A Fool for Identity Theft

Nominally honest people are forever doing seemingly innocent, very unwise things that expose them to the less scrupulous. One of my latest adventures in real-life stupidity came to my attention with a phone call a few months back from the staff of a heavy-equipment resale website. It appears that I was offering to sell a half-dozen front-end loaders and other stuff in the $30k range. News to me. But there it was, my name and address with someone else's phone number and email beneath pictures of tractors in sexy poses.

I'm as turned on by well-muscled machinery as the next fellow, particularly as I come from a family with multi-generational ties on both sides to farm and construction equipment maker J.I. Case Co. with headquarters in my hometown Racine, Wisconsin. But my email address is not of the form "david@gotopoland.com." Go to Poland? What is it about Eastern European hackers that moves them to concoct risible urls that make you blink and shake your head? Well, be thankful for something.

The would-be perpetrator of this construction equipment hoax faxed a very real looking California Resale Certificate to the website's office and so got his listings placed without difficulty. He faxed my resale certificate as a matter of fact. He was able to do so because I'd conveniently put a jpeg of the very document on my website. What was I thinking? Well, way back when I started my business I thought it would be convenient if vendors could see my resale certificate and insurance documents and know I was for real. I had all kinds of documents up for grabs, business licenses, professional licenses; just about everything except a scan of my signature, my social security number and my bank account numbers.

Sometimes God looks out for fools, which he seems to have done in my case. I assured the construction equipment people I did not have tractors, much less tractors for sale on their website. I quickly gutted my site of anything presumably useful to someone seeking to impersonate me. So far, that's the extent of the consequences. At least as far as I know.

I have been taken by people who were not what they advertised themselves to be several times in the last ten years. It does not leave a good feeling in one's breast or nurture faith in one's fellow man. I admit to my foolish victimhood because I'm mostly beyond embarrassment. I also need to remind myself quite frequently to be somewhat less trusting of strangers.

I wonderful fellow I worked for more than thirty years ago passed on a piece of curious advice. He said, "There is no shame in being taken by a professional." I can only assume he was speaking from bitter experience. A professional in any specialty, particularly a professional confidence man can out-bluff you within his specialty. The medical profession, bless all the good ones, shares this tendency to derive authority through bluffing. You must keep in mind that a century ago they were still bleeding sick people. "Scientific medicine" is still a concept in development. But I digress. No shame in being taken by a professional. Being taken by an amateur? I suppose that's another thing.

In spite of knowing absolutely for sure that a co-signer is "a fool with a pen," I co-signed on a car loan for a home health care worker who was helping Julie through an illness some years back.

The opportunity came as all successful fraudulent offers do: it was an answer to my prayers and a real bargain. A good person with a home health care certificate slightly down on her luck was willing to work in my house and take good care of my wife if only she had a car to make the trip. She actually did make payments for about 18 months so I was only hooked for a few thousand dollars (ouch) in the end. I fired her after a month when she turned out to be using crystal meth and also revealed herself to be a pathological liar. Well, I assume she was pathological because it lets me off the hook slightly for not seeing through her story sooner. She disappeared with most of my collection of spare keys to things and a few trinkets, so I had a few locks to roll and a little less memorabilia.

In my questionable defense, I'd had recent surgery and was running a pretty good serum level of Vicodin. Or maybe that episode was associated with another unwise decision. "Don't drive or operate heavy machinery while taking this medication." You should add "don't make any big decisions either." The hoary adage holds: if it's too good to be true it isn't. And in spite of how great you're feeling at the moment, keeping some things private is a really good idea. Repeat daily for maximum protection. And be extra cautious if you are about to break one of your own rules.

False Memory

The Miata runs again, has visited the smog testers, passed, and awaits her 2009 license plate sticker - only six months late. If you read this blog, you may recall that I was combing the house for two spare sets of supercharger idler bearings I was sure that I bought and then misplaced. Never found them. Went back to McMaster - Carr order history and can't find evidence that I ever bought them. So I bought a new set of bearings and finally fixed the car.

I live in a complex environment (some would say messy) and rely on memory to find a lot of things. What was I doing when I saw it last? Where was that? What would I have done with something like that? When it appears that I have remembered something that probably never happened, well, it sends a little chill down my spine. I remember those eight spare bearings pretty clearly. I have nice pictures of them in my brain, eight boxes all lined up in a row. Never happened, apparently. Or rather, whatever happened was confined within my skull. Did I dream it? Did I construct the memory because I required it?

If I could create realistic memories at will it might represent the triumph of fantasy life over reality. Why get out of bed if you're being believably seduced by lovely young women while you sleep? (Sorry dear, but men do occasionally think about such things.) It takes you right back to cogito ergo sum. Yeah, but you're just a brain in a cave somewhere imagining all of this. Philosophy fails as fertilizer once again.

Frankly, if you are unable to tell real life from your dreams you need to get out more. Real interactions with people have a texture and unanticipated quality that dreams do not. Don't writers construct believable, non-existent characters in their fiction? Yes, but I would argue that writers mostly rearrange their experience to create fiction. No experience, no fiction.

