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Replaying 1929 "Standup Economics" This economy is a what? |
Replaying 1929: Business, Financial, and earth change newsUpdated: Saturday July 19, 2008 07:22 CDT The Early Briefing In depth perspectives are for subscribers to www.peoplenomics.com |
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The Runs: Road Show We see that "Afghans call for new strategy as Obama visits." I can almost see the strings being pulled from here...With What's Her Name in the background (and seems like she's running in 2012) the odds of ending this most profitable series of wars is probably about, oh, zip. Just electioneering, I trust. --- This fall, as the economy goes into Crapper Round Two, that's when the next "terrorism" event seems likely to be rolled out to do yet another bait and switch. Want in my pool of which country we'll invade next on false pretenses? No fair handicapping based on oil reserves now...
As the Hattiesburg American notes, "Both presidential candidates claim to favor change. Yet neither has told us what they will do to end Washington's addiction to deficit spending." ---
One of us has to be horribly out of touch with reality. Since I'm a self described nutjob, I'll just pretend it's me...but you know the truth. But, it's just between us.
"T" Time? Homeland Security boss Michael Chertoff is warning that "European terrorists are trying to enter US". Say, he's not talking about the British, German, and Swiss bankers, is he?
Pampered Hampered in the Hamptons I don't mean to pick on folks who live in the Hamptons, but headlines like this one make it all too easy: "In Hamptons, Slump means less Glitz Per Gala". Shade of the French aristocracy, pass me some cake, would yah?
World Gone Batty "Alfred, where's my checkbook?" Bat Man Dark Knight seems to be headed for the record books. Now we know why he can afford Wayne Manor, although I'm waiting for the FBI to swarm the bat-house in their loan probe...
Greased Oil has just posted its biggest weekly decline ever, headlines inform us. Which, we must add, is because it had never been so high before. Couple with the roll over of commodity accounts to next deliveries, and it's less reason for partying and more for sober reflection. A time to ask questions like "Why did I think I needed an SUV with brush guards on it a big city? What was I thinking?"
Doped It's reassuring to know that the Tour de France doping stories, like terrorism can be added to editor's "Any time I need a story" peg.
Dick'ed "Report links Cheney office, oil giant to global warming policy shift" Well, golly. Who would have thought? Look surprised. Fake it...
This is Rich Department Got to admire how the democorps are selling the idea that they might actually do something other than keep warring to keep the corpgov economy rolling. I', still waiting for Nancy Pelosi to make good on here promises....and speaking of which, this is a rich headline for you:
"Pelosi describes Bush as 'total failure'.
Uh...let me see. Pelosi is eyeing spending $50 billion on a new 'economic stimulus' package paid for by who else? Our tax dollars and despite the hoopla at her ascension, we still have no 'win or withdrawal timetable. And she says Bush is a failure? Hand that woman a mirror, wouldja?
Of course, this has all been facilitated by sending the MainStreamMedia to the spayed and neutered school of journalism....
--- snip and save section ---
Coping: Super Dupers This morning started off with a 5 AM conversation as Elaine wondered "How can people be so stupid? First we end usury laws in the 1980's to protect 'those poor banks', and now, 30-odd years later, we are getting pitched "cash-backed credit cards."
I had to admit she had a fine point: Our societal conditioning to accept the use of 'plastic' is so deeply engrained that there are people who are so foolish as to pay cash to use plastic!
It's just amazing, when you think about it, how the bankster-leeches have pulled the wool over on this. Consider where they make money: First, they get cash from hard-pressed Americans for the card plus the processing and setup fees (which go into their pockets). Then, as the card is used, they screw merchants over for anywhere up to 3 1/2 - 4% discounts.
Yeah, that's right: Bank card companies/banksters chare merchants a discount off the face value of your purchase in order to cover 'processing fees'. But wait, even here, we find businesses are being charged a monthly fee, gateway fees, and a transaction fee - all on top of the discount.
Then, when the consumer is done with the card, there's the little matter of the 'leftover money' because the card never comes out right. I haven't used one of these idiotic ways to pay, so I don't know for sure, but would bet dollars to donuts that cheekiness extends to having a monthly charge for the pleasure of using a card.
WASF: Are we the only ones left who get just enough cash from the bank each month so we don't use credit cards? OK, I will grant you that the cash-backed credit card may come through the laundry better than a couple of $20's. But, do you think they offer more security if you're held up than cash? LOL, it's been years since anyone asked to see the signature on my (one) credit card.
By this point, the coffee was starting to make noise and I was becoming outraged and infuriated at the stupidity of the American public, which was paid for by the financial institutions that are out to screw us all. Remember who got kicked out of the temple in your Bible studies?
But it was all fine with E. She was already on to her next ponder of the morning.
"Do you think most people see the irony in the phrase Super Dooper, I mean like duper?"
