Things were about flat when I checked this morning.

Gold has clawed its way back up to $1,100.   Everyone and his uncle is now playing the stupid game of “who can make the most inane forecast” now.  The winner says $250 gold is out there in our future, but so is the Sun blinking out.  Just not in our lifetime, in any event.

Oil is back up to almost $50 on the international markets.

When oil begins to firm, I look around for ISIS hype and sure enough, there it is this morning in the report that “ISIS Poses a Bigger Threat to U.S. Than Al Qaeda, FBI Chief Says.”

Yes sir, we’d like to thank UncleGov for such generous funding of these dangerous start-ups.  People don’t like to be reminded that we funded AQ to fight Russia (and oh, by the by so Western mobs could get the heroin crop) and ISIS was funded to bring down president Assad in Syria.

And SecState John Kerry is facing some questions about reported “side deals” with Iran as part of the woefully bad Iran deal.  I mean a 21-day notice for a snap inspection?  Who’s kidding who?

I expect some big breaking news will have to happen not later than the early east coast news shows today, though..

That’s because Barack Obama is where?> Off to Kenya…ancestral homelands.

Which leaves us where?

Well, going back to bed, frankly.

Global markets are acting nicely and even the Athens composite is up, and that’s a market which lost half its value in the last year.

The Greek parliament has completed a second round of “stick your head in the noose” for the bankster class.

Meantime, the most influential  think tank is Greece says thanks to all this hosing of consumers, look for Greece to fall back into recession.  I should send these guys my resume…since that’s been clear since round one of the bankster demands and hold-up.  Figure they could use my help.

New weekly jobless claims hit the lowest level in 40-years today.  Didn’t move the market though, since everyone and their pet cat knows this is a terribly noisy data series.

When in Doubt, Legislate

I love stories like the one about how a bipartisan bill has been introduced to make it more of a crime to mess about with .gov internet assets.

Just one problem:  We’ve already seen 22-million OPM records hacked, so WTF?

Leading from behind, eh?

The Daily Distractomat

Lemme see:  Sandra Bland is still dead.  But no one has figured out why she died in jail, though there’s this voicemail now…

Cos in L.A.

Read More

Oh, it’s still coming, alright.

We’ve talked about this before.

Should software be immortal?

Got a fair bit of personal history with this, too, so let me explain what’s going on.

It All Starts With Software

In 2002-2003. Ures truly was part of a turnaround team at a better-than-decent software company.

It was in the higher education space; we increased sales from 6-million when I started to about 19-million when I left, and I got deeply enmeshed in the problems of growing a software company which is in the workflow solutions space.

Let’s begin at the front-end.

In 1980, or so, almost zero companies used computers effectively.

When I was running a broadcasting college, circa 1986, it occurred to me that a huge reduction in paperwork could be accomplished by building the “Electric Railroad” around the office.

Up until that part of history,  everything ran on paper. 

When you called the college to find out about classes, it went onto a piece of paper called a “lead slip,.”  This contained the name, phone number, age, and a few other basics about an applicant for school.

When the applicant came to the school for a tour and to meet with admissions staff (the sales part of school, dressed up so as not to scare people off) there was more paper.

Then there was testing, financial aid, student tracking of satisfactory academic progress, graduation, and placement efforts.  It all ate up an amazing amount of paper.

In 1986, or so, I built my first “electric railroad.”  Doing a gob of hand-coding and writing for one of the earliest Novell networks, thinking began to transform with amazing speed. 

Someone calling the school was entered into a database.  No one could delete records.  Honesty in sales increased 10-fold as did performance.

At the front desk, since the name and such was in the computer, the manual form was quickly adapted to the computer, and next thing you know, we were graduating students that we could track all the way through the program.  This was back in ‘89, or so.  I mean right down to which TV commercial on what station had gotten them to the school.

Fast-forward to 2002 and Ures truly is working on the design of such “electric railroad” workflow process software in the higher education space.  SQL, student loan processing, the whole process online.

That’s where we ran into the “hard reality of software” and it’s something not too many people talk about.

You see, when you’ve invent new – first ever – software, there is a large investment in the intellectual property development.  You need computers, architects, business use cases, implementation teams to replace the old paper system and so on.

