Month: January 2018

Retiring on the Bare Essentials at $10,000 a Month

“The Fester Addams Offshore Retirement Fund?” – The Addams Family (1991)

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When I retire, I just want to travel by plane when I want to.  A plane like this one.  That I own a fleet of.

I was at work the other day and a friend sent an Instant Message to me over the company system.  The message was as curious and enigmatic as an Easter Island statue:

“How much is enough?”

I responded.

“78 years.”

That’s what I thought the average life expectancy was.  I’d been intending to wear out all of the parts before the warranty expired, but in doing a bit of research, if you’ve lived as long as I have, the average life expectancy goes up to 81.  Meh.

78 is probably enough.  If I can’t finish binge-watching Breaking Bad on Netflix® by then, well, it’s on me.

A bit later we talked on the phone, and I got clarification – it turns out the question was really:

“How much money does a couple need each month to retire on?”

My friend’s working answer was $10,000 a month for the bare necessities.  $120,000 a year – cash, which would be equivalent to a job paying $180,000 before taxes.  A year.

I laughed.  “That’s insane!”

Is it?

I checked my own retirement spreadsheet – my model assumes that I’d spend ~$7,000 a month if I retired now (and I don’t have the money to do that, yet) rising to $8,500 a month by the time I’m sixty five.

All of a sudden, my friend’s ballpark number didn’t seem so large, after all.

Then my friend shared the family budget:

Property taxes:  $2,500/month.  Yeah.  They live in a pretty cool house, in a pretty high tax state.

Electricity:  $600/month.  Yup.  It’s hot there.

Natural Gas:  $50/month.  Seems legit.

Cable/Internet/Phone:  $350/month.  A big bundle, but you’ve got to get the Food Network® after you retire.

Car Insurance:  $250.  This seems low – they have kids and live in a major metropolitan area that looks like the Indy 500 most days.

Monthly Expenses:  $3,000 each for the Husband and Wife.

Add it up?  Pretty close to $10,000.

What do they have?  Heck, I have NO idea.  Again, they’re doing great, and in no hurry to retire.

It used to be that a financial planner would have said that you could pull out 6% of your stash of cash each year.  If you were 65.  I’m not sure, but I’m betting that none of them are saying that now.  Especially in your fifties.  Perhaps 3% or 4%?

Starting Amount %  Drawn
 $           4,000,000 3%
 $           3,000,000 4%
 $           2,400,000 5%
 $           2,000,000 6%

The lower the amount that you draw down, the less risk you are taking.  Me?  If I was in my fifties and wanted to be sure that I was going to have $10,000 a year until I died?  I’d want at least $3,000,000, and $4,000,000 would be nicer – remember, this has to last you for at least thirty years, and the longer you live, the greater the chance of significant risks, like those that hit Rome (LINK) or stupidity like the Dutch over flowers (LINK).

What has inflation done in 30 years?  $10,000 today would be worth roughly $5,000 in 1988 dollars.  And medicine, something you’ll be needing more of as you grow older has been especially prone to inflation.  Especially medicine that keeps older folks alive.  And as I’ve said before (LINK), we are soon due for a reckoning in medical costs.  My plan is to force my cells to evolve through sheer willpower to create all the drugs a doctor would have given me.

My budget varies, and is a lot more detailed.  That $3,000 has to pay for maintenance, painting, new cars, homeowner’s insurance, clothing, cell phones, food, mowers, PEZ®, vacations, eyebrow rings, good wine, everything.  Oh, and health insurance.  And medicine.  And Christmas gifts.  And ammunition.

After reviewing their number and their proposed lifestyle, I guess I have to unlaugh.  It seems legit.

It seems . . . prudent.

And it also seems very much in their power to get there (easily).

Sure, they could move away from their great neighborhood in the big city they live in, but why?

Now, I’ll note that this is more than three times the average household income of $59,000 a year.  But my friends are very much above average in every way – they’re smart, they have great jobs that they love, they’re raising kids you’d be proud to call your own, and they’re nice.  You would like them.  I mean, you might not like them as much as you like me, but there really only can be on John Wilder.  Okay, there are at least a dozen others.  But we all know I’m the only one for you.

Anyhow, these are great people.  But, they’re also frugal – they do buy nice stuff (they have better taste than I do) – but they don’t waste anything.  They’re responsible with their income and resources.  But they don’t want to be a burden on society or their children as they age.  They’re prepping against the Iron Triangle (LINK) of retirement – Time, Money and Lifestyle.

IRON TRIANGLE

Time:  They’re young, and healthy.  They’ll probably retire whenever they want in their fifties.  They’ll have a longer retirement than most, but as you have seen, they’ll be ready for it.

Money:  They’re in great jobs that require smart, trained people with advanced degrees.  People like them are in demand, and they work in strong sectors (LINK) of the economy.  Low probability they’re be replaced by A.I. (LINK).  They’re doing well.  (Yay, them!)

 

Lifestyle:  They could probably retire right now if they were willing to retire to Sedan, Kansas (LINK).  They could still eat steak whenever they wanted and they and their kids would never have any real need that couldn’t be met.  They’re not choosing the Mr. Money Mustache or Early Retirement Extreme path (LINK).

 

But why should they?  Again, they’re working jobs they love.  And if they retired, they’d probably start a side business that would garner more money than IBM® in a year or two.  If they keep working at their current jobs into their fifties?  Yup, no worries.  Ever.

The above describes about seven or eight married couples that I’m friends with.  They’ve got great talent.  They’re smart.  They studied hard for an undergrad degree in an elite field at a tough school, then got grad credentials (most of them, but not all) and then burned decades of 60+ hour stressful weeks and have succeeded.  They married a single spouse and then stayed married.

Is that what they call lucky in 2018?  Hmmmm.

How come everybody I know who did all those things . . . is doing great?

Also, I’ll leave retirement alone for a while.  Probably.

This is not financial advice.  Really.  I’m a blogger.  I’m not a licensed therapist, doctor, lawyer, oregano peeler, shrimp boat owner, or financial adviser.  Talk to a pro.  Or a psychic.  Or your TV.  Or Miss Cleo.  I really don’t care.  It’s your money.

Richard Dawson, Quantum Mechanics, The Mandela Effect

“No, it’s the Mengele Effect.” – X-Files

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Remember when a wax Rocky Balboa knocked out President Gore after the Soviets invaded Pakistan?  Me neither.

For me it started somewhere in my early thirties.

The Mrs. and I were watching the television one night and a show called “World’s Funniest Gameshow Moments” came on.  We started to watch – it was narrated by Richard Dawson.  Richard Dawson was the host of Family Feud® back in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  On the celebrity scale he was higher than most – parts in two big feature films and almost two straight decades on television.

No big surprise that he’d be narrating a show about game shows, right?  It even makes sense.

Except he was dead.  And the dead are notoriously bad at calling back their agents to get roles narrating television shows.  Except Bono®.  He’ll do anything.

I clearly remember reading Dawson’s death notice in the paper on a winter morning almost a decade earlier from the time we were watching the show in year 2000.  It was on the right hand of page 2 about two inches from the top.  I was sitting in the back of a classroom.  It was winter.

John Wilder:  “Hey, this is Richard Dawson.  But he died.  Right?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes, I certainly remember that he died.  Wonder when they filmed this?”

I booted up my computer.  I clicked on the network icon and connected to the Internet, via a nice 56k modem.

Yes, this was the sound of the Internet in the before time.  Imagine watching Netflix – it would only take 6 or 7 days to download a non-HD movie. 

After I logged in, I did a quick search, and I found out that . . . Richard Dawson was indeed alive (at that time – Richard Dawson is dead now, having passed away on June 2, 2012).

Richard_Dawson_Family_Feud_1976

Ahhh, the sweet morning scent of piano cinnamon trees.

The Mrs. and I both had very specific memories of Dawson being dead.  Very specific memories, and based on our recollection it was roughly in the same year.  And the same cause – cancer.  But we were wrong.

Now it’s understandable when one of us is wrong.  People goof.  But for us to have the same, specific detailed memory was spooky.

 

We brushed it off.  But we never forgot it.  It’s the sort of odd coincidence/occurrence that sticks pretty firmly in your mind.  Not that I dwelled on it, but every so often it came back up.  In one instance, I was travelling for work and thought that it might be the basis for a short story.

First, some background, from Wikipedia – stick with me, it’s worth it:

In Dublin in 1952 Erwin Schrödinger gave a lecture in which at one point he jocularly warned his audience that what he was about to say might “seem lunatic”. He went on to assert that when the equation that won him a Nobel prize seems to be describing several different histories, they are “not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously”. This is the earliest known reference to the many-worlds.

Catch that?  When you flip a coin, does it land heads or tails?  Schrödinger appears to be saying, “yes.”

