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.
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.
So far, none of our citizen-journalists have reported anything unsavory having to do with Jade Helm – that military operation down here in Texas and surrounding states.
Typical of reports we get is this one from up in the Kansas City area….
Greetings George,
Enjoyed your posts from your vacation. Now lets get the link out of the way first.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article27369094.html
I am not one to waste much time on reading many news rags, especially this one.
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.
“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,.
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.
Word of an Iran deal this morning hasn’t goosed the markets. In fact, the Dow was about flat when I peeked at it.
What was moving was the price of oil, which was down into the $51 range. And that is likely because if the deal is approved by the US (big hurdle there) then oil supplies will be plentiful and with the US rig count up a tad, looks like Boone Pickens might be off on his $70 oil by year end call made just last week.
Interestingly, the European markets were down. We can only attribute to the notion that war is good for the economy and peace is a loser. Hence, if the Iran deal is a solid, there won’t be all those bunker busters and arms sales.
President Obama “has the gloat on” about the deal and says he will veto any attempt by congress to block it.
For a constitutional scholar, the real problem may come if congress over-rides the veto, but that will have to await disclosure of what’s specifically in the deal.
And given how the TPP misdealing’s went, I don’t expect that today. But go ahead, surprise me, please.
Meanwhile, a court in Iran has issued a $50 billion judgment against the USA which would be almost comical, except I suppose there will be people in Washington who will support paying it.
“If you want a deal bad enough, you’ll make a bad deal” may be about to ring true.
The idea of having “foreign supervisors” ruling Greece is not playing well. We may get a chance to see how NATO will react when Greece boils over…that’d be interesting, we think.
As you read more details over here, think of the world EuroCoup.
Fell in the fresh report out just a few minutes ago from Census:
The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for June, adjusted for seasonal variation and
holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $442.0 billion, a decrease of 0.3 percent (±0.5%)* from the previous month, but up
1.4 percent (±0.9%) above June 2014.
This is a pretty damn interesting tale unfolding.
You can piece together bits of it if you know there even is such a thing as ProxyHam and it was described as a $200 way to set up a really secure internet access route.
CSO Online has coverage of the mysterious cancellation of a talk at Def Con about ProxyHam, but here’s the gist from the article about how it works:
ProxyHam is a Raspberry Pi computer with Wi-Fi enabled. There’s three antennas; one is used to connect to a public Wi-Fi network, and the other two are used to transmit Wi-Fi signals over a 900 MHz frequency.
By using a 900 MHz radio, ProxyHam can connect to a Wi-Fi network up to two miles away, and blend-in with traffic on that spectrum.
We found in the Big City that many of the people we ran into were actually crazier than us. And that’s going a stretch. But not to worry – it will all make sense, once you understand my Crack-Pot theory that may work out.
(Palestine, TX) We’re back.
I’ve been saving the best picture of the trip for this morning. It’s looking down at the dual suspension bridges of Tacoma on departure morning last week. With Tacoma Narrows Airport the flat spot in the upper right.
Click to enlarge.
Smoke from forest fires in Eastern Washington blew smoke all the way over into Montana.
As you can see left, the Cascades and Rockies were “smoky mountains” but the scenery wasn’t bad.
The old Beechcrate performed admirably, with performance helped by UPS’ing 50 pounds of excess clothing home. Two pair of cut-offs and a couple of short-sleeved shirts and I could travel the world, at least three seasons.
R&E – our readers in Sheridan, WY – put on a tremendous feast Friday night. Lobster, corn, bakers, and hand-cut 2 1/2” rib steaks. Simply amazing – and our sincere thanks. Prior to Wednesday, we didn’t even know we had readers in Sheridan!
Saturday, I spent $100 on testing my gambling theory: Ran the $100 up to $367.50 before leaving the casino with my experiment money all gone. But I did narrow down the next round of experiments, now planned for the Peoplenomics.com cruise in early September.
Panama held down the ranch, although we did suffer one casualty: The washing machine has died – and this after repairing it not 2-months back. That becomes yet-another-project for our insurmountable to-do list.
In some ways, it is great to be home, sleep in our own bed – that kind of thing.
But on the other, living a dream vacation is pretty good, too.
One problem if you’re traveling this time of the year is heat.
Elaine solved that with a one-quart spray bottle of the sort you can pick up at the dollar store.
Filled with water, and with all the vents in the car or airplane open, you can spray yourself down pretty good and keep your cool nicely. No recommended for leather seats.
In our case, it was about 90 at times in the cockpit, even though we took off at 6:30 AM Sunday from Dodge City, KS. They had 102 yesterday (in our honor?) and today they’re staring at 104F by late afternoon.
Being home, I’ll start the process of catching up – and that’s always fun with a stack of bills and the usual junk mail to sort through. Emptying voicemail ought to be fun, too.
Hot weather seems to have settled in for summer here in Texas. Rain shows and mid 70s or cooler returned to Seattle almost as soon as we left.
Seattle has had 37.43 inches of rain over the past 365 days. The closest weather station to us reports 55.40 inches. That’s a far cry from the Texas drought of a couple of years back.
