Occam's Razor

Job growth in March was a measly 88,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped to 7.6 percent, but this was largely because many people stopped looking for work. The economy had been looking pretty promising earlier in the year, with steady job growth well in excess of 100,000 jobs a month.

Now we will likely be watching the effects of austerity for the rest of this year and probably next year as well. It won’t seem familiar to many of us who were not impacted by the Great Recession, but it will look familiar to those who live in Europe. Austerity has failed to rectify Europe’s economy although it has caused two recessions. Austerity in Great Britain looks like it is causing a third recession. Yet for some reason in the United States we seem to want to emulate European austerity. The predictable results are starting to be seen in the jobs numbers for March.

To the extent the United States has had job growth over the last few years, it has been due to not following austerity. And this should not be rocket science. What exactly is austerity? It is not living at your means; it is living below your means. The hope is that through frugality one will glean efficiency, competitiveness and an eventual rebound in wealth. Austerity does not mean driving a used car, it means driving a very used car until it falls apart on the side of the road. And after it falls apart, maybe it means not replacing it.

Austerity is being enacted through sequestration, which cuts certain areas of federal spending. It will lead to the furlough of federal workers like me, actual cuts in pay that will give me less to live on and will decrease my standard of living. Some federal workers may have their pay cut as much as twenty percent through the end of the fiscal year. In some sense though federal workers are relatively lucky. At least they will have some income. It’s the vast food chain that feeds off federal spending where the impact is likely to be much greater. I have watched a friend struggle in this climate and my heart goes out to her. It means periods of unemployment, stringing together temporary jobs, working out of town in temporary housing and in general dealing with a lot of stress and anxiety. She is one of many in this situation and with the new pointless austerity trend is for more of it, because of a law posits that austerity is a good idea. For her it means no health insurance and wondering how you are going to pay the mortgage.

But at least she is partially employed, and may get a full time job again one of these days that pays actual benefits. She has some employment. Many other federal contractors are simply unemployed and trying to figure out what to do about it. The bottom line is when you have less money you have less of it to spend. Austerity breeds more austerity. Austerity does not trickle down, it cascades down. None of this should be the least surprising. Any economist could have predicted this. We can now expect modest job growth at best and a cooling economy, which was barely warm, for the remainder of the year, assuming we do not progress into a recession.

To quote Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” We are choosing austerity and we are choosing to punish ourselves because we can. And that’s what the big squeeze is all about in a nutshell: some small minority of politicians from heavily gerrymandered districts is making it so because they control a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In Europe the same economies practicing the austerity are at least as badly off as they were before they were told to be austere. In Greece and Spain, for example, the unemployment rate exceeds 25%. The real cost of planned austerity though is not money but the trail of wounds and wreckage that it causes. It’s in the excess student indebtedness because states won’t subsidize tuitions as much. It’s in young adults who, if they are lucky, can still live at home and try to fend off feelings of hopelessness as they search for good jobs that largely aren’t there. It’s in lives put on hold, if you are lucky, or watching the quality of your life diminish. It’s in putting off fixes to your car for another month, even though the engine needs to be fixed. Austerity multiplies fiscal and personal pain.

It amounts to a game of musical chairs except two chairs are being pulled with each round. In reality though it’s those who are in recession-proof jobs and who have sizable bank accounts that end up back in their chairs. Pain is distributed disproportionately to those not quite so fortunate or quite so prepared.

The multiplying effect is really the uncertainty. No one is quite sure how the sequestration will affect the economy, so they are hunkering down instead. They are not making investments, not hiring people and deferring spending just in case things go from bad to worse. You know you have a problem when Wal-mart is struggling with profitability. Between payroll tax increases, declining wages and poor job growth there is simply less for the least well off to spend, and Wal-mart, which is basically the retailer to the working class, thus has a hard time making profits. So they squeeze their employees some more, resulting in fewer employees, long checkout lines and empty shelves.

About all you can do is in good times to prepare for the bad times. The 401-K has proven a failure as a retirement system, but it is still a source of funds that in good times that I can put money too, and which can’t be taken away in the next round of austerity. And so I have been throwing as much money as I can into it, which includes now that I am over fifty special catch up contributions. The 16.3% of my income going into my 401-K means something else has got to give and that is our savings account, which needs a lot more money. Our daughter is on the cusp of a college graduation and it comes just in time. We really can’t afford to keep her in college much longer. The $1300 or so we pay for her room and board each month has to fatten our savings account instead. And like many Americans, I look for other sources of income: teaching and consulting. The latter has been reasonably good to me lately, even if it keeps me from blogging as often as I would like.

Like it or not we are all in the economy together. Our cheese is being moved and unless we have been hoarding cheese many of us are about to get caught in another pointless austerity experience. What it really will amount to will be more wealth moving toward the wealthy and our pockets will be picked clean.

It’s been forty years since the long running British TV series Upstairs, Downstairs first débuted here in the USA on a rather new and largely unwatched network called PBS. Upstairs, Downstairs would do much to reverse PBS’s image, for it was a classy show with each episode feeling like a movie. For most of us Americans, the series was also a revelation in British culture, with lords and ladies living privileged and opulent lives while a working class of servants obsessively catered to their every need. Like Upstairs, Downstairs the British ITC series Downton Abbey also immerses the viewer in the world of English social class on a large Yorkshire estate in Edwardian England. Like Upstairs, Downstairs, it is a hard series not to like.

