Thoughts & Observations

New Orleans Jazz Festival!

2012-04-24T11:55:00.000-05:00

It's time once again for the New Orleans Jazz Festival!

"A festival, says Mayfield, is one of the best ways to celebrate and present to the world the city’s unique music, food, art and culture.

“A lot of our music, primarily jazz music, comes from that outside way of being, the Mardi Gras Indians, the outside culture of what we do during Carnival time,” Mayfield said. “We definitely have a unique position of knowing how to do outside stuff and knowing how to do it really well.”

French Quarter Festival included more than 100 Louisiana Cajun, zydeco, jazz and blues acts on 22 stages strung throughout the historic French Quarter in such places as Jackson Square, the open-air French Market and the grassy park space along the Mississippi River. Visitors came from all over."

I have been to this festival many times over the years and have always had a great time. The cultural diversity of this city is highlighted by the wide variety of music, food and fun activities.

Everybody is welcome!

Except for this year... if you happen to be white.

With the Trayvon Martin case fresh in everyone's mind, it's a decidedly less friendly environment than in years past for lighter-skinned visitors. My girlfriend's sister & husband visited there last weekend with some friends, and came back with stories of rude, pushy & even threatening behavior they endured at the hands of resident blacks. If it were an isolated case I would be inclined to dismiss such stories as simple bad luck in running across the odd bigot or two. But multiple shopkeepers, blacks on the street, and even trolley conductors made it perfectly clear that they were not welcome in their city... frowns, hostile stares, refusals of service multiple times & even pushing & shoving left them feeling not only unwelcome, but actually in potential physical danger several times. One visitor commented she would not go back unarmed... if then.

A friend offered me tickets to this coming weekend's festival, which I politely declined. I'm not prejudiced myself, but didn't want to expose myself or my girlfriend to a hostile environment we didn't create and cannot control.

So if you plan to attend the festival this weekend my advice to you is... Don't be white.

Congratulations New Orleans... some of you seem to be uneducated, pathetic losers. I foresee Best Buy losing some flat-screen TVs in the near future.

Enjoy your awful, racist festival... you deserve it.

Judicial Misconduct

2012-02-11T14:18:00.000-06:00

This not only exposes an illegal use of State judge plates by an elected official, but by association implies that Judge Hicks participated in this unlawful use of Judicial plates. This comes as no surprise to me, since I just finished a custody dispute which ended up being mediated by Judge Hicks. One of the results of this mediation has Judge Hicks ignoring the Texas Family Code provision which allows a non-custodial parent to exercise what is known as expanded visitation where Thursday visits extend into weekend visitation, providing parent & child some additional time together. Completely ignoring the state law concerning this expansion for visits, Judge Hicks ruled that no expanded visitation would be ordered. No extenuating circumstances… no finding of special conditions which would make expanded visits inappropriate… Judge Hicks blatantly violated state law without comment. For those who argue that this license-plate infraction is a minor matter, please take a moment to consider that there may be more to this story than a single bad judgement. After dealing with Judge Hicks personally, I am inclined to believe that this is a serial condition for the Hicks family. Who loses? My 3 year old daughter loses that’s who. All that is necessary for evil to prevail is that good people stand mute. Link

The Impact of Fathers on Psychological Well-Being and Social Behavior

2011-04-18T10:02:00.000-05:00

Quoted from : http://www.childwelfare.gov

Even from birth, children who have an involved father are more likely to be emotionally secure, be confident to explore their surroundings, and, as they grow older, have better social connections with peers. These children also are less likely to get in trouble at home, school, or in the neighborhood.13 Infants who receive high levels of affection from their fathers (e.g., babies whose fathers respond quickly to their cries and who play together) are more securely attached; that is, they can explore their environment comfortably when a parent is nearby and can readily accept comfort from their parent after a brief separation. A number of studies suggest they also are more sociable and popular with other children throughout early childhood.18

The way fathers play with their children also has an important impact on a child's emotional and social development. Fathers spend a much higher percentage of their one-on-one interaction with infants and preschoolers in stimulating, playful activity than do mothers. From these interactions, children learn how to regulate their feelings and behavior. Rough-housing with dad, for example, can teach children how to deal with aggressive impulses and physical contact without losing control of their emotions.19 Generally speaking, fathers also tend to promote independence and an orientation to the outside world. Fathers often push achievement while mothers stress nurturing, both of which are important to healthy development. As a result, children who grow up with involved fathers are more comfortable exploring the world around them and more likely to exhibit self-control and pro-social behavior.20

One study of school-aged children found that children with good relationships with their fathers were less likely to experience depression, to exhibit disruptive behavior, or to lie and were more likely to exhibit pro-social behavior.21 This same study found that boys with involved fathers had fewer school behavior problems and that girls had stronger self-esteem.22 In addition, numerous studies have found that children who live with their fathers are more likely to have good physical and emotional health, to achieve academically, and to avoid drugs, violence, and delinquent behavior.23

In short, fathers have a powerful and positive impact upon the development and health of children. A caseworker who understands the important contributions fathers make to their children's development and how to effectively involve fathers in the case planning process will find additional and valuable allies in the mission to create a permanent and safe environment for children.

The effects absent fathers have on female development and college attendance

2011-03-25T10:48:00.002-05:00

"It is ironic, and of some interest, that we have subjected joint custody to a level and intensity of scrutiny that was never directed toward the traditional post-divorce arrangement (sole legal and physical custody to the mother and two weekends each month of visiting to the father.) Developmental and relationship theory should have alerted the mental health field to the potential immediate and long range consequences for the child of only seeing a parent four days each month. And yet until recently, there was no particular challenge to this traditional post-divorce parenting arrangement, despite growing evidence that such post-divorce relationships were not sufficiently nurturing or stabilizing for many children and parents."

"There is some evidence that in our well-meaning efforts to save children in the immediate post-separation period from anxiety, confusion, and the normative divorce-engendered conflict, we have set the stage in the longer run for the more ominous symptoms of anger, depression, and a deep sense of loss by depriving the child of the opportunity to maintain a full relationship with each parent."

Examining Resistance to Joint Custody, Monograph by Joan Kelly, Ph.D. (associate of Judith Wallerstein, Ph.D) From the 1991 Book Joint Custody and Shared Parenting, second edition, Guilford Press, 1991.

Researchers agree the females who lack father figures are more prone to experience diminished cognitive development and poor school performance (Grimm-Wassil, 1994, p. 149).

Girls who have little contact with their fathers, especially during adolescence had great difficulties forming lasting relationships with men. Sadly these females either shy away from males altogether or become sexually aggressive. Girls with involved fathers learn how to interact with males by using the father-daughter relationship as a model. They not only have a concerned male to converse with but also a feeling of acceptance, knowing they are loved by at least one male. Females without father figures often become desperate for male attention (Grimm-Wassil, 1994).

Females who lose their fathers to divorce or abandonment seek much more attention from men and had more physical contact with boys their age than girls from intact homes. They also tend to be more critical of their fathers and the opposite sex. These females constantly seek refuge for their missing father and as a result there is a constant need to be accepted by men from whom they aggressively seek attention (Grimm-Wassil, 1994, p. 147).

Girls with absent fathers grow up without the day-by-day experience of attentive, caring and loving interaction with a man. Without this continuous sense of being valued and loved, a young girl does not thrive, but rather is stunted in her emotional development. The coping mechanisms that adolescent girls whose parents are divorced develop in response to the absence of their father include the following (Lohr, Legg, Mendell, and Reimer, 1989, p. 352):

* Intensified separation anxiety
* Denial and avoidance of feelings associated with the loss of a father
* Identification with the lost object
* Object hunger for males

Studies show that females with absent fathers often have diminished cognitive, development; poor school performance, lower achievement test scores and lower IQ scores (Grimm-Wassil, 1994). Cognitive development affects how children perceive and interpret the information they are presented, thus making it difficult for them to excel if cognitive development is impeded.

Santrock (1973) presented additional evidence indicating that early father-absence can have a significant debilitating effect on cognitive functioning. Among lower-class junior high and high school children, those who became father-absent before the age of two generally scored lower on measures of IQ (Otis Quick Test) and achievement (Standard Achievement Test) tests that had been administered when they were in the third and sixth grades than did those from intact homes.

Fatherless daughters compared to those with present father figures are in higher risk of teenage pregnancy, college drop out and low self-esteem. In addition fatherless daughters are in higher risk of suicide, homelessness and disorders. According to Getting Men Involved: The Newsletter of the Bay Area Male Involvement Network, (Spring 1997):

* 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes.
* 90% of all homeless runaway children are from fatherless homes
* 85% of all children who exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes.
* 80% of rapists motivated by displaced anger come from fatherless homes.
* 71% of all high school dropouts are from fatherless homes.
* 75% of all adolescents' patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes.
* 70% of juveniles in state-oriented institutions come from fatherless homes.
* 85% of all youths in prisons grew up in a fatherless home.
* Fatherless children are 20% less likely to attend college.

