Panzers – Page 4 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

UFOs, Tiger King, Oil Prices, and Bulgarian Models

“But you have to tell her before the show is scheduled to be on. There is this guy, and he is always requesting shows that are already played. Yes . . . no. You have to tell her before. He couldn’t quite grasp the idea that the charge nurse couldn’t make it be yesterday. She couldn’t turn back time, thank you Einstein! Now he . . . he was nuts! He was a fruitcake, Jim!” – 12 Monkeys

When I woke up from surgery the doctor came in, “John, you brain was thrown outside of your body. Thankfully, I was able to put it back in.” I said, “Doc, thanks for reminding me.”

“World turned upside down” is probably an overused phrase – most times it’s used by people when there is a fairly normal surprise, like getting to work late because of a traffic jam in the hallway between the bedroom and the stairs to the basement. On Tuesday, however, the world really did turn upside down if you owned any oil. Not baby oil, my probation officer told me that baby oil really isn’t made from actual babies. Crude oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. The contract for crude oil turned sharply negative. How negative? Holders of some contracts would be paid $40 a barrel to take that bubbling crude.

Yes. You read that right. People were being paid to take crude oil. How can the industry make up for a negative price?

Volume?

If you bought gasoline around the year 1999, you might have seen $0.79 per gallon of gasoline to fill up your Ford® Probe™. The Probe© had the bad fortune of being named probe right before the X-Files© came on the air and gave probe a whole different meaning. You UFO abductees know what I mean.

Yup, politicians and aliens have one thing in common.

If you bought gasoline around July, 2008, you might have paid nearly $5 per gallon while you and Walter White were the only two people who ever actually bought a Pontiac© Aztek™. But in no case did 7-11® ever pay you to fill your tank. Buy you could drive over to Saul’s place.

That won’t happen today, either, so you can forget your dream of filling your swimming pool full of gasoline for fun and profit. Although, come to think of it, it would be humorous to watch the Olympics® if the swimming was done in a pool of gasoline. Since gasoline is so much less dense than water, Michael Phelps couldn’t float and would sink straight to the bottom. Since my swimming looks more like drowning anyway, swimming in gasoline might be just the thing to even the odds so I can finally win that gold medal.

Well, I guess everybody won at least one swimming race.

Though, there is some part of me that would love to take barrel after barrel at $40 each and dump it in a metal aboveground pool and just burn it. You’d be able to see the black cloud for miles. I’d take pictures and send them to Greta Thunberg so that she would know I’m doing my part to put valuable CO₂ back into the atmosphere. After all, she did dare me to do it.

I think that some of my readers might have read back over the past dozen or so posts about economics and thought, “Oh, John Wilder, he’s gone full doomer.” No, I really haven’t. I still have a very positive outlook about the future. But one think I don’t have is illusions. For instance, I have no illusions that the future will look much like the past. I’m not going to be 18 again, and the world won’t party like it’s 1999 again. Besides, who would want to? You’d have to actually remember phone numbers again and talk to people during dinner again.

The price of oil is a big deal to the economy of the world, and the economy of individual nations, too. I read today that over 10,000,000 jobs in the United States are tied directly or indirectly to the oil industry. Those are jobs that typically pay well, too. At least those jobs used to exist before Tuesday. Next week, I imagine many of those people will be home being introduced to the hypnotic train wreck that is Tiger King™ on Netflix©, and wondering if there is a hair-crime against humanity (crimes against hairmanity?) law in Oklahoma.

When the most normal person in a documentary is the guy whose life might have been used as the basis for Tony Montana in Scarface? It’s a cat-astrophe.

Your life changes. It’s not a static thing. A lot of the people being laid off will either blame themselves, or be bitter about losing their job. That’s natural, but being mad about losing your job is like being mad at the wind, or mad at Joe Biden. You can jump and yell, but it doesn’t matter because neither of them will remember what you’re saying, anyway.

When I was a kid, I remember being bothered by a particular idea. Pugsley brought it to mind when he showed me a piece of Plexiglas® from his computer case, scratched from his handling it over several years. “How do we fix it?”

“We don’t. Learn to live with it,” was my answer. I could see the disappointment in his face.

It was then I recalled breaking a glass in the kitchen when I was a kid. Sure, Ma Wilder didn’t like it when that happened, but what bothered me the most is that I couldn’t make it better. No amount of effort would reassemble that glass from the hundreds of shards on the linoleum floor back into the original.

That idea followed me through life: seeing a scratch in a car door, watching the tread wear down on my shoes. These were one-way events. The future seemed to be a one way street. People got older. Paint on the house faded. Keanu Reeves . . . well, I guess not everything ages.

Physicists have a description of this: entropy. Entropy means that things age and wear down. It never happens in the opposite direction.

The reason that this bothered me is that my hobbies were based on the opposite – most things in my life I could fix. When I built a model of an airplane, or a car, or a tank, in that moment it was new I felt that I had made a small piece of perfection. For me, I could look at it and see that moment in time where it would never be better. It was very satisfying to see that model take its final form because I had made the world just a little bit better. I recall holding a finished model in my hands, not wanting to paint it because it looked so perfect. Then after I’d painted it, being pleased because it looked even better.

I hate Bulgarians when they use profanity. Bulgarity is something I just can’t stand.

