Monthly Archives: December 2008

2008 Bail Out

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We’ve heard of the Year of the Rat. The ancient Chinese welcomed the Rat as their protector and source of material prosperity. 2008 was the Year of the Thieving Rats.

I don’t usually like to see a year end. I love sunsets because the sky colors light up my life at the end of the day but the end of 2008 just means I’m another year older and deeper in debt.

I started out the year with a Schwab One account and now have a Schwab .015 account.

Speaking of our financial institutions, we also started 2008 with a credit fiasco when some mope lifted Herself’s wallet in Philly; the credit card processing center kept sending substitute cards they wouldn’t let us activate.

“What are the last 4 digits on your card, Mr. Harper?”

5884.

“This looks like a replacement for a card that was lost. That’s your old card number.”

No, my old card ended in 3399.

“That’s not right. I show the old card as 5884 and the new card as 6091. Let me put you on hold.”
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“Thank you for holding. We value this opportunity to service your call. Please continue to hold for the next available advisor.”
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“The current hold time is approximately 8 minutes.”

At least they had a nice symphony playing as their hold music.

I found out later that, while I was on hold, the banks scored $700 Billion on my other credit card.

Start a spreadsheet. Right now. Immediately. List every credit or debit card you have. All of them. Include the card number, the institution name, the institution phone number, the full name in which it is issued. Include its expiration date. Make a column with every autopay you pay with each card. In a spreadsheet.

Did I mention to do it in a spreadsheet? Spreadsheets are cool.

Brett Favre, who is Herself’s favorite quarterback of all time, lost his last ever Championship hope with an illegal forward pass yesterday. On the other hand, the rest of the Jets did complete more lateral passes in a single play than anyone had seen in a professional football game this year. If they hadn’t been using their hands, we would have thought it was professional soccer.

I bought my first hard disk-based “Personal Video Recorder” this year so I could pause the news and Herself could pause fuhball.

Built in China, of course, so I did my best for the economy.

This may be the second most irritating product on the market. The operating system was designed to operate bulldozers instead of showstoppers and the remote control pretty much doesn’t. Despite that, I wanted to buy two of them and the seller shipped two of them but only one arrived. Somebody stole the second “in transit.” And now this brand is off the market. Maybe if I had ordered three or four…

Our neighbors decided a couple of years ago that my project to rebuild the North Puffin garage “disappointed” them so they sued us. In the process of beating on us with their lawyers they magically grew their postage stamp sized camp lot by a few feet to the South and a few more to the North.

We lost a few feet of land on our southern boundary and our other neighbors lost a couple of feet of land on their northern boundary but at least we have finished that episode and are done with them.

I bought General Motors stock earlier this year. Automakers and auto dealers immediately tanked. GM suspended its dividend; later Congress decided to suspend GM. I didn’t understand it then but I understand it now; I spent 100 hours and $200 selling a $1,700 used car for $1,400 this Fall.

Regular readers will recall that I had had a yen for a special plate and expected, when I bought this particular KeysCar, that I would get one. After all, DICK was available in Vermont.

Unfortunately, Vermont said I’m not a Dick.

I listed the car on the free craigslist classified advertising site. Three legitimate buyers called. I sold it to one of them for a stack of $100 bills. 15 Nigerians or Nigerian-trained operatives offered cashier’s checks. Every last one of those bounced.

Gasoline flirted with $5/gallon about 20 nanoseconds after I decided to start driving everywhere again. I have some small hope that the oil speculators who caused that spike (and have now taken it in the ear when oil dropped back to traditional levels) were the same financial wizards who robbed us in the mortgage markets.

Or maybe not. There was very little justice in 2008.

Denny Crane sure was something, though. All he asked for was my interest every week but he earned my respect and he got my vote.

The stories we Pollyannas tell ourselves are more optimistic than these. 2009 is going to better, right?

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

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In Charlotte, Vermont, a school got hammered to take down its candy cane decorations because a grinch there says they have an overt Christmas message. CANDY CANES! The Menorah probably stayed up, though.