Inconstant father-daughter relations can have a devastating effect on a female's life by making her more vulnerable to outside influences. Daughters of single parents in comparison to those from intact homes are:

* 53% more likely to marry as teenagers
* 111% more likely to have children as teenagers
* 164% more likely to be a single parent
* 92% more likely to divorce if they marry

Daughters need the example of what a man really is, how one is supposed to act, what a man needs and how he thinks (Griffin, 1998, p. 29). Fathers are the key to teaching their daughters about men. Research has suggested that most women who see their mothers being abused will themselves become abused in adulthood (Griffin, 1998). Positive secure father-daughter relationships allow females the confidence needed to be successful in their effort as well as achieve their goals.

Fatherlessness is a social problem brought on by the breakdown of traditional family. The victims are innocent children who have little voice in changing public attitude and policy. Blankenhorn (1995) studied the epidemic of fatherless America and concluded it is our most urgent social problem. He claims it weakens the family, harms children, causes or aggravates our worst social problem, and makes individual adult happiness harder to achieve'(Soberman, 2000, p. 3).

The continued involvement of the non- custodial parent in the child's life appears crucial in preventing an intense sense of loss in the child.... The importance of the relationship with the non-custodial parent may also have implications for the legal issues of custodial arrangements and visitation. The results of this study indicate that arrangements where both parents are equally involved with the child are optimal. When this type of arrangement is not possible, the child's continued relationship with the non-custodial parent remains essential."

Reference

Adams, P., Milner, J., and Schrepf, N. (1984). Fatherless children. Canada: John Wilney & Sons Inc.
Bae, Y., Computer Consultants, Inc., & Smith, T. (1997). Women in mathematics and science [On-line]. Available: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/ce/c97005.html
Biller, H., (1993). Fathers a00 families: paternal factors in child development. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Blankenhorn, D. (1995). Fatherless America. New York, NY.
Coma, C. (2000, Aug. 5). Personal Communication. New York, N.Y.
Elium, J., & Elium, D. (1994). Raising a daughter. Berkeley, CA.
Getting Men involved: The Newsletter of the Bay Area Male Involvement Network. (1997). Statistics on fatherless homes. Available:http://www.statsonfatherlessness.html
Griffin, D. (1998). Fatherless women. Los Angeles, California: Milligan Books.
Grimm-Wassil, C., (1994). Where's daddy: how divorced, single and widowed mothers can provide what's missing when dad's missing. Overlook Press; ISBN 0879515414.
Hetherington, E.M. (1978). Effects of father absence on personality development in adolescent daughters. Development of psychology, pp. 313-326
Kopf, D.E. (1970). Family variables and schools adjustment of eighth-grade father-absent boys. Family Coordinator, 19(2) pp. 145-150.
Lamb, M. (1997). The role of the father in child development. Canada: John Wilney & Sons, Inc.
Landy, F., Rosenberg, B.G., & Sutton-Smith, B. (1969). The effect of limited father absence on cognitive development. Child development, 40, pp. 941-944
Lifshitz, M. (1976) Long-range effects of father loss: The cognitive complexity of bereaved children and their school adjustment. British journal of medical psychology, pp. 189-197.
Lohr, R., Legg, C., Mendell, A., & Reimer, B. (1989). Clinical observations on interferences of early father absence in achievement of femininity. Clinical Social work journal. 17(3), pp.351-365.
Mattox, W. (1999). The role of fathers in the lives of their daughters. [On-line] pp. 1-7. Available: http://www.frontiernet.net/~jfwagner/cf03100.htm
Maxwell, A.E. (1961) Discrepancies between the pattern of abilities for normal and neurotic children. British Journal of Psychiatry, 107, pp. 300-307.
Pollack, O., & Friedman, A.S. (1969). Family dynamics and female sexual delinquency. Palo Alto: Science and behavior books, Inc.
Popenoe, D. (1996). Life without father. New York: Martin Kessler Books.
Santrock, J.W. (1973) Relations of type and onset of father absence to cognitive development. Child development and behavior.
Soberman, S. (2000). Fatherless America and its impact of "daddy's little girl" [On line] pp. 1-4. Available: http://phoenix.marymount.edu/
Sutherland, H. E. G. (1930) The relationship between I. Q. and size of family in the case of fatherless children. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 38, pp. 161-170.
United Fathers of America. (1992). Statistics on fatherless homes. Available:http://www.unitedfat...america-statsonfatherlessness.html
Wakerman, E., (1984). Father loss: daughters discuss the man that got away. New York: Doubleday & Co.

The influence of Bias & Media on Peak Oil believability

2010-03-11T15:35:00.001-06:00

With the growth of online media in the last fifteen years, newspapers are becoming obsolete, with their demise comes a larger problem; misinformation. This problem is not new, however most authors have been rather ambiguous in their conclusions. A closer look on how unconscious human behavior impacts this issue should be given, especially with the news regarding Peak Oil--Spectators caused the oil price spike of 2008 vs. demand of oil was higher then supply rings a bell. Unfortunately, no large government agency has confirmed or denied these claims in midst of smaller entities giving alternative stories. The reason for this unequilibrium is explained here.

Confirmation Bias is a human condition that causes a person to seek out only information that matches their preconceived notions. It also can be in the form of interpreting data to reaffirm a given truth a person holds. This was the subject of an experiment held by Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper. They gave subjects two studies on the death penalty—one for each side of the argument, Regardless of being pro or anti death penalty, the subjects chose the study most reliable to be the one that shared their viewpoint, even though the latter was more detailed. This illustrates two key things; the human conscience does not like contradictions, humans are irrational.

Another bias is looped with Confirmation Bias called Blind-Spot Bias. This often rears its ugly head during debate on the very subject of being bias. Dr. Emily Prolin discovered that when asked to rate ones level of bias compared to their fellow peers, humans will certainly assume the position they are less susceptible to bias and stereotyping. Blind-Spot Bias would ultimately prevent a person from realizing their confirmation bias. The question then becomes, how do I really know what heck is going on?

Thanks to the trusty—insofar—Internet, a simple Google News search shows a real life example of contradictions in the reporting of Peak Oil. The first story in the results claims “Peak Oil Period” to Be Attained By 2014, Alarm Scientists.” The fifth exclaims “there never was such a thing as "Peak Oil" or "Peak Hydrocarbons".. Economic success is balanced on how...” One gives you a feeling of panic, the other of ease. The contradictions in media today are of course in all subjects. The size of the Internet also allows an endless number of fictitious realities created simultaneously. As our perceptions become more divided, the effect has yet to be determined—depending on the severity of division will ultimately conclude the answer.

Many may be asking themselves if print media has any reliability? My answer is undecided. Every writer is prone to bias because they must create a voice in which to report the news. Also newspapers are littered with stories promoting new products and businesses while advertisements’ scatter in between. (The words conflict of interest comes to mind) However historically journalists were affriended with the common folk. I would like to think the historical significance of journalism should weigh on a few authors’ consciences.

As gas prices scamper to three dollars a gallon, I expect peak oil to finally gain some traction. Although because of theNormalcy Bias—the refusal to plan for an event because it has not happened before—should do us in regardless, or perhaps the argument that technology will save us all will come to suffice.

- Kristen Mcgreagor; Chanhassen, MN

The Over 30 Crowd

2010-03-05T11:25:00.001-06:00

If you are 30, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot...BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a freakingletter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!

There weren't any freakin' cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOD !!! Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent... you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen... Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside... you were doing chores!

And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were lucky, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place!

See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd

Our Obsolete Playbook

2009-12-07T06:12:00.000-06:00

I think it would be quite easy to make the case that our playbook has failed us quite badly. And to make matters worse, only a few are even aware of it. Energy and government experts are fudging the numbers on a daily basis, while our financial experts are groping in the dark. No one, and I mean no one that matters, is prepared to cope with scenarios not contained in the playbook. Our current world view, or “playbook”, is based upon classical, or “Newtonian mechanics” after Sir Isaac Newton and his laws of motion. Big thinkers of the time, like Rene Descartes, concluded that the world was one of mathematical precision, not confusion. Science and technology were seen as the tools to rearrange the stuff of nature in a way that best advanced the material self-interest of human beings.