Essentially, any time there’s a decision, the universe splits into two.  One pops off and becomes another, nearby, nearly identical universe.  Nobody remembers who won the coin flip to get the next beer, so these small changes that make universe splits go largely unnoticed.  Heck, maybe they collapse back into themselves for not being sufficiently unique.  It’s not like a big event like when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, right, or when we nuked Berlin?  (I’m just kidding.)

As a side note:  we have discovered parallel dimensions – check out this (LINK) for more amazing (not kidding) details.

The most common example of this theory is Schrödinger’s Cat, which is a pretty famous thought experiment at Schrödinger’s expense (rumor has it this made him kinda pissy after he heard about it).  The really short version of this “experiment” is one takes a cat, and puts it in a box.  There’s some mechanism that has a 50-50 chance of triggering, say, poison gas to be released with our kitty cat.  Pretend it’s the radioactive decay of a cesium atom.  Let’s say you set the cat-killing machine in motion, toss a cat in, and wander off.  After a while, your Internet addled brain looks up from your MyFace© page and remembers you left a cat in the Death Machine again and should go and see how it’s doing.

This is funny if you like physics jokes.  I like physics jokes.

Is it alive or dead?  According to Schrödinger’s equation and Futurama, yes.  It’s in a state of quantum superposition.  And the quantum waveform collapses only after you observe it – and this isn’t some sort of made up thing – it has been proven through repeated experiments that observation (not interference) changes the pattern that light makes.

If light were a wave, it would make a pattern of alternating light and dark spots passing through the slits:

Doubleslit3Dspectrum

Source:  Wikimedia, Fu-Kwun Hwang, CC BY-SA 3.0

Stay away from the light, Carol-Anne!  The quantum collapse might put your eye out!

But if it’s a particle, it will make a dot on the back.

If you don’t check and see where the photon comes through, it makes the wave pattern.

If you check and count the photons going through (they have a way to do this) it just shows up like a dot.

Observation matters.  There is some debate as to whether or not that observer has to be conscious or not – certainly Nobel® winning physicist Eugene Wigner thought that a conscious observer was required for quantum mechanics to work.  And if quantum mechanics doesn’t work, the universe doesn’t exist.  At all.  At the heart of physics there is a (debatable) proposition that conscious observation is required to make the whole thing (you, me, PEZ®, a potential multiverse) even exist.

I wish I were making this up.  I’m so not making it up – this is actual physics.  You can check out this link for more background (LINK).

Back to my story idea:

The concept is there was a guy who began noticing things . . . like Richard Dawson’s death/not death.  These were trackable events, but events so subtle you’d never notice them if you weren’t paying attention.  Let’s say you could go back and forth between the universe where Richard Dawson died and the one where he didn’t.  Not a lot of change?  Probably not.  But maybe, you could make yourself notice less . . . or make yourself believe you’d observed things you hadn’t.  Maybe you could move to universes that were more and more different . . . and maybe you got unstuck in reality and started drifting through various universes.

Who knows?  Maybe that’s what makes a certain category of insane people the way they are – they can actually observe and move through universes, or are maybe adrift – they don’t have a grip on reality, since reality keeps morphing around their consciousness.

Still haven’t figured out how to write that story.  But I’m willing to bet you’re a bit creeped out right now, so I win, anyway.

Which brings us back to the Mandela Effect.  It’s so named because one of the big examples is South African leader Nelson Mandela and his death in prison in the 1980’s.  Except he didn’t die then – it was December 5, 2013.  There are a bunch of other examples here at this great website (LINK) for your viewing pleasure.  It’s like an Internet meme made of words.  My addition is just Richard Dawson.  And, no, I don’t remember Mandela dying before 2013.  Just the Dawson story.

I had decided to do this article on the Mandala (or Dawson!) Effect prior to the X-Files doing the best episode of this season (so far) with their episode “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat.”  Just funny it surfaced right before I was going to do this one – and, yes, sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

Or maybe another Mr. Wilder has it right:

wilder

 

Jordan Peterson’s Cannon Lobster and 12 Rules for Life Review

“This is Peterson, your new replacement.” – Idiocracy

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The Texans had a cannon, the lobsters did not.  Therefore?  The lobsters lost control of vast swaths of Texas very quickly.  Except the Alamo.  The lobsters won there. 

Here is the first of three posts on Dr. Jordan Peterson’s newly released bestseller, “12 Rules for Life.”  The second post is here (LINK). The final post is here (LINK).  There’s a link to the book on Amazon down below.  I don’t (as of this writing) get anything if you buy it there, but that might change over time.  Regardless, buy the book.  Jordan Peterson is amazing.

Peterson puts more ideas into a five minute YouTube video excerpt from a lecture than most college courses do.  Dr. Peterson is unfailingly moral and gutsy.  He is willing to share uncomfortable facts and naked truth, which is anathema to those that would prefer the safety of soft and pretty lies.  He is unfailingly polite.  And blunt.  And I’d be fascinated to see him with a glass or two of wine in him.

Dr. Peterson’s work is based on decades of study combined with a keen intellect and countless hours of work as a clinical psychologist helping people with everything from addiction to performance measurement and enhancement.  He has earned his wisdom.

Jordan Peterson is Dangerous.  He’ll make you think new thoughts, and question your basic assumptions about who you are, and who you can be.

We need a thousand more like him.

I’ve only read a third of the book as of this writing (it was released on Tuesday), but that’s enough to get the first four rules.  By observation, the book is already in thirds – the first four rules are about an inward focus.  Rules 5-8 are about obtaining and creating control in your own life.  Rules 9-12 are about facing outwards, so my strategy of breaking this review/discussion into thirds makes sense to me.

Rule 1:  Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back

This is also the first lesson in super hero school, except they add “and put your clenched fists on your hips, and stare up at a waving American flag.”  See, Dr. Peterson and I just saved you $75 in superhero school tuition.

This is actually awesome advice, even as weird as it sounds, since adopting this pose will immediately make you feel better, more powerful and more in control of your own life.

Huh?

Yeah.  And the secret is buried 350,000,000 years back into the past.  As Dr. Peterson notes, that far back there weren’t even trees on land.

But there was serotonin.

How do we known this?  Crunchy, tasty lobsters whose life diverged from ours 350,000,000 years ago.  Turns out that lobsters have social status, and those who have good status produce more serotonin.  And a big lobster that wins the big lobster fight?  A big boost of serotonin.  One of the same, powerful brain chemicals in humans.

The loser?  The loser of the big lobster fight, well no serotonin for him.  He has to settle for having his brain melt so it can rewire itself because it literally cannot cope with his new, lower status.  And you thought you were depressed after losing the annual Christmas Monopoly game to your snot-nosed nephew who still has a lisp.

Serotonin, winning, losing and social hierarchy have been around forever. Prozac® works on lobsters to make them less depressed.

But the winning lobster wins even more and becomes more dominant.  If he were a person, he’d be setting himself up for a successful career.

Because loser lose. And they pay for it.  They’re sicker, they die earlier, and they have a lower likelihood of producing offspring.

Dr. Peterson then references Price’s law – Price’s law pertains to the relationship between the literature on a subject and the number of authors in the subject area, stating that half of the publications come from the square root of all contributors.

Winners win.  He brought up classical music.  Half of classical music played is from four composers:  Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky.  And only a small number of the songs from those four are the most beloved songs in classical music.  The same principle explains why Jeff Bezos is planning to create an Amazonian Interstellar Empire while you can’t afford to pay your car insurance bill this month.  Winning is awesome.

It’s so awesome that if you win?  You live longer.  You’re healthier.  You enjoy life more.  You’re confident.  And you have all the serotonin and PEZ® that you could want.

And we can’t all be Bezos.  But we can stand up straight like a hero.  It will make you feel better, stronger, and just adopting that confident pose will help spike your serotonin and stop your lobster-brain from melting into loser configuration.

Back to Peterson:  “To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.”

And back to Wilder:  “I want to go out of this world as I came into it – screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.”  (This apparently is from Sniper: Reloaded, per the Internet, but I’m going to pretend I wrote it.)

Rule 2:  Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible for Helping

This chapter has a fairly long digression on Order and Chaos.  Interesting, philosophical, but Dr. Peterson could have anchored it more firmly to the Rule.  I’m not complaining, but I’m not going to talk as much about it since it was rather obliquely tied to the rest of everything going on in the chapter.  This chapter probably could have used a bit more ruthless editing.  Again, great stuff, just needed to tie it all up in a bow.  Dr. Peterson:  I volunteer if you need a hand next time!

Back to the Rule:

Think of how you talk to yourself when you look in the mirror or have just screwed up.  It’s horrible.  And if a friend talked to you EVEN ONE TIME as much as you berate yourself?  You’d cut them out of your life pretty quickly.  But it’s much messier when it’s you treating you like that, because you can’t tell you that you never want to see you again.  Just not practical.  Unless you’re an old timey vampire and your reflection can’t be seen in a mirror.

I digress.

Other takeaways:

On “protecting kids” from this chapter . . . you can’t keep them away from the evil of the world so . . . “It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.”  Why anything less for yourself?

