One year ago today: February 4, 2015, at the Flagler.
Five years ago today: February 4, 2011, looking at a Znen.
Nine years ago today: February 4, 2007, Home Sweet Home.
Random years ago today: February 4, 2012, a nothing day.
MORNING
Trivia. One third of all current divorces name Facebook as a factor. And 74% of traffic accidents happen on clear, sunny days. That’s an easy one to explain; that’s when there is the most traffic, ergo the most bad drivers on the road.
Naturally, a day after I mention the lack of decent real estate listings, a few begin to trickle back on the market. Sure, I would live in Bartow, or Winter Haven, as long as it was on the right side of the tracks. Dear reader, this is not last year. This time we have the money to buy a skid shack cash, or something nice in a short time. Both ideas are appealing to me. A cabin right now would get me out of South Florida and establish a base to find the real bargains. We may not be professionals, but in the past year we’ve learned a lot about sifting through the flumtwaddle.
There is some silver back on the market following the long, slow price decline. This [decline] caused the weak of heart to gradually sell at a loss over the past few years. So when the market was up 24¢ overnight, the bullion began to appear. Remember, the dealers make their money on the bar charge, not the price fluctuations, although I’m sure many of them speculate as well. The few cents price difference is trivial when the bar charge is $3 per ounce. The shop I was in probably sold a thousand ounces today. Ten of it to me.
While all this was going on, I listened to my first full CD by the old band “Alabama”. My rating is that it is mediocre country-rock at best and I can now understand why I never did rush out and buy one of their albums. This was a freebie from DeeDee at the old bakery. Alabama sold 75 million records, none of them to me. The music was very clear and studio clean, but never gets past the impression of being just a string of country cliches. What today you could call “Early New Country”. The Nashville sound.
Here’s your “green” article. One of the moist poisonous, expensive, and wasteful products in the average household are beauty products. That healthy glow in your wife’s cheeks can be chock full of “potential carcinogens or hormone disrupters”. What’s a hormone disrupter? When they are washed off later and get into the water cycle, they cause fish to change sex. I’ve often suspected Millennials who wear too many “oily products” partially do the same.
Napa Valley.
NOON
But I’ll tell you who I am gaining respect for. Martin Shkreli, the man the mainstream media keep saying jacked up the price of a life-saving drug from $13 to $750. Unfortunately for the media, most of that is pure lies. For openers, it is not illegal to raise prices and he has never been charged with any such a crime. They are trying to get him for questionable transactions concerning a separate hedge fund. And he is making fools of congress who repeatedly question him with irrelevant issues (the drug price) that reveal they want to turn the hearing into a circus.
And that said issue is the complete fabrication of the case against Shkreli. The are getting their circus, but Congress and the media are the clowns, since they are obviously being controlled by big insurance money to go get Shkreli. Here are some facts (we’ve covered some of this before):
Damaprin(?) is not, repeat not, an HIV “life-saving” drug, rather a drug that treats a skin condition to which some AIDS patients are susceptible. Curing that or any skin condition will not save the patients.
Shkreli did not raise the price of the drug to those in need, but only the price he charged to the bloated insurance companies. (His price to patients actually went down a few dollars per pill, I think. I'm not sure, but he never charged patients anything more.)
Shkreli knows they cannot get him on any real charges unless they trick him into saying the wrong thing, and he is not about to play that sick game with these Congress non-elects.
I love the way he told Gowdy twice that he was going to follow the advice of his attorney, adding “not yours”. I watch Shkreli with growing admiration as he reveals the bullshit in Congress, who are trying to set him up by questioning him about the drug rather than the hedge fund. Again, Shkreli has never been charged with any crime concerning drug prices. I had no opinion on Shkreli until the insurance companies started using their cronies to set him up.
If you have time, watch the video and see that never once did Congress ask him a single question about the charges he is being held on. I’m no fan of Millennials, but nor do I like to see Congress non-elects pushing people around.
NIGHT
If you think the cactus picture was a pure delight, see this thrilling photo of the missing scooter speedometer cable. Turns out the repair costs a quarter the price of the now 20,000 mile plus vehicle. So I don’t want any more miles recorded on it. I removed the entire assembly. And it stays off unless I win the lottery or they make a law. Yeah, that’s the mood I’m in.
Most common Android annoyance? Presenting a different screen in response to the same command. Or displaying the same file or folders in several different places on the same screen. If all that is hard to visualize, just remember, Android sucks and it is not necessarily the user’s fault it doesn’t work right.
I did the books last night and there is enough in the coffers to start low-balling some banks. I could care less if the banks lose money. What I’m saying is there is enough money to begin testing the water for banks that are at their REO limits. I won’t cover that ground again except to say that this is unpleasant business that takes advantage of the rules that limit how many houses a bank can repossess at once. Often, the bank is forced to flip a good one for a fraction of its value.
And I’ve got this weekend slated to begin the complicated calculations to find out which price range to target. But my guess is the houses that currently list for $60 to $72,000 in the interior. And some of them are pretty nice. Acreages. What would I do with an acreage? Let a few horses run wild and let the entire place go to seed. That’s what.
ADDENDUM
Yes, folks, I do notice how many of you have this blog as a feed, and you often pick up my routine maintenance as a fresh post. Allow me to explain something. It goes nearly without saying that this blog is not like other blogs. And one of the major differences is the way this blog is not just posted and forgotten. For example, the “Yesteryear” links demand that I open those blogs to get the url. There is no alternative realistic way of obtaining that information—and your feeds pick it up as a new post.
There’s more. My older blogs along the way regularly get “upgraded” with the techniques and experience I’ve gained over a large number of years. I did not know how to format a blog for pleasing “screen” reading ten years ago. There were no mobile screens back then. And for grammar and appearance, I had little choice but to apply the standard rules of typesetting such as I knew them.
I did not know how to put proper borders around photos or even how to split up paragraphs into “screen-length” segments. There was no source to find out which HTML tags were supported and which were denigrated. Embedded pictures were always left-justified. What you see today as a visually “correct” display of the daily blog was not at all part of the deal not so far ago. And it is not like there was anybody to come along and help me out.
I also learned to avoid the shortcuts that make so many blogs run-of-the-mill. Most daily blogs are fired off and promptly forgotten. They rarely link back to themselves, so they don’t even possess a self-correcting mechanism. They use standard templates and all look alike. So the reason you get as many as 30 update notifications is not click-bait. It is the on-going process of continuing to keep standards high enough that this blog will endure past 99.9% of what is out there.
Because you are worth it.
Last Laugh
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