Generations of economists have since proffered that an endless growth in material welfare is the economy’s long-run normal state and created a debt-based monetary system upon that ludicrous assumption. In a finite world of limits, constantly looking for expansion, for economic growth, for prosperity, and for solutions to a continuation of the unsustainable path we are on, will be the root cause of our inevitable downfall. Our hubris has fostered an increasingly objective view of nature; we admire its’ natural beauty in photographs, dissect it’s workings under a microscope, and then conquer it with technology.

As William R. Catton writes in his latest book; Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, “May future generations of people inhabiting this planet be descended from the most hubris-free members of each preceding generation.”

Any reasonably well-read person, unfettered by too much sit-com TV, should be able to recognize the unfolding trend; that limits to growth are manifesting, that our insolvent financial system and our global environmental sink issues are overwhelming, any and all, technical efforts to “fix’ them. And we won’t even discuss the elephant in the room—overpopulation.

The fundamental enabler of our industrialized American way of life has been a continuous access to enormous quantities of cheap, readily abundant non-renewable natural resources in the form of energy, metals, and minerals. That “access” is increasingly becoming problematic.

The problem lies with the fact that most of the remaining oil available in the world either has a very slow production rate, or is quite expensive to extract, or both. The production rate of any unconventional oil (such as tar sands or heavy crude) is never going to compete with conventional oil. In 1901, with gushers like Spindletop in Texas, the EROEI was something like, 100 to 1. Today, the EROEI of tar sands and deep water oil is 5 to 1 or less. When the EROEI becomes < style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">
Thus, declining domestic and foreign sources of, primarily, energy, will force American society to powerdown all aspects of our economy, by either design or by default. We will have to learn to view the world differently, to a degree almost unimaginable to those who scarcely understand the concept just now. “The decades to come will see many things that are now done by machines handed back over to human beings, for the eminently pragmatic reason that it will again be cheaper to feed, house, clothe, and train a human being to do those things than it will be to make, fuel, and maintain a machine to do them.”

Many harbor an unquestioned assumption that it will be possible to just shift from the use of fossil fuels to alternative energies. The reality is that no basket of current alternatives can replace fossil fuels on the scale and in the manner we use them. People must realize that wind, direct solar, and other renewable technologies are all pretty marginal and take a lot of fossil fuel energy and time to construct the supporting infrastructure.

Our new playbook must be based upon an ecological world-view that recognizes limits; where nature’s renewable processes dictate the rate of resource consumption, not GDP, nor a desire for endless progress and growth.

And to reiterate the constant theme in my many posts over the years; peak oil is an economic crisis, not an energy crisis.

As James Kunstler recently wrote: “Both reality and history will probably take us out to some woodshed of the national soul and beat the crap out of us.”

Joe Sparano: The Facts about the Peak Oil Theory

2009-11-03T12:14:00.000-06:00

Part of the problem here lies in the fact that the word theory has two distinctly different meanings.

In science, the word theory is used to denote "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena".

In colloquial non-scientific parlance, the word theory is mistakenly conflated with the termhypothesis, "a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena". Of course obfuscationists rely on and encourage this confabulation in the public mind to keep the uninformed swallowing their drivel.

The latter is the mistaken sense in which the term is used when people utter the platitude, "just a theory". The former, scientific meaning is what is actually indicated when the phrase "peak oil theory" is used amongst those who understand the phenomenon. Denialists of course attempt to convince people that the colloquial misapplication of the term is what is meant...

The Big Move

2009-10-17T07:06:00.007-05:00

We just recently moved after looking for what seemed like forever for our new home. What a pain in the butt...! After arranging a million different details, then we still have to confront the actual move itself. We went with the rent a ruck & hire individuals method this time, which was a mistake.... broken furniture... missing items... tracking mud & dirt thought both houses... how I wish we had found these guys first. http://www.moveme.com

Conveyancing means more than just moving stuff, as we discovered. All the contract and legal work could have been done through a single vendor, but we tried to save money doing these things oursels and ended up spending even more money. All in all I sure wish we had done a little research before diving headfirst into this process without professional guidance.

We sure could have used this advice for a Conveyancing Quote.

The first mistake we made was being dependant on the sale of the old house to purchase the new house. This meant we could not close on the new property until we had cash in hand from the sale of our current property. This created all kinds of difficulties we could have avoided if we had used a service like MoveMe! Not only that but having professionals to help guide us through the entire process could have saved countless headaches as we went thorough the process of listing, closing, the old house as well as getting setup for the new house.... what a pain!

The key is finding Cheap Conveyancing of course. A little research suer would have saved us a ton of hassle, money and frustration. Make sure you do your homework on your next move and avoid these problems.

Hindsight is 20/20

IBID

2009-10-08T12:10:00.000-05:00

Sorry to serial-rant, but I should say that I think there is actually some hope in all of this....
.
I should also explain that I used to work in one of those places where the incumbent technology was about 40 years old, the sales cycle for innovative products was about 10 years, because it is a basic-materials business that is pretty well commoditized, selling into a mature industry (the automotive supply chain, of course)....It's similar enough to the refinery business that I can figure out a lot of the economics....

In that kind of environment, it is pretty easy to build a nice career, and get a nice salary, by being an innovation killer. Here is how it works: Someone in engineering, or maybe customer service, has some idea about how to improve the product, or improve some aspect of service, delivery or logistics, and in one of the periodic communication meetings that happens would thoughtfully put out some kind of proposal..... Sometimes this happened informally, but from time to time, this would happen deliberately, and a lot of the planning and business modeling would be laid out in some detail.

Meetings would be held, the innovators were allowed to state their case, and it was at that point that the "counter-innovators" would come up with a lot of excuses for not doing it, question the base assumptions, and slow down, if not completely stop, the entire process. The reason that this was a successful career strategy is that it is easy to kill an idea, or starve it to death, because the default position, so to speak, let things go on the way they have, is risk-free. The basic assumption is, "that's the way it is... it's what made us successful all of these years...."

An innovation that fails, of course, makes the innovation killers look brilliant and the innovators look like idiots. It takes 100 times more energy and talent to innovate than it does to kill an innovation, so most of the time, the innovation killers have the odds in their favor.

Any changes to this massive-scale equipment was expensive, of course, and sometimes the business would have to make a pretty sizeable investment to make it work, so in a way, in the short run, they were right. In the long run, of course, it's a catastrohpe.

An offshoot of this, of course, is the Al Dunlaps and/or Nardellis of the world, who built their career on cutting..... reducing overhead and/or streamlining operations, which is a useful skill in and of itself because it improves economic efficiency, but is terrible from the standpoint of innovation, because by its very nature, innovation is messy and inefficient.....That was the subject of an earlier rant, that we can probably unearth....

The point of all of this is, that there gets to be a lot of tension between the innovators, who have ideas on how to improve the business and make it grow, and implement change, and the counter-innovators......and at least in the mature business that I was in.....It was particularly dangerous for an innovator to be put into any kind of position of authority, because the first thing he or she did was start to shake up the status quo.... which got people nervous....and violated Peter's first and foremost rule of organizational behavior: The Hierarchy Must Be Preserved....Typically, the innovation killers were the ones that were populating the higher levels....being as it was one of those mature industries....

And, of course it is the very reason, particularly in automotive and other manufacturing, that these companies refused to change, even in the face of catastrophe, and had to be bailed out by the government.

The bright side is, from time to time, the analysts and management figured out that the headcount was too high, so there was an overhead purge, and along with the skill-free yes people, occasionally the innovation killers that were running the place would use it as an excuse to get rid of some of the 1% of the people that ticked somebody off at some point........From the point of view of the organization, these people were a bit dangerous..... but from the point of view of the rest of the world, they are the ones who are bright, ambitious, determined, innovative, risk-taking, and not afraid to keep the ball in play even if they failed from time to time...Naturally they did not fit into the corporate structure.....especially in a mature industry where a "success" might take you five years... A lot of them even had cluttered desks... can you imagine?

With these seeds of creativity finally liberated from their protective pod, these people are free to develop new products, establish new business and industries, and generally make things better for the economy and society as a whole. Of course, there are plenty of failures that are liberated as part of this too.... and it's kind of hard to distinguish between the two in the early stages.... but that is not all bad...

Failure makes you smarter, provided you learn from it, and use it as a chance to change....

The point is, that situations like this have the potential free up a lot of human energy that, in maybe 1% of the cases, can sow the seeds of a new industry. It's definitely going to be rough for the 99%.....

BTW a side point: I think the current argument about universal health care completely ignores the fact that a lot of bright people right now are dumbing themselves down, and putting up with a lot of BS in a corporate type environment, so that they can work in a place that has health insurance, rather than going out and innovating......

w/ population growth, a jobs recovery is now impossible

2009-10-06T10:52:00.000-05:00

Quote:

Just to stay even with where we are today, and keep our total unemployed number stable, we'd have to add 144,000 jobs a month.

