George Ure

If this morning’s column turns out to be a bit shorter than usual – and missing a dandy feature like an incredible Wujo story which I had planned for this morning (damn!) it’s all because we had a power outage out here at the end of the string last night which took out the power supply in the main server.  I can restore from backups, or just write this morning’s column, so I picked the latter.  You’ll have to come back Thursday for the good stuff.

Normally, when something like this happens, it’s no more than a half-hour worth of nuisance because that’s about how long it takes to tear open the box, toss in the power supply, and reboot.  However, I didn’t have a spare power supply sitting on the shelf and…after three years of non-stop work, this one finally gave out.

Keen lesson in here:  Usually I have a space 600-650 watt supply on hand…but the last one hadn’t hit the “time to buy one of those” order (they’re not free).  So instead of our usual operating post, this morning’s column is coming from the Win 8.1 laptop and it seems to be working just fine, although we won’t known until this is actually published.

Message:  If you’re a serious computer user, a spare power supply is something (besides some plugin  hard drives) to keep on hand.

I know it may sound absurd to have a laptop in a metal garbage can (which is where this one lives) but in the event of something really bad – like an EMP attack on the US – odds are fair that a lot of cars will keep working.  But it will be the “hidden electronics” – the stuff which really glues modern life together (routers, power supplies and such) — that you may need some stock of.

Of course, the logical question is WHY would you want a computer at the End of the World?  Well, lots of people who prep have all kinds of stuff on hard drives which they really need to have printed out.  Without the hard copy, you’re “electron dependent” and that means when the power goes out, you could be cut off from your library.

Which then gets us to the matter of printers.  I just ordered a Brother HL-2270DW Compact Laser Printer with Wireless Networking and Duplex for about a hundred bucks.  Since I have hundreds of manuals on everything under the Sun, I thought it would be useful to print everything off and have backups on paper.

The wireless is a no-brainer.  But the duplex printing is really key.  Duplex (meaning prints both sides) cuts the paper use in half, which seems like it ought to pay for itself in short order.  Plus, the current Brother printer I have has been blazingly fast and still seems to work OK…it’s just I don’t want to manually flip pages.    Elaine has an older ink jet which takes 31-hours per page in draft mode.  She wins a new printer.

Weighing on the Weather

Our consulting war gamer did a fine analysis of correlations between the lack of hurricanes this year and cold winters.  But not much, if anything to be gleaned there.  1904 and 1913 (*if memory serves) were the only ones.  The original email is on the dead server which I need to operate on this morning.

And then came a dispatch from our Jakarta Bureau Chief

Hiya chief!

Weighing in on the weather:

For many years, I have (had) noted that everytime a TS or hurricane came through Houston, the following winter featured snow.  In ’72, we got back-to-back storms in July or August, as I recall.  The following January/February,we had feet of snow lasting a couple of weeks.  If you know Houston, you know that’s about as rare as down on frogs.  But the pattern holds up.  Snow after Katrina/Rita, snow after Carla, snow after Alicia, etc.

As for the feller writing in about the trees not turning, it’s called Indian Summer, though the term is no longer permissible and so most folks have forgetting about it.  Comes around every five years or so.  Never much of a worry down in Houston, where everything stays green until mid-December, when the leaves all die at once and fall off in clumps.  But always heard my northern cousins (Dallas area) talking about it.

For what it’s worth.  Could be worse.  Could be hot and humid all year ’round.  Enjoy what’cha got!

The Indonesian Bureau Managing Editor,

Bernard Grover

Hmmm…a thought provoking point there on Indian summers, which means I shall henceforth be referring to them as Zombie Summers…zombies being the modern catch-all for what we no longer dare speak which is nuts, but that’s ‘Merrica for you…

Oh and here’s an email on that point from reader Joe K…

George,

I’m an urbansurvival freebie blog reader for a couple of years now, reading from central Argentina.  This is my first email to you, in response to Saturday’s post.  Very intriguing to see those thought processes develop in you.

Good call on the evolution of “the Others,” now being represented by zombies.  But I still find your dismissing of this evolution as being about PoliticalCorrectness to be incomplete: the zombie Others represent our fear of being compromised into a life of stupidity and drudgery, and of those who have already succumbed. 
Wheres the noble savages were slaughtered in support of modernity – out with the old and in the with new –  killing zombies questions modernity and what it produces.

Thanks for your work!

Joseph

Yet another sage observation.  I know there’s a billion dollar business in there somewhere.  I have to come up with a way to monetize zombies.

