One year ago today: August 26, 2016, the 50/50 ratio.
Five years ago today: August 26, 2012, crossroads from altitude, Colorado.
Nine years ago today: August 26, 2008, a repeat of August 25, 2008, basically.
Random years ago today: August 26, 2007, me in shorts. Sexy.
We’ve been warned and anyway, we’re on to these people. New housing sales dropped nearly 10% this month. And that’s the part they admit to. My position is straightforward, I believe housing sales to be the third most manipulated statistic ever foisted on the American public. That’s behind the consumer price index and crime statistics. The accounting profession has known for years that certain types of numbers are leading indicators, and two good ones used to be:
New home sales
Both of these have become as useful as the civil servants who cook them up. People will spend more now if they anticipate higher income in the future. But to prod them with fake statistics is a cheap trick and I assure you it is a politician, not an accountant, who is behind the baloney. For a year we’ve heard nothing but glowing reports of recovery quoting house prices rising by the momentary or the annual rate, whichever is greater.
Heads up here, that reported drop is in sales, not prices. It’s just that the two have such a wonderful affinity. This property of numbers can be very misleading and the fuzziness applies to any statistic. A “massive” compounded gain of 1% for ten months (a 10.46% increase) followed by a “minor” 10% correction means a net loss for the period. Recovery, my eye. And don’t forget, the banks are doing their best to influence the statistics by the unadorned expedient of not approving any mortgage that doesn’t show an uptick. In Polk County, it is nearly hopeless to get a mortgage of less than $60,000 at a decent rate.
Don’t worry, I’ve been closely looking at the rent-to-own market for some time, that’s me renting to you, Ken. When I borrow money, I pay it back, so in the end, I have money to buy houses and you don’t. The media has been strangely quiet since those numbers were announced. Strange, because they are so eager to pounce on anything that could be interpreted as positive. If there is another 10% slump this month, then all the so-called gains since 2014 are wiped out. A third month and another 10%, would put the country smack back in the housing recession. The one that was supposed to end all recessions.
This photo may be a repeat because it once again is the lowest priced on the market on the good side of town. Asking price is $49,000. I don’t want it. But I choose it for the benchmark to see what happens. It has already been marked down from $59,000. Again, I stress to the observer that there are no available jobs left in Florida that pay you enough money to buy the average house. That average price is somewhere around $109,000 depending on who you talk to. Just don’t talk to a banker or a politician.
Six-piece Swiss band.
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Mind you, if I wanted to rent-to-own something myself, the property in this next photo is available to me right now—if I want to pay the price. Oh, I can, but do I want to? It may now be a mansion by some standards, but it is a palace compared to where I was raised. Note the carport, it is completely wired and plumbed. The figures on this one is it dropped from $69k to $57k in a year. The story on this one is the guy isn’t getting many offers. He hasn’t figured out that it is listed as a “two bedroom no bathroom”.
That was y’days quote, but let me explain further.
That sounds clever but I was really lamenting at the time. How many great deals I had to let go while the rich kids just waited until the other guy screwed up. I was talking to my wealthy girlfriend at the time who could not understand why I didn’t go out and work the oil rigs for “big money”. She never understood that I understood that didn’t work. I know of only three successful oil rig workers, and they were damn lucky. Though I suppose some of them are good people, as Don put it. It took me until I was 35 to operate at a surplus, but then, I did have to replace an infrastructure that was not provided, as it should have been, by family.
Thank god I was able to see far enough ahead to do it, however. By that age, I was not rich, but you should have looked around me at the time. There were two large camps. One was the fat cat rich kids, the ones who had family. And the others were a strange bunch of people who had no family AND had not devoted any money or time to creating that necessary atmosphere for success at anything. They drove fancier cars and bought fancier houses and of course, shelling out 80% of their income in monthly payments. Whereas at age 35, let me think. Ah, I was living on the south slopes in a house with a swimming pool, my “rent” was $1,000 per year. I drove a Cadillac (paid for cash) and took twelve holidays a year.
And that also explains why today I have that infrastructure. And others don’t. It’s from planning ahead. No matter what happens to prices, I can pay. Who cares if the country tanks? If the economy collapses, I can last longer than anybody who is in debt of any kind. You see, all I have to do is wait. Um, that’s the other thing about having infrastructure. I can live great on a fraction of what others are shelling out.
And for the record, I figure a person only has to have the resources to live 30 days beyond a real calamity to survive nine-tenths of the idiots out there. Personally, I think it would be fun to watch them fry. And watch what all the credit companies try to do with all the TVs and cars they’d have to repossess.
“The first rule of tinkering
is to save all the parts.”
~ Paul Erlich
Still no word back from the guitar player, but it’s looking more and more like he just put “plays all styles” on his ad as bait. He may have no intention of playing anything except murky jazz tunes. I won’t abide by it. You don’t push your point of view on strangers. There will always be some yahoo out there who agrees with any damn thing you throw out, but that is not my style and it is not how I want to be known as a musician. I reminded him our agreement was to trade song lists and focus on the material that we both knew in common AND that audiences were already familiar with. Florida has warning signs about alligators. There should also be signs warning of guitar dictators.