Well, the population growth thing is a two edged sword, naturally, because population growth also equals "more customers"....

There is a school of thought that says that the population growth in the country is too slow, thanks to us baby boomers discovering artificial birth control, and having smaller families than the two previous generations. We got into the preposterous situation of this baby boom generation all reaching middle age, and not consuming as much as we used to. There's now way for the echo generation/gen Y to buy as much crap as we did....particularly in light of the fact that we have screwed them out of decent entry level jobs, as documented elsewhere, hence the big slowdown....

I think the demographers have been worried about this for years... The solution: Import the most productive segment population from south of the border, so that they can buy cars, cellphones, and rent our apartment buildings. and pop out a few babies to keep the game going...Same can be said for the H1B cases that we were talking about the other day.....In either case, we are not going to tell 10 million people at the prime of their consumption phase to go back home......You never hear that argument....

Quote:

Those in their 50s who remain unemployed for any serious length of time are completely screwed. They are too old to go back to school and too expensive to insure. Moreover, these are exactly the people who have been draining their home equity to fund consumption.

I just have to comment on this, as well.....since I am in this age group....I am focused on the 50-year old white collar worker at the moment....

I've been around some corporate-type environments, and I have to say that it never ceases to amaze me how many people there are in some of these places that add no real value to the business....They show up every day, email things back and forth to one another, have important meetings to determine the agenda for the next meeting and do a lot of wheel spinning, and a lot of them get paid a lot of money for it. How did such a thing come about? There was a 25 year period without a serious business downturn, and during this time, a lot of weak managers got jobs they shouldn't have, and set up their organization full of attractive people with good lines of BS but no real skills....There was no "cleansing" period during which some of the excess could be wrung out of the system.

The modern "HR" systems added to the problem. If you could manage somehow to get a job, all you had to do is be pleasant around the office, ideally well-dressed and good looking, and you'd get a favorable job review every year, because the systems are set up, as Laurence J. Peter suggests, to measure "input", that is, your participation in the system, rather than "output", the performance of some measurable amount of work....

So year after year, even at the high levels, these companies were populated by people who got where they were by agreeing with the boss, looking good around the place, and making as few waves as possible. Some of these people actually became managers. A lot of them, not all, have never run any actual business more complicated than a lemonade stand...

This did no favors to the employees, as we are now seeing. You get a job, you figure out the corporate environment, you keep your head low, and make sure to show up at the company christmas party and play nice during the meetings, and you get a good review and you do exactly the same thing the next year.... so there is no incentive to innovate, to take risks, develop new skills, and do anything if there is a potential of failure. You get people in their jobs who have not developed any sort of risk-taking skills, have no real self-assessment ability, since all they did was agree with the boss for all of those years....You get your 3% raise every year, and eventually, you are making pretty good money doing nothing of real value to the organization.

Naturally, you go out and buy a bigger house, you get a nice car, so that you can be seen as powerful around the office, you take your vacations to Cancun, put your kids in private school.... I suppose I do not need to rant at this point.....because Tyler is exactly right.... this is where the spending habits entrap them even more into the situation.

So the business hits a brick wall, the few competent managers around finally correctly start to question some of the activities, and start to lay people off, and before long, a lot of these people find their way onto the street....The situation is correctly described above: No relevant job skills except agreeing with the boss, a lot of overhead to pay for, maybe you are smart enough to save and maybe not, and you get a lot of fearful people....the most fearful, of course, are the stepford/trophy wives, that are at home taking care of the status symbols.... and have themselves developed no useful skills since getting their MRS degree in 1985 and then retiring....This adds one more source of irritation to the already frustrated man of the house..

A lot of them got overweight during this period too. Just saying.

Ironically, well, not ironically but tragically, the reality is, that a lot of these people know that they're trapped. They are not emotionally or intellectually satisfied with their jobs either (it is soul-robbing to spend your career being a yes-man )..This causes just as much stress and frustration, and makes it pretty unsatisfying to show up at the office every day.

So, what ought to be a blessing, a chance to be liberated from this kind of environment, be creative, be all you can be, and reset your career to something fun, which gives you a sense of accomplishment, becomes a life catastrophe for some of these guys. They sit around and whine, and do their outplacement which is a placebo version of what their job was, and wait....I am sure the suicide rates among these people are increasing, but suicide requires a bit of initiative, so it would not surprise me if it did not....Their stepford wives go into panic mode, at the prospect of losing their gravy train, which makes the situation even worse....So the divorce rate starts to climb....The health insurance thing makes it even worse.... I can name at least 3 overweight 50-55 year olds that need hip replacements....

So, what is going to happen? Well, these are the flower children of the 60-'s and 70's... They will use their political power (it's a democracy, after all) to do what they always did, which is to whine so that someone comes and bails them out.

So that is what is going to happen. This will go on as long as it can.

BTW my personal attitude toward this issue is completely different than most....

US will experience collapse from First to Third World

2009-09-23T07:02:00.000-05:00

laissez-faire economics... Keynesian fiscal policies...

Social Darwinism anyone?

Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)

Quote:

The core belief of free-marketeers is that people should be free to do what they want in life as long as they don't harm anyone else. They say that on the whole, society's problems and challenges are best dealt with by people and companies interacting with each other freely without interference from politicians and the State. This means that government action, whether through taxes, regulation or laws, should be kept to a minimum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Economic_Affairs

Quote:

There are "troubling similarities" between the US President's actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history

Quote:

"It is also not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first to Third World status experienced by Argentina under the national-socialist governance of Juan Peron."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/6147211/Barack-Obama-accused-of-making-Depression-mistakes.html

Cell Phone Technology

2009-09-15T06:51:00.006-05:00

So not long ago I laundered my BlackBerry. I was just washing a load of laundry, and found my BlackBerry Curve staring up at me from the bottom of the washing machine with a look of sad resignation on it's face. Just as a note for future cell phone treatments, this washing did nothing to improve the performance of my device. In fact... well... you can imagine.

I've been a BlackBerry user for many years as a corporate warrior, and consider the phone an extension of my digital presence. So of course I went on a hunt for a replacement for my now water-logged device right away. Being the Internet guy I am, I started looking online for shops specializing in smartphones and came across these guys. I had intended to just replace my damaged phone, but after looking at some of the other offerings I decided to replace my BlackBerry with Google's GPhone. I had considered the iphone because of the many iphone accessories, and cool iphone case choices but went with the Gphone instead. I liked the iphone car charger available with the iphone, and the full body case as well as the dockking station which is also a charger, but liked how the GPhone used the same mini USB for headphones. It was a tough decision because the iphone is so popular, and there are many add-on applications available for it, but in the end it was the open source operating system of the GPhone, and the excellent HTC hardware which won me over.

I love it...

Since I already use GMail & Calander etc... the GPhone was a simple transition. Popped my old sim card into my G1 and the phone did the rest. All my contacts, email, calanders etc... just appeared like magic and I was off to the races.

And take my advice... if you want a headset... get the JawBone... you will love it. Clear as a bell.

Now if I can just manage not to wash this one... I'm good.

Why Peak Oil may prove irrelevant (REDUX)

2009-09-02T13:49:00.001-05:00

No. The US experience is vastly different than that of other nations owing to the ability of citizenry to own mineral rights, which has created a whole class of minor scale operators who have no analogue in any other producing nation.

Look at the EIA page for Distribution and Production of Oil and Gas Wells by State. 355,537 operating oil wells, 125,933 of which produce 0-1 boe/d. This is not a situation that obtains elsewhere. I've asked people with experience in the industry such as R Rapier or ROCKMAN if they thought NOCs could replicate this level of attention by opening up drilling rights to citizenry, and the answer was "damn unlikely," followed by "likely wouldn't make much difference."

The HL method seems to suggest overall world decline will be fairly gentle anyway, however. But we have a lot of very steep declines making their way into the equation, owing to the prevalence of deepwater in the last quarter of the 20th century, which could hasten the decline somewhat.

