One year ago today: November 14, 2022, 712% voter turnout.
Five years ago today: November 14, 2018, WIP
Nine years ago today: November 14, 2014, it’s not the hobby, Leroy.
Random years ago today: November 14, 2013, Pecos, TX, by sidecar.
My goal for the weekend is to get the Reb home. We have talked by phone and my non-medical opinion is hospitals are too lax with their painkillers. Give us the pills and the Reb is 100% capable of taking them as needed. I contacted everyone who got left behind on this one, nobody got any notice I was leaving town. And I don’t intend to return until things that can be administered from my place are set up. One shameful aspect of my “smart phone” is that there is no direct way to find the text mode that sends photos.
Here’s the photo missing from y’day of some of JeePee’s fan mail. Hey, it’s all blurry and you can’t see the addresses. Yep, that’s why it was not posted y’day. His appetite returns as soon as I’m around, if time permits, I’ll make you a video, a gif with no sound. Or, that is, the sound of a turtle eating behind glass. He loves my chicken recipe. I took the doggies for two long walks, including a visit over to Lem’s, that’s a mile walk right there.
That’s part of the hour-long conversation with JZ. The cost of the Moonwalkers is $1,400 and I spelled it out for him. If I did not say, the scooter, which is unreliable and needs registration and parking, cost me $750 plus that $375+ I put into the carburetor which lasted two months. Anyway, add this up and I’d rather have something I can use.
I got all the chasing around done, including a trip to Mt. Juliet. Listening to “Starfire” in the van, it has how become tedious. I’ll finish listening, since I’m on disk10 of 12. It is never a war story, but some arm-chair pacifists concept of how wars are “prevented”. It’s really a plot about politics, army-talk, and some incredibly lucky teenagers. Oddly, the physics behind their microwave beam, the space-ships, and the ground receiving antenna are highly accurate.
Highnam Court Gardens.
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I’ve got most of the next six months mapped out for everything that could “normally” go wrong. The Reb may not be able to work at all. I have no details but this is America and there will undoubtedly be someone held responsible for this horrible event. However, I am departing from the situation here and looking at the big picture. I know this situation very well, where the insurance company often schemes to “starve you out”. This happened to me, I had fantastic medical insurance and they stalled payments for seven years, hoping I would die.
I shudder to think what would have happened if I had not had the money to survive. I now have plenty of experience dealing with insurance denials and delays, and can step in to help things last indefinitely. All this will be set in place by this upcoming weekend. I have no information on what will proceed, but I can guarantee there will be no starving out. Here’s a photo of Chooks and I with our backs to the sun.
Changing topics again, JZ and I talked about investments. He has access to the facts and figures and believes I may be overboard with protecting my investments. He’s wrong, but I understand exactly why he draws that conclusion. To pass on the experience, here is, in a nutshell, the lessons I would teach a beginning investor.
There are three cardinal rules. Do not invest in anything you don’t understand. Do not invest in anything you have to worry about. Do not invest in anything that you would have to keep on paying if project fails. (Be especially careful about partners who can run up bills.) What JZ is referring to is my recent revelation that to invest $16,000 I have to commit or tie up almost 30% more to protect the investment. Let me dispense some of my reasoning. With investments, I have succeeded and I’ve failed. There is a razor-thin dividing line between investing and gambling and I’ve learned the rule of thumb is 7%. Anything above that is risky, so it is not good enough to try being right 51% of the time.
You see, there is nothing I’ve found where you can invest and forget that still pays enough to get ahead. Read that sentence twice if you have to, but let’s move on. As soon as you invest, you will make enemies. Some will just be jealous, but beware, there is also a popular dumb notion that making a profit is leaching. Totally ignore both these types, they are not worth shit, you have my word on that. The enemy you cannot see is the system, and yes, just like the poor thief, the big boys will steal what they can. They just do it legally and usually slowly enough to avoid total opprobrium. The most obvious case for most people is bank fees. (Of the $6,000 I have protecting my investments, half is minimum bank balances.)
What I would say to most people is accept a little less of a return and save your heart, your nerves, and your memory of how to enjoy life. I could have remained hard-nosed and turned into a wealthy grinch, retiring a multi-millionaire from the phone company around now. But I saw what happens to people who fall into that trap. My point is, you must protect your investments from the rich as well as the poor—and this cannot always be done following the rulebook. You will be forced to learn to lie due to increased “failure-to-deny” situations where strangers get serious about finding out the who/what/where of your valuables.
Last, once you begin to get some returns worthy of the effort, you enter a mode where you are kind of a “middle success”. You have not let go of your “poor” roots but you are far from a member of the yacht club. Pay attention, this is important. Being a middle success (my wording again) makes you more vulnerable because you have something to lose and don’t have experience yet. Biden’s proposed taxes on your unrealized capital gains is just as much robbery as a mugging.
The way it works is if you have an investment, it can be stolen. You can’t bury gold in your back yard, somebody will find it, but nor can you plow your money into standard investments because the system will tax it. I don’t have the formula to circumvent this squeeze, but you will feel it now if you get there becasue of this heads-up. One last quirk, I’ve found that “rich” people actually are NOT more sophisticated investors. (Most of them inherited the money and are too dumb to invest, they hire people.) The reality is, they get more sophisticated protecting their investments. And this is normally accomplished by protecting each other. That’s where the yacht club comes in.
