UrbanSurvival

Maybe I missed something which caused ‘all this’ to happen.  Sure, it has been there in the predictive linguistics out of www.halfpasthuman.com (next run due around March 21) with its warnings of a country of years back that the ‘revolution meme’ would be running ‘hot’ (linguistically speaking) in this timeframe.  But,  even with the rickety time machine, there are events forming up that make me sit back in wonder:  Is this what “revolution” looks like? 

What’s interesting to me – and maybe it’s a symptom of increasing pressure of the socioeconomic/political/psychological sort – is America is developing a ‘hair trigger’ mentality.

It first popped conscious for me Sunday when a reader of the latest Peoplenomics report confused “George-reporter” with “George’s view”.

In my interview with Jim Goulding, he gave an interesting analysis of the conflict between generations; e.g. the Boomers, the 40-somethings (Gen-X’ers) and the young up and coming “Millennials” (Mills).  To which a reader sent in:

“I’ve never been actually PISSED that you were wrong – this statement is total and complete BS! ‘And, Xers? We all hate ourselves and think all the problems in the world are our fault. We are looking to the Mills to save us‘

UP YOURS for even thinking such a thing. X’rs ARE PISSED AT THE BOOMERS! Simply because they made a really comfy nest for themselves and fed us to the wolves.

We do not want our kids saving us, WE WANT THE BOOMERS OUT OF OUR WAY! Boomers by and large are complete idiots who have hid behind a facade of rules and regulations preventing the ascent of my generation – they have created nothing else. Just rules, rules, rules. If that is your take on the X’ers – Screw you along with the Charlatan boomer generation. Not sure I ever want to read / hear another word out of you – that’s your linguistics drop off. We stop listening.”

Until that email, the ‘revolutionary’ discussion had been – at least in my mind, a small place at that – to be confined to socioeconomic and possibly political outcomes.  But THIS was a whole LOT BIGGER.

But Wait!  There’s more.  A reader this morning sent it an email that got into how there’s a repolarization around racial lines going on as well and she noted a couple of examples from television and (as she read them) presidential books. 

She then got around to the topic of her email “The Revolution may already be here:”

“…ultimately, it seems that this country is loosing a lot of ground on the issue of mending fences, and all living “together.” my anthropological background would draw the conclusion that rather than Obama drawing people together, somehow he has created an impetus for the channeling of all old wounds into a new power of accusation rather than a melding of people. very worrisome. and part of that is just the reading between the lines of other things. of course, the problem is that history cannot be changed; therefore, if we are to base our interactions on historical injustice, there is no resolution…only a wound that grows ever larger, picked at and festering…

I’ve seen some other things but don’t wanna take up yer time, just thought you could throw this in your hopper…oh, saw a woman financial commentator from Davos; her comment was that she was very surprised at the power china had there this year, and how diminished the united states was as a power…

Other examples of the “Revolution in Progress” started to pop out of the headlines when looked at in this particular way.  For example, you saw where the (female) politic chief of King, North Carolina is in hot water because during a state of emergency due to snow, residents were barred from buying alcohol and firearms.

Now, it’s not like she personally declared ‘martial law’ – it’s just that when a state of emergency happens in many burgs, the ban on alcohol and firearms kicks in.  Stimulus-response.  Except, that America has been hypersensitized because of recent (historically speaking) events like the KatRita ‘canes that brought jackbooted thugs into our living rooms seizing Constitutionally protected rights and people have made it clear aren’t going to stand for that.

(Why someone would go out in near-blizzard conditions to buy a gun is beyond me, but I suppose that’s why I don’t living in NC… on the other hand, running out of rum for hot buttered rums that does make sense.)

I guess the key thing that’s dawning under what’s left of my hair is that ‘the revolution’ meme is not a one-dimensional political upheaval.  It has other dimensions as well:

• It’s the boomers having to give up their plans for a long and prosperous retirement since they allowed themselves to be ripped off by the banksters and fraudsters over multiple administrations who stole from Social Security Trust fund money, putting in dead-beat IO’s which will be paid back with deflated  purchasing power ’script’.
• It’s everyone figuring out that since 1913 the Feral (sic) Reserve has deliberately diminished the purchasing power of savings by 2.3% per year by printing more money than a correspondent increase in GDP would dictate in order to assure US dollars would retain purchasing power.
• It’s the X’ers who are not seeing the Boomers ‘get out of our way’ so they can move into command-level of the economy.
• It’s the remains of the crooked Boomers in politics who figure that open borders/immigration will mean more low-end workers to fund the aforementioned ripped-off Social Security and now other frauds like the payment for the bankster bailouts and so forth.
• It’s the Millennials who are taking up an ‘ain’t never gonna be able to get me some’ mindset which is coupled with ‘planet’s been wrecked anyways…’ attitude which makes them an ‘ain’t got nuthin, so ain’t got nuthin’ to lose…’ group.  Mills buy a home?  Not even on the drawing board for my kids and they’re all pushing 30.  Are they pissed?  Yep.
• Then you’ve got several imperial cultures (Black and Hispanic) trying to change the prevailing media-portrayed paradigm…which is being fought with hard times/rise-up-against-oppression music, sexually explicit imagery, drugs, and, oh just for good measure more weapons than you can shake a stick at…
• You do have the ‘right’ tattoo, don’t you?  That’s like people are putting on their own UPC codes when they ‘too’ up…marks of the beast/ownership down at the archetype level.  Preconscious tribalism/retribing/ganging/role-assigning, stamped right here.  A rite of passage into….membership in….in…..well…what?
• Did I mention the growing anger around climate/’environmental destruction?

