Published Monday - Friday about 8 AM Central Time Except Holidays....many major typos are fixed by 8:30 daily Wednesday July 1, 2009 07:55 AM CDT
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Home - Not So Sweet - Home
A reality check about the economy seems in order here. The headline that "Home prices post 18.1 percent annual drop in April" got me to looking at the S&P/Case-Shiller Report (you'll need Excel to get at this) in a little more depth.
A couple of really happy places pop out of their data. Seems that in Denver, house prices are down only 4.92%, Dallas is down only 4.98% and Boston's only down 7.71%.
But the screaming (don't jump out the window here) places include drops of 35.26% in Phoenix, 32.18% in Las Vegas, 27.27% in the Miami area, while what's left of Motown was down another 25.43%.
Sometimes I curse Excel for making bad news reporting so easy. Sorry 'bout that. But it gets even worse.
The data in their spreadsheet goes back a fair distance and looks to have peaked in July 2006 (cell W238 if you're following along here).
Since then the biggest losers have been Phoenix where homes are have lost 54% of their value, down 52.1% in Vegas, Miami homes are down more than 47% while Motown's down only 43.2.
Searching for Nirvana? Try Dallas down only 9% from the peak. I'd give you Houston, too, but it's not in the sample. Nationally, though, down 32.5% since the peak.
Next time you hear someone tell you that a home is the 'best investment you'll ever make' - kick 'em or at least point them in the direction of the good work of S&P/Case-Schiller for putting the numbers together. They're a whole helluva lot more believable than numbers out of 'gummint' lately.
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Construction spending figures are due out this morning. About 47-cents if my calculations are right.
Not to Be a Bear, But...
(Damn fine pun, that, huh? Or are you still asleep....)
A buddy who's a serious trader in EU Land caught this in the latest from Comstock Partners: "From this point we will see either continued recession or a recovery so weak it will still seem like recession."
How about that? Someone besides yours truly is skeptical. They have a solid take on things here and it's updated on Thursdays. Try to overlook that more and more places are sounding Urban-like in their open skepticism of 'the paradigm'.
Although it's a bit rickety, our time machine does allow us to groc the future now and then better'n most.
Markets
The market (as I expected) began the week higher, then turned lower yesterday mostly on that bummer of a consumer confidence report.
If you understand fractals here, let me point out out what's going on:
The decline from October of 2007 until March of this year was one leg down, and we are in two up, and then we get into three down shortly this fall till next spring then a bounce a bit at some point in 2010.
The market this week from the Monday high to the Tuesday low was also a downer, then a bounce should pop this morning, then another down when numbers hit tomorrow and then maybe up next week.
Now THE BIG SECRET. The market is inscribing a whole sequence of what I call "Memorial W's" Got it? You remember "W" right?
Now We Can Leave Department
"Iraq approves BP oil deal, rejects other bids." Of course, we all know this war was never about oil and the temporal association between oil deals and withdrawals of forces from cities is purely coincidental - you do understand that, right?
Here's another glass of fluoride-laced water and some Prozac. No connection at all, right?
More water and drugs? Speaking of water....
MSM's (Mis)Adventures on the High Seas
Answer me this: How is it that the MainStreamMedia can report every course change of a North Korean 'suspect vessel' yet the stories about how Israel's naval blockade of Gazan's food aid gets about zip in the way of coverage by the MSM? Agendas, agendas....tisk, tisk. Paul Craig Roberts' article "Pirates of the Mediterranean" seems to be on point though...
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BTW: We're still on for Israel bombing Iran in late October, though, right?
Why I don't Write Comedy
Headlines like "Jackson body going to Neverland" has me itching to write "It'll meet the economy, which left for Neverland a couple of years ago when the Bushies were still in office..." But I won't, since it wouldn't be tasteful and I have to look at the Man in the Mirror...
Reason #2
"What to do with out wayward Governor" on the SC Now web site about the recent adventures of the miss(tress)ing guv has me wondering if the waterworks machines that put fluoride in SC's water could maybe be converted to inject something more useful...like an anaphrodisiac? If you missed Organic Chemistry, that's the opposite of an aphrodisiac. (I remember Anna...just said No!) [rimshot and groans from the audience]
Reason #3
With Al Franken now officially the Senator for Minnesota, I wonder if the other guy will have to hand over back pay or something? File under Franken'sTime politics.