Peterson has several powerful questions at the end of this chapter, an example:  “What might my life be like if I were caring for myself properly?”  And no, I won’t list them all.  Buy the book.

Rule 3:  Make Friends with People Who Want the Best for You

Thoroughly enjoyable chapter, with all of the backstory that you’d expect in a superhero origin movie.  Reading Peterson’s version of his adolescence brought memories of mine back, as we both grew up in rather small, remote, cold places.  And, no, that doesn’t refer to our father’s hearts.  It ends with a friend that couldn’t be saved – because the friend didn’t want to be saved.

I’ve had a great friend walk down the drug path, where they’d do and say anything to get more money to buy more drugs.  Did I want the best for him?  Sure!  Did I try to help?  Absolutely.  But the last night he was in my car was the night he snorted coke in it.  And the reason why I didn’t lend him anymore money was he never paid me back the $75 that I lent him.  Oh, he paid me back, he said.  Left it under my front door mat.

I didn’t have a front door mat.

And friendships are reciprocal.  I was promoted at work (years ago) and placed in the partially uncomfortable position of managing the people who had been my peers, sometimes for years.  One of them was Willie.  Willie was a certified genius.  When he was a summer college intern, he (and all the other interns) were offered 3% of anything they could save the company.

He saved them three million dollars.

They gave him a cool computer and a check for several thousand dollars.  But not $30,000 to an intern.

So, I’m in the position where I’m supposed to lead Willie.

He kept coming in late to work.  It made sense because the people that he mainly worked with were several timezones west.  He’d get in later in the morning, and stay until 7pm or 8pm.  Makes sense, right?

Not to the company president.  “He’s late again.”

Oh, man.  First time leading a department and Willie was going to sink me.

“Willie, you’re killing your career.  The president of the company is on my back.”  The president was six layers of management above me.

“I don’t care.”

“Willie, you’re killing me.  They’re going to fire me if you keep coming in late.”

“Oh.”

And Willie was never late again.

A friend?  Absolutely.  We still talk to this day, even though we haven’t worked together in well over a decade.  If I needed to borrow silly amounts of money?  Yeah.  I could do that with a group of at least seven friends.  Find those people.

Surround yourself with people who will not stand for you hurting yourself, and would do anything to avoid hurting you.  Avoid those who you are friends with only out of loyalty, and whose motives are suspect.  Lies?  Deal breaker.

One of the things I love about Dr. Peterson is that he’ll quote Homer Simpson.  And Dostoevsky.  In the same chapter.   And he does it in this thoroughly enjoyable chapter.

Rule 4:  Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not Who Someone Else Is Today

The Internet makes it easy to compare any aspect of yourself to the best of seven billion people.  And you’re not one of them.  Someone is smarter.  Someone is richer (unless your name is Bezos) and someone plays better guitar than you.  If you get caught up in making these comparisons, you’re always going to lose.

And we’re not wired that way.  We’re wired to know about 150 people really well and trust them.  We can get to trusting larger numbers (through various means) but the competition for best storyteller was once a village-wide event, not a world-wide event.  It’s not really hard to be strongest out of 150 people.  It’s not really hard to be one of the best singers.

But today?  At the touch of a button I can make myself feel inadequate by comparing myself against tons of different people.

Peterson:  “Who cares if you’re the PM of Canada when someone else is the president of the United States?”

But the only real competition for me is me.  Am I getting better?  Am I pushing myself to be the best Wilder I can be?  And are the people really happier?  Was Tom Petty (LINK) happier than me?  In a hobby, I sometimes look to see what happened to famous people who I envied in my youth.  Almost universally, I turn out ahead of them.  And many of them are dead, youthful, untimely deaths.  Tom Petty or me – who has it better?  Me.

Realize that you can strongly influence your daily progress.  Do you want to be CEO?  Really?  Probably not.  80 hour weeks every week probably aren’t your thing.  Understand how your talents can best be used, and then work like hell at being the best you possible, because competing against seven billion?  That’s going to kill you.

So will fighting a giant radioactive lobster with a cannon . . . more on Peterson next Friday.

I’ve written more about Peterson’s ideas here (LINK), here (LINK), and here (LINK).  Click on them if you love Truth.

Warning Signs, The Economy, Didier Sornette, and You

“We have no Great War.  No Great Depression.  Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives.  We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires . . .”

– Fight Club

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This is the corpse of FDR, brought back to life every 75 years to fight Robot Hitler.  Notice we added a laser eye for this year.

I’ve talked about both the causes (LINK) and effects (LINK) of economic bubbles and economic depressions in two articles that won the Coveted 2017 Wilder Prize for Excellence in Journalism Related to Things John Writes About®.  You should read these articles.  They’re fun and may save your life, if you require expensive medicine from fresh squeezed bats each day and need the cash to pay for bat juice.

But what happens before everything goes straight to hell?  What are the precursor signs before a recession or depression takes hold?  Where are the danger signs that say . . . beware of dragons beyond this point?

mother of dragons

Game of Thrones would not be as popular if this was the casting choice for Daenerys.

Let’s start with definitions.  A recession (and a depression is just a bigger recession) is when the economy starts to contract, and the definition is that this contraction lasts at least two financial quarters.  A depression is the same thing, but there are great dust storms and everyone moves to California and no one bathes for a decade.

Why does the business contract?

Let’s take the last recession.  Everyone wanted houses.  Lots of houses.  In 2007 people were buying houses on speculation that they’d go up in price.  Because houses always went up in price.  And for a few years?  Yeah.  But when houses stopped going up in price?

People stopped building houses, six was enough for the average family.  But if you have no new houses to roof, and you’re a roofing company?  You fire your roofing crew and stop buying shingles.  The people you fire stop making truck payments.  The shingle company stops making shingles, and lays off the factory workers at the shingle factory.

Prices collapse.  Everywhere.  And in 2008-2009 this cascaded throughout the economy.  And the first thing that happened is that EVERYTHING got cheaper.

Perhaps the first sign that things will be going south is that . . . things are going well.  Too well.  It’s like the frat party at midnight before the heaving begins – laughter and joy everywhere.  And everyone believes that this party is different – they’ll escape the hangover gods in the morning.

So what is a gauge of the measure of market intoxication?

The VIX.

VIX stands for . . . Volatility IndeX.  VIX.  Like PEZ®, only with money instead of those small bricks of candy that build a wall of love around my heart (my doctor calls that arteriosclerosis), the VIX was created in 1990 and attempts to predict the market volatility for the next 30 days.  Here’s the graph of the VIX for the last 27+ years, thanks to Yahoo Finance©:

^VIX_YahooFinanceChart

If you look closely, you can see that when the VIX spikes, people are running and screaming in the streets because the economy is collapsing.  But what happens before the spikes?  Everyone is calm.

And, historically that’s been the case.  Everybody is an expert when the stock market keeps going up.

“Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day’s financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose, spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929.” – Bernard Baruch, famous dead trader dude (from Fortune Magazine, April, 1996)

And that’s what that low VIX number tells you.  Everything is great!  Sunny sky and the wind is in your sales.  Not a cloud in the sky.

So, one big signal is that everything is going great.  Not sure how useful that is, but the current VIX is very near an all-time low.  This is why in my (very brave) 2018 prediction (LINK) I said it wasn’t going to blow up in 2018.  Obviously I could be wrong, but as low as the VIX is, I’d expect some upturn prior to things falling apart.  In 2007 the VIX turned up before everything blew up.  So?

My expectation of an economic recession/depression/crack-up number one?  The VIX will turn up prior to the fall, probably at least six months in advance.  So here’s one indicator of future economic downturn, and it’s been shown to work.  Perfect?  Certainly not.  Sudden dislocations (think 9/11) could throw it right out of the window.

Currency and Trade

What else might indicate a coming crack up?  One that was pretty popular was high interest rates.  Back before the FED so tightly controlled the currency and interest rates by buying all of the United States’ debt that’s unsold (yes, this is somehow legal), this was a sign that the party was going to end.  Failing businesses led to banks only lending to the best projects – the ones that could afford high interest rates.  Interest rates were (kinda) set by the market.

I’m pretty sure this one is long gone . . . and not sure that there’s a replacement.  The economy of the United States is such that, if we experience difficulty, other countries experience collapse.  Think the riots in Egypt, Syria, and Libya were spontaneous – no – they were the result of economic trouble in the US.

Another major indicator would be if another currency became as well accepted in the world as the dollar – and imports rose significantly in price.  Sadly, if this happens, the entire economic system is near collapse.  As I’ve pointed out before – the only thing that keeps our currency going is belief.  I can trade two pieces of paper with $100 printed on them to a liquor store owner and have a nice bottle of Johnny Walker Blue© handed to me.  Oh.  It has to be the government that prints the $100.  Not me.

Why?  People (silly people!) believe in the government more than me.  They believe the government won’t print too many.  Just like Bitcoin () is limited in the total number that will ever exist.  Except governments everywhere print money whenever they can.  Except the Swiss.  I blame it on the cocoa.

