If you have Windows 7, or newer, and have not discovered the little utility program (Sticky Notes) you are missing one of the most useful little tools of computing out there.

Not like it’s a breakthrough, or anything like that.  My personal experience with this kind of thing goes back to my earlier days when Gaye of www.backdoorsurvival.com owned a successful computer company in Bellevue, Wa. that was sold off to a Baby Bell Operating Company (BBOC) in the late 1980’s. 

Back then, there was a program called “SideKick” which featured the (then new) ability to operate in “terminate and stay resident” mode. 

Called TSR, the features of SideKick originally included things like a calculator and it was from this, and a few other TSR programs and early PIMS (personal information management systems) that much of today’s modern computing “ease of use” came into being.

Before Windows, however, Borland’s SideKick was the serious computer geek’s secret weapon.  And it operated under DOS:

Sidekick 1.0 included Calculator, Notepad, Appointment Calendar, Auto Dialer, ASCII Table and other tools.

1.0 Plus[edit]

Sidekick 1.0 Plus included a broader selection of calculators (Business, Scientific, Programmer, Formula), a 9-file Notepad text editor, Appointment Book and Scheduler, a terminal communication tool and ASCII Table. In addition to variants on and enhancements to the 1.0 features, Plus included a 9-file Outliner, q file and directory manager, Clipboard, and supported Expanded Memory and a RAM disk. Control+Alt is the default shortcut to open sidekick 1.0 plus

The program was eventually rolled out as compatible with Windows (before they adopted year-dates, we’re talking 3.1 and earlier).

Anyway…for some reason I thought you’d get a kick out of knowing where some of us old-schooler’s got out taste for Sticky Notes….before the first mouse (and it wasn’t Apple’s) escaped from X-PARC.

But enough of history…on to my Friday notes collection.

Don’t Sue Me!

It occurred to me with all the solar power articles I wrote this week that I didn’t include our typical lengthy disclaimer.  The one where we say something like:

WORKING ON ELECTRICITY IS DANGEROUS:  All articles presented on this site are to stimulate thinking and discussion of  the art and science of alternative energy only.  We do not intend for you to actually do any of this work yourself.  Hiring a licensed professional electrician is the only way to go and if you ignore this advice you do so at your own peril.  This warning applies to everything on this site.  The electrician may even be a better stock-picker than most.

There; all happily disclaimed now.

Where’s the Dream?

Following yesterday’s discussion of Robert Shiller’s assessment of problems facing the global economy, a reader  (young/successful) took me to task:

The American people aren’t afraid of the future, they aren’t afraid of the road ahead, AS LONG AS GOVERNMENT (POLITICIANS, LAW ENFORCEMENT & CORPORATIONS AREN’T WAITING ON THE ROADSIDE TO POUNCE ON THEM), If we are afraid of anything it’s our corrupt, outlaw government taking over & destroying the world along with their crony parties in the Vatican, City of London & Israhell!

Hmmm…was I off base? 

I called my son to talk it over…had I misunderstood him, his friends, and lots of other 30-somethings?  I’ll paraphrase…

“Look dad, the guy probably makes good break..like 4-grand a month take home.  He’s lost the roots.

The reality is that even taking home $2,200 a month is about the least someone can work for here (Seattle) and break even.  That’s with a passable studio apartment, Obamacare, a little bit of food and not much else.

When you bring home less than $2,000 a month, there is not American Dream…you don’t get a bite at that because you’re just working your ass off all the time.  Student loans, insurance…I mean at less than 2,000 a month a single person is pretty well screwed here.

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Let’s try a novel approach to news for a change, shall we?  Let’s pretend none of it is real.  Or, at least not so real as it’s made out to be.

So, this doctor walks into the hospital room, looks you in the eye and announces this:

“Based on its current assessment, the Committee judges that it can be patient in beginning to normalize the stance of monetary policy.  However, if incoming information indicates faster progress toward the Committee’s employment and inflation objectives than the Committee now expects, then increases in the target range for the federal funds rate are likely to occur sooner than currently anticipated.  Conversely, if progress proves slower than expected, then increases in the target range are likely to occur later than currently anticipated. “

You look up from your hospital bed astounded by the audacity of your attending financial doctor.

“Doc, I have been pistol whipped by bankers, my last three jobs have been jacked to India, and the administration is throwing open the borders so even more poor people can come here and under-bid me! 

My house has been repo’ed, but I own six cars because that how we were going to save ‘Merica, right?  And you have the boobdacity to tell me what about patience?”