Merry Christmas, Everyone

Every radio station has defaulted to Christmas music. I’m surprised we haven’t lost that, too. I don’t particularly like Christmas music but my radio has an off switch. I don’t have to listen to it if I don’t want to.

I was raised in a family that was Quaker on one side, Presbyterian on the other. I may not be as organized now as I was when I reached the age of accountability and joined the Presbyterian church but I am still a Christian. And, of course, a WASP.

You don’t have to be either.

Today is the day Christians celebrate the birth of the Christ child and the meaning of Christianity. It was a pretty big day before the stock exchange took it over.

It doesn’t mean Do unto all the other religions, then cut out.

Here’s the thing. If you offer food to the monks on Vesak, Buddha’s Birthday, I will honor your commitment to the poor. If you celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Lights, I will honor with you the victory of Lord Ram over the demon-king Ravana. If you fast during Ramadan when the Qur’an was revealed to Mohammad, I will honor your patience and humility. If you celebrate the most solemn and important of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, I will honor your atonement and repentance. If you light the candles of Kwanzaa, I will help you honor your heritage. And if you are a lib’rul atheist, I will not proselytize.

That maybe the most important message.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, Islamic, a Jew, a Kwanzaan celebrant, or an atheist; I have no expectation that you should. It is time, on this Christian holy day, to let Christians be Christians.

My right to impose my own beliefs stops at my property line (or the end of my nose when I’m out in public). The Charlotte, Vermont, grinch’s right to his own idiocy stops at pretty much the same place. It is time to stop accepting that “politically correct” credo and start honoring the true message of Christmas.

Scythian philosopher Anacharsis wrote in the 6th century BCE, “Wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.”

Peace.

“Nothing Is Free”

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I never thought I would say this: Cubans understand economics better than Americans.

In 1932 Lionel Robbins defined Economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”

I think that is not true any more. At least, not here.

Economists should study and report on who produces, distributes, and consumes goods and services, how they do it, and where it happens. The “soft science” of economics allegedly uses empirical data but in reality is now a political exercise. In today’s scientific environment, we know more about Global Warming than we know about the economy and there is certainly more politics than science in the climatology data.

In Cuba, nothing is free, reports the Miami Herald. The Cuban people pay for it [all] with their work.

“A Cuban gets a salary of 500 pesos a month (about $20) and is told that education and healthcare are free,” Uva de Aragon of FIU Research Institute told the Herald last week. “Nothing is free. The Cuban people pay for it with their work.”

What a concept. Health care. Food. Housing. Consumer goods. All related to the sweat of one’s brow.

Despite the media furor, have you noticed that you don’t directly pay for your health care? Most of us don’t. Most of us have “insurance” (or Medicare or Medicaid). When was the last time anyone reading this brought a home-grown chicken to the doc’s office to pay for the visit? Or traded an hour of computer service for it? Since there is a disconnect between the delivery of the service and the payment for same, we don’t care that the cost has spiraled out of sight. The incoming Administration and the Congress want to take over Health Care to save you money. Right.

The Cuban earns 500 pesos a month from the state. The rest of his or her production stays in the hands of the state to pay for that “free” care.

Education has long been publicly funded by land taxes. Since states like Vermont and Florida take those real estate taxes straight to the Capitol and dole out payments to the local schools, there is a disconnect between the delivery of the service and the payment for same; the cost has spiraled out of sight. Now that real estate values (and the taxes collected) have dropped, the Miami-Dade schools will sue the State of Florida for the “lost” revenue. Right.

The Cuban earns 500 pesos a month from the state. The rest of his or her production stays in the hands of the state to pay for their “free” schooling.

Food (so far) hits most Americans in the pocketbook. OK, except for those on Food Stamps. Oh, yeah, and except for the taxpayer-funded farm subsidies that keep prices artificially low. Still, most of us spend part of our paychecks at the supermarket every week.

