One year ago today: May 27, 2018, made in Miami.
Five years ago today: May 27, 2014, how Australia spells beer.
Nine years ago today: May 27, 2010, actually, I do have an explanation.
Random years ago today: May 27, 2017, rock tumbler, my eye.
A small trip is in the works. And the hotel that gets our money will be one of the few who have an understandable web site that can be navigated by normal people. The instant a web site tries to pull something unpredictable on me, it’s history. Just like a tennis pro can no longer play at an amateur level, intelligent people find it difficult to dumb down to hotel sites. See addendum.
Here’s a nice picture. Enjoy, because I’m clamping down and learning as much of the new songlist as I can. They have not called for an audition, and may never call. That is the rule and the way to bet your money. It’s amusing to tackle the obscure titles, because I can see the guitar-nazi influence. Allow me to describe what I think creates “b-side” guitarists.
The presumption is these guitarists can’t play the a-side, so they move to the b-side. I say no, the process is a wee more complicated. Most guitar players these days have only one “talent”, which is to memorize songs note-for-note.
And that’s where b-side crap, stuff that never made it to number one, starts creeping into a song list. Around a sixth of the new song list is this kind of guitar junk. I mean, when you have played one Stevie Ray song, you have played them all.
[Author's note 2020: this picture is a paintingon the side of a Tennessee bank up on Lebanon Pike. I was going to open my account there, but of the 30-odd reviews of the place, 26 were negative.]
Mexican Fender factory.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I watched a documentary on vacant properties in London, England. They have the same situation as Miami. Offshore millionaires seeking solid assets in a world where the monetary system is haywire. You find blocks of expensive properties sitting vacant because nobody local can afford them. And since you’ve never heard of these buyers as money champions, like industrialists or inventors, you know the money is filthy dirty. But, that is why we are called open societies.
My connection is that I do not want to borrow to buy. Small borrowers risk their entire assets, where big buyers have limited liability. I agree, money should be parked where it gains, but the world has changed. The generation before me thought of retiring with enough money to live off their interest. I saw that collapse in 2002 when a bank tried to trick me into rolling over my 7% bonds to less than 1%. Today, you’re lucky to get 1/10th of a percent.
At this time, gold sells for $1289 per ounce USD, but the value it would have to attain to support the currency is over $1,000,000 per ounce. Windfall profits of this size are not unknown in Europe, where the rich are borrowing everything they can to plow it into hard assets. They know something we don’t. I’m just looking at this point. You may be curious why I won’t borrow when money is so cheap. The money is cheap because the banks create it out of thin air. But to pay it back, you must work for it. Thus, the bank gets back a different kind of money because it has value. Yes, if I was a banker, I would manipulate the hell out of this system. But something has to give and with my terrible investment record, I don’t want to be the chump yet again.
When I see this money created by banks instead of based on any value, I have difficulty applying the traditional definitions. The money is valueless and seems now to move around without any direct connection to value. If that’s the case, you probably don’t want to have a lot of money instead of real assets in case the slightest thing goes wrong. Usually what happens is people flatly refuse to take money in trade. Which, if you don't know it, is illegal. That's what "This note is legal tender" means.
People refuse to take paper money, that could never happen in America. Um, it already has. Think Confederate dollars. Did you know the ancient Chinese, who have considerable experience with runaway inflation, imposed the death penalty for refusing to accept paper money? But don't you worry, that's another think that could never happen in America.
ADDENDUM
I can tell you who else is ignorant. The people that program hotel/motel sites on-line. It’s not just the near impossibility of getting a straight price quote out of the bastards, that’s a given. The poor design of the sites themselves suck. Like TripAdvisor, you find something and see the map. But the Google map is so large scale the symbols clutter up what you want to see. It seems impossible that anything could be worse than a Garmin GPS for blotting out the map with ATM symbols, but TripAdvisor has managed it. When you try to zoom in on your hotel, the other half of the screen also “updates” without being asked, and if that takes your selection off the view area, tough luck. Because they’ve disabled the go-back key. Besides, you’ve got nothing better to do.
The strange part is I know lots of people who enjoy that brand of runaround. They have no minds of their own, so letting some a-hole millennial coder send them on goose chases is, by comparison, exciting. It’s not lost how those freaks have the same twisted relationship with a TV remote. But good luck trying to get some real work done, almost anything you click on brings unwanted results. And I haven’t even mentioned the hidden rollovers, the disappearing back buttons, or the ‘tard links if you park your cursor more than a few seconds. Let me inform those idiots that the back button is meant to take you back one level, not back one picture. There is a caret for that, you numbskulls.
There, I feel much better.