But climate drifts around a great deal…something easily exploited by political charlatans and non-profit fund-raisers.
OMG – there I went, again. Somehow a reader got the idea that I was anti-climate change. Which is not quite true.
What I AM is anti “Climate Change as a Taxation Scheme” and it’s coming, whether you like it, or not. The non-profits are already shaking down the weaker-minded of the middle class.
The REAL reason for climate change is obvious: Sawing down the Amazon rain forests and raping the hillsides of South America is a fine starting point. But, we don’t hear the climateers talking much about that. Nor is deforestation in Africa making the big headlines. Not in the corporate playbook, we imagine…
We also don’t hear about the massive land-clearing and trashing of Indonesia (Irian Jaya in particular) of a couple of years back..
Please notice that the UN is not mandating that the rain forests be restored and that rooftops be colorized in such a way as to avoid heat islanding, or any of the other OBVIOUS solutions that are readily at hand.
Instead we get the charlatans who don’t mention rain forests, but are of the same ilk as the “no borders” people and those who believe whatever this week’s popular media chant might be.
Life’s a lot easier if you don’t think.
Sadly, we run on data around here: Please refer to the highlighted yellow line for the “offishul” inconvenient truths:
Yes! In the past year 22,678 record highs were set.
But Ures truly won’t hide under the bed just yet, since 27,993 new lows were set, as well.
The official data tabulations are over here – and if you don’t like it, go argue with them.
Don’t waste your time writing me about the monthly records, either. That’s because the data set is small and within bounds for normal noisy data. Scream elsewhere.
I’m sure that brainwashed climateers will take me to task for using full year data sets only. Earth averages things out. They will no doubt cling to the increase in high minimums without referencing to the continuing paving over of ‘Merica and heat islanding is the gift that never stops giving.
That’s why we get out and do our annual aerial survey just completed. We look at the new stuff that wasn’t there before…and there’s lots of it. Something like eight 100-car coal trains coming out of the Gillette, WY area are keeping the lights on in the Midwest.
The worse news is that after looking at the data, I’m rather easily convinced that it follows – to some extent – the comings and goings of solar output (heat from the Sun) which is evidenced in the following Space Weather Prediction Center chart:
The bottom line here is simple:
I am open to the idea of climate change. I am also open to the idea of demons, apparitions, ghosts, UFOs, and great conspiracies in government.
But in all of these cases, it comes down to the data – and a whole bunch of it, if’n you please.
And instead of whipping up “man made global warming” means an excuse to tax cars, increase taxes, and restrict people’s freedoms?
Get back to me when ruined rain forests have been restored under UN mandates in Africa, South America, and Indonesia, to name a few. End corporate exploitation of native peoples and theft of their land – oh, and did I mention their water?
In the meantime, data infers that the world isn’t ending and it’s doing what it always does with climate.
Change.
Cutting down the rain forests is likely a bigger deal than anyone thought. I mean besides the biodiversity consequences. The actual year of trashing is hard to pin down, however, because when the rain forests go, it is accompanied by huge land-waste fires which cause unbearable smoke, but which also reflects some heat back into space. Cools things…but then comes the heat in the future.
The Union of Concerned Scientists pretty much nailed it down in their 2011 report on Tropical Deforestation:
Reducing growth in the demand for commodities
that drive deforestation will be important to future successes,
but so will increasing the productivity of currently
used lands and directing agricultural expansion
into grasslands rather than forests.
This has been one hell of a week on the Internet.
Today we have a couple of personal action steps you might want to consider to increase your personal resistance to being hacked.
Not only have we suffered a massive melt of computer trading that led to trading halts at mid-week, but we had the head of the Office of Policy Management step down as 21-million current and former federal workers had their personal information hacked.
As it’s not just in the government sector: UrbanSurvival’s server farm was hit with a massive DDOS attack on Friday, as well. Peoplenomics was down only briefly.
Despondency: “a state of low spirits caused by loss of hope or courage.”
Or, today, a state of low spirited caused by the loss of connectivity for a digitally connected world…
If you have had problems getting into a lot of websites today, don’t feel alone.
Something I’ve worried about ever since I wrote “Broken Web The Coming Collapse of the Internet” (Amazon) may be breaking out – and we’ll have more in our Peoplenomics update tomorrow.
For now, here’s what’s going on at our server farm:
Hi George:
We have an announcement within your client area regarding the massive DDOS attack we are being hit with. We will update that announcement periodically. Our datacenter is trying to mitigate the problem at the moment.
(Sheridan, WY) The mountain air must be clearing my head a bit too much.
When I see the stock market set to rally almost 200 points out of the chute this morning, I reach for the traveling ViseGrips and give myself a pinch.
Today’s rally will be largely based on the reports that the majority of the Greek parliament will endorse the latest bailout plan. The French are calling the proposal complete and it looks like the powers that be will rubber stamp this with the only question being how bad will the austerity measures be and how much will be stolen outright from the public?
The devil is in the details, though.
Main features of the deal include Greece cutting back on early retirements – retirement ages will move to 67 by 2022 and the sales taxes will be going up top 23% and all kinds of gory details over here.
