its normal “seat” will be a brain-centered task.  The second case, however, argues that it is merely an engineering problem to build the appropriate interface to the neural network.

And, if that trick can be done, then we are off to the stars because the main problem consciousness has is that as a semi-electrochemical function, which most seem to agree it is, the possibility of extending “its network” becomes a possibility.

Since I sacked out early Sunday night, and I’m going through a “brain on fire” moment, I thought I’d mention this as a fine thinking point to solve this week.

Obviously, if the second case is true (consciousness floats around inside of a traditional body) then it follows that at the moment of death we are able to “break-out” from the confines of the “container” (body) in which we live.  This would put some hard science behind some reported human experiences; namely the soul being able to slip the confines of the body at the moment of death.

Whether the last-moment’s overdose of DMT is wholly a coping mechanism – and a drug-induced illusion of ego – is a matter being hotly debated.

On top of cabinets in operating rooms, there are cards and plaques with numbers, letters, and symbols that are not known to staff.  Many of the people reporting near death experiences report seeing these scientific test markers accurately.  And this, in turn, argues that there is something of a chemical jailer in place.

And it may be that our brains actual produce this “chemical jailer” stuff as a part of their regular function.

For a moment, think about those web-like Dream-Catchers that you can find at New Age and Indian curio shops, particularly in the West.

Odd as it may seem at first, is there a possibility that the role of humans is to act as a  kind of “soul-catcher” whose function in the greater scheme of things is to act as a kind of incubator for the soul?  Many religions would have it so.  Many hand out concubines while others give away whole planets in the after-life.

While title to things non-owned is a questionable racket, it doesn’t move us from the central part of this morning’s ponder:  Is there a non-drug way to build a physical extension of nerve tissue to get “out?”

I’m not sure how that would work…somehow in this life, I skipped the part where I study neurology and become an expert in this sort of thing.

However, it seems (intuitively) like there ought to be a way to “wire in” to neurons that are other than what we’re born with – and if that can be mastered, then we come up to exactly the point where immortality on this plane becomes possible.

Not that it would be easy.  But huge progress looms in the Man-Machine-Interface area of research and development.

Let’s say that we could invent this new stuff that would “wire in” to a sufficiently large nerve in the body.  And then, we would be able to break out, at least to some limited degree.

I’m sure you’re aware of all the work being done in “mental coupling” – which is exactly in this realm.  On the input side, there are rudimentary “helmets” that use electrical impulses to couple to the brain.

One example of this was written up in 2013 when MIT’s work on artificial retinas was discussed in some depth here.

That was purely on the input side of the problem.  Frankly, what amounts to perhaps a 60-pixel optical field may not seem like much, but it really is an incredible start.

On the output side of the problem,  there is a ton of product on the verge of coming to market.  Hongkiat has a list of “8 mind-blowing breakthroughs” over here.

The likely leader on the output side of things is a company called EMOTIV and their website is over here.

The key products to look at – in terms of where we go from simple Apps – will be thought-controlled computer commands.  It looks like their Insight product is moving in that direction quickly.

Even more impressive is the fact that there are already Android apps coming out for the EMOTIV Insight like this one that promises:

FEATURES:
• Connect with an Insight headset via Bluetooth(r) SMART.
• Train 13 mental commands: Push, Pull, Move Left, Move Right, Lift, Drop, Rotate Left, Rotate Right, Rotate Clockwise, Rotate Counter Clockwise, Rotate Forward, Rotate Reverse and Disappear.
• Compatible with Android 4.4 and above.

It won’t be too long before the coping catches up and someone will come out with a thought-directed browsing system.

And after that?

Well, don’t look now, but if I was running DARPA, I would already be researching how to apply the Emotive Insight to flying of an aircraft.  After all, coordinated light is not as difficult as the 13-commends which are already in the Android program.  Flying an airplane by “thought control” comes purely a “mind-mapping” exercise.

To fly an airplane, you have three rudder inputs:  left/right/none.  Ailerons (roll) are the same thing – right, left, center.  And then you’ve got three positions for elevator – up, down, and neutral.

Of course, each of these has to be proportional (and did I mention simultaneous?) but it’s not that hard.

Come to think of it, it has already been done in the Clint Eastwood move “Firefox” which came out back in 1982:

A joint Anglo-American plot is devised to steal a highly advanced Soviet fighter aircraft (MiG-31, NATO code name “Firefox”) which is capable of Mach 6, is invisible to radar, and carries weapons controlled by thought. Former United States Air Force Major Mitchell Gant (Eastwood), a Vietnam veteran and former POW, infiltrates the Soviet Union, aided by his ability to speak Russian (due to his having had a Russian mother) and a network of Jewish dissidents and sympathizers, three of whom are key scientists working on the fighter itself. His goal is to steal the Firefox and fly it back to friendly territory for analysis.

A number of products in this same arena are starting to pop onto Amazon.  One such product is called Muse: The Brain Sensing Headband – Black and it will set you back $300 bucks.  It promises some insight into the state of your brain (in terms of relaxed, level of cognitive function, whether you’re all worked up, hyper, brain-on-fire and that sort of thing.  In which case, it will be very useful as a biofeedback machine.

At an even lower price-point is the NeuroSky MindWave Headset which runs $80 – but can be found with mobile options and software for (what else?) more money.  This may be the first real “brain connector I buy because of its product description:

The MindWave headset takes decades of laboratory EEG technology research and puts it in your hands.

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