|
|
A One Man Economic Daily Newspaper about the Second Depression in near real-time...
Powered
by subscribers to
Peoplenomics.com
|
Published Monday - Friday about 8 AM Central Time ....some typos are fixed by 8:30 (in theory) Friday
October 29, 2010 08:35 AM CDT
New Here? Visit our FAQ This site is supported by subscriptions: For additional content, please subscribe to Peoplenomics. . Content mirrored at: http://www.independencejournal.com/, Mobile & Kindle (.MOBI) version here
Breaking New "Unknown' Russian Missile System Damn fine reporting from WSB-TV (Ch 2 - Atlanta) which is running a story on a new kind of previously unreported kind of Russian missile launching system built into standard shipping containers...
Now we have to start wondering what's in all those containers in various places around the world that look so innocuous to satellite imagery... just one more worry with our tipping point inside of two weeks now...
Short & To the Point The main thing to grasp while the morning shot of jet fuel kicks in is that we may see another down day in the markets today simply because of the amount of global economic focus which is bearing on possible Fed quantitative easing next week, and a key report on growth in terms of GDP.
The way I see things shaping up, there is probably far less incentive for the Fed to move ahead with a second massive quantative easing (QE2) than many on Wall Street are hoping. The reasons?
Taken together, these factors may be enough to prevent the Fed from doing anything on QE2. If the Fed does lower in any meaningful way, the world's "hot money" would likely head for higher rates in China, since as any second year economics student can figure it: A country with decent inflation prospects offers a much better opportunity to lever one's way into Big Money than a country stuck in the backwaters of monetary stagnation.
Can you say "Fed in a Box"? If anything, the Fed may well face an under-recognized pressure to hold pat - or even raise - which could send Wall Street into crash mode.
Sorry about that, worker-class with money in retirement funds and other notional parking places: China is looking at strong inflation pressures over the next two years and hot money loves a good combination of yield plus currency swings...and with the Yuan/Renminbi outlook stronger, where would you put your money, given that:
Seems a pretty damn simple macro question to answer. Yes, the Fed may do some window-dressing very short term. But a big easing like the 23-trillion and up ranges (1.5-2% of GDP that would have to find its way to the worker-bees and wage slaves in the form of jobs to support higher disposable incomes? Hahaha....I just don't see it.
Beside #1: The US economy grew at a slightly faster pace in Q3 says a new report out today.
Besides #2: China is probably looking at US-anything paper with suspicions since we've been hearing rumors on the net that some MBS product sold globally contains duplicated mortgages. And they would NOT like to see their US bond holdings 'watered down' by too much 'easy money', fo sho.
I'm not the only guy who sees the problem. Go read Jim Willie's piece "Imminent Big Bank Death Spiral" over at GoldSeek.
And then be sure and have a great weekend. Life's about to change.
We're seeing the end of an era - which seems (at least linguistically) ready to slap us all silly in short order. "If you can't trust a mortgage, what can you trust?"
And - walking the talk - Elaine and I spent part of Thursday in Tyler, Texas, moving some dough from a big national bank with a Weiss Rating of "D" to a local, long-term East Texas bank with an A+ from Weiss.
We don't have enough to play "hot money". Instead, we play chicken money. A good starting point is here.
While we will likely keep our big national bank account with some dough in it - as a transactional account, I expect that we will move more ready dough to the local bank and another portion to the TreasuryDirect account.
No QE-2 (or one the Street doesn't like) crashes Dow - a serious possibility to ponder.
Lira's Latest Latest from Gonzalo Lira is under the title "Signs Hyperinflation is Arriving". --- But, unlike Lira, I don't see inflation as ramping universally. I think necessities will zoom, but some things on my shopping list (like airplanes or other physical goods) may actually decline as people try to raise money to eat as food prices can zoom. Minor disagreement among gentlemen...
Besides, if hyperinflation really shows up in a hyper-hyper way, our two gold coins oughta be able to buy most of Europe and a good chunk of Asia, to boot while our little bit of silver should buy three US states worth of foreclosures...
Who'll be Sacrificed? What's not clear is which of the Big National Banks will be sacrificed next, although we're not taking any chances and moving our own dough around based on bank ratings. --- The Columbia Journalism Review has a good read: "BizWeek reports a Bank of America Threat to Fannie: Which corporate-welfare recipient will end up holding the bag on toxic mortgages?" It's a must read.
More hints of defending against what may be to come might be inferred by reading the latest lawyer-hiring by BofA which shows up in today's WaPo.
Still, lots of other candidates out there, it's just this is where the shark fins seem to be most-sighted over the past week or three. Sharks can move quickly.... --- While we wait for the tipping point to arrive, please! Don't send me any more links to the ZeroHedge "The tipping Point Has Arrived" post that went up yesterday. But, if you haven't read it, might want to put it on your list...
Banks Run Call Going Viral in EuroLand? Say, here's an interesting 'heads-up' from one of our sources which is almost certain NOT to be in the MSM for obvious reasons:
This 'well-informed source' has a book due out via Amazon soon - and I'll let you know when that pops...revolutionary change times, indeed.
Oh, Hit Several readers have noticed the 'hurricane over land' from the SOTTC report actually happened just as predicted. Typical note goes like this:
Uh...OK. So it is....and with record over land barometric pressures of the sort associated with Cat 3 hurricanes. Neat, but only from a linguistics standpoint. Damn mess for humans. --- TS Shary aims at Bermuda today.
Vote 'Em ALL Out! All of which makes next Tuesday's elections all the more fun: Rasmussen Reports -shows that the clear majority of Americans would like ALL of congress tossed out so the Nation can essentially reboot:
Apparently the other 35% aren't paying attention, LOL.
Quick! Looked Surprised Department OK, sure, if you had several thousand dollars of unreported income and you deliberately hid it from IRS, you'd be in a heap-o-trouble.
BUT when your gub'mint reportedly does $8-billion worth of spending in the Defense Department in Afdrugistan, no receipts, that's a different deal. At least, so far...
(Afdrugistan = Afsmackistan = unfillable money pit. Hope $8-bill bought us a good start, though...why are we there again?)
Oh, Yeah...Terrorism, Alright... Which moves us to notice the headline this week in the UK's Guardian: "No terror arrests in 100,000 police counter-terror searches, figures show."
Still, 504 people were charged with something. Baggy of 406 or something like that, but no terrorist related items. Hmmm...
Guess Who's Coming to Tipping Point? Locusts - Biblical proportion of 'em. In Oztralia's Victoria region...
Un Filament That massive solar filament on the Sun has collapsed and hurdled off debris into space more or less on Patrick Geryl's schedule.
As it tossed the whatever out, it was determined not to be headed our way, so the worries about CME-like damage are nadda...this time. January 18th is our next hot data if the 87-point something sun cycle proves out.
American Ingenuity There have a fair number of articles wondering about how mjuch pot smoking as been going on in the baseball finals. But maybe it's just good, old, American ingenuity at work: Given a chance to get a buzz, with arguably less kidney throughput, and enhancing the already near-magical properties of ballpark franks, what's a poor baseball fan to do?
Is this a great country or what? Speaking of our Great Country....what about that.....