Reason #4
Russia's banning of all gambling and shuttering of casino's has me wondering just how far they will go. Sounds like they're going through the modern analog to prohibition, except since no one wants to quite the hard stuck, they'll just quit gambling? Help me here...Besides, wouldn't a ban on gambling mean shutting down their stock exchange, too? Let's be real here...
Fluage
A couple of days back, the woman with flu-like symptoms reporting she had been offered a flu shot by her doc brought a detailed and interesting note from our consulting microbiologist:
"Hi George,
Ok, so there are only two logical conclusions regarding your reader’s comments about getting the flu shot while sick: A) it is a fabricated story that did not happen, or B) if it did happen exactly as stated, then she REALLY needs to change doctors & find an office with at least a pretence of competence!
No doctor or nurse should be so absurdly clueless as to suggest giving a flu shot to someone with active H1N1 (aka swine flu)! 1) As your reader pointed out, it would do no good 2) It takes 2 weeks (give or take) before an immune response from the vaccine would be raised 3) The CDC states clearly that a person should not be immunized while sick. The CDC website is not the least bit ambiguous (bolded italics are mine): http://www.cdc.gov/flu/keyfacts.htm
“Who Should Not Be Vaccinated
Some people should not be vaccinated without first consulting a physician. They include: • People who have a severe allergy to chicken eggs. • People who have had a severe reaction to an influenza vaccination in the past. • People who developed Guillian-Barré syndrome (GBS) within 6 weeks of getting an influenza vaccine previously. • Children less than 6 months of age (influenza vaccine is not approved for use in this age group). • People who have a moderate or severe illness with a fever should wait to get vaccinated until their symptoms lessen. If you have questions about whether you should get a flu vaccine, consult your health-care provider.”
One piece of worrisome news on the flu front is that an H1N1 variant has been identified in Denmark that is resistant to Tamiflu.
They claim it spontaneously mutated in that one patient & has not spread. Well, of course that person never coughed on anyone, or wiped his/her nose & then touched some money, an ATM machine, a shopping cart handle, a door-knob….sorry, I was rambling. Good thing that patient didn’t infect anyone.
BTW, & FWIW (sorry, couldn’t resist), you most likely will NOT want to take a vaccine made in dog kidney cells. The 2 allergen proteins in dogs are CAN F1 & Can F2. They are found in the saliva of dogs. These proteins are members of the lipocalin family of proteins and related to proteins found in animal urine (especially rodents) that are HIGHLY allergenic to some people. If these proteins are secreted into dog urine, then until it is known specifically which cells do the secreting, all kidney cells are suspect. If they are secreted elsewhere & simply being excreted in the urine, then the kidney cell-based vaccine will not be allergenic to humans with dog allergies.
And I am seriously allergic to dogs....or is that the plan?
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Coping: The Breakthrough Software Department
Although I've intended for UrbanSurvival (and it's mirror site & blog) to be mainly focused on how Depression 2.0 is rolling out - and has been since the internet bubble started to collapse in the late spring of 2000, it seems here lately that I've been getting the opportunity to be 'first in the world' to get onboard with cool new software.
Started a month, or so, back when the folks at Maxa-Tools gave me the world-wide rollout of the new Maxa-Tools Cookie Manager, which can be downloaded here:
www.urbansurvival.com/setupMCMstdGU.exe The rave reviews from Windows users have been piling in ever since - most people find their computers run faster because they're able to clean out in some cases thousands of cookies of the browser non-specific type that clearing your browser cache doesn't get at. The Flash super-cookies and such, too.
Now I've heard from Maxa that a new and even further improved version should be ready shortly and it's one that will address one of the sneakiest bits of spyware ever. It's call the 'one byte' tracker.
Here's how it works: Suppose you go to a site and load up a page and let's suppose that the site has no apparent tracking cookie associated with it. Can you still be tracked? Why of course! All the page that you've surfed to has to do is have a '1-byte' image source from some add tracking site embedded into the (for now) seemingly 'clean page'.
Follow this: You load the page you thought was 'clean'. On that page is an external imgage_source call that points to some ad-tracker's site for the image_source call, and when your computer's browser goes over to that site to pull down the image which was called, the image_source server snags your IP address and you're now on yet another list.
Sneaky bastards, huh? Well, no worries, Maxa's next version of Cookie Manager will track those small-byte hidden graphics calls, too.
Am I looking forward to it? Oh, hell yeah!
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Then there's the matter of email and spam and such. Here's another break-through product which I haven't seen much about anywhere else...so read this carefully:
"Hello George:
Greetings from Chile.
I'd like to take a few minutes of your valuable time and communicate with you about something of great importance, IMO.