Beginning on the Downton Abbey estate shortly after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, this series traces the life of the fictional Lord Grantham, his wife, his three daughters, his cranky mother the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) and a crew of servants. Lord Grantham is of course just a title. His real name is Robert Crawley. With his well moneyed American wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) who provides the wealth to run the estate and their three daughters Mary, Edith and Sybil, Lord Grantham gets to live the surreal life of an English gentleman. You could not really count yourself a gentleman unless you were so filthy rich that you had nothing to do. It’s a world entirely of leisure and luxury and features being obsessively fussed over a devoted staff managed by the butler Charlie Carson (Jim Carter).

Late to the series as always, I have been playing catch up and have almost finished the first season, consisting of just seven episodes. At first it is hard to understand the appeal of the series. It doesn’t take much viewing though before you realize what the series really is: a fancy and elaborately staged soap opera. Because it deals with earls and ladies, buttoned down people, starched collars and fox hunts it is easy to forget that there is little substance to this series, other than to revel in its characters and the tensions between them. It looks way too fancy to be a soap opera, but that is its essence.

If life is a stage as Shakespeare wrote, Downton Abbey makes a great stage for character actors to strut their stuff. The real world does intrude from time to time on Downton Abbey, but mostly Downton Abbey exists to keep its family isolated from the real world, including that of its servants. It’s a world where your family dinner demands formal dress every night, where invitations arrive by mail on proper stationery and where gentlemen callers flirt politely with Lord Grantham’s daughters. Everyone has a role to play and no one more so than Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville). It’s a world where people have jobs that seem surreal and unnecessary. What exactly does a footman do? There is no equivalent here in the United States, but a footman’s job seems to be to keep his gentleman from ever having to lift his finger. It’s a world of suits, white gloves, stovepipe hats, gourmet dining and so much leisure that the Dowager Countess cannot tell weekdays from weekends.

The most interesting parts of Downton Abbey thus are mostly found in the kitchen, the back stoop where the staff smoke cigarettes and in the austere servants’ quarters. It too is a strange hierarchy, overseen by butler Charley Carson and Housekeeper Elsie Hughes (Phyllis Logan) and it too has its own strict peculiar social order. Footmen obsess over becoming valet someday, the valet hopes for butler, or even assistant butler. Housemaids aspire to be head housemaid and even an assistant cook someday aspires to be cook. It seems surreal, pointless and ultimately without value, but this is a world that Lord Grantham feels entirely devoted to preserving. To the extent that he works it is to make sure that Downton Abbey always has future generations of Crawleys to be obsessively catered to by an omnipresent staff.

In short, if you are a Lord or a Lady, Downton Abbey is kind of like heaven on earth except there is not much to do. You have staff to do the heavy lifting. They make sure the food is always great, the bed sheets are replaced every day, the fireplaces are well stoked, the chandeliers are immaculately dusted and you only have to lift a hand to have a footman refill your glass with wine.

And yet there is a price. The staff is stiff and surreal, at least until they are behind closed doors when the backbiting can begin in earnest. Lady Mary, the Earl’s eldest daughter, feels trapped in her comfortable web, doesn’t quite want to be there, but doesn’t know what else to do and sure doesn’t want some distant cousin who actually works for a living to inherit the estate. It’s a world where ladies must always be beautiful, chaste and well-mannered. It’s a world where a lady is not allowed to succumb to the charms of a roguish Turkish ambassador, but finds herself human enough to do so anyhow. It means being resentful when Lord Grantham’s army friend is appointed valet to the position long aspired to by one of the footmen.

Ultimately, interest in Downton Abbey is sustained purely from these tensions and conflicts, and it makes for a surprisingly entertaining time for us to observe it all. It is a fun show to watch, but also is an eye opening perspective to a period largely in our past. Living a lavish life made possible through unearned wealth seems so vapid and meaningless. Titles, dowries and inheritances ultimately sap a society of its creative energy. It’s not surprising then that at the end of World War II that Great Britain was bankrupt and its empire destroyed. It happened in part because families like the Crawleys were wasting their lives in unproductive pursuits upholding customs that deserved to die centuries earlier. In places like America this talent would be unleashed for more useful purposes.

It seems kind of nervy to take on a classic movie, however indirectly. Perhaps the seventy four years which have elapsed between the release of the classic movie The Wizard of Oz makes it easier to accept a new Oz movie. This is particularly so when the director Sam Raimi seems to be going out of his way to prove that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Imitation in this case means ensuring that all these scenes in Kansas are filmed in black and white but those in Oz are filmed in color. Some technology changes were made. While in Kansas the aspect ratio is a tight 4:3, in Oz we get wide screen color rich enough to be Technicolor, except the movie was shot digitally and made to look like Technicolor. Also this version can be seen in 3D at selected theaters.

The world of Oz is actually quite richly detailed, both in this movie but also in the original source material. L. Frank Baum wrote eighteen Oz books, although only one is widely read. Consequently there was plenty of source material for Raimi to work with in this movie, which is a prequel of sorts to the 1939 classic. It details how an ambitious but second-rate sideshow magician makes his way from a dusty carnival in Kansas to Oz, and sets himself up as the great and powerful wizard of the Emerald City.

