One year ago today: July 12, 2019, count me in.
Five years ago today: July 12, 2015, not a peep.
Nine years ago today: July 12, 2011, who cannot cook.
Random years ago today: July 12, 2004, Marco Island.
A morning off, I took the scooter for a tour around the neighborhood. One stop was the lumber yard. They still have no fence pickets I checked on the chickens but they are already gone. According to the PsyPost web site, when white people are made aware of the “class privilege”, they claim right back that it isn’t privilege, but a consequence of working harder. From where I stand, the two sides look identical. The harder you work, the more privileges you have, but to the website, if you are white, all privileges are unearned.
But I’ll tell you what is easy to mistake for white privilege. Indifference, that’s what. I don’t give a flying shit about anybody who thinks so differently from me they are losers. They would not know what to do with privilege if it crawled up their nostrils. It is far easier to point fingers and complain.
Today’s top picture is a photo-comment on the fall of the American housing system. A century ago, only the rich had houses and this is why so many people back then were boarders. Contemporary media has given that lifestyle a negative spin. So-and-so died penniless in a boarding house you hear time after time in history books. Fact is people were more free. You could always find a place to board and travel around the country. After WWII, when the bankers could no longer lend to the war economy, started the bunk about home-ownership as “the American dream”. Yeah, to live your life in bondage to the bank.
This is one reality of the end result. Townhouses. Here’s group of seven going up in the east end. Bear in mind, one thing Florida has plenty of is wide open empty space. So look at these “homes” scrunched together like shoe boxes. Each with one garage barely wiser than a compact car’s door handles. The lawn space is so tiny it is decoration only. A second car has to park in the driveway, blocking the garage. The really sad thing is around here, almost anybody who buys such a shitbox is going to have to lie heavily to the banks about what they can afford.
Next, I looked up soil moisture sensors. They are not expensive for beginners, around $10. The trick is finding one. The one I chose, the Mosser Lee “Soil Master” is an elusive beast. It’s the old “ship to store” boogie, where you really pay for it with your privacy. I’ll keep an eye open, somebody has these in stock and it ain’t Wal*Mart or Home Depot. As usual, the fact it is not in-store is buried in the deepest layer of the website. Keep up the good work, millennials. You’ll get yours and the neat part is, you’ll get it from each other. That means you’ll have to lie there and take it. Because the world you’ve created is hardly going to bail you out. Need a heart valve? Allow two days for delivery
That reminds me, a couple days back I described an unexplained pain in my left knee. I’m getting reports from back west of friends with the same condition. Rumors range from a common cold to the true effects of the carona-virus. They say just wait, the paint will migrate to your other joints, confirmation it is not rheumatism. Does these mean I have yet to recover? My knee has been better for two days, now I find that might not be the end of it. This calls for an early siesta.
English desk-rental shop.
(a.k.a. “deskcamping”)
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Mac, the guitar player guy from the east end. I’ve been by his house a few time, he’s never home. He did say he was planning to travel. Now I hear he got cracked up pretty badly in a car accident. If so, it’s been several months and the only source of information is shutdown over the carona boondoggle. My aim was the day off, instead I only took it easy and so should you. I’m going out in the yard for an hour, tend to my beets, see if the birds are eating, maybe putter in the shade. Tonight Forex trading resumes, all is set and in readiness. I have not conferred with the Reb over a real money account, but I did the books to find there is nearly $2,600 kind of sitting there. I say put a thousand in and get our feet wet. Who’d like to see this? Can I have a show of hands? Thank you, that’s what I thought.
Here’s some accounting information you don’t need though it makes understanding easier for most. I track the investments as originating here, which may change. Our names are picked off a list and in a pure fluke, the Forex account is called Project F. We’ve had over $790 in startup expenses not counting office and administration. I choose not to write off those expenses unless they are covered by income. Mostly, it is the $189 monthly rental. Auvoria is full of millennials, they have no ethical problem charging you the same for a trial account as for a real one. At this moment there is $941 in transit to Tennessee.