Do voyeuristic pastimes like pornography ultimately fail to arouse because they are insufficiently believable (all we need is High Definition?) or because no one is on the other end of the line? If we're just imagining life our imaginations run dry pretty quickly.

Admittedly this piece has drifted quite a ways from whether there are eight bearings lost in my house or not. Memory and it's stepchild fantasy are ultimately unreliable. Reality never follows the path anyone has imagined, not for long anyway. Winning the lottery doesn't make you luckier with the next ticket you buy. Just one more thing to contend with. Resolved: your memory is untrustworthy. One more trick life has for you if you live long enough to see it.

Tesla's Long Island laboratory, NYT 5/5/09

"There in the darkness loomed four enormous tanks, each the size of a small car. Their sides were made of thick metal and their seams heavily riveted, like those of an old destroyer or battleship. The Agfa consultant leading the tour called them giant batteries."

My bet is these were oil-filled, glass plate capacitors.  Such capacitors are an interleaved stack of thick glass plates and smaller brass sheets immersed in a bath of insulating oil.  Alternate metal sheets are connected together to form the two electrodes of the capacitor and the connections are brought out the top.  My experience is with a much smaller version with six or eight 1/4 inch glass plates about 8 by 15 inches dating from the early 2oth century.  Several of the plates were cracked and needed to be replaced.

These capacitors were part of a very impressive old diathermy machine I was fortunate to obtain in high school.  The coil on top of the 5 foot high apparatus would emit a hissing ball of crackling high-voltage, high-frequency electricity when energised.  Although a Tesla coil was part of the apparatus, the spectacular coil on top was an "Odun Resonator," which had a lot in common with early radio transmitters.  A fluorescent lamp held within six feet of the high-voltage terminal would light wirelessly.

The apparatus was driven by a 60 cycle AC transformer producing perhaps 20,000 volts on the secondary.  The transformer discharged across a spark gap assembly consisting of multiple gaps which could be varied in spacing to control the discharge coltage.  The spark gap excited a tank circuit consisting of two capacitors and a few turns of the primary high-voltage coil.  The entire device probably resonated in upper HF or lower VHF region, perhaps in the vicinity of 30 megahertz.  Radio frequency energy is perceived by the body as heat at these frequencies.  Diathermy was a medical procedure which would produce deep heating in the tissues to treat aches, pains and anything else physicians could charge for.  Think microwave oven on the end of a wand.  I'm sure something magical was claimed for the process, but what you felt as a patient was warmth inside your joints, limbs or wherever.

As Tesla famously produced electrical discharges from towers which looked like lightning, his apparatus would have required multiple, equally large capacitors to deal with the voltages involved.  The reason these large "tanks" have not been stolen over the years is probably because they weigh several tons each and contain nothing much that would be of salvage value except perhaps the oil, which would have been easy enough to drain off.  Try salvaging large, thick glass plates without a crane.  They would probably be considered not only awkward but worthless.

The riveted construction would have been typical of the time and the tanks were probably made from iron or steel plates, also used in boilers, tanks and ships.   I'm sure the devices are described in one of Tesla's many patents.  Given sufficient energy and time, I'm sure the mystery of the nature of the tanks could be solved.  But I'm sure they weren't batteries.  Given Tesla had them made, they had to be vats for insulating oil containing capacitors or transformers.

So is this a fact, a factoid, an opinion or a reminiscence?  Have it as you would.  The only part of my high-school apparatus that survives in my posession is the large, foot operated on-off switch.  The switch is mounted on a slate plate and has an insulated actutor of something like Bakelite about six inches long.   Oh, just read about it in the 1923 patent:

 http://www.google.com/patents?id=WKhdAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=MacLagan+insulated+footswitch&source=bl&ots=W9Q1xA2tga&sig=raSC6yRIiXgyJwPWNUv5N8OEXmo&hl=en&ei=pb8BSsbYBJyKtgOK1pD2BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA1,M1

Problems With Bearings

My beloved 1994 Miata has been sitting in the driveway for nearly five months. She broke a supercharger belt last fall on the way to class. The belt drives the power steering pump too. Suddenly I was wrestling the wheel. I got back home okay, but the car is definitely no fun to drive without power steering. Maybe even a little dangerous for a vehicle that depends on being nimble to stay out of trouble on the highway.

I added the supercharger kit within a year of buying the car. The 'charger doubles the torque of the engine. At the time, it was fun blowing away larger sports cars. But the design has a flaw and this is at least the tenth time the drive belt has shredded, burned, snapped or squealed. The serpentine belt goes over two small aftermarket idler pulleys to make its circuitous way from the crankshaft to the air conditioning pump to the power steering and up to the blower and back again. One of the 2 inch idlers bends the belt nearly 180 degrees. The kit originally came with nylon pulleys with pressed in bearings, but they melted when the bearings failed. Finally I got a set of aluminum idlers, each with two 30mm ball bearings. I think someone concluded that the aluminum would keep the bearings cooler. Or perhaps that enthusiasts would replace their own bearings and leave the kit maker in peace to dream up some other not-ready-for-production idea.

