Nathan Lane to be nominated to supreme court?

Is it just me or does this pic of Elena Kagan remind you of Nathan Lane in The Birdcage?

Need to fight inflation? Central Banks to the rescue!!

 

This post by Matthew Yglesias would have me laughing my ass off it it weren’t for the fact that six months ago I wouldn’t have know better myself.

I’ve witnessed a prominent European central banker state, live and in person albeit off the record, that the purpose of central bank independence is to allow him to “fight inflation, regardless of the human cost.”

Matthew, like myself less than a year ago, has no clue what inflation is, and why it exists.  Let me lay it out for you, Matthew:  A Central Bank is only there to inflate.  He is there to make it happen with as little detection as possible.  He want you to think that inflation is a natural phenomenon, and that he’s there to keep it in check – disinformation to keep you and others arguing about everything else.

Our Central Bank – The Federal Reserve “System” – was created by bankers so that they could all inflate (loan money long term with “borrowed” demand deposit funds) at a consistent rate, without risk of a bank-run.  It also creates new money so that the banks don’t run out of reserves onto which they can inflate further.

“albeit off the record”

As if there’s so much pro-inflation pressure from the public!  It’s like the drug cartel saying that their job is to fight drug addiction “regardless of the human cost”.  Same as the drug dealer, he’s there to push as much inflation as possible without getting caught.  His independence is a ruse – he’s not owned by the public, or a benevolent bunch of do-gooders, he’s owned by the frickin banks!  He’s there to inflate the shit out of the money – it’s the way the banks make their money, risk free!

Take the red pill, as I have, and all of this will be clear.   Read this book, or download it from iTunes – it’s free.  Learn how money originated, how paper money was first used, and how fractional reserve banking is immoral and should be illegal.  Learn how bank runs are a natural reaction to people who steal your money, and how the central bank is also a means to protect the thieves from us!  Learn how the the central banks partner, big government, get’s its share.

Smashing Myths and Restoring Sound Money

Thomas E. Woods is my absolute favorite economic / historian speaker.  I’ve read his book Meltdown, and listened to at least 15 hours of his speeches / lectures, and am convinced he is one of the most compelling speakers of our time.  I predict that his work will be renowned far into the future, and I am encouraging my kids to listen him also (believe it or not, they are interested in this kind of stuff!).  This is one of my favorite speeches of his:

Spray-on liquid glass

This article about Spray-on liquid glass written by Lin Edwards is exciting enough – if true, this product will be more revolutionary than most anything in my lifetime – on the level of the microware oven…  but I was struck by one statement in the article towards the end that seemed to indicate that Lin has absolutely no experience in the business world:

Liquid glass spray is perhaps the most important nanotechnology product to emerge to date. It will be available in DIY stores in Britain soon, with prices starting at around £5 ($8 US). Other outlets, such as many supermarkets, may be unwilling to stock the products because they make enormous profits from cleaning products that need to be replaced regularly, and liquid glass would make virtually all of them obsolete.

What the hell does Lin know about the profitability of cleaning products?  If it is commonly known that selling cleaning products is enormously profitable, why wouldn’t the same DIY stores be selling them and also reluctant to sell the liquid glass?  Why are the DIY stores so stupid?  And also, wouldn’t an enterprising supermarket try to attract customers from another supermarket with lower cleaning product prices?

And why would supermarkets not compete with the DIY stores, if their customers were refusing to buy their cleaning products in favor of the DIY store’s “monopoly” of the liquid glass.

Finally, consumers are going to consume approximately the same amount, in the aggregate.  Why would supermarkets care if you spend your hard earned cash on cleaning products, or on liquid glass?  All they care about is making sure they have what the consumer wants, at prices that attract the most consumers.

It appears that Lin doesn’t believe in free markets, nor does she understand the concept of voluntary free exchange.

Full Steam Ahead II

U.S. Should Plan 2nd Fiscal Stimulus

“We got great weather, wonderful bbq, and cold beer…”

Texas Governor Rick Perry on Instavision – 14:03 in.