Which unfortunately doesn’t even begin to cover all of the social pressures that are moving America into Re-Revolutionary times.  I bet there’s a secret government study group that has figured this out as well and which whispers in the ear of people in Washington: “Ya’ll better keep BIG distractions like wars in the sandbox going, or this whole thing’s gonna blow…”

Seems to me, it may anyway.  At least that’s where the linguistics have been pointing and while those who see the future (like Cliff and others – e.g. Gerald Celente) have tried to keep discussion of the ‘revolution’ in a positive light (e.g. ‘revolution in spirit’, ‘revolution in technology’, and ‘intellectual revolution’) there’s a far more sinister set of forces developing that is pushing multiple towards the barricades and confrontation with authority on multiple fronts:

• Irresponsible finance
• Disappearing opportunity for advancement
• Imperial culture symbology (bling & pimped out rides)
• Unaffordable housing
• Soaring costs for basics like food & clothing
• Environmental destruction
• Slimy political officeholders who failed to Lead when they had a chance

Like the Peoplenomics reader who got pissed that I interviewed someone who ‘put it out there’, try not to confused George the Messenger with the news he’s delivering.  It isn’t pretty.

America’s being divided by supremacists of all stripe:  Supremacy of Federalism, Supremacy of Nanny State, Supremacy of Police/Anti-terrorism, Supremacy of Financial exploitation, Supremacy of intergenerational cost-shifting, Supremacy of the Boomers holding onto power, Supremacy of Bling and Street/Turf Power, and the list just goes on and on.  Did I mention the republicrats/democons – supremacists of their own FU’d paradigm who kill third party efforts to get fundamental ‘change’ on the docket?

So if you want to figure something big, try to figure out how to reverse the tide now flowing in human affairs. 

If we (as a nation) don’t wrap our arms around this problem set/meta set associated with “the R word” then we about lock in another word and it feeds into concepts that leaves a couple of billion dead littering modelspace over the next few years:  terra change and devolution.

Like Report from Iron Mountain said:  If America doesn’t have an external enemy, we have a bigger problem…

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We’re maybe going to have some snow out here at the ranch later on this week.  One to three inches I hear.

Got to run out today and buy much rum so as not to be impacted by States of Emergency I didn’t see coming.

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Not like I’m the sole bearer of bad news on this stuff.  Go read over the Paul Farrell story “How to invest for a global-debt-bomb explosion Prepare for an apocalyptic anarchy ending Wall Street’s toxic capitalism.”

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Send your comments to george@ure.net

“Live on $10,000″ A Year

Having a hard time making ends meet?  (Like who isn’t, right?)  A good starting point to better match up income with outgo is our $10 e-book “How to Live on #10,000 a Year…or less!”

It’s an automatic download.  It’s written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left.  A bonus section called “How to Build Anything” should instill confidence if you’ve never taken on a home improvement/home creation project before, too…..  Click here for the index and details.

MyGroPonics

My commodity broker JB Slear and I have written a simple book to get you started on high density hydroponics.  It’s an example of how someone with a little creativity, access to a few ‘dollar stores’ and willing to try out some new farming techniques can grow an amazing amount of produce sin a very small space – like even an apartment balcony (if it gets some sunlight).  Sound interesting?  It’s just $10 bucks here…

Pass It On

A different take on things – that’s what you’ll find here most mornings.  If you know of anyone who might also like our content, simply click here and send a link to them.  Or, if you hated what you read, send the link to all your ‘worst enemies’.  Like they say in Burbank, “Ain’t no such thing as bad press…”

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 Last week’s report is here.    For back issues of this site, click here.

While probably 99% of American males were glued to their teevee sets for Super Bowl, I spent Sunday on the back of the snorting orange monster called Kubota (made in Georgia, btw) whipping a sense of orderliness out of about 5-acres which later on this year will be goat pasture.  this morning I’m pretty much sore all over and discovering muscles I didn’t know I had.  But about 3-acres is done for the year and ready for fencing which only leaves about another two week’s worth of tractoring – maybe three – to get the land whipped into the kind of shape I want it.

Fair bit of art to tractoring rough land.  First thing you do is poush over scrub trees and grind them up with the brush-hog a flail mower that runs on a power-take-off shaft from the tractor and beats everything to snot making a tremendous racket the whole time and jarring you silly.  The next step is to pull the Muscatine grape vines out of the large oak trees.  The grape vines, many as big around as your wrist can be 60-80 feet long and yes, when they come down on your head, they hurt, LOL.  All that’s left is running over them to turn ‘em into mulch and then to push up the logging leftovers that haven’t decomposed yet.

Point is that while I was doing this, I was reminded that there are some jobs which people do that are extremely rewarding.  For example, framing a house has always been high on my ‘personal rewards’ list.  Something about capturing or taming formerly disorganized space that’s just darn rewarding.

Writing (and broadcasting) has always appealed to me, too.  Something about being able to wr4ite (or speak) something that will get people to thinking rather than just sitting around swallowing crap hook, line & sinker.

