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©:

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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 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.

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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.

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.

r/K Selection Theory, or Why Thanksgiving is Tense* (for some people)

“But thanks to recent advances in stem cell research and the fine work of Doctors Krinski and Altschuler, Clevon should regain full reproductive function.” – Idiocracy

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This is a picture from when The Boy and I took a ride into Denali.  You can read about that adventure here (LINK).  Spoiler!  Not killed by vampires.

Winter is coming.  And it all has to do with biology . . .

I didn’t like high school biology.  Not that I didn’t have good teachers, I had great teachers.  They were committed and passionate about biology.  I love science – don’t get me wrong, but biology seemed so . . . pointless.  It was a lot of learning the proper names for things (stamen and pistil are two vaguely naughty flower parts that I all I recall, but couldn’t distinguish) and learning how a flower worked was so much less interesting than the fusion reactor that powers our solar system (Fun Fact:  If you collected all of the solar energy falling on California every day, it would be very dark there!).  And my lab partners (two cute cheerleaders who smelled vaguely of musk) almost gleefully did the frog dissection.  There were times I think that they wished they had a dead frog, but . . .

As I’ve gotten older, I realize that there are interesting aspects to almost any subject, some of which I spend hours, weeks or even months studying until I’ve learned what I want to know.  When I was younger, my biology interests mainly involved attempts at field experimentation with cheerleaders.  Decades later biology came back up in my intellectual wanderings in settings that didn’t involve double features at the drive in.

This time my study of the convergence of biology and economics explained to me why half of the US population can’t talk to the other half – and can’t even understand the other half.

It starts with a wolf.

There is a bleak, windswept plane in Alaska.  Off in the distance, the wolf pack follows a caribou herd, as it has for the better part of a week.  The pack acts as one.  A lone wolf in the north is a dead one.

The females – smaller, quicker – herd the caribou on the sides, keeping the herd moving to the west, away from the cover of the trees.  The older males push through the center, finally selecting the small group of caribou that they will take and use their superior muscle to attack.  The young wolves and pups follow along, sometimes play-fighting among each other, but more often imitating the adults.  The play will turn to hunting as they watch and learn. 

As the caribou comes down, the males feed first.  Eventually the pups feed.  It’s been a week, and they’re hungry.  The alpha male and alpha female of this pack have been mated for life, and will stay mated until the male dies in three years from an infection due to a broken tooth, but today they have food. 

A significant amount of effort is put into raising the pups, who, when they get older will split off and join other packs.

Wolves follows what a biologist calls “K” selection.

Based on their environment, wolves face a significant pressure for resources every day.  They live in environments at the sheer edge of habitability, and have to cooperate to fight those environments daily in order to survive.  Their young, have significant parental involvement and training.  Due to the scarcity inherent in the environment they must work together to live.  They only have a few offspring, but they invest heavily in them.  And a mother wolf will fight to the death to save a pup – the pack works together, and is loyal to individual members.

Rabbits follow “r” selection.  (The “K” and the “r” originate as variables in an equation that you’ll never use, but here’s the link (LINK) if you want to stare at it.)

It’s the opposite of K selection in many ways.  r selection depends upon having significant amounts of resources available.  These resources make life easy, so strategies change.

Part of winning biologically in a resource-rich revolves around having the most number of offspring.  So, have as many as you want, as many as you can so your genes spread far and wide.  Since resources are abundant, mating for life is silly.  Mate with . . . whoever.  Whenever.  However.  As long as you have babies.  Since a rabbit has lots of babies, each gets little attention, and the idea of a rabbit protecting offspring is unknown – rabbits run away, hoping you’ll eat their offspring as long as you don’t get them.

Resources are plentiful, so there’s no real reason to work together strongly.  Not that the rabbits won’t hang together, it’s just that there’s no rabbit that will ever inconvenience themselves to help another rabbit.

Biologically, the rabbits avoid competition for resources – there’s no need.  Whereas the wolves focus on mating for life, promiscuity is required for rabbits.  And rabbits are single parents.  Rabbits are single parents who come to early sexual maturity and have children young.  And they will sell out other rabbits to save themselves.

Wolves have to take part in competition, delay sex and are (mainly) monogamous in the wild.  They have dual parents for raising their pups, longer time to sexual maturity and independence, and will fight, to the death if need be, for each other.

We see echoes of r/K selection in our society today.  When the economy tanks?  Divorce rate plummets.

As social spending goes up?  Sexual promiscuity in youth goes up.  Single parenthood increases.

The numbers of children born to unwed mothers goes from 3.8% in 1940 (before welfare) to 5.3% in 1960 to over 40% by 2008.  The numbers stayed small as long as resources were limited, but once resources were free?  Boom, many women become r-selected rabbits, which is paralleled only with the behaviors seen at the beginning of the decay of empires (which I cover better than anyone else, ever, at this link (LINK)).

But a core of society remain K selected, which was the norm prior to 1960 and the mass rollout of welfare.  So, blue state/red state?  Republican/Democrat?  Liberal/Conservative?

Or r/K?