Government Drug BUY We have to wonder what the government is planning to do with drugs they are trying to buy...check out this email - our eye-popper of the day and all open-source!
True...but gosh, look at the good news in the Solicitation: "Note: Funding for this requirement is not currently available. This requirement is for process to point of award only. "
And the other good news? Delivery was not before election day. Somewhere into - or after - the tipping point, if I understand processing, right.
Wonder if home lab submissions would be accepted, huh? Just kidding....
More seriously: The underlying docs are only looking for 90-grams. Street name for the stuff is "buzz".
Still, if you happen to be driving near Dugway and see a flock of sheep which are restless, dizzy, acting confused, refusing to follow orders plus exhibit pupillary dilation, and are mumbling & disrobing, you might want to walk up to them and make your biggest meanest wolf howl. BOOO!!!! GROWL!!!
Get back to us with your results. But don't be standing behind the sheep when you do it, since we don't pay for cleaning bills...
It'd be a lot less controversial to send 'em to a Series game, wouldn't it? I mean park 'em in the downwind bleachers...who'd notice?
(continues below ad)
Coping: With a Lack of Electricity We have readers many places - last time I checked virtually every country in the world has people stopping by here...but a particularly poignant report from South America drifted up to the top of the inbox this morning:
Now multiple this reader's perspective times 300 to account for the size of the USA and you'll quickly come to appreciate how very fragile, in some regards, the world's "advanced" countries really are.
Whether it's the possibility of losing power for a few days, or losing the internet due to an attack by cybercriminals on key backbone circuits makes little difference. To my way of thinking, one can never have too much stored food, too many LED flashlights and batteries, or be in "too good shape" for such eventualities. Or too many onramps to the web...
Glad the lights came back on, though. This time...
--- this morning's report is a bit shorter than usual due to working early this morning on this weekend's Peoplenomics.com report which is where the 'shadow government' fits into all the headlines around lately.
Especially appropriate since Halloween is 'shadow people time' to some.
So more tomorrow if you have a Peoplenomics.com account, or more Monday if you don't...or so we hope. Tomorrow we'll go through the latest financial sit-tep and then hand out blindfolds to any banks that get marched out to the wall by FDIC after the close today.
Next week promises to be a festival of bad puns and strange writing around topics like "Trick or Bank", or even more fun... "Trick our Vote"...
Send your comments to george@ure.net
Reader Action Department: Now on our premium content site: Peoplenomics.com You'll Never Be Able to Retire Don't get me wrong - there will always be a few at the top of the lifetime income heap who will be able to retire, but for the rest of us the prospects are quickly dimming due to a host of factors. So this week, I thought it would be instructive not only to look at some of the causes of the Retirement Dream going bankrupt, but also what regular working people (like us'uns') can do about it.
More for Subscribers To Subscribe, CLICK HERE Need Logon Assistance? Click here.
Places to Go, things to do... Looking to read some interesting items? Try out the National Dream Center site - which I cooked up to see if there's another way to peek into the future that would reinforce some of the predictive linguistics expectations. Free - here.
Up this week for the first time: JB Slear's site www.mygroponics.com where you can buy his popular ebook on backyard (scrounged together) vertical hydroponics which is way cool - life sustaining pastimes are useful, know what I mean?
Cookie Video The folks at Maxa Research have put together a short video (sound track by guess who?) that shows the Maxa Cookie Manager. You can see it here.
I don't usually get all whipped up about software, but this is one of those dandy tools that just simply works great. First thing I put on my new computer when I got it was Avira Anti-virus and Maxa Cookie Manager (MCM). Either follow the on-screen download instructions of simply click:
Once you try it out, to upgrade to the fully functioning version, just 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.
"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.
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 always here
Thursday October 28, 2010 People & Travels With the U.S. elections coming next Tuesday, I find it kind of interesting that secretary of state Hillary Clinton is heading out of the country for a two-week Asia swing. Also out of the country around /just after election time is president Obama who will be in India and elsewhere.
That the president is staying at the same hotel which was attacked by terrorists in 2008 hasn't escaped the notice of the Washington Post which had a piece on it yesterday. --- With what's a major tipping point now less than two weeks off - the first one being 9/11/2001, I've made a not to myself to keep the travel plans of the key people in the US government (for who to watch in this period, see wiki "succession list" entry plus F1000 C level types) handy. Already hearing some of the PTB are 'out' for places like S.A. Damn, I'm nervous....
The reason for my concerns? NOT terrorism, but what threatens to be a largely financial something in the period just after elections. --- Now, toss into your brain-blender the recent comments of Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff that the U.S. government debt is not the purported $13.5 trillion which is publicly bandied about but 14-times higher at $200-trillion. Canada's The Globe and Mail offers a dandy quote from Kotlikoff: “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.” Shssshhh! Don't tell China - at least not for 10 more days... --- Not to put too fine a point on things, but to my way of thinking what's going on with all the 'tripping' is like having your house on fire but telling the fire department "Ya'll deal with it...I'm going out for pizza..."
By two weeks out, if the linguistics about what's ahead are right, we could be asking the same of America's leadership that was asked of Pakistan's president who was out of his country while the countryside was being inundated: "Was the pizza good?"
Obvious retort: "Hey! We already has reservations for pizza..." Oh? --- Of course, the dire financial outlook could be exaggerated, and we know historically that the HPH reports sometime seem more extreme than the actual headlines of arriving news. Still, Clif & I spent a bit of time on Wednesday trying to answer the question "If 9/11 - our last tipping point in the data was 2½ hours of release language, what is it that would be 3-4 days of release language and then 2½ months of adaptation to the new conditions? And not just in the USA, but globally.
Something like a US or European terrorist attack wouldn't be big enough to galvanize the whole globe, let alone for the period of time involved. But something like a US dollar swan song, that might do it, especially if coupled with a major buyer of US debt instruments getting upset. (more in today's "Coping" section.).
Of course, it could all be a processing artifacts in data, and meybe it's just a tripping point...but then again, if the shoe fits.... --- Also while we're waiting, we noticed that Rob Handler's Options Signal Service indicators are lining up - don't think he'll mind my sharing:
I'm debating with myself what to do with my own account: If the Fed next Wednesday (day after elections) does a huge QE2 then could we have a melt-up? Uh-huh. But, on the other hand, if there's no QE2, then could the market dump, I think so - but with the usual caveat that this IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE. And what would China do? --- Another curiosity - timing-wise - and you've heard me write of this in the past - is that the mysterious collapse of WTC-7 is ramping up in non-MSM with a national advertising campaign November 2-10. Called "BuildingWhat? The timing/meming is, to say the least, a little odd. --- Then - right about when we should be seeing some increase in Sun/Earth energy inputs, we noticed (with some reader help, LOL) the post on the SyzygyJob forum about a "High Amplitude Remote MT Trigger Pulse" being detected.
What your take is on the postulated earth plasma-expansion model is opinion, but seems to me we're in a decent-sized quake period now, as evidenced by what's up to 343 from the Monday (leading edge of window) quake.
