One year ago today: April 25, 2015, wooden A/C grill, really!
Five years ago today: April 25, 2011, jealousy, once-mentioned.
Nine years ago today: April 25, 2007, coffee in Boca Raton.
Random years ago today: April 25, 2010, awww, Pudding-Tat.
MORNING
One year ago today, this was the bestseller rack. And a year later not one of these books is still in print. It’s a shame what’s become of the paperback industry. Every run is a flash in the pan, sold mainly by the author’s reputation, but never with any enduring content. What have they in common? A repetitive style and a sort life span. Oh, and an outrageous price tag.
The bank absolutely depersonalizes that process. They’ll often let a place sit vacant to ruin and could care less who is first. They accumulate all offers for the first two weeks and sit on them. Then they take the highest bid that’s above their secret “reserve”. The only thing that stops them from selling to terrorists is if they by chance own other properties in the same area and don’t want to lose book value. The bank compels participating real estate agents to submit to this system.
And that, dear reader, is what we are dealing with here. Some of you may find this to be over-explaining, but allow me to correct you on that. This blog is appealing to many people who don’t have time to evaluate the same things, and also because there are so many people falsely who think they know the process. This is very true of real estate. There is a damn good reason we quit asking for advice and went out there ourselves.
I put in the offer, but against the big buyers, well, that property was just too nice. Meanwhile, I’ll sit pretty and watch how silver breaks through the $17 ceiling a bit easier every morning when the NYMEX opens. These must be sleepless nights for the banksters as more of them pile on the lid of the pressure cooker. They know there is a recession pending and if they can just keep silver down long enough for the economy to slow, they win another round. You can almost hear the Jaws theme.
See if you can hear this sound clip. If so, remember like all blogs and all types of links, the functions only work as long as the original URL is in good standing. I have no control over that, so all links in this blog function only so long as the destination is valid. There is no mechanism to go back and check if a link is still good. People at the other end have to pay for those things.
It has always been a lie that the Internet is free. I was trying to embed a Jaws first victim sound, only to learn the big players have that option completely sewed up. You can’t really do it without opening an account, which has to be the biggest disincentive to ‘Net usage ever devised. The person who restores anonymity to the Internet will be an instant trillionaire.
Turns out my fictitious silver scenarios are good for ratings. Enjoy, but bear in mind it is historically wise to presume that the longer a price has been artificially kept down, the greater the explosion. There seem to be two New York exchanges and their operating hours overlap. The one that opens at 2:00AM pounds the price of silver down, but at 8:00AM, the other exchange opens and the price heads north. And it does so a little steeper each day. The fight is then on until 4:00PM.
The Tepees.
NOON
See, I told you I get jet lag. This only means more up time to do things, and I isolated the electrical problem on the scooter to the rectifier. It is a solid state device that can only be replaced, not repaired. The proper term is rectifier, although the shops call it a regulator. Set inside cooling fins, it can short itself through an insulating plastic material directly to the vehicle frame. Baffling at first, I learned the way to tell it has self-destructed is by smell. Any electronics buff will recognize that “burnt LED” aroma.
A reply from the real estate agent has our old nemesis showing up again. Banks will not accept cash as proof of funds. We keep a float to wave under the nose of prospective sellers and I assure you this is a tactic that remains as fully effective as ever. Except with banks. The normal procedure was to open an account at the bank that was selling the property and close the account if they did not accept the offer. They are on to us. Do you remember my mention a short while ago that banks no longer have to allow you to close your account?
Furthermore, when you do close it, you will be roughly treated if you try to withdraw the cash, but not if you transfer the funds to another bank. That is, to another institution that they will keep on file the way they can’t keep on file if you use cash. I’m not ragging on the banks, they are only following orders. But I know when to smell a rat. Those issuing the orders are not wasting their time fine-tuning the monetary system for nothing. They know the majority, that’s the sheeple, won’t suspect a thing until it is too late. The banks know how to micro-manage the herding instinct of the lumpenproletariat.
Not every theory that criticizes the existing system is a conspiracy theory. Having said that, I doubt those who believe in conspiracy theories would know a real theory if it came along and bit them in the ass. That would include the unwashed masses who don’t like anything that contradicts their messed up view of the system. They believe only others, never themselves, are capable of conspiracies.
What’s the test to know if you are a sheeple? If you believe that it is impossible for you to be one and that the term only applies to others whose thinking is not as clear as your own, you are a sheeple. Incidentally, largely thanks to monitoring of cell phone conversations, the amount of data being moved per person on Earth is the equivalent of 24,000 book pages per second. (Source: earlyinvesting.com) Predictions say that will rise to 900,000 pages per second by 2020. This is a measured fact, not another conspiracy theory.