Surprisingly, I found Oz the Great and Powerful to be quite satisfying, and generally a fitting prequel to the original movie. The original movie was frankly not quite as great a movie as it subsequently became. It never won Best Picture. The same is true with Oz the Great and Powerful. Both movies are at their hearts B movies, just done well enough so that you felt well entertained regardless. You sort of expect to find stereotypes as characters instead of flesh and blood people. That’s largely true in this version too. Oz, played by James Franco, has no particular depth but seems a genuinely nice and harmless guy, albeit a bit full of himself. He is a magician with ambition but mediocre talents. His act gets few customers but he does attract a new and comely assistant May (Abigail Spencer) and a third rate assistant (Zach Braff). He also feels he has to spurn the love of an old flame Annie (Michele Williams) to feed his nebulous ambitions. He ends up in a balloon when a wrestler with a grudge tries to beat him up and vertical escape seems his only option for escape from this hulk. The tempestuous weather foments a tornado and soon Oz and his balloon finds himself in a land with the same name. He is quickly accosted by the witch Evanora (Rachel Weisz) who proclaims him as the likely new wizard of Oz, a post sadly vacant since the passing of her father. Almost as quickly he helps a winged monkey escape from a tangled vine and a lion, and thus gets Finley the monkey (also played by Zach Braff) as a dutiful assistant for life.

The movie has a lot of ground to cover and it doesn’t waste any time moving quickly between plot points. As with the original movie, characters back in Kansas seem to have alter egos in Oz. Annie shows up as the good witch Glinda, Frank shows up as Finley and the pathetic girl in the wheelchair shows up as the China Doll. Both Finley and the China Doll quickly become characters that follow Oz around.

Sorting through the politics of Oz quickly becomes confusing, to both Oz and the viewer, but it quickly becomes clear that Oz is on Dorothy’s quest, and to establish himself as a wizard he is expected to kill the Wicked Witch of the West. I won’t spoil what suspense there is in this movie, except to note that not everyone is who they appear to be. Oz himself is uncomfortable in his role as savior, and quickly confesses to Finley that he is a fraud. The wicked witches, and there are more than one of them, quickly demonstrate their mojo by wreaking havoc on Oz, including the little village where they find the small China Doll and her broken legs, which Oz quickly repairs with glue that he keeps in his bag.

The characters are all pretty one dimensional, but they are all strangely memorable and perhaps no more so than the wonderfully heartbreaking and digitally rendered China Doll. Moreover, despite their one dimensional natures, they all make great eye candy, particularly the witches. We get three of them in this movie: Theodora, Evanora and Glinda. All are sisters with personalities, tempers and of course magical powers. Oz’s only real magical power comes from illusion, and it’s something he will use as the movie moves toward a quick climax.

Oz is best characterized as a charming movie. You probably will feel charmed and amused by this well realized adaptation, even if the plot is largely piffle, as was the original movie. In this sense it is faithful to Victor Fleming’s original directing. Director Sam Raimi proves that sometimes faithful imitation is a virtue, and it is here.

Enjoy. 3.4 out of 4 stars.

Rating:  

It turns out that I am a pretty good date, at least if I am dating myself.

It used to be highly unusual to find myself sans spouse or other co-dependent. That was before my wife started going to conventions and my daughter went off to college. I don’t hold those long weekends by my wife out of town in Boston, Las Vegas or sometimes right across the river in Silver Spring against her. (This weekend it’s Boston.) She doesn’t hold my extended business trips so I can see a friend or sibling against me either. Four years ago, I disappeared for close to a week to attend the general assembly of our denomination.

We still take vacations together. And of course there is all that togetherness at home, often coming together over dinners we each prepare separately but at least consume at the same time. Otherwise during the evenings she is more likely watching television and I am upstairs on the computer. I don’t know how typical our marriage is, but it strikes me that ours is less engaged than many.

With her conventions, I find I am more frequently finding myself home alone for days at a stretch. Well, not completely alone. Our cat Arthur remains a full time occupant. He provides companionship of a sort, but mostly we inhabit separate worlds during the day, except at feeding time or when I am slathering steroid cream in his ear. Which leaves me to be my best friend. This generally suits me fine. There are certainly friends I could visit locally, but more and more when these opportunities arise I am finding that I prefer my own company. I’m not lonely, just alone. And it’s okay.

Thus last night I found that I was taking myself to the movies. A review of Oz, The Great and Powerful will come. I know some people who feel weird going to a movie alone. I’ve never let that stop me and in truth my taste in movies often differs from my wife’s taste anyhow. When I go by myself I always arrive just in time to avoid the obnoxious ads but to see most of the trailers. I also avoid the overpriced popcorn and find a nice comfy seat near the back of the theater, preferably away from the speakers. I have my smartphone for entertainment if the trailers fail to amuse. Last night I found myself in Theater 6 at the Reston (Virginia) Bow-Tie Cinemas, back in the same row where some six months earlier I had seen some other movie with a good friend. It obviously did not make much of an impression on me as my mind was elsewhere. Fortunately, Oz turned out to be a fun and engaging movie.

Perhaps the single life becomes quickly old, but when it returns in these periodic bursts I find that I welcome them. I have all the comforts of home because I am home. I find a certain freedom in not needing to accommodate my wife, or my daughter who when she is home can easily sleep past noon. And so I had Broadway music on at 9 a.m. and only the cat seemed a little miffed by the noise and went to sleep downstairs.

