Year: 2015

Now that we have the charade of the Fed decision out of the way for another month and some, we can get back to the serious endeavor of trying to figure out whether to be on the long-side or short-side of this market.

The reality of it is that it all depends on your perspective as an investor.  And that means “How long are you willing to wait in order to make some dough?”

Take the Great Depression, for example:  If you had invested when the market was around 380 on the Dow in the late summer of 1929, have you ever wondered if an investment then would have really made money in the long-term?

The answer can be calculated from a quick visit to the Minneapolis Fed page where they have a handy inflation calculator on the right column.  Plugging in the number 1929 and 380, we find that the ultra long-term investor in the Dow would have done very well….But, hello Houston – we have a problem.

The problem is that you may not have been around in 1929.  With the Dow where it is today, you can see that you could have made about three times your money by waiting around for…(you won’t like this part)…86 years.  About half the people who tried this would be actuarial dust bunnies waiting that long.

On  the other hand, if you had purchased a gold coin when Nixon slammed the convertibility window closed at the Fed in 1971 – and bought an ounce of gold for say $50, that would have returned spending power at a much higher that.  That is because the inflation-adjusted price of $50 from 1971 is $293 and where the price of gold is this morning, you would still have 3.94 times your spending power and if would have taken place in just 44 years.

If’n you were an old geezer like me, you would have been able to do this.  But in fact, we didn’t buy our “lone gold round” until 2001 at $273 an ounce.

When we push out the numbers on that?  The present value would be around $365, and that means spending power up 3.17 times but the waiting in line for all this financial glory would be just 14 years,

Which gets me to the first – and most important part – of the column this morning.

THE MOST IMPORTANT INVESTING COMMODITY IS TIME.

The biggest tragedy of modern edjumacation (sic) is that people are not taught the importance of buying while young. 

The problem is that people are being hornswoggled into buying things – like education – that may  or may not be relevant in the future.

Not to rub salt here, but I know several university educated project managers who would love to build you a high rise tower.  Problem is, with 20 mb or better speeds on fiber at home, the “floating offices” on Skype, WebEx., GoToMeeting, and so on have proliferated to the point where some app builders I know maintain only a kind of “front” office and everyone works from home and just shows up at the brick and click joint for occasional meetings where things like algo’s get built and then everyone goes home to code.

Obviously, the problem is that the project managers trusted the government would not saddle them with mountains of student loan debt if there were not going to be the huge number of project manager jobs forecast in earlier editions of the Labor Department Occupational Outlook.

Honestly, people who bought into government forecasts that didn’t come true should be entitled to a student loan rebate or forgiveness program – which someone should really work on.

Back to point though, I have always held that if you want to make money – serious money and net worth in the long run – the smartest thing to do is buy assets when young that will creep up over time. 

They can be anything – real estate, land, gold, the Dow – the secret ingredient is TIME and we don’t focus enough on the proper use of time.  All of our kids are middle-aged now.  My son,l for example is 35 now.  Still hasn’t decided to buy a home…Yet by the time I was his age, real estate appreciation had already contributed a $25,000 increase to my then net worth.  Reason?  I had a rental and I had been in a new home for several years, already.

The reason we have a difficult market this morning is so few people are willing (or able) to make a time commitment to making money. 

Not the kid’s fault, either.  There is no job surety and that means buying real estate locks people in to a location.  I don’t know what the answer is, except I can tell you for sure there should be a lot more single family home exchanges going on than there are because with real estate and moving costs, an exchange of one location for another is an incredibly bad idea.  But an exchange?  We would move closer to the kids tomorrow.

– – –

So this is what the Post Fed Decision day looks like around here.  The long term problem of how to make – and keep – a buck is still on the table.

Everyone and their grandmother has a set of “reasons” the futures are down.  But the facts are simple:

We are living in a country with no commitment to the future.  We have explained shit to the kids in terms of making investments over time.  And we have evolved a benefits –free culture with no roots to location so moving may become necessary.  And our Real Estate system is too expensive.

In almost every industry you can mention, the cost of business has been coming down because of computer horsepower.  Exceptions?  Education and real estate.