The problem is, once you are done, there is no way to pay for development of the next big thing.  People who buy your software product want to own it outright so you get hooked – just as General Motors did – on something like the annual model, complete with planned obsolescence.

Advertising goes up, cost of software customer acquisition goes with it.  Saturation looms.

As always, I was exceptionally lucky.

The software program for the higher education sector had to include a substantial update each year because the US Department of Education was forever and always adding this, that, or the other requirement to their reporting.

I mean let’s face it, once upon a time, and it wasn’t that long ago, schools couldn’t tell you anything about the number of Pacific Islanders attending their school.  Now, thanks to computer software, there are reams of such reports available.

While trying to articulate where the business would have to go (which it did and still flourishes) I came up with the idea of the Evergreen Software Model.

This essentially says “Every year we will add this feature set (or in the case of education DFBMS software, we continued compliance and added features) in order to justify a recurring expense to the end user or client.”

Now, fast-forward to the release of Windows 10:  Sharp-eyed Bruce the Expat down in Ecuador, who is one of our best critics, sent me a cryptic note of warning about what’s in Windows 10:

You do know that windows 10 includes a feature that allows software vendors to charge annual fees for using the software installed on a windows 10 computer.

Read More

Oh, sure, you’re thinking “One of those places where old people go to die?”

No.

I’m  talking about the average American couple who has looked after their health a bit, has a paid-for home, and wants to live out life there for as long as possible.

What will in take to make a home “work” well into the 80’s and (with any luck) beyond?

Read More

Allow me to begin your week with a discussion of what really matters in this life:

Relative Value.

Remember last Thursday?  I headlined “Gold Heads Toward $1000.”

As is often the case, just a few days later it was like every pundit in the world had picked up on gold’s pending weakness…

It came back this morning, too:  Down to about $1,105 on some quotes I’ve been watching.

Not that it is anything to worry about, but it is terribly interesting on the theory side.

As you know, the U.S. currency has failed several times in our nation’s illustrious past.  We’ve seen the Continentals, the Greenbacks, the Silver Certificates, and the current Federal Reserve Notes, to name some of the major currency swaps.

In more normal times, Gold would not be in decline.  The U.S. Dollar, as you know, has been denuded of purchasing power to an embarrassing degree.

Read More

Time to think about doing away with insurance companies, I’m afraid.

Any time we have government telling us we MUST buy something, under penalty, whose bright idea was it to keep the middle-men involved to scam fat profits from the public which is REQUIRED to buy something?

That’s where our bottom line goes this morning, but along the way we will look at everything from Donald Trump’s rubbing shoulders with mobsters to the problem of exploitation of first people in Bolivia.

Read More

Here’s a good reason to get-thee’s arse to work:

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.3 percent in June on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Over the last 12 months, the all items index rose 0.1 percent before seasonal adjustment.

Read More

No, this doesn’t make me particularly happy to report.

But the price of gold today is down into the $1,143 region being down again as the US  dollar continues to sneak up on the Euro.  Passing parity is a possibility.

In the (excessively mental) World of George (WoG) we can derive an interesting number about gold by taking the current spot price of gold and dividing by the ratio of the Dollars to Euros.

Given around 0.9188 for the ratio and 1,143.70, we arrive at 1,244 ish for gold.

Now let’s do a thought experiment and see where this ratio might push gold if the dollar goes to parity with the Greecerators:  Obviously $1,143.70 at parity – or, if the dollar sinks to 0.80 (where it has been in the past) then gold should go up to well north of $1,429.

While you’re building spreadsheets to the moon, you can make other observations as well, notably that the interest rates are not yet jumping.

A check of the 10-year Treasury proxy over here says the interest rate is back down to 2.35% and it has every indication of beginning to fail to break higher.  Gold may be suggesting deflation to come…higher bond prices, and all that.

No, we’re not selling our “lone gold coin” (or the silver one, either) since we knew they wouldn’t be going much of anywhere until the Second Depression really hits in 2017-2018, or so and government has to slam the printing press.  Then they may soar, but there are now sure bets around, anymore.  Everything is arb’ed and hedged.  Honest prices are only in fairytales.

But for now, the opposite dynamic is in effect. 

