If I had a Hi-fi

Then I wouldn't have to pop these family pictures up in a new window!
My favorite one hands down is Chocolate Monster. I mean my favorite of those pictures, not my favorite. You just want to say "Roawwwrrr!! out loud when you see it.


Made that with 123Show--kind of a cool program. Here are some more miscellaneous pics without the slide show spin:


Here's Kait (bowling ball shown at actual speed)



My girls

(Demonstrating my lack of camera know-how..if I had rotated the picture to keep you from tilting your head, they would just be 45° in the opposite wrong direction)



Tired of studying




The rear view mirror only shows how much stuff we packed



Loki looks like I am using a bubble lens or something, but everything else in the picture is normal. That is just the way he really looks



Scalloping in the Gulf of Mexico

No, it is opposition

Are the financial decisions our nation's leaders have been making a help to the present economic woes or an opposition? I'm currently reading a fairly dull-sounding book called "Rethinking the Great Depression: A New View of Its Causes and Consequences" by Gene Smiley (2002). "Why are you reading that?" I am asked by anyone who ever sees what I am reading. Except my wife, Jamee--she knows its simply because I'm a geek, but... As far as this book goes, can you name a more important financial event of that entire century? Thought not.

So this book was published 7 years ago about events of more than 70 years ago. But, as George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." A supplemental but less notable quote is (paraprased), "We have spent the last 100 years ignoring the lessons from history because in hindsight everything they have done looks retarded."

I don't know about you, but I'm disturbed by the financial news over the last couple years, ranging from Enron, Tyco, and (many) other corporate scandals, to stories of incompetence and greed like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide and IndyMac Bank, BofA redefining buyer's remorse with Countrywide, Lehman, Merrill, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and on and on...

The economy was a major factor in the election, and rightly so. Ostensibly, what Pres. Obama and company want (hope&change) to achieve is stability, growth and other improvements in our economy, but how are we going about it?

Large scale financial mistakes and successes from the Depression era should be our basic road map. These lessons from the past should not all have to be painfully relearned. I think I can sum up the scariest parts of these 160 pages in a few paragraphs. So here's what happened before; see if any of it sounds familiar.

After WWI, Europe agriculture production is down & demand is up. U.S. farmers borrow to purchase additional land and machinery, and farmland values increase.

Florida real estate booms for several years, much around Miami, then collapses. Hmmm...

Europe recovers quickly, ag prices fall 53.3% between 1920-21. Farm forclosures throughout the 20's. Other than that, mining and some textiles down, but everything else is rosy. Stock market booms until October 1929 crash (Dow Jones index peaked at 381 and finally bottomed at 198.

Ok, heres a 10-year chart of the Dow Jones Average with a peak of over 14,000 in mid and late 2007, and bottoming out under 7,000 in 2009. Hmmm...

Back to the past-President Hoover, wanting to avoid wage declines and increased unemployment as in the depression of 1920-21, conferenced with leaders of industrial, construction, and public utility firms at least 6 times in November '29 to get them to allow profits rather than wages to fall. A new division in the Commerce department attempted to speed federal construction projects. Hoover proposed a tax reduction to help boost the economy, and legislators voted to increase public works spending by $400 million. Hoover proposed establishing, with $100 million from the Treasury, a Federal Farm Board to fund co-ops to buy agricultural commodities when the prices were falling. Basically, bail out farming by artificially boosting their product prices. $150 million to wheat co-ops in November, $10 million to centralize the marketing of grains, and $100 million more to the Federal Farm Board in 1930 to buy more wheat. This accumulation of surplus turned off investors, and prices continued to fall. Ultimately, the Federal Farm Board ended up selling the inventory, depressing prices worse than if they had never become involved, and worsening the depression in the agricultural sector.Sounds like what will certainly happen with any industry that our gov't interferes with. GNP per capita fell 10.8% between '29 and '30.

From CIA World Fact Book:

The merchandise trade deficit reached a record $847 billion in 2007, but declined to $810 billion in 2008, as a depreciating exchange rate for the dollar against most major currencies discouraged US imports and made US exports more competitive abroad. The global economic downturn, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, investment bank failures, falling home prices, and tight credit pushed the United States into a recession by mid-2008. To help stabilize financial markets, the US Congress established a $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in October 2008. The government used some of these funds to purchase equity in US banks and other industrial corporations. In January 2009 the US Congress passed and President Barack OBAMA signed a bill providing an additional $787 billion fiscal stimulus - two-thirds on additional spending and one-third on tax cuts - to create jobs and to help the economy recover.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html

Reminds me of that Federal Farm Board thing I heard about one time, hmmm...