We are locked in the “butt in chairs mode” for education and we are locked in the pay commissions and move all your possessions paradigm for the other.  The effects of computational horsepower in terms of delivery of value have been stuck.  Even raw land commissions are nailed in the 7-10% range.  Only the really smart people use a real estate attorney and save a lot on commissions that way.

I don’t mean to sound sour about the Fed.  But they have no choice.

The growth that has been hinted at is mostly an illusion.   The reason the markets are going up (and please, remember Ure’s Dow 25,000 call for the market next year or early 2017) has nothing to do with growth.  It’s all been about the declining returns from bonds and investors nibbling into stocks.  Which is why a huge stock market bubble approaches for the simple reason that bonds have been improving in value every year (on average) since 1981.  See chart here.

We don’t have much in the way of “real” news other than GDP and unbelievable takes by the highly biased media on how the GOP debate went last night, so the market is set to open lower.  Futures were saying 85 lower earlier when I looked, but blowing off all of the post-Fed relief rally and then some wouldn’t be a shocker.

Fundamentally, we have a country with no border, an administration not articulating a vision the whole country can support (like going back to the moon) and we are teetering on the brink of people downsizing and microhousing our way into poverty.

Funny thing is, people in backwards countries have already beaten us in small housing and the like – and while we may think deconsumption is a fine thing and good for the environment, and all, the process has to be somewhat moderated while economics comes around.  Otherwise, the risk of everyone sitting on their wallets and collapsing the whole shitteree will come.  At this point, 2017 or 2018 looks likely.

We now return control off your screen to more conventional sources of propaganda and normalcy biased inputs.

New GDP Data

Oh, boy.  Here’s a new wet spot of economic data to squirm around:

“Gross Domestic Product: Third Quarter 2015 (Advance Estimate)

      Real gross domestic product -- the value of the goods and services produced by the nation’s
economy less the value of the goods and services used up in production, adjusted for price
changes -- increased at an annual rate of 1.5 percent in the third quarter of 2015, according to the
"advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  In the second quarter, real GDP
increased 3.9 percent.
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You may remember we have had this conversation before:

It has to do with how events seem to cluster in life.  Sometimes the way life rolls out, seems like you can do nothing wrong.

Then there are days like Wednesday when everything you put your hands on turns to doggie-do.

The Facts:

Wednesday around here started off perfect (as most days will).  Had a great Peoplenomics column.  Elaine whipped up the usual (and now we’re informed – Cancer-causing) breakfast.

Nothing odd about that, but one of the egg yokes broke.  This happens so infrequently that it’s a miracle.  When E breaks a yoke it seems to signify that statistics are about to turn against us. E’s been cooking for more than half a century.  How much longer is classified somewhere above missile launch codes.  But let’s just say she is an expert in the kitchen.  Egg-cidents  don’t just happen to her.  Period.

Still, everything tasted great and shortly thereafter I sat down at the computer intending to answer emails – including from from a young reader who is becoming an airline pilot.

But, it wasn’t meant to be. 

“Your battery needs to be charged.  Consider plugging in your laptop” the 17” Samsung at my overstuffed chair advised me.

“What the hell?  It IS plugged in,” I told myself. 

Still, just to make sure, I pulled all the plugs, reset the transient scrubber…you know – all that “supposed to fix it” kind of crap.  All to no avail.

“Seven minutes remaining.”  Another pop-up on the screen..

Say, this is turning into something “un-fun.”

Turned out to be a lie, too.  The screen went black in less than five minutes.

The last time the laptop power cube went out, we were up with Branson, Missouri with the Landry’s – seems that was a couple of three years ago.  That’s when the original power supply failed.

Powr+ brand, by the way.  The heck of it is that I had the thought cross my mind not three weeks back “Gee, should I get a back-up for the laptop supply?  It has failed before… Naw, not now, too busy.”

Bad call.

On the way back from taking cover pictures for the upcoming novel, Panama and I swung by Wal-Mart to pick up a replacement.  They had a laptop power supply that would work with laptops.