The Fed has shut down the printing press (if you look at their H.6 money stocks report) and Janet Yellen is telling congress to keep the hell out of the Fed’s accounting books looking for “transparency.”

What seems to be going on behind the scene is that the Fed wants rates to go up.  Not too far – that would blow up the National Debt.

By killing the money printing festival, there will be less cheap money around and the bankster class will start to charge more and that will give the Fed the space it needs to raise.

But whether this dynamic will occur fast enough to keep the dollar from becoming worth more than the Euro, or whether it will happen before gold touches $1,000 is quite the sporting bet.

At any rate, we expect the dip in gold to continue while new equilibrium levels are reached.  And like the First Lady of Dough herself said:

‘ A decision by the Committee to raise its target range for the federal funds rate will signal how much progress the economy has made in healing from the trauma of the financial crisis.

That said, the importance of the initial step to raise the federal funds rate target should not be overemphasized. What matters for financial conditions and the broader economy is the entire expected path of interest rates, not any particular move, including the initial increase, in the federal funds rate.

Read More

“Reminds me of the carpenter who got into gardening. 

Figured he’d raise lattice & tomatoes…”

Perhaps it’s because of being cooped-up in the house because outside temps will be pushing 100F for the next couple of weeks…   Or, because other than attending to a couple of subscriber issues this morning… Or, because I’ve about had my fill of flying for a while…Or, because there’s not ham radio antenna work that can be done when it’s so damn hot out…Or…

Whatever the reason, I’m pondering how to better monetize my life.  And I’d bet you do the same thing.

Everyone has a list like this:  A time of the year when – for whatever external reasons – your ability to innovate, create, replicate, and denominate new ideas comes to a screeching halt. Productivity collapse sets in.  Seasonal burn-out?  Maybe.

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, too much rain and cold weather kills just about all outside work.  Like roofing, housing painting, and if the rain is heavy enough, landscaping and yard work along with gardening.

Along the northern tier states,, Wisconsin, northern Ohio, and such, it’s just weather that’s too damn cold.  Same in the hinterlands of Colorado.  I have now idea how our friends who built the big castle up at the 7,700 foot level of the mountains west of Trinidad, Colorado did it.  When I get up to those kinds of altitudes, my get up and go turns into long periods of sleep.  I’m a sea-level, or neat it, kind of guy. 

All of which gets me to the first major truth in my new quest to monetize something:  Where you are matters little.  But mental attitude matters greatly, and to a lesser extent, so does physical conditioning.

I have to admit to some envy of my son’s ability to monetize his life:  He works for his local health department for maybe 20-hours a week, then as a researcher at the university 40-hours a week. As if that’s not enough, he’s an assistant apartment house manager, and when that is slow, he’s consulting and working events as an on-call EMT at things like festivals and music venues and what-not.

He’s smart:  With risk widely spread, he’s about to work 70-80 hours a week, save money, and make plans for the future.  Something of a workaholic like dad, but he’s been thinking about this “How to properly monetize my life?” question, as well.

Been making a list (and checking it twice) to keep track of ideas.  Things I can monetize.  Any comments of suggestions on how to better monetize retirement are welcome.

a.  Finish my novel DreamOver.  Estimated time to complete and really proof-read?  About 200 hours.  And I hate proof-reading and correcting.  (I is a writer, and I ain’t much on editing.)

b.  Skip the first novel (hard to give up on 75,000 words and a bit stupid) but Grav is really pulling at me. 

Demons on the To-Do list.   My old friend Larry Coffman used to tell me “Ure biggest problem, Guru, is focus and that includes completion…”  No doubt about it.  I’ve only got a 5,000 word attention span – I’ve measured it.

Try measuring yours sometime, and let us know.

c.  Up visiting with the doc who has developed the breakthrough treatment of macular degeneration has gotten me to thinking about photobiomodulation.  And I’ve got a number of light mixes I’d like to try and grow tomatoes with. 