Now when the bearings disintegrate, sometimes slowly so the belt overheats and sometimes quickly (then it screams), I can replace them. I have a shop press to get them out and back in. McMaster-Carr sells bearings. Sweet.

The last time the bearings failed I bought eight new ones, four to use and four to use next time. While I was fixing the idlers I discovered another four new bearings. It seems that I ordered eight some time in the past as well. Good, I have two spare sets. Bad that I cannot remember doing so, but at least my mind retraces the same rut. Usually I fix the car within a

week. Funny how suddenly it's four months.

Yesterday was finally the day. I had partially disassembled things several weeks ago but broke off for another project that seemed more urgent. Now, before I loose all the parts, I figured I'd complete the job. One hitch, though. I cannot find the spare bearings. I looked for two hours. No joy. I gave up and grabbed a beer.

To say that I live in a somewhat disordered environment is both kind and truer than I care to admit. I depend on putting things in logical places and then remembering where they are. I'm also a keen observer. I can find stuff Julie loses in under a minute. So I probably put all eight bearings on a shelf where I could see them, a little lineup of eight identical boxes. Logically I might have put them with other Miata parts, like oil filters and gaskets. Perhaps in one of the many pigeonholes in my office. They could be in a drawer with other important stuff. Finally, they may have fallen victim to Eloisa.

Eloisa has kept us clean for 15 years. She likes an orderly looking place so she puts stuff that is lying around into boxes or drawers or closets. When something disappears we suspect it has been "Eloisa-ed." I have several sacred spaces Eloisa knows not to go. One is my office. Or the second desk in the loft or the small table by the front door. Stuff I put there -- on it's way to wherever -- stays there. So I've even gone through many strata of Eloisa's past attempts to make the house look orderly. Nothing.

The thought occurs that the problem is me. I'm going senile. My shrink says no, I'm just getting slightly and normally a little more forgetful, typical of people my age. I'm not sliding into dementia. How nice to have a professional opinion. I still haven't found the bearings. Worse yet, I'm sitting at the computer writing this when I could be out there looking. That would involve straightening up one of my sacred spaces. Because I do what Eloisa does too. When my desk is just too much to bear and something needs urgent doing, I slide the contents into a box, promising myself I will sort it all out when the urgency passes. Sometimes that actually happens. I sort through the box and put stuff into smaller boxes, one for stuff going to the shop, one for stuff going to the boat, one for stuff going to the truck and then, finally, some makes the wastebasket. Sometimes these sorted boxes get to their destination and sometimes they just pile up. I can usually remember where I've seen something last, so it has been less of a problem than one might think. Until now.

You don't have to develop much brain friction to start forgetting where you put things. At least I don't. I seem normally competent to myself and those around me. But an edge is a little duller somewhere. Perhaps it's time to clean out the loft again. After all, finding things presumes you can get to them, see them.

I pause. . . .

Perhaps after another cup of coffee.

Postscript: I found the possibly imaginary bearings in July in my top dresser drawer. Who would look there? Shortly after the original post I bought four new bearings and fixed the car. So I still have four spares. Maybe if I run the belt a little looser I will not need them very soon.

Let's Escape Torture if We Can

An extract from my "Living Will" signed last Summer follows.  It's boilerplate for a while and, by necessity covers ground we'd rather not think about.  But stick with it, I do not propose to waste your time. 

End-of-Life Decisions

I do not want my life to be prolonged if:

• I have a terminal condition

• I am permanently unconscious, or

• the likely risks and burdens of treatment would outweigh the expected benefits.

In accordance with these wishes, I do not want artificially administered food and water.

Grant of Discretion to Agent

If I have expressed, in this document or in any other manner, a clear wish regarding a specific treatment or condition, I want that wish to be followed. In all other situations, I direct that my life not be prolonged and that life-prolonging treatment not be provided or continued, in accordance with what my agent determines to be in my best interest. In determining my best interest, my agent shall weigh the burdens of treatment against the expected benefits, considering my personal values to the extent known to my agent.

Relief From Pain

I direct that treatment for alleviation of pain or discomfort be provided at all times, even if it hastens my death, except as follows:

When the time remaining to me in this life is short by any reasonable definition, I will trade a few moments of lucidity for relief from agony. I have no more "last words" to communicate. Whatever secrets I take with me stay with me. I anticipate no deathbed changes in firmly held principles. There will be no last-minute religious conversions. I have not been reticent in expressing my love or in extending forgiveness. As death approaches, I direct that treatment for alleviation of pain or discomfort be provided at all times, even if it hastens my death or makes it impossible for me to communicate. Those I love know that already, and that is the only message worth expressing. Play my favorite music, if you can find it. If not, Bethoven will do.

Other Wishes

In addition to the instructions I have given above, I would also like my health care providers and others involved in my care to follow the instructions below.

Personal Values Regarding End-of-Life Decisions

I have read authors who profess horrible fears that death will mean the extingushing of their existence. I don't know what is on the other side of that door, but I certainly do not feel so self-important that I fear my end. Many people seem genuinely afraid to die. Do they fear eternal punishment? I do not. Is it an instinct, the last gasp of self-preservation? It is the job of our minds to calm our instincts.

