That was Ray-B on the phone for 50:05 minutes, a convo totally concerned with music and real estate. At age 35, my second doubts really began about spending the rest of my life in a cubicle making only enough money to continue the game. Yet on paper I had one of the highest paying careers. Actually, it was a career until the mid-90s when upper management changed it into a job. The point is, I had played by the rules and had no expensive habits; still I was not a cent ahead of where I was when I started.
For that matter, neither was anybody else, but they lacked the extensive accounting skills needed to understand the situation. Each generation of fat cats since 1960 tried to borrow its way to middle class comfort while pretending that paying back a loan was the same as saving up. Fools of the highest magnitude because they learned the wrong lessons.His mild envy is understandable when I talk of these places for sale in the $40,000 range slightly north of here. They aren’t prime destinations, but after a certain age you quit worrying about that. Ray-B tells of people he knows whose mortgages are so far underwater their situation has become hopeless.
Don’t believe all that nonsense on the news that there is relief and programs for your house. Those outfits are predators coveting the misery of others. The bank wants you in that house paying until you die, which is the only way they’ll ever get their money back. People are now cheating those poor banks in increasing numbers each year by legally dying. You just can’t trust a Yuppie.
As for real estate, the most intensely studied bubble was the 2008 US crash. Most home buyers might be interested to know the Feds, banks, and even Wikipedia claim this recession-they-call-it ended in 2009. That’s right, there is no official crisis after that date. One of the side effects of the studies showed that just before a price collapse, the number of searches on the term “housing bubble” shows a drastic increase. Seeking Alpha published this chart. Canadian searches have risen to the top, precisely as happened in California five years ago.
[Author’s note: while the Canadian mortgage laws are different, the rules that drive capitalist economies are universal. The major differences are that Canadians banks carry mortgage insurance (charged to the borrower) and Canadians cannot deduct mortgage interest off their taxes (but when they sell the capital gain is tax-free). These technicalities cannot overrule falling incomes as the lack of job creation pushes Canadians into self-employment. The self-employed make 15% less money in the long run.]
Ray-B also reports a Fishman on sale on CL. I called but got the old scam “leave your name and number”. Does anyone still fall for that any more? To be fair, it is after hours so I’ll try once more but I rarely buy from people who give a phone contact but can’t be bothered to be there to answer it. It does look new, although Florida is strange for people trying to sell used stuff for 75% of new. Message to numbskulls: it is used the instant you open the package, knock 33% off right there.
Music dominates everything. The reality of the matter is the paying gigs are now further inland. If you work the beach, somebody will undercut you. There are so many guitar-backing track acts out there that variety has become a joke of sorts. Did you hear about the Florida guitarist who did all new material at the club last week? Neither has anybody else.
On inspired New Years, I treat myself to ten munchkins, those donut holes from Dunkin Donuts. I can’t remember when I last had ten, but they were a dollar. Today, they were $2.85. Don’t trust that ersatz inflation index, it is regularly redefined to conceal the facts. And the facts are what you personally shop for. It’s been going up 10% per year.
Electronics for the day. In a discouragingly tough study week, I finally produced a working NOR gate circuit featuring a single transistor. There is nowhere to begin describing this effort, which included for the first time saturation current calculations, partially shown here. I previously kept voltages well into the off-on ranges, but opted for efficiency. The setup pointed to works perfectly but at a price. Here goes. It utilizes a type of logic I never liked, where “off” is defined as the absence of “on”. My preferred two transistor models use a positive activated switch for each condition. I also abhor people who program this way, where the lack of any other number is defined to be zero. For compatibility with my 5V power supply, this gate requires 33,000 and 680 ohm resistors, uncommon if not rare. No getting around needing four resistors, but they are considerably cheaper than transistors.
There has been much written about the end days of the solitary scientist, which I well understood before I started. My rate of progress means years before I build anything useful and the chance of a breakthrough are less than impossible. You may have noticed most activity (in electronics) now happens through teams in well-equipped military-funded laboratories. There will be few Telsas in this century.
On parting, I saw something I probably wasn’t supposed to. Twenty years ago I took a college-level gemology course and still have my loupe. This and my old microscope explain why I am familiar with 10x, or put another way, I am more familiar than average about what many things are supposed to look like under that magnification. I spontaneously inspected the 680 ohm resistor, as the darker bands are hard to distinguish. Then I saw it, just at the edge of my field of vision. A lower quality silver band had been over-painted by a gold band indicating 5% tolerance. It’s probably nothing, but if intentional, that was a sneaky thing somebody did.
I do not have the equipment to photograph at this scale, but I’m working on it.
ADDENDUM
I responded to an ad for a duo and met another professional musician. But professional can imply many different directions. We’ve made tentative plans to jam on the weekend, but I still can’t reserve all judgment as we had a phone conversation about the music situation in this. We concur about the terrible state of affairs, with the beach gigs paying what, $80 these days. We differ on what to do about it.
Our first departure, as is usually the case with most meet-ups, is the song list. Folks, call me whatever, my experience says the more songs you play above 42 means the less well you perform each one. Over 50 songs and you sound like an assembly line.
I believe in playing fewer songs but doing a crackerjack version of each. The new lady is a vocalist. There is no such ceiling on singing. With an iPod on stage, they don’t even have to memorize lyrics any more. She reports knowing over 300 songs. I can’t match that and do a good job.
Nonetheless, this town is so ripe for a duo that I’ll follow up knowing (and I told her this) I don’t know a single jazz song, or any Lady Gaga, and could not name you three contemporary bands. There is also a concept I’ve heard plenty of talk but not heard any of the music. That’s playing anything the audience wants and it has a strange appeal to vocalists who don’t have to memorize chords. I’m writing in broad, general terms here.
My approach is to focus on a distinct style of music, in my instance country-sounding million-sellers. And I now have videos to prove my theories work very well and work much better than the guitar virtuoso who plays “at the audience”. I get very few requests, maybe two in the past year, both from jerks trying to prove a point. My message to the guitar know-it-alls of Florida is that requests are bad. People are telling you they are not happy with your material.
Rather than try to play it all, I find famous tunes that are not standards. This makes my act novel and the majority will always remember the music. This has been central to my performance. The people MUST be entertained. Only guitar players like a steady diet of Neil Young and his typecast 1960 guitar music written for other guitar players. And he’s still cranking it out.