---
So between Clif & Patrick running numbers, and with the Indonesia quake right about 'on schedule', the timing is close enough for home use, which means we will set the timer for around January 18th for the next round of shake & quake - that is, if this series is over... --- I am just assuming you can connect the dots between these two stories, right?
#2) Inside selling is now at the highest level ever tracked.
Repeat after me: Tipping Points may not be entirely spontaneous and some insiders may know about them in advance, but let's not go the full meal conspiracy deal to leezard-class funding land...
Why, that'd be truly wild-eyed world-class conspiracy theory stuff, at least before the fact, LOL.
BlueFlu's Dues No, not getting hardly any play in the USA, but al Jazeera is reporting under the headline "BP dispersants 'causing sickness' that an "Investigation by Al Jazeera online correspondent finds toxic illnesses linked to BP oil dispersants along Gulf coast." (<---graphic descriptions, eat first...)
This, whether it makes it into the Western corporate MSM or no, is certainly evidence of the long-term carry values prior to the gulf spill...
Bully Bonds Bye-Bye The Calculated Risk site has a pretty good article on the coming Fed printing festival (QE2) and how that spells the end of the "30-year bull market in bonds", we have to wonder when the PM's will begin to go vertical. May not be long...
Number of the Day Latest Unemployment Numbers on a weekly basis...
MSM headlines this as an 'unexpected drop". I'd headline it "Last report before elections!" --- My "morning dart" landed on up open, weak close, low tomorrow mid day and then run up into the weekend. Helluva throw, I might add. NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE...just a SWAT (simpleton's wild-ass throw).
Genetic Politics OK, maybe politics is supposed to be 'free choice' but what happens if the scientists come up with a statistically meaningful finding that how you vote is to one degree, or another, genetic.?
Which then leads to all kinds of interesting questions about juyst how much real "free choice" is there in development of religious preference (if any) and so forth. Sure makes Earth appear more and more like a thought-control breeding lab, doesn't it?
Ooops... you're supposed to skip the realization that you're a lab rat. Lab sheep then...
Another nip of 'medicine' this morning? OK, then...
Foil Shorts There's a report out of Denver, picked off of Channel 9 up thataway, which begins with the disturbing headline: "Study: Laptops with WiFi can cause sperm damage."
All of which gets me around to adding one more feature to my new product I call "Corporate Depends". Never heard of this gazillion-dollar invention of mine? Hmmm...
Well, it's like the adult diaper made for people with incontinence problems, but with a special ability to absorb more BS than most because this product is targeted at the three persons that still have corporate jobs in America as boardroom audiences for long-winded idiots.
We'll just as foil to them now to round-out the feature set...so thanks Channel 9 for the great input!
Coping: With Capitols, Fish and Beyond If you're a long-term subscriber to Clif's www.halfpasthuman.com reports, you'll maybe remember the odd bit of language (terra entity) I think it was from several years ago in the old ALTA series. The specific imagery (words and pairings) had to do with 'fishing on the steps of a capitol building' or some such.
Maybe it's just me but when there there graphically odd words in data, that makes it memorable. Kind of like the 300-dead/land driven back to a previous age that was our in August of 2004 before the December 2004 Banda Aceh quake.
It's with this in mind that the October 15 earthquake in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Valley for some reason got my attention. State capitol being involved and all.
Probably nothing, but if in coming months, it becomes possible to go fishing without leaving home in the Sacramento area, just consider it a very long term values fill that took longer than expected to arrive. Been one of those 'been meaning to mention it, kind of stories.
It sets the stage however, for a kind of a 'back room' discussion that Clif and Igor had while working on the data and preparing the current "Shape of Things to Come" report.
What we think we know is that whatever comes our way around November 8-12 is going to be so large that there won't be any denying it was a major tipping point. What isn't in the SOTTC report is some language which could be interpreted around the massive financial collapse/disaster which could roll out like this - and please, consider this a 'future template' more than anything, a kind of example/framework which outlines how the future tipping point still 11-days out, could be framed:
Whew! Hardly seems possible, huh? That's the kind of thing that Clif and Igor argue about while pushing modelspace around and clicking colored pixels for hours trying to figure out which this language shift - or that pink one over there - mean.
For me, the process is a lot more simple: I like to take the stuff that's in the report, plus some of the cutting room floor content that doesn't make it into the repor4t and piece it together in template-like fashion to come up with a fill in the blanks template.
Which is what the China arrests, tries, demands, dumps scenario could be viewed as - and this is key: It's a template.
The use of a future template is key because it allows us to assign variable and plug in terms to see how future events could play out.
As a very concrete example of how templating the future works out, take yesterday's story in the UK Telegraph by most excellent financial report Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, under the heading "The Fed's impending blunder" which goes to the idea that as soon as elections are past, the Fed will announce (in their November 3 statement) a very large quantitative easing #2 (QE2) a massive injection that some are pegging at $4-trillion dollars.
Now, using our template, the Chinese could do something really outrageous which actually could happen if the Fed announces what the Chinese consider a bond-endangering QE2. Reason? The Chinese bought our bonds in good faith and if we are going to reduce their purchasing power by some X percent unilaterally, they could be what? Seriously pissed.
So, in a sense, we're in a kind of financial minefield here over the coming 2-3 weeks and any one of a number of 'mines' could go off: Anything from an uncertain election outcome - which would under that template include charges of voting machine fraud as happened before, or that other template over there, which might be the major quake takes out Three Gorges template and so our list goes.
A couple of things are becoming clearer as we get closer to the elections next Tuesday: A fresh Gallup report says the republicorps are set to make large gains and as a result, the lame-duck session of congress will be in a position to pull all kinds of shenanigans because it will be the last chance that Pelosi and Reid have to rubber stamp legislation. After that, the incoming crowd of newbies become a little more unpredictable.
Hand me another template for that one, would you?
To Bank Elaine and I are off to Tyler, Texas this morning to set up a new bank account and move from funds out of a D/D- rated national bank into an A rated local one. Not that it will help, but the grim reality is that as far as I know, there's no way to plug in a debit card to our TreasuryDirect account. Maybe just as well...,but gee, if we could just get into an overdraft condition there, couldn't we like get some TARP money, or something?
Overly Ready? Here's one from a reader:
Another choice is the sites that sell DVD's opf military field manuals - I think I've either got nearly everything that's cleared for public release, or at least a big chunk of it...
Luxemburgers A note from a reader in Luxembourg points out that in our list of the least corrupt countries, Luxembourg was accidentally left out.
They come in somewhere in the teens, but as I pointed out to the reader, I can only count as high as 21 before running out of appendages, and it was a cold morning when I wrote that story, so you figure out the rest on your own. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking with it.
Customer Service Department We get all kinds of interesting email - like this one which said in part:
Watching the markets with little else to do, our customer service answer?
Wednesday October 27, 2010 How Durable, How Good? Not very and not very, is the answer: Durable Order report out from the Census Bureau this morning for September and since this is a 'rear view' report, I would have expected it to be better than it is...
I'll withhold comment. Futures hinting at a Dow 60-80 point drop at the open speaks to the issues much more eloquently than I could ever....
Pulling You Lever Although UrbanSurvival is nominally (ostensibly?) about long wave economics and how the broader role of history figures into economic life, our work is - by necessity - also about shorter economic cycles, one of which is the presidential cycle.