That’s where we find ourselves today – much of our political division now having root in differing biological strategies.  When the strategy is rooted so deeply, it becomes a point of self, not something abstract.  When someone attacks an idea that supports that strategy, it’s often viewed as a personal attack, rather than a discussion.  Ever see a political discussion go from zero to yelling in under thirty seconds?  Chances are, someone attacked one of the deeply seated r/K differences.

Hot button topics like this?  Anti-nuke movement.  Anti-illegal immigrant movement.  Abortion.  I could keep going, but I think you could do it from here.

And it’s fairly insidious – we rarely examine our individual biological imperatives – more often we end up just following unexamined urges and then rationalizing them to prove that we’re smart, not animals.  We think we’re making choices, but we’re not.  I imagine an unwed mother with eight children cannot even fathom, may even look down upon, the parents with 1.2 children and a perfect lawn.  It’s a division that’s not rich/poor, but deeper.

What happens when the resources dry up, when the fields full of rabbity grass give way to the cold steppes of wolfen tundra?  Society changes – the ability to use surplus goods for r-selected people goes away.  Societal attitudes change, too.

Watch conflicts around the world and think about . . . how many of them are simply due to a difference in r/K reproduction strategy?  These conflicts inevitably move a society from abundance to scarcity.

The rabbits rule the spring, the wolves the winter.

“Winter is coming,” wrote George R. R. Martin over 20 years ago.  And I have to wait until 2019 to see the end of Game of Thrones.

I think I’m triggered.

Simple Way to Avoid a Heart Attack, Roman Style

“Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself?  What is its nature?” – Silence of the Lambs

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So, if I’m reading this right, I’m not supposed to stress out the alligators?  I’m not supposed to stress out the 400 pound armored killing machine?  Okay, getting right on that.

I ran across a health article about heart disease the other day by an actual medical doctor, not an amateur Civil War surgeon like me (Motto:  Splinter in your toe?  Amputate.).  Dr. Mercola’s theory was simple, that stress causes inflammation which causes the damage that kills you.  Here’s a link to his article (LINK).  Now this article was on a political site, so it wasn’t even related to the main focus of the site, but I read the article and immediately thought of you Internet.  And also me, since I was looking for something to write about today.

It just might be that stress is a problem for you that actually might kill you.  It also just so happens that I have a 2000 year old solution for you – all bright and shiny since I dug it up in my backyard last night:

“Your present opinion founded in understanding, your present conduct directed to good, and your present contentment with everything that results.  That’s enough.” – Marcus Aurelius, Mediations 9.6

Okay, okay, you say, it’s John Wilder Talking About Dead Romans Again.  And you’re right.  Because they were ever so much more like us than you might imagine.  Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic.  And he was also Emperor.  The book he wrote, Meditations, was just that.  His thoughts that he meditated on.  He wasn’t writing it for us, he was writing it to sort out his own thoughts and feelings.

Yeah, a Roman Emperor, able to command power few before or since ever had – King, President, Pope, and General all rolled up into one – had to work out his thoughts.  This makes sense, because Marcus was the last of the Five Good Emperors (spoiler alert) and thought himself something of a philosopher.  It’s like Vladimir Putin took time out of his busy schedule of wrestling bears while shirtless and dating Olympic gymnasts to attempt to deeply study and understand a philosophy of living that directly worked towards the quote from Marcus, up above.

But the quote above encapsulates in just a simple two sentences the core of the Stoic philosophy.  Let’s look at how it can help you reduce stress.

“Your present opinion founded in understanding . . .”

If I were to take liberties, I would re-write that one, “Your present opinion founded in truth.”

Dealing with reality was the core of the philosophy – that’s why it came first.  And if you are dealing with truth, you’re dealing in certainty.  You’re not lying to yourself.

“your present conduct directed to good . . .”

So, you’ve studied and know the truth.  Now you have the opportunity to turn your work towards the good.  You’re doing the right thing, the right way.

“and your present contentment with everything that results.”

You did the right thing for the right reasons.  You have purpose, clarity, and are taking positive action.  And, the best part?  You don’t have to win to win.  Whatever happens, happens.  If it didn’t work?  You tried.  Be content.  If it did work?  Great!  This is a formula for a low stress life.  The Stoics got to the core of it – things have meaning because we place meaning on them.  We think that the world should be a series of results, instead of a series of truthful opinions and actions directed toward good outcomes.

What happens, happens.

I know this is hard, because every day when I try to divorce myself mentally from the outcome of an action that I’ve taken, and just be cool when it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to work out.  The worst part?  When I get upset about something that didn’t go my way . . . that didn’t even matter.

Perspective that I need to remember.  Most things don’t matter – at all.

Back to Marcus:

Marcus Aurelius had a really, really awful son.  Commodus.  So bad Commodus’ wife poisoned him.  So bad that Commodus’ best friend strangled him.  So bad that they had Joaquin Phoenix play Commodus in Gladiator.  Did Marcus have a clue that Commodus would be so awful?  Probably.  But he did everything he could.  And his book has reached across centuries to us.