For a brief moment, your doctor weighs a deeper answer.  But there is no choice.

Unlike medicine (“First, do no harm…”) there is no corresponding hold harmless in Economics.  So again the doctor repeats, like you’re a complete, blithering moron:

Based on its current assessment, the Committee judges that it can be patient in beginning to normalize the stance of monetary policy. 

Since there are no real weapons for inmates of the Monetary Institute, you try a different tack:

“Wait Doc!  Hear me out:  When you came by yesterday, you told me “Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability “  But don’t you see Doc, that open borders are at odds with maximum employment for those already freaking HERE?”

The doctor eyes you with contempt.  The insult of it all…having a patient of all people, telling her, the doctor that economic largess is supposed to stop at the border… She turns to leave.

“I’ll check back with you…let me see…March 18th, then…  Remember, those people are just seeking asylum…and you’re just lucky enough to be already in one…”

No sooner had the door closed than it’d thrust open again and a huge orderly, the guy was 6’6” and 300 pounds of rippling muscle, advances toward your best.  Noticing leather restraints you try to move.  He’s carrying a large needle.

“I have money.  I have an IRA… I have my kids school fund.  See?  Says right here in the NY Times (nodding toward a table) that the President had withdrawn plans to tax the 529 school savings plans…so I have money….oh God….not again….”

A burning sensation in the veins of your right arm begins for the umpteenth time.  And the last thing you hear drifting out of consciousness is something garbled…something like

”… Executive Order or Hillary will do it when we put her in…”

Eyes Wide Shut

Suddenly, you’re conscious again.  Over on the wall, a television seems to be on a money channel.

“…after dropping nearly 200 points Wednesday following Dr. Yellen’s Fed Statement, looks like the market will score some solid gains today with Dow futures up a solid 40 points…”

“You idiots…the Dow lost almost five times that yesterday!”  The television seems not to notice.

It’s no use.  Big smiles and talk of recovery pepper the rapid-fire market hype.

There’s a quick knock at the door.  A cleaning lady comes in.

“Morning, sah.”

“Good morning, Mary…any news on reality…that stuff outside this damn place?”

“Uh huh.  Germany is now in deflation, but the headlines are careful to keep the word “inflation” in the story so’s mos people won’t catch on…”

“Any other real news you can tell me?  My doctor…she keeps me locked up and tells me to be patient and wait till her next visit which won’t be for two months….

“Oh, sure.  The 12-month M1 increase is settling out at 9.5% for 2014…and since prices have gone up a bout 1.4%, us cleaners are thinking deflation here is running about 8.1% now…but I’m ain’t sayin that outside this room because you’re a crazy person and I can say anything I want to say  to you.”

“What about the Baltic Dry Index….it was down to 666 yesterday and it always leads the market by 90-day, or more…what’s it doing?

“Well it’s down another 34 points…down to 632 and those are levels we haven’t seen since the 2009 bottom.  But don’t be telling anyone else, dis stuff cuz it’d rile up dah whole wing…I best be going… I’ll see if I can get you dah new GDP numbers tomorrow morning when I come by…”

You vow silence fearing another visit from the big orderly with the needle.

And in Other News

Somewhere, in another room a radio has been flipped on.  Hard to make out all of it, but you catch bits here and there.

“…Asia where the MH370 crash has been declared an accident….”

“…The CEO of McDonalds is stepping aside….”

“…and in our editorial this morning, we’ll be asking why is the Fort Hood shooter still alive?  That and more just ahead…”

Suddenly, the door bursts open and the big orderly is back.

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Just out from Case-Shiller/S&P is the latest Housing data:

New York, January 27, 2015 – S&P Dow Jones Indices today released the latest results for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices. Data released today for November 2014 shows a continued slowdown in home prices nationwide, but with price increases in nine cities.

More than 27 years of history for these data series is available, and can be accessed in full by going to www.homeprice.spdji.com. Additional content on the housing market can also be found on S&P Dow Jones Indices’ housing blog: www.housingviews.com.
Year-over-Year

Both the 10-City and 20-City Composites saw year-over-year growth rates decline in November compared to October. The 10-City Composite gained 4.2% year-over-year, down from 4.4% in October. The 20-City Composite gained 4.3% year-over-year, compared to 4.5% in October. The S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, which covers all nine U.S. census divisions, recorded a 4.7% annual gain in November 2014 versus 4.6% in October 2014.

(I marked the Elliott wave danger area that we don’t want to break below – g)

Miami and San Francisco continue to lead all cities, posting gains of 8.6% and 8.9% over the last 12 months. Nine cities, including Tampa, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Portland, saw annual growth rates climb more than other cities in November.