Energy

Other signs of big trouble?  Oil above $100.  Oil above $140 is screaming collapse.

Modern economies run on energy.  What would we do without it?

This is from Kentucky Fried Movie.  Good times.

Oil is consumed by every product you buy, generally in the production, packaging and transport.  Because of that, it acts as a general tax on the economy when prices go up.  And because oil extraction infrastructure takes years to get going – high oil prices can distort the economy for years.

Cash Ban

Horrible sign.  Venezuela will look awesome in comparison if this happens.

Math

I’ve mentioned Dr. Didier Sornette before.  He’s a French geophysicist that applied advance math previously used to predict earthquakes to predict whether or not a bubble exists in stocks, and, if so (at least in prior work) how long the bubble had until it popped.  He pegged that we were going to enter a singularity around 2045 or so where all bets are off, based solely on the math.  Don’t know if he still stands by that, but he produces a monthly report at the Economic Crisis Observatory (LINK).

In the latest report, of the sixty stocks in the US he studied, 35% were in a bubble.  That’s up from the previous month.  From this, we’d deduce the bubble is (potentially) inflating.

And Dr. Sornette absolutely called the big Bitcoin bubble a month before it topped.  Pretty amazing.

I’d keep an eye on this work.  It shows that there’s plenty of bubble a brewing in the record setting stock markets around the world.

And be careful.  There may be dragons here . . . .

NOTE:  I AM AN INTERNET HUMOR-DUDE, NOT A FINANCIAL PROFESSIONAL.  Consult someone sane prior to making investment decisions.  Like your Mom.  Or a lawyer.  Or a carnie.

12 Strong Movie Review, Exploding Tide Bottles, Rifles, and Significance

“Good Lord!  We can’t get them.  I never figured on having to shoot through dirt!” – Tremors

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Good times.  Not pictured:  plastic Tide® bottle.

How many of you remember that perfect day?  That wonderful day where the Sun was shining, everyone was in harmony, and you lost yourself in the activities you were engaged in?  Those days are significant in their perfection – days that you remember now and that you’ll remember when you’re 50 or 60 or 70.

I imagine The Boy and Pugsley will both remember watching their dad’s form silhouetted in front of exploding Tide® laundry detergent bottle at least that long.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One of the place where I think I’ve been negligent as a dad is in not taking The Boy and Pugsley shooting often enough.  Shooting is fun, but it also teaches patience and persistence.  How do you get good at shooting?  By shooting.  Nobody’s great at shooting coming out of the box, but by patience and practice you learn to get better – and the feedback loop is literally supersonic – you can see the result of your efforts nearly immediately.  And you have to be patient.  And disciplined.

Two weeks ago we went shooting, and had a great time.  We brought only .22 rifles (I’m sure that in California these are registered as assault weapons or orbital bombardment cannons or something) that time.  It was about 40˚F out (-371˚C for you living in Great Britain) so after a while (400 rounds or so) we decided to go and get warm.  But a good time?  Absolutely.

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I have no idea where this meme came from, but I bet it wasn’t Europe.

I’d been watching the weather because it’s no fun shooting when it’s colder than a brass monkey in the fridge on the dark side of Pluto.  We couldn’t go Saturday, since The Boy was busy with athletics.

Fortunately the weather looked good for Sunday.  And on Saturday night we got home early enough to rope in Pugsley and go see 12 Strong.  12 Strong is a true story about the first Special Forces (Green Berets) unit into Afghanistan after 9/11.  It’s rated “R” primarily because it features Americans being unambiguously good, moral, and upright against unambiguously evil people even though it stars an Australian as an American Special Forces Captain (Chris Hemsworth) in a clear case of cultural appropriation.

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I’m pretty sure Warner Brothers wants us to share this image, since it gives sixteen buttons to share it . . .

The movie was good, in a “I love America and the values that it stands for” way as shown by the bravery of the troops, the fidelity of the spouses, and the idea that a promise made is one to be kept.  In this movie there are no politics of division.  And the American men and many Afghani men (almost every character in this movie with more than two lines is a man) were brave.  And it didn’t try to discuss deeper issues – it had the decency to allow us to have and believe in heroes of flesh and blood.

How good was the movie?  Pugsley is 12, and is now contemplating how he’s going to become a Green Beret (a little less likely for The Boy – I think he’d rather create nuclear-powered x-ray space lasers).  Scary for a dad to think that?  Yeah, it is.  But boys grow up, and the responsibility of holding a rifle is sobering for a 12 year old, given its sheer destructive power.

My ranking on the movie?  5/5.

Okay, back to shooting.  Today we went shooting again.  It was one of those fun coincidences that as we left the house “Freeze Frame” by The J. Geils Band was playing on the radio . . . Pugsley started doing a dance when the lyrics, “shoot, shoot . . . deedle leedle lee” kept repeating since I think he was excited about going shooting, or “shoosting” as we called it, in an homage to Lisa from Green Acres®.

However, we also brought two additional things that we didn’t bring last time:  an AR-15 I’d bought from a friend several years ago that I’d only put about 20 rounds (for New York readers – that means I’d shot the rifle 20 times) through.  The Boy had NOT liked shooting it several years ago.  Scary.

Also, I brought explosives with the explicit idea that we’d shoot them and create a series of explosions.

I know what you’re thinking.  More on that later.

The Boy and Pugsley each jammed out a few hundred rounds of .22 down range.  Then I pulled out the AR-15.  An AR-15 shoots a .223 caliber bullet – really only slightly larger than a .22, but whereas a .22 comes out of the barrel at 1600 feet per second, a .223 comes out of the barrel at over 3,000 feet per second.  And a doubling of speed is a quadrupling of energy.  (Really closer to 8 times, since the bullet is larger.)  For all of you purists – we are NOT getting into the difference between a 5.56 and a .223 in this post – go get technical somewhere else.

The Boy and Pugsley each shot the AR and pronounced it . . . amazing.

So, I thought, perhaps it’s time to mix up the explosive?

Sure.

We tried to use the .22 to initiate the explosion.  You were supposed to be 100’ away . . . and we shot at it for a ludicrous number of shots (it was about 2” x 1”, so it’s not that small of a target at 100’).

Nothing.

The Boy went downrange and checked.

“You went clean through it twice.”

Hmm. I put another explosive packet together since the powder had leaked out of the first through the bullet holes.  I stuck it on the side of a plastic Tide® laundry detergent jug – one of the big ones that does 5,000 or so loads of laundry.  I took a shot with the AR.  Hit the Tide® jug, and the explosive fell off.  (Stay 100’ away, the instructions said.)  I went down range and put the explosive back on.  Walked back.  Shot, and hit the jug again.  And knocked the explosive off.  (Stay 100’ away, the instructions said.)  Again.

I finally determined the add-on sight that I was using wasn’t even remotely accurate, and pulled it off to use the basic sights (“iron sights”) that come with the rifle.  Frustrated, and thinking the explosive was a dud based on the previous experience we’d had with the first packet, I stuck the packet back on the jug, and then moved back and I took aim at the explosive stuck to the Tide™ jug not 20’ away from me.

There was a flash.  Lots of smoke.

And the Tide® jug . . . ceased to exist.  Gone.  Left this plane of existence.  The only thing left was the label.  I could see something that looked like tiny orange fragments of plastic jug, but only a few.  But the jug?

Vanished.

Wow.

I felt my face.  Small particles of dirt or unexploded explosives were imbedded in a dusty patina all over my face.  Thankfully I was wearing glasses and hearing protection.

So, the explosive did work.  And 100’ was certainly a much better idea than my 20’ – I’m guessing something about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread?  I walked back to the firing line.

The Boy:  “How on EARTH can that be legal???”  His grin was huge.

It is, at least where I live.  Your mileage may vary depending upon what location you live in.  US Federal law allows this explosive to be sold because when they sell it, it’s two compounds . . . a “binary” explosive.  You have to mix the compounds yourself.  And you can’t transport it after mixing (without insurance, permits, etc.).  You have to use it for personal, non-commercial use.  And . . . you should research this yourself.  I believe in California they will ____ your ____.  And you don’t want your ___ to be ____.  Very uncomfortable for your _____.

No.  Seriously I think they’d call that a felony.  But where we live?  It’s Sunday afternoon.

Hint:  Google® “Tannerite©” – although Tannerite™ wasn’t the manufacturer of the stuff we used, it’s the easiest search term.  This is NOT a law blog – you need to figure out if this stuff is legal where you are.

So, it is legal here.  That doesn’t mean it’s always used in a smart – one gentleman filled a lawnmower with a binary explosive, shot it, and it promptly lopped off a leg.  But that’s the definition of freedom – not stopping idiots from being idiots.  If we go too much further down that road, every surface in every house will be mandated to be made of Nerf®.

Regardless, the Tide® bottle was gone and I still had all of my parts.