So, he did the right thing for the right reasons.  And it worked.

After a fashion.  To quote Marcus again:  “That’s enough.”

John Wilder is not a doctor.  Go see your doctor before you take medical advice from a blog written in a basement . . . .

The Iron Triangle of Retirement . . .

“Well, it’s not really fine, but it’s not why I’m here.  Hell, man, you know me.  Money’s not my issue.  I could’ve retired straight out of MIT, off to some island, let the business run itself.  Nobody told me to try and save the planet.  I wanted to.” – Kingsman, The Secret Service

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Downtown Houston, reflected off a building at dawn.  No, I wasn’t there at dawn to catch the picture – I was working as hard as Jean-Claude Van Damme at a splits contest.

At some point, I’m going to retire.

No, not change the low-tread tires on the Wildermobile – I generally like to wait until the tires are completely showing steel before I change them out.

Silly, I’m talking about working all the time.  For money.  So this blog is safe.

Some people suck at retiring.  I work with one guy who retired six years ago, Ted.  About six months after Ted retired, he came back and asked, “Hey, have need for me to consult?”

Although Ted decided he wanted to retire (and got the cake, party, and everything), Ted wasn’t really ready.  He keeps coming in to work even now after six years.  Thankfully Ted has a unique perspective and awesome experience on technical systems that can help train some younger workers, so it’s a win-win.  But he’s not ready to retire.  That switch that says, “hey, I’m done,” or “hey, if I have to go to hell it’s worth it to never see you people again,” or, “I never, ever, ever want to live in this soul-sucking environment again,” never flipped for him.  And I don’t think it ever will.

Work for him is still a big part of who Ted is, the definition of himself when he gets up in the morning.

For a long time I was with Ted.  I could no more see retiring than I could see Kim Jong Un and President Trump forming a “Guys Only” fort in the Oval Office and sending the secretaries out for chocolate milk while they watched Loony Tunes® cartoons on a Saturday morning before Mom picked them up to take them to the skating rink and the movies after.

But recently?  Yeah.  I’ve started to think that I’ll retire one day, and that’s what this is about.  (The decision to decide to retire is a different post.)

I’ve discussed retirement before in the best and most comprehensive article ever written on early retirement strategies (LINK).  But that article was focused on people who retire young.  Which would be less than 1%.

Let’s see when people really retire, based on 2015 Census data, as analyzed by LIMRA SRI and as I found on Financial Samurai (LINK).

retirement ages

This excludes people like Abraham Lincoln who exit the labor force for other reasons, of course.

Most (68%) of people retire at age 65 or earlier.  This makes sense, but first I’ll have to introduce a self-serving concept and graphic.

Let’s talk about John Wilder’s Iron Triangle of Retirement Fate (JWITORF).

IRON TRIANGLE

I made this graphic at great expense, after paying Freddy’s Advertising, Kites, Etc. $2,300 and waiting six weeks for delivery as it came on a container from Shanghai.  Oh, wait, I threw it together in 5 minutes.

Regardless of the cheese factor of the graphic, John Wilder’s Iron Triangle of Retirement Fate does explain pretty neatly how retirement works, and why people wait so long to do it.  So, why 65?  Statistically speaking, you’re at or near your maximum wealth as you near age 65.  Additionally, you have a reasonably long life ahead of you (statistically speaking) but not an unreasonably long life.  Presumably, you’ve also reached the age of wisdom where you’re smart enough not to blow through your retirement cash on cruises, vacations, PEZ®, pantyhose, and chocolates.

But let’s look closer at the Quantum Entangled Boxes at the Vertices of John Wilder’s Iron Triangle of Retirement Fate (QEBATVOJWITORF).  Or, just the boxes with words.

The first one we’ll tackle is:

  1. Lifestyle

You can upsize lifestyle to spend virtually any amount of money including a fortune the size of Johnny Depp’s $650,000,000.  The world entrusted $650,000,000 to Johnny Depp over the course of 31 years.  .  He’s kinda broke now, since he buys mansions at the drop of a hat, and his personal expenses run to about $2,000,000 a month.  His security alone costs $300,000/ a month.  And hair gel?  Thankfully he saves on soap and shampoo.

My needs are a bit more modest.  Most planners say you should expect to spend between 70% to 80% of your take home pay when you retire.  But others say you only need to plan for 50%.  Or 100%.  Or . . . more!

Part of the problem is that their guidelines assume you spend everything you make.  If you have the ability to save (like in the earlier retirement article LINK) a very large proportion of what you earn, these metrics don’t make sense – you might only need to replace much less than half of your present income, since you’ve radically reduced your lifestyle and eliminated many items . . . like security for $300,000 a month.

Lifestyle is a retirement variable that you mainly control.  Get a budget and live by it.

Biggest risk?  Healthcare.  Who knows what that’s going to cost – might be $60,000 per aspirin by 2019.  You don’t want to guess what calf implants will cost . . . .

  1. Longevity

If you’re dying tomorrow, like Abe Lincoln, you already saved too much for retirement.  If you’re going to live another 80 years, you don’t have nearly enough.

