Category: Rome, Yet Again

Corona Virus, with a Slice of Recession?

“Global? Oh, great. I’ve doomed humanity.” – Ash Versus Evil Dead

china

I hear it can only be caught from crowds.  Introverts everywhere smiled as they stared at your shoes.

The other day I was emailing back and forth with James M. Dakin, proprietor of the Bison Prepper (LINK).  I mentioned that I’d bring up an old essay we’d both read back when Jim and I went to different high schools together.  That essay was I, Pencil.

I, Pencil was written by Leonard Read and published in 1958.  The essay is available here (LINK).  I, Pencil is a fairly short essay with a fairly long introduction.  Spoiler alert:  Leonard felt that no single person on planet Earth can make something as simple as a boring old yellow No. 2 pencil.  And, he’s right.  A pencil, even a 1958 version, uses components that are sourced all over the globe.  Mr. Read makes a great point – the free market takes components from all around the world to make even the simplest and most mundane object.

pencil

I cut myself with a pencil – I drew blood.

Likewise, the knowledge required to make that pencil is distributed across the globe.  No single person can make the pigments for the paint by milking the Tanganyikan paint turtles, and pick the aluminum from the Australian aluminum trees to make ferrule that holds the eraser on.  And that eraser?  It’s made of rubber from the Congo.  I’d make fun of the Congo, but, really.  It’s the Congo and they have enough problems (LINK to a really fascinating story of crossing the Congo).  Plus the wood is made from sustainably farmed free-range vegan trees in California.  Don’t forget the graphite – it’s from the Sri Lankan graphite glaciers.

The humble pencil is a creature of Globalization.

How much Globalization?  Sadly, it looks like Dixon Ticonderoga used to make most of its pencils in the United States, but now apparently makes only enough pencils here to claim that it actually makes pencils in the United States (LINK).  There were a few pencil jokes I was going to make here, but they’re pointless.

While we talk about globalization as being a new phenomenon, Globalization has been a thing since the days of the American Revolution – the tea that Sam Adams threw in the harbor during the Boston Tea Party came from halfway across the planet.  Even back to the days of Rome, there is evidence of far flung trade – shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean are often found filled with wine or olive oil being shipped across the Empire.  Sadly, the Romans abandoned those cargos after they broke the V second rule of being on the bottom of the ocean.   

ROME

X/X

Globalization provides a huge advantage.  Some things aren’t available around the world – resources come from other places for a reason – corn is imported to the South Pole because corn grows rather poorly in ice.  Shockingly, wood comes from places with trees, and having Saudi Arabia export timber is probably not a great business strategy.  But having Saudi Arabia export oil is.  And having the United States export food also makes sense – we grow more than we can eat.

When done right, Globalization provides the benefits of bringing together resources and knowledge from far-flung corners of the world to meet the needs of people that most of them will never meet.  But Globalization doesn’t consist only of benefits.  With Globalization, Ticonderoga® can decide to make pencils in China.  Hundreds of jobs are then lost in the United States.  A typical journalist would indicate that the people who lost pencil-making jobs should, “learn to code.”  When those same journalists lost their jobs due to Globalization, they cried on Twitter® when told that perhaps it was their turn to #learntocode.  The journalists even got people banned for suggesting they take their own advice (LINK).  Still missing:  journalists who became coders.  Also missing:  journalists with a sense of humor and irony.

Although the United States spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on yellow No. 2 pencils made in China, should pencils stop showing up from China, there won’t be chaos and anarchy in the streets except around SAT® test taking time.  I mean, we all remember the No. 2 pencil riots of 1989, right?

But that is just a humble pencil.  What other things are imported from China (LINK – warning – quite an addictive set of graphs)?

crust2

You can tell that toothpaste was invented in New York City.  Otherwise they would have called it teethpaste.

A lot of the things the United States imports from China are trivial, or convenience items that we could live without:

  • Lots of toys are manufactured in China, including trikes and video game consoles, virtually all Christmas decorations, and (the census has a category for this) practical jokes. Yes, the Corona Virus could directly cause a shortage of fake dog poo.
  • Strollers and toasters are almost all made in China. Why did I combine these items?  No reason.  None at all.
  • Millions of wet heads could result.
  • Artificial flowers. Now here the Chinese are particularly cunning – they’ve cornered the production of not only plastic artificial flowers, but also artificial flowers not made from plastic.  This is a true strategic threat.
  • Nearly every thermos. The United States could bankrupt itself in additional ice costs.  Also, cold soup?
  • 100% of lawn edgers are made in China. 100% of my lawn edger hasn’t left the garage in five years.

Okay.  There is a lot of stuff that comes from China we live without.  Unless you work at Wal-Mart®.  Without those imports to be sold, the impact should be minimal.  Very few people have ever had a life or death situation that could be solved by fake dog poo.  I’m pretty sure this is the first time that last sentence was ever written in the English language.

polystat

Had much super fun time inserting receptacle into hand.

But . . .

  • Nearly every “portable digital automatic data processing machine not weighing more than 10 kilograms” comes from China – all $37 billion worth.
  • 65% of cell phones – $72 billion.
  • 80% of “other radio telephones” $44 billion.
  • And, oops, it seems that 80% of pharmaceuticals and 97% of antibiotics in the United States are imported from China ().

Amazingly, everything that China exports to the United States only amounts to (about) 3% or of the United States economy.  Stopping Chinese imports to the United States would have an immediate impact because of lowered sales regardless of what we import.  But as the bullet points above show, slowdown of imports from China could also have an immediate effect because of what we import.

The third impact would come from what we make out of the things that China sends us.  Things like . . . cars and pickups.  Where does the housing for the alternator in the Ford® pickup come from?  Touch screens?  How many are made in China?  How many days until Chevy™ can’t build a car because it’s missing a switch that runs an air conditioner?  Last time I checked, most cars need nearly 100% of the parts to be called a car.  At least until I work on the engine – then I always seem to have a few bolts left over.

headlight

Not one of my repairs.  But I have used zip ties as a structural material.

The third impact of reducing manufacturing in the United States would be large.  I don’t have precise figures but I can guess – it might be as much as a 10% drop in the economy in the year it happened.  For reference, the Great Recession of 2008 had a 4% drop in economic activity.

I’m probably not the guy to talk about how the Wuhan Flu is going to spread.  I’m certainly not the guy to tell you how to treat it if you get it.  But I do know that something like the shutting down of factories in China can spill over to the United States and cause recessions or worse, even if the Corona virus never became an epidemic here.

Stock up on pencils while you can . . . .

The Lighter Side of the Apocalypse

“It’s the Apocalypse all right.  I always thought I’d have a hand in it.” – Futurama

spider

I make apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.

Wednesday’s are normally a day to talk about wealth, and when you’re prepping, what is wealth?  Is it gold coins?  Is it ammunition?  Is it beer?  Is it a paid off house?  Is it a decade’s worth of PEZ®?

In many cases when I go to other websites that discuss either economic or social dislocation I see people arguing in the comments section about the way to prepare.  In some cases, these arguments have even occurred here at this humble bastion of Internet civility and decorum.  All of the people arguing are right.

No, that doesn’t mean that John Wilder is out there awarding participation trophies for comments, far from it.  The problem is one of definition.  As Tolstoy said in Anna Kareninananana, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  Each of the stunningly attractive and freshly washed (and waxed!) geniuses that comments here has an IQ that would put Joe Biden to shame.  Yet they disagree because they’re talking about different things – each apocalypse is unique in its own way.

charlie

Protip:  if you’re a mortician, tie all of the corpses shoes together – that way if we do have a zombie apocalypse, it’ll be funny.

Therefore, I’ve decided it’s important to talk about the W.I.L.D.E.R. Scale.  It’s like the Richter Scale for earthquakes or the Fujita Scale for tornados or the Joe Biden Scale for Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldiers.  But this one is better, because I came up with it.

Most importantly, what does W.I.L.D.E.R. stand for?  It’s the:

Wilder Index of Life Disruption and Economic Ruination.

See?  W.I.L.D.E.R.  No, wait . . . W.I.L.D.E.R.™  There.  That looks better.

The scale is broken up into a ten point scale, as described below.  Why ten?  Besides being my mental age, it also describes the number of fingers that I had before using a table saw.  It’s also metric.  So, all of you people who live in countries that haven’t nuked Japan (excluding the Japanese) can have this one in metric.  But you have to keep the soccer.

NOTE:  This is not a comprehensive financial guide or preparedness guide.  Depending on the W.I.L.D.E.R.™  level you’re preparing for, this is only the barest bones of a start. 

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 0:  All Quiet

Everything’s fine.  Life is good.  Life is projected to be good – you have a job, it’s fairly secure and has good benefits and it pays the bills, mostly.  Save money in your 401k, grill some burgers and watch the game.  Go back to sleep.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 1:  Local Slowdown

What is it?

A W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 1 is the lowest level of economic disruption – local job loss, minor and non-chronic civil .  It’s not great if you’re caught up in it, but it’s pretty mild.  There may be widespread local job loss – a factory was closed.  It’s not pleasant for those caught up in it, but the underlying economy outside of that local area is sound – you may have a longer commute, but you can get a job.

What to do?

Have savings.  Have minimal debt.  In many cases, you’ll be able to keep doing what you’ve been doing, but you might have a farther commute or reduced wages.  The nice thing about a Level 1 is that if you’re willing to move to a new city, chances are you’ll find something.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 2:  Regional Slowdown

What is it?

One thing that was more common in the past in the United States was a regional level of economic slowdown.  Entire areas would remain stagnant for periods at a time, sometimes years.  In the case of New Mexico, no one really knew it was a state anyway, so we’re not even sure if New Mexico has an economy.  As we have been in the “Boom Everywhere, All the Time” mode for the last 20 years (with the exception of that pesky Great Recession), the economy of the United States seems to be far less regional, but more centered in larger cities.

