Coping: With the Global, Planetary, Screw-fest

I was about half-way through an interview with Jake Fox at Black Tower Radio up in (is that you?) Rochester when the global, repetitive nature of the human condition hit me like a ton of bricks.

Jake had made the mistake of asking a logical question and I’m not sure he was prepared for an answer of the length delivered.

I don’t do a lot of radio interviews lately – just enough to get back into my “talker mode” from the broadcasting days now and then.  Heck: One question and I can go on seemingly forever, or until the engineers turn the transmitter off at 3 AM for maintenance.

I figure this ought to make me a marvelously popular radio show guess because with one well-chosen question, a host can send out for a pizza, detail their car out front, or take a good nap.

But it wasn’t the length of the answer so much as the image the flew by as I was speaking that I caught and wanted to share with you this morning.

The answer I was giving morphed into a rap on why the planet is (more or less) screwed.

Went something like this:

The reason that kids today aren’t buying homes is so many are looking at the world around us and asking “Why would I bring an innocent child into a world in these conditions?”

So demand for Housing ain’t what it used to be.

Except everyone in government knows that without growth, the whole economy implodes because growing an economy is the one thing that (crony) capitalism actually does well.

Knowing this dirty little secret, government does what it does best:  Makes up money and grabs more authority.  The attack on cash is just a convenience for government to grab every nickel they can.  Little to do with terrorism or crime, but you knew that…

The growth problem is why there is a new real estate loan I heard about the other day:  It would allows first time home buyers a chance to buy a home with 3% down.  97% of the purchase would go on an ultra low 30-year mortgage.

Off site reference read about Conventional 97 Loans here.

Don’t have a down payment?  Fine.  This new program will give you 3% for a down as a second mortgage.

But now here’s the making up money part.  After making your payments on the second for some period (like 3 to 5 years) then the second is forgiven and you effectively would have gotten a new house on something right next door to zero down.

Except  that I’m not too optimistic about this since people today are not likely to actually have money for this because of student loan debt. 

I trust you saw the note the other day about how student loan debt was heading for the 20-trillion range in a few years and will collapse the economy on its own weight?

But that’s the way things are because so many people have been pushed at gunpoint (If it’s an IRS declaration, it might as well be) into buying Health Care Insurance./

So we begin to see the awful pattern start to emerge here:  We are not able to sell a lot of whatever the Next Big Thing is because people don’t have homes and home equity.

They don’t have homes because their money is going to insurance companies.

And even when that’s done, there is the series of student loans that have millions buried. 

And once all that’s done, we’re back to realistically looking at the world and seeing infinitely increasing taxes, continuously watered-down money, and now let’s toss Zika virus into the the great testicular roulette wheel of Life.

Somewhere, I paused for a breath and the topic went on to other matters.

One of the “learnings of the day” was that all of the rally in the stock market Wednesday can be attributed to the drop in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.

Yeah, I know…that’s not supposed to work that way…”strong dollar” has been one of the silliest political idiocies ever uttered.

What that does is means we have been paying artificially low prices for imported goods, which in turn has resulted in cheap energy and cheap goods from China (and a lack of plants to make things being built in America.).

There is, under the hypercomplexity model, not end of clever ways to apply economic patches, work-arounds, and hot-fixes.

But, in the End, all we are doing is trying to keep a Swiss-cheesed inner tube pumped up by putting on patch after patch after patch.

No one is talking about how the layer of patches is now several feet thick all over the inner tube.  Instead, they utter even crazier ideas like how a Constitutional Convention might be able to “build us a new tire…”

Sadly, when we talk about things like building a new tire, the odds become nearly 100-percent that it won’t be as good as the old tire.

When you step back mentally, far enough, what fades into focus is this idea that the whole World is evolving like a Microsoft operating system.

I mean, the idea is great…but it’s going to need a few patches, maybe a service pack or three, a heaping side-order of hot-fixes, and for those terminally incapable of thinking life a software engineer, a bevy of Mr. Fixit’s to attempt to put things right.

I’m pretty sure if Bill Gates, or whoever is running the joint up in Redmond these days, was running the World, that we would be on Service Pack 2 with at least 3 patches for security features and a whole bunch of new drivers to install.

And that’s why the presidential election is such a disappointment on the republican side.  The R’s don’t even have a Release Candidate yet.

And have the democratic Release Candidates could be indicted and taken off the table.

We live in a world where, like God, we’re busily creating computers in our own image.

As we look around the sorely F/U’ed world today, we can’t fault the Jews, Muslims, and Christians going off on their end times search for one very simple yet profound reasons:

The World needs a major Update not just a pile of new hot-fixes.

Why heck, everyone who’s sane is “looking for an update” and can’t say as I blame ‘em.

As for religions as business models, have you ever wondered how they only release a service pack every 2,000 years or so?

– – – – – – –

There.  A short column for a change.  One that seems to make sense.  Don’t look for that to be a trend…

I’m off to work on  the next chapter of “Peoplenomics:  Second Depression Handbook” while there’s still time.  It’s appearing for Peoplenomics subscribers one chapter at a time as written.  The book will be along one of these days, but a month or three near as I can SWAG.

Getting Older – Ham Radio is still a Pleasure

Late this month, I will be having a birthday as #67 shows up.  Been a fine ride and I am in no hurry to leave.

Most important thing about Life I’ve learned, by the way, is this:

If you live a life where you’re honest with yourself and color inside the lines of society, you don’t have to every look back over your shoulder.  And you can keep an eye on what’s ahead.

Yesterday, my friend the retired Major who’s been a pal since we were both age 3 and some fraction sent me a marvelous book:  Reflections Transmission Lines and Antennas (Radio amateur’s library).

He’ll be coming down to visit around the first of Tax Month, or so.  Since we are both fairly serious about the hobby, we will likely be putting up a few antennas, taking the tower down for fresh cable up to the beam antenna.  Yes, even LMT-400 ages and I need to do some welding on the tower, too.

We didn’t get into ham radio until age 13 in any serious way.  In 1963, however, we were busily assembling ham transmitters from kits.  For me an Eico 753 kit with factory-made Hallicrafters HA-5 VFO.  He was more a Heathkit man; HR-10 receiver, DX-60, and the matching VFO.

Over the years, we’ve had different ham radio adventures.  But some of them are really pretty neat.

His son (driving C-17’s for Uncle presently)  married the daughter of a construction magnate who lives not far from Gig Harbor, WA.  And being a smart fellow, he’s picked up a ham ticket to keep a  handy-talkie for prepped for  “…in the event of an actual emergency…”

The construction magnet and my bud were able to use little handy-talkies as the CM pre-ran an ultra-marathon course a while back.  That course was from Ellensburg, WA down to Yakima along the Wenatchee River.  The radio only had 50% coverage though because the ultra-marathon course was hilly and there weren’t a lot of repeaters around.

Fast forward to this weekend:  the construction magnate will be running a warm-up marathon up in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. But the radio coverage should be nearly 100% on this one due to the repeaters up on top of Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island.

People tend to forget that “emergency communications” is this flexible.  But it does have non-emergency applications…and this is a fine example.

OK, off to the day’s To-Do list…while we await the Planetary Service Pack.  But don’t hold your breath.

Write when you break-even

George   george@ure.net