More pressing than that is how nations will react when peak oil registers as a fait accompli, which of course is wholly unmeasurable.
Where you measure the decline rate is of import as well:

Biggest Losers for 2008 from Stat Review:

Code:
Yemen -11.59%Chad -11.50%Italy -10.88%Brunei -10.00%Mexico -9.05%Tunisia -8.89%Other Africa -8.33%Nigeria -7.89%Denmark -7.72%European Union # -6.24%Vietnam -5.98%United Kingdom -5.76%Other Europe & Eurasia -5.18%Other Middle East -4.98%Syria -4.10%

Biggest Winners:

Code:
Other Asia Pacific 3.23%Brazil 3.48%Indonesia 3.48%Saudi Arabia 3.66%Turkmenistan 3.66%Oman 3.70%Total Middle East 3.94%Kazakhstan 4.54%Thailand 4.81%Azerbaijan 4.95%Peru 5.13%Kuwait 5.32%Angola 8.27%Colombia 9.21%Rep. of Congo (Brazzaville) 10.92%Iraq 11.52%Qatar 13.17%

Would be interesting to compare decline rate to overall production.Tex - US Production minus Alaska:Looks like a neolithic spear head.

That piddling little uptick in the 80s is what the greatest drilling campaign in history produced.

Heart Surgery In a couple hours

2009-08-28T08:12:00.000-05:00

So I've been recovering at home in what I assume is the traditional fashion.

No unexpected complications to relate... just the healing process. Had my first follow-ups with surgeons & cardiologists which seem to have gone well, so it seems like these folks have saved my bacon, as it were.

As mentioned earlier this thread, I fall into a category of preexisting, & therefore non-insurable cardio-treatment. Which basically means I'm on the hook for 100% of the costs associated with this experience. This makes me a poster-boy for medical reform efforts in the US I suppose...

The short version is I'm a 45 year old male with a pretty typical history of medical care, as well as professional history. I have been working since 14 years of age in a variety of occupations, the last 20 years of which have been as a professional technologist. I started at $2.10/hour way back when, (minimum wage) & worked my way up the wage ladder over these many years to the 6 figure guy I am today.

It's been a rocky ride between 1975 & today, with many ups & downs along the way; both personal & financial.

The vast majority of this time I have been contributing to mandatory taxation including Social Security contributions, as well as voluntary insurance programs mostly sponsored by my employers. I'd be hard-pressed to give an accurate total for these contributions over the decades, but it's certainly been many 10's of thousands of dollars.

Fast-forward to a period where my Cobra extended insurance coverage expired before I managed to procure new employment-sponsored insurance, and we find my first cardiac event. This of course makes all subsequent heart-related medical events preexisting as far as insurers are concerned, and therefore un-insurable.

The result of this timeline of events is of course, massive amounts of debt.

Multiple trips to the stint lab for angioplasty plus this latest bypass procedure adds up to about a million bucks in debt. This excludes doctor visits, prescriptions etc... I'm paying for all of this "out of pocket" as it were, which is, of course, absurd on it's surface. It effectively makes me a medical share-cropper for life. No possibility of repaying this debt in my lifetime, and therefore in perpetual servitude to the medical-industrial community in perpetuity. To be fair, this beats the alternative... these folks saved my life... no doubt. And I also have a keen appreciation of the triage process which much have occurred prior to this bypass surgery in my favor. A panel of medical folks who were well aware that I'd never repay the debt generated by this procedure, made a decision to perform the surgery anyway. What a nightmare decision this must be, especially since they must get confronted with multiple instances representing individual lives on a regular basis. Our system is literally forcing life/death choices on medical administrators, surgeons & doctors across the country.

So where do we assign blame/responsibility for this condition?

My fault for failing to get new insurance coverage and prevent gaps in coverage?
Insurance companies for excluding preexisting conditions?
Medical device/service providers for the incredible costs of these systems?

All the above?
More?

And where do we go from here?

Since I can't possibly pay for the accumulated debt of these treatments, this financial burden will fall onto the shoulders of taxpayers & insured consumers at the end of the day, in the form of higher taxes & higher premiums.

In a world of shrinking resources, what will be the criteria our medical community employs to determine who receives these heroic measures... & who does not?

I am of course grateful beyond words to be here to write this post, and my thanks goes out to all of the people who made this possible for me. But if you're gonna save Aaron from peakoil.com, you're gonna get some pointed questions eventually which are directly related to energy, resource depletion, financial fidelity & the moral/practical application of these concepts to individual humans, and society as a whole.

As always, your thoughts & comments are most welcome...

A Dark Hole: How the Fed Prints Money Out of Thin Air

2009-07-22T18:55:00.001-05:00

William Greider, The Nation

Quote:

If Congress chooses to take charge of its constitutional duty, it could similarly use greenback currency created by the Federal Reserve as a legitimate channel for financing important public projects -- like sorely needed improvements to the nation's infrastructure. Obviously, this has to be done carefully and responsibly, limited to normal expansion of the money supply and used only for projects that truly benefit the entire nation (lest it lead to inflation). But here is an example of how it would work.

President Obama has announced the goal of building a high-speed rail system. Ours is the only advanced industrial society that doesn't have one (ride the modern trains in France or Japan to see what our society is missing). Trouble is, Obama has only budgeted a pittance ($8 billion) for this project. Spain, by comparison, has committed more than $100 billion to its fifteen-year railroad-building project. Given the vast shortcomings in US infrastructure, the country will never catch up with the backlog through the regular financing of taxing and borrowing.

Instead, Congress should create a stand-alone development fund for long-term capital investment projects (this would require the long-sought reform of the federal budget, which makes no distinction between current operating spending and long-term investment). The Fed would continue to create money only as needed by the economy; but instead of injecting this money into the banking system, a portion of it would go directly to the capital investment fund, earmarked by Congress for specific projects of great urgency.

This is what Ellen Brown, author of Web Of Debt, has been advocating strenuously - get rid of the Fed and have the government print its own money without any indebtedness to private bankers. The national debt is beyond repaying anyway. Who still believes it could possibly by paid down? The current system is bound to snap.

I'd be in favor of another Estate in government, in addition to the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, called the Monetary branch. Members (say, 12 of them) would be appointed by the president, confirmed by Congress and would serve open-ended terms similar to Supreme Court Justices.

The infamous Mayer Amschel Rothschild Quote, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws", is a pretty good indication that the People, not private interests, ought to control their own money supply.

Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

2009-07-01T15:11:00.000-05:00

Tanada

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:47 am

Expert

Joined: Thu Apr 28, 2005 2:00 am
Posts: 4766
Location: West shore Lake Eire, MI, USA

Aaron wrote:

Quote:

The French State still owns 79% of Areva – the company supplying the Finnish reactor,which also operates the French reprocessing plant at La Hague. Having unnecessarily givenlarge contracts to Areva over past years to reprocess its spent fuel, EdF has accumulated over80 tons of plutonium, and vast quantities of nuclear waste at the reprocessing plant at LaHague. So it is now confronted with huge liabilities, but insufficient funds to cover them.The Court of Accounts estimated France’s nuclear liabilities at Eur 71-billion, with Eur 48-billion of that belonging to EdF. There are also huge uncertainties attached to these liabilities.For example, the cost of a potential deep disposal facility for nuclear waste could be between40% and 230% higher than allowed for by EdF, according to radioactive waste managementagency Andra. (35). It appears, therefore, that EdF currently plans to fund only around half ofFrance’s nuclear liabilities.

Nuclear power is a failed technology which has failed to deliver. It has squanderedunparalleled, unstinting support from taxpayers around the globe leaving them with burdensthat may last for millennia. The idea that such an industry should be resuscitated with orwithout even more public subsidy is absurd.

http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/reports/Nuclear_Subsidies.pdf

That's just funny given that Edf turns a large profit every year selling electricity and that money is turned in to the French General Fund to be spent on other government expenditures.

_________________
Always appeal to a man's enlightened self interest, you can trust him to look out for himself honestly, It's when you appeal to his Honor or the Common Good that he stops paying attention.

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pstarr

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:52 am

Expert

Joined: Mon Sep 27, 2004 2:00 am
Posts: 9065
Location: Behind the Redwood Curtain

Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Can we now safely assume the correct nswer is SOCIALISM?

_________________
yesplease wrote:
"Odds are economic growth will start to even out as population reaches it's top of ~10+ trillion"

yesplease wrote:
"What we're seeing, adding about a billion people every thirteen years or so, is linear population growth."

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Tanada

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:55 am

Expert

Joined: Thu Apr 28, 2005 2:00 am
Posts: 4766
Location: West shore Lake Eire, MI, USA

pstarr wrote:

Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Can we now safely assume the correct nswer is SOCIALISM?

I think in this case it is, the electricity industry is government owned and operated. Isn't that the definition of Socialism?

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Aaron

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:13 pm

800 lb Gorilla

Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2004 2:00 am
Posts: 6868
Location: Houston

Tanada wrote:

Aaron wrote:

Quote:

http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/reports/Nuclear_Subsidies.pdf

That's just funny given that Edf turns a large profit every year selling electricity and that money is turned in to the French General Fund to be spent on other government expenditures.