As I grew older, woodworking as a hobby filled made me feel those same emotions: the smooth feel of freshly sanded wood and then the sight of the grain soaking up the stain for the first time. It would never be more perfect than that moment in time. The second that I finished, it would start aging. Dust and time would take their toll. They’d be dropped. Or things would drop on them. Regardless, without effort, they’d never be the same as that moment.

But at that moment of creation, it was perfect, or at least as perfect as I could make it. Yes, the physicists are right about entropy – everything becomes more disordered over time. But the one thing they don’t mention is that entropy only increases when there’s no energy flowing into the system.

If you look outside, there’s a huge thermonuclear reactor that powers the Earth every day, sending in a really ludicrous number of watts of power. But watts is a silly metric unit, so I changed it to horsepower. It turns out, if you were to measure the Sun’s output hitting Earth in divisions of the Ford™ Shelby® 350’s 526 horsepower engine, it would take 18,377,411,500 (yes, I did the math) of them running for 24 hours straight at 7,500 RPM to equal the Sun’s output for a single day. For those of you doing the math, that’s 2.42 Shelby© engines for each person on Earth.

I think we have figured out the real reason for Global Warming®. The Sun. Or 18.4 billion Shelby’s® running at the red line every day.

If we have another ice age, we could heat the Earth with these babies. In the process, we’d solve the oil glut crisis, and hit full employment just at the Ford® plants alone. Plus I heard their exhaust kills Coronavirus. That’s my green new deal!

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to accept change. A lot of changes that have happened, I didn’t get to choose. Like my back hair, they just happened. That doesn’t make me a victim, though. I get to choose how I feel, how I react to those changes. Sometimes, changes just are. I get to choose, each and every time, how I react to them. For instance, braiding might be a solution.

Sometimes they are shattered glass type changes are like the first bra a young man runs into: it can never be undone. Sometimes, the changes are a block of wood to be smoothed, something that can be made into a temporary little bit of perfection that will enter my life. But I’ll never know what kind of change that it is until I work at it, and see what it is.

Not long after I saw Pugsley’s face after telling him to live with his scratched computer case, I looked it up. There are lots of ways to get at least some of the scratches out of the Plexiglas®. We’ll give it a shot, to see if we can’t make it better.

Spoiler, it might not be perfect, but it will be better. And it will be ours. We’ll own it.

Change is coming.

Deal with it.

Endgame: At Some Point? This has to stop.

“You know, when I was a kid, food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life.” – Soylent Green

I pity the fool that thinks we’re done.

In 471 B.C., a group of soldiers of the Roman Republic broke camp one fine morning. The way the story works out, I’m pretty sure it was a Monday. Their plan was to go attack some smelly hill people under the command of the Roman Consul, Appius. As the horn sounded to leave the camp, the smelly hill people swarmed down on the Roman column from behind. In the defense of the Roman soldiers, this was way before the invention of coffee but after the invention of wine, so they probably weren’t exactly awake.

As an aside, I imagine that the whole of the ancient history can be explained by un-showered illiterate people who were hungover most of the time trying to run things. I guess this description also applies to congress, but at least the Romans dressed well and threw great parties. Can you imagine Bernie Sanders or Adam Schiff or Mitch McConnell being fun at a party?

Perhaps the artist was a talented person who had only ever seen birds with lazy eye and just imagined what a person might look like?

Regardless, the Roman column broke under an attack less expected than the Spanish Inquisition. The Roman historian Titus Livius, more commonly known a Livy, is the reason we remember this battle. Livy wrote that the reason the hill people stopped pursing the Romans were that the Romans were running away faster than the victorious hill people could wade through the dead Romans, but remember, the smelly hill people didn’t have coffee, either, so maybe they just got . . . tired. The Roman Consul, Appius, tried to stop the fleeing soldiers, but wasn’t able to do so, no matter how he tried.

Appius rallying the troops. Colorized.

When the Romans made camp far enough away that the mean hill people weren’t going to attack them, Appius lined all of the soldiers up. Every soldier was asked, “Where are your weapons?” Every standard bearer was asked, “Where is your flag?” Then Centurions that had fled the field of battle were identified.

All of these men were beaten, and then beheaded, because being beheaded wasn’t quite enough. That made a bad morning worse, but it didn’t stop there: of the remaining men, they drew lots. One out of each ten was executed for the overall cowardice of the unit. Why not ten out of ten? There were still lots of smelly hill people around, and Appius might have been faster than some of them but not all of them.

This latter part where one out of ten was killed lives on today in our language as the word “decimate,” from the Latin “deci” meaning “Lucy’s husband,” and the Latin “mate” meaning, “someone an Australian drinks beer with.” But, in a literal fashion it means losing one out of every ten, and has been a military punishment used all the way up into the 20^th century, when the Soviets did it to at least part of the 64^th Rifle Division after a very bad day at Stalingrad in 1943, though rumor has it no one had fun in Stalingrad in ’43. If you don’t believe me, read your “Argentinian” grandfather’s real diary.

I know you’re thinking, “Hey, John Wilder, that’s fun, but why are you talking about dead Roman bird-faced men when the economy is collapsing?”

To be clear, I don’t have any dirt on the Clinton family.

