One year ago today: September 2, 2014, not a police car!
Five years ago today: September 2, 2010, Sajak shows ‘em how it’s done.
Six years ago today: September 2, 2009, cobbling along . . . .
MORNING
Stock market stumbles again. That makes me somewhat happy, since the top 1% own almost half of those stocks. It reduces the gap between rich and poor. So I take it a lot of the ultra-rich have been propping the market up on margins. Their hope was evidently to squeeze the remaining savings out of the increasingly desperate remnants of the middle class by allowing unfunded pension plans to collapse with their shell companies.
Academically, the situation also has my full intention because something has to give. The next crisis will occur during a situation that has never happened before: a marketplace now completely adapted to zero interest rates.
How hot is it out there? Nobody showed up for the club meeting. So hot that people won’t arrive for free food. And how about Comcast trying to claw back business to their overpriced, crappy programming. They’ve announced a move to bill those who download 300mb or more per month an extra $30. That’s a move closer to metered service—and don’t say there was no warning. The telecom companies have been pushing for metered service since the fifties.
This is a dangerous development. Not just a privacy issue. Unlike television broadcasting, the cable company is tracking what you watch. You do not want metered service. They just keep upping the usage fees until, like England, the service to half the population simply “goes dead” toward the end of every month. Oh, and once you go over the 300mb limit, you have to pay the $30 even when you don’t.
NOON
Another glance at real estate shows a very cautious market. Cautious? Yep, everybody keeping tabs is anticipating another shake up. Housing prices by themselves don’t tell the whole story. That’s because this time around prices are outrageous in comparison to what people can possibly pay for them. There will always be the crowd willing to sacrifice thirty years of life for a hut to live in, but they are no longer the driving force in the market.
Here’s a picture of the only safe property for sale in De Soto county under $30,000. It needs a new roof, lots of fixing, and has no cooling system. So it is somebody’s fishing shack. And it traded hands last in 2005 for $65,000.
My estimation of the situation is that the sellers aren’t listing because prices have to rise significantly before they make a real profit. And buys, such as myself, know that prices have to change and are just as likely to fall as to climb. Either way, I’m hesitating to see the effect of the inevitable rise in interest rates. My ideal would be another huge plunge in prices, this time with sellers unable to wait for mortgages that may never materialize, so they’ll self-finance or drop the price.
Remember, I am still significantly miffed that the banks were not enjoined to obey the law last time. If they had, a hundred thousand plus repossessed houses would have hit the market in one year just in Broward. That would have collapsed prices back to 1970 levels where they belong. I was mistaken to think the law represented a kind of rule book in the game.
So, go ahead and check for yourself. I have also chosen two other far-flung counties where I keep an eye on things. I’d say the situation looks the same from here. Everybody is waiting to see. Should something come up, we are more than ready to pounce. Otherwise, September traditionally means another winter in paradise, with complete with doldrums, until early spring.
NIGHT
I’ve read through all the books here again. I don’t even have anything I could take up to the coffee shop that I haven’t read four or five times already. Expect a slow season. No band, no property, no major trips, no surprises. Even the motorcycle tire is in the shop, awaiting a slow shipment from California. And it still needs that brake job, that’s around $120 more dollars. And I’ll be needing new shocks on the Goldwing, that’s not pressing, but that is nearly $500.
So, I stayed home with a pot of tea and modified Arduino code until I got a sample one-digit working. I modeled it on Internet samples. I dislike cut and paste code because a lot of it leaves out commands that should be explicit. For instance, code that stops by itself when it reaches the end of an array. That’s fine, as long everyone who needs the code remembers that fine detail about arrays—and as long as the code is only run on a self-stopping chip.
You will find that C+ code is full of this type of construction. I dislike code that only works because some sort of externality was present at the time of writing. My code tends to be the opposite. If it is not specifically commanded to do something, then code should not be doing it. Otherwise, why put brakes on a car when eventually it has to run out of gas and stop by itself. True—but plain dumb.
When in doubt, spell it out.
Last Laugh
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