But regional economic slowdowns do occur – an example would be in the Oil Patch when the price of oil first goes up, and then collapses like my resistance to a steak on Friday night.  The good news is that when the oil price collapses, you can buy a small child in Oklahoma for the price of a cheeseburger.  Not a plain cheeseburger, but the fancy one with lettuce and tomato and onion.  Oklahomans have standards.

What to do?

Have savings.  Have minimal debt.  Have a realistic budget and know the difference between what’s really required and what’s nice-to-have.  Have a house that you can either sell or walk away from.  Be prepared to change careers – have an additional skill that people will pay you for if you have to change careers.  Be prepared to sell a kidney – grow an extra one or two if you can for a rainy day.

philoso

Philosoraptor.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 3:  National Recession

What is it?

Since World War II, most recessions have lasted, on average, a little less than a year.  Recessions mean that, broadly, the economy is shrinking.  Since the entire economic (and banking) system is based on continued expansion and growth, a recession typically kicks people out of work.  During a national recession it’s easier to drive drunk and text Shakespeare from memory while smoking weed than to get a raise.

Even though the economy “recovers” after a year or so, the failures and economic transitions that come from the recession linger in many lives for up to a decade – careers at failed businesses may not be viable anywhere.  If the entire factory is shipped to China, chances are slim that the Chinese will want to import people – it’s not like there are enough bats for everyone.

What to do?

If you are graduating from college, think twice.  People who graduate during a recession and take a job during the recession typically earn less for their entire careers.  Several of my friends went to graduate school instead of into the job market during a recession.  It worked out well for one guy – he became a dictator of a country in the Middle East.  He’s generous, too.  I heard that he last week at the bar he ordered shots for lots of his friends.

If you have a job – do what you can to keep it.  Pay down remaining debt, but understand what bankruptcy might mean if you don’t have six months (or more) of cash to cover expenses.  Stock weeks of spare food, if you can.  If you can’t, start making friends with neighborhood cats.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 4:  The Great Depression

What is it?

The Great Depression, and, to a lesser extent, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the Stagflation of the 1970’s fit here.  These are much greater economic hits than a recession.  They are nationwide, and may threaten the economic collapse.  Expect extreme measures to get the economy working again, many of which will actually be counterproductive, but it’s government, so you expect that.  Banks will fail.  Weird things will happen to the money supply.

What to do?

If you have spare cash, this is the time to pick up great bargains.  As the Great Recession hit, the price of gold dropped significantly.  People who had debt but too many toys had to sell them – it was a great time to buy boats and cars and motorcycles and mistresses and admission for your kid at Harvard®.  Several stocks were selling at ridiculously low prices.

Why was this?  Money had dried up, so there were bargains everywhere.  Of course, I didn’t have enough money then to buy anything.  Except a house.  Before the prices collapsed.  (Spoiler – I got out of that house okay.)

Again, having no debt and cash to cover expenses is key.  Having a spouse who doesn’t work (but could) is also key – in a pinch, they can work, too, or you can sell their kidneys for buckets of wheat.

Diversify your banks.  Diversify how you keep your money – is one currency enough?  Desperate people will be desperate.  Be able to protect yourself and your family.

home

Hey, don’t laugh – I can almost buy two packs of gum in 2024 with the money in that picture.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 5:  National Collapse

What is it?

Governing structures cease to function in a meaningful way.  This is also known as “Tuesday” in most African nations.  Weimar Germany, and the late Soviet Union are examples.  They didn’t collapse in the same way – Weimar Germany collapsed in an explosion of hyperinflation.  The Soviet Union collapse was the collapse of an entire economic system, and now nobody knew who got to take the cow to the dance on Saturday.

What to do?

When nations collapse, their currency collapses.  This always happens.  In surviving any of those collapses, a pocketful of gold was more helpful than a pocketful of paper.  If the nation collapses, it can be difficult to predict the system that will replace it, but they generally are totalitarian strongmen who take over in the chaos after collapse.  The Soviet Union was a happy departure – as rough as it was on the former Soviet citizens, it could have been far worse.  Chef Boyardee was originally chosen as Gorbachev’s replacement, but they didn’t like that he called his secret police the Gazpacho.

Six months of food isn’t extravagant in a situation like this.  Some means of protection are mandatory.  Realize that changes could happen in a second, so plan.  Have friends.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 6:  Civil War

What is it?

The American Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Balkans War are examples of civil wars.  Civil wars are probably more vicious than any other type of conflict.  When the Germans started fighting the French and English in World War I, they weren’t really into it – they even stopped the war for Christmas in 1914.  But when the French finally snapped before the French Revolution?  They were ready to throw down like a rabid epileptic cat in a strobe light store.

What to do?

Moveable assets like gold or foreign bank accounts, a second passport, and lots of lead are preferred.  Be in a place (if you can) surrounded by like-minded people.  It helps if you’ve been there for years before trouble breaks out – being an outsider during a civil war isn’t preferred.  Have food – a year?  Have weapons.  Have a supply of necessary pharmaceuticals if you can.  Be aware that your side might lose the war.  What would that mean?  Oh, and don’t forget to floss.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 7:  International Collapse

What is it?

World War I and World War II are modern examples of this, but earlier examples include the fall of the Roman Empire and the late Bronze Age Collapse (~1200 B.C.) (LINK).  These are collapses that take down multiple nations and re-write borders and history.  They are cataclysmic, and are often followed by the mass movements of people, either as invading conquerors, or fleeing refugees, or in the 2010’s, fleeing conquerors and invading refugees.

target

Some things never change.  Image:  Lommes [CC BY-SA 4.0)]

What to do?

Be away from where the war is happening.  That may be more difficult than it says on the label.  All of the suggestions for Level 6 responses still fit, especially flossing, but finding a place not torn by conflict is exceedingly difficult.  Events have the ability to move very, very, fast.  If you’re in continental Europe, learning German is probably a good idea.  A year of food will likely not be enough.  Lead is recommended.  Gold may or may not help at all.  If you think it won’t, I’ll watch it for you.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 8:  Regional Extinction

What is it?

Regional extinction last occurred when the population collapsed after the Europeans brought disease to the New World.  Smallpox, measles, and high cholesterol (eventually) killed an estimated 90% of the pre-Columbus population through either disease or carryover effects.  That amounted to, perhaps, 10% of the world population at the time.

What to do?

Don’t eat bats.  Don’t welcome Spaniards.

mayans

I fell in love with a calendar.  Together we had a lot of dates.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 9:  Continental or Multi-Continental Extinction

What is it?

This hasn’t happened in recorded history.  There are some scientists that theorize that the supervolcano Tomba that erupted 75,000 years ago nearly eliminated humanity.  How close?  Genetic evidence indicates that it might have been as low as 1,000 breeding pairs of humans.  However, some people think those scientists are bunch of cotton headed ninny mugginses, and say that people were just fine – the restriction in genetic variation shows up because some people were MUCH better at propagating their genes, if you know what I mean.  Also?  Asteroids aren’t your friend.

What to do? 

Be lucky.  Wear clean underwear.  You cannot save enough food for this contingency – it may last years and the task will be nothing less than rebuilding civilization.  Read Lucifer’s Hammer for a lighthearted look at life after a Level 9.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 10:  Planetary Extinction

What is it?

Game over, man.

What to do?

Save money in your 401k, grill some burgers and watch the game.  Go back to sleep.

 

And there’s the W.I.L.D.E.R.™ scale.  Drop me an email or leave a comment if I missed something.

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

alexkerm

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.”

patton

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.

dallas

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.

hooter

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.

buzzmars

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?

gruber

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

Health Goals, Girls in Togas (and a Bikini)

“Trying is the first step toward failure.” – The Simpsons

bojack

I want to get my face on a coin – that way I achieve my goal to help make change in the world.

One thing that I’ve decided to focus on even more in 2020 is my health.  Even if I followed all of Dr. Sinclair’s advice (Living Forever, The Uncomfortable Way), I’m still getting older although my immortality is working out so far.  In some respects I think that we might be in for some very interesting times in the next few years, so being in better shape than I am now would probably be a good idea.  Besides, as Pugsley gets older, taller, and stronger if I don’t do something he’ll wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to break you, little man.”

One way to do that is to keep my life under constant review.  This isn’t new, at all.  The Romans may be dead, but I contend that Roman philosophy dating from the first century A.D. is valid today.  Heck, current American civilization looks a lot like Roman life around that time.  In reading Seneca’s Letters, I saw a conversation where he described checking into a hotel, looking down from the room at the fitness gym next door.  A little later he described that the Romans had regulations on boat speeds in particular areas.  It was like California, but only 30% of the population in Rome were slaves.

hera

Romans on diets were happy when their togas went from L to XL. 

In particular, one of my favorite philosophers of the first century was Seneca.  Seneca was a stoic, but had managed to make a considerable fortune open a chain of all-night toga laundromats.  It was there that the togas were washed with water from the sea tides.  Occasionally, a batch of this water would get too stiff from the added starch used to flatten the togas so they weren’t wrinkled.  That’s where the Roman expression, “beware the tides of starch” comes from.

Okay, but what Seneca really said was:

“I will keep constant watch over myself and will put each day up for review.  For this is what makes us evil, that none of us looks back upon our own lives.  We reflect only upon what we are about to do.  Yet, our plans for the future descend from the past.”

– Seneca

Before I read that particular passage, I had bought a little Moleskine® notebook for just that purpose.  When I said, little, I mean it.  It’s really small – just a little larger than a 3×5 notecard.  It’s small enough I can fit it in my wallet.  I bought it for a very specific purpose:  to reflect on progress towards my goals, specifically my health related goals for 2020.

keeper

Her parents even named her Annette.