When I first started looking at retirement with a spreadsheet and projected assets and lifespans, one fact popped out at me:  the earlier you retire, the less you earn, so your retirement savings will be less.  And you will pull money out sooner since you don’t have a salary anymore.  Sure, it sounds like a “duh” conclusion, but once I put my numbers in and played with it, it began to make perfect sense.

So, if you retire early, it helps if you die early, too.  And don’t forget your spouse!  If they’re much younger than you, you might want to try to convince them to pick up smoking, skydiving, BASE jumping, and prison boxing so they don’t outlive you by too much.  You’ll thank me for it later.

Outside of shortening life, you don’t control tons about your longevity, either.  Biggest risk?  You outlive your money and so does your spouse and you get a never ending stream of “I told you so” when you’re 90 but she just uses a crutch and can beat you and your walker.  Thankfully you can be a burden to the state and your children at that age.

  1. Amount of Money You Have

This is (mostly/kinda) in your control, too.  Bill Gates has billions of dollars saved for his retirement, and I know some people who work a whole year and don’t make a billion dollars.  Okay, I kid.  But I am certain that you could save more money than you are saving right now.  Part of the value is adding additional money to your savings, but the other value is in reducing your lifestyle and knowing what you really need.

A second portion of your money will come from your 401K.  Most of these are a really good deal, since you company will give you free money to add to your savings.  They do this to encourage you to contribute, since a portion of their bonus is based on how much you contribute.

Pensions are awesome if you’re part of the 0.0001% of private sector jobs that still have them.  If you’re working for the government?  Yeah, I guess you can count on* that.

Social Security is a real thing – and one that you probably can count on*.

*Bigger risks?

  • Inflation (here’s a LINK to my commentary on how that’s inevitable in our current monetary system).
  • Budget deficits (here’s a LINK to my commentary on what the likely impact of our deficits is).
  • Economic dislocation (here’s a to a discussion on Bitcoin and how it can disrupt economic systems).

Best idea now?  Max out your 401K and savings.  Understand what lifestyle is really necessary and what you have to do to pay for it, both in dollars today, and in years of your life in the future.

John Wilder’s Iron Triangle of Retirement Fate© . . . ignore it at your own risk.  Assuming you’re not going to be like Ted (and 10% of Americans) and work past 75 . . . heck, I might have new tires on my car by then . . . .

John Wilder is not a professional financial dude.  Consult your attorney, financial planner, or shamen for real advice.  

Penultimate Day and The Biggest Story of 2017

“Everyone thought the agency was a joke, except the aliens . . . “ – Men in Black

ufoguncam

Yes, this is gun camera footage from US Navy fighter planes.  Yes, it shows something no one can explain.  Yes, it’s the real, actual US Navy.  Not pictured – Will Smith.

It’s the end of the year, so it’s the holidays.  By holidays I mean, of course, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Penultimate Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day.

Okay, you’ve heard of most of those days, but Christmas Eve, really?  Whose idea was that . . . ?

I kid.

We actually have a Wilder Family High Holiday, called Penultimate Day.  Penultimate doesn’t mean the last (like many people do), it means . . . next to last.  That’s one of the things I love about the English language – that there’s a word for “next to last” just like there’s a word for “throwing a person out of a window” – defenestrate.

Cool!  But this isn’t a case of “Ask Mr. Language Person.”  I’ll leave that to the MUCH older Dave Berry.  This is just explaining our Wilder High Holiday.

It started (I think) in 2010 or 2011.  The Mrs. had been having problems with her cell phone – at that point an actual Blackberry™ with a real, physical keyboard.  We went shopping for a replacement on December 30.  In order to get a new one from for/from our carrier, we had to drive nearly 100 miles.  We went both to our carrier’s store and the local Best Buy®.  We were frustrated by the deals, which were fairly incomprehensible unless you were fluent in a variety of Klingonese spoken only near Sherman’s Planet.  And none of them were deals we liked.

Frustrated, we gave up and went to the local Olive Garden®, which is the closest one to our house.  Yes.  We live over 100 miles from an Olive Garden©.  But, I promise, we have indoor plumbing and flush toilets and everything.

We had a wide variety of their pasta (I think I had the one that mixed steak and fettuccini Alfredo) and joked about our frustrating search for cell phones.  It was there and then, since it was December 30, the real and actual Penultimate Day that I proposed a new holiday, Penultimate Day.  In order to observe Penultimate Day properly, one must:

  1. Drive South.
  2. Look At, But Not Purchase Cell Phones.
  3. Eat Italian Foods.

I can see how religions schism.  The Boy is adamant that the above list is heresy, and I could hear him conspiring with Pugsley that I should be cast down since the only true way to observe Penultimate Day was to:

  1. Drive Two Hours South.
  2. Look At, But Not Purchase a Sprint® Cell Phone.
  3. Eat At Olive Garden®.

Perhaps one day after the apocalypse there will be a Council of Sheboygan where the Sheboygan Creed will come down that will indicate that to observe Penultimate Day, one must:

  1. Look Southerly.
  2. Have a race where one Sprints® and finishes second (Penultimate Place).
  3. Eat an Italian.

While getting ready for our Penultimate Day celebration (which, for various reasons we had to celebrate late today), I looked at The Boy.