The United States labor force in February 2020 was 164.6 million. In the last three weeks, respectively, 3.0 million, 6.9 million, and 6.6 million people filed for unemployment, bringing that total to 16.5 million newly unemployed. For those of you without a calculator or fingers, that’s just over 10%. And as bad as the rest of the news is, I had to search for it, rather than it being front page.

Think of it, the second worst unemployment numbers in the history of the United States not being above-the-fold page one news. Instead? “Could have been worse. At least the sky isn’t dripping blood and lava.”

Employment in the United States has been literally decimated in the last two weeks. Sure, it’s not as bad as being beaten to death because of those stupid scary hill people who had the bad manners to attack before lunch or being a Russian (or a German) at Stalingrad, but it’s not good.

It is catastrophic. And next week will be more of the same, if not worse.

If we listen to some leaders, it could be “until August,” or if you listen to Bill Gates, “until the entire United States can be vaccinated and Windows 14™ implanted into their spinal column.” Neither of those two are acceptable, especially since some people, like Joe Biden, have no discernable spine.

He sniffs, he sucks, he scores!

But removing those restrictions is important. Even as farmers dump milk that they can’t put into supermarket-sized cartons and break eggs that they can’t put into 18-packs for Wal-Mart, the system is breaking down. At a certain point the economy is important, because a breakdown in the system might be just the key for some of the more fringe elements on the Left to begin to “finally try real communism” in the United States, which will end up with a bigger butcher’s bill than COVID-19 could ever create. Yeah, it’s a worst-case scenario, and I don’t think we’ll go there, but did anyone think the Fed and Congress could imagine $5 trillion dollars in extra debt. In a single month?

The other side of the argument is, “Start everything back up. Now!”

That won’t work, either. You won’t see people crowding into quaint and cramped Italian restaurants, because nobody wants to get Coronavirus from the busboy. People want to see the infection numbers drop before they commit to getting into a stadium with 77,000 other people to cheer on the NFL®. Zero? Nope. But lower than the 30,000-ish daily (hopefully) peak of newly infected we’re seeing right now.

Well, I guess this is the hard part of the Art of the Deal.

And if you really want to see the fireworks over this idea, wander on over to Aesop’s place. Here’s a representative post. The genius (and the real nuclear part) is in the comments (LINK). As you can see, Aesop has a plan. The plan? Probably not. But it’s important, because it’s a plan.

One thing that is owed the people of the United States is the plan, complete with criteria and reasoning. We know, for certain, that after restrictions are removed that more people will die of COVID-19, and that every single death will be placed at the foot of Trump by the Left. Even though we know that collectively the Left couldn’t organize a hunger strike at a fashion show, we do know that they’re aces at blaming everyone for everything, just like The Mrs. blames me for not having the hardwood floor installed six years after having purchased it. Oops. The Mrs. messed up. She trusted me.

We also know that the devastation of job loss and economic collapse will create thousands of ‘silent’ deaths through despair and addiction. Trump will be blamed for that economic loss, as well. There’s no daily graphic for showing economic misery. Well, not yet there isn’t, but as soon as it sells in the news media? Expect it on the front page of Drudge® every single day.

You dirty birds. I have to apologize for this one since Misery the movie came out in 1990, but it’s at least cheap to watch on Amazon®. Which Pugsley and I did, after I wrote this. I guess we’re dirty birds.

When the time finally comes for Americans to emerge out of their basement bunkers fatter than Hillary Clinton after a wine evening with the ladies? And we’re caught up on all of that “must-see TV” (spoiler: fire insurance is a must if you live in King’s Landing®), what kind of a landscape will they see?

Americans are already getting antsy. It won’t last until August. I don’t think it will last past May.

The economy won’t be the same. Small businesses are in really bad shape. Since they don’t have a lobbyist like Boeing®, that steak house on Main Street? Owned by Ma and Pa Steakhouse owners? They don’t have anyone looking out for them. They’ll get loans, sure. But another loan on top of the mortgage on the restaurant? Another loan on top of the bills they have for the steaks sitting in the freezer because no one is coming in? Yeah.

That’ll help. Just like links from the chain of the anchor would help a lifeboat from the Titanic.

I’m an upbeat person, I really am. Work back through my posts, and I defy anyone to find me being downbeat. I’m not. I think that things will generally work out for me, at least until I die. That part will probably suck. Unless Anne Wilkes has a sledgehammer between me and the grave.

But one thing I want to stress is that hope isn’t a plan, and that hope isn’t your friend. Hope keeps you wishing for a future you wish to see, rather than the future you can work to have. If you hope that after Corona-chan is in the rear-view mirror, the United States will be the same, you will be disappointed.

If you hope that the world will snap back into “happy motoring” (thanks, Jim Kunstler) in June, you’ll find that hope will be a straightjacket. Hope is not your friend, to the extent that it allows happy thoughts to replace action.

Don’t hope. Do. And live. Hope is for amateurs and dreamers.

The United States as you knew her in February 2020 is dead. There. You have it. Deal with it and plan your life. You don’t have to be among the decimated.

But know this:

The United States is dead.

Let all of us go and find her. She is there, waiting for us.

Hans Gruber, a Hooters Waitress, Patton, and Health

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. Benefits of a classical education.” – Hans Gruber in Die Hard

Alexander the Great loved chewing bubblegum and conquering Persians. And he’s all out of Persians. And bubblegum wasn’t invented until 2,251 years after he died. Poor Alexander.