Each day I write down several things:  how much and what I ate – if I ate anything (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water), how much I exercised, what weights I lifted and how many repetitions, my morning and evening weight, and whether or not I felt that aliens had put pods near my house that would turn into an exact duplicate of me if I dared fall asleep.  Those are a few of the things that go into the book, though not all of the things I put down.  It doesn’t take particularly long to write it down – just two or three minutes.

I find, for me, the process of writing this data down makes it more real somehow.  And it makes me jump on the scale on days I’d rather not (like after Thanksgiving) so I can get the data.  And collecting that data and writing it down is important.  It makes me face the cold, hard objective truth and holds me accountable in an equally objective manner.

So, I record what I’ve done, and how I’ve lived as it relates to my goals.  When I’m fasting, I write about that progress.  I also record how much I’ve slept, because even though I know that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, I also know that I’m probably not sleeping enough – though I would say that the passengers in my car seem to get unreasonably angry when I try to take a short nap.  “Are you trying to kill us?” they ask.

Worrywarts.  The road is practically straight.

drool

Sometimes I wake up grumpy – other mornings I let her sleep in.

Writing those experiences and activities down also help me celebrate victories – and holds me accountable for lapses.  It also sets up a feedback loop.  Nothing makes the next lunchtime session on the treadmill more focused than seeing that I gained weight the last week.  But present me certainly doesn’t want to make life worse for future me by setting future me up for a failure.  Writing things down changes outcomes.  I certainly don’t want to write down failures.  I mean, one time someone told me I tended to blame others for my failures.  He was right.  I guess I get that from my mother.

But in reviewing the past, and in reviewing my failures, I don’t, and won’t use past failures as a club.  I don’t allow them to poison my future.  Instead, I use failure as a lever.  Since I caused the failure in the first place, more than likely I can solve it.  Unless it involves communism.  Then you’re on your own – you should have seen the red flags.

kim

I’m hoping Kim declares war on his real enemy:  Twinkies®.

I also use this time to reflect on the things I did to take me towards my goals, and the things I did that take me away from them.  It sounds overly simplistic, but most people would be far healthier if they just made several small changes each day about what they eat, how much they work out, how much sleep they get, and what is the appropriate amount to pay for a hooker in Tijuana*.  $3.50 is probably a little low.

Weakness is powerful, so having to write down every time I make an error is one way make me more powerful.  It also strengthens the cause and effect relationship between my action and the outcome.  This further makes me accountable.  Dangit.

In a sense, this is (sort of) a sequel or companion piece to Wednesday (Focus is a Key to Life and Look a Squirrel!), and ties to focus.  You can have a plan, but if you don’t collect data and don’t analyze it regularly, you’ll never focus on it – it’ll be like an objective your boss gives you and then never mentions again – it simply will never get done.

  • If you write about it, you will focus on it.
  • If you measure it, you will manage it.
  • If your ego is against it, you’ll never measure it.

gob

“I’m a failure – I can’t even fake the death of a stripper.” 

I heard an interview with Penn Gillette, the Penn part of the illusionist duo Penn and Teller.  He was talking about his recent weight loss.  He mentioned what he thought his starting weight was, but then added, “I really don’t know how much I weighed at my heaviest, no one does.”  What he was stating is that his ego wouldn’t let him step on the scale at that higher weight – he simply didn’t want to know that answer.  It wasn’t until he’d started losing weight that his ego allowed him to start measuring.

And start managing.  And start tracking.

And start winning.

*I have never been to Tijuana, but I saw a Cheech and Chong movie once where the plot involved them making a van out of marijuana in Tijuana, so I feel I have some expertise.

Success, Fight Club, Strippers and Socialists

“We have just lost cabin pressure.” – Fight Club

wilderclub.jpg

The second rule of Wilder Club is if this is your first visit, you have to comment.

I had a conversation with a friend today.  Oh, sure, I hear you say, what would an iconoclastic iron-jawed individualist with a body odor redolent of medium rare ribeye (with just a hint of pepper) like John Wilder need with a friend?  I guess we all have our little weaknesses.  And dogs follow me.  Because I smell like steak.

In this particular case as with most of my friends, I’ve known this friend for years.  I’ve known most of my close friends longer than The Boy has been alive, and he’s in college now.  It’s nice.  If a day, a week, a month or a year goes by, so what?  We can still restart the conversation where we left off.  It’s as comfortable as watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times.

I’ll make the observation that the only place where the character of people change is in a movie – almost all of my close friends have the same sense of humor and the same sense of values that they had when our friendships were forming.  Absent a significant emotional event, people are a constant.

And I like that.

There is a corresponding trust that comes with being a close friend – honesty.  That’s why when talking with my friend, I really enjoyed the chance to be honest.  Honesty is difficult because it requires that trust, because really honest criticism is hard to take, even when it comes from a friend.  Or a co-worker.  Or a relative.  Or someone you just met.  Or your UPS® delivery guy.  Oh, wait.  Most people don’t like honest.  But my friends do.

This particular friend is really in a good position in life, which seems to be a common pattern with my friends.  He has a spouse that makes more money than he does, and, in general, the household probably brings in enough cash each month so that Nigerian princes send emails to them asking for money.  They’re wealthy enough that they donate to the homeless.  This appears to be a more socially acceptable donation strategy than my “donation to the topless,” scheme.

strip.jpg

Yes, this is the only joke that I’ve ever seen that involves both the Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism and stripping.  I’m sure that Seneca would be proud.

But lest ye want to class my friend as the evil, selfish, wealthy type, he’s not.  The family has a huge number of kids, and it’s a close family.  My friend is constantly taking time off to go to athletic events, and when we catch up, I can sense that the relationship he has with his kids isn’t a surface relationship – it’s genuine and deep.  I can tell, because I know people who understand genuine relationships, who listen to both sides of a family argument – my neighbors.

And yet . . . despite the wealth, despite the great family, my friend feels that there’s something missing.  He is as high as he wants to go in the company he works at – any higher and the travel demands would pull him away from family.  He’s long since mastered his job – there is little that can be thrown at him that he hasn’t seen in the last fifteen or so years.  So, his condition is one of high pay, mastery of work, and, improbably, discontent.

John Wilder:  “You realize you have an advantage that 99% of people would die for.  You’re financially secure.  You can quit your job anytime.  Literally, you could walk in to your boss this afternoon and quit.  Your lifestyle wouldn’t change a bit.”

Not Elon Musk:  “Yes.”

Unlikely Voice of Wisdom John Wilder:  “So, what is it you want to do?”

Really, I Promise It Isn’t Elon Musk:  “I need to think about it.”

Channeling Tyler Durden From Fight Club® John Wilder:  “No.  If you think about it, you’ll end up doing nothing but thinking about it.  You have to do something.  Physically start it.  This weekend.  I’ll check back on Monday to see how you did.”

There is a scene in the movie Fight Club™ where Tyler Durden holds a gun to the head of a liquor store clerk.  If you haven’t seen the movie, I strongly suggest it.  I probably watch it once a month while I write – I think there are few movies that communicate the human condition in modern life so well.

clerk.jpg

Pugsley doesn’t miss many school days.

JACK, in voiceover:  On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

CLERK:  Please… don’t…

TYLER DURDEN: Give me your wallet.

Tyler pulls out the driver’s license.

TYLER:  Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.  A small, cramped basement apartment.

RAYMOND:  How’d you know?

TYLER:  They give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.  Raymond, you’re going to die.  Is this a picture of Mom and Dad?

RAYMOND:  Yes.

TYLER:  Your mom and dad will have to call kindly doctor so-and-so to dig up your dental records, because there won’t be much left of your face.

RAYMOND:  Please, God, no!                            

JACK: Tyler…

TYLER:  An expired community college student ID card.  What did you used to study, Raymond K. Hessel?

RAYMOND:  S-S-Stuff.

TYLER:  “Stuff.”  Were the mid-terms hard?  I asked you what you studied.

JACK:  Tell him!

RAYMOND:  Biology, mostly.

TYLER:  Why?

RAYMOND:  I… I don’t know…

TYLER:  What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel?

Tyler cocks the .357 magnum Colt© Python™ pointed at Raymond’s head.

TYLER:  The question, Raymond, was “what did you want to be?”

JACK:  Answer him!

RAYMOND:  A veterinarian!

TYLER:  Animals.

RAYMOND:  Yeah … animals and s-s-s —

TYLER:  Stuff.  That means you have to get more schooling.

RAYMOND:  Too much school.

TYLER:  Would you rather be dead?

RAYMOND:  No, please, no, God, no!

Tyler uncocks the gun, lowers it.

TYLER:  I’m keeping your license.  I know where you live.  I’m going to check on you.  If you aren’t back in school and on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead.  Get the hell out of here.

JACK:  I feel sick.

TYLER:  Imagine how he feels.

Tyler brings the gun to his own head, pulls the trigger — click.  It’s empty.

JACK:  I don’t care, that was horrible.

TYLER:  Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessell’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.

greta.jpg

How dare you . . . make Greta uncomfortable.

And it’s true.  I tend to think that everyone’s life would be a little better if they had Tyler Durden to be a life coach, to ever so gently coax them to be the best they can be while holding a .357 magnum Colt® Python™ to their head.  That seems to be a bit frowned upon, so that leaves my friends with me.  See how lucky you are?

In my role as Dr. Durden, I’ve noticed that there’s a problem some people have.  It’s being too clever.  It’s thinking.  How do I know?  It’s my problem that I try to compensate for by writing and doing.  If I think about doing something, it will never get done.  I keep thinking about fixing the bannister that broke when we moved in to the house a decade ago.  It’s never been high on my list, since people falling down stairs is funny, with extra points if they are really old.  But thinking about doing something never accomplishes anything.