The Cuban earns 500 pesos a month from the state. No free lunch there, either, since he has to pay for his meals out of the 500 pesos (about $20). It costs most American families more than twenty bucks to hit the Mickey D Supper Club once.

Congress and the Fed believe we can spend our way out of any problem–health care, food, housing, bad loans. That’s probably true if there is enough earned income to tax to do so.

Uh oh.

Congress and the Fed (and apparently the Miami-Dade school superintendent) believe we can spend our way out of any problem by printing more money.

And nobody in Congress has broken an honest sweat in years.

Here’s the reality check. If I take a fine art photograph, print and frame that photograph, and sell that photograph to Joe next door, I will receive cash money which I can then spend in the grocery store or at the gas pump. If I don’t take that fine art photograph, or print and frame that photograph, or eventually sell that photograph to Joe, I will have no money for food or gas or my tax bill.

Any Congress Critter who doesn’t understand that dooms you and you and you and me.

America Going Chinese

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I spent the day in my closet again. I need a divider wall and shelves to increase my storage capacity.

Nice, painted, real plywood paneling cloaks some of the walls in this house; it has grooves that simulate random width boards. I like the look and planned to duplicate it on the divider wall.

The orange box had no plywood paneling that matched my pattern. They did have a flimsy, MDF panel but that very thin medium density fiberboard (paper) panel has only one advantage: cheapitude. 1/8″ thick. Wibbly, wobbly, swelling, sagging stuff. Coated so it won’t take paint. It does not install well and it certainly does not stand the test of time in this humid, subtropical climate.

I bought a good, smooth sheet of actual plywood for about a buck more than the MDF. It has three core plies and two very thin veneer layers, all sandwiched into 5.2 mm of thickness. It “gives up” 3/64″ on the standard 1/4″ panel but I can live with that. I have a router and just four grooves to cut for each divider panel.

My neighbor came over shortly after I had discovered the “Made in China” label on the plywood. He spent his entire life in the forest products business and built a state of the art sawmill operation, planer mill, and a lumber remanufacturing operation in Wisconsin.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “I’ve seen their plywood plants. They have big, modern presses but no conveyors or material handling equipment.” Of course not. Material handling is a serious expense here. People there are still cheaper than machinery. Skynet would not (yet) get a foothold in China.

He also told me that the veneer logs had been cut in the spring or summer when the sap was running. “Good veneer makers want only winter cuts,” he said. The sap stays in the tree and starts it rotting. These panels have black traces where the rot was. Chinese manufacturers don’t care. The 4×8 panel sold for $11.87 in the orange box and that’s all that matters.

Geno wrote in a comment to an earlier post:

It is a wonder to me that corporate upper-management — both for profit and nonprofit — remains ambulatory after shooting itself in the foot by doing exactly as Dick avers. But let’s face it, the best and brightest are the most highly paid; and since cutting cost is the sole liberal textbook criterion for avoiding bankruptcy, those employees are the first to go…

“Cutting cost is the sole liberal criterion for avoiding bankruptcy.”

Likewise cutting cost is the sole Chinese criterion for making sales.

What a wonderful economic model.

Oh, are we in trouble.

Engineering adage:
There is never time to do it right
There is always time to do it over.
Sometime soon I will harp about bean counters.

Good Money After Bad, Redux

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The news reported that the automaker CEOs will return to testify again this week

The President-elect will “pay close attention” to what the CEOs say. Barney Rubble plans to beat them up again no matter what the Congressman said on 60 Minutes. The Toyota Republicans say we ought not let Congress mess with a free market economy.

There is a timeworn and well known joke:

An older and particularly odious man approached a beautiful woman. “Would you sleep with me for 700 billion dollars?” he asked.

“Oh, I have to think about that. Yes!” she said.

“Would you sleep with me for one dollar?” he asked.

“Never! What do you think I am?”

“Madam, we have already established that. Now we are simply negotiating the price.”

We ought not let Congress mess with a free market economy??? Sorry, folks, that horse has long since left the barn.