Working on electronics has its own special rewards, too.  Chasing electrons around through the bowels of a radio, for example, trying to find where they’re not corralled and doing what I want ‘em to.   And finally, getting them to come out of a speaker or an antenna output, depending on whether they’re receiver electrons or transmitter electrons.

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The reason for mentioning this – and on a Monday, at that – is to remind myself, my kids, and maybe you that if you’re doing something that you really enjoy, it’s not really work.  It’s activity and sometimes the right activity can verge on being fun.

I realize not everyone can be having fun all the time but there’s a joy that comes from a good landing, well-stitched artery, perfectly prepared meal, properly operating software, timely mail delivery, and nicely designed and framed house that is its own reward.

I figure the safest time to be out working in the woods of East Texas is when Super Bowl is on; fighting a cold north wind, trying not to snag a hydraulic line on brush being pushed, not to snap a stump with the mower blade, and at the end of it having a nice piece of land looking cared for.

Best of all:  No hangover and I get to do more of it over the next several weeks and maybe some of the novelty/joy will wear thin.  I’ll try to shoot a few  before & afters for you.  Main difference between Super Bowl Sunday and After Bowl Monday, near as I can figure, is most places don’t supply beer & grazing materials on the job site.

Gone Sailing

Meantime, as a 10-year liveaboard sailor, I’d be negligent not to mention that the America’s Cup trials are getting underway today.  Good story on the NY Times website about the monohull versus multihull debate.

Since you may have never got deeply into nautical design, allow me to bring you up to speed a bit.  There are several different approaches to ‘hull’ shape – the part of the boat that goes in the water. 

A traditional hull is a long banana-ish kind of affair that moves through the water in a very predictable way.  The basic formula is 1.34 times the square root of the waterline length gives you the basic ‘hull speed’ which can be diddled with this way and that.  But it’s why little boats can’t keep up with bigger boats of the same hull type.  A 36 foot traditional monohull will do 8.04 knots (6 * 1.34)  as a basic displacement hull, while a 9 foot boat will do 3.02 knots.

The diddling is incredible, though.  How the bow enters the waves, reduction in wetted area (wetted area equals friction) and even how well the boat is “faired” around protrusions like through-hull fittings for engine cooling or how much disturbance the rudder makes – all that figures into ultimate speed for a given set of conditions.

The 1.34 monohull speed is just a basic rule of thumb and there are calculators alike this one where you can find conversions for multi-hulls, although truth be told, if you’re going exotic, I’d recommend you look at hydrofoils, but that’s a whole other discussion.  I’m sure if my friend Cliff were up at this hour, he’d say something like “What about skimming & planing hulls like the Sharpie and the Geary designed Flatties?”

Example of a flattie may be seen here  of you can go buy one used for $500 bucks if you’re in Oregon.  The discussion of “sharpies’ could last longer than a day at work and there’s a fair write up on Wikipedia about them.  Cliff really likes the Phil Bolger sharpies, although if you like sailing straight up and down, you would be much better off with a multiple hull since the sharpies are tender – nauticalese for tippy to a point (about 30º of tippy since you asked).

Which gets us around to the whole question about the America’s Cup racing: Should the sport continue to be confined to monohulls, or should the sport be changed up to include multihulls and exotics like hydrofoils?

Hard call: traditionalists on one side, speed demons on the other.

Either way, as the old sailing joke goes:  ‘If you want to get a really good approximation of sailboat racing, go stand in a cold shower and tear up $100-dollar bills.”  Been there, done that. If you ever get there yourself, a little more Buffett and remember the old saying “Gentlemen never go to weather…”

Press on General Aviation

I’ve been getting a fair number of emails and notes from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association urging me to contribute to their fund to fight new restrictions and user fees in Washington, although no sign of user gees for general aviation/sport pilots in the current budget.  Still with the budget process just starting it may come up…so goes the fund raising material.

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My own feelings?  If a plane is using ATC [air traffic control] it oughta pay its fair share, TCA’s [terminal control areas] excepted so sport  & private pilots can still fly on the cheap.  But pressurized pistons and corpjets using IFR [instrument flight rules] airspace (Class A airspace is all that at and over 18,000 feet)?

“If they fly Class A…let ‘em pay…” or how about “17-9,  free is fine…”? Although I appreciate how it takes a checkbook to be heard in Washington.

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How comes FAA pilot’s licenses STILL don’t have pictures on them?????

Lifestyles/Deathstyles:  Killer Boredom

New research says you really can be bored to death.  Funny this would come up.

While I was resting up after having my Sunday brain bouncing I was looking at airplanes again and thinking to myself.. I’ve got to come up with a new hobby and/or huge personal project.

I’m convinced that people are by nature inquisitive, learning, wandering, adaptive critters and that when they stop wandering, inquiring, adapting, and learning news tuff they wither up and die.

This being Monday is a fine time to ask “What turns my crank?  What’s my BIG GOAL that I’m working toward?  What’s the big mountain I’m climbing?”

If you don’t have one, go find one…’cuz is you don’t, you may be sliding toward the Big Exit faster than you have to….seem the movie “The Bucket List” is very much on point.

Reader’s Writes:

Here’s one:

“I read your column every day…sometimes twice if needed. It is part of my morning routine up here in the Great White North.

I have two complaints.