I have been taking these four days and three nights alone at my own peculiar pace. It’s a good time to watch movies on DVD that I have seen many times before, simply because there is no one occupying the TV room to compete with or object. I don’t believe in take out food, but when I am home alone I can be lured into indulging, even if take out means a six inch steak and cheese sandwich from Subway. Last night after the movie I felt in the mood for a snack. Alas, after ten p.m. the Baskin Robbins was shutdown, as was the Dairy Queen. The bakery at the Giant Food was still opened. It worked.

This life suits me very well, at least for a few days. I exercise when the mood strikes, but mostly I indulge my hobbies, which over this three day weekend has mostly been about serving a few customers with my software consulting services. Last week I successfully rehosted a client with a forum of over 100,000 posts, a major challenge as it turned out because his search tables were corrupted, which meant the database extract could not be imported. I ended up surgically snipping them out of the 600 mb file using text editors and the Unix split command, then rebuilding the search index manually. I upgraded software for three clients; in one case removing dozens of plug-ins that were causing performance problems. It’s kind of geeky but it put a few hundred bucks in my PayPal account, and no one objected. It also kept me out of strippers’ bars and red light districts.

Music has been playing from the stereo, music that neither my daughter nor my wife would enjoy much if they were here. I indulged in waffles for breakfast one morning. I slept deeply at night, which is not hard if you are home alone and there is no spouse in bed to distract you. I walked for exercise with podcasts to distract me. At the gym I put in an extra fifteen minutes of aerobics and lifted a set of weights. And it was good.

Tonight though the wife returns from Boston. My momentary days reliving my bachelorhood will abruptly end. Likely after she settles in trash TV will be coming out of our entertainment room tonight. So it will likely remain until her next convention when I plan to take myself out on a few more dates.

Sometimes you hate being right. Today on the 10th anniversary of our counterproductive invasion of Iraq, I looked back on my post dated March 17, 2003 are realized, tragically, I called this war right from the start.

Ideology is dangerous. If you have ideology, you don’t have to worry about whether an action is advised or ill advised. You know you are right because your ideology tells you that you are right. That’s the sort of immovable force that is George W. Bush. Morality has become a substitute for critical thinking. Circled by his coterie of advisers who only reinforce his inclinations, he does not feel dissent. When antiwar protesters come to town he is conveniently at Camp David.

…

If you have ideology you can pretend that our forces spread out across Iraq won’t be a target for every fanatical Muslim in the region, and there are plenty. You can pretend that because we can “liberate” Iraq, that the Iraqi people will love us, even though they hold us responsible for years of sanctions. You can ignore the minor problem that Muslims will consider our occupation something like a holy war, and that they will see us as Christians on a Crusade.

This is what “your either with us or against us” gets us as a nation: virtually the whole world is against our preemptive war. Close to half of the American people are against it too. This sort of attitude causes only further polarization, making compromise impossible.

I am deeply ashamed of our president, and aghast at what our country is about to do in the name of peace. We will not have peace, we will only be throwing more gasoline on the fire. Why do they hate us? We will be giving them plenty more reasons, rest assured.

Please tell me this isn’t happening. Please tell me this is all a bad dream.

To the people of Iraq: I am so ashamed by what we did to you and your country. Some of us tried really hard to stop this counterproductive war. Sadly, we were drowned out by an overwhelming chorus of “if you are not with us, you are against us” so-called patriots. Still we marched, we hollered, we wrote our representatives, we petitioned. It was just not enough.

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone

Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”

Google, the benevolent overlord of the Internet, last week bared its teeth and bit us. Oh maybe not you personally, but certainly those of us who depend on Google Reader. Reader is not the only product that Google announced that it is pulling. It is also pulling its user portal, iGoogle.

Unsurprisingly, I first learned about this in Google Reader, which is where I spend a good part of my day. First there was the announcement in Reader itself saying it was going away July 1, and providing a convenient link so that you can download your list of sites to import into a different newsreader. But also, my Google Reader soon became full of articles about Reader’s demise. Indeed, I used Google Reader to learn about an online petition on change.org to try to persuade Google to keep Reader. I immediately signed it, of course, as have more than 120,000 others, but the mighty overlord is likely to be tone deaf to our requests.

Secretly, I think that Google suffers from passive aggressive behavior. That’s because it now wants me to do everything in Google +, its latest social network, because it has a serious problem with Facebook envy. It has been aggressively pushing me to use G+. I believe that Reader’s demise is at least in part because people continue to doggedly use it rather than G+. It’s pretty obvious why we are still using Reader: it is a really elegant solution to reading lots of content that we care about.

Still, it is not popular like GMail. It is one of their niche products, something they threw together as newsfeeds began to take off. Newsfeeds are still all over the place. Most sites wanting to attract traffic wouldn’t be caught dead without a newsfeed, along with their Twitter account and Facebook page. It’s all part of building, promoting and sustaining a brand on the web.

With Reader, I don’t usually have to visit a web site to read its content. I simply grab its feed, which it usually advertises either explicitly with a link on its page or implicitly with HTML markup that my browser recognizes. With a couple of clicks the site’s news will be forever tucked inside Google Reader. Now I can go to one place, Google Reader, to read content for all my favorite sites and favorite bloggers. I don’t necessarily have to visit the site again, unless the publisher chooses to publish only teaser text and I choose to read more on the site. Infoword.com, one of the many sites I have in Reader, uses this approach. I can’t imagine trying to keep up with tech news without these site’s newsfeeds.

