One year ago today: December 2, 2022, the long way.
Five years ago today: December 2, 2018, why I don’t use hotels.
Nine years ago today: December 2, 2014, 97% electronic.
Random years ago today: December 2, 2002, pivot tables are a brain fart.
Taking inventory, the place stayed mostly put while I was away. The yard plants are the obvious changes. Here is the cactus plant that was growing “flowers”. They were not really flowers, but bud-like replicas of the parent plant. Now these hips appeared at the top and it looks like this is some final cycle of the growth process. Too bad, I liked that plant. The good news is when I left, there were a cluster of ripe papayas up the tree. They are not only gone, they have disappeared. Something must be eating them as I found one small bit of rind on the ground. Good, I was beginning to wonder if JeePee likes that fruit.
It looks like a nationalist has been elected in Holland. Sure, the left-wingers will call him a right-winger, but this guy doesn’t care. He’s openly state that White Christian principles are incompatible with Muslim ideology and has announced plans to ship back any criminals and close down any “mosques” that receive foreign funding. I’ll be watching. Silver has broken through $25, considered a ceiling. It has to more than triple that before I’d sell.
The Prez has scheduled rehearsal for Sunday, we’ll tackle more technical material as he’s ready for it. He must be wondering how he went from pretty much nothing right into the spotlight in eight weeks. He’s certainly got patience where other guitarists would be screaming “Hotel California” by now. I sifted through my news feed, we have another call for a flat tax to get rid of the IRS. Careful, or you will wind up with both, America. IN Denver, the Democrat mayor had his car stolen when he showed up for a Biden rally. And here is a recent video of exactly the reasons I quit working for a Canadian company almost 30 years ago. It was obvious to me by then that “high-paying” job was a trap, as I was in a 61% tax bracket (up from 17% when I started the job).
I can imagine some future “historian” saying he’s discovered the tax rate was only 36%. Wrong. He’s forgetting surtaxes, sales taxes, and that when you buy a loaf of bread in Canada, you are paying 360 or more taxes passed on to you as value-added. Canada almost once passed a law making it criminal to point out that surtaxes and taxes were the same thing. Since that was in the era when I hand-wrote this blog, what tipped me off is that their economy is based on a Ponzi-scheme. It also means I can't easily locate what I wrote about it at the time.
You think you are getting richer because the numbers keep going up. But, after around five years, I noticed the “degree of suffering” did not change. When I started, I had to work an entire week of each month to earn enough money to pay my rent. Five years later, it still took a week. Also, getting rich is comparative. All of us can’t “get rich together” if in the future we are all worth the same. Surtaxes include items like medical (which is not free), and other deductions you cannot opt out of even though you will never see any benefit.
The video also makes another factor clear. Once you get into Canada, it is like debtor’s prison. You will never make enough money to get back out. The video points out several angles where people who go there then have trouble getting the hell back out—and I can almost guarantee you those that did got outside help. Canada is, in that sense, just a springboard to get into the USA.
Today in North Dakota.
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This spindly-looking plant is the trunk of my big cactus. Since only two of the four exhibited this, it must be some genetic thing. They are all clones of the same original plant. The stalk, shown here, is turning yellow and brittle. Shown also is the peeling paint of my test wall, invisible from the street. Only a few tufts of the flowering parts remain near the top on this plant, which is showing other signs of dying off. Attempting to get something done today, I unloaded things from the van. Hardly a day’s work but hey. I’m thinking of building another small box for my soldering gear. If I get that started, it will be an asset considering the way I feel. I cannot get the Reb out of mind long enough to concentrate, yet she is the most independent lady I know. And I only know
The emergency also throws off my year-end reconciliation because I withdrew cash money, then did not record it until today. I’m out $4.70, which might seem immaterial, but every discrepancy is looked into. Also, that September CD that matured produced a paper statement which revealed how the interest is handled. I believe I described how they rolled it over, which was not spelled out in the literature. I had to see it for myself, as normally CDs are not recorded except in even dollar amounts.
This means I’ll set up another account just for tracking the CDs. The interest dropped from 4.68 APR to 2.68 APR. For any non-investors out there, APR is the only certain way to compare interest. It takes what you actually earned and compares it to what you would have earned if the same money had been on deposit for one year. I used to know how to do this calculation, but why bother any more. I can usually guess within a dollar.