I also told him it was unfair for either of us to expect the other to learn a new musical style from scratch gut he doesn’t seem to have grasped what that means. We are here to play music, not to indoctrinate the other guy into some style that is strange to his ears. And jazz, well, you know what you can do with jazz. But I think that is exactly where he is headed with that. This could still work out but for now it appears I’ve got another “cool persistent” type on my hands. Keep in mind, this is not some clever ruse they use, but a category of personality many of them consider so natural they don’t even realize it has been labeled.
The ad mentioned, the one that said “all styles”, is a common lure for older men who really mean they want a backup band. So they can sit there all night and play guitar hero. This is a far cry from the concept of playing in a band that comes to mind when people say they want to join up. It is difficult to drill this concept into the head of guitarists because in every room there will be a minority of slopes that will cheer you on. But that doesn’t mean what you are doing is right in the big picture. What about the rest of the room, for instance? Music is about doing what appeals to the greatest number. Ask Johnny or Elvis. Because you won’t get a straight answer out of anyone born after 1991.
Sorry, I got distracted there. What was I on about? Oh yeah, “all styles”. The average guitarist, when he says that, means Guitar Center taught him one or two of each, they are on his song list, so if he doesn’t con a group of people into backing him up, he’s lost his lesson money. But what he does not mean is that he is open to playing in a band that features those styles. Because then he would have to do the one thing all talentless hacks fear the most—learn more songs by endless repetition. Forget it, that’s why it took him 20 years to learn the first 12.
ADDENDUM
Here is the relevant data for the Moon on August 21, 2017. Eclipse day. I’ve calculated the GP of the Sun, and now it is the Moon’s turn. I have not done the calculation yet, as I’ve got a roast in the oven and I haven’t had my coffee. That will be a few minutes yet, so how about we take a look at the Almanac, just to say we did, and to maybe spark some interest. First column is the hour of the day, the next two columns are data for the Sun. I’ll compare this to what I found in the Italian Idiot Almanac, but the numbers already look familiar. It is the final (right-most) five columns that we’ll be working with.
I’ll describe what the columns used for, but how to use them is a different field of research. All I’ll say is I learned it despite some efforts by the best teachers in the world to throw me off. So you’ll know, the relevant row is 19 under the left Mon (Monday) column. If I didn’t say, I chose 2:46PM as the maximum darkness and that is 19:00 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). Skipping over the two Sun columns, we find the Greenwich Hour Angle, a measure of distance, to be 103° 43.5’, which we can see is awfully close to the GHA of the Sun at 104° 14.9’. I will use the remaining four columns to fine tune the position of the Moon to exactly 14:46 and compare that with my Sun calculation. If they are within a few minutes, a measure of distance, from each other, then we have learned a potentially arithmetic way of finding an eclipse. Not bad for a simple daily journal of a blog, wouldn’t you say?
The column with the small v, which I think stands for vector, is used to look up on another table the amount the Moon moves during fractions of an hour. This number is always positive because the Moon only orbits in one direction. Now, at the relevant hour, the next column gives the Declination, or position of the Moon from the Equator. In this case it must be north of the equator, but be careful. Now the Moon doesn’t orbit straight across the sky, so the small d is a factor to be looked up on yet another table to find out how much it changes its “latitude” during each hour.
You might notice this is a negative number. Actually, the educated navigator would simply look at the Dec column to see if the numbers were getting greater or smaller and deduce the same information. Can you picture why it is negative? Because it is autumn and the Moon and Sun are getting lower in the sky each passing day. The Moon is so close to the Earth, celestially speaking, that we must allow for that movement each hour.
The final column, HP, is horizontal parallax. It applies to the amount of adjustment needed on your sextant reading, but I won’t need it as I’m seeking a known position, not trying to fix where I am. Ah, to those who find this logical, the S.D. along the bottom is the semi-diameter of the Sun and Moon. The Almanac figures are at the center of those bodies, but a sextant reads to the edge. This number is the minutes that you adjust your reading. Oh, and yes, the Sun also has a small declination change per hour, but it is so tiny it is only given once at the bottom, where is says d=-0.8. You can figure out by now why it is a negative number.
These tables are not always found in the same publication, which can be frustrating. It’s a sign of our decline that such books are now produced by publishing experts instead of navigation experts. They print what is convenient rather than what is useful. They are not above leaving out a necessary table or two to trick you into buying another book.
That’s all for now. I usually work the calculations on a sheet of paper, so maybe I’ll do that over breakfast tomorrow. It is tidbits like this that you love this blog. It’s like real life, you have to read so darn much to find the parts that do you any good. You could, of course, learn it all by not reading, but I think we all know people who’ve tried it that way. I think it’s called the School of Hard Knocks.
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