Watch the whole thing.  If Texas were ever able to secede, I would move back and watch the crash from there.  Who knows, maybe the states like Texas could pressure the Feds into giving up their power…

Iceberg Dead Ahead

I’ve had this “knowledge” for a long time that the USA was headed for a financial disaster.  Nothing in the immediate future, but someday far from now, all of the Ponzi schemes that the Federal government keeps pumping out are going to kill our economy.  Most of this knowledge comes from my father’s belief in fundamentals as they relate to macro economics, and his talent for not letting a good opportunity to point these fundamentals out to me go by.  Eventually, even a thick skull like mine will absorb the teachings from that kind of barrage. 

Anyway, this knowledge consists of a few things that are coming to a head in the near future:

1. Baby Boomers Retiring.  The Mother-of-all-Ponzi-Schemes, or so-called Social Security, will soon be paying out more than it collects when more and more baby-boomers retire.
2. Medicare / Medicaid.  An aging population combined with rising medical expenses!
3. Healthcare Costs Escalating.  Has your insurance ever gone down, or your coverage ever gone up, or has the complexity ever been reduced?  Mine neither.
4. Deficit Spending by the Federal Government.  Despite what seems to be common knowledge that we had a surplus in the late 90’s, spending by the federal government has never in my lifetime been below tax receipts (see Bureau of the Public Debt, US Treasury)
5. Federal Debt Financed with Short Term Loans.  Short term borrowing is a recipe for disaster – unless you are repaying short term.  But we aren’t repaying (see #4).  If interest rates go up to even modest amounts, we will be adding another $ trillion to the annual deficit. 
6. Consumption Economy.  I’ve heard about the trade deficit my whole life.  Can an economy sustain several decades of high and increasing trade deficits?
7. Ever Increasing Regulatory Environment.  Our elected officials seem to think there is no cost to Sarbanes-Oxley or OSHA or The Patriot Act.  Or a bazillion other regulatory burdens.
8. Taxes.  Never.  Go.  Away.  I remember when I was a kid, the sales tax was less than 5% in the part of Texas where I grew up.  It’s over 8% now in AZ,  PLUS as income tax!  My property taxes increase every year, even when my house is worth 40-50% less.  And my Truck Registration was over $750 the year I bought it (‘06).

I had this knowledge well before the events of last summer.  I wasn’t that concerned because I felt like it was too far away to get too worked up over – after all, we’ve been hearing about this sky-is-falling stuff since Perot in 1992.  But sooner or later, these looming disasters are going to kick us on the crotch.

Full Steam Ahead…

If McCain had won the election, I’d still feel like we’re headed for the iceberg.  I’m sure he would have tried to slow the ship.  I’m sure he would have introduced various reform packages that each would have been steps in the right directions, but could he have stopped the inevitable?  Could he have reformed Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid, balanced the budget, absorbed the gigantic cost of raising interest rates in order to refinance a $9 trillion debt with long term loans?  Could he have turned the momentum of spiraling healthcare costs, and converted our economy into a production economy with a trade surplus? 

I don’t think would have been able to come close.  McCain was somewhat fiscally conservative, but he had a weird idea of free markets.  He had his name of a lot of non libertarian bills (McCain-Feingold, Lieberman-McCain, etc.), so it’s questionable as to how hard he would push for reform.

But McCain didn’t win – Obama did, as he’s fond of reminding us.  And far from slowing the ship, Obama is shoveling the coal faster than anyone ever has ever dreamt possible.  Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke started this mess under Bush, but Obama has taken the wheel and kept his foot on the gas.  Take the following graph of Annual Debt Increase updated monthly (in $billions):

This just addresses the debt issue, but we all know that Obama has grand plans for increasing our Medicare / Medicaid coverage, and is an advocate of Federal Regulation.  He has taken over most of our nations banks, and two our of three of our domestic automakers.

And today, the Democratic controlled House passed a bill to force US companies, and therefore US consumers, to pay additional taxes for CO2 emissions

Ship of Fools

It seems like every single decision this government makes is the EXACT wrong decision – especially when it comes to economic decisions.