Sure it does...

With taxpayer funding you always "turn a profit".

_________________
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln

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Arthur75

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 2:40 pm

Tar Sands

Joined: Sun Mar 29, 2009 4:10 am
Posts: 35
Location: Lutèce

pstarr wrote:

Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Can we now safely assume the correct nswer is SOCIALISM?

I'm not sure you can really call that Socialism ...

First of all a lot of these big "national enterprises" , EDF for electricity , SNCF for rail date back from right after WWII or just before for SNCF, France Telecom (ex PTT) even before, and are all related somehow to "infrastructures".

And since the war, there as not been any "socialist labeled" government before 1981 and Mitterrand's election, it was either "Gaullist" in power or "center right"

Now it is true that there is a strong "services publics" tradition associated to the "corps de l'Etat" and major engineering (and administration) schools as stated above.

But this tradition is somehow down for quite some time already, the Anglo Saxon "liberalism" (European meaning) having taken its toll on this glorious devoted nationalist spirit ...

And in concrete terms, all these markets are being liberalized these days (EDF has been splited between the network and producers part, same for SNCF (network and trains operators), telecoms deregulated like for AT&T at about same time, etc)

To tell the truth I'm not sure the big "no government everything private" dogma means much when you talk about infrstructures ...
And for instance, whereas in France and other European countries many freeways are privately operated (with tolls), the US highways infrastructure is what ? A socialist shithole ?

What was exactly AT&T before the deregulation ? Is AT&T eating most of what was deregulated right now or not ?

As to EDF, the CEA, or Areva making or not a profit, yes they do (maybe not for the CEA)

Letter from a Dodge dealer

2009-05-21T08:16:00.000-05:00

May 19, 2009
Letter from a Dodge dealer

letter to the editor
My name is George C. Joseph. I am the sole owner of Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu, a family owned and operated business in Melbourne, Florida. My family bought and paid for this automobile franchise 35 years ago in 1974. I am the second generation to manage this business.

We currently employ 50+ people and before the economic slowdown we employed over 70 local people. We are active in the community and the local chamber of commerce. We deal with several dozen local vendors on a day to day basis and many more during a month. All depend on our business for part of their livelihood. We are financially strong with great respect in the market place and community. We have strong local presence and stability.

I work every day the store is open, nine to ten hours a day. I know most of our customers and all our employees. Sunshine Dodge is my life.

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars. This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as "new," nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service. There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.

Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler's insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.

HOW IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAN THIS HAPPEN?

THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS NOT A GOVERNMENT ENTITY

This is beyond imagination! My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN. We did NOTHING wrong.

This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy. This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families? This is a total economic disaster.

HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN IN A FREE MARKET ECONOMY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

I beseech your help, and look forward to your reply. Thank you.

Sincerely,

George C. Joseph
President & Owner
Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpag ... ealer.html

Response:

Dear George:

Sorry you are having so much trouble. In a way, it's not all your fault, to be sure, but in a way, of course, it is.

You have spent the last several decades selling Dodge cars. You of all people ought to know that far from a glorious tradition of automotive excellence, a lot of these cars were pieces of junk. The contract you had with Chrysler Corporation said that you agreed to sell whatever they sent you, no matter how crappy, and you did so, with a smile on your face, for many years. I am sure you are good at what you do.... you have to be in order to stay in business.

http://www.daimlerchryslervehicleproblems.com/

One of the ways that you stayed in business is by the service department that you are so proud of. I am sure you told your sales people to brag about it every chance they got. What you did not want to tell them is that making crappy cars works in your favor.... you get to charge your poor customers for the honor of fixing up the car that you sold them. What they really, really wanted was a car that would not break down. I am sure you have a dealer convention or something where you could feed this information back to Detroit, but evidently they did not get the message.

Another of the ways you stayed in business is by making sure your prices were lower than the Dodge dealer in Ft Lauderdale. To you, it was important that if someone wanted to drive a Dodge, they could go to you for the lowest price in the area. The guy in Lauderdale was doing exactly the same thing. From Dodge's point of view, both of you were undercutting one another, and it was costing them several hundred dollars per car. So, with one of you out of the picture, they are hoping that they can do away with some of this.

What they don't know, unfortunately, is that people nowadays can get on the internet, find the lowest price in the nation for the car they want, and with a couple hundred dollar airplane ticket can go someplace else and drive their car home. You, and the rest of the dealers, did not embrace this technology and take advantage of it, because you, after all, are just the grey haired version of the same greasy car sales people that you hire and fire every day.

Speaking of which, I can think of no other business where the customer is so shockingly humiliated and disrespected as he or she is in the American automotive sales transaction. Just saying.

Anyway, George, I do not want to keep you too much longer, because I know you have a short attention span, but I would just suggest that there are plenty of ways for you to make a living, starting with your big service department... people still need to have their cars worked on, even Toyotas break down occasionally, and they all buy tires and other supplies..... You are a victim of cirumstance, it is true, but what you really are is a victim of hubris... doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You probably could have made the change gradually... or you could have gotten the message back in 1979 when the first Chrysler bail out happened.... but you stayed with what you know because you could, and now you can't. Sorry.

Anyway, if you are smart, you will figure it out. That really is free enterprise for you.

Later
pup55

My old man said. ....

2009-05-06T19:56:00.000-05:00

My father is 85, born as a menonite farmer during the depression, was going to be a preacher until he went to World War II were he met my irreverent Italian mother whom he married and brought back to the US. He dropped religion and became an athiest even though in all other ways culturally he remained quite conservative and true to his prudish upbringing. He ended working for Westinghous in their atomic energy division until that closed down. He was a lifelong democrat until Reagan, become a republican through George Bush's first term. He voted for Obama.

So I asked the old man yesterday how he viewed the current economic crisis and what he saw happening going forward.

He said the economic recovery will not happen quickly this time around since there is no more bubbles to inflate since the last two, the banking and consumer were fake, unlike the manufacturing and information technology booms which were based on something concrete. He said the era of governments backing corporations and the banks is over and that the government will turn to a more socialist agenda to focus on the needs of the middle class. He said this is necessary since now it has become clear that corporations and banks are only out for their own profit. He said it is time for the government to look out for the little guy. He is a great fan of Obama by the way.

Around mitigations for issues like peak oil and global warming my Dad said the human being is not capable of changing his appetite for growth and expansion and all attempts will be futile. He said this will be taken care of by mother nature sometime in the next 200 years. I told him it will happen in my life time and certainly in the lifetime of my daughters. He is skeptical of any radical changes to the status quo in either direction, up or down.

Just interesting getting an old man's view of things which I thought I would share.

Weekly US Petroleum and NG Supply Reports 2009

2009-04-28T09:32:00.001-05:00

Prediction
Unleaded Prediction 24-Apr
Beginning Inv mbbl 217.3
Imports Wk/Day 7.7 1.1
Production Wk/Day 64.4 9.2
Available 289.4
Balance Wk/Day 70.7 10.1
Ending Inv Mbbl 218.70
Prod Supplied 9.1
Predicted Change 1.4

Distillates Prediction 24-Apr
Beginning Inv mbbl 142.3
Imports Wk/Day 1.4 0.2
Production Wk/Day 27.3 3.9
Available 171
Balance Wk/Day 28.7 4.1
Ending Inv Mbbl 142.3
Prod Supplied 4.1
Predicted Change 0.0

Crude Oil Prediction 24-Apr
Beginning Inventory 370.6
Domestic Prod 38.15 5.45
Imports 65.8 9.4
SPR+/Supply- -1.61 -0.23
Total Available 472.94
Provided to Refineries 101.5 14.5
Ending Inventory 371.44
Predicted Change 0.84
Refinery Utilization 83.000

You just get the feeling that there are some funny things going on.... maybe it's just below the surface... maybe it just stayed too quiet for too long.... maybe it's just the season, people getting ready to gear up for summer...

a. We have this situation with the tankers, noted above... an unprecedented collapse in the baltic dry rate, lots of floating storage available.

b. big fluctuations in the import figure every week... the system importing as much oil as ever, even though the inventory is at a multi-decade high....

c. the refining capacity dropping temporarily to a new multi-decade low for April a couple of weeks ago, followed by an uptick last week..

d. the pricing, increasing a couple of dollars on Sunday night, like it did yesterday... still off by 66% versus a year ago...

e. You have the demand. Unleaded demand is within roundoff error of what it was last year at this time. Distillates way off, jet fuel way way off....

f. The little "gap" between calculated and actual demand on unleaded.... it was over 1.1 mbpd last week, which is really high, compared to its historical level of about .7, which suggests that there are a lot of blending components coming into the country, that are double counted as they are blended at the tank farm....

g. We have the trillions of dollars that were pumped into the economy over the last six months looking for a home... some of it ended up in gold, which is still over 900 I think.... perhaps some of it is ending up in oil....

h. No word from China on anything.... except their demand was down 16% or something year-on-year.

i. Suggestions that OPEC did indeed cut back this spring, but all of the volume being made up by Russia and Brazil

j. Potential collapse of Cantarell....