Cycles is a contentious thing in economics; most 'real' economists only general acknowledge they might exist since to admit otherwise would blow the covers back off many quant 'pet theories' which hold advanced math can predict market behavior better than common sense and a calendar.
On the other hand, such thing as 55-day cycles, 17-week cycles, and the obvious ones described by giants such as Schumpeter, Juglar, and Kitchin continue to flex their muscles every so often, regardless.
So it's with some amusement that we can look back on the very short term impacts of a non-presidential year which is the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November.
If we look at the data from 2006, for example, we see that the Dow closed the last trading day of October at 12,080.73. (Source) By the November 7 election day that year, the Dow was up to close at 12,158 and change. By the last day of the year, the Dow had rise to 12,463 point something.
If we'd bought the Dow on the last day of trading for the 2002 non-presidential cycle, we'd have gone in at 8,397.03 (source) On the November 5th election date, the Dow went to 8,678 and by6 the last trading day of 2002, the Dow was back to 8,333 roughly, so not such a good play.
In 1998, with the October-ending Dow at 8,592, election day hitting 8,706 for the November 3 election, by the last trading day of the year, the Dow was all the way up to 9,275, or so. (source)
Since data gathering is more fun than writing, I'll go on to 1994: Last of October was about Dow 3,908, election day Dow (Nov. 8) 3,831, and by the last trading day of the year is was 3,834. (source)
1990 had an October close around 2,442, an election day at 2,.485, and a year-ending at 2,629. (source)
Arguably, therefore, one might be tempted to posit that non-presidential year elections have tended in recent years to be pretty good for the bulls, but there's probably a lot more to the dynamic than that.
For example, with a high probability that the control in Washington will be split after the elections, would that be good, or bad, for markets?
We notice that the Harris organization has a new poll out showing president Obama with the lowest approval rating for his term in office so far just being posted and wonder what the 'split control' will be like?
More important, however, and especially so given the fragile nature of the many "too-big-to-fail" banks, we have to consider how much pressure and 'hurry up' legislation will be attempted by the lame duck session of congress after elections?
I'm someone will say that the trend for these last few days of October to the end of the year has been higher on a recent historical basis. But the Law of Large Numbers (which I provided to myself again and again - being a slow learner - at the Arizona casino last week), seems to suggest that just because we may have had a short run of bullish outcomes, that doesn't bias the future toward another winning stretch.
Every flip of the voters seems to have its own probabilities. More important is how the broader playing board of global economics is biased. The presence of stories like "Greece may default by 2013" may seem ages away now, but markets often get in a hurry to discount.
With China down 1.85% last night, and our elections only three trading days away, we'll be watching to see if there's a bit of last-minute discounting of US stocks.
Buying Voters, Part 2 Say, don't know if you've thumbed through the Las Vegas Sun lately, but the article about how free food and even gift cards are being used as part of Harry Reid's "election" strategy is pretty interesting.
Where's the money coming from? A check of the www.OpenSecrets.org political contribution tracking website offers some reports to ponder. --- Just on the face of it, the question to ask in the abstract might be "How much is a politician worth?" Along with "How much are voters worth?" But, of course, the key metric is "What's the proximity of the next election?" since this is one of those variable variables math problems...
Who Gets to Vote? --- Not that it matters: I figure there will be more challenges than ever before in history to election outcomes after the fact.
Waiting for Glitter? The report yesterday that the "CFTC's Chilton raises alarm about si8lver market" doesn't seem to have had a lasting impact, so far. Silver was a quarter when I looked.
Conspiracy For Breakfast, Dept. Say, if you'd like to read something that will harmonize with much of what I've been writing here, consider the contents of the article "Engineering a Global Depression to Crease a Global Government, "Crisis is an Opportunity"" by Andrew Marshall who has a book on point in the works.
Sounds kinda familiar, eh? No, you're not paranoid, they really are out to get us, LOL
Global Fascism's March Can't See the Forest Department Word in this morning's UK Telegraph that "Ministers plan huge sell-off of Britain's forests" is just one more sign that government is selling off assets to global corporations at an ever-increasing rate. --- Not convinced that corporations taking over government is fascism? Better go back and look in the dictionary while it's still in there.
Oh, and the Russians are being co-opted into it, too. Go watch this video on Russia Today about how the "Privatization agenda to shape new corporate landscape."
In fact, every time you read the word "privatization" you oughta be substituting corporate fascism/control in it's place. Oh, but that's too much work, isn't it? Besides, your vote is already bought and paid for for this year. But, come on, who's gonna believe a.....an.....encyclopedia! --- There was a NY Times piece that moved on Yahoo this morning under the headline that "U.S. Companies Hoarding almost $1 trillion cash".
Down on Wall Street, this is no doubt seen as one of the reasons the recovery hasn't been robust (or present at all...). But down on Main Street, it could be viewed as something more like "To the Victors go the Spoils..."
En-Gorged Three Gorges Dam in China has filled up, according to reports. --- Am I the only one who worries about projects built by lowest bidders? Just one major shake or quake from disaster is my worry...
Tipping Point Watch Maybe Missing Missiles Missive Well, not exactly missing, but we try never to let a few facts stand in the way of a good alliterative headline around here.
Besides, with Son of Stuxnet, almost surely in developments by baddies (or crazies), can you image the Stangelovian plot lines possible with this? "US Lost Command of One-Ninth of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Arsenal Last Saturday." --- Now let's go out on a limb with some incredibly far-fetched speculation: You want a real 'world changer'? We seem to recall that Osama bin Laden/al Qaeda/non-state actors specialize in the use of asymmetry in warfare, right? In other words, they use an enemy's resources against it.
Well, it's one thing for baddies to steal some jets, but quite another to go for the outlandishly large plot. You know, the kind so big as to be unimaginable. Since ‘unimaginable’ is our stock and trade, consider this "way out there" possibility.
What IF a group of non-state militants was really good at software development, have come from a culture that invented much of math and what IF both US and Russian missiles were somehow web accessible, or could be reached in Siemens PLC fashion via laptops used for functional checks?
Further, what IF bin Laden has had more than nine years to write code which could 'hijack missile control systems' via PLC's, USB sticks, or whatever? Or, what if some state player had developed the capability in order to cover-up the massive derivatives fraud and give reason to take over virtually all real estate in the world? --- Not something we like to think about, but IF I was in charge of global security, I'd sure as hell be on the phone this week to the Chinese and the Russians with a singularly important question:
"Ya'll had any lapses in missile control systems in the last month or three...even year?"
And then I'd implement a whole new scrub-up procedure for anything used in missile diagnostics to check for Stux-like telltales.
This is unfortunately, one of those virus scans you can only get wrong....once. --- Not worried about Clif's predictive linguistics outlook, yet?
Well, fine. But under our "Lifetimes Piling Up" peg, here's two more reasons for you: TimeWave with the Kelly number set here... and Robin Handler's options outlook...scroll down to "Cycle Inversion" here.