One thing that I think holds people back isn’t that they plan, it’s that they don’t plan big enough. I’ve been fortunate enough in my life that I’ve made most of my goals come true. That may sound like a good thing, but is it?

Of course it is. It’s really cool to be able to be successful at achieving your goals, because losing sucks, and if you have great goals you end up with Cash and Prizes®.

But what would happen one day if I looked around and said . . . “I’ve done it. I’ve accomplished everything I’ve set out to do.” What purpose is left to drive me? And if I did reach all of my dreams, what’s left to work for?

An example of exactly this happening is Buzz Aldrin. At the age of 39, Buzz walked on the Moon. The frikking Moon. It’s so difficult and expensive to do, we can’t do it today. Yet Buzz was the second guy to walk on the Moon. As a goal it’s awesome. But like the miniature schnauzer that catches a Humvee®, what do you do once you’ve won? Buzz didn’t have a clue, but he didn’t have a problem asking Jack Daniels™ for assistance.

Another example is General George S. Patton. Patton had been a highly competent general in World War II – daring, audacious, and cromulent. Yet, he found himself in a position where the war that he knew how to fight was gone – it was over. In his diary he wrote: “Yet another war has come to an end, and with it my usefulness to the world.”

Little known fact: French tanks in World War II had rear view mirrors. Those were so they could observe the front line.

But Patton and Aldrin aren’t alone with this conundrum of having their success be the source of their discontent – you see this behavior again and again. It’s a common story in Hollywood: nobody to somebody to discovered cocaine to dead. Or, if the actor has a heart made of titanium, they become beloved actor Robert Downey, Jr. The most interesting part of that is the cocaine, especially to Robert Downey, Jr. Although you might think cocaine comes from Colombia, it really comes from the boredom of having everything you want.

It’s curious that one of the things that keeps us healthy and not developing a liver the size of Johnny Depp is the struggle to achieve a goal. In the absence of meaningful goals, bad things happen to people. They drink too much. They vote for the Left. They get depressed – why get out of bed when there’s nothing to work for?

Goals are important – and there are two ways that you can lose them:

Believe that they are impossible and give up, or
Achieve them all and run out of goals.

Essentially these are the opposite problems – one is believing you’ve got to play a football game against the 1985 Chicago Bears® using 11 toddlers. The other is being on the 1985 Chicago Bears© and playing 11 toddlers.

I know it’s a soccer ball in the trophy. It’s not like the Cowboys® would recognize a real football.

Both are no-win outcomes. Toddlers cannot run a receiving pattern at all. And they cannot hold a block long enough for their toddler-quarterback to get a decent pass off. And if you’re the 1985 Chicago Bears™, what’s the best thing that could happen? You beat a bunch of toddlers. I mean, it’s fun and all, but it’s hardly a greater achievement than defeating the Dallas Cowboys© or a school for ten-year-old girls that lisp.

A goal is required for good mental health. The very best goals require that you work at your limits, pushing yourself to become better. They’re goals that you believe you can achieve. And they’re goals where you can see a path to make them become real. And the best part of the goal is at the end, after you’ve achieved it, if you plan ahead you’ve got another goal waiting.

One of the waitresses at Hooters® lost a leg in a car accident last week. She now has a job at IHOP™.

As I mentioned in Wednesday’s post (Playing The Game, And Goals For Life) I had goals, just not work-related goals. I’ve been working to create some, and I’m not there yet. That’s okay. The goals have to be meaningful. And I’m not working without a net – I have sufficient goals out in front of me that even if I couldn’t work out a work goal, I have plenty of others. Is having a cup of fresh, hot coffee a good goal? Dangit. Back to the drawing board.

So, what about these great men who had everything when they accomplished the goals of a lifetime?

Patton’s uncharacteristic self-pity in the quote from his diary was the result of his achievement – the war was won, and he contributed to the Allied victory on the Western Front. He had fame. Only 11 men had ever had a higher rank in the military. From what I read about Patton, I’m willing to bet that he would have been able to channel himself into a post-war United States without too much difficulty.

Would he have been a politician? Hard to say. It’s unlikely that he would have the desire to speak pretty little lies just to get elected. But you can bet one thing – if he hadn’t died, Patton would have done his level best to shake up the United States. I wouldn’t bet against him.

And what about Buzz Aldrin? Buzz crawled into a bottle and managed to skip most of the 1970’s. Admittedly, that wasn’t a bad decade to skip since not having a memory of the Bee Gees® is something some people would pay for. At some point I believe that he managed to come to a truce with the Moon. He decided to instead focus on making money for himself and to be a spokesman for his cause: “Get your ass to Mars®.” Is being a celebrity spokesmodel as exciting as going to the frikking Moon? Certainly not. But you might as well be comfortable if you flew to the frikking Moon.

Buzz Aldrin sadly got divorced in the 1970’s. Apparently his wife needed space, too.

But Hans Gruber got it wrong. Plutarch actually wrote:

Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: “Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?”

In this case, Alexander is saying the exact opposite of the Hans Gruber quote – that he had a goal to conquer an entire world, but wept because his dream wasn’t yet complete. The moral of the story?