Look,  if the humane societies can raise millions in support of dogs that bite people and promote the cult of picking up warm, steamy lumps of poop with plastic bags in foul weather, people will buy damn near anything.  Yet, we let these cult members vote! Is this a great country or what? 

I wonder if Adopt a Zombie has potential?

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‘Come Watson, you must see this!”

“See what, old man?”

“Behold the difficulty in  which the Moriarty administration now finds itself!  After a shameless charade of a shutdown, to they now risk interference with high-level trading models by reports economic data due some weeks back, or will they delay the inevitable until next month’s reports?”

“You mean with 83% of workers still on the job, they haven’t had the numbers in their back pockets all this time?”

“It matters not!  All that matters at this instant is when, not how, Moriarty will release the data!  Get my mouse, Watson, we’re on the click!”

And so, as the great criminal enterprise known as runaway corporatism begins this morning, one of the oddest of problems of all to ponder, as we go into the weekend, is when all of the missing economic data from the shutdown period will be unslung and flung on the Street.

Natürlich, Ures truly is not the only one eyeing this Case of the Missing Data.  So’s the New York Times.

While the market should (by my trading model that I so studiously ignore, and thus lose money in spite of its being ridiculously right) tack on another major rally today or Monday, the seat belts should be fastened about Tuesday when the last month’s unemployment data is revealed.

Not that it will tell us much, mind you:  The Labor Department is highly expert at turning sow’s ears into silk purses.  However, the long-term observer will focus not just on the “headline number” but on the underlying collapse in manufacturing (the jobjack number) and the labor participation rate.

The really interesting confluence of data will come when the CPI figures come out on October 30th and then the next unemployment numbers are due the following week.

In the meantime, for Peoplenomics subscribers, we’ll do our fearless review of West Coast Port data tomorrow morning.  The brothers and sisters of the ILWU didn’t walk out and so we have at least some guidance available there.

In the meantime, the Fed H.6 Money Stocks report reveals they’re is goosing M1 and M2 at an 8.2% print rate, and if prices aren’t keeping up, the reason is whatcha call deflation.

But that’s not the whole story.  If you look at the Fed’s H.3 report, you’ll see the banksters’ reserve balances are up (very roughly) a HUGE 60.2% from the same period a year ago.  We’re obviously in the wrong business or just need a rich uncle.

Are the problems now over?  Well, no.  Lots of experts are skeptical that anything different in the way of an outcome will happen when it comes around again, shortly.

In the meantime, euphoria and fall are having a grand battle of it.

More after….oh, you know…

This is Sick Dept.

The Obamacare story just keeps getting better and better.  Now, we’re seeing reports that insurers are getting the wrong data.

Seeing how F/Ued this is really makes me appreciate Microsoft a whole bunch more.  My Windows 8 updated worked like a champ out of the box.  For a hell of a lot more money, seems to me the error rate in O/care is not something that would play in the halls of Redmond, know what I mean?

In the real (i.e. nongovernmental) world of software, we do things like look at the user experience, redundant data checks, test release candidates, and oh, yeah, have customer support that can actually answer questions.

This is getting just rucking feediculous.

Damaging Doctor-Patient Relations, Too

A side effect of the evolving, Obamacare-driven distrust of the insurance-industry backed premium-care system is a deterioration in doctor-patient relations, as I can attest to personally, since I went in for my periodic checkup this week.

Since I still own me (not my straw man, though) I think I can tell you this story without myself suing me for violation the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act privacy regs.  However, I don’t put me, suing myself, entirely aside since we live in that kind of a world now, but here’s my personal healthcare experience:

Went to the doctor and I said, “Do I need to do anything about this [small] navel hernia?”

We’d talked in the past about it…it hasn’t changed any, and his answer was doctorly spot-on:

“Well, if it starts to bother you sure, but it looks stable and lots of people go to the funeral parlor with them…”

My doc is a straight-shooter, but thanks to O/care and the healthsurance scammmers (which is what I call it when different carriers have different rates for the same operations, which in God knows any other industry would be felonious price-fixing) I found myself asking very difficult questions on the way home:

• Did my doc do my a favor by keeping me from getting technical unnecessary surgery?
• Is he secretly watching the debate between webbing and re-sewing approaches to navel hernias?  My long-life friend gets an occasional twinge from his still…hmmm…
• Did he recommend not worrying about it because I would likely have signed up for Medicare and thus, my surgery would up Medicare costs?
• Or??? Was he protecting my Big Insurance Company which doesn’t pay a dime until I hit the $5,000 mark annually but then covers everything up to $2-million a year?
• Was he simply marking type to see if it changes any more over time?