Got it home, opened it up – no tips.  On inspection, the box had been opened by some partial shoplifter who had taken the adapter tips only.  This was a fact undiscovered until I got home.

So Elaine offers to run it back into town (half-hour each way) and a little over an hour later she triumphantly returns.  Only the power supply she comes back with doesn’t fit Samsungs.  Lenovo and half a dozen others?  Sure.  So this morning, she will take it back and tell the staff S-A-M-S-U-N-G.

While she was off being run around the block in town, I discovered that the FedEx people had delivered my new air compressor I was telling you about.

Works fine, except it was damaged in shipping.  The two pressure gauges (tank and down line pressure) were smashed.  Oh, and the handle doesn’t fit because one of the brackets was smashed out of round.

So off goes the customer service email on whether I return the entire machine or whether I fix the handle (easy) and they just send me the two replacement gauges so I can call that project complete.

Seems stupid to do anything else, but who knows.  In the meantime, until that’s resolved, the shop is out of commission because it’s got compressor shipping materials all over the place.

The rest of the afternoon was spent re-tasking the Supercomputer (i7 920 12gB, 500 gab SSD, multiple multi-TB additional drives on which my copy of Nostracodeus.com software lives) so that it would pick up email which had previously gone to the laptop.

This morning I will actually go read all those emails.

That handled, the media computer in the living room (from whence I write this morning) was loaded with my site authoring tool…and in answer to reader Nelson, the configuration of that tool puts up a temporary post to download format of the site – which is why feed readers may have seen a strange looking post from me that made no sense.  It did to the computers.

Amazon is overnighting not one but TWO laptop power supplies.  And as long as I was at it, I tossed in a new battery for the laptop, as well.

But that’s not the point of this morning’s discussion, although it’s one hell of a lead-in.

Our real point is about how everyone has a “Personal Retrograde.”

The last time I wrote up a longish article on Personal Retrograde was back in December of 2014 – the article is over here.

Here’s the interesting thing:  In that article (Dec 30,2014, I noted that the retrograde date was January 21st.  So my personal retrograde seemed at that time to come three weeks ahead of the “recognized” date.

Fast-forward to the now.  If this crackpot theory of mine is right – namely that we all have a personal offset from the generalized retrograde – then we should see a retrograde around November 17-19.

What’s this?  Mercury is NOT  retrograde in three weeks.  But here’s the interesting thing:  We are about three weeks after Mercury goes direct station.

For what it is worth, the discovery du jour is that may actually have two positions in their charts where Mercury-like events may cluster:  One date would be in the vicinity of retrograde (mine is about three weeks ahead of it).  The other would be related to Mercury on-station in which case my offset would be 19-days after.

Now that I have all this figured out, life should get back to normal rather quickly.  The compressor gauges issue will be resolved, the new power cubes and battery will arrive – and things in the Ure household will be back to normal.

I would ask you to do a little research.  Astrology would not have been around for a few thousand years if there was nothing to it.  (The same could be said about major religions, as well.)

So next time you suffer a day where multiple things go wrong, jot down the dates and check them out against a retrograde source.  You may be surprised what you find.

On the other hand, it could have just been “The Bates Luck” that was rubbing off – my brother-in-law was present much of yesterday and his relationship with luck is legendary around here.

For example:  While on one of his combat tours in ‘Nam, he suffered a terrible leg wound.  Bad luck.  Fortunately, a medic got to him and got him into the closest LZ for medevac.

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Too early to say Happy Halloween – but not to early to say Happy Fed Day.

Of course, we all know what a bubble economy is.  We have been through plenty of them.  And when they fall apart, they hurt – badly.

This morning, we ask a terribly important question:  Is the whole “information economy” something of a load-balanced Xeon-powered server bubble that will blow over one of these days?

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The Fed gavels in today.  The Big Rate decision is due tomorrow.  My bet, based on historical precedent would have to be on an improbable small hike, with another in three or four months, but the smart money would be on another quantitative easing.

That gets us to the day’s fresh data which includes Housing and Durable Goods.

Let’s start with housing.

New York, October 27, 2015 – S&P Dow Jones Indices today released the latest results for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices. Data released today for August 2015 show that home prices continued their rise across the country over the last 12 months.

