George Ure

Hum-dinger. 

A discussion and chart is up on our premium content site, www.peoplenomics.com.  The report link is here.

The rally might have had something to do with the release of the Fed meeting minutes for last month which included this downright supportive of low interest rates for a while longer:

In their discussion of monetary policy for the period
ahead, members judged that information received since
the FOMC met in July indicated that economic activity
was expanding at a moderate pace. Household spending
appeared to be rising moderately, and business fixed investment
was advancing, while the recovery in the housing
sector remained slow. Fiscal policy was restraining
economic growth, although the extent of restraint was
diminishing and would soon be quite small.

Read More

UC:  ubiquitous computing.

A New Pet Theory (NPT) is rattling around between this ears this morning and while it’s simple enough there are profound implications.

Let me lay out some (rather large) data sets here and see if you get to the same conclusion, shall we?

Dataset #1

Peak oil is real and fracking is destroying the earth..  I get tons of email on this point from Oilman2 because it’s what he does.  As good a petroleum engineer/bit designer/rig operator as he is, he’s even a better thinker and writer.  Some examples:

You know I travel a lot to Mexico – and while there is a different mind-set, it is simply because they have been living in an oilgarchy much longer than we have. They have Chili’s, McDonalds, malls and even outlet malls – just like we do. But they have no way to set things right, as their hyper-corrupt government is connected at the hip to the largest military power in the world – us.
https://news.vice.com/article/inside-the-mexican-college-where-43-students-vanished-after-a-violent-encounter-with-police

This is where we are headed as the economy continues to decline, mi amigo…

---

Here you are:
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/10/07/central-california-aquifers-contaminated-billions-gallons-fracking-wastewater
http://www.bakersfieldcalifornian.com/business/kern-gusher/x167883935/Farmer-lawsuit-blames-crop-loss-on-oil-companies-waste-injections

Kern County has tricky geology, and there are few traps that do not leak to surface (this is the place where “bubbling crude’ existed, a la Beverly Hillbillies…). Injecting anything into that geology is problematic…

Oilman2

The extraordinarily caffeinated might be able to discern two data sets here:  Mass migration for economic reasons (all over the place) and the implicates of Peak Oil and Really Desperate Frackers.  Either way, let’s just look at them as one data set.

-Dataset #2

The things people put into their minds in general.  Lots of it just doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny.  Blood moons and a certain enterovirus, as an example. 

I won’t go into all of this except to say that the “alternative press” gets things right about 50% of the time.  Sometimes, it’s the other way around, like the Judicial Watch story about ISIS agents sneaking in from Mexico over the nearly non-existent “border…”

“Judicial Watch  Confirms: 4 ISIS Terrorists Arrested in Texas in Last 36 Hours”

We can argue for hours, I suppose, on whether the congressman who made the claim is basing it on accurate information. but that’s good coverage at JW.

On the other hand, the peripheral coverage on Ebola (and other viruses like D68) has in places been hysterical.

Read More

Hmmm… we were on such a beautiful track, too…

Remember Monday morning I was telling you how the Dow was scheduled to zoom skyward?  Well, I was right….sort of.

The Dow had opened at 17,010 and then sipped up to 17,099 and change, which is close enough I’d say to call it an 89-point gain.  Call me a liar over 18 points come the close, but what about mid-session?

It was then cold feet set in.  The market was tossed for an 18-point lost (less a stick of chewing gum if you want to argue the decimal points) maybe because of the Spanish Ebola case.  That’s not a bad working theory…since markets in Europe are mostly down this morning…and the US futures are back pointing to another quick flush with Charmin due in about mid-session.

Besides the broadening top, we have to go back to some longwave economic theory.

Remember what happened on September 19th of this year?  Answer (you look too sleepy to figure this kind of thing out without prompting…)  That’s when the S&P hit a 52-week intraday high of 2019.26.

We also know from working with the data for what…17 years is it?.  The big collapse risk zones come around 27 days and 55 days after major peaks.

Look at 1929, for an example.  Back then the market peak came on September 3rd and by the end of October the country was reeling in the rubble from the Wall Street Crash.

