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.