Second shot?  We taped an explosive packet up to the plastic cylinder the explosive originally came in.  The Boy took aim with the AR, and . . . first shot it exploded and likewise disappeared into another dimension.  I went to check for more things we could blow up in the car we brought (it was The Mrs.’ car) and was rummaging around in the back seat.

And found a Wal-Mart bag containing two pounds of thick-cut bacon and three pounds of hamburger.  Sitting in the back seat.  Of a car The Mrs. hasn’t driven in three days.

Pugsley:  “Oops!  Guess I forgot to bring that bag in.”

Normally I’d give him a much harder time about leaving $30 in meat to rot in his mother’s car, but in this case?

We had explosives.  And guns.  And meat.

It’s even better if you imagine they’re singing “gone shoosting”.

Two explosive charges and the bacon was unrecognizable.  One charge took care of the hamburger.  Both The Boy and Pugsley were dead-on in their shots, hitting the explosive charge on their first shot in almost every case.

We picked up the exploded stuff (left the bacon and burger for the coyotes) and packed up and went home.

But the bigger perspective?

I was talking with another dad the other day – he was coaching a group of kids at the same sporting event The Boy was at.  We talked back and forth.  He was coaching his own son, which he felt was really the toughest coaching he had to do.  But, he indicated, he thought he’d keep coaching even after his son was done.  He really enjoyed it (and he was a good coach – his team did well that day).

“You know,” I said, “it’s not the money.  It’s not the things you do to things that matters in this world.  It’s the opportunity to be significant to someone – to give them training and experiences that change them for the better.  And these kids will remember what you did for them and how you changed them, coach, for the rest of their lives.  Now that,” I paused, “is the definition of significance.”

“That’s pretty well said,” he responded.

“Yeah, I’m Noted Internet Humorist John Wilder.”

And these perfect days can be the perfect days that will form memories for The Boy and Pugsley that will reinforce their character forever.

I wonder how many perfect days I’ve got left?  Not too many if I stand too close to too many exploding Tide® jugs, so I think I’ll avoid those from now on.  It would be good to be around to see what happens with The Boy and Pugsley . . . Green Beret or not, I’m sure I’ll be proud of both of them.

The Flu, Fred Hoyle, Creation of all the Elements in the Universe, Panspermia, and You

“You’re from Pittsfield.  Know what happens to scholarship students caught cheating on exams?  You had the flu that day, didn’t you, David?  You didn’t take the exam?  You missed the test. And since you were ill, why not write me an essay instead?  Go get started.” – Dreamcatcher (Flu obsessed Stephen King)

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Pictured – Cosmic Background Radiation left over from the Big Bang.  Maybe.

Winter is flu season.

I know, I’m being so topical.  I promise I’ll get off being topical in two minutes and take you someplace you’ve never been before.  Promise.

First, let’s get to basics:

What exactly is the flu?  The flu is a virus, from the Latin word . . . virus.  It literally means “Poison” – but it’s been a long time since Poison had a viral video . . .

Hmm, that was way, way cooler in 1988 before Bret Michaels discovered carbs.

Anyway, the flu virus isn’t poison – it’s a cellular invader.  A virus can’t reproduce by itself, it can only reproduce inside a cell.  And since it doesn’t have any cells, it needs a host critter that does have cells.  The flu picks . . . you.

Once it gets inside of you, it spreads as fast as it can, by attaching to a cell wall like a stripper on a billionaire.  After injecting part of itself into the cell, the cell cooks up millions of copies of the virus.  So, the virus uses your cell as a copy machine.  But it’s really awfully hard on the machine.  It’s like you sent a copy of your taxes to your printer and it exploded, but left you two million copies of your taxes splattered all across your basement.  Because the virus, in order to reproduce, makes the cell explode.  Thankfully, you don’t have to drink toner to get better.  (Although I’ve heard that toner solves the problem so quickly life insurance companies will not pay off – they don’t like tonercides.)  But still?  The cells explode.

In this case the cells are located in your respiratory tract.  You know, the place that provides life-giving oxygen so your Twinkie® and ice-cream eating body can live another three minutes?  Yeah, that place.

Your body has groups of virus hunter cells who look and dress exactly like mid-level late 1990’s programmers.  These virus hunters isolate the virus, and, once isolated, they extrude flagella that look exactly like baseball bats and destroy the invading virus.

Yes, I know that’s not the original song.  The Boy subscribes to this blog.

That’s how you get better, really, from any sickness this planet tosses at you – programmers attack it with baseball bats.  And your immune system keeps those geeky programmer guys around – so you don’t get the same virus again.  But the flu comes in all sorts of strains and mutates every year so the geeks don’t recognize the next virus.

How is the flu deadly?

Two ways.  The first and most psycho way is a cytokine storm.  A cytokine is a chemical signal that brings the cells with the baseball bats to destroy the copier.  (I apologize if this is getting too technical).  But let’s just say that your body releases too much cytokine?  In a really bad design flaw, all of the guys with baseball bats come from everywhere in your body and start trashing the place, even when they’ve run out of copiers.

In a cytokine storm your immune system trashes everything.  And can kill you.  So when you hear that a 205 pound (that’s 650 kilograms for you in Canada, or, as I like to call it, America’s hat) 22 year old bodybuilder with 4% body fat died two days after getting the flu?  Cytokine storm.

Medical hint:  If a medical science describes something as a “storm” it’s generally not a good sign, unless it happens to a really rich relative that liked you.

So far, I haven’t had at cytokine storm.  Since I’m breathing and all.  But the second reason flu kills people is the one that gets me in trouble:

All of the cells (copiers) that explode?  Well, all of their parts are everywhere in your respiratory system.  Your respiratory system is beyond inflamed – it’s covered in cell debris.  Which looks just like food to normally harmless bacteria that live, well, everywhere in your throat.  They sense the food?  Yeah.  Bacteria food fest.  And they don’t necessarily stop at the cell debris.  And then your already psycho baseball bat wielding immune system comes along, and . . . pneumonia.  Nothing fun about that.

That’s the one that gets me to get on the phone to my Internet doctor and pretend I have strep throat to get some amoxicillin.  It only happens every 11 years or so (this is important for later) so it’s livable, and also defines then interval between doctor visits for me.

But let’s get to the REAL point of this post, the one I’ve been teasing.

Flu, or “Influenza” comes from the Italian word . . . wait for it . . . “Influenza.”  Yay!  It’s easy when English just coopts the whole word.  But in Italian, influenza means, literally, influence.  Influence of what?

Influence of the stars.

So, you and I would just chalk this up to fate, karma, or some random encounter with some grimy plague covered dude.

But not Fred Hoyle.

Fred Hoyle, excuse me, Sir Fred Hoyle was a British dude.  And not only was he a British dude, he was a British dude who was smarter than Stephen Hawking.  Yeah.  I’ll stand by that.  He was (essentially) cheated out of a Nobel® Prize™ for the discovery (solo discovery) of how heavier elements are formed in stars and supernovas.

Yeah.  That smart.

Why was he cheated out of the Nobel©?  I’m thinking it was one of two things:  first, he berated the Nobel® committee for not giving the award one year to the grad student who actually did the work and made the discovery.  Hopefully she appreciated that.

Second?  He wasn’t shy about giving his opinion.  On anything.

Ever hear of the “Big Bang”?

Sir Fred was the guy who came up with the phrase.  He came up with the phrase while describing a theory that competed with the leading theory of the day – steady state.  That means the Universe didn’t start with a singularity – it has always existed.  Sure, we need more matter.  Hoyle speculated that the matter itself was being continuously created – he postulated that was no crazier that the idea that the Universe came from nothing.  His point when the background radiation was found by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was that the radiation they found, if it were 10 times more or 10 times less would still have been proclaimed the background radiation from the Big Bang.  The conclusion was fixed – the evidence could change.

Other crazy things.  Carbon.  Hoyle looked at carbon and the physics for carbon formation in stars and supernovae.  He found that it was crazy unlikely that carbon would be present in the quantities that it is.  (HINT:  we are made of carbon.  And if there were less of it?  No us.  There are literally millions of carbon compounds – it’s a crazy versatile atom.)  He felt that the physical constants that governed carbon atom formation were so unlikely, that they were tweaked to make carbon since it is so important to  . . . us.

Did I mention Hoyle was an atheist?

Yeah.

He also felt that life was so unlikely (the analogy of life being as likely as a “747 being assembled by a tornado throwing parts together in a junkyard” was his) that he was a major proponent of panspermia – the idea that life was seeded here from interstellar space.  Because the idea that even single celled life occurs . . . is amazing.

Hoyle was also a fan of the concept of abiotic oil.  Abiotic is just a word that means “no dinosaurs died in making your gasoline” – the petroleum is a result of natural forces bringing it together.  If I didn’t have my next 18 blog posts planned out?  I could just start with Hoyle and get a dozen.  The man had ideas.