1. You publish your blog at 8 hundred and I am up at 5…gotta wait 3 hours. 2. You are getten gun shy. Somebody must uh sprinkled some buckshot your way in the form of rebuke.

My very humble advice would be to not be shy concerning your views. Your blog is a source of truth and hope in an entropic society.”

Answers are simple:

1.  Sleep in more.

2.  Not getting gun shy – just ‘normal folks’ (if I can stretch that far enough to include you ) are getting more radical.  Remember, when the web bots started talking about how regular folks will be using terms like ‘revolution’ (3-4 year ago) that was revolutionspeak.  Today it’s ho-hum.
 

No put away that Molotov cocktail and get’cher ass off to work. Don’t you have a hobby to fund, or sumpthin?  Leftovers and replay of game highlights to look forward to tonight?

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Send your comments to george@ure.net

“Live on $10,000″ A Year

Having a hard time making ends meet?  (Like who isn’t, right?)  A good starting point to better match up income with outgo is our $10 e-book “How to Live on #10,000 a Year…or less!”

It’s an automatic download.  It’s written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left.  A bonus section called “How to Build Anything” should instill confidence if you’ve never taken on a home improvement/home creation project before, too…..  Click here for the index and details.

MyGroPonics

My commodity broker JB Slear and I have written a simple book to get you started on high density hydroponics.  It’s an example of how someone with a little creativity, access to a few ‘dollar stores’ and willing to try out some new farming techniques can grow an amazing amount of produce sin a very small space – like even an apartment balcony (if it gets some sunlight).  Sound interesting?  It’s just $10 bucks here…

Pass It On

A different take on things – that’s what you’ll find here most mornings.  If you know of anyone who might also like our content, simply click here and send a link to them.  Or, if you hated what you read, send the link to all your ‘worst enemies’.  Like they say in Burbank, “Ain’t no such thing as bad press…”

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 Last week’s report is here.    For back issues of this site, click here.

In a word: No.  But since this is Friday you get the long answer:  Reader wanted to find out if we’re into a buy zone for gold yet:

“George,

Can you believe that people are still fleeing into the dollar? It’s like they are running to the one room in the center of the burning house that doesn’t have smoke in it yet. The DXY was up to 80.28 at my first check this morning (3:30 AM…the puppies got active early). I can’t seem to find a straight answer on whether Greece is going to default and start the cascade or accept restructuring with austerity and have a total political meltdown. The EU bankers are smoking dope if they think Germany is going to bail out the whole Mediterranean region. I read that Spain is twice the burden of Greece, Portugal and Ireland put together. I don’t know whether that is an exaggeration or not. Today is going to be a good day to buy Gold. I look forward to seeing what you have to say today.

I don’t give financial advice!  But IF we fire up our hugely complex graphics program and take a couple of Kitco charts (that’s where I bought my lone gold coin, LOL) we’d see that 1) there’s a trend line which we can see in the one month charts which to me (not you!) infers lower to come and also that someone(s) saw yesterday coming and probably made pretty good bucks on the $46 beat-down:

Remember, gold spiked up to $1,212 in December, so I keep my credit card handy and Kitco’s phone number in hand for just the moment when I think a bottom is really in.  Now?  Not in my opinion – but that’s because I want to see if the $990 holds, or between now and summer if there might be further beat-downs administered to shake out some of ‘those of little faith’ which would allow the PTB to add to their positions before the whole economic system hits the skids later this year.

More than 2-cents worth, but since you asked, that’s how I see it.  Again – THIS IS NOT TRADING ADVICE!

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Still, the longer-term decline in the dollar seems to be reversing and so a rally to 0.80 vis-à-vis the basket can’t be ruled out, especially if the Eurozone is going to have a series of financial IED’s going off. 

So follow my logic on this.  So given that we’re around $0.73 this morning, that would infer a run of something near  8 3/4% rally, which means in my vastly simplified way of looking at the economic world that I am expecting:

• Gold pulling back to at least $980
• The Dow coming down to the 9,400-9,500 range

Of course, this is just a dart thrown early before the CES jobs adjustment got unveiled, but that my present trading plan.  The only thing that changes more than my trading plans, however, is Elaine’s choice of paint colors for the house and even then, I sometimes run ahead.

Once we get there, i.e. Dow 9,500, then I may go long a few selected stocks (via options) and then once the rally targets are hit, roll over once again onto the short side of stocks.

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Lots of times people ask me about entry points into trades that I make and I seldom answer.  Oh, sure, I will occasionally tells Peoplenomics readers about this trade or that but only after I enter and updated again after I exit so no nit-picky regulator can accuse me of profiting from revealing my trades…and that’s all goodness so no problem. 

But the remarkable thing is while everyone seems to want to know my entry points nobody ever asks my exit points.

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Howard Hill (www.mindonmoney.wordpress.com) and I were talking about this last evening since one of my short-term plays might be to buy ‘aty-the-money’ call options at the depths of the current decline (today or Monday maybe) on the cheap and then roll out of them in about 7 trading days (or so) going into the February options expiration which comes on my birthday this year.

Howard thinks I’m nuts (not that he’s wrong, mind you) and he suggested as an alternative I consider buying one of the “Four Horsemen” (of Bankpocalypse) since there’s one which is still priced like an option and about half its book value and his gut is that it could return 20% in fairly short order (6-8 weeks).  It’s why you oughta read Howard’s column.  Damn smart fellow and generous to boot.