About two years ago I challenged my brilliant son to write a program to replace eMail as we know it. It is done, and it is ready for prime time. It eliminates all spam, all 'scripts' and other nasty things, and messages can be encrypted legally (so the odd person cannot read what is being communicated), it gives automatic read-receipts . . . and much more. (The 'legally' is a big deal - more on this if you wish to know.) In order to check out TrulyMail, please go to www.TrulyMail.com
We hope you will be thrilled with what he has done. (I am.) He is giving it away 100% for free (forever) for the next 6 months. We would love it if you would help us with our roll-out by offering it to your subscribers. Questions are invited.
Warm Regards, John
There are a few limitations - like only be able to send 10 MB per day - I hope they have an upgrade path for folks like me who send lots of attachments to clients and such, and no, I haven't had time to see if it has a 'mail router' in it to where I can set up 'rules' so that email sorts itself into what gets down in what order...but those are nits, right? It's a great combined feature set that seems to get around some of the issues with email...so give it a try and let me know what you think?
Replies and comments on both Maxa-Tools Cookie Manager (MCM) and TrulyMail will be forward to the development teams...and you and I will be asking "How come the Big Outfits" haven't taken care of these issues? Easily answered, my friend.
Repeat after me here: "Follow the money..."
Tags, Weather, and Friends
Went down to the former Chrysler dealership Tuesday for the annual safety inspection sticker - no emissions check, just the basics out here in the East Texas outback: Brakes work? Lights? Tires looking like racing slicks yet? That kind of thing. As expected, no problems, except that the sun baked wiper blades could stand replacement - no problem and $20 to have it handled on the spot.
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A lot of people would probably have driven up to the AutoZone or O'Reilly's store up town, and maybe saved $6-bucks by doing it themselves, but in George Land, a half hour to 45-minutes has time value, since I live Life like a foot-race with the Grim Reaper - the essence of a Type A personality.
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Between the head of the service operation and the head of sales, it was concluded that one, getting ten drops of rain while driving to work from over near the Trinity River, has 11-more drops than the other.
Weather doesn't mean much to folks who live the box life: Live in a box, get in a box to get to the office-in--box, and then inhabit a cubicle once there. For some reason, I've always found myself when possible living in 'weather's important' environments. Living on a sailboat, where it's a quarter-mile walk up the dock for a shower if you don't want too much mold growing aboard in the winter, or out here goat ranching, guess what's important?
People in Big Cities are thus out of touch - in many ways - with what's really going on a bit nearer the earth.
It's this time of year that I keep an ear really close to the ground about weather and farmerly talk. heard Tuesday, from another friend who keeps tabs on about 17,000 dairy cattle up in the square states, that dairymen are only getting about 10 per hundred weight when break-even is up around 18/hundredweight. Which means dairymen might be moving toward reducing their 'fleet size' by 400-thousand head nationally. A drop in exports to places like Europe seems to figure into it, best they can figure.
If the Drought (see the weekly drought monitor map updated Thursday here), keeps up through the summer and there's some fleet...I mean herd-size reductions in dairy, then along about late fall or early winter, food prices ought to be going up - a far bit at that.
Adding to that, of course, will be oil which continues to firm in price - up to $71 this morning as fresh attacks have taken place in Nigeria.
Lemme put that MBA to work: Hmmm...drought +reducing herds + high input costs for fuel - and by extension, fertilizer - and what happens to prices?
I called my commodities broker (JB) and told him to shop a few March 2010 lottery tickets for me.
"Lottery tickets? I didn't know commodity brokers sold lottery tickets?" you're wondering about here.
Yep. That's what I call grain (commodity) call options. $500 out of the money call options when you have a gut feeling that prices will be going up a fair piece over the next year. Add in the 'stimulus' and you might - this is not a recommendation, mind you - have some fun.
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Made another decision while visiting the former Chrysler dealership: Noticed that they charge $70 an hour for shop time and I still have putting the new radiator in the old Daewoo, where Elaine tried to put a coyote or wolf through it on the way back from Dallas, couple of weeks back. Just haven't had time to get to that part of my list since that part of my list doesn't work once the temp is above 80, or so.
Decided to let them do it...since they can do the change-out for an hour and a half of shop time, whereas I could piddle away most of the day and they have a few tools which I don't; namely the car lift and so on. Don't mind an oil change, or tinkering on the red car, but putting in a radiator verges on real work. I'll bring them the car and parts, and go about the rest of my list.