Yeah.  He wrote novels, too.  The one I read (The Incandescent Ones) was not particularly memorable.  I read the synopsis and . . . oh, yeah, I guess I remember that.

But the biggie for this post has already been alluded to:  Hoyle, in 1989 and in 2000 brought up . . . the flu.

Hoyle’s thesis was that the flu was not from Earth.  The flu came from outer space, and incidents of significant flu outbreaks were tied to the Sun.  See my link here (LINK) for other Sun linked things, and there will be (it’s currently scheduled for sometime in the next six weeks) another Sunspot linked post.

Did you catch that?  Hoyle felt that the flu came from space (queue echoey space music) and the solar cycle correlated to when we would have flu outbreaks.  The previous times Hoyle brought this up were at solar cycle peaks, in 1990 and 2000.  And the Spanish flu that killed 50,000,000 and infected 500,000,000.  (500,000,000 of a total population of 1,800,000,000.  25% of everyone on Earth got the flu.  The same flu.)  Yeah, that happened at a solar cycle peak.  Going back to the origin of the word “flu” or “Influenza” or “influence of the stars”?  Yeah.  Most scientists thought he was wrong.  Which is how every scientist feels about a new idea until they die.

solar cycle

Did I mention that Hoyle felt that life outside of Earth, began in space?  Yeah.  I did.

The Universe as depicted by 1978.  Note:  No Cylons were injured in the creation of this film.

The flu is dangerous.  A minor modification could make that cytokine storm much more likely.  Another minor modification?  Near universal death.  Call it a full flu.  But that’s a sad thought.  Not one that anyone has ever had.

Yeah, The Stand was an awesome book by Stephen King.  Read it!  It’s what a full flu would do to you!  (Note, not an instruction manual for the Anti-Christ.)

So I’m struggling for the moral to the story this week.  Don’t allow the flu to turn your immune system into baseball bat wielding dudes who will kill you?  Avoid crazy ideas since you won’t get the Nobel™ Prize®?

So an atheist that knew more about science than you or I ever will was convinced that not only the Universe was rigged in favor of life (carbon atom formation) and that life was so improbable that he speculated it came from space . . . .

Yeah, that’s the moral.  The flu can be more than a virus.  It can make you flat-out think.

Be like Hoyle.  Allow one crazy idea a day to enter your brain.  Figure out where it leads.  And take vitamin C (LINK) if you get the flu.

Believe me, you don’t want the one the aliens came up with this year.

 

Did I mention that my buddy John Apollo has a birthday this weekend?  Yeah, he does.  Happy Birthday!  Leave a comment and let him know that you care.  Or don’t and make him wallow in horrible sadness.

Scams, Your Momma, and Cheap Speakers

“You were right about that computer scam.  That was a bad idea.  I’m going to take the blame for it, I decided.” – Office Space

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I’d like to report this sign for false advertising.  The town was not made of Cuervo® nor did they make Cuervo™ there.

Back a few decades ago . . . .

I was in a college classroom, after class.  A bunch of us were sitting around talking and Joe jumped in.

“So, guys, the most incredible thing happened to me,” said Joe.  “I was at a Burger King® and I had just finished eating.  I was walking back out to my car, and this guy in a van stopped me.”

I think I jumped in with something to the effect that very few good things happen when a guy from a van approaches you in a Burger King™ parking lot.

Joe ignored me and continued, “He had these speakers in the back of his van.  He had dropped them off at a rental, and he had mistakenly signed two extra out.  If he took them back to the shop, they would have fired him for checking the extras out.  These are $1000 speakers! Each!

“I got them for $300 for the pair!  They sound totally awesome with my stereo!  I had to run to the bank to get the cash, but I got them!”

I smiled.

I had just read in the local newspaper that there was a scammer group operating around the metropolitan area of Moderatelylargecity, East Westeria near where we lived.  They were selling speakers worth about $50 a pair out of the back of trucks at fast food restaurants.  Cash only.

I thought to myself – “Hey, Joe likes the speakers.  He really likes them.  And if you tell him it was all a scam, he’ll hate the speakers and feel stupid.  Is it hurting anyone to let him think he got a deal?”

Joe was a nice guy, and I successfully held back my inner jerk (on that far distant morning).  I’m betting Joe has no idea to this day.   Maybe I should call him and tell him?

And of the bunch of us talking, Joe was by far the nicest guy.  Probably the most moral.  If you read this blog you KNOW it’s not me.  (Yes, I know John Wilder’s halo is firmly askew – but it’s in a roguish Captain Mal Reynolds way.)

The world is full of scammers.  Many of the scams are legal, just like the one your mom pulled on your dad.

And how do I know so much?  Yeah.  I got scammed.  More than once.  The first big scam occurred when I signed a contract when I was pretty young (20??) that wasn’t a good one (for me) but it only cost me $1000.  For a membership in a buying club.  To buy things at factory cost.  When I had no money to buy things at factory cost.

Thankfully, it was financed with monthly payments of like $50, which was a lot back then.  But looking in the rear view mirror?  That $1000 was cheap, and the payments made it better.  I got to feel stupid not one time, but EVERY SINGLE MONTH when I wrote out that check.  Now?  I try to look through my lens of past stupidity to evaluate every single deal.

Recently I responded to an email from a “group” that appeared to be tied to a professional association that I am a part of.  Mistake.  Set up an appointment and it turned out I could join this “group” for only $200 per month.  This would be awesome!  This would help me advance some professional goals that I was interested in.  Well, $200 per month plus a $250 startup fee.  I was discussing the opportunity with them on the phone:

Me:  “Well, how often does this actually work?”  (I was expecting 95% or something.)

Jim Q. Salesdude:  “You can understand that we don’t keep statistics on our success rate.  But most members are active for more than a year . . . .”

And I’m sure he’s telling the truth.

The average person that would be wanting this kind of opportunity could afford $200 a month.  And the process would likely take months.  So, yeah, I’m sure he’s telling the truth, because he has people who can afford it buying . . . hope.  I looked up the company online, and saw very few positive reviews – most indicated it provided them no help whatsoever.  Heck, I can just go the bank and get $200 in ones and at least be able to make a fire out of it.  Why should I give them $2650?

But what are the signs of a scam?

  1. Hard sell/won’t leave you alone. – This is often the number one sign. The salesman has money on the line – you money.  If you sign up?  They get money, and it’s likely that they’re morally flexible in the first place.  With this opportunity listed above, the salesguy is getting sort of clingy.  He’s very insistent – like a psycho ex-girlfriend level insistent.  As long as he doesn’t come to my house in the middle of the night and shave my dog completely bald and then take a magic marker to him, I think I’m okay – nobody wants that to happen to them twice.  He called me today even after I told him I wasn’t interested.  Even sent me an email to reschedule on my calendar after I ditched his call.  When in full hard sell mode, they make high school sophomore girls who just got dumped in public look stable.
  2. Implication that this is special, or maybe kinda illegal. – In my case, this was supposed to be a backdoor link for “special access.” I was approved after describing my experience in a single sentence, and then told how special I was.  Alarm bells!  This is also an incentive for you to be quiet after the scam is over – not everyone gets special access!  I’ll give you a heads up:  there is no Secret Nigerian Prince and no one has picked you to get a special offer because of what you’ve done.  You’re not that special.  And your kindergarten teacher doesn’t even remember your name.  Mine does.  But that’s because of the knives.
  3. Payment for things that aren’t usual. – Back (farther) in the past The Mrs. and I attempted to get an agent for a book we’d written. We found one who loved us and loved our book!  This agent also wanted to . . . charge us.  We believed in our book.  A bit too much.  Thankfully, we were only out several hundred dollars on that one.  There’s no way you should pay an agent, and no way that you should pay people for “super special professional opportunities.”
  4. Too good to be true (threats and promises). – One salesmen talked about how people who bought “Brand X” (his competitor) often got fired. I liked the guy, but made sure that I’d never buy that particular product.  I respond poorly to threats.  I respond much better to treats, which is nearly spelled the same way.  Treats are better:  Like sausage.    Wine.  Beer.  Some mixture of wine, bacon, sausage and beer.  In a smoothie?
  5. Quick response required. – If you don’t act today, you can’t get this deal! If someone tells me that?  I walk.  No deal is that good.  Have to act tonight?  Hmmm, I’ll pass.  If it’s a good deal where both parties will benefit, it will be available tomorrow, like your mom.

Nigerians and internet scammers look for stupid people.  Why?  You can keep them going forever.  That’s why the emails from the “Nigerian Prince” have spelling and factual errors.  If the person reading the email has enough brain cells momentarily clear the fog and do a Google® search for “Nigerian Prince” – well, that’s way too bright for the scammer.  They want them stupid (certainly) and rich (would be nice).  Since most things in the third world can be bought for about six dollars and handfuls of the wrapping paper the locals call money (sometimes including the local parliament) – you are rich if you live in America.  Even if you make minimum wage.