Once upon a time, when you went to the doc and asked him a question, you got a simple answer. But with increasing public awareness of how the accountants are going to do for medicine what they did for American manufacturing, well, sh*t, now I just don’t know what to think or believe.  You know about doctor junkets from the pharma boyz, right?  Toss that in, too. 

He’s a serious workaholic, my doc, who I can’t even talk into a quick 9-holes of golf…with me paying…which is about as tough a problem-solving option as I’ve ever come up with.  I figured on asking about the 5th green, or so, to see if it could screw up his short game.  But he’s too busy to play free golf so you KNOW all this medical froth is ruining relations and working docs to death in the process, right?

In the meantime, I’m being very careful not to lift weights over 100 pounds or so.  Although I maintain my sharp mental focus and intellectual acuity by vigorously working out with smaller weights of, oh, about 1.5 ounces at a time, PRN.

We’re on Roaming

At least in a manner of speaking as our Winnipeg news analyst notes:

Dear Mr. Ure,

Do all roads lead through Rome? Those who prefer a mountain view to the seven hills may wish to embark upon an easy search of publicly available whois records. This is not investment advice. 

Who, Me?  Dept.

Edward Snowden says he took no secret files to Russia with him.  But, lemme ask you this:  Did he say anything about located elsewhere servers?

I can overlook this one:  After all, the kid was raised in a country where the President was saying “Depends what you mean by sex…”:  So, I guess, “take with him” could be rather narrowly defined, too.

Traffic Advisories

It’s a good thing our consulting client in the East Bay doesn’t have to deal with this crap most mornings:  Bay Area Rapid Transit is out on strike this morning.

Soooo… if you live, in say, Oakland, and see yon sign on the BART website, it may be faster to swim than drive around.  And if I were a cop,; I betcha the whole monthly quota could be bagged on the 280 coming up from San Joser (sic) later on this morning.

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Thank you Congress.  By running back to the printing press you have jammed up the price of gold more than $35 bucks (some are excitedly saying $50), which is fine by us, but is this really the rational thing to be doing in here?

With stock futures pointing to a slight pullback at the open this morning, down may 50-75 points after yesterday’s nosebleed-inducing rally, there I was by the phone when long-term reader Nick called.

“So, George, let me see if I have this right:  Congress needed to pass the debt ceiling so that we could keep paying our creditors, right?”

Well, uh, yeah….

“So wouldn’t it be safe to call this just one big Ponzi Scheme – you know – like the one Charles Ponzi set up where the new “investors” coming in had their money paying people their “returns”?”

I bet you know what happened next, don’t you?  I spent the next few half-hour on the phone with him explaining that the difference is that when “crime” is done by government, (not Chuck Ponzi) under the color of law like this, it’s call monetary policy.  It’s theft, but Theft Lite.  It’s good for you.  (“Git those hands back up where I kin see ‘em pardnah…”)

OK, just more smoke and mirrors, since there are some who argue that there never was a crisis in the first place.

You mean theater to perp the bigger shake-down?  Gee, gosh, golly, look surprised!  Emergency! Emergency!  Everyone run from Street!

If you just went out back next week, printing up hundred-dollar bills when you happened to  overdraw your checking account, you’d be a guest at Uncle’s (we’ll leave the light on for you) Iron Bar Hotel.  The main difference, of course, being that Congress has an Army, and consequently taxes (including Obamacare) is magically not an insurance industry shakedown (look up protection racket).  Instead, it’s national health care.

Of course, any competent business man can see that this just “kicks the can down the road” and as of this morning I think our next attempt at actuarial suicide will come in just 73-days.

Still, the Markets ought to now roll on to new heights, at least until the called-back federal workers getting a 16-17 day paid vacation (for not going to work) in this shows up on people’s screen.

All of which sets up furloughed workers who do get paid with the future prospects of getting almost four months a year of vacation.  Here’s how:  Say you’ve been around a good while and you get four weeks of regular vacation.  Maybe you could roll up some comp time and get that up to five weeks, right? 

Now, let’s say that this kick-the-can crap (coming back shortly, remember)  can be scheduled to occur four times per year.  That would make it…uh…64-calendar days or about 9.1 weeks, which when added to the five weeks of earned vacation is 14.1 weeks.  OK, it’s only 3.68 weeks of vacation.

If I had suggested this to you six months ago, you’d have been right to call Ures truly a raving-mad lunatic.

Now, I’m an economic policy realist and I’m kicking myself six-ways to Sunday for not getting a cushy federal job back in the day.

