One year ago today: August 15, 2014, the heat index.
Five years ago today: August 15, 2010, Florida coffee shops extinct.
Six years ago today: August 15, 2009, what Arab navy?
MORNING
So much for increased competitiveness. If you decide to take the “cheap” city transportation to the furthest railhead, it works out to exactly the same price. Wasn’t the Internet supposed to lower prices? Here’s this morning’s before and after shot. Top photo is the way the project started. A simple voltage divider to take 5 volts down to 3 volts to operate the new camera battery eliminator.
Aha, I heard somebody say you could buy these items. Not so fast, what I’m contending with is not the strict power supply, but the say that the camera uses the power at different rates. We all know the flash takes longer to charge up the more pictures you take. And the power indicator reads empty, so you just turn the camera off for a few minutes and it works again. There are technical reasons for this, but suffice to say you must use a voltage divider and those only work well when the load is constant. With cameras, they are never constant.
The picture is hard to see, but that there are two models, the top was the simple test case, the contraption on the bottom the final production run. I found out that these work best on cheap cameras. The better quality camcorders can be very fussy about input amperage. Therefore, I now have plenty of lousy footage. The good news is I will easily be able to make a unit that works of the USB tap in JZ’s truck. I like travel footage because the way a lot of other people travel is pretty boring by comparison.
NOON
I decided not to take a mini-trip anywhere today. My three main hobbies (music, computers, and robots) take up a lot of space. I spent an hour trying to tidy up around here but I am long since out of room. I see I should consider reading a major hobby, too, as I have six bookshelves full, three in the bedroom, three in the Florida room. A bigger place for me means more going on, I’ve never been one to spend time keeping a pristine workbench.
Of all the crazy things, my new health care insurer has dropped my primary care provider. I guess that situation was just to comfortable and now I have to start over again with some other outfit. If they do the same with my cardiologist, then I truly have no reason to remain living in Florida. This state is becoming another California anyway.
Prices are cascading. The government has stopped the easy money policy that has been giving the impression of a recovery. Even the stock market “boom” is the result of borrowed money. Didn’t Ron Paul say that money, like housing, is just another bubble and a currency collapse is overdue. The stickler there is I have no idea how to prepare for that kind of event. By comparison, inflation is easy to deal with. How did he say it? Something like the reason the dollar hasn’t fallen yet is not due to any strength, rather only because other currencies are even worse.
Mind you, he has been predicting doom for so long now that eventually he has to be right. I follow his logic, not his advice, for that reason. It’s the same old story for me—I don’t have to outrun the bear. Besides, while I am by no measure prepared for a collapse, I know I’m in better shape to survive such an event than most, and I certainly won’t miss many of the same things as other people will so obviously find impossible to live without.
I’ll stay put today and listen to my news feed. Then, I may turn it off, since the “presidential campaign” has deteriorated to a squabbling match of losers. Nobody but Trump is really running for office, instead the whole load of rabble are bent on making sure he doesn’t win. They are playing right into his hands, the fools. People know they’ve been lied to and now the both parties are ganging up on the one person in fifty years who really wants to change things.
Anyway, I got to thinking that what Trump is advocating is quite simple. We take the American army and we invade America so that the country qualifies for all the free infrastructure money.
AFTERNOON
I stayed home reading some translation of da Vinci. My records show that I gassed up in a place called Dade City, out near Tampa. I have no recollection of the place. However, it is famous (says Wiki) for its library and Edwinola. Edwinola? That’s what I thought. It is a hotel built in 1912 and since converted into an old folk’s home. The city has an annual kumquat festival. Damn, I like the place already.
This is not a shocking as it seems, because Florida regularly farms out mental patients to relatively cheaper “retirement homes”. And of course, lunatics have more rights than we do, so there is no real way to find out if any nut cases have been checked in.
But the heck with all that, I want to know about the kumquat festival. Here we go. It’s held on the last Saturday of January, from 9 – 5. So that’s January 30, 2016. Too long away to contemplate. You don’t have to spread it around, but I’m sure what a kumquat is. But if I buy a house with a big yard, I’ll see about planting a kumquat tree. Or bush. Or whatever.
One distinction for sure is this festival ranks as one of the most poorly advertised events in Florida. Even the customized web pages are difficult to read.
EVENING
A bump in silver, but it fell back just as quickly. Some silver trivia for you. Half the silver in the world is in India. Most silver (82%) is traded in certificates, not the metal. You might find it curious that all the silver planned to be mined is sold out 15 years into the future. The market has been manipulated now for four years, so none of the formulas and charts have much bearing on changes.
My return to interest in silver, as opposed to just sitting back and watching the goings-on, was triggered by news that at least one crypto-currency is considering backing up their “bit-coins” with stocks of silver. That could also be a game changer, as every time anybody has tried that before, the international banking cartel got the democracies (and their “allies”) to bomb and blast the hell out of them. All for the good of mankind, of course.
The fact that business always moves in cycles means demand has fluctuated, yet for years there has been a steady decline, a downward pressure on silver prices. A lot of people are unaware that the daily precious metals trading in the world is larger than all the stock markets combined. I recall hearing the figure $10 billion per day. Yet, who ever follows that?
If you examine the pattern of these predictions, you find the mainstream belief is that the run on silver will be caused by a currency collapse as people rush to “preserve their value”. I don’t know about that, since my experience shows maybe one person in a thousand knows anything about buying and safekeeping silver. Instead, my opinion is that all this cheap silver simply has to have caused a shortage somewhere in the organization of things.
[Author’s note: there is also another factor at work. Buying gold and silver does not, in itself, preserve anything. There is an entire style that has to be learned as far as taking advantage of market fluctuations. Put another way, the average person who thinks you just go out and buy silver and your value has been “preserved” is sorely mistaken.
I have probably tried every known method of making money with silver and no longer look at its mere possession as a guarantee of anything. One needs to know, in quite some detail, the mechanics of manipulation, or you’ve just got a pile of metal you can’t sell or protect from thieves, including the government kind.
I also know the changes that must be enacted to one’s thinking and behavior to make anything of value (of which money is but one component) from commodities like silver—and trust me, most people, with their super-strange attitudes of how the world works, would have a very hard time learning even the basics.
Tell you what, put it to the test. Ask the average guy, if silver went to $100 tomorrow, how he would make any money at it. Nope, that won't work. Nope, you'll get caught. Nope, after taxes you lose. See? Told ya.]
Last Laugh
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