It was about here that I interrupted his thinking to remind him that I can’t envision anything more boring than a 20-25% return in 6-8 weeks.

Howard – having the Big Name School math degree (but he didn’t go skulls which is a clue as to which school maybe, LOL) – pointed out that if I’d make one 20% return trade a month, I could end a year’s worth of trading up nearly eight to nine times my original stake.

True that, and maybe it’s why Howard’s house is much larger than mine, but I like adventure, adrenaline, and the riskier plays.  Something about all those flashing lights going off on one of the monitors.  Gives me an excuse to sit on my butt staring at a screen.  Still, I figure if I can make 40% returns in the same period, my year end return would be closer to 56-times my grubstake.  Magic of compounding. Either that or the wild-eyed greed of unresolved karmic issues.  Or, whatever….

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All this ambles around to something serious pros do and rank amateurs don’t:  The pro has a defined entry point for a trade as well as a defined exit point.  The amateur asks only for entry points.  May I remind you: Divine inspiration when to sell usually comes when the trade is upside down and by then it’s a little late.

Soooo…If you plan on making serious money, might I ever-so humbly suggest that you get in the habit of writing down before each trade what your entry and exit points are as well as the “do not exceed levels” along the way? 

Ure’s Primary Trading Rule:

 ”He who trades and runs away has cash to trade another day.”

Hurts having such discipline, but following it I clicked out of half my put options yesterday when 10 puts purchased for $100 per contract hit $140 per contract Thursday afternoon, and yes, that’s a 40% trade entered on 1/12/2010 and exiting 2/4/2010.  The other one I closed out was 4 options at a different strike entered 1/12/2010 for $170/option contract and closed yesterday for $240 per contract. 41%.
Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.  But I have been sitting on the sidelines long enough that I’m no longer considered a pattern day trader.  Time to start buying a few of these cheap lotto tickets as the markets panic? 

With Maps of Global Risk

A reader told us that the World Economic Forum has a mighty slick “Risk Interconnections Map” online which is useful for figuring out how one world event interacts with another.

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I can’t tell for sure but it looks like the map is a 2D isolation off a mapping ap most likely done in the ThinkMap platform. I showed you the p0latform back in December, 2008 (scroll down to VisualThesarus here.)

So yes, while the map looks cool in a static 2D display, it’s even cooler when you can pop up the 3D version and spin it, rotating around, up, and under it…Even neater if it has streaming news content and an emotional impact engine on it, but presumably you don’t get all the bells and whistles unless you’re in the WEF…still, the static display gives you the idea.

Now make each one of the dots a multiple drill-down into the supporting systems (markets, resources, manpower, politics & religious sects, etc…)within each country and see if you can get it on the store shelves at the $59 price point before Christmas…and don’t forget the RSS feed with risk ranker, OK?

Nice to see the ThinkMap ap being used…if that’s indeed what it is.  The fonts and links look right…. I talked to Cliff about rolling the web bot predictive modelspace over into ThinkMap instead of using the IntelliCad LISP interface, and while it would be keen and neato, doesn’t gain anything at a practical.  Still would have been cool to have link maps tying concepts in and changing over time, but the rickety time machine isn’t going to market.

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Speaking of which!

The new RAID 3 X 9 is happily check-checking its heart out so spiders oughta to be venturing forth in a few weeks and we may get out first glimpse of web bot data around March 21st, or so.

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Send your comments to george@ure.net

“Live on $10,000″ A Year

Having a hard time making ends meet?  (Like who isn’t, right?)  A good starting point to better match up income with outgo is our $10 e-book “How to Live on #10,000 a Year…or less!”

It’s an automatic download.  It’s written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left.  A bonus section called “How to Build Anything” should instill confidence if you’ve never taken on a home improvement/home creation project before, too…..  Click here for the index and details.

MyGroPonics

My commodity broker JB Slear and I have written a simple book to get you started on high density hydroponics.  It’s an example of how someone with a little creativity, access to a few ‘dollar stores’ and willing to try out some new farming techniques can grow an amazing amount of produce sin a very small space – like even an apartment balcony (if it gets some sunlight).  Sound interesting?  It’s just $10 bucks here…

Pass It On

A different take on things – that’s what you’ll find here most mornings.  If you know of anyone who might also like our content, simply click here and send a link to them.  Or, if you hated what you read, send the link to all your ‘worst enemies’.  Like they say in Burbank, “Ain’t no such thing as bad press…”

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 Last week’s report is here.    For back issues of this site, click here.

Every now and then – as a writer – there’s a chance that something will be ,’skipped over’ which the writer thinks is terribly apparent on the face of it, but upon reflection is based on the writer’s near certain knowledge that the reader will be able to keep up with dot-connecting at near warp speed.  That doesn’t often happen, so this morning (*with apologies for not laying out the dots in more obvious fashion in Wednesday’s report) I’m going to hand a little more meat on the concept of “Depression-Era Thinking Visible, which was the top story/most important concept change I noticed on Wednesday morning.

To make this easy, I’m going to actually throw down a whole bunch of dots for you and lead you through the connections to avoid confusion.

Dot #1

The January 24 issue of Peoplenomics made it perfectly clear what my expectations are for the present period forward several years…as we slide to the bottom of the Second Depression.