John Wilder:  “So, with all of the crazy things this year, what’s the biggest new story of the year?”

I expected to hear something about Trump.  Russia.  Nuclear North Korea.  Star Wars® being the worst movie of the year.

Nope.

The Boy:  “Aliens.”

Yup.  He got it in one.

Here’s the story:  There were several United States senators who decided UFOs needed to be investigated.  Since they were senators, they managed to get several million dollars appropriated.  At the rate the Pentagon spends money, several million dollars would be less than they spend on attempting to milk mice with itty-bitty automatic mice milking machines to get enough mice milk to . . . well, its classified why the Pentagon needs mice milk.  Move along, citizen.

Anyhow, they put together a program to monitor UFO sightings.  In charge of this program was one Luis Elizondo.  Here are a few of his recent quotes from Luis’ interview with The Telegraph:

“It was enough where we began to see trends and similarities in incidents. There were very distinct observables. Extreme maneuverability, hypersonic velocity without a sonic boom, speeds of 7,000mph to 8,000mph, no flight surfaces on the objects. A lot of this is backed with radar signal data, gun camera footage from aircraft, multiple witnesses.”

“. . . if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of beyond reasonable doubt.”

So, we have the person in charge of the government program researching UFOs indicating that we are seeing evidence of the amount and magnitude that indicates the phenomena is real.  Not made up.  Not swamp gas.  Not little old ladies dipping too often into the cooking sherry or medical marijuana.  Not even the Canadian Air Force (I hear their plane is working again, though).

This leaves us with several possibilities:

  1. The evidence is faked.
  2. The US (or Russians) have propulsion technology that allows them to do what no other aircraft in the history of aviation can do and no interpretation of our current physics can explain.
  3. We are being visited by entities from off of Earth (in our solar system).
  4. We are being visited by entities from another star.
  5. We are being visited by entities from another dimension.
  6. We are being visited by entities from another time.

That’s it.

That’s the full well of possibilities.  There are no more.  (taps well of possibility) Bone dry.

Let’s hit the possibilities one at a time:

  1. Fakey Fakey UFO Bakey.

So, Luis and all of the Pentagon faked all of the data.  Sadly, this is the most likely case.  There is no reason that this would have happened, and plenty of evidence that past world leaders knew something was up . . .

The following is a quote from Mikael Gorbachev:

“From the fireside house, President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’” (source: Smithsonian.com)

Gorbachev agreed to a full truce and full cooperation in the event of an alien attack.  Yes.  This is a thing that happened.

I’m not inclined to believe this is a lie, but still the highest probability merely because it’s easiest to explain – not because it fits any facts.

  1. We have the tech.

Attractive.  It would be nice to think that we have this technology.  But the energy and speed involved dwarf literally all known technology by orders of magnitude . . . .

So, to believe this we’d have to believe that we can create not only speeds outside of our ability, but also control inertia so that any pilots weren’t turned into paste through inertia.  Let’s pretend that’s not the case – the structure of the craft alone would be distorted beyond all ability to fly.  After the first turn.  And if the USSR had this tech?  We would all be studying Russian now, comrade.

This, oddly improbable as it is, is the second highest probability.

  1. We are being visited by entities from within our Solar System.

The Earth is about 4.5 billion year old, and could have created several sets of intelligent species during the last 250 million years.  Mars might have had a similar window, but several hundred million years earlier.

Could they have escaped doom and watch us, even now?

Not really likely.  It would get very boring – more even than watching reruns.  But it does solve one problem of the next possibility:

  1. We are being visited by entities from another star.

Moving between stars is Hard.  Capital H – italicized Hard.

Stars are really far apart.  Not far apart like driving through Texas far.  But far apart like driving through Texas twice with Alaska in the middle Hard.  And there are no gas stations or rest stops and you just drank 20 Big Gulps®.

And the confines of the life spans we are familiar with aren’t compatible with interstellar travel.  Traveling 1/10th the speed of light, (which is fast, almost 19,000 miles per second) it would take you 40 years to get to the nearest star – and we’re not sure there’s even anything interesting there.  And it would take as much energy to get you going that fast as the world’s largest nuclear bomb – ever.  Add in supplies?  At least the annual electricity consumption.  Of the world.  Just for you.

So, if you could freeze yourself (if you could figure out how to do that) and then spend thousands of years getting here.  Just so you could fly around nuclear bases and make US Navy fighter pilots nuts – “I don’t know what it is, but I want to fly one.”

Alternatively, there could be technology that would allow faster than light travel, even though there is no indication, ever, that there is any way to travel faster than light.  But we didn’t think that heavier than air flight is possible for . . . almost all of history.  Is there a physics we don’t understand?  Certainly.  Does it include faster than light travel?  Unknown.

But what doesn’t require suspended animation and won’t die on a long trip?

Machines.