But it certainly explains a lot of past government hiring actions, like those thousands of new employees at IRS and DHS, for example.  My theory, waiting only to be proven out by events, is that the federal government won’t really be doing any more actual work.

They’ll just be beefing up to handle all the vacation time.  God, we’re generous with all that free tax loot, ain’t we?.  Makes me ever so much more anxious (even eager) to send in my Q4 tax payment in January.  You too, I bet?

Oh, here’s another meaty morsel in all this:  Mitch McConnell cut his state a fat hog – to the tune of $3-billion in earmarked funds for Kentuckians, as part of this..

Best government money can buy.

It’s just too bad that voters can hold multiple state residencies, otherwise I’d be inclined to take up residence in California. Nevada, and Kentucky, just so I could vote against the folks who jammed this through, rather than fixing our underlying (we’re bankrupt, right?) problem.

The way I figure it, about 3/4th of the senate needs to be shown the door at the next election and a like fraction on the other side of Ponzgress.  Which leaves only the matter of keeping the country from being repo’ed out from under us by corporations (and China) between now and then.

Reader Charles figures it this way:

…All that was done is the Clowns all crowded back in the car to drive in a circle in the Main Ring and get out to do it all over again several weeks along!

Bread and what?

Look, if this was really such a big deal, how come the president is waiting until this morning to sign this and get things back on track?  I know if you or I were in the White House, we’d be up till 3 AM, or whatever it took, to get ‘er done.

So the urgency is, how shall I say, a little suspect at a minimum.

Who’s Healthy?

Meantime, that blip on television of a House stenographer is out and about on the ‘net.  In case you missed it, this woman got up from here House job writing down what was going on and blurted out:

“

“The greatest deception here is this is not one nation under God. It never was. Had it been, it would not have been. No. It would not have been. The Constitution would not have been written by Free Masons. They go against God. You cannot serve two masters.

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As promised, reader Bill (he’s about the 200th Bill around here, so it’s easy to get confused) sent in his WuJo experience:.  Wujo being, if you’re a first-time reader, those events which DO happen but logically should NOT happen…

A couple of weeks ago, my wife was sitting at the head of the kitchen table going through the Sunday coupon insert. Sitting at the other head of the table was my mother and under the table was the dog. On the chair to her right (a 90 degree angle) was a plastic shopping bag that she was putting in the pages that she didn’t want so that they would eventually go in the garbage. I was going to eat my bowl of cereal for breakfast, so I took the bag and put it on the back of what is now my chair, as I was eating, she was still putting the unwanted pages into the bag. At some point, she stopped and we were talking, I don’t remember what we were talking about. With our small conversation over, she returned to her coupons, she reached for her bag and it was gone from the back of my chair. We looked all around and found it on the floor, behind my wife and to her left. It was laying there sort of like if you took a bag in your left hand, put it behind your back and dropped it. We were both amazed and sitting there puzzled. In no point in time did anyone of the three of us (My wife, my mother nor me) got up or move and the dog was still laying on the floor under the table.

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Take me off your contact list, please.  The latest pisserlation (a revelation which causes you to get what?) is that the NSA – already seized by Gestapo-like management, is now ripping off your email address book contents, according to the Washington Post this morning.

What the article doesn’t get into, in much depth, is the why they’re doing it.

So here’s the deal, down and dirty:  The intel agencies (Stasi lites?) believe that they can build up a who profile on every single human being in America by bits and pieces without outright breaking the law.

You need to closely study the Wikipedia entry on “social mapping”

In social geography a social map is the cartographic, twodimensional representation of social institutions or processus projected on a plane. The first social maps date from the early 20th century. A recent example is the mapping of the residences of U.S. Facebook users and their social links [1].

In marketing a social map is a visualized analysis of a digital identity of a person, brand or company. A social map shows exactly where a digital identity is created, formed or discussed and sets each element in context and proportions.

These social map created an intense discussion about digital reputation and digital identities. For companies a so-called Corporate Social Map is still very new and an unusual methodology, but also very effective and meaningful.

Conspicuously missing is what it means to government and law enforcement.

Basically, it takes guilt by association (an address book entry) and attempts to electronically morph it into probable cause.  

Since everyone on earth is connected to everyone else on earth, the wet dream here is to develop software that will ‘see through’ the six-degrees of separation’ problem and will turn everyone on a contact list into a suspect.

Of course, by weighting other contacts into the mix, we can see how it might, in theory, actually work.  But, the downfall is that the digital underbelly of everyone is exposed…except for the HMFICs who are running their own game.  Yes – the same guys who talk about –  but don’t deliver what?  TRANSPARENCY.

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