The books show 68 transactions already, this is just to position ourselves to open a real brokerage account. I tend to record the transactions as simply as possible, reserving compound entries for either familiar or otherwise tricky to follow events. My plan for later today is to go over those entries one by one to verify each. My money barometer tells me there is $2,600+ ready to invest. You must not think this is easy to come by. I had to make all my money the hard way. What you may be picking up on is my apparently frivolous regard for the money, trust me, that is completely an illusion. Here’s what is really going on.
I’ve learned to regard invested capital as separate from personal finances. Where I can tell you to the penny how much I’ve spent on gas each month in the past twenty years, I have to tally up what is floating around—because yes, I do behave as if it isn’t there. Talk to anybody who has made successful risky investments and they will confirm this is the way it must be. Every other communication with the Forex people carries a reminder to never put in any money you can’t afford to lose. My method is ideal for that situation, the more so because I pick up that others dispensing the advice have not got it as isolated from their affairs as I do.
So, I’m not trivializing the $2,600 because I worked for every penny of it somewhere along the line. I would not doubt is some of that is from investments I made in my late twenties. That’s why I snort if anyone suggests it was due to some privilege. I had the disadvantages if you want to get into it. I’m going to propose we put at least $1,000. I tend to refer to such amounts as “tuition”.
By later, squelch my plans to go to Winter Haven for a brew. Instead, I decided a better idea was to sit around here and drink a half-sack of YinLing, oops, I mean, cough, sputter, work the burning barrel. The lean-to work so far has produced two barrels of lumber ends and 10 gallons of sawdust. I’ve never minded working in a dusty or messy environment. I fell like cleaning up the area. I’ve got some lighting in the lean-to, along with a fan and some fence pickets along the south wall. I shoved the table saw into place, not much fun. I measured and cut what’s needed to get that work counter happening, including the posts and digging the holes.
If it sounds like a lot, it was. But I was working mostly in the shade—how do you like them apples? I even ran two loads of laundry. This, folks, is how important having a that work space was for me. And I’m only half done. One has to ask, have things been going too well? Ask me in the morning, there are 13 outstanding trades on the account and the New Zealand dollar is recovering. Hmmm, that makes me come across like an expert. I have to make many more millions to attain that status.
ADDENDUM
Not again. Another data breach, all credit information. The problem for most Americans is their credit information is a complete record of their entire physical existence—and it’s there for anybody who wants to help themselves. I finally saw an article on “two-factor” authentication, something that has been standard here for some twenty years. A few days ago I rejected Parler for security and privacy reasons, it seems I’m not the only one. Not only is the sign-up sequence highly suspect, it turns out they are already banning users. Their biggest draw was an alternative to Twitter. However, I’ll tell you why I don’t mind. They are shutting out leftist propaganda and the radical left is screaming “censorship”. They ought to know it when they see it. Let’s see who winds that tug-o-war.
Kudos to the Turkish garbage collectors to established their own library from books thrown out. Back to computer data breaches, I wonder when some bank will be smart enough to go off-line. That’s correct, offer manual service. Want your balance? Go see a teller. Everything done manually, even the phone lines don’t give any anything, neither confirmation or information. Banking is what the Constitution means by personal papers and it should be one of the most secretive institutions in America. As of today, it is the least secretive, the banks turn everything you do over to the credit agencies, even if you never have a credit card or loan.
Remember the doggie wig place? The lady paid me by check and the first one she got my first and middle names mixed up. The bank still took it, back then they had the brains to know when an exception was the right thing to do. Four months later when I pulled up my on-line profile, the backwards name was listed as a “known alias”. My point is the American electronic banking system is broken. And as long as it is programmed in C code, it cannot be fixed. The only computer solution is to completely start over again no matter what it costs. This is the type of hard choice is no longer the challenge and opportunity of my era, the ass-enders will run like chickens until it is too late. Possibly, it already is [too late] since they are psychologically groomed to think cashless is better.