I understand that many of the special skills I have developed in my life will not survive me. I wish that I had been granted a better opportunity to know my grandchildren and pass along what I could. But no one really has the opportunity to see his hard-won skills live on after him. Everyone takes anything that is meaningful in life with him to the grave. New generations start over and learn again, That is simply the way it is. Who am I to question the sequence?

My soul feels a deep calm. I have spent enough time among the living, the dying and the dead to appreciate the nature of the process. I have also witnessed birth and the development of children to adulthood. This is how life proceeds. I understand the importance of sex to the survival of a species. I also know that sex would be meaningless without death and birth. I appreciate the wonder of the universe and especially the wonders that are beyond my ability to understand. My mouth gapes like a child taking in his first Christmas tree. I have been given many opportunities and I have done what I have done, most for better, some for worse. I have taken my turn with my shoulder to the wheel, pushing civilization along the best I knew how. I took over the task from my father and he from his. My children are now taking my place and my grandchildren are learning that being a grownup is their lot as well.

How can you understand the pattern in this and fear death? Do you see yourself outside of history? You are deluded. So, to repeat myself, I do not fear death. The death of an individual marks the end of one cycle in the pattern, that is all. Those who will live the next cycle have been born and are getting ready to shuffle their genetic inheritance and reproduce, creating unique individuals who may be slightly better adapted to this environment than we were. But only slightly.

I am grateful that I have been given the opportunity to play a nearly insignificant part in the great show that is the rolling wave of humanity. I have enjoyed it, mostly. I have tasted success and defeat, advantage and it's lack, sorrow, joy, love and hate, true ecstacy, deep depression, happiness, contentment. I have been largely spared pain and infirmity although that may lie in wait around the corner. I understand that the cycle for one individual ends when it ends. There is little to gain from shifting the timer a little either way. I do not think I am writing the great literary work that I must stay alive to finish.

So let me end in peace, let me end in peace like a silent snowy meadow in the mountains with a full moon glinting off each snowflake. Let me end in beauty like the calm ocean with a full moon making the whole world like silvery metal with just enough disturbance to let you know it is not solid. Well, that's my hope, lets see what I get. If it's reasonably fast it doesn't much matter. If it is horribly drawn out part of me will be inside crying. But I understand some pain is unavoidable. I also understand that we do not completely chose the future, it unrolls in front of us.

I have enjoyed the ability to spell words in English correctly. I would have corrected each spelling mistake in this document if the software were not so balky and my patience short. Where I've made a mistake, I know it. Please forgive me.

Wishes Regarding Hospice and Palliative Care

I am not afraid to die. I am quite reasonably afraid of being tortured along the way. I value my lucid concious mind. This is the essence of life to me. I have witnessed others take general leave of their wits. I have seen people susutained in this condition for years and find it morbid and grotesque. Sustaining the body when the conscious mind no longer functions is a supreme exercise in false hope or indecision. Keeping the shell of the body technically alive is no virtue once it's owner no longer spends any appreciable time in residence. It constitutes an immoral allocation of social resources masquerading as waiting for God's will to be manufest in ending the person's life. We are God's agents and must be the conservators of his creation and the liberators of the unconscious suffering.

Although it is possible for the demented to occasionally stitch together a few moments of lucidity, it has never seemed to me that such flashes of consciousness outweigh the horror, for them, of realizing they will sink back into confusion and incommunicability. Existence, for the demented, must seem like a horrible dream. They still feel pain and frustration. Please do not sustain my body for one more brief flash of some remnant of what had been my mind. Let me go to my natural and inevitable end as has every predicessor from time immemorial.

The law may not recognize profound dementia as an immediately terminal condition. I consider it to be the death of the person while the body is still walking around. The demented are essentially warehoused, waiting for their bodies to achieve the same state their minds already have. If they were not supervised as closely as small children, the profoundly demented would die from an inability to eat and drink by themselves or they would wander into dangerous situations and be lost.

If my mind slowly fails before my body does, I would like to continue my normal activities as much as possible. You may take away the car keys and anything else that might endanger others, but please don't take away my ability to walk outside or sail my boat upon the ocean. Such activity will sustain what is left of my spirit. The small risk that I may come to harm along the way is one I chose to accept.

I was not allowed to see my Grandmother for several years before she died. She was kept in a locked ward for the demented. My Grandfather visited her every day his own health permitted. She could not recognize him. What was the point of this? Was it to upset my Grandfather? Was it to protect my grandmother so even God would have to bide his time until her body failed enough to let him take her home? It seems that it was an inability of our social institutions to deal compassionatly with the issue of dementia. Was it the medical mantra of "keep the body going at all costs?" I do not know, but I think it was horrible for her and for those of us who witnessed this and are forced to remember her that way.

If my agent determines that I am on a reasonably certain and inevitable path to death I direct that I receive palliative care to keep me comfortable and alleviate pain. I do not wish to undergo "last chance" or experimental medical treatments that do not have at least a 25% chance of significantly improving my condition. I have never bet long odds and do not want to start now. Let medical science advance by torturing someone else. I have seen the effect of pain medications prescribed insufficient in either type or quantity and the prospect of this happening to me is horrifying. Addiction has no meaning for the terminally ill. Please use whatever must be used to be effective, whether that includes powerful opiates which will temporarily addict me to them or not. I shall soon be free of the addiction and your consciences may rest easy for you will have done me a final service.  