Coping: With Terra Not-So-Firma A while back, I put up the link to the story about how a large land "rip" was appearing in Michigan, but it had done so without the usual accompaniment of an earthquake to mark the occasion.
This morning a reader sent a link to this YouTube video which explain explains how this could occur:
Then there's the little matter the Kepulauan Mentawair earthquake down in Indonesia. As Universe provides, our one-time Houston Bureau cheif is still down there in Indonesia seeking his fame, fortune, but oil & gold will do, too. He sends this dispatch:
The aftershocks are continuing down there, with a 5.8 and 5.3 this morning, and last time I checked, the death toll was 100 and rising.
And this relates to the 'tipping point" how? Remember our discussion about the 'picket fencing that will be happening in this temporal period? Since linguistics are not a precise science (not hardly!) this might be considered one of the 'early pickets' of the global tipping point still 12-13 days out.
I continue expecting things to be mostly economic but this is getting enough 'splash' globally (and enough body count, too) that it may be be our first picket/little coincident indicator. --- Oh yeah, keeping worrying about terra not-so firma - our consulting 'quake sensitive" sends this:
If he nails this, we'll have to renew his 'quakes coming' consulting contract.... ;-)>
Oh Venus... Numerous people yesterday sent in links to the big object appearing in the LASCO C3 solar imaging. A typical email went like this:
Not to worry, says NASA, that's just Venus going by. Still, the idea that the Vogon Planet Destructor Fleet moving into position to clear out an interstellar highway did have us singing a few bars of "So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish..." Speaking of "so long"...
Passings We sadly note the Zacharia Sitchin site carries a banner now that he's passed on. His latest book "There Were Giants Upon the Earth" had just been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, and French... --- There's a fair amount of data about how Earth may have once been partial inhabited by giants. Steve Quayle's book "Genesis 6 Giants: Master Buildings of Prehistoric and Ancient Civilizations" is another one to read, if you haven't.
But no, those photochopped images that go around in many emails on topic don't pass the smell test....
Office Tools A couple of readers asked "What was the software that you used to generate that nifty drawing yesterday?
It's called Inspiration 9
There's a similar kind of product at a lower price point (free) called FreeMind which Clif's fond of (but then, if you can't write SQL tie-ins in your sleep, some of them may not be useful, I have a tough time with SQL queries even when amped on Starbucks' Jet Fuel Edition....). You can find FreeMind here. I'll stick with Inspiration, thanks.
Witch Ever Say, here's a pretty good email from a non-traditional path to mull:
Uh...gee, thanks, appreciate the sharing. Oh, (I feel a bad pun coming on...) Use caution reading Clif's report. It might give you the runes....
But, as one reader quite correctly points out, the odds of a Big Flash-Bang in two weeks is low, more likely the 'tip' will have drawn out consequences...
Well said, and saves me a lot of writing. Thanks, I'm good with that... I may have to build a coffee cup this week that's simply labeled "JP-8"
Tuesday October 26, 2010 Just In Case Shiller/S&P Housing Report Press release just out within the hour:
Can't speak for you, but to these old eyes, looks like it's turning down again...
Someone gets it ...as MoveOn puts out a video which talks about what? The republicorps. Gee, a little later than we thought, but the presence of a timestream and the word bots....LOL...what can we say. Do we own the future, or lease it? Matter? See this one, too....makes a mention of republicorps...
All in fun...and reminds me next time we should trademark our words.
Waiting for the Hindenburg A while back, people who watch the market were going on and on about the appearance of something called the Hindenburg Omen. But today, there are many stories starting to surface hinting that the Omen may have been a false alarm. One asks "What happened to the Hindenburg Omen Crash" and another headline informs us that the "Hindenburg Omen creator, once tracking possible market plunge, is now bullish."
While my inbox has been loading up with "Where's your crash, George?" even long-term market experts are reassessing the bullish case.
And that's precisely why I am staying on the short side of stocks right now.
Oh, and one other thing: A call from my consigliore last night. He pointed out that the number of US aircraft carriers out is at historic record levels. If one more goes out in the next couple of weeks, he's thinking about exiting from his large Midwest town till after Clif's tipping point.
"Another thing you want to look at," he continue4d "...is that there is usually a full moon right at the last-gasp peak of the market, so Monday would be the analog for this cycle and 55 days out? That's when we should hit an intermediate low from a crash if one happens and that would come around the winter solstice...in fact, right on the winter solstice..."
He's been a 55-day cycle watcher forever, and I had to admit that a full moon's proximity and the solstice were of at least passing interest.
Not that the stars drive what happens in markets, although anyone who's worked in an emergency room will tell you (off the record) that they see a lot more 'crazies' when the moon is full and the word lunacy didn't crop up and stay in modern language without solid reasons. Market peaks could be among them, LOL.
Under the stars, there are comments from the Fed which is now setting up to get involved somehow in the bank mortgage practices problem, which is festering in the background, like a dirty joke not to be fully revealed by the MSM until after the election.
As a Monday conference, Fed boss Ben Bernanke rolled out the latest financial acronym:
Meantime, the big banks are trying to walk the tightrope as long as possible: On one side are consumers and the courts questioning whether the paperwork for thousands of mortgages was done 'right'. Then on the other wise, we see the people who invested (read: got stuck with) the CDS and MBS products out there, who are circling - I expect - to file the first-ever trillion dollar fraud suit until after the elections.
That little 'bump' you felt yesterday was a torpedo going off below the waterline of the economy. It was in the form of a press release from the National Association of Realtors which started off pleasantly enough: Cut after the optimistic set-up, the reality peaked through...
So, as the housing crisis continues to act like a hit below the waterline, and while readers are sending me emails with charts of one of the biggest banks in America (...ahem) continuing to drop share price, all I can say is that it certain leaves us in a pickle, Ollie.
Transparency? Not that you visit the website of Transparency International every day, but today may be an exception, since they are out with a report that sizes up the most 'ethical' - least corrupt countries on earth.
And the least corrupt countries are? I mean the top 20 least corrupt?
Actually, the Danes, Zealanders, and Singaporeans are in a three-way tie...
Notice that the good old USA is not in the list? We're down to #22 on the list.
After the elections and the further adventures of shaded truth in Finance Land, we might be lucky next year to remain in the 20's.
Depression - The Mood If you haven't seen the ABC News article "Public optimism in the U.S. system of government hits a 36-year low" is worth a read.
Almost like reading Strauss & Howe's Fourth Turning, the emails from other generations when I write in my column here, as I did recently:
The accompanying note?
That sobering view is the stuff of which social revolutions are made, I fear.
New Harris Poll out this morning heaps doom on gloom this way:
Depression or recession? We report, you take a pill.
Taxing in Cuba The headlines that "Cuban self-employed to pay taxes up to 50 percent" may sound like more Castro-bashing. But: Consider the total tax burden on Americans. suppose your household makes decent money and is in the 35% bracket, right? Add in an 8% sales tax and several thousand per year in excises taxes that are hidden (motor vehicle fuels and such) and property taxes and... well you get the idea, right?
Maybe Cuba's just catch up? The low end of their rate is 25%...
The Fading MSM Reports are out that big circulation newspaper's readership is off about 5% year on year.