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In Monday’s column we talked briefly about the different ways that people can go “offworld.”

There was the literal version, which is what NASA and the International Space Station is about.

And there’s the virtual way which spans another array of contenders including move-in virtual worlds like Second Life and bring-backs, in the sense that Bitcoin is a currency “discovered” in virtual territory that’s being brought back into present here & now.

And most recently,, there’s Microsoft’s way-cool Hololens project that we described yesterday along with the pointer to their demo video.  Nice stuff…all of it.

What I didn’t mention then is that there’s another way that people go “offworld” a lot…and it will be the subject of this coming Saturday’s Peoplenomics report.

The foundational notion of this other “offworld” is that people do it all the time.  And there’s your Big HINT.

People are effectively offworld when they are reveling in some past moment, event, or music.  And by the same token, they are also offworld when they are daydreaming about the future and wanting to make it this way or that.

Which means what?  If you “live in the past” or are off “future tripping” you cannot, by definition be fully present in the “eternal now.”

So what does all this have to do with making a buck?

Ah…the study of time has come a very long way…and (paradoxically) quite quickly in an emergent field called retro-causality.

Be careful as you read forward from here because the great shocker is that while most of the time, the world is a “cause and effect” place, it’s also a “cause-effect-cause” place.

Wiki it:

Although philosophical efforts to understand causality extend back at least to Aristotle’s discussions of the four causes, the idea that the arrow of time could be reversed is substantially^{[peacock term]} more recent.^{[dated info]} In fact, retrocausality was long considered an inherent self-contradiction because, as 18th century philosopher David Hume discussed, when examining two related events, the cause, by definition, is the one that precedes the effect.^[4]

The ability to affect the past suggests that causes could be negated by their own effects, creating a physical paradox,^[5] such as the well-known^{[peacock term]} grandfather paradox.

Importantly, there is some breakthrough work that has happened in the past couple of years that explain (in advanced mathematical terms) how all this works.

Unfortunately for conventional physics believers, there is now a growing body of evidence emerging that leads, according to one researcher , to a world where this sort of thing becomes real:

“Say you need to pass a written drivers license test.

You study for it on Thursday.

You go in and take the test on Friday.

Then counter intuitively, you study the test, focusing on all the right answers and ones you guessed correctly, on SATURDAY after you have already passed.

Turns out that your odds of passing the test (in a statistically valid way) will be up to 10% greater if you commit to study AFTER successfully taking a test.”

That’s from recall and very roundly what’s out there.  But in the upcoming Peoplenomics piece we’ll move a little further along the research that I’ve been working on since last weekend.

Terribly fascinating stuff..but can you imagine the economic value of a 10% improvement in investment decision-making?  It’d be huge.

And, to monetarily-oriented us, it’s therefore a valid field for additional study.  I’m gonna get them HFT suckers yet…

What this opens is a door to scientific proof that personality types (like mine) that are very hard on themselves for getting things wrong (and review tests results all the time) is actually a statistically better approach to learning than simply taking a test and not reviewing results and studying what went wrong.

Powerful – and very empowering – stuff, huh?

I mean this is right up there with the re-tuning of the musical scale to disempower people.  But we’ll save that for another morning…except to say A432 is hugely different that A440.  That ought to get you started down that rabbit hole beyond our present preoccupation with retrocausality…

Is this Why Storms are “Named?”

Reader Andrew has a heck of an interesting viewpoint that he was willing to share.  Seems to answer the question we’ve been asking about all this “Storm Naming” that has been going on.  We’ve gone from Pineapple Express on the West Coast, and Lake Effect snows to now all these named storms and it just plain didn’t make sense until…

Named storms launch differing caveats with home owners insurance. By naming the storm Juno, it puts the payouts for damage into the hurricane category for deductibles (sometimes 3% or more of home value) Vs. the standard policy deductible ($500, $1000, etc.)

I don’t know if it is true, or not… I’d have to get out our homeowner policy and read through it.  But new policies obviously could be written in such a way as to cap damages in the event of a “named” storm or whatever, and in that case, an insurance company would be able to limit its reinsurance costs while continuing to collect nearly the same premium levels.

And, if true but not “outed” by supposedly public-minded insurance commissioners, who would be the wiser?  Except the readers of fine print, who would be investing in care to guess which kind of insurance outfits?