It’s been 20 years since I had CDs, so this was a trial. The principle was $1,000 and I earned $16.08 in three months. It automatically rolled over for another three. Now, banks have taken to CD rates that match ever more unknown factors. From here on, I will watch the rates more closely, as there was an alternative period I could have rolled this over at 5.03%. (For more details, see Addendum below.
This is the “funeral account”, and all of the last year, the full amount (now over $4,000) has earned only $5.75 interest in savings. This one CD produced three times as much in 90 days. I will begin to monitor this investment as a challenge, since the money has to sit there anyway. Now excuse me, I have not touched my bass in weeks and I’m going to put in a few hours. Overall, I get the impression that CDs are not in favor as an investment at this time. I have these deposits at the second largest “holding bank” in the USA, based in Tennessee. All that means is they have more rules and regulations than savings banks, but then their accounts are insured against failure by five times as much as FDIC.
It also means they don’t have much interest in maintaining a fancy web page. Thus, I cannot go on-line to shop for the best deals. To be fair, my contact lady has been clear about this as this is also the bank that will not let me use on-line banking unless I allow them to track my daily activity via cell phone. I wonder, I do all my deposits there by mail, it’s become a kind of institution as I may be the only customer they have with such an account (they are business-oriented). Put another way, they don’t have many clients who run the savings like a business. I may have to show up in person to take advantage of their short-term CD rates. For anyone curious, this emergency trip to Tennessee cost me $998 on top of any medical bills. That figure includes $180 for gas and $370 for groceries. The doggies ain’t gonna feed themselves, you know. But I also spent $140 on repairs like that patio door that I did not have to.
Two and a half hours later playing the bass, actually. I often look for guitar tabs to see if there is anything I can use. I figured two old songs like “Driving My Life Away” and “I’m On Fire” would have a plethora of transcriptions to choose from. Instead you come away with yet another lesson that the Internet has spawned the era of the bullshit expert. I noticed this change in textbooks as well as music in around 1996. Each one claims to be the expert and each one leaves out that one detail you were needed help with. Not one of the milliezoomers on-line shows you that bridge in Eddie’s song after each chorus. This is neither a bass nor piano run, so I had to get it by trial and error. Thanks for nothing, all you “experts”.
Tell you what, here is the riff as I would play it, avoiding open strings. The tab on top is mine, the other is what the on-line professionals actually play, which is NOT the way it goes. Now some of you might say my version isn’t like any bass tabs you’ve seen before, and you would be absolutely right. Also, my version shows the H for hammer-ons, you would quickly pick up they are 16ths, not 8ths, and I show a cue where the lyrics begin. I do play the G string open, as otherwise it is impossible to get the right sound and hit the octave E on the 7th fret.
ADDENDUM
Dang, the jack on the lapel mic I found is for some proprietory recorder and cannot be adapted to work on my equipment. Into the spare parts bin it goes, with the offending part clipped off. Since you have read this far, I’ll present a mini-lecture on how to compare APRs. That CD was at a an annual rate, but only for 90 days, with the interest compounded monthly. It is that compounding that can confuse the hell out of newbies. There are two factors at play, one is how the interest compounds, and the other is the compounding period. This is the old saying (in this blog anyway) that 2% + 2% is not 4%.
Try it. Pretend you invest $1,000 at 12% for one year. That would only be true if you waited the full year, then got paid the interest on the final day. But most banks compound monthly. No, you cannot just say divide 12% by 12 and say you get 1% monthly. The bank would not like you, since every month, you’d gain interest on the previous month’s interest, and that is what they call “the miracle of compounding”. You would end up on the last day not with $120 interest, but $126 because each month your balance gets higher.
If you don’t follow this, investing is probably not in your stars. What the bank does is lower the monthly interest rate from 1% down to the figure that results in 12% at the end of the year. This is one of the courses I passed with 100%, by the way. I used to do all those calculations by hand, but since that allows me to check for reasonableness, I just run spreadsheets these days. The monthly compounding rate to produce 12% in 12 months is not 1.000% but 0.949%. This is why you have APRs, convert everything to the amount you would get at year's end, and use that for comparison.
