This nice picture shows your tax dollars at work. This is east Hollywood Boulevard, the showpiece of beach approaches. That Atlantic is just over the horizon. The city has planted the median shown here, which will grow into an impenetrable hedge in a year. That means any pedestrians wishing to cross the road must hike up to the nearest intersection. They are around a quarter mile apart. You people who have been nipping across the street to visit your neighbors have been getting away with it for years, so you had this comin’.
Did you know 97% of the money in the world today is debt? The 3% that isn’t constitutes the entire group of rich people on the planet. Thus, if you can live without debt or minimize it to trivial levels, you have joined a very exclusive club. I propose an alternative test of poverty: anyone who has to borrow money to buy the things needed to survive on a daily basis is poor. If you have put a loaf of bread on a credit card in the past six months, you are poor. If you run a tab at the bar, you are poor. Nobody’s buying that story that you didn’t have time to get to the bank. If you can’t plan that much ahead, you don’t have what it takes to be rich.
You need plenty of “free” time to analyze trends that working prevents you from seeing and you cannot be prepared. The proletariate get their information from TV and that isn’t good enough to see reality setting in. And I still believe the American collapse will not be home grown, it will stem from the collapse of one of the USA’s decrepit overseas financial colonies. Like Argentina or Columbia. They have nothing left to lose by refusing to repay.
Will our economy turn around in 2014? No, and even if it does, very little of the new jobs or money will find its way to the working classes. Washington and the Miami Herald will continue to announce the recovery without any visible improvements. The damage of the housing collapse is by now a permanent feature of all our lives. The only reason real estate didn’t implode is the banks illegally stopped foreclosing. (They did so by inventing a dodge called “pre-foreclosure”.)
Will I gain in 2014? In a sense, yes, because you can gain by not losing as much as the rest. This happened to me big time in the 1987-1989 run up to the market slump. While others counted losses, I bought a Cadillac cash, took almost a year off work, and made seven overseas trips, among other things. I suspect 2014 will be a tough haul for most at a time when I am looking to buy property. Am I confident? No. No matter how right I am my timing has consistently been wrong. But not the kind of wrong where I lose money, Wallace. But as long as I’m accumulating resources faster than prices are rising, I know I’m moving in the right direction.
ADDENDUM
Electronics, in particular my control panel project. This is a progress report for those who follow my efforts to learn robotics and build that time machine. I see that the original specs for the chip, called a 7489, did not call for a feature called pull-down resistors. Think of these as a method to ground unused input pins to ensure they are really-really off and not subject to stray voltages at the milliamp level. So I’ll add those.
Before I begin, I already know some of these descriptions are redundant. But I’ve also learned to effectively teach or learn, it is best to describe something three different ways on different days and let the student decide which one makes the most sense. In that way, I’m light years ahead of most teachers and engineers who think their way is best. They repeat things over; I repeat them different ways. Where’s my Nobel?
This 7489 chip is an “integrated circuit”. What’s “integrated” into one chip is 16 memory locations, each of which can hold 4 bits (a 0 or a 1) of information. True, this chip is primitive and obsolete, but it is also the first memory chip that I completely understand. Don’t get me wrong, I read the datasheet and knew all that was needed to pass a test over this component. But we know that is a far cry from being able to rig one up and run it. This is the challenge in this instance.
The chip needs 5 volts of power before it will work and anything stored in memory disappears if this current is removed. Like most chips, the pins are not located in convenient patterns, but rather where the design team felt like it. For example, the address pins on the 7489 are located at positions 1, 15, 14, and 13. This gives you an idea of the mentality of engineers—as long as it works and they get paid, to hell with the problems caused down the line.
Another strangeness to the engineering mindset is the “complement”. This is the binary opposite of a number. If you have the number 0110, its complement is 1001, and that is what you must enter into memory. No, there is no mysterious or higher-level consciousness of why this should be and I call it an error, the result of faulted thinking. It would be nothing at the factory level to add an inverting transistor but that is not the kind of thing taught at engineering school. I have no doubt between them they’ve cooked up some nonsense reasons of why it has to be backwards. Think of it like this: when an engineer gets an idea, the light bulb goes out.
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