Scammers sell empty hope, which makes them equivalent with your state’s lottery board.  Last night I dreamed I was talking with my brother.  And mentioning how Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin) and I were friends.  Heck, I even had Steve’s phone number in my phone.

And I woke up, and was briefly sad that I really wasn’t friends with Steve Martin.  See how sad that was?  I bet you’re crying and sobbing that I was so disappointed.  That’s what selling empty hope is.  That and assuming that your parents really loved you.

I’ll leave you with this:  You can’t scam an honest man.  If you stick to honest reward for honest work and honest value?  You’ll never be CEO.

But you’ll never be scammed, either, if you also remember never to trust a five year old or a dude selling speakers out of the back of a van at Burger King®.

The Biggest Frickking Scientific Discovery for a Long Time, French Artists, and Your Momma

“Could they be talking to us from the future?  Maybe.  Okay, if they can?  They are beings of 5 dimensions!  To them, time might be yet another physical dimension.  To them, the past might be a canyon they can climb into.” – Interstellar

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Pictured, cool lens flares from the Saturn IV rocket first stage.  Not pictured?  Transdimensional aliens. 

The Family Wilder was having breakfast this morning lunch this afternoon (we don’t get up easy) and were discussing the news of the past week, and somehow Pugsley drifted the conversation into “how would you make a fully functioning holodeck, such as was seen on Star Trek© but for use with multiple people.”  The easy answer is to wave your hands about and say “science.”  But, we came up with an explanation that would fit the facts shown on Trek™.

We then ended up talking about inserting a jack into your skull (as in The Matrix®).  The Boy was in favor of this, and was looking up surgical tools on his iPhone®.  I noted that, no, we’re probably pretty close to just being able to put a hat with electrodes on – no surgery required.  At this point, I’m pretty sure the other folks eating in the small-town diner who overheard our conversation figure we work for the CIA or . . . we’re nuts.

We’re nuts.

But then I remembered the biggest story of the week:

“Hey, did you guys here that they’ve discovered proof that there is at least one other dimension? (LINK)”

That stopped the conversation at the table, let me tell you what.  Pugsley was first out of the box:

“How does that work?”

I tried to explain a hypercube using a salt shaker, bits of hash brown, three cream containers and the spare plate from someone else’s table (they were nearly finished with it).

Turns out that’s a difficult thing, explaining something that’s so beyond how you normally think.  But that brings me to one way, dear Internet, to give an explanation:

In 1912 a French dude named Marcel Duchamp (pronounced “John Smith”) tossed together a painting that irritated his friends, namely, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.

Duchamp_-_Nude_Descending_a_Staircase

This was the initial centerfold in “Multi-Dimensional Playboy”.  The main problem was the centerfold was in 11 dimensions and no one could figure out how to fold it back up.  (public domain via Wikimedia)

What Duchamp was attempting to show was the human body with time as a static dimension – you got to see the body’s outside perimeter.  Imagine rolling a tennis ball – but you get to see it at each point of its path at the same time – it would look like a fuzzy green tube since the parts that got covered up through subsequent motion wouldn’t be visible.  Fuzzy green tubes are cool looking.  Now imagine the perimeter of the human body heading down a staircase . . . you’d have a fuzzy-topped blob of flesh with frozen waves where the body had moved through.  Kinda like a fleshy, hairy, meat tube.  Kinda like . . . Marcel’s picture, but Marcel skipped on the gross parts.  And it’s not a surprise that Duchamp tried this – he was a great mathematician and chess player as well, so his mind thought in these sorts of abstract ways.

His friends thought it sucked, and the art show asked his brothers to ask Marcel to either take the painting down or to change the title.  After this initial reaction, Duchamp thought, “Merci!  I must take my genius to New York!  Certainly zey will understand it!”

Marcel apparently didn’t know any New Yorkers, because they certainly didn’t appreciate it:

Rude_Descending_a_Staircase

Hey, any publicity is good publicity.  Just ask Harvey Weinstein. (public domain via Wikimedia)

The New York Evening Sun parodied Duchamp in print after his picture made everyone in New York mad as well.  Apparently New York was a better place to be hated in, because eventually Duchamp moved to the United States and shot John F. Kennedy.

Anyway, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is the only Cubist art I really care for – precisely because it attempts to show reality through the lens of another dimension.

Here’s another good one:  it shows a hypercube.

public domain hypercube

Yes, keep watching it . . . beautiful, isn’t it?  Imagine 4 spatial dimensions.  Some weed might help.  (Source, Jason Hise via Wikimedia, Public Domain)

I can draw a hypercube, but it’s not really very good unless it’s in motion, like this one.  Only as it moves can you see the way that it shows another dimension.  Ironic that Duchamp stopped time to show another dimension while this requires motion to show that dimension.

But what are the implications of this?

Nothing short of stunning.  Last month we have a stunning disclosure about UFOs (LINK).  This month?  WE HAVE FOUND PROOF OF ADDITIONAL DIMENSIONS.

This has the possibility of being the most profound discovery in the last 12,000 years (second only to agriculture and the mysterious mechanism of the PEZ® dispenser)!

Keep in mind that we went from not understanding the radio to being able to use it “see” the images of galaxies 11 billion years in the past within 70 years.  We went from not understanding the atom to atom bombs in 15 years (plus a war’s worth of investment).  We went from stuck to the ground to the Moon in 65 years.  Transistor to personal computer?  30 years.

We are remarkable as a species at understanding and exploiting new ideas.  I imagine this one has implications similar to radio, the atom, flight, and information technology.  So, let me re-write the above:

HOLY FRICKING CRAP!  WE HAVE FRICKING FOUND FRICKING PROOF OF OTHER FRICKING DIMENSIONS!

Additional dimensions might (and I stress might) be able to provide:

  1. Space Travel – Imagine that distance isn’t the same in one (or more) of these dimensions. Step into the dimensional transformer and step outside 2000 miles away.    Why Miami?
  2. Time Travel – Imagine that time works the other way or at other speeds in one or more of these dimensions. Step into the dimensional transformer and step outside 2000 years in the future.
  3. Surgery Without An Incision – Reach inside your patient in the fourth dimension. Pull out his gall bladder without breaking the skin.  Caesarian sections?  How about Einstein sections for having babies?  (Since I’m the first to think if it, you should call them “Wilder Sections.”)
  4. Explanations for Gravity – Why is it weak? It’s like gravity doesn’t even lift!  Maybe it bleeds off into other dimensions and surrounds your mother.  Which is why she’s so fat.
  5. Explanations for Dark Matter – Okay, dark matter is just a theory – we can’t see it, we can only see its effects. Let me explain:  The planets all rotate around the Sun like particles.  At different speeds.  The spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy (where you live) all rotate around the Milky Way like the Milky Way is a record album.  Sorry – out of date.  CD?  Sorry – out of date.    Yeah.  Except no spinners.  Why the difference?  Some say that there’s a halo of dark matter around the galaxy that causes it spin as if it is a solid plate.  JOHN WILDER OFFICIAL PREDICTION:  dark matter is bogus.  It’s either gravity leaking from another dimension or gravity has a non-linear distance component.  I actually calculated it, and it works, but it doesn’t explain some effects, so my Physics Nobel© medal still hasn’t been engraved.
  6. Explanations for Dark Energy – What is it? Why is the Universe expanding?  What will stop it?  When will it stop?  Maybe . . . another question that might be answered by other dimensions.
  7. Explanations for Why Your Mother is So Fat – Oh, sorry. That’s chardonnay, canned frosting, Twinkies®, and regret.
  8. Explanations for Things We Haven’t Even Thought Of – So many things this might explain, including the Grand Unified Field Theory – the theory that explains all of physics, chemistry, and why your Mom is so fat. Except we know why your Mom is so fat.

So, it’s a big deal.  A big thought.  Maybe, just maybe, the biggest scientific discovery of your lifetime.  And you heard about it here first.

So, who is the journalist now?  Yeah.  This guy.

Old Italians, Ukrainian Lawyers, Mice, and You!

“Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

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Pictured:  Science.  Not pictured:  Stubborn Old Italians.

In December I put together notes about a story that I’d read online that rubbed me the wrong way.  It was about stubborn people.  Specifically, the headline said, “Stubborn People Live Longer:  Here’s Why.”  I read the story.  Some science-y folks studied a small (relatively) remote village in Italy.  They picked 29 participants between the ages of 90-101.  Then they picked family members that were between the ages of 51-75.

They picked people that lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the ravaged Italy after World War II and found out . . . shockingly, that they were stubborn?

They then picked people who grew up in a post-war renaissance, rebuilding, and rebirth and found out they were not as mentally healthy as people who had been toughened in some of the most horrific conditions of the 20th century?  Where literally every day of their lives was better than any day of 1944?