So if we are going to hit the iceberg anyway, I say “Full Steam Ahead!!”  Let’s sink this ship while we still remember  free markets, and when the decisions made are so dramatically obvious to everyone.

Maybe if we crash soon, our public might have the will to enact real constitutional protection that really limits what damage our government can do.

In the coming months, I am going to make an effort to point out some of these foolish decisions, but with a positive outlook!  The faster and harder we crash, the faster we can get back to being freedom loving Americans!

If it’s too big to fail…

Glenn Reynolds links to this NYT article asking “If It’s Too Big to Fail, Is It Too Big to Exist?” with his answer “I think so.”

I would follow that question with “Is the US Government too big to fail?”  Or, “Is the US Dollar too big to fail?”

What the hell is that?

Ok, I’m not the biggest Obama fan in the world – certainly not in the top 65 million…  but i thought this pic on The Drudge Report was a bit odd, especially since it didn’t seem to correspond to any adjacent storyline.  I don’t read People Magazine, or any print news media for that matter, so I’m not sure if the person that Michelle is staring down is famous, or just one of the evil rich people who’s going to Fund the Health Overhaul.

Here’s the whole page:

UPDATE: It’s Carla Bruni, and Ann Althouse is having a caption contest!  Glenn Reynolds is reminded of this photo.

Count me among the 17%

According to Rasmussen Reports:

Twenty-six percent (26%) of American adults believe it was a good idea for the federal government to take ownership of General Motors as the auto giant was on the verge of collapse. Nearly as many--17%--say that Americans should protest the bailout by boycotting GM and refusing to buy its cars. Most Americans are somewhere in between.

I Blame the users

What do you get when you combine a system with a dozen programmers, some of which never heard of data integrity, maintaining a business application based on a database with almost no built in constraints over a period of a couple of decades?

Foreign Flag	Count
N	876179
NULL	812543
	97164
Y	34235
1	2729
N N	1132
N Y	3
Y Y	2
44128	1
305	1
28103	1
Y N	1

Apple Fan Boy

I’ve been called this recently and I would agree. I fell in love with the “it just works” way of Apple. When my wife goes to the mall, I tag along so that I can visit the Apple store. I own a MacBook Pro, and iPhone and and iPod. I also have loads of attachments for the mac; gadgets like the Bose Sound Dock for the iPhone and wireless keyboard and mouse for the laptop. I have tons of software and enjoy working and playing on the mac. I’m messing with xCode and iPhone programming, use parallels to run windows so that I can VPN and RD into work.

I can’t think of anything negative to say about the mac.

My problem… I need to run Visual Studio and Sql Mgmt Studio from anywhere. I picked up a Virtual Machine solution for this but I don’t enjoy it because running OSX and my virtual machines does not give me the performance I desire. I do throttle each but it still does not compare to native speed.

I decided to install the Windows 7 RC1 and boot to it rather than the VM solution. This way I get full dedication of my machines resources to the operating system I choose. It took a little over 30 minutes to do the install, call it 40 if you include the windows and driver updates.

I’m in shock. “It just works”. And it is really really fast. Granted it is bare bones and I am rocking 4gb of ram but this thing cooks. It doesn’t have the bloat of Vista (well it might but they swept it under the rug). It’s snappy, looks great and makes me want to use it. Thank you Microsoft!

Now, for my foot-in-mouth moment: If Microsoft could move Windows 7 to the mobile world and make the Zune HD a little more natural to use like the iPhone, I think they'd really have something they have been missing… A smart phone/pda contender. Let’s be honest, the iPhone, from a human usability perspective, just does it better than any other. They are bound to that silly AT&T contract and Microsoft is not. Ditch the Surface and get this HD phone available from any carrier. Put Win7 on the Zune HD or similar device, nail an app store, destroy Google Android and remind everyone that great software does not have to be open source.

The twitter complaint card

Raise your hand if you like to vent out loud? I sure do and so do millions of twitter users. I've tried to be cautious with what I vent about on twitter because it's public and permanent. You don't want your foul mouth rants following you where ever you go. Sometimes, though, you get frustrated enough that all bets are off and the venting flows freely.