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This is an important little story.  Not because it is a big deal in and of itself.  But because it serves to remind each of us how much power we actually hold as consumers and how, properly wielded, it can actually make for positive change.

Before I tell you the story (it’s short), a word or hundred on how companies and corporations have personalities.  Although it can be fairly argued that a corporation doesn’t have a personality, the facts speak differently.

Besides, I have no less the U.S. Supreme Court on my side.

There was a case a while back called Citizen’s United.  The Wikipedia summary gives you the general layout of things:

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No.

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Before we get into the yawn-to-the-Fed meeting work-a-day stuff, there is a very interesting tale to behold in the now 7.5 earthquake over in Afghanistan this morning.

A few of the details:

The October 26, 2015 M 7.5 earthquake near the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan (SW of Jarm) occurred as the result of reverse faulting at intermediate depths, approximately 210 km below the Hindu Kush Range in northeastern Afghanistan. Focal mechanisms indicate rupture occurred on either a near-vertical reverse fault or a shallowly dipping thrust fault. At the latitude of the earthquake, the India subcontinent moves northward and collides with Eurasia at a velocity of about 37 mm/yr.

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Odd conversations around the Ure household this weekend…perhaps it had something to do with all the rain passing through East Texas this weekend.  Although, come to think of it, that’s not a big deal because we only had a bit over 7-inches in the gauge and around here, that will do little more than keep the dust down.

The comment from Elaine pointed out a news item about how marketers are running out of words to use for new products.  To be sure, I hadn’t considered this previously, but a quick look at the problem should dispel all fears.

First, though, a word about the problem – because in some ways, it is already here.

A word that seems to be very high on the marketing-lingo circuit presently is the word “genesis.”

This has been spelled any number of ways now – including with a spurious y and whatever other ways marketers (with limited mental capacity) have in the way of typological trickster moves to make you think there is a new genysis or genesys around.

It’s even worst for pharmaceutical companies because they pour untold billions into getting you to “Tell your doctor” – so there is a market for familiar – yet customized – words.  The thinking is they stick in your mind better.

The thing is, though, there are tons of options available to “solve” the problem.  It’s just that fear and inertia are the main things slowing human progress.

Breaking words down into brandable name extensions is one way the problem is already being handled.  Say you have an electronics company and you’re looking for a branding mascot (seeing as you have been inoculated with the Geico gecko uncountable times).  You take the electronics extension “tronics” and add a frog in from of it forming “Frogtronics.”

But, as you can see over here, there are 860 Google hits on ”Frogtronics” so that would not be a good name.  More generalized, Petronics has more than 15,000 page references.

Not believing me when I tell you the obvious you go for a cat as your new Catronics logo, only to find there are 11,600 uses of that word ahead of you.   Dogtronics has a mere 2,300 hits, which must be telling us that while dogs may be man’s best friend, into today’s world of broad spectrum marketing, dogs are not the marketer’s best friend.  Cats are.

We are tying sexual orientation into everything, too.  There are many uses of “gaytronics” as well as bitronics.  Bitronics is an interesting one because it clearly illustrates the imprecision of modern language.  As you can see in our context here, our reference was to “bi” (as in sexual) not “bit” as in computer…but that’s how language rolls over time.  Meanings come into vogue and then roll out.

There are more than 7-thousand references to transtronics, too.  But again, it’s not the current marketing vogue use of the term “trans” (as in sexual).  It’s more like trans as in (transistor) and so on.

Still, the point about running out of name is real and it is becoming more difficult all the time to trademark and protect one’s space in the mass consumersphere. 

I’ve bitched uncountable times about all the rip-offs of the www.urbansurvival.com brand, founded in 1996.  People at a hyphen or the word “site” and believe that qualifies them to imitate a good, original brand.  And the hell of it is, it works.

Still, were not out of naming conventions yet.  There are more “last names for words” than “tronics” and “LLc.” 

But the change I am waiting for will be when marketers are reduced to using numbers integral to the brand.

This has been around for years – as you can sense from the several million hits for the term “1-a-day.”