Can it happen again?  Why sure…

Putting the math to it, we could expect the major decline for the year to come either around 10/23/2014 or 11/10/2014.  Just based on past performances.

Historical market action is always interesting stuff.  The market collapse in 1929 is no exception because it actual focused on two dates:  Black Thursday was October 24, 1929 (51 days past the peak) and Black Monday was October 28th – our 55 calendar days past peak..

October 29th (Black Tuesday) was the 56th-day.

Students of “When to panic about the market” should be advised to carefully read upo on what was going on in the markets back then:  For one, there was a lot of “trading on margin.”  Basically, you’re gambling with borrowed money when that happens.

Margin is still around (and widely used) today.  But much of the gambler’s penchant for risk has been laid-off onto options which is a whole separate discussion.

Look what happened though as the SHTF back then:

Over the weekend,  (following the prequel Black Thursday on the 24th) the events were covered by the newspapers across the United States. On October 28, “Black Monday”,^[12] more investors facing margin calls decided to get out of the market, and the slide continued with a record loss in the Dow for the day of 38.33 points, or 13%.

It was asymmetry of information at work: Once the momentum of margin calls passed a certain point, the collapse was bound to happen.  These things take on a life of their own.

The current “modern” thinking is that such a thing could not happen again.  But I beg to disagree.

The reason is social media.

Imagine what would happen if all of a sudden, a credible meme began over in social media and a rumor was set up that a “huge  crash is coming and the only way to survive will be to move everything in your retirement account into bonds…”

As prices began to fall, this hypothetical warning would be sent to more and more people – who upon seeing prices collapsing, would pile-on and the modern collapse would be on.

“You can be safe with just one telephone transfer…” would go our hypothesized market-panicker.  “If you don’t move your money right now, half your retirement could go down the drain…?

Of course, lots of events could trigger such an event.  Someone might, for example, set up a fake “doctor” who would announce some quite saleable doom-porn onto Facebook and the rush would be on.  “I’ can tell you with certainty that the government is behind Ebola and it’s all part of a worldwide conspiracy of the very wealthy to massively reduce world population.  If you don’t get out of markets before they are collapsed, you will have no hope for a bright future.  You will die like everyone else…”

People are dumb.  They eat doom-porn.

Social media has been a lot of fun.  Like CB Radio and Hoola Hoops.  And Beanie Babies.  And collecting Coca Cola memorobilia.

Read More

Don’t ‘cha hate it when the damn alarm goes off on Monday?

Most Mondays I would have to agree with you but this one?  It’s a bit odd…almost surreal.

You see, there’s a massive global rally underway and it’s something worth discussing because it deals with an intriguing aspect of economics; namely that there’s only some much wealth (in aggregate) throughout the world.  So where does it go and where does it come from to drive these fits of elation and collapse that we go through?

In Asia, both the Japanese and the Chinese markets were up better than one percent.

Gains in Europe were on the order of one-half to one percent in the early going, too.  Except for the French, who you’ll pardon me for saying, can be a bit slow at times.  Even they are up a quarter of a percent.

The market futures were looking like a 60-point rally in the Dow, something less in the S&P and the metals were going zombie on us: Rising a bit from the dead.

OK, Detective:  Why?

For one, the weekend hype machine has just about convinced the world that the “U.S. is Safe from an Ebola Outbreak.”  Spit fire and save matches – that’d sure be gasoline on the market IF TRUE.  (You’ll pardon me if I wait a month and see if it’s just the initially exposed folks in Dallas…and whether there are more in the wings.)

Don’t let the Calendar get in the way of a good story, though:  The market loves the Jobs report out Friday and we have clear sailing statistics-wise until the the inflation numbers come out after the 15th.

The ugly under-belly of economics here is that money creation is being dialed back by the Fed.  When there is less money being printed, rates tend to firm…and if it’s carried far enough, rates will actually rise.

Over the past year, creation of M1 (the narrowest measure, basically a look at cash) was up 10.2%,  Notice how – in the six-month view it drops to a 7.2% annualized rate and then down to a 3.9% annual rate basis the most recent three months.