Maybe if Hans knew his Plutarch better he might have not fallen off the Nakatomi Plaza Tower.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Alternative Investments

“Well that’s fantastic. A really smart decision, young man. We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we’ll re-invest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest aaaand it’s gone.” – South Park

I’ll have you know there are at least three things that you can use an empty potato chip bag for.

I was reading Bison Prepper (LINK) (and you should, too) last week when Lord Bison mentioned that stocking up on things that you used regularly as consumables was a survival strategy. It is. Beyond that, it’s also an investment strategy.

In the world of investment, when you buy a stock thinking the price is going to go up, it’s called “going long.” If you were to buy Apple® stock thinking that the world hadn’t had enough iPhones®, iPads©, or iCrap™, you would be “going long.” For this strategy to pay off, when you finally decided to sell Apple©, it would have to be worth more than when you bought it. Buy low, sell high.

Duh.

But I started this post by writing about consumables. What’s the deal? Those aren’t investments, right?

I recalled reading another article a few years ago about a financial writer showing up on the Tonight Show™ with Johnny Carson, so I looked for the interview and found it – a whopping 200 people had watched it, even though it had a glimpse of Susan Sarandon while she was still cute and before her eyes popped out of her head like they were trying to escape. The writer that Johnny was interviewing was Andrew Tobias. Johnny said in passing: “I like how you said that if you had $1000, you should invest in tuna.”

I was really shocked when he said, “Sit on it.”

Tobias responded: “If you want to make 40% tax free on $1000 you can . . . if you buy tuna fish . . . and shaving cream on sale, and get a case discount.” The audience didn’t laugh – they were living in pretty uncertain times and the advice was serious.

Andrew Tobias posted this clip on YouTube®, and was really irritated with himself – since his jacket was buttoned it looked like he was forming a human air scoop as he sat down with Johnny.

Back when this clip was filmed was in the late 1970’s, and the economy was in trouble. The interest rate was high – a mortgage (if you had great credit) would charge you really high rates, between 10% and 14% . . . compared to a tiny 4% or so today. Inflation for nearly everything you could buy was running around 10%.

The entire key to making this odd investment strategy work is that you have to buy things that you’ll actually use. Sure, Wal-Mart® sells five-gallon troughs of flaming pickles soaked in Cheeze® Ballz™, but will you actually eat that?

It was even worse when she flipped off people we passed.

What’s a list of things that most people buy that this would work for?

Tuna (and long shelf life canned food) – especially good if you need to keep your mercury intake up.
Shaving cream and razors – buy extra if your wife is a Kardashian or you’ll look like you’re married to a Chia Pet™.
Various condiments – mustard keeps forever, and can be used to slow Kardashian hair regrowth.
Laundry soap – I have to keep this on the list, my hands are Tide®.
Paper goods – I’ll make a toilet paper joke, since I’m on a roll.
Wheat, rice, and other grains (properly stored)
Honey – They’ve found 5000 year old honey that is still edible, so it probably gets the nod as the most stable food ever. Plus it’s really handy to have local honey if you’re in Russia – I hear it’s made there by cagey bees.
Ammunition – Don’t be like JFK and have this be the last thing on your mind.

Now, you should be smart about this – if your family won’t eat cans of clams, buying them when they’re super cheap won’t really help you because then you have cans of clams that no one will eat, until there’s a food drive, and then you give them the clams. If this sounds oddly specific, well, we don’t have canned clams anymore. Likewise, if you decide to grow a beard, six cases of shaving cream suddenly become worthless until you decide to shave again.

The Mrs. didn’t buy the line, “But she looked so lonely, like she could use a good home.”

And don’t be nutty. If you live in a tiny house, putting several thousand cubic feet of tuna and wheat might not be the greatest idea. Unless you like sleeping on cans of tuna. There’s a limit. When Tobias gave that advice, he suggested that it could be used for $1000 worth of stuff. Today that translates into about $4,500 worth of stuff, if the inflation calculator is to be trusted. That’s certainly a lot, and would translate into 20 or so tons of wheat, but you’d probably have to stack hide some of it under the bed.

One dangerous point: if you buy something, like, say, wine and get a 10% case discount, it doesn’t really help your cause if you drink the wine twice as fast. Or if when you see a Ding-Dong®, you immediately rip open the silvery plastic sleeve and try to suck out the “cream” filling until you are sitting in the corner in a sugar coma. So you might want to reconsider stocking up on things where your self-control will turn a savings into a disaster for your liver or waistline.

9 out of 10 doctors recommend water over alcoholic beverages for health reasons. The other doctor is from Flint, Michigan.

In the 1970’s, you could do this strategy with nearly anything since prices were going up on everything, as long as you didn’t have to borrow the money – interest rates on credit cards were 18%. As opposed to the 18% today. Hmmm.

Regardless, if you have high-interest debt, get rid of it. The sooner the better. The future is uncertain, so getting rid of debt is a certain way to be in better financial shape.

In the last decade, inflation is most prominent in two things that you can’t collect like tuna: health care and college tuition. Oh, sure, you could pre-injure yourself, but who has the time? Likewise, you could avoid steep college tuition hikes by sending your three year old to college, but that would make congress unhappy. They hate competition that’s smarter than them.