“Decline starts here, doesn’t end this year and we see Down under 4,000 before the year is out. A bounce early next year after a low this year of….hand me a dart, wouldja? Uh…3765.8 on the Dow. Then a rally to (another dart?)….uh….7,223.79 and then a Wave 5 decline to Dow 783.”

Since that report, although we’ve seen a couple of rally attempts, the market hasn’t gone much of anywhere and the put options I bought have been up as much as 27% although in fairness, they’re presently up less than 10%.  Nevertheless (and this is not trading advice so don’t whine at me later, you’re a grown up and your money is yours to deploy as you will), it seems to me that the majority of the bounce off the March 2009 lows has a better than even chance of being IT and a longer deeper decline lays ahead.

Dot #2

Some very good people I know…I mean extremely bright, talented, innovative folks in the money field have lost their jobs.  One writes the most savory www.mindonmoney.wordpress.com and the other, Trader Jim Goulding got pink-slipped this week up in bond fields of Chicago.

The thing about Trader Jim’s being cut loose that bothers me is that I’ve told you many times about his excellent free ebook “Winter is Coming“.  He’s an excellent trader and trading coach, yet he reports that when it comes to hiring nowadays  up in Chicagoland Bond Trading World, the only folks in high demand are “quants” – quantitative analysts – who might be able to squeeze fractions of pennies on massive volume, but strategic trading?  Forgitaboutit.   Not in vogue.

Goulding’s resume is on line here if you know anyone who needs a group of traders managed or some serious risk management handled.

My observation (and it may be wrong) based on dozens of similar dots over the past year or two is that there is a fundamental change in how investing is handled in play.

We saw it coming along slowly at first as some of the major stats like M3 was “disappeared” by the Fed.  True, it’s been reincarnated by Trader Bart over at Now and Futures, but don’t go looking there before you’ve finished breakfast:  The annualized change rate for M3 is now running about 4% negative on an annualized basis.

Do I have to scream this at you?  OK, then…

“DEFLATION IS OUT THERE!!!”

Which is why I have been telling anyone who will listen that my personal strategy (nut not advice) is to balance your risks so as to be impervious to a high rate of inflation or a high rate of deflation.

Which is why some money on property which can produce a little bit of income, some money in US Treasuries (as long as government is intact, they should have some return) and some precious metals to balance off the risk that government will have to resort to hyper-inflation in a year (or three) to create enough jobs to propel us out of the mess we’re sinking into.

A reader looked at yesterday’s report and sent in a note which needs clarification:

“What escapes the discussion is a fundamental problem of economics: IF people really DO cut back on their spending, it actually LENGTHENS the amount of time taken to recover. Sometimes best to shut up. ”

Say what? The Prez is not allowed to speak about values that made this country great?

It certainly is not consumption, borrowing to the hilt and indiscriminate spending. Is that not what got us into trouble in the first place? Have you looked at the exploding debt, relative to GDP since 1998? Every crisis was counteracted with more easy money from Easy Al and Ben. So what’s wrong with saving rather than continuing to consume and deferring the burden unto our children? It is precisely this now-now-ism that got us into this mess in the first place.

Want to be clear here:  I’m not critical of the Obama administration’s ‘you don’t go to Vegas’…I’m simply saying that we’re seeing a process – one that Nicholas Kondratieff thought was unavoidable:  At some point the return to core values (thrift & savings) collide with the desires of the bankster class and one faction of the PTB that wants to follow the myth of prodigious and persistent growth and deny the reality of economic cyclicity which the return to Depression Era “Thinking brings.

This is neither good nor bad.  It just is. 

Jim Goulding’s work in “Winter is Coming” suggests the bottom of the present ‘recession turned Depression’ won’t be along until sometime around 2014.  I’m not trying to be critical of the Obama administration on economic policy (that’d be too easy).  Instead, I’m trying to chronicle as we go how the rhyme with the first depression is laying out in this one and note that in Depression 1.0 government officials tried to guide financial behavior and it could be argued that their policy responses just made things worse.

The reality – best I can see it for all the media fog – is that this administration knows that the only way to kick-start the economy is with a whole lot of easy money but they lack the political capital to do what’s necessary and with headlines about how marginal democrats are starting to distance themselves in campaigns this year, and folks like Nouriel Roubini using terms like “political capital” it’s evident to me that we’re now into the acceleration to the downside of Depression 2. 

Whether people want to get straight and come to terms with that reality is another matter.  My main point was that pushing thrift now from the highest policy levels amounts to stepping on the gas in a car that’s just gone over a cliff.  May not change the outcome, but it draws attention to who took over as driver once the car was clear of the cliff’s rim which happened in Bushtober of 2008.

No, UrbanSurvival is not a place of “now-now-isms” that got us into this mess..  It’s about watching the economy, driven off cliff, estimating its trajectory, figuring out an approximate landing zone, and then trying to figure out in advance how to crawl out of the wreckage.

No hurry, though.  If Jim Goulding’s right, Robin Landry’s work is right, my consigliore’s work is right, and if my own well documented writings here are anywhere near right, we’ll be in decline for a couple of more years.  Or has the reality of the ‘jobless recovery’ somehow escaped you, or hasn’t it sunk in yet?

WuJo: Code?