 

Assuming the Recession Will End?

As I write this gasoline is selling for less than $3 per gallon.   I still drive my van 40 miles to work on a boat on a typical workday.  Business has been slow for a year, but is showing some signs of coming back.  How long will my personal economic model survive?  That's what I worry about.  I'm not young, so the problem is not quite as serious as it is for my grandchildren.

Half the boats I work on are powerboats.  The larger ones can consume over 750 gallons on a weekend outing.  The energy consumption rate is a matter of boat design and physics.  If you want to move a 37 foot boat across the water at more than 6 or 7 knots, you consume a serious amount of energy.  Petroleum is the only sufficiently concentrated form of energy to make a fast powerboat possible.  How many weekend trips will people be making when Diesel hits $15 / gallon or more.

At this point we seem to collectively assume the recession will end sometime within the next few years.  Things will come back to a point we have known as "normal" for three generations.  Well, maybe not.

Last night I watched "A Crude Awakening."  This 2005 documentary about oil was eerily prescient regarding the economic crash of 2008.  What is more real, the film asks at one point, finance or oil.  I guess we have now proved the case for the un-reality of finance.  

The case that we have hit and passed peak oil production is probably better supported than the case for global warming.  Cities built before 1900 will likely continue to be functional as increasing oil demand hits the wall of decreasing oil production within the next 10 years.  Suburbs will industrialize or rot.  Or we will all be bicycling to the train station to get to work.  My 80 mile commute will be economically unsustainable.  For better or worse, the US will have to rebuild itself.  All those freeways will probably get bike lanes.  Can you imagine a much warmer Canada having to choose between ripping up the ground to mine oil sand or leaving it in place to grow corn?  We can beat our junk cars into rails and bicycle frames.

Talk about an upset electorate?  Rush Limbaugh for President, anyone?  Maybe not him, but it could be someone who would actually make Bush II look good.  Not a happy prospect, but perhaps I should trust the American electorate a little more.  Maybe the Internet will actually stabilize us as a people.

New President Obama is currently fueling hope that most of us will get through the next 8 years relatively unscathed.   Many of us would like to think that Obama represents a return to reason in the country's leadership, a reversion to the mean.  We would like to think Bush II was the aberration.  If gasoline hits $20/gallon which way do you think things will go?  Today's people will readily accept alternative fuels, even much smaller, lighter vehicles.  But getting back on bicycles?  Perhaps we should have more faith in youth.  My generation would never do such a thing, although I still have my mountain bike in the garage.  Perhaps I should replace the tires and start riding again?

As this must-see documentary points out, the current population of the world can only be supported by the energy from oil.  Global warming will also affect the ability of the world to support current population levels.  As the available energy from oil inevitably declines, do you suppose all the extra oil-supported people are going to go away quietly?  I think it more probably that we will see resource depletion driven genocide as the rule rather than the exception.  Sort of a new hundred-year's war that ends when enough people have been eliminated and the rest are too exhausted and isolated to continue.  Remember the 100 year's war?  Look it up.

In my youth we worried about nuclear winter.  We thought the hydrogen bomb would make the world unlivable.  We thought  the USSR and USA would mutually eradicate each other.  Denial is a powerful thing and we are all still here, mostly not thinking about it.  It could still happen.  However, now I'd put my bet on  a few new Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's, isolated horrors perpetrated by disaffected minorities on us and on each other.  

Do you know of any weapon that was invented, perfected and never used?  All that is needed is the weapon plus sufficient hatred, desperation and no regard for the consequences.  Sound like any suicide bomber you've met lately?  Do you know that Japan's use of suicide pilots late in WWII was considered a real aberration, almost beyond understanding?  It was something that just did not happen.  How times change.  One can defend against almost anything except an opponent who will sacrifice his own life.  The disaffected, unemployed multitudes provide lots of foot soldiers willing to die if they can take you with them.

We believe in helping poor countries.  We believe in cutting infant mortality by the spread of better drugs.  We know this promotes exploding populations but we believe solutions for this problem will be found in the future.  Yes, as it turns out, solutions like war, starvation and genocide.

Perhaps help is really beyond our capabilities.  Perhaps Darfur is the new norm.  Our charity all rests on a foundation of cheap energy.  This energy foundation is so pervasive and has developed so smoothly that we notice it no more than we notice the air.  At a time when we use 25% of the world's oil and have two percent of the world's population (to use 2005 figures from the film), perhaps we should begin to doubt our charity is sustainable.  This is to say nothing of our way of life.

The human race has not hit a wall, has not passed through a population bottleneck for some 50,000 years.  We don't think it could happen again.  No physical law says it cannot happen again.  I think the possibility that human life will be extinguished on the earth to be almost vanishingly remote.  I also think population could collapse to 1% of what it is now over a reasonably short time, say a century.  That takes us back to the world population as of 1800.  Maybe today's world is all just another cheap energy fueled bubble waiting to burst.  200 years to grow by two orders of magnitude, another hundred to collapse back.  Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.  And the population in 1800 was hardly a bottleneck.  That's more like 5000 people, a level at which significant genetic variation is wiped out.  

