One year ago today: February 14, 2016, Adobe sucks.
Five years ago today: February 14, 2012, well above street level . . .
Nine years ago today: February 14, 2008, my delivery vehicle.
Random years ago today: February 14, 2001, my caddy, Key Biscayne.
This has got to be one of the more useless tools for what it is supposed to do, allow me to explain. It seems like a great idea until you try to use it to pry something or pull a nail. It’s too small for a wrecking bar because it doesn’t have the leverage to pull apart a couple of 2x4s nailed tight. Yet it is too thick to pry trim. Then you got those useless nail puller notches. Have you ever tried to actually pull a nail with this piece of crap?
Strange an otherwise reputable outfit like Stanley would market this piece of junk. There is always the contingent who will say the tool is not for prying or pulling nails, and therefore it works as intended. As a paperweight? Anyway, that’s a lame Millennial argument. I say if it won’t pull nails, it should at least carry a warning sticker about that on the label. Get yourself a good old crowbar.
Today we talk history unless you want another day of me working on the house and yard. Fun as that is, guys, it is all made possible by moolah. And it should be unmistakable by now that my core values on the topic are far different than you’ll get from the crowd the hamster cages. This effect is heightened by a series of pages from October 1984 that I’m just publishing now. How neat to go back to a specific day that long ago and have the memory of a single day sharpened to an exactitude not really available any other way. The links are above, if you get curious, and yes, I was far more likely to talk about “escapades” back then.
So, this morning I find out this Watchdog of Wall Street is a Libertarian. That’s got my attention. Unlike the majority, I tend to schedule to specific radio broadcasts and tune in for that time slot. Since I am unlikely to do this as a result of advertising influence, most media can only interest me based on their own merits. One the other edge of that sword, I can be the last guy you know to latch on to something. I found out this program has been syndicated for 17 years. And it’s new to me, but that perspective is why you all keep coming back.
These days he’s on about Obamacare and things I don’t get into, but this morning he talked about stock options. That’s where I made my early money, you know. I signed up for the maximum when the company made the offer, I believe that was 1982. For every share I bought the company credited my account with a quarter share. Five for the price of four, an immediate 20% return. This is also the year I maxed out my pension, the now famous $19.34 that people laughed at—until it eventually bought me this house. The company plan was a result of studies that employees who had a stake in the firm performed better. I suppose, but my real motive was that you could time your sales for the market peaks.
The shares also paid dividends, and any wise investor knows that outfits that pay those are necessarily run fundamentally better than those who do not. I think the official term is “blue chip” but I’ve found that term is not understood by most, they think it means good investment. Like Enron? My income, while not the most I’d ever earned, tended to be 15% better than my compatriots, and in those days, 50% of my investment budget was for the long term, as in 30+ years. You might find it interesting to know I lost the other 50%. There were ups and downs, and in the end it was all down. I’ve lost as much as $8,000 in a day, but unlike the casinos, at least mine was all on paper.
Oregon coast.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
NOON
Here’s the Rebel in downtown, somewhere. The map says there is a town population 2500 right about here, but I think they mean Palm something over on the old Mulberry Highway. This here is a rough crossing, though it remains a mystery why they singled this one out for a sign. I had to hit the bank in the south end, and reinforced my contention that there is no such thing as a quick motorcycle ride. The temptation is too great, and I didn’t get back home for another six hours.
There’s another aspect to investing that was never publicized in 1982. It was how the system was heavily geared toward self-preservation. New ideas could not come along and upset the structure, it was pretty much designed so any new idea had to be run past the powers that be. It was never true that there was nothing stopping you from getting ahead, it took the computer revolution to break that monopoly. And as before, only the people with already big money could get into the game. But at least these new-fangled computers upset the existing order, though only to the extent they created a new class of millionaire, none of whom really invented anything. Prime example, Bill Gates.
Concepts of competitive advantage get lip service at the universities, but in reality, the upper class have a distinctly mercantile view of competition. If you are an outsider, they see every dollar you make as one they failed to make because you took it. I repeat, the computer created a new class of rich guy, it did not cause any existing rich guy to fail. It met little resistance because it streamlined existing business practice, but just you try it any other way. Like they say, if you had invented the motorcycle in 1982, it would have been outlawed as unsafe.
In fact, it is easy to delineate the power structure based on class. If you want money for a business, the bank won’t lend. You have to seek an angel, who, if the venture is successful, will do everything he can to get rid of you and take over. I’ll tell you where you’ve recently seen this effect. It’s the way Trump tweets. The existing class of “professional” politicians are furiously critical because he used a novel system to take away votes that rightfully, they believe, belonged to them. They had an ordained and hereditary right to divide those votes up amongst themselves as they’ve been doing since November, 1963. And you can bet they are pissed.
AFTERNOON
Here’s a photo of a T-bevel, which didn’t look right in the last paragraph. Carrying on . . .