So, there are a lot of things going on in the subsurface, that for the moment are ending up as nothing, but might at some point end up as something.....

As long as we continue to import 1.1 mbpd of unleaded into the country, at the current usage levels, we will continue to build inventory.

Despite the increased refinery usage, plus deposits into the SPR, we will continue to build the crude a little... despite the fact that the citizens of Cushing are already ankle-deep...as long as we continue to import over 9 mbpd

the production dial is all the way turned toward "unleaded" right now, so we will be about even in distillates, as long as the demand remains seasonally like it now is.

This could get fun, if there are widespread disruptions in the travel system because of the flu.....

Perhaps it is time to lay in a supply of popcorn....

Re: American Tax Protests Growing

2009-04-16T12:38:00.002-05:00

Quote:
I wonder if a tea party Party could be formed out of this

...yeah, right. This stuff happens every few years.... and never accomplishes anything, because in the famous words of Howard Ruff, Americans have figured out how to vote themselves benefits out of the federal treasury, and that goes double for the middle class white guys who are running these so-called "protests". They whine about lower taxes, but at the same time do not want to give back the generous government benefits that they themselves are getting.They drive to the rally on roads that are paid for by the government, they go home to their suburban tract homes which are subsidized by tax breaks on their interest, they complain if their public school has a smaller stadium than the next suburb over.

They whine if somebody breaks into their car and steals their stereo because of too few policemen patrolling the streets... it's a big scandal if the government ambulance or fire department takes five minutes instead of one, to get to their house when they have the big H from eating subsidized beef and pork... They drive to work on to either a Lockheed plant, whose profits depend almost solely on their ability to sell more and more complex weapons systems to the US Military or Space Program, or else to their job on an assembly line at the new Kia plant, which was built out in the country by generous industrial revenue bonds issued by the county, or direct subsidy by the local and state government, which they were happy to do in order to get people to work and pay taxes to keep the whole thing going.

On the weekends, they go to the local lake, an impoundment put up by the Corps of Engineers to generate power, so that their electricity will be nice and cheap.... they catch a nice bass that was stocked in the lake by the Fish and Wildlife department. It is nice out there, clean, because the state paid someone to go out and pick up the old beer bottles....and kept the chemical plant upstream from discharging its waste directly into the water supply.

They call their elderly parents on the phone that night.... their elderly parents that have been kept alive via Medicaid and Medicare the last couple of years, after their heart attacks, which were caused by smoking the government subsidized tobacco all of those years, and they are happy that the old folks are able to live in their own house, subsidized by social security and/or a variety of other public pensions, without which they might actually have to (ugh) move in with them....

Who wants to cut back on all of that stuff?

nobody.

They go shopping.... where do we begin? The produce aisle? How much government money went to irrigate all that land out in California to produce all of those beautiful vegetables.... The bread department? Farm set-asides and supports for wheat farmers, regulation of the product by the FDA to keep it from poisoning you, and naturally, easy transportation via the highway system.... The milk section? Lord knows how much a gallon of milk would cost.... or whether or not it would be thinned out with formaldehyde like it was at the turn of the last century without government resources.... Anyplace else in the supermarket, including the supermarket itself, which is inspected by the local health authorities on a frequent basis to keep rats from overrunning the place....You can look no farther than the nearest jar of peanut butter to know what would happen to the food supply without some sort of government review or regulation.... and it is a huge scandal if the health department lets some guy get something past them....

So, these guys can protest all they want.... but they would not think of walking away from some of these things...Better yet, they should spend some time in the so-called "developing countries" to see what life is like without a lot of this stuff....starting first with a minimum wage, and some labor and job safety laws, that keep you from getting your fingers chopped off in some piece of unsafe equipment.... all of that stuff takes government resources...laws, regulations, and inspectors.....I have been all over the world, including the so-called worker's paradise in China, and can tell you some stories....

Now to be sure, the tax system we have is bullshit, and I am second to no one in my desire to have some of this be common-sense such as not requiring 10 handicap parking spots in front of the local skating rink...but I would say that 99% of the fat white guys that are running this stuff have no idea how good they have it.

Since I am in a ranting mood.....That is not to say that the government, at any level, is organized in some kind of efficient way either....Billions spent on weapons systems, hardware, satellites and other crap for the military that is the next thing to useless....I just had to laugh at the following article on Savinar's site today....http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/
Quote:
Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.

A military that is designed to project power and protect our oil supply and keep the system together another year, which is unable to protect two of our three tallest buildings from attack by a seven-foot, left-handed, cave dweller on dialysis, and unable to conquer a nation of 22 million rug salesmen in five years, at the expense of a Trillion dollars....and unable to protect our southern border from an invasion by somewhere between six and ten million potential guerilla fighters....A school system in which the lowest paid people, the teachers, are the least respected, but simultaneously the ones in charge of performing the actual customer service, while the good old boy ex-football coaches, as Ross Perot used to say, are running the show, making the curricculum decisions to fit the economy of 1977, while the kids are going to have to earn a living in 2037, while the little kids in Malaysia are working their asses off to learn English so they can take our jobs while we sell hamburgers to one another.....

In our state, the two highest paid State employees are the two football coaches at the state universities... followed by the basketball coaches.

The ongoing catastrophe that is our "social welfare" system, that is anything but, and fails to produce anything except another generation of government-dependent thugs....and the development of a permanent underclass...

State and local agencies that are used as a jobs program, to fatten up a particular constituency, or tilt regulatory activities in one way or the other, rather than as a way to provide government services....

The Democrats used to be the prime proponents of this, as anyone who has waited in line at the DMV knows, but Republicans became expert in this by populating the federal agencies with of graduates of Liberty University and other similar places ref: Monica Goodling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Goodling

Our billion-dollars worth of jails are full of non-violent drug users, while our biggest growth industry, from various reports, is the importation of "illegal" dope from places such as Afghanistan, which is ostensibly under the control of the US Military, and one or more of our Southern neighbors.....

Our bridges fall down, our levees break....one thunderstorm in Chicago sends our air-traffic-control system, if you want to call it that, into complete chaos....

we have a massive bureaucracy in charge of preventing 75 year old ladies from carrying on more than three ounces of &^#$& toothpaste aboard an airplane flight...and containerloads of dope and other contraband coming into the country via the highways and ports....

But, we keep spending the money. In fact, we spend much more than we take in, because the coward politicians will not go to the public and ask them to pay for the government services...I don't blame them. They're probably embarrassed, the system being in the condition that it is in. They might be held accountable.

And accountability.... that's a joke. A politician's popularity is more linked to how much pork he can bring back to the state.... and congress still has a 90 percent re-election rate, despite the chaos.The bailout thing... that adds a completely new dimension to the problem....an unprecedented taxpayer reward of incompetence.... or corruption... or some combination, never before seen in human history. Ironically that whole thing has an excellent chance to swamp any of the above in terms of the sheer magnitude and audacity ....

I can come to only one conclusion: We are stupid.

I guess people are people.... maybe it's human nature. Individually, we can all see that there is a problem, but collectively, we are a bunch of idiots. I am afraid there is going to be a lot of chaos, and there is no way to make it any better with the system the way it is, and no guarantee that any other system will make it any better.

But, it's unsustainable, at the scale at which we are now trying to run it, in the way we are trying to do it.

Sorry to tell you this close to lunchtime. It's enough to make you sick.

GM Pensions Could Be Worthless

2009-04-14T12:28:00.000-05:00

All pension schemes, be they GM, Social Security or 401K are not supportable in the long term without perpetual growth. The longer a company is in business, the more retired workers it generates. You need to keep increasing the number of new workers and the size of the business to pay for all the retirees you produce as well.Immigration was encouraged in the US to keep the Ponzi scheme alive. As long as more workers kept coming in and could be taxed on their labor and their consumption, those at the top of the pyriamid who got in early could still be paid off. Now of course, nobody wants new immigration, because there aren't any jobs for them on which they could be taxed to support everyone else.

It doesn't matter whether you saved for your retirement yourself in a 401K invested in "safe" Bonds or whether you participated in a pension scheme like GM or just stuffed your mattress full of dollar bills, you still will get the same result in all cases. There isn't productivity to keep paying nonproductive people in perpetuity. The money in the matress gets renderred valueless over time thru inflation.

