One year ago today: October 3, 2023, $250,000 down.
Five years ago today: October 3, 2019, national pizza month.
Nine years ago today: October 3, 2015, quietly at home.
Random years ago today: October 3, 2003, I quit.
This lopsided green picture is doggie food. Forty-four pounds of it. Off to the Sheriff’s pound, now that I know the full story. These are the stray dogs that nobody wants and yes, if they are not adopted they are put down. There is no good reason for them to also be hungry. The staff kind of knows me, so I might drop another hint that I’d like a tour. Lifting this bag is difficult for me, but not the mic stands and music gear it is resting on. To keep track, I know the day lifting bulky objects began giving me extra troubles. It was lugging the dog fence into the back yard by myself one day last summer. It didn’t put me out of business, unlike many, I recall the day, gravity-wise, that I got old. Now, another anniversary.
The band’s been together a year last month and we played our first gig at the Pavilion on October 8th. We have played maybe 15 paying gigs all year, this is a complete failure by my standards. It is also well know it is nearly impossible to start a new band in the area. My latest scan shows still only 17 clubs or organizations in the county that hire regularly. The Legion where were play the most is not regular. So, other than clean lungs, there are no other anniversaries on note on the master calendar.
Unless lots filters in this month, the books are done for 2024. The overall effect of inflation here has been $143.07 on budget items, mostly food and gasoline, but gasoline includes Tennessee, which has a much higher budget than before. The figure only reveals the increased cost. Sadly to report, my total investments have not increased by enough to cover that deficit, so overall, thanks to Biden, I am poorer than a year ago despite the finest investments I can possibly manage without taking undue risk. In fact, hang on a sec and I’ll get you the exact figure.
Here it is. In the past year, I have gotten poorer by $36.24 per month. Before anyone calls that trivial, let’s remind us of a few facts. Top of the list is that I know to the penny how far I’m falling behind and how many do you know who can say that? Show of hands. That’s what I thought. I possess a very smoothly functioning budget system that most people can’t even imagine. And over two-thirds of my income today is the result of investments I made beginning 45 years ago next month. I have no blind faith in the future and here’s more facts about those investments.
They were my small backup plan, the investments that were intended for long-term survival. To be exact, they were not made to get rich, though I would not have minded that. I made other investment that went up and down, and tried dozens of small business ideas. But the startup world had shut down ten years before I arrived and, in the classical sense, I lost money on every one of them. One could have sacrificed even more, but by the time I was 16, I noticed how doing that changed people for the worse. To this day I continue to lose money in a band—until you consider that I’m losing far less than if I was not on the stage.
The backyard startup in America has been a dead end since 1980. I found it better to focus on a good job, invest quietly, and hope for the best. In the end, my backup plan was the only one that saved my neck. Every other income-producing investment was zero-sum in the long run, even my real estate ventures. When I walk into Wal*Mart and see some 75 year old man working as a greeter, I know exactly what he did wrong to get there, even the order in which he made the mistakes.
The conclusion so far is that other people are in desperate straits but don’t realize it yet. The current regime has been a disaster since day one, yet they still sit around arguing who is responsible. Too bad there is no other matching example in history I can compare to this, but what will happen if there is a collapse? Some how these people are clinging on. What could save them is a deep real estate crisis, worse that 2006, bringing house prices down to a reasonable $80,000 (no, I’m not dreaming) and bankrupting all the speculators. Top of that list would be Blackrock.
The hurricane only dumped 3/10ths of an inch of water, but it seems to have gotten into everything around here. Everything important was safe but it was a close run thing. I found a booklet on trivia that had fallen behind the headboard, so I’ll have some selected gems for you over the upcoming week. All trivia is not created equal around here. Did you know Marlon Brando was such a klutz he had to read all his lines from cue cards. Titanic, the movie, cost more to make than the actual ship would have cost to build with the same money, around $200 million. And diamonds are formed 93 miles below the Earth’s crust.
I’m still on my decades long quest to find somebody to teach me how differential equations are applied. No, not how to solve them, I passed those exams 40 years ago. I want example after example of how to apply the formulas in practical, useful situations. Years of time-to-time searching have not produced a single source of this material. It was during this mornings peek at the local colleges that I see Florida technical schools now reject all applications not accompanied by a transcript from a school not on their master list—and it must be in the USA. That means Einstein would not be admitted to a Florida school.
As before, I remain unimpressed by the offerings. In this age where the value of university degrees has been watered down to inclusion levels, the has been a predicable spike in trade school enrollment. I figured that would result in an expansion of the course varieties. Not so far. Take Florida Southern. Courses in “social-emotional learning” and “teacher workshops” sound spooky to me. Or local high schools with no shop but evening courses in “federal compliance” and “nutritional counseling”. Call me old fashioned but those do not sound like trades one could ply in the absence of massive governmental bureaucracy.
As before, I remain unimpressed by the offerings. In this age where the value of university degrees has been watered down to inclusion levels, the has been a predicable spike in trade school enrollment. I figured that would result in an expansion of the course varieties. Not so far. Take Florida Southern. Courses in “social-emotI would more like a course in old radio repair or building wooden airplanes that at least has some interest as a hobby. Then again, since I’ve moved to Florida I only know of one person over forty who ever took up anything new.
Eastern Tennessee.
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This Porsche six-stroke engine that’s winning races was my research topic for this afternoon. Instead of working in the yard, I printed out some reports and curled up under the new office air-conditioner. Six strokes does not make sense, but the claim that the engine uses only existing tools and facilities is meaningful they also say it reduces emissions. Two hours later I can’t say I know how the motor works. I get the principle, which is that it reburns the exhaust gasses a second time. The worst emissions are unburned or partially burned particles. This engine uses two compression and power strokes between each intake and exhaust. Got that?
ADDENDUM
Finally, some 31 years after I warned the world about OOPS (object-oriented programming systems), there is a single mildly-worded mention of the problem in Wiki. It is not just that invisible inheritances cause variable conflicts, but that the code makes it mostly impossible to maintain the subroutines where the variables are contained. I have seen code with up to 60 subroutines where local variables all had the same name. All my variables are descriptive nouns, the subroutine names are the same with verbs.
I had classmates but not lab partners in the 1990s who utterly hated my system for no reason except to say it complicated things. The 1990s was also the period when schools began to assign partners rather than let us choose our own. (This ended the long era when the babe in each class wound up with me.) By happenstance, I found a representative picture of what my average lab partner looked like. In most classes, there were at most one or two females, I would just pick the prettiest one.
It was well-known by third year I would partner that way, and it was not just a sex thing. My female lab partners always got the second highest marks in the class. I made sure of it, even if we had to stay up all night going over and over the material. There were some marathon sessions of bytes, ascii, hard drives, and peek & poke commands. Some will say I’m exaggerating, but why bother—these days everything I’ve said is easy enough to verify. I could infuriate some by adding that often enough, it was the women who chose me.
My explanation of that is the same as it is today. I do not look nor act like most men in public. They all go ballistic trying to be the first choice without figuring out it is the final choice that means anything, and that choice is the woman’s. I was still in my teens when I discovered the best approach is to just make it easy for the gal to say yes. Now you know too much.