If I plan to do it, it will get done.  Half of my time driving to and from work on a day I’m going to write a post, I’m writing it in my head, selecting jokes, thinking of themes.  It’s also spent thinking of how I’m going to connect the idea I want to share with students who might be forced to read this post when Mrs. Grundy tells them to compare and contrast my work with that poseur, Mark Twain, in high school in the year 2248 (that’s when Kirk will be a sophomore).

driver.jpg

Okay, generally on my drive to work I have about five or ten minutes between cars, so it would take several hours to get a group of cars behind me like that.  But a man has to have goals!

It may look like I’m driving to work, but I’m really plotting out what I’m going to write about.  To be honest, it sometimes takes both lanes to do that.  I wish the State Patrol® would be a little more understanding to artists like me.

Thankfully, The Mrs. is.

The Mrs. and I had a conversation the other night.  It may or may not have involved wine – I’m not telling unless I’ve been subpoenaed and am under oath to a House subcommittee.  Actually, it wasn’t so much a conversation as The Mrs. describing to me how she felt about this little project I publish three times a week.

I don’t make any money on this blog, though I’ve made clear since day one that can change at any time.  I have plans for several (eventual) ways to do that including adding subliminal messages causing you to want to pay for my health insurance.  It looks like it’s already worked for Bernie Sanders.

bernie.jpg

In a socialist paradise all bloggers make $450,000 a year, right?  But I worry that for this Christmas we won’t have an Elf on a Shelf, we’ll have a Bernie on a Gurney.

No, at this point, writing is a hobby.  But it’s a hobby that takes over 20 hours a week, sometimes closer to 30 hours.  I still have a job, and I won’t stop interacting my family, so most nights I won’t even start writing before 9pm.  A lot of that time comes from time I’d normally be selfishly engaged in what you mortals call “sleep”, but a chunk of that time comes directly from time I’d be spending with The Mrs.

When I’m writing, I’m simply not available.  I’m writing.

The Mrs.:  “You know, I would certainly have an issue with the time that you spend writing, if it weren’t important.”  There was more to this, where she detailed the number of hours I spend.  But I keyed in on the word “Important.”

I was a little surprised by that.  “Important?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes.  I can see that what you’re writing about is important.  People need to hear it.  So keep doing it.”

Okay, that proves she never reads this stuff.

But as I talked more with my friend, the concept of “meaning” came up.

My Friend Who is Really Most Certainly Not Elon Musk:  “So, it’s about meaning?”

Suddenly as Wise as the Roman Philosopher Seneca John Wilder:  “That’s silly.  You don’t go off chasing ‘meaning’ in your life.  Pick out something you like to do, and do it.  But figure out how to make it important to other people.  You like to woodwork, right?  You say you never have time to do it.  Do it this weekend.  Film it.  Put it up on YouTube®.  I’ll be checking up with you on Monday.”

I asked myself, why is my friend working at all?  I think because he feels he’s supposed to work.  That having a job is a rule, it’s what he’s always done.  The problem that many of us have is that we tend to create rules where there aren’t any rules.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps we need to justify what we do.  Perhaps it’s like my two important rules for life:

  1. Don’t tell everything you know.

Success?  My friend is already successful in most ways a person can be successful.  Their life is really good.  I told them, directly, “You’ve been given so many gifts.  If you don’t make something special of your life, you’re wasting it.”

Interestingly, this applies to you, too.

And me.

How will your breakfast taste tomorrow?

Too Big To Fail: Banks, Bikinis, Toddler Throwing and an Amy Schumer Joke

Stan:   I got a hundred-dollar check from my grandma and my dad said I need to put it in the bank so it can grow over the years.

Bank Manager:  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

itllbefine.jpg

I hear the Slovakian banks moved to digital currency.  They ran out of Czechs.  It’s okay, it’ll be fine.

Last week we talked about the Angle of Repose (The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Angles of Repose, Virgin Physicists, Economics, and Population).  The conclusion, stated briefly is that our economy and indeed our civilization can be compared to a sandcastle.  Like a sandcastle, the economy is built out of a myriad of individual particles, glued together by innovation, hope, aspiration, and desire to watch free naught movies on the Internet.  Like a sandcastle, if the conditions aren’t just right, the walls of the sandcastle can crumble in a growing cascade.  An even faster way to make the castle fall is to drop a shot put on it.  It’s especially fun if the five year old that made it is still working on it when you drop the shot put.

fallen.jpg

Sadly this Canadian shot putter was disqualified after it was identified she was taking age-accelerating drugs to age more quickly so she could qualify for the Senior Olympics®.  Her only defense was, “I identify as 86 years old.”

Unlike a sandcastle, our economy isn’t made of grains of sand of rough uniformity.  If the average person’s net worth of $97,000 was a single grain of sand weighing 0.011 grams, Jeff Bezos’ $110 billion dollars would be a 28 pound steel ball, the perfect size to ruin a kid’s day.  But even that isn’t large compared to a bank.  JP Morgan’s® $2.5 trillion dollar assets when compared to that single grain of sand would weigh nearly 624 pounds.  If I had to pick between lifting 624 pounds of steel or 624 pounds of butane, I’d choose the butane.  Why?  It’s a lighter fluid.

toddlertt.jpg

I imagine this toddler weighs about 28 pounds.  It’s a perfect competition size toddler, depending on the shape of its head, of course.  Sadly, I can’t throw one farther than about 35 feet.

The size and scale of international banks today is huge, and I’ll admit when I put together the weight comparison above, it was the first time that the vast scale of the international banks was even slightly comprehensible, though mind boggling – it takes me from a weight I don’t notice, to a weight that I’d have to use both arms to lift.  Okay, I’m lying.  Maybe if I put my back into it I could lift it with one arm.

worldstrong.jpg

Thankfully, my net worth actually weighs less than pocket lint.

In the 1984, a bank named Continental Illinois® was failing.  As the cratering price of crude oil hit, the bank experienced massive losses.  Fearing a bank collapse, depositors pulled their money, but of course the bank had loaned it out.  Continental Illinois™ was bailed out through a combination of cash infusions ($5.5 billion), emergency loans ($8 billion), and change the Federal Reserve® found in Paul Volker’s couch cushions.  In congressional hearings about the matter, a congressman noted that Continental Illinois© was “too big to fail.”  The phrase had been used before, but this time it stuck – a Google™ search for “too big to fail” brings up about 5 million pages, most of which are about Amy Schumer.

The reason that they bailed out Continental Illinois© wasn’t that they were good natured.  The reason that the Federal government bailed out Continental Illinois was that they were scared to death – they had no idea what would happen if they just let the bank fail.  Would it bring down the economy?  No one knew – and just like wondering exactly what’s in a hot dog, no one was willing to find out.  And don’t tell me what’s in a hot dog, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.

What were people worried about?

hindenbank.jpg

I asked my bank teller to check my balance, and he tried to push me over.  Nah, I’m kidding.  He threw a snake at me.  I should stop keeping my money at the river bank.

A bank failure to most people is nearly risk-free.  The FDIC® (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation©) extends insurance to cover more money than the average family is worth.  But a small business or farm, even one that doesn’t have a multi-million dollar net worth, might have enough money moving through the account that a bank failure might trigger that small business to fail since its cash was . . . gone.

If that business had debts to other banks, it would then be in default, and cause a loss at the next bank.  If the next bank doesn’t fail, there are still problems.  The next bank will lend out money only to customers that it knows will pay it back – if it has sustained losses it won’t want to make loans that are risky.  A small town farm bank failure is bad and might devastate a community if it causes other businesses to fail.

When Continental Illinois™ started to fail, it was the seventh largest bank in the nation.  No one had any idea what its failure would do to the country, so it was not allowed to fail.  The government looked for someone to buy it, but they had no luck – like a Leftist spending his own money, a buyer for a massive bank that is failing is fairly difficult to find.

But let’s go back to JP Morgan®.  How did it get so big?  If you rewind the clock, the average size of a bank used to be pretty small, operations used to be limited to a single state, and there were no branches – each bank in each town was an independent entity.  Sure, one person might have owned more than one bank; even dozens of banks.  Each bank, however, had to stand on its own.

With that kind of small exposure in both size and location, banks limited the damage that they could do if they failed – over 9,000 banks failed during the Great Depression.  Sure, that was devastating, but I would argue that the failure of just one bank, JP Morgan®, would far exceed the damage that was caused by the failure of those 9,000 banks, each of which certainly weighed less than a toddler.

bikinibank.jpg

I was going to add transparent bikini graphics, but The Boy went off to college so you’ll have live with these. 

Is there an argument for large banks?  Paul Krugman thinks so.  And if Paul Krugman is for it, I’m probably against it.  If Paul Krugman said that Wilder, Wealthy and Wise™ was his favorite blog?  I would argue with him, even if it involved a knife fight, which would probably work out okay for me because he’s old and weak and I smell like hamburger.  Krugman’s argument is, more or less, that bigger banks are more efficient so we should regulate them properly and let them live.

My counter to Krugman’s drivel is that is that the banking regulators are not working for the Federal government, they are working for the banks.  Most banking regulators want to work for the big banks, because that’s where the money is.  Actually regulating the bank would doesn’t look good on your resume.  This isn’t my imagination:  I actually had this conversation with a banker who had been a regulator.  His conclusion was the only real way to get fired as a Federal banking regulator was to do your job.  Come in late?  Go to sleep at work?  Surf porn on the Federal computers?  All that’s fine.  But ask Wells Fargo® to follow the law?

I smell a firing.

Big banks create a risk to the very existence of our current economic system since they have the unique ability to take profits when things are going well, but if they screw up?  You and I are paying.  I rate this risk as not as bad a risk as the drunken sailors masquerading as politicians in Washington, but still a pretty big risk.

From the above, I think it’s obvious what the downside is to having larger banks, since they risk our economy as a whole, and that’s not even mentioning Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs), or fiat currencies (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse).  And, make no mistake – the failure rate for all businesses nears 100% over a long enough timeline.  Just ask Tyler Durden.

wwtwd.jpg

I Am Joe’s Inflamed Uvula.