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Also heard that the surviving dealerships that were not on the 'cut list' have blanketed former customers of this particular dealership with all kinds of promotions and ads aimed at cutting off their shop business, leaving the cut dealership in the . The joys of predatory capitalism, huh? So I'll have them do the radiator change-out...keeps the money in the neighborhood, anyway.
Speaking of Tune-Ups
One of the items that actually got done yesterday was re-linking the old (by several years mostly) content of the Exurban Living section of www.independencejournal.com. If you go there now, down this link, you'll find a number of oldies but good's including Oilman2's "What If?" series. Along with our 2002 adventure of buying this place in the outback sight-unseen over the internet. I've always had a wild-eyed gambler streak.
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While we were watching the deer ramble through the yard last evening (looking for more tomatoes, I assumed) Elaine mentioned that one of the downsides of 30-acres is that you can end up with so much 'stuff' that it can become overwhelming. Which indeed it can.
She even mentioned that one of the nice things about living on a sailboat was that there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. I mentioned the Seasteading Institute's ideas and suggested returning to a 60-foot sailboat is always an option.
While she's promised to think about it, seems more'n likely it's just from the weather being too hot. Come fall and something less than a cross between blast furnace and sauna outside, and she'll come back to her senses.. Still, a large sailboat again...ah. But the reality is those get too cold instead of too hot. So, what's a fellow to do?
Web Bot Project
Reader is asking:
George,
I recently read an article that said the webbot was being retired. Is that a true statement? If it is why is it being shut down?
I have recently gained interest in your webbot and kind of wan to see the project continue.
Thanks for your Time!
Nope. Not shut down. It changed form, since doing the week-after-week high immediacy values got to be a complete and utter bummer for Cliff. It's now issued every once-in-a-while and is only $10-bucks at www.halfpasthuman.com. More than worth it.
Thought everyone knew the 'rickety time machine' wasn't going to weekly reports and would be more like semi-monthly, or so. Maybe there are people who's caffeine uptake is lower than ours, though...
Curious Email
Have to admit it, this one has me stumped:
"George & Cliff: Just a word of thanks to you both for increasing awareness that everyone should be more self sufficient. Planted a garden at home & on my sister's farm. Bought jars, lids & canners, 2 grain grinders, wheat, Berkey water filter, cistern pump, rain barrels, food juicer, wood cook stove for cooking and heating. Checked the well for water quality. Food, Water, Shelter top priorities.
No one in my family or community is concerned so I figured someone needs to prepare. Hopefully I won't need some of this, but I sure hate to watch or endure suffering. I fear suffering more than death.
Still need a pellet gun for rabbits and squirrels in the yard and a chimney inspection."
How do you inspect a chimney with a pellet gun? America wants to know!
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Send comments to george@ure.net
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The UrbanSurvival Mall:
Marching to the Wall
Have a blindfold and cigarette handy? The next year or so will see lots of people and entities being 'marched to the wall'. (Thanks; gotta light?). Our biggest problem is who to march out first, but that easily solved thanks to a source of mine that keeps track of the Gnomes of Greenwich who have California lined up to march out next. California defaults, the Gnomes make billions, and guess who is left behind to mourn? Then shortly thereafter will come 'small investors' who can see the wall, but can't break out of the lock-step march towards it, either... Ten-hut! Forward march!
More For Subscribers Subscription Information
MyGroPonics
My commodity broker JB Slear has nailed a great solution for people who living in apartments and condos who want to become at least partially self-reliant when it comes to raising food: An ultra-high efficiency micro-hydroponics system using readily available local parts. 25-pages and plenty of pictures to turn you into a farmer no matter where you live (Great if you have back problems, too...)...or if you just want to fill up the back yard with MyGroPonics trees and feed the neighborhood... $10 bucks here...
Maxa-Cookie Manager
Maxa-Tools has provided us with a free demo - which you're welcome to try - of their dandy cookie manager tool that I use here on all my computers. It shows both the browser-specific and the newer browser-independent cookies. Quite happy with it.
Here's the download link for the free demo:
www.urbansurvival.com/setupMCMstdGU.exe
Once you try it out, click the upgrade button (!) on the upper right hand side for the $35 unlock to get it to remove even those pesky 'non-browser specific' cookies. Bonus: You computer may run faster. I took over 1,000 cookies off my son's machine that he swore was clean. It ran much faster.
Attn: Mac Drivers: MCM does support the Safari Browser, but that does not mean it is compatible with Mac OS. Maxa-Tools only support the Windows world.