Couldn't have happened to a sweeter bunch. Oh, yeah, fills another linguistic expectation - that the non-MSM media share would grow by leaps. How about that? All without cutting down a tree...
Weather Notes, Terra Entity Watch Terra popping off with goodies - besides the quakes (7.7, 6.2 Indonesia area) as we creep up on the Oct. 27-29 window here:
And, you might want to wear a crash helmet walking in Chiago today:
Which means, we can look forward to storm damage pictures on the news tonight.
Oh, and on the sun, SpaceWeather reports spot group 1117 is growing fast...should be just in time for tomorrow, maybe?
Who'da thought? Except us, of course....
Coping: With Life's Probabilities I should start with an apology, I suppose: The times we are in right now are incredibly different than times before, and I just take it as an article of faith that everyone understands that Life is a conflicting set of statistical probabilities and that it's very much like living somewhere like the Mazatzal Hotel/Casino where I spent two days last week on our cross-country jaunt. Why would I spent a precious couple of days there instead of building a more robust survival platform?
If you find yourself asking questions like this one, consider the following reader note as a kind of compilation of questions worthy of answers...
Let me answer one topic at a time, since I wrestle with this all day long:
On yesterday's column, I didn't consider it wholly "self indulgent'. There is some really interesting work going on in figuring out if the world is holographic in nature, and if that's the case, we may be on the verge of rediscovering something that may have been articulated centuries ago. Rather than call it "self" indulgent, I'd prefer you think of it as "soul indulgent". This is a key distinction for the following reason.
1) Everybody's going die. Some one, in statistical fact is dying right now, others will die later on today, and with certainly (or nearly so) I can assure you that everyone will be gone by age 120 or so, latest health breakthroughs notwithstanding. Even here, any such massive life-extension breakthrough would likely be made either illegal or unaffordable, since as we've discussed many times, life extension much beyond where it is now poses extreme (systemic) financial and environmental risks. There is just not enough savings and not enough physical resource to have it all pencil out. Double lifespans and unemployment goes through the roof, we're all on calorie restricted diets (which, paradoxically, simply seems to add even more to the length of life), and the unemployment rate zooms.
2) Most people don't live as though they are going to die. Everyone's got a denial mechanism. Even when facing their last breath, a lot of people I've seen go through the process go out 'denying dying'. A graceful few go out willingly.
Most of the time I am in the 'denying and struggling' category; I've got too much to do, have made tons of preps to live through most anything I can imagine (short of an asteroid impact in the middle latitudes).
That's why despite the 'soul indulgent' column Monday, the main work feature here at the ranch yesterday was getting a few more barrels of 'investment grade diesel set up with biocide. $2.569 a gallon, by the way, for off-road diesel presently.
3) To write - morning after morning - about what we're doing here would not necessarily be healthy.
True, Clif's work is 'out there' to those who haven't been following the project since mid 2001 (before 9/11) when I started writing about it has as good a chance of being 'right' as the most excellent call made in late 2007 for the October 2008 markets turn, but it the upcoming tipping COULD still be wrong.
It's here we get into the probabilities discussion and wandering around the casino.
Suppose for a moment we were playing a complex game of Russian Roulette. But to make things really complicated, let's also suppose that we're using "variable power ammunition". This 'special' ammunition might - depending on the precise moment of trigger-pulling - be anything from a small BB rolling innocently out of the guns barrel and all the way up to a Hiroshi-sized fireball.
Consider now, if you will, how you would position you're thinking going into the once-in-ten-years, or so, tipping point where this statistical 'gun' is about to go off.
On the one hand, there is only some probability - four in five or five in six? - that nothing will happen.
In the event this eventuality comes around, you'd want to be in paradigm continuation mode. In other words, you'd still need to make your tax payments, still need to use credit cards, and still need to go about something that's pretty close to 'daily life as now lived'. Plan party, eat cake.
In such an eventuality, you'd also be up to your behind in stored survival goods. As a result, the strategy that we've been following is designed in a best case outcome to be items that will cost reduce our future.
Because I'm getting close to this conventional world's 'retirement age', I figure that having a 6-month supply of toilet paper, a year's supply of food, and having made a substantial investment in alternative energy equipment, and having put up diesel in such a way that it can be used any time now through 10-years out, is actually little more than advance purchasing.
If you're into accounting, think of survival goods as a pre-paid expense.
That's what an investment in survival goods really is, when you think about it. So, later today or tomorrow - when another shipment comes in from Emergency Essentials -- it will include more yeast, dough enhancer, powdered butter, and so on, remember that stuff will be used no matter what.
Now suppose, on the other hand, that Clif's work is right. What then?
Our stored food, energy independence, and so forth, will increase the odds that we'll be able to survive. It doesn't ensure our survival; it only changes up the odds a bit in our favor - maybe.
4) Clif's report does indeed 'chill to the bone' but the problem we're left with - given the size and breadth of the pending tipping point - is a kind of 'can't help everyone' since we ourselves can not resolve the data down to this state or that county. Just doesn't work that way. Predictive linguistics is a difficult science at best.
I guess the analogy might be something like "It's as good as a Columbus era compass". OK for getting from one side of an ocean to the other, but not exactly the kind of instrument you'd use to fly a 747 full of passengers to a landing in Category IIIB instrument flying conditions at San Francisco's SFO airport in dense fog, right? For that something like redundant WAAS enhanced GPS, dual VOR's, and side orders of DME's, HSI's and how about a radar altimeter, too; certainly not just a lodestone floated on oil.
5) Your comment that the 'nature of reality' is 'non-consequential'? We maybe disagree. Everyone alive on earth today will likely be gone in 120-years, and since there's some evidence that a bit of human energy does something at the moment of death, any thought put into that ahead of time, seems like a worthwhile investment to me.
True, if the end of life is nothing more than a neat DMT-induced drug trip on the way out, then yep, yesterday's column could be labeled inconsequential. BUT, the flip side is also true, in other words, IF there's something beyond the here and nowness, THEN it's just one more kind of preparation.
Some books written about people's death experiences put the event in terms of 'jumping into a cold pool'. Since we've established that everyone is going into the pool at some juncture, occasionally walking around the pool with the intent of learning even little bits of the experience from others who have 'been in' and 'come back' to tell of it, seems worthwhile to me.
Maybe you've got a way to keep from going into the pool, but at 61 I don't and the closer I get to being 'pushed in' the less 'inconsequential' reading the literature becomes. Whether it's the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bible, or the latest on DMT release, the exercise is akin to looking at maps before going on a trip - leastwise, it is to me.
6) As to setting priorities between a species-ending event and a birthday party, I'd advise the birthday party, of course.
To jump back to the the 'BB rolling out of the gun' analogy, if it's truly a species ender, then grab all the good memories you can, because that seems to be one of the points of life; the gathering in of good experiences and sharing with others the joys of Life.
If nothing happens you won't need the stored foods, mobility plan, or any of the rest of it.
And, if something in-between happens, at least you'll start off with left-over birthday cake, with any luck. I'll be able to keep baking bread for the next year.