Reader saves so much time by keeping me from needlessly going to sites of interest. It’s like my own personal newspaper of the web, always topical, and always with stuff I am likely to care about. Okay, maybe 80% of it I don’t care all that much about. Most of what I read amounts to scanning headlines and then digging deeper if I find the content of more interest. I do the same thing with a newspaper. I scan the headlines but except for the front page rarely make it beyond the first couple of paragraphs of an article. That’s the whole point of a newsreader like Google Reader: to allow you to efficiently browse news and content. A good newspaper contains all sorts of divergent topical areas: national news, international news, sports, style, arts, local news, business, etc. Reader does this for the web except it customizes it based on your interests. It will even suggest feeds you might like based on what you are reading. It’s like getting the Washington Post without the sports section, which I never read, but with a bonus tech section stuffed with content it knows that I will want to read. In short, it’s brilliant!

Google Reader is certainly not the only newsreader out there; it’s just the first I found that made reading newsfeeds elegant, simple, intuitive and fast. I had tried other newsreaders before Google Reader came out and they all sucked pretty badly. For one thing, Google Reader was web-based whereas most newsreaders were client programs. So you would see stuff at home you already read at work. Reader also has intelligent search algorithms, prefetching your content. Boom! It’s there. If you see something of interest that you want to read later, you just “star” it and it keeps your list of starred items indefinitely.

Clearly Reader is not for everyone since you have to be a bit geeky to get it. A little education on the business of “feeds” is in order. It helps to know what a newsfeed is, how to subscribe to it and why Atom formatted feeds may be better than RSS 2.0 feeds. (Actually, there’s a bit of a holy war about this.) Once you “get” it, and it’s generally the geeks that quickly grasp the enormous potential of a newsfeed, then the only question is “which newsreader?” After you try a half dozen and you try Google Reader, you don’t want to use anything else but Reader, even if it is boring black type on white pages.

The argument against newsfeeds is that you can get the same stuff by other means. Everyone is publishing to Twitter now, so follow the site on Twitter. And maybe that’s okay if you live your life on Twitter and find the most elegant Twitter client to organize it for you. But not everyone publishes to Twitter and there are only 120 characters there per tweet. Typically a tweet is full of annoying hashtags and @ symbols to parse. It comes across like Spanglish. Facebook is another sort of alternative. Often a site’s Facebook page will have similar content, or not, but again you have to be a Facebook aficionado and read your Facebook newsfeed, which likely includes tons of stuff from friends and family to throw you off stride. The whole point of newsfeeds though is that they are independent of proprietary delivery mechanisms. They are about liberating content on the web. One of its chief evangelists and founder of reddit.com Aaron Swartz recently committed suicide, arguably because he was pushing too hard for the idea that information should be free.

This stuff matters. Newsfeeds matter. No, I’m not kidding. They really matter, big time! In my case it matters because it is an incredibly efficient way to read or at least scan lots of relevant content. Newsfeeds are like Cliff Notes for recent content on the web that you care about. It may be geeky and unsexy but it matters. Most likely the people you read the most on the web also depend on newsfeeds and are probably spending most of their days in Google Reader. That’s how they maintain their edge. If in part I manage at all the project an erudite manner on this blog it comes across because I read a lot, I read it fast, and I read it efficiently in Google Reader.

But it will soon be gone! Which means that while newsfeeds will still be around that I must find another way to get my news. I am experimenting with alternatives, and the Feedly browser extension looks promising, but it’s still not Reader. I was used to Reader. It offered zero latency, i.e. I just didn’t have to think about it. Feedly looks gorgeous but I want to be absorbed in the content, not the window dressing.

I wish the mighty Google would rethink this decision. The intellectual brainpower of the Internet is going to decline sharply when they pull the plug on the unsexy but remarkable Google Reader.

I was born upon the fathoms
Never harbor or port have I known
The wide universe is the ocean I travel
And the Earth is my blue boat home

Peter Mayer, Blue Boat Home

Are you paranoid? Good! I might not have swampland to sell you, but I am sure I could be unethical enough to try to sell you some gold, albeit at hugely inflated prices. Owning gold suggests you own something with eternal value. Our currency may get suddenly devalued by ninety percent tomorrow but the thinking goes that as long as you got your gold coins locked up somewhere you still have wealth. You can maintain that standard of living because you own something no one can take away, and whose value none can diminish. You own gold! You are a survivor, you shrewd investor you!

I will grant you that gold will probably maintain its value much better than, say, the Zimbabwean dollar. Gold is pretty to look at, quite malleable, won’t tarnish and it must be worth something or it would not make up the majority of wedding rings. Mine is made of gold too, albeit white gold. It seemed better at the time than a ring from a Cracker Jack box. And since I have gold on me at all times should a financial apocalypse arrive, my wedding ring might buy us some food, a tank or two of gas, and maybe a couple of days in a hotel in our post deflated dollar world. Beyond that my gold wedding ring has far more sentimental value than monetary value. It turns out that its real financial value would be if I sold it for, say, American dollars. Dollars are convenient in pre-apocalypse America in that I can use it for an even exchange of value. Gold: well, not so much. Exactly how do you get change for your gold coin or ring in something that will retain value? It might help if everyone else kept a stash of gold coins too, but of course most of us don’t own gold and if we do it probably won’t be gold coins.

