This is a pick punch. I’ll take two. Smile, the remainder of today’s post is not that cheery, unless you played your cards right for the past twenty years, I mean. Then you can look forward to a decade of freedom while the rest of the country wallows in the pit they’ve dug for themselves. Those who thought bankruptcy was only for screw-ups will be meeting the enemy. Myself, I’m more concerned about the pick punch.
In the upcoming year, you’ll find, I begin to pay a lot more attention to the state of the country. The boomers are retiring in droves and form the leading edge of those cashing out of the stock market, in turn causing a real collapse. It’s not wisdom on their part, like real estate, some people always escape by sheer luck. What I see is a year of cruel events concerning the smug middle-class who took their ways for granted.Why not, they believe, it isn’t evil to live your entire life on mortgages and credit cards as long as this forces others around you to do the same just to survive. That’s the horde I’m talking about. Almost half of them read less than 100 hours per year and if you discount the misleading equity attached to the houses they can’t sell, have a negative net worth. As I’ve said, if the true was out, very few people who’ve slaved their lives away will have anything more to show for it in the end than I do right now.
No, we are not all in the same leaky boat. If I live another ten years, life will be good. Technically, I could claim that I have not worked since November, 1981. When I get a paycheck, I either travel, get educated, or do some underground investing. (Right now, I do not get a paycheck.) My priorities are a far cry from what happens to the proletarian slugs on payday. If the world does end this December 21, I have regrets, but nothing on the scale of a life wasted chasing fictitious security and keeping up appearances.
We’ll also see the beginning of a swing in public stances toward what they’ve traditionally hated. Nothing beats personal tragedy later in life to transform middle-class morons into instant hypocrites, except maybe self-interest. Watch them whistle different political tunes when it is their privacy that gets invaded. When they’re the one that needs a stem-cell heart. When their son loses the job because he isn’t queer. When they themselves need food stamps and disability. Just don’t tell them they are too late and the money’s all gone.
What bubbles will burst this year? Probably the stock market, this time for real. We talked about the fallacy of including accounts receivable as a valuable asset. The medical profession has gone overboard, so there’s a candidate for implosion. I’m tending more to scrutinize oil prices as a bubble and I fear under-funded pension plans, though not for personal reasons.
Yet, using the same yardstick, I don’t see many upcoming surprises. Barring the big one in Los Angeles, or the terrorists going nuclear, everything good or bad will proceed as predicted. The cracks in our national foundations will enlarge as desperate voters seek bigger chunks of the shrinking pie. But the highest paid employees who still hold high paying jobs in America should get very afraid. They are also the oldest workers, and the rest of the world is taking dead aim on those jobs.
Now I’m forced by events to follow up my comment on social economics of y’day. The word is that good jobs are the next battleground. The first thing I noticed overseas is that there are no good jobs. Even lawyers in Venezuela drive a taxi when necessary. The Phuket islanders were astounded when I told them what garbage collectors made in Seattle. American industry needs another Edison, or Ford, or another Wright brothers and I fear so much political attitude has been injected into education that the next few generations will dream not of invention, but of get-rich-quick Internet ploys that create zero jobs.
Boy, did I catch enemy fire by mentioning the book by Michael Moore y’day. So, he’s an offensive dork, but he is a good writer--by my standards, one of which is a consistent view of the world. I’ll have you know he and I share a lot of the same opinions about bureaucrats, politicians, Washington, big business, cable TV, foreign aid, and prescription drug patents. He’s just better informed, because I only react, whereas he lives totally in that community, right smack up to his little credit score.
A complete review of the 2011 country music shows another slow year of even slower songs. The fastest tempo [billboard] hit, Currington’s “Like My Dog” drags melodically because of the eight-measure ligatures. It’s nothing-years like the last which give rise to third-rate “stars”, right Jackson Five? Not one of the tunes has a truly distinctive theme or hook to it. Was it all produced in the same studio?
Most tunes, I listened to without clicking download. That’s the equivalent of an insult. I have to commit a certain time to process and learn a song, it is sad when not one gets past the screening, because I frantically need new upbeat tunes. Same with 2010 so I fear that country has, like rock, become formulaic. It is so predictable how each new artist with one hit instantly floods the market with a dozen more. That spells S-O-N-Y.
Second last, Arduino, the microcontroller of my choice, has been a runaway success in that market last year. It is less pricy and avoids many of the loony steps required to work the competition’s devices. I read, and understood, the spec sheet on the newest revision, the Uno R3, as I’ve already run up against the same limitations (a good thing). You haven’t heard about the Arduino here for a while because Arduino led me to electronics, not the other way around. And we’re catching up fast.
Nobody’s forgotten how I stated the world was going to see a flurry of Arduino products—and don’t be surprised if some of them are what America needs. But this time, it will be the small operator in charge, like for instance, this toilet paper printer. Ingenious. My own project, the world’s first real drum machine, is drastically more complex and farther into the future.Last, I’m following the moon gravity experiment underway at NASA. Gravity has measurable waves, and from what I learned in physics, the effect is instantaneous. Every object in the universe exerts gravity on every other object. The waves may be slow, but the effect travels faster than light. Interesting, that.
[Author’s note: I believe yet to be invented measuring devices will find that even gravity is not instantaneous, but that it travels 4.18 million times faster than light and has a polarity.]
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