A couple of days back (or was it last week?) I had a link to an airport runway which when viewed with Google Earth seemed to be packed with vehicles.  But a reader who looked at the strange places were there were no vehicles inferred something else:

“George, when I first looked at “closed” base and saw the SUVs parked on runways…first thought was it looked like the old computer punch code cards, why are there gaps in the grouping of the cars? why not fill in and why leave a space behind. if you were to get a vehicle they would come from the sides, not middle ???? strange…code”

Lacking our ability to make scalar communications system, are we trying to communicate something to off-worlders by laying our vehicles on a closed airport runway in punch card fashion?  Makes a helluva plot for something..

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Send your comments to george@ure.net

“Live on $10,000″ A Year

Having a hard time making ends meet?  (Like who isn’t, right?)  A good starting point to better match up income with outgo is our $10 e-book “How to Live on #10,000 a Year…or less!”

It’s an automatic download.  It’s written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left.  A bonus section called “How to Build Anything” should instill confidence if you’ve never taken on a home improvement/home creation project before, too…..  Click here for the index and details.

MyGroPonics

My commodity broker JB Slear and I have written a simple book to get you started on high density hydroponics.  It’s an example of how someone with a little creativity, access to a few ‘dollar stores’ and willing to try out some new farming techniques can grow an amazing amount of produce sin a very small space – like even an apartment balcony (if it gets some sunlight).  Sound interesting?  It’s just $10 bucks here…

Pass It On

A different take on things – that’s what you’ll find here most mornings.  If you know of anyone who might also like our content, simply click here and send a link to them.  Or, if you hated what you read, send the link to all your ‘worst enemies’.  Like they say in Burbank, “Ain’t no such thing as bad press…”

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 Last week’s report is here.    For back issues of this site, click here.

Problems down at the WuJo keeping up with all the high strangeness, not the least of which were all the orb pictures people sent me. 

Which gets me to the first point of this morning’s update:  While Mr. Esoteric is in the high powered aquisition of new ways to behold Universe at all times – which implies an open mind – he is always balanced by Mr. Science who says “Open mind, yes, but not so open as to have your brains fall out…”

One set of ‘orb’ pictures I reviewed was such an obvious set of doctored pics that I wondered how anyone could fall for them being as purported.  But, to be sure, there were some that seemed straight-ahead “Yup, that could be one…” but even these are not conclusive in any sense since I’m not actually buying into ‘orbs’ until I see some face-to-face, or at least take the pictures myself with known camera gear under known conditions and tear it apart with the latest from Corel and Adobe (Photo-Paint and  Photoshop) which I keep on hot standby for events like people telling me that this picture is this, or that picture is some space goat entail or whatever.

Remember: Open Mind, Skeptical Always.  Remember the state motto of Missouri.  (A big-ass hint if you need it by scrolling down a ways here…)

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Speaking of which, I have to stop mentioning Missouri.  In one of may manic marketing moments I sent the State a note suggesting an updated motto more friendly to building tourism dollars.  I suggested what?

“Missouri Loves Company”

Never heard back from them.

If you’re not rolling on the floor (or yelping from spilling coffee) you have absolutely no sense of humor.  Read it aloud a few times and see if the lights come on, or if anyone is home upstairs.

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A little more intriguing, while I run around snapping flash pictures all over the ranch at night (much to the consternation of the goats who are sure (again) that I’ve ‘lost it’, is the report of high strange out of Oztralia.  Folks on the net there have been writing up all kinds of copy (and snapping screen captures) of supposed ‘radar anomalies” lately.

Our Ozstralia regional WuWu correspondent sends this…

“You want to know JUST how odd it was here in Australia today???

The electronics all over the house went nuts, the wifi connection for my computer reset itself again and again (and it’s been acting nutso for almost a week now), my cameras (which all have computer sensors in them) stopped working and then later resumed all functions, my electronic flash unit stopped and then later restarted, and the icing on the cake was when the emergency flashers on the station wagon suddenly started flashing just before dinner time and the car hadn’t even been driven for several days!

The cat came in the house this morning and he was really, really agitated and he never left my side all day — following me to and fro between the cottage and the studio. And he kept ‘talking’ all day to let me know that he was quite upset about something. The last time I saw him like this was 2 years ago on the 100-plus degree day that my husband Mark got bitten by a poisonous snake and the snake also killed our Burmese Gigi.

Mark and I knew something was wrong all day — it was like the air was a gel consistency and you had to work at moving through the density of it. Throughout the day we had to keep stopping ourselves and doing little mental corrections so we didn’t absorb the energy or get stroppy with one another. And I knew straight away that it was something external.

When I had the flash unit cease working tonight and then the car flashers started blinking all by themselves within 20 minutes of each other, I told Mark, “This is NOT coming from us! There is something going on out there in the world!”

I don’t have time to read all of the forums and alternative news sources to keep up to date with this stuff nowadays — but it was quite apparent from my own inner sensing that things were being ‘toyed with’ out there in the planetary atmosphere. If this isn’t HAARP, it certainly is something equally insidious and it is frankly appalling that people’s lives are being toyed with in this manner!

We’ve got a couple of candidates for ’source of high strangeness’ on the radar (pun intended, sorry).  One is this persistent rumor on the ‘net that there will be a major earthquake around 11 AM this morning (or is it tomorrow?) on the US west coast somewhere, which will be an 8.0 or some-such.

While we’ve been terrifically accurate with our own earthquake predictions based on the rickety time machine (example: The 2008  China quake call within a three days) but there doesn’t seem to be much threat of “Big Ones” until after July 7 by that metric.