So, you want to know more about me and the stock market. What eventually happened? The government moved in and said the stock options were taxable at source. This made it a break-even operation, since in those days I was in a 37% tax bracket. The same law said the options had to be carried on the book, so the value of the trading shares sank overnight. I was in Thailand when I got the news, so I remember that more than very well. The company rapidly folded up the stock option plan, except for executives with incomes above $100,000 annually. And I was about a third of that in 1984, my third year with the firm.
Like many an old guy can tell you, life was once more intense. Today, it did not slow down, I slowed it down. There is no parallel between my life, and where there are similarities from long ago, mine were worthy enough to be written down. I still regularly meet people who wound up where I am, but not by choice. Put another way, I did not get to Lakeland, Florida, as a result of a lifelong litany of screwing things up. I chose my life today to be the way it is today, not the other way around.
What was the best money I ever made? It was on a penny stock. Another one of those rip-off non-existent mining companies that sells the metal by the metric ton before they get it out of the ground. It had a snappy title, like “Investor” mining, something like that. I bought it for 3 cents a share. Three years later it hit the jackpot. Not the motherlode, but some dotcom company wanted the name and bought us out for $8 per share. But, as we all find out later in life, a small bundle of money down the line does not begin to make up for the way the system treats the non-rich from the get-go. It was around this time I realized the stock market was a zero-return activity because it has to be. It doesn’t create any money so it simply has to be an inside game.
“When I asked the kids if they’d seen the TV channel changer,
they said she left me last week.”
NIGHT
Here’s a great shot of the new look on the window screens. I do have enough lumber to cut decorative corner braces for all the screens. The specimen shown here still has the old metallic screen installed. This nice white color is only primer. But You gotta love the way it sharpens up those plain old screens from before. This is the second glue-up, may I report that the white carpenter’s glue I used the first time all failed when left out in the morning dew. They were clamped, but still never set up. They could be broken out with a simple twist. The frames are now redone with yellow glue.
Patiently wait for pictures and you’ll get them. The work has to be divided up into tiny steps that I can handle on my lonesome. There is no budget for help except JZ, who I don’t have to supervise. As a treat for reading so far today, I’m going to tell you a little about the early Internet that is not on the history books. Not the version they teach the kids in school. But, the kids would quickly recognize the bewildering back-and-forth. Where you get so many contradictory instructions that you realize the teachers themselves don’t know, so you focus on passing the exam and hope the knowledge will make an appearance later.
That was back in the early 90s, a weird era for the Internet. Just like today, very few people really understood it, but nobody admits that. The people selling the service were considered the experts, but that is as crazy as regarding the used car salesman is a professional mechanic. I had a substantial reward to anybody who could explain how to connect a wireless WiFi system first time every time in a manner I can understand it, step by solid step. Nobody ever collected. I’ve hooked up dozens of systems, but each one was by trial and error, the instructions were futile once the first thing went wrong. That’s another subject where I passed the test without knowing how the system actually worked—and the difference between me and the thousands of experts out there is I admit it.
It was also the time when the sellers went ballistic trying to convince everyone that you needed your own domain and a web page or you would never survive the onrush of the digital panzers. I met people by the boatload who were paying for these things, but had no web page, no clue how to make money with it. I know, because although I never got suckered into buying such things, I had no idea how to make money with it either. You can read back in this blog to discover the long hours I put in trying to find out how to make the thing work, but could not get any straight answers.
Among the best idea was an online vault where the user could enter the serial numbers of all his valuable property. The service was free until he wanted the information back, which was usually after a house fire or a break-in, but hey, I don’t work for nothing. You can read about the huge intellectual problems of getting this thing underway. How I could not get past the first few chapters of Apache and PCP(?) and nobody out there would help you. I understood each component, but as for making them work together, buddy, if I can’t do it, nobody is going to sell me a “domain”.
Nor could I find any definitive material on how those who did get in early learned the trade. How did Amazon work? Where did AOL get all their programming done? Where did they even find out what was needed? It wasn’t being taught in any university I knew of. There were these and dozens of other barriers to establishing an on-line money-making enterprise. But it was a familiar situation—nobody will tell you how to do it, but they will sure take your money to do it for you. When asked, most people who actually got something working on line told me it cost them around $22,000, a bit more than the advertised price of $49.99.
Who remembers Art? The guy who built databases. Art hasn’t met you but he thinks you are pretty stupid. He’s the guy who tried to tell me he could not build a database without knowing what I was going to populate it with. Sorry Art, I ain’t that dumb. I want eight fields of so many bytes each, and that’s all you need. You do not tell your programmer what you are putting in those fields. Classic example of people who didn’t heed this advice: Facebook. In the end, Art refused unless I told him what it was for. All Art got told was to go to hell.
Last Laugh
(Millennial youtube posting.)
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