If you’re planning to buy a house, car, or other big-ticket item, it may be getting on toward time to close on that purchase because it begins to look like rates will (very, very slowly)  be firming.

Proof World is Not Ending

Baltic Dry Index – holding over the 1,000 level with a read of 1,029 this morning.  If the world was going to end, wouldn’t we be down into the 600’sd again?

Out Peoplenomics trading model still hasn’t turned down, despite end of world pronouncements left and right.  Damn little bugger just keeps up the smiley faces – for now.

Rude of crude to point out demand is still slack: Under $90 for crude this morning.  Is gold about to kiss the underside of $1,200? 

Week Ahead

Gee, how about the Fed’s Consumer Debt of Yoke and Oppression due out tomorrow afternoon?  Of course they call it the Consumer Credit report – which is the nice way of handing you a loaded revolver, I suppose.

Fed minutes Wednesday, and the Treasury Budget on Friday, but nothing to keep you from hitting the “snooze” this morning…

Ebola Historical

No more cases reported today (be patient, er, so to speak).  In the meantime, the actual facts of the case are being collected on Wikipedia, which will be as good a contexter of the hype as any.

Breaking Up Ain’t Hard to Do

Want an HP Computer?  You may soon be asked whether that’s a Hewlett or a Packard….as the once technogiant is on the verge of breaking up in order to be more in the business and personal marketplace, reports the NY Times.

It leaves me asking embarrassing questions, though:  Like “How come ya’ll just don’t do this internally through internal accounting?  Unless, of course, the idea it to do a stock-deal so the execs can make out…know what I mean?”

Are two options packages better than one?  You might want to check out how Bell breakup execs really did…

Art of Cheap Living:  Falling Gas Prices

Check out the “selected market” tool over at the AAA’s Fuel Gauge Report.  Shows that prices are really coming down – in fact down to $3.289. nationally when I checked out prices for Texas.  The Seattle area, where we just spent a month considering the possibility of moving, shows up with some of the higher prices around $3.702 per gallon.

This compares with $3.102 in   both Dallas and Houston…Granted the price of gasoline is not a particularly Big Deal when we’re creeping up to the retirement finish line, but 19% is 19% on any line-item in a budget…something worth paying attention to.

One other note abut retiring to the “Outback.”

Our property tax bill for the year came in Saturday.  Right around $873.  That for the house and 28.82 acres +/-.

Granted it’s a highly customized modular, but stay with me on point:  Our friends up in the northwest seem to be averaging around $3,000 a year in property taxes.

Effectively, this means our “rent to the government” (which is what property taxes really are) pencils out to $73/month for retirement.  Up north, the tax bite would be $250 per month.

Planning retirement is still pretty simple:  Take whatever your projected income in, then downsize the lifestyle until there’s more coming in than going out.

Read More

Since we didn’t go up to Shawnee this weekend as planned, and since most of my Sunday was spent cleaning my office and writing code for the “Big Secret Project” we had some time to discuss a new book that arrived:  Mathematics 1001: Absolutely Everything That Matters About Mathematics in 1001 Bite-Sized Explanations.

Elaine had opened the book to the page (2/3rd’s) of the way into the book in which a simple discussion of the Monty Hall Problem was being discussed among the finer points of Probability and Statistics.

The Wikipedia entry on the Monty Hall Problem runs down the set-up this way:

The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle (Gruber, Krauss and others), loosely based on the American television game show Let’s Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975 (Selvin 1975a), (Selvin 1975b). It became famous as a question from a reader’s letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant‘s “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade magazine in 1990 (vos Savant 1990a):

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Vos Savant’s response was that the contestant should switch to the other door (vos Savant 1990a). Under the standard assumptions, contestants who switch have a 2/3 chance of winning the car, while contestants who stick to their choice have only a 1/3 chance.

However clear this application of Bayes Theory is, Elaine wasn’t buying it.

To her was of thinking, if the contestant on the television show can now pick either door out of a Universe of two doors, the odds are down to 50-50. 