But if I was to choose a theory that is probably not conspiracy because it isn’t secret, I would say the move toward a cashless society makes most sense. The outlawing of cash is where the government takes control of personal dealings. They already do this with businesses, where the tax law makes the government an unwelcome partner in every transaction. It would no longer take much to extend that to everyday purchases.
This would, of course, boomerang because the majority of people love the anonymity of cash. If money is subjected to prohibition, some other entity would arise to take its place. I can’t predict the outcome, but I do know every time this has ever been tried before, it was upon an unarmed and defenseless population. It would likely not be so easily accomplished in America.
And here is a good time to remind the reader of the old adage: the fortunes that survive are those which can be carried across the border at midnight in a suitcase.
national debt
AFTERNOON
Money is always a popular topic, so here is some data redacted from several sources and is also sort of your trivia for today. If you want to look up further information, the term you are searching is called the “Topple Rate”. It is the stats on the number of American companies that start and fail, and the amount of time between those two events. The following are some related facts.
√ Since 1955, over 88% of the companies in the Fortune 500 are now “absent”.
√ The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company has dropped from 75 years to 14 years.
√ All 1916 companies on the Forbes 100 are kaput except one: General Electric.
√ The oldest firms in existence are all family-owned businesses.
√ The oldest American business is Zildjian Cymbal (founded 1623 in Constantinople).
Having said all that, most long-lived companies are remarkable for little else but their age. One oft-quoted example is Kikkoman, those people who make real soy sauce. They know more about yeast than anyone. I never buy the phony artificial sauce, read your labels. Harvard Business School studies have indicated that long-term survival of business may only be possible for those with access to “trust, pride, and money”. That’s such a sweet, sweet way of putting it.
The problem right there is the woeful decline in college standards. There is no way schools prepare anyone for the real world, where the average person is not kind and apologetic. I’ve often thought of returning to college simply because it is so easy these days. A degree in anything consists mainly of “adopting the easiest ideologies to digest and regurgitate”. See photo.
[Author's note: If I was a Millennial, the sound clip above would have self-played at full volume and and proceed to endlessly link to other more useless garbage.]
I’m as guilty as anyone about thinking certain old concepts are ridiculous along with the people who subscribe to them. I believe in conditions that some consider outrageous, such as the concept that children have privacy rights, people who work harder should be paid more, and that nobody is entitled to life-long welfare. My point is, unlike today’s college grads, I was not taught what to think about those issues. I learned it, but I was not taught. YUGE difference. (That’s a joke, son. Plainly I did not learn my spelling and grammar in any public school.)
Today’s students have such fixed common beliefs that you just know they are mass brainwashed on social topics in order to pass exams. This results in a condition where students do not learn from others because anyone not born since 1991 must be too old to “get it”. You’ll witness my dissatisfaction with their programming because they associate change and newness with progress. All they have to do to correct the majority of errors is to look at how the same problem was already solved in the past. Have you ever tried to use the Windows 8 search screen? That’s what I’m talking about. It is actually more difficult to be that stupid than to just follow the same algorithm used by earlier systems.
Ann Landers said, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.” But she was born before 1991.
It is also a fact that I’m not current with certain developments. It’s called experience. I may not know much about the process of using the cloud, but I know an awful lot about the value of promises that your data is safe on somebody else’s storage system. I know exactly how stupid someone has to be to fall for that. It might be convenient to turn on your refrigerator using your smart phone, but not so smart or convenient when the burglar uses that data to determine you are vacationing in Alaska. I cannot name one contemporary TV show, or tell you the name of one state governor, or name one general in the army. There are some things it is smarter not to know. I do not suffer much just because I cannot tell most cars apart except by color. But I can tell you to the penny the true cost of owning one and I’ll bet you can’t.
NIGHT
Sleepless in Miami, I finally read through the coma-like 125 pages of nonsense that is the middle third of “Port Mortuary”. I think the author is trying to justify or popularize her own half-schizoid brain farts. The reader wants to know how the victim was killed without bleeding and that author makes you wait for 250 pages. Since I don’t want you to go through the ordeal of her self-justifications for what are really childish foibles that real women outgrow, the answer is a WASP.
It is a $500 knife with a CO2 cartrige in the handle. Meant to be used underwater, it will easily drop any land animal instantly. The gas freezes on injection and embolism means no blood until later. The gas discharge requires you have the presence of mind to find and depress the trigger in the knuckle guard.
Okay, I have some real trivia for you. Have you ever heard of a grave torpedo? It’s what it sounds like, a type of explosive device activated when the lid of a coffin is removed. There are a variety of types, from simple pistols to what is basically a pressure mine. So don’t even walk over old graves, my friend.
Last Laugh
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