That was the case for me a couple of weeks ago when my recently upgraded Qwest connection went down. For about two days it was randomly disconnecting until finally it just died. Both my wife and I work from home and we go to school full time. Our internet connection is just as valuable to us as water and food. Well, not really, I'm just trying to be dramatic.

I posted the following message on twitter in frustration with my internet connection "#qwest Internet is down. I wish they would tweet or email stating such...". Four minutes after sending that tweet I received a tweet back from @TalkToQwest asking for my billing number. A couple of tweets later I have a phone call from a tech guy at Qwest. When I say tech guy, I mean someone who "knows" tech like I know software. It's almost as if the Fizzbin keyword was spoken for me via twitter.

After my quick tech call, I had a tech person at my door within a day or two and they fixed the issue. No annoying tech call for me where I had to talk to 20 different people and tell my story ten times over. I didn't waste hours of my life trying to solve the problem myself. I simply vented using twitter as my audience and it payed dividends for me.

I'm curious why a company would monitor twitter and provide great customer service on a social network and still maintain such horrible customer service standards via their call-in numbers or normal website. + 1 for qwest on the social front. -1 for paying someone real money to do this and not focus on your other major areas of customer service.

While I'm on this topic, I thought I'd mention my hatred for Papa Johns. Not the food; the food is great. I recieved an email from them with a coupon. While my wife and I were running errands with the offspring, I decided to order from them via this coupon. I clicked the coupon and tried to pull up the phone number of the nearest resturant. No dice, their zip code finder could not find me even though I was standing in the same strip mall that the resturant sits in. So, I used Google maps on my iPhone to get their phone number. I placed my order on the phone with them and gave them the coupon. They rejected and said that it was a website only coupon. Are you freaking kidding me? So I went to the website and tried to order my pizza. They tout a mobile optomized website, one that I don't need because I rock an iPhone but hey, mobile optomized means fast and that is exactly what I wanted. Imagine my surprise to find out that their registration process is more difficult than applying for a freaking credit card. You call that mobile optimized? Why on earth would you serve up a giant registration for to a potential customer on a mobile device?

Needless to say, I opened my big mouth on twitter again "Papa Johns has the WORST mobile experience. Mobile should be fast & fluid. No long a$$ registration process. #fail". Unfortunately for me, Papa Johns does not have a dedicated twitza (that's a pizza twitter person) to review negative comments about them.

Rethinking the Global Money Supply

More talk about ditching the US Dollar as the reserve currency in this article.  What do you think will happen to the exchange rate of the US Dollar if all those countries who use the US Dollar as a reserve start selling those dollars?

The U.S. response to the Chinese proposal was revealing. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner initially described himself as open to exploring the idea; his candor quickly caused the dollar to weaken in value—which it needs to do for the good of the U.S. economy. That weakening, however, led Geithner to reverse himself within minutes by underscoring that the U.S. dollar would remain the world’s reserve currency for the foreseeable future.

Does the US Dollar need to weaken?  Higher oil prices, higher food prices, and higher car prices are what we need?  Is the problem with General Motors and Chrysler the strong US Dollar?  The dollar has been weakening for years.  I went to Europe in 2002, and a Euro cost about $0.88 – It cost about $1.60 just prior to the market crash of 2008, where a rush to the perceived safety of the US Dollar caused it to strengthen.  That means that a $30,000 Chevrolet Tahoe cost 34,091 euro in 2002, and 18,750 euro in 2008.

It should be the job of the US Government and the Fed to protect the US Dollar – not weaken it.  By the way, “overly expansionary monetary policies” is another way of saying “Printing too much money”

The end of the world as we know it

The bad news for me is that i often sound like a crazed lunatic when I start describing my beliefs of the coming economic collapse.  The good news is that I’m in good company.  When people ask where I'm investing, i tell them that I’m mainly into gold and oil ETF’s, since I want to preserve what little savings I have.