Quickly I poured by two cup measuring cup full of coffee and headed out for the office. Traffic was a bit backed up on the porch as both cats were demanding pets and complaining about the lousy mousing conditions with the bright moon last night.
I vowed to myself to put up a link to the phrase 'super dooper' when I finally got through the cat traffic...so 60 feet later, arriving in the office I wrote down this note so I wouldn't forget. Thinking about the spelling difference between 'dooper' and 'duper' and the cash-backed 'credit' card scam had gotten the adrenalin running and prevented low blood pressure, once again.
Depression Era Cooking Having come from what was, at the time, a lower-middle income household, I can actually remember dishes like this one described in a dandy video by 91-year old "Clara" who describes Depression era cooking.
If you're trying to cut back on your family food budget, this video, and the accompanying ones will introduce you to the whole subject area of 'cooking when you're down and out'. The Poorman's Meal is reminiscent of many meals as a kid.
Another low-income dollar stretcher was something my mom called Hungarian Goulash. Although the word 'goulash' is derived from Hungarian, the interpretation of goulash in America is basically elbow macaroni, a little tomato paste or a can of stewed tomatoes, and a single pound of hamburger which is stretched as far as you please. Or, whatever other bits of meat could be afforded.
It's the little things, when it comes to cooking when you can barely get by, that really make the difference. I remember what a treat Hungarian Goulash was when there was a can of corn thrown in...Yum!. Or my grandmother's vegetable stew, which was a few carrots, an onion or two, a head of cabbage sliced up, a can or three of the cheapest stewed tomatoes available (or fresh in season) and then small meatballs - usually 3-4 per person. Sopped up with bread (home baked) to get the last drops, it was probably a lot more nourishing than 99.9% of the prepared foods today.
All of which has me anxious to set up the sun oven today and make up from of this fine genre of comfort food. It's inexpensive, incredibly healthy, and simple. --- I forget which one of his books where he talks about it, but the late Louis L' Amour had a fine description of the lifestyle and this kind of scrounge and simmer cooking in one of his books that described his time 'on the beach' in the San Pedro/Long Beach area in the Depression as a merchant seaman looking for work.
L' Amour also describes the value of books ,well. He used to read to other sailors in the fo'c'sle (forecastle) of whatever ship he was on - carrying around his list of books to read, and crossing them off one at a time as he read them. In a long ago interview he told me that he figured out early on that in order to be a good writer, he needed to read as much as he could, so even while he was knocking about, he was reading everything he could get his hands on, especially the classics.
Many were small pocket books, hardly bigger than those little dime store spiral-bound you can put in your shirt pocket, perhaps 2 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches in size; such was the cost of printing, and those were days when money saved, was money that could be used to put food on the table.
My advancing age shows, though; the 'dime stores' of our youth are you 'dollar stores' of today; no doubt shortly the 5 & 10 won't refer to coins, but rather fiat/paper dollars.
Nevertheless, that was also a time when the 'classics' were read by lot's of folks - and it's the historical basis of things like Random House's "Everyman's Library' series, which was a larger series, 5" by 9" and in small 8-point type in the early editions. ---- At the internet archive site (a place where you can get lost for weeks if you're not careful) you can find a catalog of the first 505 volumes of the Everyman's Library circa 1911 and available as a 30 MB PDF file here. Takes a bit of time to download even with a big pipe like we enjoy out here at the ranch due to the server speed at the other end (about 28.7kb at the moment), but a good list to start from if you haven't made it a practice of reading great books to keep your brain tuned up.
And, as I mention frequently, using the time monk's speed text reading software and a trip to the Project Gutenberg online archive, and you could wolf down the classics at a 3-a-week clip, if you could do without the sillyvision for that long. The Gutenberg Top 100 ebook download list is here - when wolfed down with the Vortex speed reader, things like the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are ever so good as movies because the theater of the mind is far more compelling than even the best of HDTV. But, you need to learn that one for yourself, I figure. --- Send snip and save items to george@ure.net --- end snip and save section ---
Peoplenomics.com A Mid-Summer Checklist Just as pilots go through checklists (pre-flight, take-off, and landing), it's useful at times to step back a ways and survey all the major areas of life we can think of to see what can be improved upon. We'll organize it this way: Ure's 'seven major support systems of life [food, shelter, transportation, communication, energy, environment, and finance]. We'll do a quick scan of the headlines to get a sense of 'current status' of that life-supporting system, update the 3-month to 3-year outlook, and then list different ways of coping with the range of possible outcomes at a personal level. Along the way, we'll set some 'trigger levels' for further action as the likelihood of a particular outcome changes... More For Subscribers Subscription Information
Not a Subscriber yet? It's just $40/Year: (Allow 48-hours for processing) Tell Your Friends UrbanSurvival has a very interesting business model - one that depends on growth. This business model is a lot like capitalism in that growth is required, but of course we won't ever get to cutting down the rainforests. So even if you don't subscribe to our premium newsletter at www.peoplenomics.com, please tell everyone you know about this site. The more this site grows, the more time and content will show up on the free site... Click here to send 'em an invite... Thank you!