Here’s a (really short) story I wrote a couple of years ago.  Enjoy.

It didn’t use radio.

No one knew how it communicated, but they couldn’t pick it up on any band that we knew. On the TV, they speculated that maybe it used some sort of “quantum” thing to communicate, but that didn’t tell me much.

It was on the moon.

At school, my teacher Miss Rachel told us that some person using their backyard telescope pointed at this crater on the moon – Aristarchus – had seen something one night. That had happened before, but this time the flashes, the glimmers, they didn’t stop.

It was moving.

It didn’t stop, either. By the time they wheeled Hubble over, they were able to see it in real time. There were clouds of dust, but that didn’t matter much. There isn’t any atmosphere on the moon, so the dust drops out real quick. Something was going on, but we had no idea what.

The rock that it launched hit Stanford.

The professor in the wheelchair used his machine voice to tell us that we were too close. Whatever it was up there was listening to us. It maybe always had been. And it was old, old as the whole solar system, maybe. It was a tiger trap, a wolf snare. Stanford was where the best AI research was, he said. Maybe they were getting too close. Can’t be too close now – Stanford is nothing but a crater, and about two million people died, according to the Internet.

It’s watching.

I guess it always was. I guess it always will be. Wonder if the dinosaurs got too close way back when? Right now, I’m wondering if this was a warning shot or a warm up.

Yeah.  Sleep easy.  Don’t worry about the Terminator under your bed.  Or on your Moon.

This has a low probability.  But . . . it’s at the same time nearly 100% certain.  Aliens could easily create AI that could travel between stars.  That tech is nearly available to us now.  If there’s intelligent life it’s high probability it will develop to our level of technology given enough time.  And if it took thousands of years?  Who cares if your iPhone takes 100 years or 100,000 years to get to a destination?  If designed well enough, it could prep and wait for  . . . whatever it was programmed to wait for.

  1. We are being visited by entities from another dimension.

Well, now I just throw my hands in the air.  We do know that there are other dimensions, or at least are pretty sure that they are necessary to explain much of the physical phenomena we see around us today.  It’s possible, likely even, that there are alternate universes out there.  Maybe an infinite number.  But what if you could go to one that was next door?  That sounds really hard.  But might even be easier to move between alternate Earths than moving between stars.  We simply don’t know.

But if I could move between dimensions?  I could see wanting to keep track of the neighbors . . . .

  1. We are being visited by entities from another time.

This one is way weirder, and I consider much less likely.  Why?  Moving through time is probably way harder than moving through space.  The Earth is moving around the Sun.  So, if I tried to travel back in time?  I’d also have to travel through space to the place the Earth is now, not then.

And the Sun is moving through space.  It takes about 230 million years for it to do a lap – so it’s done over 19 laps around the Milky Way galaxy since it formed.  And the galaxy is moving, too.

Sorry to disillusion you, but if Doc Brown sent Marty back 25 years in time?  He’s die gasping for air in a DeLorean off in interstellar space, since the Sun is moving 30 miles per second in its orbit around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.  He’d have been 24 billion miles from anyone who had ever heard Johnny B. Goode.

In space no one can hear your guitar solo.

This is the least likely scenario.

Regardless, it is “beyond a reasonable doubt” that something out there, came here.

Those are not my words.  The dude who ran the program to study UFOs said this.  Obviously he’s seen more than we ever will.  I just hope he celebrates Penultimate Day in a non-heretical way.

The Boy is waiting to punish heretics . . .

Depression, Debt, and Saving Tinfoil for Fun and Profit

“We have no Great War.  No Great Depression.  Our Great War’s 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, and movie gods, and rock stars.  But we won’t.  And we’re slowly learning that fact.” – Fight Club

debt depression

Depression related to debt?  Unpossible!

My Mom went through the Great Depression (she was pretty old when Ma and Pa Wilder adopted me, nearly fifty) as a child, so she told us kids ALL about it.  To hear her tell about it, the Depression wasn’t all that Great from her perspective, but no one wants to talk about the Mediocre Depression.  One of the ways that she was impacted by the Depression was her relationship to physical objects that might be of use someday.  Tinfoil that you used to cover last night’s casserole?  Hey, you might be able to use that again.  Aluminum pie tins?  They could be cut to make a great decorative lantern (no, they couldn’t, but Ma kept them anyway).  They call this “hoarding” now.  Pa even built a building to hold Ma’s stuff.

The reason for her obsession was understandable.  During the Depression, many times her family had to do without basic necessities.  Our family was well off by comparison, but Ma Wilder never got over the times when she had so little.  We wrapped our Christmas presents one year in the comics section of the Sunday paper to economize.  Food?  Never thrown away.  It fed us, then the leftovers went to the dog.  During my life as a kid, we never spent a cent on dog food.  Pa Wilder eventually got her to throw away old TV Guides® (kids – it’s a tiny part of the Internet that describes “what’s on TV” that they used to print out and send to us every week).

Perspective:  Pa Wilder was the president of a bank at that time.  We were NOT hurting for cash.