Average unemployment in 1929: 3.2%, by 1930 it was 8.9% and rose to more than 14%.Average unemployment Oct. 2006: 4.1%, by March 2009 it was 9%.

Drought in the southern states causes farm loan defaults, that plus bad loans and bad investments lead to bank failures, causing many Americans to withdraw their money quickly and completely in a short period of time (called a run on the bank), causing even more bank failures. Hmmm...

Other countries experienced similar bank failures and depressions, but it was longer more severe in the U.S. Hoover held economy conferences, discussed cutbacks in government spending, and then massively increased taxes including doubling income tax. Decline in sale of Ford cars led to massive layoffs in '31 and '32. Hmmm...
In '33 several farming states established one-year moratoriums on farm mortgage foreclosures, and the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of it despite the Fifth Amemdment's protection against the taking of private property--in this case, that of the mortgage holders.

Presidential election gave Roosevelt a victory and swept a Democratic-dominated Senate and House into power. Hmmm...
He ran a campaign that was notable for being the first to extensively use radio to communicate, which reminded me of Obama and Twitter postings, web casts, etc. Roosevelt is known for the New Deal, social programs, Social Security (Having one arm of the government (Social Security) own IOUs from another arm (the Treasury) doesn't help the government as a whole cover its bills. ) which is projected to be negative half a trillion dollars by 2030.

Here's the thing--the national economy comprises a vast number of complicated intertwined causes and effects. It's just like grandma used to say about dual rotation light and medium duty hydraulic motors--the higher the cubic inch displacement, the lower the rpm--the inch pounds of torque goes up, but the psi goes down. OK, she never said that, but it applies...Reduction in money supply lowers price of goods and services. Deflation reduces price levels. This causes increased money supply elsewhere, along with rising prices, which leads eventually to fewer sales, and then back to a reduced money supply. This is apparently a very poorly-understood part of the supply-demand cycle. When the government sticks its stupid face into private business, say by tinkering with interest rates at which banks get money...it causes a reduction in domestic investment , which causes declines in economic activity, rising unemployment, and falling prices. Not to mention the creation of money by the U.S. or other countries to buy war supplies during the world wars that artificially inseminated the entire money supply..uggh. So if the tinkering appears to have an undesired effect, they turn the knob the other way--move interest rates the opposite direction. To me it seems that any interference that is not part of the consumer demand, supplier react and provide cycle will have unintended and unpredictably bad results. Leave the economy to the people legitimately involved, and it will work itself out.

All I can say is to Contact Your Elected Officials and let them know you would like them to stop hosing us.

Puff up

I caught a small portion of El Rushbo on the radio yesterday and he was reading a UK Times review of a Honda hybrid by Jeremy Clarkson. This article was so funny I had to share some of it (edited for space, and with my favorite portions in italics) :

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.
So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.
So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).
It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.
And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.
So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit.
Because the Honda has two motors, one that runs on petrol and one that runs on batteries, it is more expensive to make than a car that has one. But since the whole point of this car is that it could be sold for less than Toyota’s Smugmobile, the engineers have plainly peeled the suspension components to the bone. The result is a ride that beggars belief.
There’s more. Normally, Hondas feel as though they have been screwed together by eye surgeons. This one, however, feels as if it’s been made from steel so thin, you could read through it. And the seats, finished in pleblon, are designed specifically, it seems, to ruin your skeleton. This is hairy-shirted eco-ism at its very worst.
However, as a result of all this, prices start at £15,490 — that’s £3,000 or so less than the cost of the Prius. But at least with the Toyota there is no indication that you’re driving a car with two motors. In the Insight you are constantly reminded, not only by the idiotic dashboard, which shows leaves growing on a tree when you ease off the throttle (pass the sick bucket), but by the noise and the ride and the seats. And also by the hybrid system Honda has fitted.
In a Prius the electric motor can, though almost never does, power the car on its own. In the Honda the electric motor is designed to “assist” the petrol engine, providing more get-up-and-go when the need arises. The net result is this: in a Prius the transformation from electricity to petrol is subtle. In the Honda there are all sorts of jerks and clunks.
And for what? For sure, you could get 60 or more mpg if you were careful. And that’s not bad for a spacious five-door hatchback. But for the same money you could have a Golf diesel, which
will be even more economical. And hasn’t been built out of rice paper to keep costs down.