What’s the downside of breaking banks into smaller units, and perhaps limiting their capitalization to what Jeff Bezos keeps in his “spare mistress” account?

  • First, there’s more overhead. You need competent people to run the various independent branches, but what you get is the resiliency of an inefficient system – the risks that will cause all of the banks to fail are remote.  So, breaking apart banks would lead to more jobs for competent people.  Yes, that would lead to lower profits for the banks.  Yes, I’m a capitalist.  No, that’s not bad.
  • Second, if they’re limited to geographic regions, the banks that are in regions that might become economically depressed would have less money to lend. That’s probably okay.  I’m pretty sure I don’t want money from my state going to those heathens in Rhode Island, so I’m okay keeping it nearby.  Besides, if there are good opportunities here?  Money will flow in.
  • Third, smaller banks could That would make investors more likely to keep an eye on their investment.  And if bad things happened?  They’d be limited to failures that we could deal with, like forgetting to pay the cable bill.  Somebody nag me on Friday.
  • Fourth, it would be harder to borrow a few billion dollars. Okay, this can be solved several other ways for the legitimate requests to borrow a billion dollars, like needing to buy a first edition .

Even with smaller banks, some of the conveniences like ATMs could still remain in business – that sort of networked information exists now, so it could exist in the future.

I brought up the example of Continental Illinois© bank.  The name wasn’t at all familiar to me, but I did look up what happened to them.  Continental Illinois® was sold to Bank of America™ in the 1990’s.  Bank of America© is the second largest bank in the country.

How to solve the problem of too big to fail?

Make the too big to fail banks even bigger.  Is that a problem?  Is dropping a 624 pound shot put on a sandcastle a problem?

Nah, it’ll be fine.

Be Prep-ared

“Be prepared, son.  That’s my motto.  Be prepared.” – The Last Boy Scout

prepare.jpg

The most prepared person is my friend, Justin Case.

When I was a kid, camping meant backpacking.  I had the good fortune to live in the mountains, where it my daily view waiting for the school bus was what people took vacation from work to see.  Heck, it was valuable enough to them that they would buy an SUV to haul a miniature home to come and experience for five days.  But to me, that wasn’t camping, that was daily life.  It’s amazing how we can become bored by splendor when surrounded by it daily.

Backpacking was camping.  When you camp as a backpacker, everything that goes up the hill goes on your back.  You are the SUV, which may explain why Pop Wilder put a bumper sticker on my butt.

bumper

Okay that wasn’t it, but if it were 2019 the sticker would say, “Hey, vegans, you can thank me for killing that cow that was eating all of your food.”

When you backpack for more than a day or so, you really learn what’s essential.  The Boy and then later Pugsley joined the ranks of a familiar organization in hopes of becoming . . . “A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts®” so that they can avenge me after the communists put me in the drive in movie camp.  I just know that there won’t be Raisinettes©, because communists hate Raisinettes™.

When The Boy first joined Cub Scouts® (the younger version where parents have to camp with the kids), my brain still equated camping with backpacking.  The tent I bought for camping with him?  A good four-man backpacker.  If you know anything about tents, you know that a four man tent is not big enough for four normal-sized humans.  In fact, it was just big enough for me and The Boy and our gear, and it was one you had to get on your knees to crawl inside.  To sleep on?  Self-inflating sleeping pads.

Honestly, I’ve never camped with anyone that I wanted to kill more.  When I was sharing the tent with him, every time I’d start to drift off to sleep, The Boy would shake me back awake.  Every time.  Why?  Because, allegedly, I would snore.

If you have never spent two nights camping with someone who intentionally wakes you up just as you’re getting ready to go into deep sleep, you may not understand that’s the sort of thing that makes you think . . . “You know, The Mrs. could produce a decent copy of The Boy that looks a lot like this one.”

wolverine.jpg

I shouldn’t make too much fun of Charlie Sheen – I hear he’s got a new show set for later this year – Two and a Half Personalities.

Everything I brought camping for that first Scout© trip including the tent and cooking gear fit into one decent-sized backpack.  Surely everyone else had the same idea about camping, right?  No.  When I got there I saw that spacious, palatial multi-room tents with cots, tables, and even sinks was the norm.  On one camping trip, the leader even brought a gasoline-powered electric generator for powering his tent.  I’m pretty sure at least one family brought a television, but since I was sleep-deprived, my memory might be suspect.

It was at that point I realized that outside of where I grew up, camping meant “living in a fabric palace with every possible amenity known to man.”

Yikes.  Eventually I gave up and bought my own fabric palace for camping with the The Boy and Pugsley when they were Cub Scouts©, though I stopped before we bought a generator and sink.  But when The Boy moved over to the actual Boy Scouts®?  Things changed.

The idea of camping there was that the boys (not the adults) were responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, equipment, and logistics.  They planned the meals, they selected the cooks, they divided the work, and nobody considered a fabric palace with a generator – it was not quite the austerity of backpacking, but it was close.  One especially nice rule was “no phones” for the kids.  As I was an adult leader in this elite paramilitary organization, I got to go camping quite a lot – sometimes over 30 days a year.

packing.jpg

My first trip, packing took an hour.  My most recent trip, packing took about five minutes – I’ve discovered that if I forgot it?  I can live 48 hours without it.

I experimented with gear – what gear made sense, what gear should be thrown out.  Thirty days of camping gives a lot of testing time, and do it over the course of several years?  Soon enough you’ve put nearly 150 days into the field for gear testing.  I learned what was useful, and what was useless.  Probably the best lesson was about things that were sometimes useful.

What was always useful?  The list is in (more or less) order from “never give up” to “might give up based on the trip.”

  • Clothing – Fully half the days of the year near Modern Mayberry, if you chose to go camping and it wasn’t raining, you’d need no more than your camping clothes to sleep. Might it be a chilly night on some nights?    But you’d be okay.  We often forget that the first line of defense against everything from sunburn to bugs to cold weather that we have is our clothing.  Clothing also keep us from getting arrested, or at least that’s what my probation officer keeps saying.
  • Shoes – Foot protection is important – no protection on the feet, you won’t be moving around. Sure, people in the distant past . . . yada yada.  It takes years to build up the appropriate calluses on your feet to walk around.  Having good shoes is just a trip to buy them.
  • Tent – I know one leader that made due with a tarp. I know one that only used hammocks.  I liked actual tents – it keeps the bugs out.  I eventually caved, and in car camping I use a tent that I can stand up in.  I know the others could work for me, but that’s what I chose because I’m old.  It was also good down to -15°F (-456°C).
  • Knife – I always carry one. Can cut a rope, I can cut dinner, but I just can’t cut the mustard.
  • Matches – In the winter, staying warm is a must, and fire can cook food.
  • Sleeping Bag – I take a sleeping bag, even in summer – worst case, you can sweat all over it.
  • Cot – I experimented with sleeping foam, and inflatable sleeping pads, but a cot is about the best. Sleeping pads are a pretty close second.
  • Coffee Cup – Yes, for coffee. But also for soup.  Or stew.
  • Bowl – I started out using a fancy mess kit. I know one person who used a Frisbee®, but I just settled on an unbreakable ceramic bowl.
  • Cookware – The bowl could double, if it was metal. I’m all for having both a bowl and a cooking pot.
  • Spoon – Spoons are like bowls on the end of sticks. Amazing that people would invent a smaller bowl to empty a larger one.
  • Book – I always took one, I always read one. Nice during down time.
  • Toilet Paper – Better than using poison ivy leaves.
  • Folding Chair – Sure, silly, but it was always used. You can only stand so long.  A stump works, certainly, and when I backpack we’d pull up a log.  But chairs are nice.
  • Light for Inside the Tent – Mainly useful for reading the book.

useless.jpg

This was nearly as useless as that glass hammer that I got from E-Bay®, or that wooden frying pan that I got from Amazon©.

What was sometimes useful?  The order is less useful here, since depending upon weather or other conditions, some of these would really be essential.

  • First Aid Kit – I still always carry one, though mine is a bit more tricked out than an over the counter version – I’ve added Super Glue®, butterfly bandages, a foam splint, and blood clotting agent. It’s hard to be John Wilder:  Civil War Surgeon® without a bag tools.  Did I mention I have a knife?
  • Bug Spray – Depending on the time of the year, this is really nice to have. I tried not showering as an alternative, but that only works as a people repellent.
  • Rope – Paracord is about right – you could always use more if you were hauling something heavy, but we never ran into any situation where paracord wouldn’t work.
  • Rain Poncho – Useful when it was raining, in theory. In practice, when it’s raining and 80°F out, it’s not required unless you happen to be made out of sugar.  When it’s raining and 40°F out?  It’s a necessity.
  • Water Bottle – Why isn’t this useful for every trip? Well, most places we went had water.  If they didn’t?  We brought it.  If unlimited fresh water wasn’t the case, I’d revert to my backpacking days where a water bottle and a water filter were near the top of the list.
  • Saw/Axe/Hatchet – Most fires that we made were out of small wood that we could easily break by hand. We used saws/axes/hatchets more for making things.  In deep winter camping, we’d probably want better firewood, so a saw becomes more useful.
  • Map – This is listed in “sometimes useful” but only when we taught map reading. We never went any place so far off the beaten path where a map was required.  If you didn’t have a cell phone?  This might be useful once again.
  • Frisbee/Football – Good times. And football doesn’t mean soccer ball.
  • Flashlight – When I started camping, I thought this was essential. Between firelight, moonlight, and starlight, rarely did I use a flashlight after the first thirty days.
  • Cell Phone – Okay, I’ll admit I surfed Drudge® while I was camping. And it’s great to have as an emergency backup, if there’s signal.

bear.jpg

I always carry a knife when I have a flashlight – you won’t see me taking a stab in the dark.

What was rarely (if ever) useful?