I often get the question “What good is Gold?”, and “It’s just a perceived value.”  I am not good at countering that argument, especially since I’ve only been buying it for 6 or 7 months, but I do like to refer to this article by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (written in 1966, twenty years before he became fed chairman).  The last two paragraphs really hit home with me:

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

 

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

  The article is titled “Gold and Economic Freedom”, and it goes into great depth of why Gold is real money, and the best form of currency.  A Currency that is backed by and redeemable in Gold cannot be inflated.  In fact, for most of the history of the United Stated of America,  Gold, along with Silver, was the primary asset backing “gold certificates” and other certificates of deposit.  Up until 1971, the US Dollar was redeemable for a fixed amount of gold – not to Americans – FDR made that illegal when he cut the value of the US dollar in half in the 1930’s.  The first three sentences of the Alan Greenspan quote above bears repeating:

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.

The US eventually had to drop the Gold standard because they were printing money without actually acquiring the gold to back it up.  Foreigners, who could own Gold, were redeeming their US Dollars for the stated exchange rate, causing the real value of the US Dollar to drop.  Had the US not made it illegal for it’s own citizens to own Gold, then the US government would never have been able to print money without Gold to back it up.

Gold is real value, paper money is not.  If the exchange rate of paper money to Gold goes up (more paper money per ounce of Gold), then it’s obvious that the paper money supply is being inflated.  It seems very apparent to me that the real indicator of inflation should always be the the exchange rate of Gold to the US Dollar.

Alan Greenspan says “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.”  Which brings up this chart of the past and projected US Budget Deficit:

And then there’s Gold:

It’s a lot easier sounding like a crazed lunatic when the numbers are on your side.  I think I’ll continue to put my savings in Gold.

Confidence in the US Dollar continues to erode

Brazil and China eye plan to axe dollar

In what was interpreted as a sign of Chinese concern about the future of the dollar, the governor of China’s central bank proposed in March that the US dollar be replaced as the world’s de-facto reserve currency.

In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency ”that is disconnected from individual nations” and modelled on the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, or SDRs.

Hold on to your hats – the US Dollar is dropping like a stone:

The Fed, Inflation, and The Federal Deficit

The past 6 months have been very educational for me from a macro-economic standpoint.  I have never been interested in technical economics to the point that i am now, except for some things I naturally understand, like free markets.  A Free Market economy is easy to understand to me because it’s my natural reaction to the world of trade.  If you’ve ever had a garage sale, or sold something on eBay, you understand it too.  It’s simple – you put something up for sale, and if people think your price is reasonable, they will buy it.  If not, you have the option of lowering the price.

But when all these bailouts started last September, my Father and brother, who are both professional economists to a degree, started teaching me, as a much more interested student, about the macro economics being massively affected by all of this government intervention.  So i started really trying to understand the big picture, and at this point, i think i have a pretty good understanding of it.  I can say it seems pretty simple – almost exactly like free markets.

The Fed & Money Supply

Not many people know what “The Fed” is, except that Alan Greenspan used to run it, and now Ben Bernanke runs it.  And it’s real important to the economy.  And they can lower interest rates.

The Federal Reserve System was originally created, from what I understand, to provide emergency cash to banks when there is a potential bank panic – where too many depositors withdraw their money because of fear that the bank may fold.  The purpose seems to have evolved to some kind of political entity that sets the interest rates in order to loosen or tighten the money supply, usually because of the hype surrounding a recession, or inflation fears.

How The Fed affects interest rates

Banks loan money to us that they get from two different sources: Depositors, and The Fed.  The Fed will create money out of thin air and loan that money to a bank at the discount rate, who, in turn lends money to private citizens and businesses.  This increases (or inflates) the total money supply, and when the bank pays the money back, that decreases / deflates the money supply.  A lower discount rate will attract more borrowers to banks, causing the lending of money to outpace the repayment of money, resulting in a net increase in the money supply.  A person or business may default on a loan to the bank, but the bank still has to pay back the money it borrows from The Fed.  If the bank fails, then the unrecoverable money it owed to The Fed is non-performing, and will forever be added to the overall money supply – The Fed will have to raise interest rates in order recoup that. 