The best information that I can find is that 401k plans returned an average of 7% for the last five years. Better than a jab in the eye with a sharpened terrier, and probably still a smart thing to do. I have one. The beauty of mine is that my company kicks in an instant match – and whatever match I get is an immediate return – if the company matches dollar for dollar, it’s an immediate 100% return. If it “only” matches $0.50 on the dollar, it’s still an immediate 50% return. I’ll pay taxes on it after you begin to pull it out, assuming that it hasn’t been confiscated by Bernie Sanders to fund his “waterslides for the poor” initiative.

But the 401k immediate return is hard to say no to.

For me? I’ll take belt sanders over Bernie Sanders any day.

But I can easily make 30% to 40% return tax free on toilet paper, if i buy it on sale, and in bulk. And I’ll never pay taxes on that return. It’s just free money – again, assuming I don’t have any debt.

If I have a mortgage of $100,000 at 4%, and I pay it off, I’ll make a $4,000 return before taxes. Not bad, but after taxes, it’s really as low as $2,000 depending on the rest of my income. But if I get a sweet deal on non-dairy gluten-free vanilla creamer, I get all of the money I save.

There is one other advantage of putting some of your money into stuff that you’d use – you’re making yourself more resilient. If the dollar (the United States one, not one of the phony dollars they use in places like Zimbabwe or Philadelphia) were to weaken, you have investments in things other than dollars. I heard a story of a German boy who got a gold coin as a tip while working at a hotel. After the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, that same German boy was able to buy the same hotel for that same gold coin. Of course then it became a target for B-17 bombers, but who’s keeping score?

Oh, yeah. Everybody. Except the French – they’re waiting for their record to improve.

A French border guard was questioning a German. “Occupation?” “No,” replied the German. “Just visiting.”

The idea that I’m trying to convince you of is that you should think of your average daily purchases as if they were investments – because they are. It’s not only stocks, bonds, precious metals and a 401k that are investments – what you buy on a day to day basis and how much you pay for it can also be an investment.

The other thing that many people overlook when they think of investments is their time. How are you spending yours? You can, like me, spend your time in a PEZ®-addled haze, watching Bojack Horseman™ on an endless Netflix© loop, or you can spend it productively, making yourself better. That’s tax free, too.

Remember, investment means more than stocks and bonds. It’s the things you buy, the way you spend your time, and avoiding B-17 bombers by not buying German hotels.

A.I., Health Care, Google, and Elon Musk

â€œNow, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home and have aÂ heartÂ attack.â€ â€“ Pulp Fiction

I wanted to get a doctor appointment to treat my invisibility, but he said he couldnâ€™t see me right now.

A computer can predict who will die using medical data better than a doctor.Â As of today, like science has no answer as to how California copes with the landfill requirements of Kardashian body hair, science has no understanding of how the computer is doing it.

A gentleman by the name of Dr. Brian Formwalt led a study where approximately 1,770,000 electrocardiogram records were fed into a computer.Â An electrocardiogram is also known as an ECG, for obvious reasons.Â For less obvious reasons, itâ€™s also known as an EKG.Â EKG stands for elektrokardiographie, which is exactly the same thing as an electrocardiogram, but in German.Â If your doctor calls it an EKG, he just might be thinking about expanding his living room.

Always be careful when Germans research expanding anything.

But back to the study.Â So, there were 1,770,000 records, but only 400,000 people in the study, so the average person had more than four records.Â Obviously, these werenâ€™t all healthy people, since I have had (I believe) exactly one ECG in my life, and it was for a pre-employment physical as an astronaut for Wal-MartÂ®.Â At least the recruiter told me Wal-MartÂ© needed astronauts, before Wal-Martâ„¢ cancelled the program when China accidentally delivered 50,000 small space shuttle toys rather than one life-size one.Â I guess thatâ€™s what happens when you buy space shuttles by the pound.

But what is an ECG?

Electrocardiograms are the little machine light that makes the beep sound every time your heart beats.Â The beat is measured by injecting elves into your body that send radio signals to the machine every time that your heart muscle squeezes them.Â Okay, the technical side might be a bit off, but it doesnâ€™t really matter if you or I know exactly how the machine gets the data.Â Itâ€™s just the device that goes beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep to let you know that John Wickâ€™sÂ® dog died.

Cardiac surgeons are the guys you want to see for a change of heart.

Okay, so now you know everything that you might need to know about technology invented in 1895.Â But it now produces an electronic file rather than the old method, where the heart rhythm was tattooed on the backs of ill-tempered Chihuahuas. Â The 1,770,000 records were then fed into a computer that had been previously taught to read ECGs.Â The simple question was asked â€“ which of these patients will be dead in a year?Â I mean it used to make me feel better when my doctor told me, â€œthatâ€™s normal for your age,â€ but then I realized that at some point being dead will be normal for my age.

Since all of the records were over a year old, it was known which of the patients were alive and which were dead.Â Essentially, the doctors were (with very little data) asking the computer to predict the future.Â It did.Â And it did it better than human doctors.Â Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors â€“ they detected no abnormality, yet the computer was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.

Then the next doctor told me it looked like I was pregnant.Â I said, â€œBut Iâ€™m a guy.â€Â He replied, â€œBut it looks like youâ€™re pregnant.â€

It doesnâ€™t surprise me.Â Computers are powerful tools that are great at taking lots of data and being able to compare it quickly.Â The reason that they can do this is they:

Have 100% focus, and if they get a sore throat you can give them Robo-tussinÂ®.
Donâ€™t need to make payments on second wifeâ€™s MercedesÂ® and third wifeâ€™s Lexusâ„¢.
Can retain every previous ECG reading ever seen and instantly recall the pattern if needed, much like I can retain the plot of every one of the episodes of Gilliganâ€™s Island.
Donâ€™t get distracted by how healthy a patient looks or how much kale he eats.