Renewable/Solar Questions

A number of readers have been asking questions about solar systems – of the size big enough to drive a house.  So that will be up tomorrow for Peoplenomics.com readers.  And it will be in response (as well) to Oilman2’s questions.  He was by on Sunday and we went over his plans to put in commercial-scale aquaponics at his bujg-out place down near Grapeland, TX.

Meantime, a reader wonders:

Great info as I learn how to set up off-grid system.

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The people of the Northeast, that part of America that seems to believe the sun rises and sets because of their exceptionalism are back at it this morning.

Out here in Texas we call it “snow.”

Ya’ll are calling it “Juno” which I assure you is nothing more than a marketing twist to it.

I assure you, it snows in most of the rest of the country from time to time.  Not so much in Miami, more in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Seattle, and the Dakotas.

But you don’t hear us issuing parking bans or handing-wringing about it.  It is winter, after all.

Nevertheless, officials are using phrases like “crippling and potential historic” to describe an event which hasn’t happened yet.

Last week, Amarillo had nearly a foot of snow…yet there was no hand-wringing.   Life went on…and even the cattle in the feedlots west of town got fed.

Help me a bit with my cynicism, here:  Why is it that the lib media of the NE can hand-wring about potential snowfall and not at least mention in passing that climate change may not really be such a big deal after all.

I mean other than a way to stampede the low-information voters into supporting yet another tax which will create yet another industry to solve yet another non-problem?

Oh, my, 3,500 flights have been canceled.

Worry, fear-monger, scare ‘em all to death.

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This is something to read carefully and think about.  The Federal Reserve is revising the way it reports the H.6 money supply figures.

THEY’RE WHAT?

Yep.  Here’s how it’s explained on their site:

H.6 (508)

MONEY STOCK REVISIONS
The Federal Reserve revised its measures of the money stock and their components to incorporate updated seasonal factors and a new quarterly benchmark.
This release includes seasonally adjusted measures of the monetary aggregates and components produced with revised seasonal factors, which were derived from data through December 2014 and estimated using the X-12-ARIMA procedure.[1] The revisions to the seasonal factors resulted in a lower growth rate for seasonally adjusted M2 in the first half of 2014 and a higher growth rate for seasonally adjusted M2 in the second half.
This release also includes a new quarterly benchmark, which incorporates minor revisions to data reported in the quarterly deposit reports, and it takes account of deposit data from Call Reports for banks and thrift institutions that are not weekly or quarterly deposit reporters.[2] These revisions to deposit data start in 2013.

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Funny how life works.

Yesterday morning, out of the blue, the power went off.

Even funnier?

I didn’t even know about it.

Until, that it, my lovely bride and brother-in-law wandered into my office and asked:  “Did you know the power was off?”

I gave a gesture around the room:  My super-computer (in the midst of an upgrade to an SSD) was still on.  So were all four monitors that display what’s going on via the two dual HDMI video cards.  The music was on.  Zeus the cat was laying half up against the 750-watt electric heater *(which was on low).  My halogen desk lamp was on.  The scanner was still displaying blue ready for scanning.  The duplex laser printer just had a page coming out of it.

“No, how would I know the power’s off?”

This, my friend, is the joy of a huge, massively over-built power system.  I seem to remember there had been a single “beep” from the computer, router, and satellite uplink UPS power system a few minutes earlier.  But the light hadn’t gone out.

Still, even though my office was warm and cozy while the rest of the property was getting more than 3-inches of rain, I picked up the analog old-style wired phone and called the local power company and reported the outage, although what most people may not appreciate is that while yes, Smart Power Meters may slowly morph our genetics, the Smart Meter would also stop reporting and power companies know that when blocks of meters go off-line together, there’s an outage.

Checking for Dangerous Backfeed

I turned off the halogen lighting and the heater.  They’d been on since morning and I didn’t really need additional heat or light. and had Elaine follow me out to the power center.

I held up the 7-watt light in a plug-in light socket – one of those $2 parts that you can find at Lowes which is useful to see when an outlet is powered up, or not.

“Even though I don’t need to do this, I do it anyway,” I said, as the light was plugged into an outlet box labeled “Inverter 1 grid side” and then into “Inverter 2 grid side.”

As it should, the light stayed out.

“Do I need to know how to do that?”  Elaine wondered.

“No, I just do it whenever we are at home to make sure the grid-interactive part of our system is still dropping the grid like it should.  “ A note to the system log followed.  “Tested system for no backfeed” and the date.

What’s backfeed and why does it scare the hell out of power company linemen?

Suppose you have a generator and the power goes down and you haven’t spent the money to put in a real transfer switch to physically disconnect your home  from the grid in event a wire goes down somewhere down the road a ways.