  • Compass – Modern GPS technology and cell phones have made this of similar usefulness as a buggy whip. I have several.
  • Bear Spray – Not very good for spicing up my chili when camping. When hiking, scouts make enough noise that bears are afraid.  And my (alleged) snoring would keep any bear away at night.
  • Wallet – Nothing useful there for camping, unless they need to identify the body.
  • Keys – Useful before and after camping. Not so much during.

A camping trip isn’t the end of the world, so there are things that we plan to take with us that we consumed during the trip:

  • Water – Needed. Unless you’re a kangaroo rat.  Clean water is of great importance, but maybe we take it for granted – and remember, it’s no substitute for beer.
  • Food – Unless you have a medical condition, over the course of any short duration, food is not a necessity, it’s a comfort item. We were comfortable campers.
  • Paper Towels – 99% of cleanup is done with paper towels. Not a necessity.  But nice.
  • Soap – To wash dishes. Or yourself.
  • Trash Bags – In a pinch, you could use them for rainwater collection, as a poncho, or weave it into a plastic rope to let yourself out of a psychiatric prison again. We just put trash into ours.

“Here’s a lesson to test your mind’s mettle:  take part of a week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantly in shabby clothes, and ask yourself if this is really the worst that you feared.  It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead, for when Fortune is kind the soul can build defenses against her ravages.  So it is that soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight and exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes they won’t grow tired.”

– Seneca the Dead Roman Dude

“It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress.  If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”

– Also Seneca the Still Dead Roman Dude

seneca.jpg

Roman algebra was boring.  X was always equal to 10.

One of the best parts about camping is that it allows you to walk away from 2019.  It allows you to leave behind the past and live with virtually no technology younger than 70 years old.  Camping pulls you away from most of the meaningless parts of our world, and it’s interesting to see people cope with moving from an environment that manages to provide amusement on demand to one where high-tech includes propane stoves and fire.

One particular campout brings this one to mind – an adult was continually whining about the weather.  Sure, it was November, and there was a constant rain.  Thankfully, we had an adult whining about the weather every chance he got.  Since the boys were off doing their own thing, they weren’t exposed to the negativity – the boys loved it, cooking oatmeal in the rain for Sunday breakfast.  Several thought the campout was one of the best they’d been on.

The lesson?  You don’t need most of the things you think you need, not even good weather.

Things that you need that you don’t think you need:

  • Practice – spending that amount of time away from a house taught me a lot about what I need, and what I don’t.
  • Mental Toughness – The life we have on a daily basis isn’t really normal, especially when compared to the lives people have lived throughout history. We live in luxury, with a great freedom from want, and ample food for everyone:  whether it gets distributed is another matter.  Living without these luxuries for a week and learning you can be happy with less is a great way to prepare for emergencies.
  • Amusements – Simple things like a deck of cards can help with the withdrawals from 2019. The next step is meaningfully connecting with people.  Crazy idea, that one.
  • Purpose – Understand why you’re doing all of this. Having a purpose that’s beyond Facebook® is priceless.

Here are some lessons I picked up from Hurricane Ike:

  • 90%+ of people don’t prepare at all until the last minute.
  • Unless you’ve practiced, you’ve forgotten something. I forgot propane for the gas grill, my neighbor had some.  He forgot gas for his car.  I had some.  Even trade.
  • Unless your family has practiced, they’ll be mentally weak. Even just a few days without power had people missing it, and in the aftermath of the hurricane, it got hot.  With no air conditioning, Houston was just plain horrible.  None of us were used to that.  Another week of no power and I’d have shipped off the rest of the family to a hotel.

The basics of survival are simple:  Air for breathing.  A place to get out of the cold.  Water.  Eventually, food.  Survival is hard to practice for – taking a few days off and camping is easy.  Taking a month off is harder, and taking a year off is nearly impossible for anyone who has bills to pay.  But if you’re ready for a disaster that lasts a month?  You’ve already gone to the head of the class.  And if you’ve learned to not murder your child because he wakes you up every time you start to snore so that sleep is impossible?

Well, that’s a positive, too.

Remember:  just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it won’t.  And when you’re prepared for a range of outcomes, both physically and mentally, you’re ahead not of 90% of the population, but 99%.  What will the future bring us? That’s a big question, but if you prepare, remember that practice is a part of the preparation.

As Concerned American always notes over at Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), “This material will be on the final exam.”

The Roman Emperor, The Navy SEAL, Elizabeth Warren, and Your Future

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

aureliusheaven.jpg

Jimmy Page could NOT believe it when he found out that Marcus Aurelius would be available as a lead singer.

I know what you’re saying, “John Wilder, how can you be so freakin’ funny three times a week every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?”  The answer is simple – my goal to be the funniest person on the Internet, with the exception of those anchors on CNN®.  I mean, how do they keep a straight face?

That goal requires work.  Really.  Oh, sure, “work” includes researching things I’m interested in anyway and (sometimes) drinking a glass of wine or two while I work on punchlines.  But I won’t hit publish or stop writing until it’s done.  And done means I’m happy as a twit in a toga with a toupee.  Speaking of  noble noggins in nighties, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (notice that smooth transition?) said:

Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you.  Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that still might happen.  Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself whey it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.

Whenever I quote him, I remind everyone that Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome while it was still at the height of its power.  This man had the freedom to make decisions on the literal life and death of citizens and non-citizens alike.  He was, no joking, the most powerful man in the world.

obimarcuskenobi.jpg

What’s the fun of telling the Stormtroopers© that “These aren’t the droids® you’re looking for,” when the Stormtroopers™ work for you?  It’s like they were thinking, “Okay, play along, the Emperor is doing cosplay again.”

But despite this worldly power, Marcus took the time to write down his personal philosophy.  It wasn’t to pass down to posterity, it was for him.  His book is called Meditations because these were the things he meditated about on a daily basis.  These were the problems and doubts and issues he dealt with in his everyday life.

meditations.jpg

You can tell this was the first page of Meditations – later on Marcus used glitter pens and stickers.  The historians were so happy when the found the key to the little lock on the diary.

When I was younger, I thought that the solution to my problems existed outside of me.  I thought that if I could get more power, I could be happy.  If you think being more powerful will automatically ease all of your worries and concerns, Marcus Aurelius is proof that power won’t help you in that way.

Sure, Marcus didn’t have to worry about making a mortgage payment or about not getting a tasty chicken sandwich because he showed up at Chick-fil-a® and forgot they were closed on Sundays, but the passage above shows that the decisions of running an empire and planning military campaigns were still overwhelming and stressful.  While outwardly Marcus had to be stoic in the sense of a strong Roman emperor, in his book he could share the truth about his worries with himself.

Let’s look at another quote, this one by Navy SEAL Jocko Willink (LINK):

This is what I want you to be afraid of:  waking up in six days or six weeks or six years or sixty years and being no closer to your goal . . . .  GET UP.  AND.  GO.

At first glance, these two quotes might seem separated.  They certainly are separated in time and pace, not to mention power.  Marcus wrote about the present and living through the moment.  He spoke of action in the small moment of “now” to allow him to get back to being able to deal with the big picture.

Jocko writes about failing in that future to spur action in today’s small moment of “now.”

warrenseal.jpg

Or maybe he identifies as a SEAL?

Two men, writing about the same thing centuries apart, come to the same conclusion through different methods on escaping the paralysis of fear in day-to-day life:  action is vital for you to be the best you.  You can’t dwell on what might happen if you make a bad decision – but you have to be afraid of the person you’ll be if you don’t take action, or, worse yet, don’t have a goal.

Why don’t we take action?  Probably the number one reason is our egos.  Egos are fragile things, and ego in many ways is our enemy.  Aurelius wrote about getting through the moment, not being crushed by the overwhelming vastness of life.  That’s his ego not wanting to be wrong.

ego.jpg

I thought we’d have more of moved off to Canada by now?

Willink writes about wasting that future life.  That’s his ego avoiding action today because it might fail.  Ego wants to, above all things, not fail.  Taking yourself into a future where you have failed by not trying is a sneaky way of using your ego to help you improve.  Taken to extreme, it’ll make you single-minded.  The biggest danger is that you achieve your goal and don’t have another one.

Don’t let your ego drive your life.  Most people really don’t care about you, and that’s a good thing.

  • They don’t remember that your pants split during that presentation in college and you weren’t wearing underwear. At least I hope they still don’t remember that.
  • They barely remember when you made a fool out of yourself that one time at the party by walking into that glass front door, making you look like a 200 pound sparrow who left a face imprint, complete with Hot Mustard Sauce® that you were dipping Chicken McNuggets© in.
  • No one remembers that you time travelled into the past and that your high-school age mom tried to put the moves on you after you hit Biff Tannen.

Those that do care about you . . . don’t care about those oddly specific things I listed above.  They care about you and want you to feel better.  After you do something embarrassing, an inner voice beats you up.  That’s your ego.  Your ego is insulting you so you don’t embarrass it again.   And, I assure you, if anyone said to you the things you tell yourself when you’re feeling guilty or embarrassed and looking in a mirror, you’d cut them out of your life in a minute.  Unfortunately, when I tried to cut my ego out, my family stopped me because the electric drill I used couldn’t find it.  The ego is kept behind the drywall of your closet, right?

I mean, that’s where the voices come from.

embar

And his shoes didn’t match his purse!

Ask yourself:  how does fear of embarrassment or fear of failure drive your behavior?  How many things have you avoided because of fear?  How many great things did you miss out on because you weren’t willing to take the risk?

Be the best you.  Start today.  And ignore or make your own use of that inner voice that your ego uses to punish you.

Currency Collapse Explained Using Sexy Bikini Girl Graphs, Part II

“You’re the one that’s collapsing.  Been sitting at that contraption for twenty-two years.  It’s time you tried a girl.” – The Addams Family

civilkini.jpg

It is related to the post.  I promise.  That makes it literature, so you have to like it.  It’s sophisticated and swanky.