How good will gold be in a post Apocalyptic world? Well, it will be better than nothing but in a post Apocalyptic world when push comes to shove you will gladly exchange a large value of gold for basic foodstuffs and medical supplies. See, it’s that stuff you really need to survive the Apocalypse. Gold has no caloric or nutritional value.

Most people who own gold coins don’t keep them at home because they are worried they will get stolen. Gold coins are worth quite a lot, obviously, with an ounce of gold worth roughly $1600 at the moment. A one ounce gold coin though is probably going to cost you more than $1600. Someone has to make the coin and distribute it, and that’s a profitable business. Curiously no one buys gold with gold, but they do buy it with money, which gold dealers are eager to accept. Money, unlike gold, is fully fungible. Which makes money in general far more valuable than gold, which is why people prefer money to gold.

Some people with enough means pay a banker or a company to store their gold in a vault somewhere. It’s nice to know it is somewhere safe, but it’s unclear if everything goes to hell whether you will actually be able to withdraw your gold. I’m pretty sure most vaults are not safe from nuclear weapons. Even if they are, it’s likely that your banker won’t be around to open the vault. How would you make a withdrawal even if you could get to the bank? Hopefully there would be enough infrastructure in place and you will have an armored car to make the trip safely, providing the bridges have not collapsed and the roads are serviceable. Of course, once you have your bullion you would then feel the need to protect it from theft, not an easy thing unless you own a Brinks truck.

So maybe you need a more fungible form of gold. You could invest in gold stocks. Get a piece of paper that says you own twenty pounds of gold instead. Maybe in a post apocalyptic world showing your gold certificate will let the local black market distributor advance you some credit. Or maybe not. Maybe there just won’t be anyone around to barter for goods with anyhow. In a real Apocalypse, gold will be the least of your problems, because you probably will be dead. We’re pretty sure you cannot take it with you.

Are there reasons to invest in gold? As a hedge against inflation its record is pretty spotty, and people often tend to buy it when it is overpriced, i.e. when they are feeling scared. Perhaps having some part of your total assets in gold makes a certain amount of sense for the same reason some part of your assets should be in cash. In the real world though it won’t be gold that you will use to buy goods and services. It will be good old-fashioned money. You will want to convert your gold into money and use that. And unless gold appreciates in value over time, it’s probably not going to be a great investment.

Gold simply offers the illusion that your worth can maintain value regardless of the uncertainties in life. Rest assured this is an illusion, but perhaps it has some value because you won’t need to regularly pop Valium. Real worth is predicated on people thinking something has value. Moreover, real worth is the consequence of the way society is ordered and your place within in. Worth rests on a complex web of relationships, which must be there for your worth to have value. Worth depends not just on your job and your assets, but in the investment that society makes in civilization. It depends on the networks that make ATM machines possible and people’s willingness to work for a living wage, yes even at Walmart. It depends on roads being there so you can get to where you want to go. It depends on a justice system so the criminals aren’t preying on you and your neighbors. Without these and much more gold is worthless. Which means that chasing gold in the hope that it will keep you safe from calamity is foolish. It is fool’s gold.

As Peter Mayer put it, we are born upon the fathoms. Our home and our standard of living is an illusion. In reality we are living on a boat adrift in the sea, a giant Noah’s ark that we all share. There is no permanence; we are just around for the ride, but it’s a ride that we are all in together, so it behooves us to play nice and share our toys. So if you want to maintain your wealth and standard of living, stop looking at gold and try investing in society instead. Let’s make our world a place where we all have the likelihood to achieve our potential. Let’s keep investing in roads, good schools, new drugs and technological inventions. All these things though depend on a healthy and sustainable natural environment. Which means that our real treasure is not our personal wealth, but our shared natural world.

Now there’s a solid investment.

I won’t claim to be an economist or financial wizard. I don’t bother to try to time the stock market. I buy in mutual funds in good times and bad times, hoping that general growth in mostly proven funds will mean I won’t eat dog food in retirement. So I was buying in March 2009 when stock indices reached their Great Recession bottom and I am still buying funds today, albeit steadily and incrementally.

That’s one way to make money in the stock market: keep buying in good times and bad and count on general growth for appreciation. That’s the boring and safe way to make money from the market, as long as you do it in the long term and keep plugging away. Hopefully you are not buying crappy stocks, funds and bonds, but ones with decent track records for beating the market.

The other way to make money is to follow the maxim: buy low and sell high. The smart people with capital were doing just this in March 2009. They were fearlessly investing while others were willing to part with their stocks for just about any screwy lowball price others were willing to bid. Oh my God, the world is going to hell. Gotta turn this stock into cash right now and maybe survive the next Great Depression. That was the wisdom of those times, just four years ago. People were chasing their fears and their fears told them to horde cash. As I noted in June 2009, stock in the bluest of blue chips, General Electric, briefly fell below $6 a share that month. GE, like many stocks, was crazily undervalued. Those with cash and nerve should have been telling their brokers to buy GE in bulk. If they had, and I wish I had enough spare cash to buy it, they would be sitting pretty right now. On March 5, 2009 you could buy GE common stock for $5.88 a share. Today four years later it closed at $23.67 a share. That’s an appreciation of 403% in just four years, or 100% appreciation per year, on average. It was, as I said then, a crazily great investment. Granted this is not as high as GE stock has ever gotten. On June 22, 2001 right before the tech sector collapsed GE traded at $51.86 a share. It was crazily overvalued then.