"Live on $10,000" Updated There's now a single-page website devoted to my little ebook "How to Live on $10,000 a year (or less) at www.liveontenthousand.com. Yep - still possible. I also took a bit of additional material that was pertinent from recent issues of Peoplenomics and included them. The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the aforementioned dollar amount, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you make a little more than that and do some active savings... Click here for the page with more details on it. ---- Last week's report is here. For back issues of this site, click here. (Goes back to 1997!) Friday July 18, 2008 Urgent Update Time Monks: A Crop Circle Decoded? Odd hints about the future often come from our friends the time monks over at www.halfpasthuman.com, and occasionally the hints are interesting enough when they 'pick up a scent' of a change in the future, that it bears sharing publicly.
That's the case today as they've sent along this "OK for regular humans" extract from their predictive linguistics report coming this weekend for their subscribers:
You'll have to scroll down at the Earthfiles page to see the 'mess of triangles' crop circle, and then click over to the Buckminster Fuller site to see that the 'mess of triangles crop circle' is an iteration of a Fuller Dymaxion Projection map of the earth:
Our hats off to the time monks for serving up this curious insight. And another piece of pie for chief time monk Cliff. Such are the joys of design patterns...
Open Interesting As my friend/consigliore explained in yesterday's column, there are some problems in finance which are much more efficiently approached if you take a 'top down' rather than 'bottom up' approach.
Obviously, if you could get the 'spot on' view of how things were going to work out in the future, you'd be able to make more money than most, simply because you'd have your bets placed on the right side of the table. Thus, a 'right-brain' view can be more accurate than the 'left-brain/quant' view of things.
While quantative and analysis is fine for a lot of things, in terms of projecting yesterday's performance of a security or commodity off into the future, it's usually a ton of work and the odds of getting the 'big picture' outcome right is often only slightly improved. While I enjoy Elliott Wave study, Dynamic Gann Angles, Fibonacci sequences, and the like, using them to project the economic conditions of America 6-months from now is a real stretch of math and the imagination.
What's really most important to curious George is not the Gann Angle, Elliott count, or any of the technical analysis views individually, but rather, their collective impact on the world as a group of data that drive investor expectations.
What many people don't spend much time on (probably because it's real work) is rather than using the traditional TA methods, there is plenty of readily available data which, once considered, will give you the absolute truth of what people expect conditions to be like at some point down the road a ways.
Consider, if you will (he said, putting on this best Rod Serling voice), the strange case of open interest in oil contracts for late this year. Forget about all the headlines - let's just look at the twilight zone of oil as reflected by the open interest in oil call opens for the December expiration.
To get these, I called my commodities broker JB and asked him to read out Deece's (hip trader talk for December options) so I could throw them into Excel and see whatzzup:
There was an oil interest yesterday of 32,712 $200 oil calls when we looked versus only 30,824 at $100.
The key takeaway I got from the exercise was that the market doesn't seem to have made up its mind one way or the other about future oil prices. However, if I squint just so, I can almost make out two camps; imagine one as a normal distribution between about $75 and $139, while another 'camp' would be a normal distribution between 139 and 250.
Once we get to the attack on Iran (late September to early October?) we'll watch this and update it, in order to see the high-end prices expand and push up toward $300-$500, which is where I was thinking about buying a few cheap calls anyway - which is how I got started on this charting exercise in the first place.
Oh, and as a progress check on what?
The Bankster's Coup d’état Oh, sure, there are a few people left who can read the Constitution, but the bankster's corpgov coup would just as soon there weren't, I'm sure. Take for example Devvy Kidd who writes this week of the "Freddie and Fannie Unconstitutional Bail Out Using What?"
You're not supposed to figure out at a) the answer is your income taxes and b) that by a single stroke, this increases America's potential liabilities --doubling them.
All of which ought to be wildly bullish for gold, silver, and anything that's a hard asset, but maybe there's enough fluoride in the water, or enough Prozac being passed around to keep folks from 'getting it'.
Bail Out Shell Game While it's nice that Barney Franks wants to tie any bail out of Freddie and Fannie to the U.S. Debt ceiling, we've all learned out lesson from recent economic past that lots of accountants have largely gone crooked with off balance sheet accounting. Was he sleeping during Enron? The off-books stuff in the world is probably as large as the on-books accounting, especial if you throw in the narco money, non?
Is the Low In? Jury's out, but Robin Landry has gotten his longs out of the market yesterday. "We made some money, we take some profits..." And a friend down at 125 Broad St. in Manhattan (not in the daycare center there, LOL) sent a note about the number of lows this week:
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