Of course, that’s not right…switching doors will “win the car” 0.66 of the time.  Not the 50% which would be the case if the contestant just picked from an initial Universe of two doors. 

The contrast in probabilities, a 2/3rd’s chance of winning the car if you switch) versus a 50-50 chance if you look at the problem wrong, brings to light a fascinating aspect of Bayes theories that (extended out to infinity) have some really shocking spiritual implications.

At the core of it is something I can “event-chaining” in real-life.  The concept of “event-chaining” is already well known in computing, it’s just that most of humans are right on the front steps of computer science and haven’t grasped that computers are teaching us about some very subtle aspects of Reality, if we’d only be quiet long enough to pick up on it.

The difference between the host and contestant and two doors, two outcomes being a 50-50 and a host and contestant grappling with three doors is just this little matter of event-chaining which is not well-described in spiritual matters.

Chains matter immensely, however.

Accident chains, specifically:  And there’s a little form you can use to see how what people do results in “accidents” but this is almost always a series of chained events.  Which gets us back to the Monty Hall Problem in statistics.

Accident-chains are very big in aeronautics, too, by the way.

The usefulness of Bayes is that it views the world (even after Monty opens a door) as still being part of an event-chain.  The choice problem does not “reframe” just because it now looks like a two factor two-door choice.

So in addition to everything else you do this morning, on your way to work, see what happens when you go through the implications of this statement:

“If by opening a door, the Monty Hall Problem results in a pro-change shift of adds, does that mean that other factors in Life may be working the same way in my life?

Or, as I got to on Saturday…

“Am I facing a Bayes choice problem because I am fighting a Firewire from hell problem in my studio while I have the Secret Project still pending?  Is Universe trying to bias me (my activity choices) from my natural inclination to do one thing (fix the damn Firewire problem) before doing the other (finish the Secret Project Server mods)?”

I decided (since Universe wasn’t budging on the Firewire problem) that I’d move to the Linux problem (hairy Squid proxy issues related to mixing content from eth0 and wlan1 in a secure way.

I should know in a week, or less how this will work out, but in the meantime, it’s yet another one of those “off moments in Life of George” when I frame something up (Universe shoving me this way or that) and the next day, UPS has left us a book which we happen to open and which happens to frame the Monty Hall problem and that happens to deal with how this Universe pushes topic.

So the ponder is (if Elaine and my sensibilities about reframing aren’t correct) Just how many discrete chain-steps removed are we from the set-up for the game of Life?

And then (depending on how far back you can see Bayes at work) is there any probability or is Free Will really not more of an illusion that we previously have been led to believe.

Or (weirder still) is this just a further hint verging on mathematical evidence that Life is a Big Game and we are nothing more than The Bayesian Blind” not being able to see back up the causative chains far enough in real-time “play” to really grasp more personal control over the Outcome of the Game?

I wrote this on Sunday immediately before firing up the Linux server.  I’ll make a note in a few hours on how programming went (sparing you the details).  The question before me is “Is finishing the Linux project a key “event-chain” that needs to be done right now?

Read More

We’re not big on spending money foolishly, but the net is afire with crazy talk about Ebola, risks, and what people are planning to actually do about it.

Therefore, this morning we will go through the basic systems of Life (all seven of them) and work though a common-sense prepping plan – one that we put into operation on Wednesday when the word of the confirmed case in Dallas was making the rounds.

What we’ll focus on today is the concept of “dual use.”  In other words, what are the disease isolation tools that you will have use for no matter what and what future purchases that you’ll need in the coming year, or two, can be moved up to present day purchases?

Read More

Before we get into our usual dose of economic news and trying to make a buck in a world-gone-mad, we should begin with a huge WTF for CDC officials.

As you can see in this video from YouTube, it appears that unprotected workers were involved in washing down the sidewalk outside the residence in Dallas where Patient Zero was; a sidewalk where  P-0 had reportedly puked…

This is getting huge traction on the net this morning as people are asking what is going on?

Oh, and the apartment sanitizing crew for the apartment has been turned away reports CNN.