People often times will plug a generator into the closest outlet in their home and if they are lucky, that leg of the 240 VAC power coming in will bring up a TV and the fridge and maybe some lights in the house.

Few bother to think about the downed line.  A generator that’s plugged into house wiring will feed power back down the line to where it is broken.

It’s enough to kill an innocent lineman.

So apparently, Universe arranged our Thursday to make a major point about real back-up power systems.

NEVER NEVER EVER BACKFEED.

Now, about that Real Emergency Power System…

Hers is the shopping list I would go with for a really simple system:

Renogy 100W Mono Starter Kit: 100W Solar Panel+20′ Solar Cable+30A PWM Charge Controller+Z Bracket Mounts   This will set you back $185 at Amazon.  For another $150, add a second RENOGY 100 Watt 100w Monocrystalline Photovoltaic PV Solar Panel Module 12V Battery Charging as their 30-amp charge controller should handle the power of both cells.

Then you just need a good to great deep cycle battery and an inverter: Power Bright APS1000-12 Pure Sine Power Inverter 1000 Watt continuous / 2000 watt Peak 12 Volt DC To 120 Volt AC which is about $280 bucks.

Inverter School 101

There are two kinds of inverters:  The cheapo kind are “modified sine wave” and the way these work, if you look at their output on a scope is it looks like those stepped pyramids in Mexico, rather than a smooth rise.  It’s a stair-step kind of thing.

The pure sine wave is a better choice if you are planning to use a television, microwave, or radio gear because those “steps” may cause microwaves to hum oddly, televisions to have oddities to their pictures, and ham gear to hear “hash” on low bands.

But they are less than half the price of pure sine wave and if the batter is fully charged, you can microwave popcorn with either variety.

Battery Capacity 102

Now we need to talk about your battery capacity.

The most important thing to know is scientifically called the Peukert Exponent.  Old Wilhelm (going from memory) came up with this law in the 1800’s.  What he discovered was simply this:  The faster you discharge a battery, the lower its effective capacity is. 

For the science nerds, the details are in Wikipedia:

Manufacturers rate the capacity of a battery with reference to a discharge time. For example, a battery might be rated at 100 A·h when discharged at a rate that will fully discharge the battery in 20 hours. In this example, the discharge current would be 5 amperes. If the battery is discharged in a shorter time, with a higher current, the delivered capacity is less. Peukert’s law describes a power relationship between the discharge current (normalized to some base rated current) and delivered capacity (normalized to the rated capacity) over some specified range of discharge currents. If the exponent constant k was one, the delivered capacity would be independent of the current. For a lead–acid battery, however, the value of k is typically between 1.1 and 1.3. It generally ranges from 1.05 to 1.15 for VRSLAB AGM batteries, from 1.1 to 1.25 for gel, and from 1.2 to 1.6 for flooded batteries.^[1] The Peukert constant varies according to the age of the battery, generally increasing with age. Application at low discharge rates must take into account the battery self-discharge current.

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Yes, the Ure-a-pee’in Central Banksters moved today to make up money, just like the US Fed did and as a result, while we don’t think the end of the world will result, it sure is looking like the EU is in a heap-o-crap.  Done dunged by their own bad policies, is how it looks from here.

Quantitative pleasing. $60-billion in round one, but this stuff is like crack.  Hard to quit.

From the press conference:

First, it decided to launch an expanded asset purchase programme, encompassing the existing purchase programmes for asset-backed securities and covered bonds. Under this expanded programme, the combined monthly purchases of public and private sector securities will amount to €60 billion. They are intended to be carried out until end-September 2016 and will in any case be conducted until we see a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation which is consistent with our aim of achieving inflation rates below, but close to, 2% over the medium term. In March 2015 the Eurosystem will start to purchase euro-denominated investment-grade securities issued by euro area governments and agencies and European institutions in the secondary market. The purchases of securities issued by euro area governments and agencies will be based on the Eurosystem NCBs’ shares in the ECB’s capital key. Some additional eligibility criteria will be applied in the case of countries under an EU/IMF adjustment programme.

Second, the Governing Council decided to change the pricing of the six remaining targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs). Accordingly , the interest rate applicable to future TLTRO operations will be equal to the rate on the Eurosystem’s main refinancing operations prevailing at the time when each TLTRO is conducted, thereby removing the 10 basis point spread over the MRO rate that applied to the first two TLTROs.

Third, in line with our forward guidance, we decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged.

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