7) There's an overarching rule in medicine "First do no harm." I look at my life (now and whatever's next -- if anything) and I sketch out "How to Play the Future" this way:
I have convinced myself that at some level, there's very little downside risk to living a thoroughly "prepared" lifestyle.
In a 'best case' scenario, the only thing that happens in the Nov. 8 -12 window will be the beginnings of a serious global economic meltdown, if anything. That would fill the linguistic expectations and toss in a handful of super-sized quakes and so on, and you'd get good fill on much of the predictions.
As I pointed in this morning's lead article, the whole 'flavor' of things is skewing off into the financial, and we can't ignore the possibility that linguistically it will be Lifetimes of savings lost, not lives per se.
Remember, too, that our timing if often imprecise, just as people's use of words is rather imprecise, as well.
After 'inspecting the gun' my current expectation is that the reality of D II will be slapping us around pretty good next month and the rest of that 'picket fence stuff' will fill in against this darkening cloud. Could it be that the 'data gap' is from something other than global catastrophic? Why of course!
Sorry to sound schizophrenic at times, but I'll decline the opportunity to be locked into a single expectation set because this is all about language and the vagaries of humans using it. As the headlines chance, the 'fit' will change. So we could be anywhere from nothing on up to some kind of mass depopulation event.
Hell, I'd go have a fine time with the birthday party.
While you're doing that, I'll be pondering a personal Life Loop.
Don't know as I've mentioned these before - think I have, but it may have been over on the Peoplenomics site.
The main idea is that as you go through Life, you'll often be able to make out 'loops' of 10-30 years in length. These Life Loops have an ascending, peak, and declining aspect.
For some reason, my 'Life Loops' seem to revolve around new technologies.
My first one was as an idea which languished for a while - something I called "consta-comm' and it was an application of time-division multiplexing so that two-way radio communications could take place on a single simplex frequency. About 10-years after I sketched out the idea, Furuno brought the product to market for the commercial HF SSB marine market.
I had always thought it would be a dandy tool for aircraft operations or search
& rescue, where the ability to interrupt would imply a safety margin in
communications. My second Life Loop in new technology came in 2003 when as news director of KMPS back in the day, a fellow named Don Stoner and I did the world's first-ever broadcast of wireless data on the main channel of a radio station. More than 150 people in the Seattle area got involved in wiring up their 300-baud modems to record and play back an embedded message.
I went on to become the marketing champion of something called "Sofcast" at the time. This was 1983 mind you. So technically I guess I can legitimately claim to have at least in the delivery room of the technology we today call "wireless".
And then in 2001, Clif & I started to work on this current project using shift on the internet to foretell the future.
For some reason, I keep being way damn early on these things. Although recently, I note that www.recordedfuture.com is doing work in the field and I'm sure you saw the article in the Toronto Star that outlines "How Twitter can predict the financial markets" by sampling...guess what?
To sum it all up, will life be back to the 1800's next month? Don't know and won't know until we get there.
Universe has been slapping around me to acknowledge, I've done a much better job of being right 10-years out than I have been 10-days out. If that sounds a bit confusing, you ought to be looking at it from my side of things: How could I be assisting in the delivery room of wireless and not be filthy stinking rich? Or, even here lately, being handed the future in advance? I managed it!
I have to go...more important indulgences to work on....including a few more barrels of 'investment grade diesel. Have some cake for me, though. Life is always about balance (and frosting) no matter how long - or short.
Monday October 25, 2010 Just Another Run-up Monday The price of gold was up around $1,350 briefly this morning...and the futures down on Wall St. look green as ever. But then again, of course they would: This is Monday.
Part of the reason for such (ill founded?) optimism is that the Gee 20 has vowed over the weekend to avoid a currency war. At least for now.
Meantime, the Wall St. Journal is reporting that key tax breaks, like deductibility of mortgage interest, are on the table as the deficit commission is trying to figure out how to balance income with outgo on the federal budget.
What I'm trying to figure out is whether the market run-up today will be caused by:
Another reason to run up? Monday was an up day last week, the week before, and except for October 4th, down Mondays have been rare as hen's teeth.
Not much in the way of numbers this week, existing home sales today shouldn't surprise anyone, although tomorrow's S&P/Case-Shiller housing report may remind us again how home prices are doing.
Stonewalling Bloomberg Remember back in January of 2009 when Bloomberg went after details of the Treasury's bailout of Citigroup? Seems now the Treasury has responed with more than 500 pages of mostly meaningless emails.
All of which reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. Wanna hear it?
"Transparency."
Krugman's Right Another Paul Krugman piece in the NY Times this weekend outlines how the Obama administration hasn't spent enough to end the recession.
Krugman is right, of course. Just spending money on politically fxriendly causes isn't what ends recessions. (Do I need to give you the wooden arrows reminder again?) The money has to be spent in ways that put meaningful numbers of people to work.
Curiously, some foreign writers in the Unemployed Kingdom don't get it, and pen articles under headlines like "Will someone please shut Krugman up".
I was going to write something acerbic here but I'm reminded "If you can't say something nice...". Still, another joke does come to mind...wanna hear it?
"Change."
As Goes France, II Then there are the reports that the workers strikes in France are costing up to half a billion dollars a day, plus or minus a cheeseburger. And what's this? A BBC headline that "French pension strike 'threaten economic recovery'?
All of which misses the importance of the concept in our Peoplenomics report this week: The social contract as it relates to retirement is being torn up. Plan is - near as Howard & I can figure - that we'll all die like horses in harness...
The BlueFlu's Green Side Two curious BP stories: One is how the company is selling off four oil fields in the Gulf to help pay for clean up.
Meantime, market pressures are mounting on BP to restore a shareholder dividend.
Seems a bit like "have your cake and eat it, too" except it's "have you spill and dividends, too"...
Mass Layoffs Try this chart on for size:
Class Essay Project: Is the chart improving a result of real economic improvement, or just no one left to fire many places?
If you're a business school prof, and you happen to be looking for more than rewarmed curriculum, here's a dandy one for you: Have your students figure how many times the American consumer can be cajoled into paying for entertainment.
The reason for asking this? Oh, check out the AP story over at Yahoo under the heading "Online TV spats mean fewer free shows on Web" for a start.
In the very beginning, television was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth. Or, by a fellow named Zworykin who had a patent on point.
Whichever side of that you come down on, television (the industry) started paying Farnsworth royalties in 1939.
And where did the money come from? Advertising.
But, it didn't stop there. As CATV systems started going in, better known as cable TV, the costs of the community antenna got spread around with what was once a modest bill.
Fast-forward a decade, or two, and launch of satellites presented yet another way to pay for television (and now radio, too, since revenue generation is (bad pun alert!) serious business.
Next along comes the web (present day) and outfits like GoogleTV and Hulu and...well, some YouTube, too, and you end up with a helluva stew of revenue streams and revenue claims.
Os there no end to how many times Americans will pay for content? Already we seem to have moved past "TV accounting". Still, the way I see it, we often pay for:
So is there a limit? I would have thought so, and thanks to FTA satellite (free-to-air) and a NetFlix account, we've trimmed our television costs to about $10/month, but Second Depression, or not, the general television audience seems willing to pay at least six times for content, and it brings up the larger question for B-schoolers: Is there a limit? Or, is this one of those "all of the people some of the time" business models?