These are great advantages.Â In the future, machines will be able to do things where we may never understand how they made a correlation, or, as in this case, even what the correlation is.Â Arthur C. Clarke Third Law states that â€œany sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magicâ€, and heâ€™s right.Â Health care generates amazing amounts of data, and also outcomes.Â Itâ€™s only a matter of time until some big corporation gets evil . . .

Oh, yeah, GoogleÂ®.Â It bought FitbitÂ®.Â Now it knows what youâ€™re searching for, and it also has a treasure-trove of heartbeat and fitness data.

GoogleÂ® is female.Â It wonâ€™t let me finish a sentence without giving suggestions.

Well, I guess thatâ€™s kind of scary.Â But at least GoogleÂ© doesnâ€™t have access to medical records.Â Oh, Googleâ„¢ has patient names, diagnoses, prescription data, and records from 2,600 hospitals.Â Millions, perhaps tens of millions of patients?Â In (possibly) all of these states:Â Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Maryland, D.C., Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida?

Nah, that should work out fine.Â There isnâ€™t a record of GoogleÂ® ruthlessly monetizing every corner of the Internet not already inhabited by Facebookâ„¢, AmazonÂ® and MicrosoftÂ©.

I think the case is clear for someone to go through this data.Â With only a few records and outcomes fed into it, a computer is better at predicting medical outcomes than a very good doctor.Â If all of the data could be available?Â I think weâ€™d have a legitimate revolution in health care.

Frankly, if we donâ€™t descend into civil chaos, I think that this health care revolution is certain.

But GoogleÂ®?Â Googleâ„¢ has proven itself untrustworthy.

Iâ€™d suggest that we give control of the initiative to a leader thatâ€™s more trustworthy than GoogleÂ®, like Bernie Madoff, but he seems to be otherwise, um, detained.Â And Iâ€™m sure that Jeffery Epstein has better morals, but, um, he seems to have accepted a unique opportunity with the Clinton Foundation.

Heck, letâ€™s give the job to Elon Musk.

Life is Struggle. Struggle is Easier with Panzers. Especially if You’re Struggling with France.

“Your death will stand as a landmark in the continuing struggle to liberate the parent land from the hands of the Roman imperialist aggressors, excluding those concerned with drainage, medicine, roads, housing, education, viniculture and any other Romans contributing to the welfare of Jews of both sexes and hermaphrodites.” – Life of Brian

Fun fact: the first winner of the Tour de France was a Panzerkampfwagen III.

A few years back I worked with a friend named Will. Will was one of the more creative people I’d ever worked with. One particular week, I knew he had a deadline to finish a rather significant project for our boss that Friday. It was Tuesday and I asked him if he had finished it, since he was goofing off enough to make George R.R. Martin’s writing progress look like a cocaine-snorting crotch-weasel. And cocaine-snorting crotch-weasels move pretty fast.

Will responded, “No. I think I’ll start on Thursday afternoon.”

In the conversation that followed Will admitted that work was pretty easy for him. “But if I wait until I have some important deadline, until I’m not sure that I have enough time to finish, then work gets pretty interesting.” He was completely serious. He didn’t really care if he got fired or in trouble – he just wanted life to be interesting. I thought about it, and, looking back, had noticed that I had done much the same thing. In fact, it’s so common, there are thousands of posters and jokes about it. I mean, if they threatened to kill one of my friends each hour I procrastinated, I could probably be pretty productive. But, you know that depends, too: which friend?

In retrospect, this points out that winning doesn’t make people happy, in and of itself. If that was the case, Will would have done his work in advance and goofed off later rather than earlier. That’s simply not the case. Most people do the same and procrastinate in some fashion. Statistics show anywhere from 25% to 95% of people procrastinate.

Procrastination will be my downfall. Emphasis on “will”.

That’s a wide enough range to be utterly meaningless. And since social scientists did the study, I trust it about as much as I trust drunken toddlers run the legislative branch of our government. Congressmen probably would agree with me, since I know that they generally really hate that kind of competition from intellectually superior people who are at least attempting to be potty trained.

Why procrastination?

I think there’s a lot of stress today in the workplace because the work is no longer optimized for the worker, it’s optimized for the lowest common denominator. Most companies want most processes to be able to be done by someone of limited *ahem* intellectual means. That makes the pool of qualified workers so much bigger, and they can pay lower wages. Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that everyone who’s working a job that’s designed for an I.Q. of 85 has an I.Q. of 85 – far from it. But take someone of average (100) I.Q. and dump them in an 85 I.Q. job? There is more than a little potential for boredom.

And with that boredom can come mischief.

Horseplay? Quit foaling around.

The best possible job for anyone has certain characteristics – you know what’s expected of you. You have the tools to do it. Crucially, the job can’t be so easy that it’s trivial. The job should also not be so hard as to be frustrating. There’s that middle road, where you’re learning, where there’s enough challenge to keep you fully engaged in the work. Thankfully, many jobs have a ladder where as you increase your competence, you get increased responsibilities.