The Credit Crunch, or recent contraction in credit beginning last summer, began mainly because of ridiculously low interest rates for mortgages, usually in the form of ARM’s, to subprime borrowers began to default at high rates.  The free market reaction to high default rates is to increase interest rates (who wants to lend at low interest rates when default rates are increasing?)   In order to keep interest rates low, The Fed creates MORE money out of thin air, and  purchases debt on the open market. This is called Quantitative Easing, and it also increases / inflates the money supply.

The only way to decrease the money supply from quantitative easing is to sell those assets back on the open market for cash (which will increase interest rates), or when those loans are paid by the original borrowers, in the case that they are performing loans.  In the case that they aren’t performing loans, who the heck would buy them?  If the loans aren’t marketable (i.e. non-performing) then that money is also forever lost to the overall money supply, and the only way to make up for it is for The Fed to raise interest rates.

And if that isn’t enough pressure…

For the first 6 months of this budget year, the US government has already doubled the amount of money it has borrowed all of last year – at the same time our trade deficit has been cut in half.  The US government (not to be confused with The Fed) borrows money by holding auctions for Treasury Bills (short term) and Bonds (long term).  In March alone they borrowed $192B.  Normally in a market where people with money want to loan less of it (exporters to US, banks, etc), and the number of people who want to borrow money is increasing (US Treasury), you would have a price increase – higher interest rates. 

The people who normally buy our treasuries (the Chinese, Japanese, Saudis, etc.) all have seen their net exports to the US decrease substantially.  At the same time, the US is selling 4x the amount of debt???  There’s only one way this can unfold – more quantitative easing.  Ben Bernanke is going to purchase US treasuries in order to keep interest rates down.  I’ve heard that the Chinese will continue to buy our debt, but how much can they buy?  Are they going to have 1.7 Trillion dollars extra this year, with exports to the US cut in half?  Are they going to even have 5 trillion over four years – let alone 5 trillion to lend to us?

Stealing your wealth 101

This is where free markets come in… Our currency is traded on free markets – anyone with a pile of money can trade it for other “stuff” – groceries, gasoline, stocks, treasury bills, wheat futures, Euro’s, Yen, etc.  If you sell stuff, you may decide to take US Dollars in trade.  If supply is greater than demand, the price goes down, and if demand grows faster than supply, the price goes up. 

The same thing goes for currencies – if the supply of the currency is greater than demand, then the exchange rate of that currency goes down.  If you increase the supply of a currency by 10% – guess what?  It’s value decreases by about 10%.  By increasing the supply of US Dollars, The Fed and the US Government are essentially confiscating wealth from anyone holding them.

To Summarize…

• The Fed creates money by loaning money to banks and / or buying assets on the open market, which has the effect of lowering interest rates.
• The Fed decreases the money supply only when loans are repaid to it or when it sells assets it previously purchased, which has the affect of raising interest rates.
• The US Government is borrowing money like there’s no tomorrow, in times when nobody has any to lend.
• Because nobody has any money to lend the US Government, The Fed purchases debt from the US Government with printed money.
• More money causes inflation.  Lots more money causes massive inflation. 
• Inflation causes interest rates to go up, causing The Fed to create more money to keep them down, causing more inflation, causing The Fed to create more money…  you get the picture.
• Holders of US Dollars see their holdings decrease in value, causing them to sell their $, causing the US Dollar to decrease in value even more, causing other holders of US Dollars to sell theirs, causing…  you get the picture.
• Finally, with exchange rates for US Dollars at very low rates, the sellers of things we import (remember we import about half of our oil, and most of our consumer goods) will want more US Dollars for them – increasing our prices!

How can you prepare?

If you want to watch something educational, check out this 8 part video.  Watch the whole thing to get a good idea of what’s going to happen, keeping in mind that this video was made in November of 2006.  This set of videos focus primarily of Peter Schiff’s speech, but the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Association presented two points of view, the “bull market” view coming from Dr. Barry Asmus.  Peter’s predictions are uncanny, and Dr. Asmus’ rebuttal’s are embarrassing in hindsight.