No doubt, the market rally this morning will have something to do with these developments, but unfortunately for the whole world, this only sets up the fifth wave blow-off we have been telling Peoplenomics readers about.
Then there’s the matter of corporate earnings which are floating about. Many of them subject to stock buy-back puffery. Even Forbes notices three ways buy-backs hurt investors.
Sure, some corporations are to report bigger earnings, but come on, stock buy-backs have a very dark side to them. What it means is that management of many companies can’t think of better investments. No new plant and equipment, money into research and developments…you name it.
Accounting chicanery comes and goes in seasons. Remember the last time we had a good dose of it? That was when EBITDA was making the rounds in high tech firms as the Holy Grail of growth models.
The wreckage from that kind of thinking was the tech wreck and people tend to forget that accounting’s hand was in that $5-7 trillion dollar disaster.
So when you hear about Greece, and when you hear about corporate profits soaring, look at the underlying qualities of what’s really going on. Greece just put on the yoke of debt and check to see if there have been stock buy-backs when big earnings come in.
Remember, false profits have great press agents.
Meantime, China is papering over its mess.
Oh, yeah.
“Whatzzit mean?”
Simply this: The Federal Reserve is drying up its easy money policy. This means with less money being printed (by the truck load) the value of the money sloshing around will go up.
That will a) strengthen the US dollar, b) bring down the stock market (it takes less of powerful dollars and more of wimpy dollars to buy the Dow) and it means c) despite the HS&J (hype shuck and jive) about the TeePeePee, US exports will not be going up because our dollarsized goods will go up in price overseas.
Should I mention gold goes down?
Bet that makes you feel, swell, doesn’t it?
Still, when you see outfits like Ford planning to cut Focus and C-Max production (and maybe move it offshore) we have to remind you of a Trumpism:
“If you want a deal bad enough, you will make a bad deal.”
We are a country awash in bad deals, thank you.
And that gets us to…
After deftly steeling the “straight talking” mantle from the remains of the GOP, The Don told Anderson Cooper of CNN that he still doesn’t know where Obama was born.
Not a point in this campaign, but if you’re a conspiracy theorist, interesting to note The Don’s point about how some birthers have been promoted after dropping their inquiries. Like Hillary, for instance…
In an UrbanSurvival bar room poll conducted last night (sample =8) Trump is the clear leader over everyone with the one caveat that people worry he’s a Perot, II.
What most people seem to forget is that Ross Perot dropped out of the presidential bid back when under conditions that could be fairly labeled “duress.” Go over to AboveTopSecret and read some background info.
The biggest question about Trump is how will utterly corrupt corporate-owned government silence him?
Another leak on the tube Thursday was Boone Pickens (or energy fame) saying that he expects oil will pass the $70 mark by the end of the year.
When it comes to oil supply? “We’ve turned over and it’s down from here. A thousand rigs makes a lot of difference” Pickens told CNBC.
How long have I been writing to you about the Manufacturer’s Resource Wars? That’s what we’re in and nothing in the data, whether you’re talking oil, gas, bituminous, or lithium, suggests anything else.
It’s a slow game, but a big one.
Once again, our way of looking at things is showing through. Oh, sure, the headline is that 1 in 15 Americans is impacted by the Federal OPM hack.
But doesn’t that also mean government is too big?
New word: “Distractophy.” Means the art and science of a made-up distraction, usually to keep people’s minds off the reality of what’s going on in the important world, as opposed to the MFW = media fiction world.
Take the Confederate flag distractophy, please.
In the latest hype, high school sports is coming down with political correctness disease. Can’t have teams with those colors and called rebels, can we?
I can hardly wait for the next shoe to drop as political correctness disease sweeps America.
Yeah…let’s forget the horrible costs of Obamacare, which go up again in 2016. And let’s not talk the service economy bubble, the open border, the questionable presidential dictates, or how China is buying America out from under us.
Hell no. Have some more of this-here Kool-Aid.
I’m gonna start another distractophy right here: It’s way more important to rename the Dixie chicks something like the Tampa Tramps or Houston Hoes…because yes, brothers and sisters we have lost our collective minds.
My friend “warhammer” – the oak cluster dude has some good insight into what starts next week:
“George,
Found this little gem on joint military exercise Jade Helm 15 (aka JH15) while cruising the NET this AM:
http://american3rdposition.com/wp-content/uploads/Jade-Helm-Martial-Law-WW3-Prep-Document-1.pdf
If you lean to the ‘domestic conspiracy theory’ side of the isle, the ‘no media access’ aspect of this exercise proves that JH15 is the first step toward an Orwellian American future.
Knowing what I do about exercise planning and execution, I believe there are several more viable ‘real world’ purposes for this two month, 7-state ‘joint’ exercise (meaning more than one branch of the military is participating, not that weed will be liberally provided). An exercise of this size and scope is quite expensive and resource intensive.
Two scenarios, both involving areas far from the 4-corners region of the U.S., are my personal, plausible ‘real world explanations for this massive (and expensive) exercise.