And I recall that Grandpa McWilder plucked a fiberboard suitcase for me out of the closet so I could pack my things to come and visit him and Grandma McWilder every weekend (LINK).  The suitcase was missing its original handle.  Grandpa took an old leather belt and cut it and wrapped it as a handle on the suitcase.  It was (probably) better than the original suitcase handle.  Whenever he needed something, his first trip was not to the store, but to his shop, where he would craft whatever he needed out of wood, leather or metal.

And Ma Wilder followed her dad’s example.  Her crafts were legendary, making a passable statue of Ben Franklin out of a wine bottle, some sand, a sock, some blue felt and grey yarn and some copper wire.  Our family was not in need of Ben Franklin statues, but Ma Wilder liked to keep in practice, since at that time the US was also tied up in a great period of inflation – it looked like the wheels were coming off of the great capitalist experience called the United States.  Interest rates to buy a house were all in double digits.  Even the Treasury notes were yielding 18%+.

What this did (looking backwards) was trim all of the non-productive investments from the economy, and I do mean all.  If you could stick your money in a bank account and make 12%, you’d do it. Why risk your money in a business venture, unless that business venture was really, really good?

So what business ideas got money at that point in time?  Only the best.  And those great ideas had to have great teams behind them.  The crappy ideas were laughed out of the bank.  These high interest rates also depressed the stock market.  Why buy stocks when you could buy government bonds at 15%?

This high-interest rate environment led to a recession, but what followed the recession was the greatest peacetime economic expansion in history – the stage had been set by winnowing away the crappy companies.

As time went on and as the economy expanded it also changed as small companies grew to enormous size and replaced large ones that didn’t serve a purpose in the economy anymore (MicroSoft® grew, Montgomery Ward™ exploded).

The interest rate was then lowered.

And lowered.  And lowered.

The idea behind this (from the standpoint of a politician) is that cheap money encourages business.  Which encourages hiring.  Which is one way of using the people’s money to buy their votes.

interest rate through time

And, it’s a great idea.  Companies borrow money.  That makes the banker happy.  People get jobs when the companies use that money to invest in stuff, like buildings, stores, employee PEZ® dispensers, Johnny Depp’s ego, factories (once upon a time we made stuff here) and oil wells.

In a functional economy, some of these businesses flourish, and some fail.  The flourishing businesses more than compensate for the lost incomes (and bad loans!) of the failures.  This is healthy in an economy – bad ideas, like my Internet pizza by the slice company (no, we don’t deliver, you have to pick it up) fail.  Good ideas, like Amazon.com, flourish.

But as you can see above, we got to a point where the graph went . . . flat, like Johnny Depp’s career.  And flat as in zero.  Also like Johnny Depp’s career.

So, if high interest rates force businesses out in a Darwinian competition that only the strong survive?  What happens when interest rates are low?

Well, we live here in Smallville.  Smallville is . . . small.  It had some hotels built during the 1950’s and 60’s.  And one obviously from the 1970’s.  One might have been the late 1980’s.  And one last hotel built around the late 1990’s.  Most nights nobody is in any of these hotels.  I’d bet it’s generally a 10% occupancy rate or so.  Low.  In a nearby town, you can buy one of the 1970’s vintage motels with 50+ rooms for $200,000 or so.  Yes, you read that right.  Annual income for the thing is about $120,000, and it probably nets out at $40,000 a year or so after costs.  Sort of expensive for a $40,000 a year job.

But right now in our very lightly visited (and way off the beaten track of any busy highway) town they just built a brand new hotel.  That might be 15% full on a good night.

Why?

Because money is historically cheap.  Like 5,000 years of history cheap.  Save it?  Never!  The investment only has to yield more than the interest rate of the loan to be profitable.

Cheap money is like gasoline to the bonfire that is our economy.  To start the fire, a little is needed.  But to really get the party going?  Toss on more gasoline.

When there’s a competing economic system or discipline from organized investors, this won’t work.  The confidence of the economic system would be lost, and interest rates would go up as people fled the money system.

If there’s an alternative.  But today?  There really isn’t a credible alternative to the dollar (the euro is too new, the yuan and yen are too closely held, and every other currency on the planet (except the Swiss and British) is generally more valuable as holiday wrapping paper than as actual money.

Without this constraint of an outside competitor, politicians did what politicians do.  They opened the spout to the money supply.  Yay!  We can borrow and spend ourselves into infinite economic prosperity, right?

Not exactly.

A little debt adds a lot of GDP.  It funds great ideas like desktop computers to massively increase business productivity.  It funds control valves and robots and data systems that automate pipelines and car factories.

The big ideas get funded first.  They change the world.

Eventually you get to funding ideas like “bigger cupholder” in a Camero®.  You get less return, less profit with each dollar invested.