Numbers have been big in the auto sector (409, 427, 440, 383, 327) and in consumer electronics (i5, i7, 4K) and so on.  But so far, the generic soup at the store is not 6Mushroom, 1221Broth, or any of the like..

But based on the data, eventually here in Babylon, II, we’re going to run out of ways to brand and when that happens, the tower marketing will begin to teeter.

I can hardly wait.

The Bank Between Your Ears

Ramble with me.

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Because our projections of the market being in a blow-off top formation lead-in are working out very closely, this morning we extend things out many years to get a better idea of how the future could present itself.

Granted, this is highly speculative in nature, but then again, so was our recent call for a Dow to zoom up to as high as 25,000 – or more – between now and the period after the 2016 election.

The problem is getting the right data into the model and then doing a bunch of date math to figure out when particular economic landmarks should be passed.

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The market this morning looks like the rally will continue.

Hell of a thing.  Because, most unfortunately, in my work on long wave economics, we seem to be stuck right in the midst of a replay of the 1921 market drop and the subsequent rally that led to the blow-off high on September 3, 1929.

I have a pretty good idea of when that high will come.  We’ll cover that for our www.peoplenomics.com readers tomorrow.  But it is all kinds of fun to see the future even hazily compared to the rest of the lost-sheep.

Here is the chart which will no doubt be copied, cloned, and ripped off, which is why I don’t put a lot of material on the free site:

Futures are up another 160…and 200+ today should surprise exactly no one…not among Peoplenomics subscribers, anyway.

Tomorrow, we can start laying up dates, but the war cycle in the 1930s followed the Great Depression – and in many ways was the final tool to force the nation into recovery.

One of the tenets of long wave economics is that periodic massive destruction of human capital as well as infrastructure is required in order to set the groundwork for the next major economic advance.

The peculiar problem of the next global war is that it will likely have a terrible outcome since nuclear, genetic, and computer warfare (NGC) are likely to kill more people that have ever been killed in a spree, before.

What will likely drive it is the resource depletion issue.  And that has quite a rhyme with events leading up to WW II.  But this time, instead of people collecting aluminum  and hoarding tires, look for software and critical elements like lithium and oil to be at the heart.

The good news is there is much time left to figure out the details of how to hedge this, but keep in mind there is an expiration date  on humans, every bit as much is there is an expiration date baked into every continuously depreciating (fiat/paper) currency whose value is submit to whim and compound interest.

The horrific reality that no one else is talking about on the net right now is that the National Debt of Russia is a shade less than $246-billion. while the US National Debt is presently $18-trillion and it’s only less than $20-trillion because of fancy/slippery, marginally honest accounting footwork at the Treasury/Usury Department. 

Put another way:  The Russian debt-to-GDP ratio is about 18%.  In other words, 18% of one year’s worth of Russian GDP would pay off every plug ruble of their debt.

In our case, the current debt-to-GDP ratio is about 101%.  And when the debt ceiling gets raised in a week (or five) the debt ratio will move up to 102-104%…and as you can see, we never come in from that ledge.

That is why the US Federal Reserve is likely lying when they talk about “raising interest rates.”  It may have a short-term salutary effect on the market (see the 1928-1929 period) but when all is said and done, the GDP collapses and we return to the basics of hard work, sharing, and working through the resource depletion mess.

Our only real fear is that one side in the upcoming collapse of the globalist troika is that one of the countries (US, Russia, China) COULD opt for the “war sooner than later” option.

That might mean that instead of a much longer build-up to global war, it could be actually moved forward (closer to the present) and that would be a real bummer.

Someone’s models besides the ones we run around here should be hinting that the time to take on the USA is NOT when we have a screaming market rally likely for the next year, or 18 months.  But rather when spirits are low and heading lower.  That clock, however, is constantly ticking,  And what makes the “taking of America” key is our natural resource base, namely all weather agriculture and petroleum.

So if you are around in five or six years and you notice European descendants dying off from a genetic disease, remember where you first heard the approach considered.

SuperCane

It’s called Patricia and it is about to solidly kick the booty of Mexico down south of Baja.