Looks like the ground is being tilled for pay-per-view via the internet, in which case we will be able to up our count to eight ways to pay: We'd have to count some of our ISP charges as well as the PPV charges...
Nine? Anyone one give me nine revenue streams?
The hell of it is most content is still worth what? Hint: What's one digit less than one?
Mountain Interest Got a volcano maybe about to pop off in Indonesia.
Coping: The "Waking Up" Problem The biggest story of last week had nothing to do with the stock market, and I suppose I should have mentioned it at the time, but chasing profits is just so much fun why spoil it by pointing out other things that are more important?
And what, you're thinking, could possibly be more important than money?
Ah...how about the very nature of reality?
OK, sure, I'll grant you that there is no real relationship between the economy on the one hand, and the behavior of markets on the other, but there's some damn fine science going on that's about to rediscover that what we call reality is nothing more than a hologram.
An article in Symmetry Magazine outlines current progress on what's called Craig Hogan's holometer, which is setting about to proven - one way or the other, whether life is "real" or just a 3D hologram.
What it all comes down to, if you read through Hogan's November 2009 PowerPoint is the implications that fall out of a holometer finding that below the Planck scale, everything is just wave interference. Slide #29, please?
Of course, we already know the outcome: They are going to find out that yes, indeed, the world is nothing more than a series of colliding waves and what passes as "reality" is nothing more than 'matter' appearing to coagulate and the maximal interference point of multiple waves.
We've referred to this many times around here as the problem of the kalapas which popped into later Buddhist teachings somewhere between the 5th and 11th centuries:
So in a sense, we already know that yes, Hogan, et al, are going to find out that yes, the whole world is holographic and is very much all pretend once you get down to the noise floor. Above that, seems real enough.
But the nature of this pretending called Life is a little more complicated.
Probably the easiest way to explain it is to remember that light is both a wave and a particle, depending on what you're expecting to observe...something already well established by the Erwin Schrödinger's cat experiment.
Oh, and you wonder why various religious figures keep saying "I am the Light"? Just another one of those 'hidden in plain sight" clues that there are two ways of living, the particle way (as in here/now) and spiritual way (wave state of additional realities...).
All of which informs the aware reader that the odds are pretty good that life is akin to a 3D video game that's played by spiritual /light beings and seems totally real, but only because inside the matrix, the light wave/particle duality is the bounded one, given away only by the noise floor which acts as a kind of boundary of the screen the game is played on.
So...if you wake up one morning and find you can sudden fly, walk through walls, and such in a kind of waking dream-state, either enough people will have awakened on this side of the veil to form a massive consciousness tipping point (where we can fly and such), OR you will have returned to the unbounded spiritual player side of things where the other half of light's particle/wave duality is expressed.
Just a note of caution: Too many people on this side 'waking up' to their infinite power, all at once could be dangerous; can't have too many people bilocating, flying about, walking through walls, and such, can we? Thus the paradigm defenders muck things up a bit, just enough to keep all this from becoming obvious, and thus acquire more 'power' in the game...
So let's all agree for a little while longer that this current reality is all there is. Pretending is so much fun...and we all know the game periodically reboots or resets (cataclysms) until it finally ends. Some refer to the end of the game as Judgment Day, but we have a lot of engineering down around the quantum noise floor to do before that happens, don't we?
Before the chart, a little background: Once upon a time, a long while ago, I observed during my quest for 'truth' in economics, that the PowersThatBe, the talking heads on the teeve, and the other information sources that actively engage in the programming of humans not to think, had conveniently swept several trillions of dollars that disappeared in the Internet Bubble's bursting (since spring 2000) under the rug. Surely, it wasn't unnoticed by the thousands of people who called brokers and said "Where is my money?" "Gone, but hang in there as you're a long term investor!" was about all they heard back.
So one of our charts for Peoplenomics subscribers oughta be widely circulated - it shows that if you line up the peak of the Dow in January 2000 with the peak in early September of 1929, we're on a very very close replay track. Much closer than even the chart shows if you were to back out inflation, and put in the effects of 1929 deflation, but that'd be real work, and I'm sort of lazy if the truth be told.
No, it's not a perfect replay of 1929, but history doesn't repeat exactly, it only rhymes. So think of this as the rhymes and the crimes chart:
"George, that's only a coincidence!" your monkey-mind will protest.
Why sure it is...you bet. A 9½ year long coincidence...yessir....just a coincidence, we're like SO sure... (Shhh...don't tell anyone that major Depressions are two-part coupled affairs like the linkage between 1920-21 and 1929, OK? Damn, dude...don't spoil it for the sheep...)
Oh...don't forget to "Write when you get rich!"
George Ure, The People's Economist
|
Be Sure to See: Bots: NE Power Outage Our Favorite Tool: Minneapolis Fed Inflation Calculator
Our Suppliers: Commodity Trading
Web Hosting
Emergency Food Stores
Tequila
Organic Heirloom Seeds:
| ||||||||||||||||
|
This is a Free Financial News and economic information site updated daily except Sundays. If you can not get to http://www.urbansurvival.com/ from your corpgov workstation, please try our mirror site: http://www.independencejournal.com/ . This site is also available at www2.urbansurvival.com and www3.urbansurvival.com which may not be blocked. Hey www.urbansurvival.co works, too! · Bulletins are posted as our work schedule permits and as events warrant. · I try to publish Monday-Saturday by 8 AM Central Time/ 9 AM Eastern with 7:55 Central pretty normal. If you're easily offended by the occasional typo, then check about 8:15 Central we usually proofread and spell check after the first post. We've had some amusing typos in the past... Sometimes a Saturday issue will be dropped due to projects & chores on our ranch. · Financial and news judgments of the publisher are not to be considered "advice" · Please read and understand our disclaimer · All original content © 1997-2010 by George A. Ure except sources as linked. Very short extracts are occasionally used under 'fair use' but never entire articles without permission. That would be beyond 'fair use'. · Copyright of all linked articles is cited under fair use as this is a topic specific site (long wave economics and humanistic economics, which we call "Peoplenomics"
Our premium service, which contains more in depth reports is available on a $40/year subscription basis. Details at www.peoplenomics.com/subscribe.htm.
The "web bot project" indicates a reference to the time predictive technology embodied in the "Asymmetric Language Trend Analysis Intelligence Reports" technology pioneered and operated by Tenax Software Engineering for http://www.halfpasthuman.com/. An intro to the technology is here. Extracts, when used, are with exclusive permission and any references on other web sites must contain a link to both this site and HalfPastHuman's main page: http://www.halfpasthuman.com/.
Site Contact: george@ure.net
© 2010 Copyright Notice: The author(s) of this site requires that any links or use of material from this site include the author's name and a link to this site. All links included in our material must also be included in citations. Address questions to: george@ure.net. Copyright infringers will be pursued, and please note that Fair Use requires identification of the author/source and we require a link which when you think about it is really minimal recognition of our works and the works of those who are quoted herein.
|
|
and it's about $70. I find it incredibly useful for 'mind mapping' of
ideas, although there are other mind-mapping products out there.