That’s shown pretty well on the following graph – it relates debt to GDP (GDP is like the country’s salary – it’s all the money the country makes).  The first bits of debt (earlier on) produce the greatest growth in productivity.  The last bits of debt?  It shows that they aren’t horrible, but in reality this graph reflects consumers getting out of debt as fast as they can during the Great Recession – individuals don’t take on more debt when they’re not sure they’ll even have a job at the PEZ® factory next month.  Unless you’re Johnny Depp, in which case you just buy $30,000,000 in castles and some albino bears.

debt to gdp

This is called diminishing returns – the latest debt doesn’t add as much to the economy, unless you really need a castle filled with albino bears and can sell tickets.  The later investments are worth so much less than the previous investment.  Eventually?  You get debt without GDP growth, so you pay interest on the PEZ® that you ate last night.  Forever.  Your bonfire?  The wood has burned all away, and the only thing that keeps the fire going is the gasoline.  And it makes a much smaller and more dangerous fire.

Yes, eventually the added borrowed money swings your income downward, as you pay interest on investments that produce nothing.

This was like another time in history.  Just wish I could remember what it was.

Maybe I should save my tinfoil now?

The Chinese Farmer, Kipling, Marcus Aurelius, and You

“I’ve come back. Give me a drink, Brother Kipling. Don’t you know me?” – The Man Who Would Be King

Rudyard_Kipling_(portrait)

Kipling in 1895.  Good heavens, what a handsome mustache!  No wonder the English ruled most of the world – any group that can create such handsome whiskers deserves to run the place.

I first heard this from a friend in 2002 or so . . . there were several of us that would get together to talk about ideas and concepts, and one of the participants told this story:

There is an old Chinese story about a farmer.  One night, there was a terrible storm.  The wind blew so hard, it opened up his corral, and his horses got out.

“Bad luck!” said his friends.

“Good luck, bad luck.  Who can say?” replied the farmer.

The next week, his horses, lonely for home, came back.  But while they were loose, they got in with a group of wild horses.  The wild horses came home with them.  The farmer now had twice as many horses.

“Good luck!” said his friends.

“Good luck, bad luck.  Who can say?” replied the farmer.

A wild horse is good to no one, so the farmer’s son began to work on breaking the horses.  Most of them were no problem, but one particularly fierce horse bucked the farmer’s son off.  The farmer’s son broke his leg.

“Bad luck!” said his friends.

“Good luck, bad luck.  Who can say?” replied the farmer.

The next week, the Emperor, having decided to go off to war due to a very dangerous threat against the empire, marched with his troops through the farmer’s town.  They called up in a draft all of the able bodied young men to accompany them to war.  The farmer’s son could not go – his leg was broken.

I think you can see where this is going.

But the story does stop there (thankfully!), though you see that it could keep going indefinitely, probably ending up with the farmer’s son constructing an evil robot army to enslave the human race that ends up saving us instead by stopping the invasion of the mole people from below South Carolina.  Oops!  I think that’s the plot of the sequel to Pacific Rim.

pacific rim

Source:  Uproxx, by porkythefirst

Despite my firm belief in the power of self-determination, even I’ve got to admit that sometimes you just have no idea how an action will impact your future – what will the result be of a decision you make today.  Opposite effects aren’t unknown.

For example, brush your teeth every day in order to keep them longer, right?  Well, at one point they used abrasives in toothpaste in order to scrub off that yellow tint that evolves over time.  Unfortunately, over time you weren’t brushing your teeth – you were sanding them down to nubs.

That’s an extreme example, but here’s another:

You work really hard at your job.  You’re smart, and come up with innovations to make things work a little bit better.  Your boss notices, but so does his boss.  Rocket ship to the top, right?  I mean, at least a promotion?

No.  Your boss is lazy and scared that he’ll lose his job.  The last thing they want to see is you breaking the curve at work.  He is now focused on . . . . getting rid of you.  Again, the opposite of what you’d expect, and the opposite of what your work merits.

Which brings me to this:

If

by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

I am an unapologetic Kipling fan.  And in this poem is more good philosophy than you’ll find anywhere.  Well, anywhere but here.

At a certain point, you realize that you’re not going to be a trillionaire.  Or even a billionaire.  You have to settle for what you’ve done and not feel regret that you’ve not transformed the world entirely.  In reading history, it wasn’t just one of the best poets ever to live who understood that, but also, over a thousand years earlier people understood it.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”  Pretty cool statement.  From?  A frigging Roman Emperor, Caesar Marcus Aurelius.  I’ve mentioned him before.  His book, Meditations was something he wrote for himself.  He didn’t write it for other people to read to see what a smarty-pants he was.  No, these were his private thoughts.

And as Caesar, he had more power than most people on Earth have ever had.  And he still worried about stuff.  He worried about doing a good job.  His back hurt him.  He worried that he wasn’t being a good dad (he wasn’t – his son was horrible and was destined to be played by Joaquin Phoenix – a curse of history).

But Marcus, the unnamed Chinese farmer, and Rudyard all had it tuned into the same thing – we can’t understand exactly what the outcome will be.  We can only go out there and do our best – break the horse, fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds of distance run, or do our best to run the most complex civilization ever devised.

So, today’s your day.  Go out there, and run as hard as you can.  Maybe, just maybe, one day you can have a mustache that will rival Kipling . . . .