First thing in the coping department this morning I’d draw your attention to an article by Giordano Bruno called “While You Were Sleeping…the Economy Collapsed.” Not only are the facts lined up much as we try to line them up around here every day, but the theme is the same – a kind of “Go out and yell at the sheep wandering by…” which passes as entertainment when you’re living in the East Texas Outback.
Yelling “Sleepwalking into 2010!” has a nice ring to it, although if this is more than your fifth or sixth visit here, you no doubt have that developing sense, too.
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As tonight is Christmas Eve Eve, and hardly anyone left will commit to getting a package out in time to play Reindeer Driver, there is still one gift you can give – the gift of awareness.
Not that I can tell you how, or where, to deliver it. Anymore, even within my own family, I’ve become a bit of an outcast for my incredibly practical and well-reasoned views. People just don’t have much interest in those since it’s so much easier to go along with the spin and float down the river of De Nile.
What sets the whole world up for a second major leg down in the economy is a bullish consensus and with headlines about like “World market up again on US economic hopes” I wonder how close the downturn is?
We live in a world where stories like “Report says 225,000 Haiti children work as slaves” without going deeper into the modern context of slavery. You know: The kind where 306-million (less old, young and unemployed leaving about 155-million workers in the USA) work as wage slaves. Give a man a Lexus and he’s slave to an gasoline bill, give him a big screen and he’s a slave to the power company, etc. Give a man an office, he’s slave to the PTB…etc.
Runaway materialism is a hard addiction to beat, but like Bruno writes, “While you were sleeping…the economy…” is dying. As Rogoff & Reinhart’s book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
But we seem poised to enter 2010 in a headlong rush to discover it ain’t really any different this time, either. Think I’ll go back to bed; I may be suffering depression depression, know what I mean?
The Razor’s Edge
A friend of my visiting son was chatting with us last night about cell coverage here in the Outback and the subject of “What’s the best cell phone?” came up. My son’s phone is an iPhone in a ruggedized cover while hers was a Razor. Since both kids are in the emergency response field the discussion about “How many bars for what kind of signal” came up and turns out that our guest’s observation is that Razor’s have a very good rep for working in low signal strength areas among local LE & fire types…something I thought I’d pass one.
The Great Escape
A couple of readers have sent in the article from New Scientist this week titled “Engage the x drive: Ten ways to traverse deep space “. Not sure why anyone would want to leave this rock that we’re in the midst of destroying with resource-stripping consumerism, especially if there ain’t no tax collectors in the rest of the galaxy, but that’s a topic for a different day, I ‘spose.
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I’ve always loved Star Trek which manages to have very little ‘economic content’ but I imagine that if you have a holodeck it would be hard to keep an economic con game going, wot? Of course that has set a lot of brainpower in motion trying to actually build a holodeck.
If you get one working, invite me over…better still: Sell one to the government so they can save money printing our way out of the current financial mess…save some trees, yada, yada….
Year-Enders
Marketing, marketing, marketing: I see where the NY Post has done something a little different than the usual boring countdown of the “Year’s Top Stories”. They’ve come up with the “2009 Best Lingerie Images“.
Oh sure, for the more serious-minded, there’s Project Censored’s “Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009” but where’s the Christmas cheer and eye-candy in that?
If I were 30-years younger and single it’d be a simple choice to pick #12 from the Post list instead of #12 from Project Censored (“Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind“), but on this side of 60 the choices become more difficult.
Only a few more years and I’ll be at the next great intersection of Life: Where IQ, speed limit, and age all converge.
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Send your comments to george@ure.net
The UrbanSurvival Mall:
Peoplenomics This Week
Short Term Values, Capital Preservation, 2
Several readers have asked me for an update to the August 30 Peoplenomics report (#418) in which I expressed growing skepticism of the rally which was then in the are of Dow 9,544. What is difficult to find in investing are clear signals when one should flee from a particular investment and see something else. So this week I’ll pick on a couple of markets (gold and stocks) and show you just how close I think both are to the ‘fight-or-flight’ technical level. Along the way, some discussion of an indicator that very few people seem to use anymore – exponential curves. Before we can do that, however, a little math and long-term perspective is necessary. Not hard stuff – unless you were math-averse in school – in which case we’ll make this as painless as possible. As usual, this is not trading advice, and I assume you’ve read our comprehensive disclaimer here. True, that’s like holding you a lit stick of dynamite, and saying “Now – you hold this….while I go hide behind that rock…” But, that’s how today’s litigious world operates, isn’t it? So we’ll start with you holding a chart and me lighting it like so….
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Maxa-Cookie Manager
Been a while since I’ve updated you on how many cookies and web bugs have been removed from my main computer by the Maxa Cookie Manager from Maxa Tools: 1,602 web bugs and 54,131 cookies so far. It’s amazing.
Take it for a free test drive by downloading it. To upgrade to full functionality will set you back $35 bucks, but Christmas is coming… Is your privacy worth it?
Once you try it out, click the upgrade button (!) on the upper right hand side for the $35 unlock to get it to remove even those nasty and highly intrusive ‘non-browser specific’ cookies. Bonus: You computer may run faster.
Attn: Mac Drivers: MCM does support the Safari Browser, but that does not mean it is compatible with Mac OS. Maxa-Tools only support the Windows world….so far. Given Jens and the other engineers time…
“Live on $10,000″ A Year
With another round of layoffs due to start later this month…a round which will start to axe many of the middle managers who have managed to avoid the HR grenades…might I suggest a preemptive tactical move? Voluntarily dropping your lifestyle back a bit, since we’re all being marched down that road by either circumstances or some out-of-control-PTB types who write checks to Washington lobby and to anti-reformers in California! A good starting point, at least if you’ve still got $10-bucks is my 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… 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
The business model of this website is base Simply click here and send a link to this site to everyone on your distro list…Nothing more dangerous than sharp, clear-thinking upstarts who ask a lot of questions, eh? Unless you believe WTC-7 fell over on its own, of course….
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Last week’s report is here. For back issues of this site, click here. (Goes back to 1997!)
“If you ain’t paranoid, you ain’t payin’ attention!”