Reason?  Tomatoes require lots of light – and if you can invent the right light mix to outperform sun (or halogen grow lights) using LEDs, then the pot growers will beat a path to your door.  Yeah, sure, tomatoes for us.  What people would do with Ure Boxes would be up to them.  We have no control over what seeds go in.  We just know there is a (resinous) market for high light densities at lower energy input levels.  The kind that won’t self-reporting via Smart meters to DEA.

d.  With the big shop, and the grandchild, I’ve been  thinking about kid’s toys…like that drawing compass for chalk and concrete.  Problem with this one is no barriers to entry and OMG product liability for a kid’s toy…are you kidding me?

Woodworking is a simple hands-on joy, though. 

e.  Easiest of all would be to increase readership over at the Peoplenomics.com site by doing some actual promotion of the site.  But again, that eats time, a little money, and might result in a pop-up ad on the UrbanSurvival site if I got serious about it.  

You will notice that my Amazon box ads have disappeared.  Laziness on my part, I suppose.  But it makes the morning page speed load times faster for you.  (You’re welcome…)  the odd in-line references will remain and they are fast-loading being embedded HTML.

f.  Work on various subtle energy fronts is on the list, too.  I’ve been  collecting the parts to build a Schumann Resonance machine that will POSSIBLY help people’s health.  Need to wind a couple of Hula-Hoops with magnet wire – and again, it’s all about time. 

Winding a few miles of 28-gauge magnet wire is even less fun than watching paint dry, though.

Don’t know how much reading you have done on subtle energy medicine, but there’s something to it.  Our grounded half-sheet seems to have made a difference in sleeping and to be able to improve on that kind of thing is something I look forward to. 

Even more “out there” is work on Weather Modification – which seems closely related to Orgone energy.  I still haven’t found the right mirror for the airborne “cloud buster” I was given by a friend to test.  But still have it and am still working on the theory behind it.

g.  Equally intriguing is some work colleague Vince and I have been working on that relates to  anti-gravity.  And this, in turn, gets back to the B field of magnets.

Everyone has seen  those dog-bone type lines when you hold a bar magnet under a piece of paper with iron filings on it.

But little work has been done on concentration of the B field.

You see, James Clerk Maxwell wrote about this stuff in the 1700’s – when  group-think wasn’t so prevalent.  He dated to ask “What is the force that pushed the field away from the bar magnet in the middle?  That, force, my friend, is the B field.  

As you know, the Boyd Bushman patent for creating magnetic beams is out there and we have been working speculations as to how to build a B field analog and then – the most intriguing part is whether this would unlock the doors to antigravity…  On YouTube you can find Bushman describing how magnets in opposition react to gravity differently.

Meantime, pulsed magnets in opposition at [pulsed] high power levels gets us off into the same kind of territory rumored in the Philadelphia Experiment but doing the work in this would maybe find the effect and that’s what’s at the core of my second novel, Grav listed as b) in this list.

This one has been the most recent time sink.  Reading up on how to wind the proper coils to concentrate as much magnetic energy in opposition as possible…that kind of thing.  Even then, once the design is done, then we’re back to winding coils and driving them in synchronized fashion and then test flying them.

The Bushman video claims that magnets in opposition fall to earth slower than  unopposed magnets which fall at 32 fps/s² “regular” speeds.  Opposed magnets (really strong ones) fall slower.

The concept, then, is to build a high-power pulsed magnetics in opposition rig, perhaps at the 500 watt level, and then fly it in the Beechcraft to see what happens to aircraft performance.  Would there be an improvement?

We already know that the military is using plasma airfoil modifiers on advanced aircraft….and what would be interesting would be to work on the power-density (energy weight) problem to see if magnets in opposition could result in dramatic aircraft performance improvement.  The dot-mil people aren’t really keen on sharing their breakthroughs with the Beechcraft club that I’ve seen.

The plot for novel #2 (Grav) should be smacking you in the face about now.  Be a hell of a movie too, with the right “secret sauce” in the story line which, no, that’s not being disclosed until the book is done.

h.  Totally practical is my big deck railing project, because that will be the basic outline of my waist-high hydroponics system that I want in operation for this fall.

Again,.

Read More

The Secret of Happy Retirement is what?

Reduce your operating costs in advance of retiring.

A number of readers have written in (a few trolls, I suppose, too) and have whined about my recent travel discussion, pictures, and so forth.  Sorry, that’s not flaunting – that’s sharing.

Read More