How can one guy get it so right – to the “T”, and the other guy be so wrong?  How did Peter know?  My guess is that Peter Schiff has known for a long time that bad monetary policy is the root of all evil.  It’s like government interference that nobody realized is happening.

If you go to the first question in part 7 of 8, there is a dude who explains to Peter how entrenched into the real estate market he is and then asks if he should slit his wrists…  I’ll bet that he now really regrets his skeptical attitude, and wishes he would have believed Peter.  If he could go back in time and sell all of his houses in 2006, he probably would.  All of Peter’s predictions came true, so who knows – maybe he did slit his wrists.

So if you listen to Peter Schiff now, he would tell you to move your assets out of the US Dollar.  Buy gold, silver, foreign stocks, foreign currencies, etc.  I would recommend that you buy his book – Crash Proof – also written before the credit crunch – and follow his advice. 

My Digital Backup Strategy

I'm an amateur photographer. I've enjoyed taking pictures ever since my grandma gave me a Pentax camera when I was a kid. About two years ago I purchased a Nikon D40 and started using the Flickr photo sharing service so that my wife and I could share our memories with our extended family. Since then I have uploaded over 11,000 high quality images to Flickr.

The whole concept of Flickr was fascinating to me because it's really a dirt cheap high capacity storage solution for media. It's backed by Yahoo! and has been a cinch to work with. I've never worried about the data because they offer paid DVD copies if needed. Also, there are third party solutions that do backups locally.

Recently, something happened that changed my outlook on everything...

I had several hundred photos on a machine that I was selling to a friend. I wanted to move those photos to Flickr but had not gone through and touched them up so I opted to move them to an external hard drive. Everything moved over just fine and I was waiting for a good time to get back into the touch-up editing.

About a month after I sold my old machine I bought a MacBook Pro. The first thing I wanted to test was the TimeMachine backup utility. I already had an external drive and figured I could use it both on the Mac and my wife's PC. Keep in mind that this hard drive contained several hundred photos (and songs) that my wife really wanted. So, with the inexperience of a 5th grader, I slapped the drive on my desk, plugged it into the Mac and was on my way.

I recall a modal dialog that was severed up to me. Something about the drive not formatted for that Mac and that it wanted to reformat it. I heard that it was easy to partition drives on the Mac so that's what I did. Half for the Mac half for the PC. I setup time machine and it worked flawlessly.

Once I had the Mac backed up, I went over to back up the wife's computer and hooked up the hard drive. I decided to check on those files just to make sure they were safe. Nope... Something went horrible wrong. When I formatted the drive, it seems like it formatted the entire drive to be Mac friendly, then partitioned out a windows area. The panic ensued!

I immediately went into damage control mode. How do I recover the files? I search and searched until Google called and asked me to stop hogging their bandwidth. I've tried program after program but I cant get these files back. The strange thing is that the files are there, is some binary crazy encoded format. Each utility can locate the files but they can't read them. I'm screwed!

What I have now is a paper weight. I don't want to use the drive anymore because these precious files are on it. I'm in denial that they are unrecoverable because I haven't taken it to a professional yet for an opinion.

The good news from this experience is that I've become much more data conscious. I've got the mac doing monthly/weekly/daily/hourly backups. My wife's computer is SOL for now. I tried to use Windows Live Sky Drive to copy the files that are important to her to a safe place; what a joke that was. I'm using mozy for now but I don't care too much for it.

The solution...

I just purchased an HP EX487 MediaSmart Home Server. It's a 1.5 TB backup solution for the house. It also centralizes all types of media content that can be shared from anywhere with an internet connection. I really like the iTunes centralization so that my wife and I can hook up our ipods to one library. It also offers integration with Flickr for my photos. I fully intend to load my pics on the mac, edit until my hearts content, move the data to the server and have it automatically load my pictures on flickr.

So, in addition to a backup solution for both my mac and pc's, I now have a file sharing server which means I can load all my HD video (got like 100 GB on my mac right now), audio files and other crap onto this server and keep it off of my machines. You can call Flickr my redundant backup solution for photos. I don't like clutter and I hate slowness and I hope to really clean things up. With my new 20 MPS internet connection I suspect that the backups and file sharing will be very fluid. Did I mention this thing has dual 750 GB 7200 RPM drives?