There is no such thing as a "safe" investment, and everybody is going to get punished for simply being part of this system to begin with.Blaming GMs failure on the burden of its pension system or the Unions is ludicrous. The whole REASON workers gave up their lives to deadly boring jobs on the assembly line was because of the PROMISE made to them of security through the pension and health care bennies they offered to employees. That is HOW GM got its workers. Unions simply negotiated on behalf of the workers for the best deal they could get, and you always have more bargaining power as a group than as an individual. Of course as soon as they could find cheaper forms of unorganized labor in China and Mexico, off they went to those places with the jobs, but by then it was all being financed thru debt anyhow, and they still had the burden of obligations made to get the car company off the ground in the first place.

It had to fail, and so it did. Its really just a microcosm of the whole Capitalist scheme, which eventualy becomes top heavy and periodically has to crash. Long as there is still exploitable resource out there you can restart after a while, but we are fresh out of those resources now.How long before every last system here collapses?

ShortonOil pins the maximum as late in 2011, that seems a reasonable estimate to me, but I'll be surprised if it lasts that long. Every last financial scheme out there is in some stage of collapse at the moment, and is only being propped up by steady infusions of Funny Money. Its all going up in flames now, in the Greatest Bonfire of Paper Wealth in all of Recorded History.

AIG sues the US taxpayers for $306 million

2009-03-21T08:50:00.000-05:00

Quote:

While the American International Group comes under fire from Congress over executive bonuses, it is quietly fighting the federal government for the return of $306 million in tax payments, some related to deals that were conducted through offshore tax havens.

A.I.G. sued the government last month in a bid to force it to return the payments, which stemmed in large part from its use of aggressive tax deals, some involving entities controlled by the company’s financial products unit in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, the Dutch Antilles and other offshore havens.

A.I.G. is effectively suing its majority owner, the government, which has an 80 percent stake and has poured nearly $200 billion into the insurer in a bid to avert its collapse and avoid troubling the global financial markets. The company is in effect asking for even more money, in the form of tax refunds. The suit also suggests that A.I.G. is spending taxpayer money to pursue its case, something it is legally entitled to do. Its initial claim was denied by the Internal Revenue Service last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/busin ... .html?_r=1

These guys are putting the robber barons of old to shame. They're actually using the American peoples' money to SUE the American people to get back all the taxes AIG was forced to pay when they got caught red handed in their tax haven scams.

Natural Gas Crisis Looming

2009-01-31T06:05:00.001-06:00

Rockman has come up with a startling view of the near term future for natural gas in the US. He said he was ok with me starting a thread on this very important matter. Here are some of his quotes from the neighboring thread on drilling:

"...NG is where we'll see the big decline due to rigs being dropped. We're one of the big unconventional NG drillers and are dropping 40% of our rigs in the next few months as the contracts expire. The drop off in drilling combined with the steep decline rates of all those unconventional NG wells (which were the primary source of NG production increases in recent years) will result in significant supply drops in the next 12 to 24 months. Even if demand continues to fall as the economic contraction worsens we may see increasing NG prices down the road. And that's one more burden we won't need on top of every thing else."

"...I suspect the rig drop in the next few months will shock some folks. The down turn came very quick and companies responded as quickly. But the UNG wells take 2 to 3 months to drill. Add contractual commitments and it can take a company 5 or 6 months to completely shut down if they choose to do so. We and other companies are paying penalty fees in order to drop rigs faster.

And we see it daily on the personnel side. Rig workers at the bottom level are being dumped daily as well as salaries being cut for the keepers. As I type I’m working on a deep well in S La. There are a few young guys here with shiny new pick up trucks and worried faces. There are different job levels and many are being demoted to the next lower level. Essentially improving ability levels at a lower cost.

What I can't guess is how quickly production will fall. I might be too optimistic (for the consumer) by guessing it won't impact significantly for 18 to 24 months. If we have a colder then average winter (always the NG seller’s wet dream) there’s an outside chance we could see short term shortages as well as higher prices by next winter."

...
"Until I saw our latest drilling schedule I figured we wouldn't see a big drop for 18+ months or so. And then only if the slow down stretched out. But when I saw us cutting back from 18 rigs to 3 rigs I wondered if it might hit you folks by next winter (it will hit us air conditioned folks hard in Texas too...a big chunk of our electricity comes from NG). Even a better chance of rougher times ahead if the others operators are cutting back to a similar degree. I don't have a data base that I can model the decline potential but perhaps someone hanging around TOD does. Qualitatively, I am concerned we could see much higher NG prices in the next winter cycle even if demand destruction continues. Higher unemployment and higher NG/electricity prices: truly painful times."

"The current NG rate is composed of a number of different types of reservoir drive types (with different decline profiles) of different ages (thus at different points in their decline lives). There are old conventional NG fields which individually produce small volumes but collectively add up to a good bit. The decline rates in these fields is generally low. Then there are other conventional reservoirs which are relatively new. Last summer the Deep Water Independence Hub pipeline system became active in the GOM. It came on close to 1 billion cubic ft per of NG. Fortunate timing because it made up almost exactly for the production soon to be lost from the hurricanes. Much of that lost production is still offline and coming back on slowly. But no way to project those gains. Those Deep Water NG fields have high initial rates but fairly quick declines (4 to 6 years) but not as rapid as the unconventional NG plays. And then there are the UNG wells themselves with high initial rates and then quick decline followed by a low decline but a potential long life at those low rates.

To come up with a projected US NG rate for the next couple of years one needs the numbers and age of wells in each category above and their current flow rates to generate even a rough production model. That is the lacking data base I refer to above. A rig count projection only gives a part of the model: how many wells won’t be drilled in the future. An important part of the model but only a portion. That data base isn’t so much lacking but beyond my time and logistic capabilities. The USGS could throw 4 or 5 folks at the task and come up with a fairly good projection in a month. The data is out there and all publicly available. Whether they know to do it, want to do it, have already done it and don’t want to tell the public….who knows. I can only offer a qualitative guess. The rapid rise of US NG rates were due largely to the UNG and the Deep Water GOM. Both have relatively high decline rates. Thus my final conclusion: we’ll see NG rates go down almost as quickly, just as quickly or even more quickly then they rose.

Whatever the case, it won’t be good for the economy. Whether it drives NG rates below demand even as that demand declines with a worsening economy remains to be seen. Remember: all NG reservoirs are always declining at some velocity. The UNG reservoirs at a very high velocity. It’s their relative percentage of the mix that will determine the potential impact. It was only the ever expanding UNG drilling that hid that overall decline from view."

Link

Denninger to Congress: The Truth Ben & Hank aren't Telling

2008-11-26T06:49:00.001-06:00

Congress, please listen:

The Truth is that we now require about $5 of debt to generate $1 of GDP.

The Truth is that the reason you were not asked to approve $700 billion to capitalize 10 new banks, thereby creating seven trillion in lending capacity is that the economy cannot soak up that new lending capacity; each dollar of new debt generates almost no aggregate GDP. If this were not true then that would be the logical and effective cure for the 'credit crunch" - if the borrowing capacity and impact on GDP necessary to help existed. They do not.

The Truth is that you were lied to about the purpose of the TARP/EESA, because what you were sold was mathematically impossible. It is supposed to be unlawful to lie to Congress.

The Truth is that the purpose of the EESA/TARP is to rescue the bankers on Wall Street and elsewhere who have made imprudent loans, all of whom are aware of the declining value of a dollar of debt in the economy - a fact they have intentionally concealed from you. The bankers (including Hank and Ben) all know how to do this math, and they are well-aware that the best they can do at this point is to "Rob every dollar you can while the getting is good, and hope they don't figure it out before you get the cash."

The Truth is that once you reach a level where a dollar in debt will not support a dollar in GDP you must inevitably either pay down or default that excess debt. Unfortunately, in this case we must pay down or default approximately 80% of the aggregate public and private debt in the United States in order to return to a standard were $1 in debt will generate $1 in GDP. Defaulting or paying down less will "turn the clock back" to a degree, but does not change the ultimate outcome. Only returning to $1 of debt returning $1 or more of GDP, and holding the total level of debt outstanding at or below that level, results in a stable monetary system.

The Truth is that if we reach the point where a dollar of debt has a NEGATIVE impact on GDP The United States monetary system and government will implode. The reason for this is mathematically obvious - each additional dollar of borrowing beyond that point actually contracts GDP instead of growing it; this is, for all intents and purposes, a "black hole". It is that event that has led to the implosion of other monetary systems such as the hyperinflationary implosion of Argentina.