Most likely GE stock and the market in general are suffering now from irrational exuberance as well. Stock prices are inflated, largely because the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates artificially low. While the Fed has no immediate plans to change this policy, you know it cannot last forever. In fact, some are speculating that even if the Fed continues to keep interest rates low, the market will correct this artificial imbalance through inflation. Inflation happens when too many dollars are chasing too few tangible assets. With nowhere else to put money in hopes that it will grow, people are buying stocks. This tells me that stock prices are inflated. But also I can sense they are inflated. I can tell from the anemic growth in our GDP, the 7.7 percent unemployment rate and median wages that continue to fall. While increasing stock and home prices will help stimulate growth, if it comes it will come much later, and it is likely to only help stocks reach their current valuation, not actually meet their current valuation.

March 2009 was, in retrospect, the time to buy and hold. Arguably, March 2013 is the time to sell and profit. Convert that valuation into cash, while other irrationally exuberant buyers are willing to buy your stock at inflated prices.

Of course if you followed the crowd and sold stocks and funds in 2009 and are buying them now again in 2013, you are guilty of two things. First, you are guilty of being like most everyone else: following the herd. There is some comfort perhaps in that you were not alone because your neighbors were doing the same thing, which is one reason their net worth (and likely yours too) fell. Second, you are being stupid a second time. You are the bottom fish that the bigger fish are about to consume. They are picking your pocket, not the one you have now, but the one you think you will retire on. You are buying what is likely to be overvalued stock in the long term. Why are you doing this? You are probably doing this because you cannot make a decent return for your cash by having them in savings and money market accounts. You are frustrated and you see the stock market surging up 26% in one year and you are thinking, “I deserve a piece of that action”.

And you do, but you are probably chasing an illusion. There is a stock market correction coming. I cannot tell you if it will be this month, this year or five years from now. But it’s not too hard to see that it is coming. Economic growth is anemic and profit depends on growth. Growth also depends on people having more money to spend. While the rich do, they are a tiny part of the populace. People like you and me are probably watching expenses like a hawk.

What do you do if you have been following the herd? My suggestion is to stop buying stock, most of which is dramatically overvalued at the moment, and put that money in a cash account for future investing. You are unlikely to get much appreciation for your investment, but you are likely to lose money buying stocks. Wait for the next market correction, when the stock indexes have lost a third or more of its value. Then steel your nerves and buy, probably in blue chip stocks. Then hold and sell many years later when the signs are clear the market is overvalued again. That’s when you lock in the profit.

If you did buy GE stock in bulk in March 2009, you are probably smart enough to do what you are already doing: selling it and converting it into cash for future buying opportunities. In general, if you have genuine appreciation for your stocks and bonds as a result of buying them low, now is the time to lock in your profit. Profit may also be found in selling your house. In most markets it is a seller’s market and prices have fully recovered from the Great Recession. If this is true in your area, your house is mostly equity, and you want to lock in that wealth, selling your house may make sense. (Of course there may be capital gains and other tax implications from doing this. Consult a financial adviser before doing this.)

Will I be doing any of this? No. As I mentioned, I don’t time the market. I invest regularly and I invest long term. If you are not this kind of investor though, look at your portfolio carefully and note those funds that now are valued significantly more than what you paid for them. Unless there are some special circumstances for these particular stocks and funds for future growth, now is the time to sell them and convert them to cash. Most likely you will find this to be a very profitable experience.

Six and a half years later our three-year-old rescue cat Arthur is now pushing ten years of age. His age is just an estimate, but the veterinarian that examined him estimated that he was born in late 2003. He came to live with us in September 2006. It took him a whole year to get fully housebroken. This was perhaps not too surprising given that he probably had been mostly living on his wits the first years of his life.

Arthur the cat (2012)

A video of Arthur

Picked up off the street in Lovettsville, Virginia, our domestic shorthair cat made his way to a no-kill cat shelter in Loudoun County, Virginia and eventually into our house and into our hearts. Affectionate with people by nature, he was not completely domesticated. He remains unusually skittish but after a year of occasional naughty episodes like peeing in our vents he fully settled in. He seemed finally completely at ease when the carpets were ripped up and replaced by hardwood floors. No more scents of deceased cats to torment him. We marveled at his relative youth when we got him, for we were used to aging cats that often threw up more than they digested and were more than a bit senile.

At around ten years old though, there are signs that Arthur will not live the nineteen and a half years his predecessor Sprite did. Arthur has become an expensive cat, attested to by $1400 in medical bills racked up in the last couple of weeks. His symptoms were perhaps not surprising to long term cat owners: vomiting, diarrhea and sneezing. Various veterinarians have puzzled over him. Pills were tried and special cat food was put in his dish but they did little. Eventually it seemed just part of his nature, something to endure. Because otherwise Arthur seemed happy, eager to sit on our laps, happy to be perched on a chair and looking outside the front window in the mornings and anxious for daily commutes in and out of our screened in deck via his special kitty door. He purred easily, never was the least bit malicious (unlike our late evil cat Squeaky), never considered escape and never shredded the furniture. He enjoyed being fussed over him and we fussed over him a lot.

