One year ago today: December 11, 2016, on wind power.
Five years ago today: December 11, 2012, I discover flip-flops.
Nine years ago today: December 11, 2008, must be my turban.
Random years ago today: December 11, 2007, one wheelbarrow of flour . . .
This is a condemned house down in Ft. Meade. I was out for a drive today, mainly to get a haircut. Gee, there’s a lot of abandoned property in Ft. Meade. The significance of this one is the builder ran into many of the same challenges as I had. I took ten minutes to study the architecture but that yellow sign in front was a warning not to even enter the yard. To the far right side, there is a small carport. I won’t to that for good reason. My back yard is huge. If I put a carport, that limits the height of what I can park back there.
This concept was entirely alien to him. That if paying the fine is cheaper than complying with the law, accept the penalty as a cost of doing business. He was also unaware that the police can lie to you but you can’t lie to them. He had no idea on many of these major issues, so it was quite the spirited conversation when I told him how I shredded some papers from the hospital. What? I didn’t tell you about that? Listen up, this is choice.
Without giving up any specific details about my situation, a hospital threatened me to send me to collections if I did not sign a bullshit document stating that if I did not get a high enough award to pay their bill, that I would then be in lifelong hock to them for the balance. My credit rating, huh? I told them if I didn’t get enough money, they have a quarrel with the court, not with me. (They were stunned.) Yeah, I told them, if there is a shortfall, sue the other guy because I did not willfully incur a single penny of debt. It was like I said something they’d never considered before, whereas I get the same ga-hunk look on their faces all the time. I honestly think this may be the first time they’ve ever been told to go to hell because they were after the wrong guy.
It’s quirky, but there is a precedent to my conduct on this. I’ve already told you how I was raised in a peasant household. That’s where people protect themselves by having nothing. They think it clever to be the stone nobody can get blood out of, but it’s plain stupid because they lead empty lives. It’s tough to play a piano you don’t have. So, I have a boatload of experience protecting my belongings, with one supreme difference. They had nothing, but I have lots, just not in my own name. I brought the peasant concept into the 21st century. Hey, it worked for Goldman-Sachs.
The Hotel Ukrainia.
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Yep, that was a 56-mile wrong turn and I wound up getting back home via all the old motorcycle routes I used to take. With a stop for groceries that reinforces my warnings about inflation hitting the things most people buy, as opposed to what the government places in that phony CPI basket. A single serving of blueberries was $5.74, so here is a picture of nearly $18 of desert for three people. The people who said we should let in illegals to do the work should try to explain this. They forgot that the whole system adjusts to supply and demand, not just their favorite little parts of it. Next beside this on the counter was a handful of cherries for $6.98.
I got motivated and made a quick tutorial video of how to play Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart”. What a boon to the business it would be if someone could invent a real guitar strumming machine. Even my space-age idea of a robot hand doing the strumming is better than anything that’s out there. In the end, I found several passages in that song were studio overdubs. These generally make the music difficult to duplicate live. I tend to choose and play the sound that is dominant, which is not always the best choice. That was my project for the evening. One day I’ll make up twenty of these lessons and sell them on-line for ten bucks a pop.
That puts me in competition with a zillion other tutorials on-line, but have you seen what lousy teachers most of those characters are? Most of them don’t even have a concept of camera angle. About half of them don’t explain what they are doing, which makes you wonder if they even know. My method is different. I point out every note that is played, demonstrate all patterns and passing notes, then play along with the exact version that I’m teaching. It works out to just under a ten minute video for each piece.
ADDENDUM
Here’s another product that is already over-priced. Clamato, though I don’t think all that many people even care what it costs. What got me is I’m old enough to recall when a bottle this size cost 39 cents. This one set me back $2.69. That’s 690% inflation in my lifetime. There is a tendency to blame businesses for these price increases, but in fact it is a form of hidden taxation. It is the result of the government paying its bills by just printing up the money.
The bonds are another rip-off. In the long run, they can never pay more than the combined effect of taxes and inflation. They merely shift debt to future generations. I read recently that the government has finally finished paying off World War One. The only worse investment than bonds is bank interest, which is a guaranteed loss.
NPR, I think, had a rare couple on the air today. A man and wife in their early 30s who had done something that is so scarce it made them stars. They knuckled down for three years with their combined incomes and paid off their mortgage. Now they were writing books and ladling out advice on how to live debt free. Hmmm, the same advice anyone could have gotten from this blog over the past half century. The show caught my attention because of the way they answered questions. I knew within moments they were telling the truth.
For example, where most people regard a budget as a fixed piece of paper, this couple knew it was an on-going process, often a daily series of revisions and adaptation. It was a dozen similar things they said that I personally know can only be learned by successfully working a plan against the whole credit-based culture out there. If you can, these days, live your life out of debt, you have essentially beat the system. They must have done it because they knew things that cannot be imagined. And the most important such thing is they found out how little money it takes to live once you don’t owe anything anywhere.
That’s correct. Most people dream that being out of debt means you’ll have all the extra cash around that formerly went to payments. That’s true, but the real revelation is that you no longer have to bust your chops to get that much money [the amount needed to both pay the bills and survive] together every month. That’s when you learn you don’t need much, rather just enough to outlast a few credit billing cycles while all the people who thought they were smarter than you go broke. That’s your opportunity to teach them what buy-low sell-high is really all about. What’s more, you quickly figure out the real reward is making less but having more time to enjoy it. I confirm that totally.
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