That's more or less the number of modern humans who walked out of Africa 50,000 years ago from whom most if not all of us are descended.  The folks who's descendants eventually migrated into Europe and "displaced" the Neandertals.  If the populations interbred, no genetic trace of the Neandertal can be found in today's humans.  Racism is apparently instinctive in humans.

In 2009, "Globalization" is still accepted as the way the immediate future will proceed by the leaders of rich countries.  I suspect we have seen it's greatest extent and will not be sorry to see it pass.  We may not regret the disappearance of mass air travel.  When the disaffected must cross oceans to strike at us - well, that may not be so bad.

Oh yes, you will say "the old man is depressed again and raving away at the keyboard."  Perhaps, but that does not change the facts about energy.  Oil is about to get more expensive again, soon, and we are hooked on it.  Our entire way of life is supported by cheap energy.  That is about to change.  We'll find out who's lucky and who's not.  For me, I'm not planning to buy another work van, even with 125,000 miles on this one.  I think it will last as long as I can afford to drive a van.  And for the record, I've enjoyed the cuisine, the house, the family, the whole ride.  I'd give back the lawn.

Too Big to Regulate

Secretary Geitner has recently suggested a "super regulator" for financial institutions which are so big that their failure would damage society.  That is an idealistic, over-complex suggestion.  Can there be any doubt that creative financiers can outwit the control of any government regulator?  Bringing regulation back into vogue would not change the outcome of the last thirty year's experiments in financial anarchy.  The "greed" motivator is all on the side of the financiers.

The telephone system worked pretty well before deregulation.  A slightly less drastic solution might have kicked the company into allowing us to own our own phones.  Power utility deregulation was mostly good at pulling money from our collective pockets to line those at Enron.  The financial industry under Glass-Steagel, the depression era law that separated financial companies by function, was less exciting but worked just fine.

Building walls between powerful entities is less efficient overall, but it does provide natural checks and balances.  The result is an imperfect balance, as we see in our constitutional government, but it limits the harm the government can do as well.  Re-creating distinctions between different types of financial institutions is more likely to succeed than expecting a supreme regulator to police huge, complex institutions.

The correct solution to entities which become so large that they pose a danger to society:  limit their size and scope.  The Federal Reserve Bank is divided regionally.  It's seperate from the FDIC.  We could all do with a little less financial excitement in our lives.  The prospect of B of A being broken up into competing  and complementary institutions does not frighten me.  Teetering CitiBank frightens me.  AIG, where the right hand knows not what the left hand is promising, frightens me.  Get over it, Robert Rubin was wrong here.

Less efficient?  You bet and praise God.  What an engine of job creation, reversing the mergers and acquisitions that left hundreds of thousands of employees on the street.  Huge financial institutions, like centrally planned economies, are impossible to manage.  No one can be aware of enough facts to make the right decisions and limit the risk the institution faces.  If mark-to-market comissions are the way people get paid, they will forever give away the future for millions in hand right now.

Sensible Ignorance About the Mortgage Crisis

Here I reveal my ignorance of law, accounting, and whatever else you want to accuse me of.  But it still makes sense to me in a "best overall outcome" sort of way.

Banks have written down billions in "worthless" mortgages.  Nevertheless, they are holding homeowners (the people on the other end of those mortgages) responsible for the full value of these mortgages.  If the homeowner cannot pay per the terms of the contract, the bank forecloses.  The homeowner is out on the street.  The bank auctions off the property at a value that probably comes closer to what it is carrying on it's books as the "written down" level of the contract.  The bank has basically taken the loss for making a poor judgment in writing the contract in the first place.

Wait a minute.  Do we have to go through foreclosure, eviction and auction to make the books balance?  Why does the homeowner end up on the street?  

Why doesn't the bank, having written down the value of the mortgage, reduce the obligation of the homeowner as well?  Then the bank gets a performing loan with (probably) a higher value than what the house brings at auction.  The homeowner gets to stay in the house.

The sanctity of the mortgage contract is the only thing that is getting protected in the conventional scenario.  Is the paper worth more than all the people involved?

Waiting to Exhale Through Insurrection Prevention.

ORANGE, CA SATURDAY JAN 24:  I absent-mindedly got my cart a little crosswise in the Walmart checkout line.  It took two requests to cut through my mental fog: I was blocking both lanes, even if only by a few inches. I pulled my cart back and apologized to the patrons squeezing by.  They could now at least wheel their few bags out of the store.

The woman behind me in line observed that things were really busy.  I have hardly ever seen the store so jammed, I replied.  Unfortunately, it wasn't a very good economic indicator, she muttered.  No, I said, to be crowded into the least expensive store in the area wasn't exactly a sign that things were looking up.  She observed people were finally being forced to get out and buy a few necessities.  No one's cart was full.  Everyone's been holding their breath, I replied.  She agreed, everyone's budget was dialed down to minimum through fear if not necessity.  No wonder things were contracting, I observed as my time to checkout finally arrived.  