While the TV talking-heads are assuring us that all is OK with this, we offer this extract from the Public Health Agency of Canada which has a useful summary of Ebola data here.

PHYSICAL INACTIVATION: Ebola are moderately thermolabile and can be inactivated by heating for 30 minutes to 60 minutes at 60°C, boiling for 5 minutes, or gamma irradiation (1.2 x106 rads to 1.27 x106 rads) combined with 1% glutaraldehyde ^{Footnote 10 Footnote 48 Footnote 50}. Ebolavirus has also been determined to be moderately sensitive to UVC radiation ^{Footnote 51}.

SURVIVAL OUTSIDE HOST: Filoviruses have been reported capable to survive for weeks in blood and can also survive on contaminated surfaces, particularly at low temperatures (4°C) ^{Footnote 52 Footnote 61}. One study could not recover any Ebolavirus from experimentally contaminated surfaces (plastic, metal or glass) at room temperature ^{Footnote 61}.  In another study, Ebolavirus dried onto glass, polymeric silicone rubber, or painted aluminum alloy is able to survive in the dark for several hours under ambient conditions (between 20 and 250C and 30–40% relative humidity) (amount of virus reduced to 37% after 15.4 hours), but is less stable than some other viral hemorrhagic fevers (Lassa) ^{Footnote 53}. When dried in tissue culture media onto glass and stored at 4 °C, Zaire ebolavirus survived for over 50 days ^{Footnote 61}. This information is based on experimental findings only and not based on observations in nature. This information is intended to be used to support local risk assessments in a laboratory setting.

A study on transmission of ebolavirus from fomites in an isolation ward concludes that the risk of transmission is low when recommended infection control guidelines for viral hemorrhagic fevers are followed ^{Footnote 64}. Infection control protocols included decontamination of floors with 0.5% bleach daily and decontamination of visibly contaminated surfaces with 0.05% bleach as necessary.

I will let you make up your own mind based on the data from a source believed reliable.  (If you can’t trust Canada, who can you trust?)

All of which gets us around to the next shocker:  We’ve learned from a non-federal government source that there are only two labs currently testing Ebola samples.  One is the State health department lab in Austin and the other is at CDC headquarters.

This official (in  a comparably-sized city to Dallas) tells me officials are trying to decide if they should set up local testing in his city.  There are two sides to it:  CDFC wants to maintain control on the one hand, but if that adds time-delay into the mix, then that’s a serious thing.

And, as mentioned yesterday, CDC was real “late to the party” getting training materials out to US hospitals; October 1 when we’ve known it’s coming seems inexcusable.

Meantime, the WaPo reports that four people have been quarantined and over 100 may have had contact withy P-0.

And if the training screw-up and wash-down questions aren’t bad enough, the CDC chief is supporting the corporate line when he says “We can’t shut down borders.”

And that is another pant load of crap.  Of course we can shut down all our borders, it’s just that we’re such a lazy-ass weak-willed, corp-whipped, sissified country we don’t have the will to do what’s needed.  Political correctness rules the Ebola response…

Which is why I am pessimistic on future prospects.  I’ll bite my public tongue…

Here’s a source for the plane flight trips patient-zero was on.  This should have been out on the 28th, but don’t let me get started on how slow information kills in situations like this.

Our Peoplenomics.com report tomorrow is “Ebola Prepperdemic: Keeping Ahead of the Curve.”  More than anything, we’re focused on how to minimize contact and getting ready for possible isolation.

    

About That Jobs Report

The market was already primed to open up 70 points before the jobs report came out…so here’s what the investor community was looking for:

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 248,000 in September, and the unemployment rate declined to 5.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services, retail trade, and health care. Household Survey Data In September, the unemployment rate declined by 0.2 percentage point to 5.9 percent.

Read More

Please accept this in lieu of our usual “Coping” section this morning.  This is more the flavor of a Peoplenomics report, but since we are doing through Ebola trigger points and preps in tomorrow’s report, I wanted to share some perspective on what’s ahead for the economy.