It’s hard to know when a cat is really sick. One way is when their habits suddenly change. That was what triggered the start of $1400 in veterinarian bills to make Arthur whole again. Arthur was nothing if not habitual, and he did not come out to greet me when I came home. I called and called and he eventually showed himself, but wholly spurned the dinner he usually scarfs down. His water had hardly been touched, and he was losing weight again. Moreover, he was usually quiet and rarely purred. There was plenty of diarrhea, however. The truest sign of this sick cat was the moribund tail lying flat on the ground. It is usually extended behind his back and curled up toward his head. I scheduled a trip to the vet for the following morning and wondered if he might be dead before I got him there. Our wily cat that can usually sense a cat carrier a dozen feet away did not object when I gently put him in it and took him to the vet.

Shots for hydration. Shots to stimulate hunger. Shots to cool an enflamed butt, because his bowels were enflamed. Newer, blander cat food to try, plus a day in the cat hospital being monitored and getting blood work. He ate well at the vet, perhaps due to his shot. But mostly there was an urgent request from the vet to get him an ultrasound. It was likely one of three things: a tumor, a general lymphoma or irritable bowel disease.

He came home, survived another night while looking ever weaker and more dispirited. The following day he was seen at the local Southpaws where for $600 or so he had his belly shaved and an ultrasound performed on his GI tract. A tumor was thankfully ruled out. A thickening of the bowel walls was noted, but it was impossible to say if it was a lymphoma or the IBD that was causing the diarrhea, although a kitty colonoscopy for another $600 could probably rule out one of these. Another shot in the butt to calm things down was followed by more water injected under his fur. And there were pills. A pill developed for people with cancer to stimulate appetite. Another to get rid of his diarrhea. And one twice a day pill to calm his inflamed intestines: a steroid.

Lots of pills, lots of shots, lots of bills but his progress seemed marginal. He mostly didn’t want to eat, so it was hard to get pills into him, even when put in his food. As anyone who owns a cat knows, pilling a cat is generally not an option. Mostly Arthur was listless and out of our faces. His food and water seemed mostly untouched and he kept losing weight. So yet another trip to the vet was scheduled, this one for $200. More shots. More hydration. And suddenly we had a cat that was ravenous and would not stop eating. And one who purred again. And one who sat outside our door in the mornings again, and looked out the window after finishing his food, just like old times.

And so it went for a day or so, and there was great rejoicing, until his appetite ebbed again. Getting pills into him via his food on time became problematic. Arthur was in a better place, but still struggling. And there he remains today, a subject of considerable concern.

He is aging and he is struggling. He will probably need to be on pills the rest of his life. Right now we wrap them in cheese in hope they will get consumed. It works, for now, but history suggests it will not work for long, and cheese may not be good for him. The root of his problem is likely an allergy, but to what? We have no way to know. We try different prescription foods and see if it has an affect on his explosive sneezing. Or maybe it may be something environmental that we could not possibly know.

It seems crazy to spend $1400 on a cat, and we will likely spend a lot more than that over the course of his remaining life. He is such a plain and ordinary cat to look at, but such a total sweetheart in person. He is constantly sweet (or when he cannot be, at least inoffensive), constantly gentle, full of good heart, honest and naturally endearing. If this is the start of his decline, it will be a sad process to witness every day. Meanwhile we hope for the right combination of food, environment and medicine so that this ultra sweet cat can simply go on being his sweet, inoffensive and endearing self.

Arthur, we love you. It may not seem like it but we are doing our best for you. Stay with us. We will do our best to keep you safe, healthy, warm, hydrated and loved.

The blog’s theme has been updated! This won’t be obvious to those of you who subscribe to the blog via email or view it in most newsreaders, but if you visit the site you will notice the newer look.

I hate to call it a “new” look because I have been using variants of this same look since the blog began in 2002 as a MoveableType blog. I like sidebars and I plead guilty to filling them with self-promoting crap. It’s okay; I pay for the hosting space. In general I prefer darker pages and I prefer shades of grey to whites and colors. When I go with a theme I tend to stick with it. I like my little Rodan’s “The Thinker” image attached by my posts and pages, although I changed it slightly for the new look.

Still, any WordPress theme can get moribund over time. This one needed updating because it was designed for version 2 of WordPress, and WordPress has been on version 3 for years. This meant occasionally jury-rigging the themes to match version 3 features. This blog finally moved to WordPress in October 2007, which is how long I’ve had the same theme. Five and a half years later it is now using a MidnightBluePlus theme. Naturally it did not look out of the box quite the way I preferred. So I used the power of my editor and Firebug to tweak things in a preview mode until I had it all looking perfect.

Delving into the deep corners of WordPress gives me renewed appreciation for this elegant blogging platform. The best software is software that does what you need it to do, but no more, yet is easily extensible when you need it to be. WordPress is “just good enough” for blogging and any lightweight content management solution. If you need a small site it’s a perfect solution. If you need to host hundreds or thousands of pages, WordPress is not for you. You need an industrial strength content management system, like Joomla or Alfresco. WordPress is also elegant in the sense that it is easy and fun to tweak. You can get a plug in to do just about anything. It is also incredibly popular. Wikipedia says that 22% of new web sites are in WordPress.

With this upgrade I was able to put a few dynamic applications I wrote wholly inside of WordPress. The movies, comments and post list tools that I wrote can now fit inside a WordPress page, thanks to the Allow PHP in Posts and Pages plug in. This makes the whole presentation so much more seamless.

So hopefully the new theme gives the site a little pizazz and seems a little more professional. Enjoy.