We wished each other well as I rolled my few purchases away from the check stand.  I'd been in the store over an hour, but sections of the bottom of my basket were still exposed. 

As far as I can tell we're all waiting for some signal to exhale.  I drove the truck back home to my house of 18 years.  The Miata is still down with a blown belt idler and a cracked supercharger mounting bracket, but at least one vehicle works.  Even if it's the gas hog of the fleet.

I've set up all the regular bills to pay through Wells Fargo's automatic payment system.  This guarantees payments are never late.  But I've already had one credit card line reduced to the existing balance.  Thanks fellas.  Appreciate your support.  

My life has boiled down to keeping an eagle eye on the checking balance.  Business is down.  Boats repairs and upgrades are a deferrable expense.  Some months I get buy with pulling less out of the nest egg and some months more.   I'm not out of savings, but it's pretty clear it will be easy to outlive what's still in the bank.  To say nothing of unexpected expenses, a hospitalization episode equivalent.

My son's severance pay has just run out and he has a monumental mortgage payment.   This is the longest he's ever been out of work, six weeks.  But even a scrambler isn't getting much job market traction.  There are a few pockets of income and savings scattered through our family, so I suppose we'll keep his wife and children out of foreclosure somehow.  But it places all of us in danger of being on the streets.  That is not acceptable.

We all feel defrauded.  We were sold homes at willfully inflated prices during the bubble run up.  We were peddled mortgages that only made sense under the most optimistic scenario.  An arguably fraudulent securitization frenzy was whipped up so a small number of well positioned individuals could pocket vast wealth.  Now the cards have collapsed and we're subsidizing bank asset write downs with public money.  

Writing down the value of the mortgages has not stopped banks from foreclosing on these mortgages as if they still held full value.  This doesn't seem right even if it is legal.  The perpetrators need to be taking baths, not just the victims they seduced into the base of the scheme.   Mortgage relief, a recalibration of debt to current market value, is needed.   If it's been written down and replaced with public money, that write down needs to flow through to the mortgage holder, the original unsophisticated victim.  

It is very difficult to see the mortgage bubble as much beyond a massive fraud committed by entire segments of our banking and financial institutions.  Everyone from agents and appraisers, brokers to banks to Wall street PhD's are complicit.  The gains were ill gotten, no less than how Enron stole from California electrical consumers a very few years ago.  The entire edifice of deregulation from Regan on is now revealed to be massively fraudulent and corrupt.

If foreclosures continue and people keep being thrown onto the street, we're going to have to pull the National Guard back from Iraq to keep peace in our own streets.  We feel betrayed.  If people get pissed enough,  guns will come out of their closets.  My point is we need to head off the worst case, potential insurrection, as improbable as that may seem today.  Sufficiently desperate people can be pushed into sufficiently desperate action to defend their homes, no matter how the dead hand of mortgage law reads in normal times.

Eating Closer to the Root

The faintly crazy spectacle of salmonella-laced peanut paste turning up in more and more US food products probably isn't so funny if you come down infected. However, you have only yourself to blame. Well, yourself and nearly the entire manufactured food industry in the country.

Existing on manufactured food always entails risk of poor nutrition. Manufactured food has a small but non-zero risk of poisoning or infection. Peanut paste is just one of the non-zero instances.  Whatever its effects, the consequences of manufactured foods will be widely distributed and affect many people. This is simply because most people in "advanced" populations primarily eat manufactured food.

Avoiding manufactured food, which means eating principally real food, minimizes these risks. I think the human body evolved eating "peasant food," food most of the relatively poor members of society have eaten through the milennia. That is my personal nutrition strategy. I eat grains, fruits and vegetables. I am not a strict vegetarian, but my diet usually works as if I were. I eat a lot of basic stuff wrapped in flour tortillas. Basic food like rice, beans and lentils.

I am healthy. My weight is the same as it was when I was 30. I do not feel deprived. My food is not very expensive. My lipid levels delight my cardiologist. I don't spend much time eating.

Manufactured food, synthetic stuff compounded from generic ingredients, seems like a disaster always waiting to happen. Manufactured food comes out of a machine. Generic food-like ingredients also come out of machines. These machines can be anywhere in the world. Economies of scale drive the size of the machines up and aggregate them into factories. The same economies drive the number of factories down. Consequently, a problem in any food-like substance factory quickly becomes a very large problem indeed.

Without reiterating what Michael Pollan has said so well elsewhere, manufactured food is not really food. It is food-like. You can eat it. It will sustain life, more or less. You have no control over manufactured food. No preparation, "cooking" if you will, is involved. You unpackage manufactured food and eat it. Perhaps you combine several manufactured foods to make a common edible, a tiny cheese-like sandwich on soda crackers. Or you can just purchase the basic combinations already assembled wrapped in some clear film so strong it requires tools to penetrate.

Manufactured food is designed in food laboratories. It is designed to appeal to every appetizing characteristic that can be identified. It is usually sweet or salty and has great mechanical properties. The mechanical properties are known as "mouth feel." It is crispy or satiny or chewy or anything else humans have evolved to seek out in food.   No wonder manufactured food is popular.