The downside, of course, is that the most skilled carpenter might make a really crappy carpenter foreman. The skill set from one spot in the organizational hierarchy to the next step up may not even be remotely related. The idea and general practice of promoting the best carpenter to foreman at least has one advantage – at least we know that the foreman is good at something. That something may not be leading people, but worst case, his people know he’s good with a hammer.

H.P. Lovecraft loved getting hickies, but would only get them from neck romancers.

I’ve mentioned the following story more than once, but I keep bringing it up because it was one of my “a-ha!” moments of understanding in life. In the very old HBO® series Dream On the protagonist was a literary agent. He had a secretary named Toby, who specialized in being unhelpful. In one episode, Toby was at work, playing a supermarket simulator on the company computer. She started as a bag boy.

“Cleanup in Aisle 9!” she screamed at one point in the episode. She showed an intensity playing the game that she never showed on her job. “I’ve been moved to cashier!” She was thrilled at the promotion.

Finally, her crowning achievement. Toby had won the game.

“I did it! I did it! I’m the manager!” she yelled, with excitement.

A long pause.

“Of a supermarket . . .”

Now her voice had dropped into a questioning tone.

“that doesn’t exist.” The last line was delivered with profound sadness and self-awareness that her day had been wasted.

Me: What’s up, glitches?

Toby, the secretary had been thoroughly engaged in the game in a way that was never available to her in real life. I’ve played a few video games since seeing that episode, but for the most part that one line stripped them bare to me: “Manager . . . of a supermarket . . . that doesn’t exist.” It showed that her victory was as hollow to her as the skull of a congresswoman from New York.

Since many jobs have been defined downward in so many ways, I can certainly see the rise of gaming. Gaming sells the experience people want and need. Good games provide a tutorial system to show you how to use the controls. They then run you through a series of challenges that teach you to be more competent with the in-game systems and controls, and provide tools that are in many cases only barely adequate for the job, requiring focus and concentration for you to succeed. Winning the game requires an investment of work, study, concentration, focus, and control. And $60.

Games provide the challenges that work really should be providing to the younger generation. They often have tools and abilities that far exceed what their job should provide. How do they cope? Killing cops, stealing cars, shooting radioactive zombie cowboys. But eventually you have to go home so you can play your game that you paid $60 for.

Gaming is popular because humans are machines built to compete. If life offers sufficient competition to keep us interested? Fine. But if living standards are great and everything is going well, but the people aren’t challenged? Hello, World War One. There was simply no reason for Europe to descend into that madness other than things were going well and the people were rich and bored.

If you survive assault, pepper spray, and mustard gas, are you a seasoned veteran?

Easy success is boredom. What happens to a society, a world, where success is set on easy? It breeds discontent. We see that in Europe now. Germany was nice and happy and reunited and things were going well. Boring.

Here’s an idea! Let’s import a bunch of foreigners. That should spice things up! Foreigners now make up 12.8% of the population, but commit 34.7% of the crimes, according to the Wall Street Journal®. Why do they commit the crimes? I’m pretty sure I don’t care. But why would Germany want to import a population that commits 30% of the murders and over 41% of the burglaries? They were bored. Things were going too well.

Normally, when things were going too well, Germany would fire up the panzers and take a trip west, but that turned out just to be too easy. And I like giving the French a hard time – I get more visitors from Malta (Want Some Short Term Gain and Long Term Pain? Also, Malta.) than from France. And the Germans certainly couldn’t take over Malta, mainly because the distance to Malta isn’t measured in panzers per baguette.

I recently read a book about French war heroes. That was an inspiring six pages.

But if you have the difficulty of your society set too hard? Riots and revolution and turning into a tyrannical dictatorship. The difficulty is no easier, but at least you get brainwashing and random executions, so there’s that.

Western Civilization has been fairly stable is that it’s built on two fairly strong foundations – capitalism and hierarchy.

Crony capitalism is inevitable. If I were to say “in a properly functioning capitalist society” I’d be no better than the Leftist weasels that lament that their particular brand of Hell on Earth has never been tried. No. Capitalism in the United States isn’t fair, and the rich get to make a lot of the rules and restrict competition. But you have the ability to join them. The system isn’t so rigged that mobility is impossible. And you can certainly trace out a comfortable life, especially if you’re born rich.

But capitalism really does provide competition – it’s hard to dominate a system (unless your name is Bezos) that is so huge, just like Jeff’s mistresses butt. It’s a game of nearly infinite complexity. You can play as hard and as long as you want on so many different angles. That leads to stability.

The other factor leading to stability is hierarchy. Men, left alone, will soon develop a hierarchy. They want the hierarchy. It gives them a place. It creates (generally) healthy competition to reach the top, unless your name is Macbeth. That hierarchy is often replicated in structures across the country – from homeowners associations at the very bottom, to Elon Musk at the very top.

Sure, there is only one Elon, but you can live in the middle to upper half of the hierarchy without having to even have a job. There are many activities that pay nothing and lead to huge amounts of mojo. Musician. Biker. Actor waiter.

Blogger.

And, yes, there are days when I put off things, too. I’ve had this one project I need to do at work. I’ve had it since July. It’s due next Friday.

Guess I should be starting that one pretty soon . . . .