Of course, I am well aware that there are a great many people in the world who believe that the burning of fossil fuels will one day kill all the Dutch and that something must be done.
They will see the poor ride, the woeful performance, the awful noise and the spine-bending seats as a price worth paying.
... ... ...

*whew* Click the link at the top if you want to read the whole article; the rest is pretty funny, too. Clarkson makes a good point in saying that the Insight is "Good only for parting the smug from their money." Labeling something "green" is a fad that will help sell certain products to certain people, regardless of whether the construction or total cost of ownership nets any actual savings in carbon output into the world, of which humans are only responsible for a tiny portion anyway. Hydrogen cars are sweet though, and you know it!
Overall, my favorite car that I've owned is the Jeep Grand Cherokee. Just wish it was new instead of 10 years old...

Must Sell at Tallest Sum

It seems like everyone talks about the economy on a daily basis now. A lot of people are obsessed with money; retirement, how can I make more money, how should I invest, saving money, the things they want to buy, and the buying low and selling high and all that.

As everyone knows, I Timothy 6:10 For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
I know my profile list my occupation as profiteering, but specifically, I'm in sales and marketing for a hydraulic and industrial distributor. I custom build web sites for my company's products and design and implement online marketing campaigns to draw customers to the ecommerce sites, as well as sell on ebay, amazon, and yahoo stores. Doin' stuff on the internet. Sure sounds cool, huh? But no matter what industry you are in, the point is to make money, right? Lot & lots of money...

http://www.floridahydraulic.com	http://www.floridahoseguys.com
http://stores.ebay.com/floridahoseguys	http://www.bonzerhydraulics.com
(Shameless self-promotion, huh?)	http://stores.ebay.com/bonzerhydraulics
http://www.thehydraulicshop.com	http://usa-hydraulic.amazonwebstore.com/

But making money is only the point for the time that I am at work, and it's important not to define yourself by your employment or future career path. If you overhear someone asked, "So, what do you do?", you never hear them say that they go to a certain church, or talk on the phone, go out to dinner and watch movies with their wife, go fishing and play basketball with their kids, and they make pretty good lasagna, and so on. People seem to always say, 'I sell cars', or 'I'm a teacher,' or whatever. But what you do for work isn't who you are, or at least it shouldn't be. Think about it; if most people sleep for about 7 hours a night, then they sleep 9 more hours a week than they work. Hey.. you're not an account manager, you're a sleeper. Maybe I'll start telling people that ask what I do that I just sleep most of the time. Wait.. actually, while 7 hours a night is not most of the time it's still a whopping 29%. It's pretty lame that in an 85 year lifespan, you'll sleep 24-1/2 years!
Anyway, we should try to keep our minds set on what is truly important to us in life. Just like the adage not to bring your personal problems to work, don't worry about work in your personal life. We all need money for expenses, but sometimes our wants drive us to pursue money too much. Point is, balance. Go to work all week, then cash your check and forget about work until Monday. Work hard without being a workaholic. Be careful with money, but not necessarily a cheapskate. Be generous to others without being frivolous. I say, forget working on days and nights and weekends.. I mean, you have to be reliable and industrious to have job security, but go ahead and miss work to do stuff with your family if you have to-- work will always be there, and you'll never look back and regret not earning a few more bucks, but missing important parts of your kids' childhoods can't be undone.



Next time: How to Make Millions From Home on the Interweb!

Top Spot

Ok, Skool for the Gifted is my first expedition into the blagosphere... & I figure blogging is infinitely less vapid than MySpFaceTwitterBook. I can't comprehend why people update their "status" on those things every time they're getting a cup of coffee, but oh well...

I've always thought it would be very rewarding to write a book; especially a smart, and funny book. So, I was watching tv with Jamee recently, and saw part of an interview with the widow of a Iraq war vet who had kept a daily journal for his newborn son as a contingency in case he died overseas. The wife had the journal published as a book and the boy will always have that to remember his dad. As a father of four, there will no doubt be things that I want to tell all mine but somehow forget to... memories that I'd like to document (but Dads aren't known for scrapbooking) or advice that would be good to state just for the record; and I thought this could be a good way for me to begin something encompassing thoughts, memories, the wisdom and advice passed on to me from my parents and others, and my own Deep Thoughts (haha). For those who know me best (that's you, honey) the title is maybe both ironic and fitting, both for me, and even for my little ones. Since I'm the author, I look forward to recording some history that conveniently excludes my follies and utilizes the stylings of my own humor...

And maybe someday, I'll have enough to put some kind of book together. We'll see..