Manufactured food is designed to have long shelf life. The packaging may contain a "best if eaten by" date, but it is usually just fine long after. The date is placed on the package primarily so some percentage of the product is destroyed before it is sold at retail. This keeps what is on the shelf "fresh" and increases the amount of the product that must be bought at wholesale.

Manufactured food has a long shelf life because it contains preservatives and because the packaging is designed to keep the product clean and to prevent oxygen and moisture from turning the product stale. I recently ate soda crackers that were stored on my smelly, damp sailboat for at least two years. They were perfect.

The nutrient content of manufactured food is also engineered. Food-like precursor ingredients are selected for low cost and their contribution to the product's appeal. Nothing particularly toxic to humans in normal doses is incorporated. The product has so many calories of energy, so much fat and so much protein. Lowest cost ingredients tend to inflate the fat and sugar content, but not so much as to become objectionable.  I think the nutrient content of manufactured food is secondary to what makes it appealing and profitable to sell.

By now you should have realized that manufactured food is far removed from a plant that grows in soil under the sun. The plants that manufactured foods come from are themselves highly engineered to produce maximum output and make use of as much synthetic fertilizer as possible. They are grown in large tracts of genetically identical plants, monocultures. Monocultures are extremely succeptible to infection by pathogenic organisms, so chemical pesticides and other artificial infection controls are mandatory.

I could go on and on. Not much associated with manufactured food seems really good. True, it supports a large population. I maintain it systematically malnourishes them, but that's my opinion. The manufactured food industry is more energy and resource intensive than farming the foods I eat. I can't prove it, but it seems quite likely. I avoid most manufactured food on principle. I believe I'm healthier for doing so. You should think about avoiding it too.

Be Careful What You Wish For

In late July 2008 I wrote a piece here about entreprenural values and institutional values.  At least that was where it was headed.  I was going to contrast the "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" work environment I came out of with the "If it's not on the list of permitted activities, don't think about it" attitudes I found around me.  The first environment encourages taking reasonable risks as the best strategy to success.  The second environment discourages initiative so you don't get into trouble.  I foundered on this disconnect as I left the business world and joined a sailing club to prepare for a new career around the water.

I briefly acquired a reputation as a troublemaker, and perhaps something of a dangerous person.   It seemed so innocent to me, but there I was, outside Dana Point harbor on a charter boat being chased down by the harbor patrol with lights flashing.

to be completed. . . .

Catching up with the future

I've been involved in electronics all my life.  I've had a computer since I could build one, which predates microprocessors.  But building most things sort of stopped at VLSI and the PC.  No point.

Some people never adopt a personal computer.  If they developed methods for doing their work and organizing their life before PCs, they tend to stay with that.  If you grew up recently, you may not understand what is "under the hood" of your PC any more than your car or television.  It just works and you use it and rarely think about it.  How do they do ADSL anyway?  Few people care or know.  I know what's going on in the guts of computers because that's what I was doing growing up.

New generations don't bother to learn what I had to learn.  It's just taken as a given that there are cell phones and computers.  Move on from there.  So people learn to text faster than they can work a keyboard.  No big deal for them.  Big deal for me, because I have to learn a new method for something I already have perfectly good tools for.  So I don't bother.  There are enough learning curves to climb.  You pick your challenges.   I never learned to touch type either, but I'm really fast with two fingers.

Then I run across something I want to adopt, like syndication.  RSS feeds.  Getting my Twitter posts to show up on Facebook or vice versa.  I go through lots of fumbling around.  A bit like when I built (assembled, actually) my latest computer.  I was going to dual boot Windows and Linux.  Well, Linux turns out to have a really basic prerequisite level of knowledge to use at all.  Things so basic no one ever talks about how to do them.  This is stuff that seems even too basic for "Linux for Dummies."  But if you never learn it, you can't get in the club.  Since I didn't have a Linux-literate buddy, I stumbled.  I decided the learning curve wasn't worth it at that time.  So I still run Windows.

I ran W2K on everything until about a month ago.  Then I got a copy of Vista for the new machine.  Skipped XP altogether.  Works great, I like it.  Similar enough that I've adapted.  Open Office was like that too.  Out of sheer ornieriness I hate Microsoft Office.  Damned if I'm going to keep sending them money for new versions I have to learn all over again.  Once, in the dim past, I was a Word expert.  Then they changed and I didn't know anything.  So fuck them, I'll get Open Office, which works just fine.  It saves and reads the usual Microsoft formats (except docx).  It's cross-platform, so will work on Linux if that ever happens for me.

I have a website I wrote myself which is not yet an embarassment.  This is a blog.  I did a Textpattern based blog and the overhead was just a little to high to fine-tune it.  I don't have to learn XML for anything else.  I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  I sort of know what feedburner is, but have not used it.  I subscribe to feeds on iGoogle.  I was a loyal Firefox user until it started crashing every day and so I switched to Chrome, which I love.  So I'm not exactly Neanderthal.  But this morning I'm stuck trying to connect Twitter and Facebook.  Playing catch-up to the technorati a generation younger than I am.