This series of posts was inspired by a great e-mail from Ricky.  This is Part Two.  Part One can be found here (Big Swedish Coins, Italian Women Pole Vaulters, and the Future of Money, Part I).

Let’s – again – state the basic thesis in Ricky’s words:

“I’m right there with you that collapse is coming to our house of cards because of the way they were dealt.  But after all of the individual survival dramas play out, survival ultimately depends on a community rising from the ashes.  And the glue of a community is ultimately the deals made between its individuals.  And money is the encapsulation of those deals.

“So when the dust settles and the smoke clears and the phoenix rises from the ashes of the eagle’s nest, there’s gonna need to be a reset on money.  On what it is, and how it works.”

Last time we looked at the financial history of the United States up until the Civil War.  The first Civil War, not the next one (Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming), I mean.

Just a few generations after the Revolutionary War, in the 1860’s, both halves of the United States defaulted on currency during the Civil War.  The North defaulted on gold redemption in 1863, and the South printed Confederate currency like they were trying to make the Founding Fathers look like that one sailor that stayed in his bunk reading the Bible when the Seventh Fleet hit Sydney.  My father-in-law swears that’s what he did, and no one with an Australian accent has shown up claiming to be The Mrs.’ long-lost sister.

Okay, after the Civil War, the United States is at least done with defaulting, right?  I mean, we started up the Federal Reserve Bank™ in 1913 to stop these sorts of shenanigans, so that must have worked?

No.  If the Federal Reserve ever pretended to have the mission of maintaining the stability of the dollar, it failed like one of Oprah’s diets.

nokini.jpg

Ricky sent this one.  It’s perfect, with the exception that it doesn’t contain girls wearing bikinis.  I think . . . we can do better.  I think . . . we can Make Economics Sexy Again!

Bikinicurrencycollapse.jpg

See, fixed that for you, Ricky.  Graph is now 1000% better, unlike our currency.  You can see her toes are pointed down into the sand, which shows that the value of the dollar is lower.  Also, if I can point your attention to the years between 1950 and 1965 you can see what an amazing, um, time span that was.

In 1933, the United States had $4 billion in gold.  Sadly, it owed $22 billion in gold that it would have to pay off in just a four years.

Solution?

Make owning gold by your own citizens illegal, and make them hand it in on penalty of going to jail if they don’t.  After you’ve got those dollars, redefine the dollar so that it’s worth a lot less.  Presto!  You’ve stolen all the gold and then made the resulting “dollars” that your citizens have worth a lot less.  Then you can give your cheaper dollars to other governments in payment.  It’s like being Enron®, but with 100% less jail time, so it’s exactly like being a Kennedy.

So, yeah, I’d call that a default, too.

Finally in the 1970’s, the French decided that they could wake up from their wine and cigarette haze long enough to see that the United States was way short on the amount of gold necessary to pay all the debts that Johnson and Nixon created to get elected.

Defaulting on your currency is like a divorce:  once is a mistake, twice is a trend, and by the third time….maybe, just maybe, it’s you.  The French decided to be sneaky, and took all of their dollars, showed up at the bank, probably with a baguette under each arm, and requested gold.  The United States essentially said, “Umm, we didn’t think that you thought we were serious about that.  OMG, LOL!” and stopped giving anyone gold in exchange for their dollar.   My scoring:  yet another default.

Since August 15, 1971, the United States dollar is backed by our sterling record of fiscal responsibility, along with thousands of nuclear warheads.  As Pop Wilder always used to say, “You get farther with a kind word and a sophisticated professional military and thousands of nuclear warheads than you do with just a kind word.”

I would my own discovery, the John Wilder Rule of Sexy Economics™: “You get more attention with bikini girl economics graphs than with just economics graphs.”

unemplkini.jpg

As careful study of this graph will show, the glorious years of 1970 led to the bare times to follow and a sensitive employment time in the early 1980’s.  Unemployment never looked so good.

So, that’s a little bit about money along with some recent history.  Looking at all of history, though, I’d say what happens with money depends upon the kind of collapse we expect to see.  For the sake of simplicity, I’ll break collapses into three sizes.  Why these three sizes?  As of the time of writing I’m a bit thirsty, and the local convenience store only has three drink sizes.  Here they are:

  • Medium: The definition of a Medium failure includes monetary easing.  It could also include a default that may cause economic hardship, but doesn’t impact the government of the country or the ability of a country to issue its own currency.  This describes all of the defaults of the United States.
  • Large: This involves the complete destruction of a currency.  Common examples are Weimar Germany or modern-day Wakanda©  In both cases, the currency imploded as the major engineering problem of the day was how to print more money, faster (hint:  the Germans only printed on one side to double press production).  In Germany, the change led complete dissolution of society and a rebuilding under . . . well, Literally That One Guy Nobody Can Mention.  In Zimbabwe, it led to complete destruction of the currency and eventual loss of power for the guy who had been President for as long as Zimbabwe had been Zimbabwe.
  • Big Gulp®: This is the complete destruction of the economic as well as political system.  Rome, long laboring under a fiat currency, finally imploded and left behind a smoking crater that took hundreds of years to fill.  Thankfully, refills are only $0.29 with purchase of the official mug!

So what happens to an individual in one of these failures?

In a Medium Failure, you can keep your currency, if you like it, but what cost $100 a few years ago probably costs $1000 now.  Everybody adapts and you can generally go about your business, but you’re poorer and not at all happy, and it looks a lot like the Housing Bubble of the 2000’s.  Another analogy: it’s like you were forced to spend way too much time with my ex-wife.

homekini.jpg

The Housing Bubble can be seen pretty clearly here.  Somewhere.  Keep looking.  You have my permission.

In a Large Failure, ultimately the currency is toast.  Your money is gone.  But the country will restart the economy using either a new currency, or just by adopting an outside currency that’s moderated by someone marginally more adult than you.  Zimbabwe’s unofficial currency is the United States dollar, but there aren’t enough of them to go around, so many people use mobile currency that’s (more or less) run by cell phone companies.  When your cell phone company has a much better record of fiscal restraint than your government?  Yikes.

A Big Gulp© Failure is social collapse.  The biggest one in recent Western history is Rome.  The Roman Big Gulp® was so big that it spawned collapse after collapse in nation after nation as Rome shrank away from areas it could no longer afford to protect or govern. Great Britain is an example of the collapse.  After the last Roman Legion left people buried their money . . . and never dug it up.  Why?

The silver content of Roman coins in the late Empire consisted of waving a bit of silver over the top of the molten metal before a coin was made.  Rome had gone full fiat.  Roman coins, in the absence of Roman troops, were worthless.  Money itself was abandoned, and barter was the key, when local bandits and warlords didn’t just take what they wanted.

fiatcurrency.jpg

You want a worthless currency?  This is how you get a worthless currency..

How do we get to these collapses, and how likely are they?

Medium Failure:  I think that there may be as high as a 70%-90% chance of a Medium Failure hitting the United States in the lifetime of the average reader.  The challenges we will face with medical care (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck) and the possibility that the politicians won’t resist the lure of free money promised by Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs).  Read the articles at the link.  They were written by a cool guy I know, but before he really focused on getting better.

As a reminder of how close this might be to happening, a penny costs about $0.02 to make, so to get your two cents worth only costs a penny now, and that’s after they took out all the copper.  The copper alone in an old (pre-1979) penny is nearly $0.02.  It would cost about $0.04 to make a copper penny today.  A nickel costs $0.06 to $0.08 to make.  A dollar in pre-1964 silver coins is worth $10.60 at the time of this writing, which tells you that we’ve really already failed at keeping the value of our money up.

Ricky points out some interesting alternatives to currency in some of the supporting links he sent.  Just like Zimbabwe leaned on cell phone providers to be less insane and more trustworthy than the government, Facebook® is betting that its new currency, named the libra (LINK) will be less insane than the dollar, and has the added bonus of having the word “bra” as part of its name.  Honestly, I would have thought that Facebook™ would have denominated its currency in selfies and named it the lookatme.

debtkini.jpg

Student loan debt makes you feel like you can’t afford much clothing, and you’re between a rock and a hard place.  And very fit and tan and covered with oil.

Large Failure:  Large failures are big.  I mean, it’s in the name “Large.”  It generally comes after really horrible financial malfeasance for years.  Our current medical payment system (which is really bad) will, if not fixed, lead to a large failure.  Other notable large failures?  The start and end of the Soviet Union.  North Korea.  Nationalist China.  The country is still a country, and, with outside help and a new government, can, after a generation emerge from chaos.

I think there’s as high as a 40-50% chance this will happen within the lives of the average reader.

Big Gulp© Failure:  What would lead to a modern Big Gulp™-Level, end of Rome type event?  Nuclear war.  Running out of hydrocarbons.  Meteor impact on George Clooney’s ego.  Catastrophic disease.  Reuniting the Spice Girls®.  Regardless of the cause, I could easily see a failure of this magnitude ending 90% of the human lives on the planet.

Big Gulp® failures might last 1,000 years, since the last one lasted 500 years.  That means, since the time of Christ, Western Civilization was in a Big Gulp™ failure for 25% of the time.  Still – it only happened once.  I’d give a likelihood of 5-10% of this occurring within the lifespan of the average reader.  Pray some of the Spice Girls© have bad tickers.

overalldebtkini

Okay, these aren’t the Spice Girls™, but their ascending height from left to right is the perfect way to show that whatever lines are on this graph are going up from left to right.  I assume the thing going up is bad.