On the other hand, if we  indeed do get something north of say a 6.5 today or tomorrow around 11 AM, then the source of this particular quake prediction will go up several notches in credibility.

Meantime, the quake is ,supposedly to be nearest to Portland, Oregon.  The hell of it is, that when made, such predictions (Feb 3 instead of Feb. 6) gain lots of traction on the net because it sometimes seems people don’t have enough to worry about.  Like tax hikes, the national debt, multiple wars, pink slips flying all over and the soaring cost of groceries wasn’t enough.

Either that, or there has been so much mental energy put into this particular meme that something relatively routine (6.0 or under) would be declared “IT” and the effects of prayer will be credited with making it smaller than the 8.0+ which has been so widely bandied about.

Not to put down prayer – or any other way of manipulating the template of The Field in any way, shape, or form, but seems to me that if it’s a smallish quake that could just have easily been created by pushing the templates of The Field/kalapas around, know what I mean?

if not5, run over to Amazon  and pick up a copy of “How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life ” and review the chapters on how humans – equipped with dandy patterns recognition skills – can actually “make up” patterns that aren’t really there.

On the other hand, an 8.0 felt anywhere in Oregon today is a statistical improbability and that would impress me greatly.  However, be advises, I don’t impress easily and under a 6.0?  Forgitaboutit.

Cheap Screens

I think I’ve mentioned that one of the joys of coming out to my office in the morning, sitting down with a 24 ounces of coffee and writing up this running commentary on money, Universe, and the missteps of the great Dance Instructor is that I have multiple monitors on my computer.

Four to be exact.

So I can watch a market ticker on the left screen, have a 64-bit browser open on the right side of #2/middle, FrontPage on the left side of #2, Outlook and weather/time/date gadgets on #3 and network monitors, intrusion attempts and so forth on #4.  A 32-bit version of Internet exploder is on #1 in case I want to see something in Flash whichj seems not to work on 64-bit exploder.

Reason for laying this out for you is to explain that by simply plugging in an additional screen (if you have a spare video out, as on a laptop) you can utilize the extended desktop feature of Windows.  So you can have material on one screen, and should you wish, just drag it to the other.  Dandy for writing reports while looking at a spreadsheet, marketing plan, or running SQL queries (little early for that, though) on the other screed while your word processing hums along on t’other.

Why mention it again this morning?  Because as part of rampant deflation, the price of LCD monitors is collapsing.  I have three matched 24″ Sceptre’s that came in at $160 each.  And I got an email this morning that CompUSA has $99 18.5″ monitors on sale.  TigerDirect’s overstock page features some 22″ monitors (refurbs) for $119.97.

Ever since I got hooked on multiple screen computing back in 2001, or so, I would never live any other way.  It makes work fly past and it’s just a lot more efficient way of operating.

There is one drawback…and only one:  When people came into my office I would have to peer around a pile of monitors to see them.  A simple rearranging of furniture ended that LCD-lined foxhole appearance.  

Even visiting Panama Bates has two monitors now, the regular one on his laptop and an extended monitor above it.  Works like a charm.

Mr. Ure’s Birthday

In light of the horrible condition of the economy, I’ve decided to recommend only CraigsList items for you to send me for my birthday this year.  Here’s an ideal one.  (See the pix…nice ride, fo sho)

Power From the People

Say, yesterday I was moaning about my high electric bill and a reader wondered if I was selling anything to the local power company off our solar system.  Nope.  Consuming that, too.

Nevertheless, the reader makes a dandy point in that IF I had an amount of power to sell back compared to what I consumed, the local utility would still get the upper hand since they charge all kinds of things that residential solar types don’t charge them.

 Think about it:  The local utility charges a “power correction factor” so on a seasonal basis they charge more per KWhr because of their higher costs, and then there’s all kinds of taxes, too.

“You oughta be charging them taxes back…” suggests our egalitarian reader.

Fine point, that…

One Second Thought

…send the money to your local food bank.  “Hunger in America jumps to ‘unprecedented’ 46 percent.”

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Wonder if there has been a  corresponding downturn in the weight-loss industry?

Including the ones of this page here…

—

Send your comments to george@ure.net

“Live on $10,000″ A Year

Having a hard time making ends meet?  (Like who isn’t, right?)  A good starting point to better match up income with outgo is our $10 e-book “How to Live on #10,000 a Year…or less!”

It’s an automatic download.  It’s written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left.  A bonus section called “How to Build Anything” should instill confidence if you’ve never taken on a home improvement/home creation project before, too…..  Click here for the index and details.

MyGroPonics

My commodity broker JB Slear and I have written a simple book to get you started on high density hydroponics.  It’s an example of how someone with a little creativity, access to a few ‘dollar stores’ and willing to try out some new farming techniques can grow an amazing amount of produce sin a very small space – like even an apartment balcony (if it gets some sunlight).  Sound interesting?  It’s just $10 bucks here…

Pass It On

A different take on things – that’s what you’ll find here most mornings.  If you know of anyone who might also like our content, simply click here and send a link to them.  Or, if you hated what you read, send the link to all your ‘worst enemies’.  Like they say in Burbank, “Ain’t no such thing as bad press…”

—-

 Last week’s report is here.    For back issues of this site, click here.