If the USA was really smart on this border problem, we would be working with Mexico that offer them rebuilding aid and perhaps some property redistribution when this thing goes through. 

The idea being that properly monetized, a natural disaster can be turned net positive – if you don’t weight the human suffering too heavily into the equation.

Give Mexico a recovery loan, have them create recovery jobs, and then to pay off the debt, have them build a wall?

Trumply, for sure, but it might work…

Defense Bill Veto

The partisanship never stops, does it?  The Borderless in Chief has just vetoed the Defense spending bill because it doesn’t give him free enough rein. AND He says it has gimmicks.  Which is rich, huh?  When the other party puts spending earmarks on things, is that somehow different?

The Corporate duopoly rules, as always.

Shoving Ryan On Us

For the secret trade bill?  Check.  Open border guy?  Check.  Democrats endorsing him?  Check.

Now comes the corporate-aligned Wall Street Journo with another my, ain’t he special article.

Like this will keep him (or any other put-ups from the Obama wing of the GOP) from being a bad idea?  Where’s my ViseGrips.  A big enough lie, oft-enough repeated…

Another “Dual Citizenship IS BAD” Example

Yeah – familiar rant here.  My position is pretty damn simple: The U.S.

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The first rain of the season hit at 3:21 A.M. this morning. 

I know because it was the muffled sound of a few drops on the roof.

It didn’t last very long – about five minutes.  And then it was passed.

But it reminded me that we are into the seasonal change in how humans operate and a short discussion of how your body chemistry works is definitely in order here.

The first thing that happens with the onset of cooler weather is the gray skies.  That means that your body will not make as much vitamin D3 as normal. 

“Sunshine vitamin D” needs what?

A shortage of this critical vitamin has been associated with many diseases, but the main focus for us is the subtle effect of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD.

From Wikipedia, SAD is…

“…also known as winter depression, winter blues, summer depression, summertime sadness, or seasonal depression, is a mood disorder subset in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter or summer.^[1]

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV and DSM-5, its status was changed. It is no longer classified as a unique mood disorder but is now a specifier called with seasonal pattern for recurrent major depressive disorder that occurs at a specific time of the year and fully remits otherwise.^[2] Although experts were initially skeptical, this condition is now recognized as a common disorder.^[3] SAD’s prevalence in the U.S.

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Sounding ever more like an UrbanSurvival reader, Donald Trump is telling USA Today that Janet Yellen and the Fed should have already raised rates.

But, the Donald thinks they are being held low for political reasons and might not be raised until the next president is in line.

Although such sound thinking is not about to be listened to, and the market is likely already off on another bullish run (with the asterisk of a pullback likely around Thanksgiving), the thinking is sound, nevertheless.

What happens in wildly deflationary times is that the government prints oodles and gobs of money in order to maintain the delusion that inflation is still out there.  As long as working people can be hoaxed into that, they will keep up their free-spending ways.

On the business side, though, there is little incentive to build new plant and equipment – after all, it’s Cheaper in China, so who needs American workers.

So the cash piles up.  Not just for the bankster scree, but also for the 1% because they have few alternatives other than putting money in bonds.

What ends up happening is low rates beget lower rates and the first thing you know, deflation is a worldwide phenom with the Megalomaniacal Central Bank –a/k/a the ECB – is forced to hold rates at record lows as well.

PRESS RELEASE

Monetary policy decisions

22 October 2015

At today’s meeting, which was held in Malta, the Governing Council of the ECB decided that the interest rate on the main refinancing operations and the interest rates on the marginal lending facility and the deposit facility will remain unchanged at 0.05%, 0.30% and -0.20% respectively.

The President of the ECB will comment on the considerations underlying these decisions at a press conference starting at 14:30 CET today.

Damn/…that’s during my nap time…  Next week the Fed here will either QE or hold.  Dow 25,000 in 2016 has been in our work for a long time.  Might ask the doomers where that market collapse is… Futures up another hundred.

Point is that we are still in deflation and it is being covered up by huge money-printing world-wide and that’s just how things are going…sliding sideways until the general deflationary facts become undeniable…and the stock market will explode as it did leading into 1929 and it will be bubble time, once again.