Checklist – Signs of a Currency Collapse:

  1. Gasoline is priced in goats.
  2. Bankers take cold pizza as mortgage payments.
  3. You can pay off your medical school student loans with the change from buying a candy bar.
  4. Bill Gates is bumming cash by cleaning windows of passing cars.
  5. $100 bills are too cheap to use as notepaper.
  6. Americans are caught sneaking into Honduras.
  7. George Soros begins laying off politicians and selling some on E-Bay®.
  8. The IRS starts giving a 25% discount for cash.
  9. Your financial adviser will have helped you get to a small fortune, but only if you started with a large fortune.
  10. You try to make a withdrawal at the bank and they tell you they have insufficient funds.

So, Ricky, there it is, Part I and Part II.  See you in Stockholm to pick up our Nobel Prize™!

Don’t forget to bikini wax.

How Auto Manufacturing Makes You More Likely to Die in a Crisis, Plus, Ironman is a Mass Murderer.

“The most efficient killing machine ever invented; you’ve got her doing the laundry.” – Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles

counterproductive.jpg

My first job was in a toy vampire manufacturing factory.  I worked as part of a two man team, so I had to make every second Count.

Modern society is based on efficiency.

Efficiency in what?

Efficiency in everything, from the proper number of employees to completely mess up my order at McDonalds© to using the absolute minimum amount of labor and material to make a car.

Let’s stick with cars, because the local McDonalds™ in Modern Mayberry is primarily efficient only at serving me a Sausage McMuffin® without sausage, egg, or cheese.  Yes.  They served me a plain muffin, which I guess is more efficient.  In 2018, Toyota® sold roughly 8,000,000 cars, trucks and station wagons (I refuse to call them SUVs on principle) worldwide.  Overall, 86,000,000 new cars were made and sold in 2018.

I think cars just might finally be catching on as a consumer item.  Maybe they’re not a fad after all.

When you do something 86,000,000 times, though, you start to get good at it, or at least sore.  I brought up Toyota© because they decided to get good at making cars, and were highly innovative in trying to increase quality while at the same time increasing efficiency – they made better cars with less labor, less rework, less effort.  While I can make the case that Detroit finally caught up with Toyota™ by the early 2000’s as far as quality goes, Toyota® was leading the pack for decades – that’s why they’re the number one auto manufacturer in the world today.

One particular innovation that Toyota® came up with was “just-in-time” manufacturing, which is also known as “Lean Manufacturing.”  The concept is simple:  I make a car with parts that just showed up – nobody has to go get them, they just show up right when I need them.  The ideal would be the supplier delivers the part to the production line at the moment it’s required.  The windshield wiper salesman puts two in the bin as the next Corolla™ arrives at the windshield wiper installation station.  There isn’t a bucket of thousands of wipers behind the worker, just the few he or she needs right then.  Hence?  Just-in-time.

Just-in-time sounds really nice.  The things you need just show up, right when you need them, as if teddy-bear angels with lace wings made them materialize from the aether as they used to when Victoria was Queen.  In practice, you need more than two windshield wipers at the Corolla© assembly station, but you might only need enough for an hour.  Or two hours.  That de-clutters the line, and makes the work actually go faster.  Implementation of this system is one reason Toyota™ went from a mass producer of cheap cars to a mass producer of high quality cars.

Why didn’t they invent and do this just-in-time production in 1880?  Transport speed.  Slow transport requires stockpiles and large shipment.  Also required is production coordination.  Assembly lines break from time to time – you have to make sure that the windshield wipers don’t stack up like chocolates on an assembly line.  There has to be sufficient communication, and the Internet helps make it easy.

Now?  I can order prescription glasses online and have them shipped to my house directly from the manufacturer in China in less than a week.

Worth watching again even if you’ve seen it before.

The rest of the world has, in the last thirty years, done everything they could to adopt this system, which is now called “Lean Manufacturing.”  Accountants love it, because it reduces inventory, and turns that inventory into cash as soon as possible.  An example:  the average grocery story turns over its entire inventory nearly 14 times per year, which means lots of items hit the shelf and disappear.  Some grocery stores even have the vendor stock the shelf, eliminating costs there as well, as they attempt to get the customer to do the job of a checker.

selfcheckout.jpg

But the at least the cashier was dead sexy.

The result of this effort is a one-time boost in profits as inventory is reduced.  There is also the ongoing benefit that the money that paid for the inventory (that no longer exists) can be used for some other business purpose like bonuses, bacon-wrapped shrimp, corporate jets or Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment lawsuit settlements.

But since there’s less inventory, you need fewer warehouses.  And fewer warehouse workers.  Yay!  More money for bacon-wrapped shrimp!  You can see how this was a dominant concept in the late 1990’s when most corporate jobs required that you sign over your soul to Satan®, or Al Pacino if Satan™ had taken the corporate jet with Weinstein that day.

If I were to create a personal analogy, Lean Manufacturing is similar to the idea that when you buy gasoline you buy just enough for this trip, and this trip only.  No more wasteful storage of gasoline inventory.  And why keep more than a single meal on hand in the house?  While we’re at it, let’s also reduce that inventory of money we keep in the bank.  I bet we could make sure our lives are structured around a system that I think I’ll invent a snazzy name for:  Paycheck-to-Paycheck™.

paycheck.jpg

If you think no one cares if you’re alive, skip a month’s worth of bills.

So, all sarcasm aside, the paycheck example starts to illustrate the problems with Lean Manufacturing.  Inventory is a bad word in a manufacturing plant, and no manufacturing plant in the world would keep spare capacity that it doesn’t use regularly just sitting there.  Soon enough, a bright young soulless MBA from the head office will either start production on the spare capacity, sell the manufacturing equipment, or take a jet trip to a conference where there is a platter of free bacon-wrapped shrimp.

What has been profitable business advice is, as you can see, horrible personal advice.  Life isn’t about efficiency.  Life is about . . . life.  Being inefficient actually has some huge advantages.

People who regularly prepare for disasters (“preppers”) have popularized the phrase “Two is one, and one is none.”  I looked for the origin of the phrase, and I believe it is old enough that it probably originated in a Roman Legion stationed in Carthage, when a grizzled Centurion stuck a cigar in his mouth and was dressing down a new recruit for having an insufficiently shiny gladius.  And don’t tell me that it was another 1,500 years until tobacco was introduced to Europe – an outfit with a good supply guy can find anything.

twoisone.jpg

Okay, you don’t need two of everything.  A friend of mine has two ex-wives.

The philosophy of prepping is the exact opposite of Lean Manufacturing.  It says that we are stupid – we don’t know what’s going to happen so having extra supplies is crucial.  Stuff gets broken.  Stuff gets lost – just this week somebody found a batch of Revolutionary-era bayonets in a pit at Valley Forge.  You can bet there was a corporal that got his butt chewed over those by George Washington.  But I’m betting that the Continental Army had some extras.  Heck, it’s certain that even the Egyptians knew to store the extra grain in good years 6,000 years ago because:

  • Spare capacity is freedom,
  • Spare capacity is resilience,
  • Spare capacity gives you time and space when both are precious, and
  • Scarcity is the enemy, not inefficiency.

Recently, there have been a series of movies about obscure comic book heroes from the 1970’s.  You might have heard of them – The Avengers™.  In one of them, The Avengers:  Quest for Infinity Cash®, the villain (a very large Smurf™ named Thanos©) had been hungry as a child and decided nobody should ever be hungry again.  Thanos® then gathered a bunch of magic rocks which allowed him to make a super glove so he could make a wish.

I’m not making this up.  People spent $2.048 BILLION dollars to see that story.

grapelives.jpg

See?  Big Smurf® and magic rocks.  Told you I wasn’t making it up.

Anyway, Thanos®’ wish was that half of the people in the Universe disappear.  That’s just what happened.  Half the people turned to ash.  It really wasn’t that sad, at least for me, because it’s a comic book and Superman and Batman have each died something like fifty times, so death in a comic book movie is about as permanent as a Hollywood marriage.  The movie ends with lots of people, including Spiderman®, dissolving into ash.

I took The Boy and Pugsley to go see the sequel, The Avengers:  Endgaming for Even More of Infinity Cash©.  Whether or not the people who turned into ash were going to come back was spoiled before the movie started – one of the trailers was for the new Spiderman® movie.  Endgaming© starts five years after half the people in the Universe turned into ash.

After watching the movie I’m thinking that, like every member of Congress, the screenwriters had no training in economics.  Okay, a big Smurf© snaps his fingers and everyone disappears and I’m concerned they didn’t get their economics right.  Yeah, I’m an economics nerd.

What did they miss?  Well, after all the people disappeared the economy would have cratered.  We would have gone from producing 86,000,000 cars to producing . . . zero.  The economy would stop completely.  Grain would rot in the fields because half the people who ate Twinkies® were ash.  In 2009 when the Gross Domestic Product dropped by 2.5% and the economy nearly locked up.  If half the people disappeared, the economy would drop by 70%.

Anarchy.

But in The Avengers:  Endgaming for Even More of Infinity Cash©, everybody who was turned into ash returns after one of the Avengers® (Tony Stark™) snaps his fingers.  Take that, Thanos©!

Except by doing that, Tony Stark© just sentenced most of them to death when they showed back up.  Why?  In five years, the economy on Earth had contracted to serve not 7 billion, but 3.5 billion.  When an extra 3.5 billion people show back up?  Our just in time world only has food for 3.5 billion.  We only planted enough corn for 3.5 billion.

Massive famine and starvation.

starkface.jpg

Oops.

Thanks, Ironman©.  Instead of a nice, peaceful death you’ve condemned some large fraction of beings on every planet to a horrible slow death of starvation, misery, and violence, mainly thanks to the lack of resilience in our planetary production systems.  I guess that I should stop expecting economic accuracy in a movie that features a talking raccoon.

efficient pantry.jpg

Only be the last guy to the supermarket during a disaster if you want to take amusing pictures.

But I am concerned – our economy is based on a global experiment in efficiency that frees up capital for bacon-wrapped shrimp, at the cost of making our lives less secure.  What could go wrong?

Sweet dreams!