The value of the old Beechcrate is showing up this weekend as we’re going to pop up to Oklahoma to spend some time with Robin (and Mrs.) Landry.

I appreciate you don’t give a rip about my comings and goings (except that it it interesting that the trip with tail wind tomorrow morning should clock in at 1:53 of flying versus about 6-hours for driving).

What you like do care about is the reason. 

Both in our Peoplenomics charts and in Robin’s extensive work using both Elliott wave counts and regression channels, the stock market is in an extremely precarious position.

We both has a very good handle on the “long wave” elements of it.  Here, the short version is that a collapse into a 1930’s-style event looms larger than life.  It’s just a matter of identifying what the “nominal” cause will be.

As explained in yesterday’s column, there’s been no appreciable dialing-back of debt, just more promises and cross-insurance to keep things from falling apart.

So the focus of this weekend’s working session is “When?”

There are two general cases:  One is a continuing “muddle through” where we slog along until the Fed bumps up rates a tiny bit (they’ve been yammering about how this has got to be coming for months, now). 

Under this scenario, we have a decline here (1,900 on the S&P?) and it possibly could decline to as low as 1,740.  If that’s how coming months work out, then we would expect there to be one more absolute hum-dinger of a blow-off top.

That’s the best case.

The worst case is what happens if the markets continue to slide and wipe out critical support at 1,740 on the S&P.

If THAT comes around, we’ll be in a  position of having all the modern risks of pandemic disease at the same time as we get a mega-collapse and replay of the Great Depression of 1929-1941.

This latter case is interesting because of the “mood control” of the last Depression.  Remember, The Communications Act of 1934 was how government made sure that corporate (responsible/compliant control) of mass media of the time (radio) would play out.

However you want to characterize it, the result of government machinations during the Great Depression was the wholesale distribution of Keynesian Theory which today would be more properly labeled “corpgov” based on what we know.

The Great Depression brought with it an opportunity to enact sensible concentration of wealth programs to prevent the cyclical collapse which stands before us, either sooner, or later.

This happens because in a Great Depression, the One Percent are mostly wiped out.  They have spent almost 50-years accumulating wealth.  But it has cost us dearly, in that working people’s share of income has fallen to fund those at the top.

A good discussion of socialism’s resurgence in the 1930’s may be found over here, and in many ways it parallels the activist climate of today.  Which is being managed and manipulated, if case you hadn’t noticed.

Naturally, socialism isn’t the answer, but then again, neither is ultra-capitalism – those policies that allow capital to accrue in the hands of the very few.  It is the cyclical re-accumulation of wealth that triggers collapse as when working people wake up and demand part of their due in the face of deteriorating personal balance sheets that revolutionary talk arises.

I note that Marx and the other “great socialists” were offspring of upper strata families and didn’t have a real hands-on knowledge of work.

“Karl’s father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education; he became a lawyer and lived a relatively wealthy and middle-class existence, with his family owning a number of Moselle vineyards. Prior to his son’s birth, and to escape the constraints of anti-semitic legislation, Herschel converted from Judaism to the Protestant Christian denomination of Lutheranism, the predominant sect in Germany and Prussia at the time, taking on the German forename of Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.^[“

Young Karl was privately educated, by Heinrich Marx, until 1830, when he entered Trier High School, whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father. By employing many liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government. Subsequently, police raided the school in 1832, and discovered that literature espousing political liberalism was being distributed among the students. Considering the distribution of such material a seditious act, the authorities instituted reforms and replaced several staff during Marx’s attendance

Marx skipped military service and after a seven-year engagement married a baroness.

His cohort, Frederich Engels was another one who didn’t do well at real work:

At 17 years of age, young Frederick had dropped out of high school due to family circumstances. He spent a year in Barmen. In 1838, his father sent the young man to work as a nonsalaried office clerk at a commercial house in Bremen.^[6][7] His parents expected that he would follow his father into a career in business. His revolutionary activities disappointed them

In 1841, Engels joined the Prussian Army as a member of the Household Artillery. He was assigned to Berlin, where he attended university lectures and began to associate with groups of Young Hegelians.

Read More