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We might as well jump right off into the weird  this morning – because I had one of those “waking moment” insights that are often quite valuable

The idea goes something like this:

When I was a kid I was bounced around between regular and accelerated math classes.  Some damn fool thought I had a brain but didn’t realize that I didn’t come with a single ounce of attention, discipline, or will to study.

But curiously, my second-highest scores in school were in English.  Not spelling, not proof-reading, not syntax…just English.

Fast-forward to this morning’s life review.

Long time ago -In one of those “accidents” that happen to kids, I was up the street at my life-long friend’s place and we were (age 11 or so) messing about with a tape recorder as I recall, and as I got up, a #2 Yellow Pencil fell out of my shirt pocket and I stepped on it as precisely the moment it was pointing straight up.

Naturally, it didn’t remain standing up and promptly broke off with about one-inch of pencil point broken off inside my right foot.

So off to the emergency room, doctor fishes out the left-over pencil parts, puts a piece of surgical rubber tubing in, and for the next three weeks, I pull an 1/8th inch of it out every other day, or so…

The foot healed find and that was that.

Until this morning.

At which point, something in the brain finally fires – 55-years after-the-fact – and asks a very profound question:

“What is the one skill that pulls about all of your work experience together as a common thread?   Writing, right?”

Well, I sit there pondering this-here little gem for a couple of minutes and sure enough what is it that on-air broadcaster, newscaster, management geeks, and financial writers (and did I mention airline VP and college president) all have in common?

They have to write like maniacs.

And grad school…what was that?  Again, more writing.  In fact, what I learned in grad school was how to write for an audience – my faculty advisor.  The more and better I wrote, the higher the GPA until when all was said and done it was a 4.0.  But not necessarily on quality – I think it was more the quantity that blew ‘em away.  2000 word essay?  Two hours flat.  Hell, that’s only 17 words per minute…

Education is comprised of two parts.  There’s the rote/parrot part – and I know people who excel at that.  Then there’s the logical analysis, problem identification, recipe formula, and eventually the implement of the problem-solving.  But we don’t score the latter highly.  Modern education is still trying to figure out the topology of intelligence but the way is slow.  Way slow.

This pencil-breaking-in-foot story got me to wondering how many people get “inoculated” in some manner into what will become their life’s work?

I have seen bits and pieces of it:  A young man who falls in with bad company rises to become a Raymond Reddington criminal sort.  A woman who was always playing with her dolls as a child, who then ends up in the fashion industry.  The boy fascinated with chemistry and fire as a child grows up to be a firefighter…Kid breaks an arm or leg and is captivated by medicine – hears mom and dad talk about how expensive health care is so he grows up to sell malpractice insurance, lol.

When I see kids who are playing with video games (to the exclusion of much else in life) I can’t help but suspect that these ‘inoculations’ are in some manner about to appear as our future.  The video gamer is now a drone driver and they m ay have a bright future as remote vehicle operators.  In an earlier time, the gamer might have been good fodder for the nuclear power industry which does a good bit of remote-control work.

When you get a few minutes, it may be productive to think back on your youth. 

If my nutty idea du jour is correct, there may be a pivotal moment when something happens that forever locks you onto a path in life.

It also places huge importance for parents on tracking the activities of kids to see what the ‘inoculation’ happens to be.

Daughter who is getting married next month, for example, had a serious brush with celiac disease (wheat allergy) when young – and that put her on the path to a career in the culinary arts…that kind of thing.  The ‘inoculation’ was a food issue and the career just followed down that path.

You’re welcome to report any experiences along this line in the comment section below.  I’m collecting a few and what comes out of it is a very interesting question about exactly how these childhood/prepubescent events form us throughout the balance of life to follow.

OK, on to practical matters…

Self Reliance:  Death of an Air Compressor

My 10-gallon air compressor is finally giving up the ghost after about 8-years of service. 

I was cutting up some 10-inch wide galvanized flashing for the deck with my nibbler (similar to the Neiko 30067A Pull Type Air Nibbler $57) and the compressor started to scream (belt slipping) and the cylinder head completely overheating.

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