I’m shocked.  (okay, I’m not)

And to further confound this “study” when you pick a small town in Italy, you simply have to deal with the fact that . . . these people are more closely related than you’d see in New York City.  When I drive around Smalltown, in northeast Midwesteria, I see can see family resemblances everywhere.  When you see the names on the plaques in the high school lobby for the team that won it all in 1954, you see . . . the grandparents of kids The Boy and Pugsley go to school with today.

The Italians may all share characteristics and genetics of some stubborn old dude who kept making Italian women pregnant up until he was 99 while Leonardo DaVinci was still fingerpainting.

And any statistician will tell you that 29 participants isn’t enough to tell you . . . anything.

So, we have a questionable study that gets rolled out by a “journalist” who needs to pop something into the paper so they can feed their kids.  They and 20 other 24 year old kids get assigned the “write a science filler piece about old Italians.”  Since the only science they know was taught to them on the Disney® Channel (there is no science requirement to be a journalist, folks) they poke at the scientific study like Ukrainian Mall Lawyers attempting to fix a broken printer, hoping their clumsy fumbling fingers mash into something so the pretty words come out again so they can go back home to Nadia, who is boiling potatoes and smells faintly of vodka and used to repair tanks at Ukraine Tank Manufacturing Plant Number 342.

So, they pick what words they understand, and attempt to educate us all . . .

Don’t get me wrong – there are some really, really smart journalists.  And some have dedicated themselves to covering science and do a great job.

But not many, because science is really hard.

How hard is it?  To plumb the depths of the structure of the sub-atomic world we build machines miles long, some stretching the diameter of the Earth.

And biology and behavioral science is also hard.  I read once (way back a long time ago, in a book, on paper) about a scientist who was studying mice in mazes.  Mizes?  Anyway, this scientist looked not at the mice, but at the experiment itself.  How could the mice cheat?  Well, they could look up and see the light position for guidance, so he made the light diffuse and uniform over the maze.  They could sense the table wasn’t level, so he leveled the table.  They could hear noise from nearby offices and laboratories, so he soundproofed the room.  They could even feel vibration from the building’s heating system, so he had to dampen the table.  All to get one maze to be “fair” so the mice couldn’t cheat.  As I recall, he did this in the 1920’s or 1930’s.  After he published?  People promptly ignored him and this wonderful research.

Bad science has shown up in lots of places, and journalists with bad stories have helped it along:

  • Then: Eggs will kill you!  Now:  Eggs are the perfect food.
  • Then: Fat will kill you!  Now:  Plenty of place in a healthy diet for fat.
  • Then: Eat high carbs!  Like PopTarts®!  Now:  Carbs are death.
  • Then: High fructose corn syrup is the same as sugar!  Now:  No, it’s not even close.

I heard about this company in Great Britain that was going to, wait for it, transplant poop from one person to another for a fee.  Because it happened to this one lady and she lost a lot of weight.  Hey, a journalist wrote about it – it must be awesome!

Yeah.  Great science.  It may turn out to be founded in reality, but I’m expecting more Ukrainian Mall Lawyers . . . poking at the copier this time.

But I’m skeptical.  Which is . . . another word for stubborn?

Obamacare, Health Insurance, Ear Hair, and Looking at Breast Implants

“No, Steve, the guard, accidentally looked at Medusa’s head.  Turned to stone.  Who covers that? Is that health insurance or Workman’s Comp?” – The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines

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A picture of Fairbanks Memorial the day Pugsley was hatched born.  I had good insurance then.  Too bad it’s gotta go . . .

Almost everything in the world (almost!) has gotten better since I was a kid.  Well, the music isn’t as good.  And the movies are gloomier.  And my hair has migrated from my scalp to . . . everywhere else.  For heaven’s sake, why did it have to go INTO the ears???

As I look to things that have gotten much worse in my lifetime, the number one is . . . health care costs, which is even worse than ear hair.  Obamacare (or the Affordable Care Act for those of my readers that regularly appear on CNN®) was supposed to fix that.  In my case, my premiums nearly doubled while my deductible went up by a factor of eight.  If my math is right, that means my health insurance is worth, on a dollar basis, one sixteenth what it was before Obamacare.

When Pugsley attempted to self-amputate a finger on a camping trip, The Mrs. took him to the emergency room.  He came back with two stitches.  My bill?  Over $1000.  And I had to pay it, in cash.  Did he really need all of his fingers?  Nine is a good number, right?

I’d love to blame Obamacare – but it’s really just part of the system that’s vaulted health care costs upwards.  We’ve all experienced it – we’re paying unconscionable rates for care that’s not (in some cases) as good as it was in the past.  I know we have fancy equipment and machines that go “ping,” but the idea of a family doctor that knew you family from your birth until his death is over.

Now doctors have to see as many patients as possible to pay for their rent, BMW® and the loans they took out for college, their divorces, their small airplanes, and their portion of the partnership.  And they practice defensive medicine.  They run tests that you have to pay for to protect their medical license.  And if your insurance doesn’t pay for the test because it’s unnecessary?  You pay for the test.

I love capitalism.  It’s awesome.  But our health care system doesn’t even remotely resemble capitalism.

Let’s start with theft.

Our current health care system was changed in the 1980’s.  If you showed up to an emergency room in 1979 and had no ability to pay for care . . . they had no obligation to provide care.  None.  As a matter of principle they’d stabilize you, but a life changing surgery involving 20 heroic doctors?  Not so much.

I heard a story about a woman who lost her health insurance.  And then got cancer.  She couldn’t afford the $80,000 or so in costs for chemotherapy and treatment.

She died rather than bankrupt her family.

And, sadly, that’s the right outcome.

The economist Thomas Sowell said (more or less), “If an economist was designing a car, instead of an airbag in the steering wheel, there would be a knife pointed at the driver.  Good economists believe in in consequences for actions.”

There needs to be an incentive for people to pony up and get insurance.  And in the 1980’s they removed that.  Now, regardless of my ability to pay, if I show up at the hospital, they have to treat me.  Can’t turn me away.

Now I’m all for compassion.  But in this system, the person who is compassionate (the politician) forces the provider (doctor/hospital) to treat someone for “free” – but in reality passes on the costs to the responsible idiot with insurance and money (me and you).

Why does a Tylenol® cost $11 each in a hospital?

Yeah.  You’re paying for the freeloaders.  For the lawsuits.  For the administration costs.

One hospital (Duke) had 900 beds.  It had 1500 billing administrators.  Why?  They have to navigate through Medicare rules, as well as rules and correspondence from hundreds of different insurance companies.  You spend a night in the hospital?  You have 1.7 people there with you just counting the costs.

Yikes!

Of the things that determine a capitalist system, it’s all missing.

  • You don’t see those until weeks or months after the event.  How can you make a decision?
  • They don’t have the choice to refuse to serve you.
  • You don’t have one if you’re bleeding out.  You go where the ambulance is taking you.  You don’t haggle when you’re unconscious.
  • The system is so regulated that the American Medical Association determines the number of doctors in the country.  Think that they’ll increase competition?  Hospital regulations (mainly Federal) are extensive.
  • Lipitor®, which treats something or other, was making Pfizer $5billion a year.  After it went generic?  Less than a $1million a year.  Protections for drugs are routinely extended and live longer than the original patent period.  Apparently Viagraâ„¢ also keeps the patent system going for a long time, too.
  • LOL, whut?

What does a free market look like for medicine?

We actually have great examples.  Laser eye surgery costs have plummeted over time.  And, it’s never been cheaper for ladies to become . . . ahem . . . enhanced.

Why?

People have choices.  They don’t need the surgery.  They want it.  So they shop around, and will only get it if the price meets expectations.  $10,000 to not need $200 glasses?  Not on this planet.  And even the girl who wants bigger boobs is budget conscious, even though her boyfriend now has had laser eye surgery and can see them.

Recently several doctors have cut the cord.  No insurance.  None.  Come see the doc?  Cash.  But the prices . . . are much lower.  Much.  Many are less than the copay for your insurance.  Here’s a link (LINK).

The Mrs. and I were discussing this problem last year.  I outlined the issues.  The Mrs. leaned back and contemplated.  She swirled the Johnny Walker Blue Label™ in her glass and said . . .

“Make it illegal.”

John Wilder:  “Make what illegal.”

The Mrs.:  “Insurance.”

When she said that, I immediately pushed back in my mind.  The costs were so high . . . how could anyone ever consider that?

But then I realized that she was right.

Health insurance as a concept really took off during World War II.  The government had frozen the wages of the workers so we didn’t have runaway inflation as the tank factory tried to steal workers from the bomber factory.  But . . . you could add benefits.  Life insurance.  Pensions.  And?  Health insurance.

This began an 80 year distortion of the health market.  The person taking the action (you) was not paying the bills (insurance company) or writing the prescriptions (doctor).  How could costs NOT explode under such a twisted system?

So, The Mrs. is right.  We have to burn this village to save it.  And we will – because otherwise it will torch the whole country as I’ve previously predicted (LINK).

Until then?  We can stare with perfect vision at augmented . . . attributes.

If only there was a cure for ear hair.