I also have a separate 1 TB drive that I will use to backup the server. I'm currently investigating online storage that is cheap and integrates seamlessly with the home server so that I'm completely covered for any disasters at the house.

I think I've said too much already. I suspect I'm going to be backing up the in-laws machines now, also my brother,  my grandma and aunt. See where this is going? Maybe this was a bad idea.

Warranty void if removed

I’ve had an itch to buy a desktop system for a while, and I've been debating everything from a Mac Pro Quad Core to a home built system.  All the new stuff seemed so frickin expensive, and I didn’t have any more programming I could pimp out to my wife, so I was reluctant to try to sneak a $3000 charge by her…  Then I remembered a site from which I’ve bought at least three other computers: Dell Financial Services Direct Sales.  I found a 3.2 GHz Intel Dual Core Xeon 5000 with no OS for only $490.  It only had 2gb of ram, but I knew I could get more, and I didn’t need an OS, since I was going to experiment with Ubuntu on it.  So I whip out the ol’ MasterCard and order it.

Enter MemoryStock.com

In the meantime while the MasterCard was still warmed up, I went memory shopping and found the memory i needed at MemoryStock.com.  I verified the memory configuration with Dell and a couple of competing sites and placed an order.  Confirmation emails quickly followed with confidence building shipping notices and tracking numbers.  I’m thinking these guys are obviously well versed in the field of online customer service!

A couple of days later the 4gb of memory arrives, two days ahead of the computer.  Of course, I rip open the fedex package and take a look at the merchandise.  I know what to look for, since the day before I rummaged through the ram graveyard at my company to see if there was any “obsolete” memory I could use.  See if you can spot the signs of a rip-off in the pic:

That’s right – there’s a sticker over the memory model / speed sticker that says “Warranty void if removed”.  This is clearly a sticker with the sole purpose of hiding the model of the memory.  It would have been a bit less conspicuous if the giant word “MemoryStock” identifying the seller hadn’t been there – at least I might have suspected that it came from the manufacturer that way - for a couple of minutes.  The sticker covers nothing else – it is obvious that there could be no other purpose for it.

Something tells me that this is not the PC2-5300 DDR2 667 ecc Fully Buffered memory that i ordered (something beside my x-ray vision).

The next day I initiate one of those online customer support chat sessions with them:

Johnson> Hi, thanks for contacting MemoryStock - How may I assist you today? *** If this conversation ends abruptly (or) if you no longer receive messages from us, please feel free to initiate another chat interaction. You may also send a email to info@memorystock.com and our support team will respond to your queries. ***
Johnson> How may I assist you today?
Crash> i ordered memory from you guys, but ther is a BIG sticker over the model #
Crash> warranty void if removed 
Johnson> yea
Crash> why? 
Johnson> warranty sticker
Johnson> we offer lifetime warrenty 
Crash> i'm shipping it back if i cannot see the model
Crash> and i will call my CC company to charge it back 100%
Johnson> can you please call to our Rma dpt 209-475-0152 exnt#102
Johnson> call after 10.30am CA time
Crash> will do 
Johnson> they will assit you for this matter
Johnson> Thank you for using Memorystock Live Chat Support. It is our great pleasure to serve you. If you need any other memory help or information please do not hesitate to contact us. You may also email us atinfo@memorystock.com.

I call this number at the agreed upon time and left a similar message with instructions to call me back by end-of-business that day.  Later that day I called again and left the same message.  No call.

Worried that I might be mistaken, I check the order confirmation email.  I didn’t check it when it arrived, but when I reread it, the memory model number was not there:

737ms-737-H - Precision Workstation 490 4Gb ddr2 fully buffered kit

so i go back to their website and trace my steps.  1st the memory options for the Dell WS490:

Memory Size	Chip Description	Part Number	Price	OEM Part#
2GB ECC Kit	1024MB-533MHz DDR2-533 PC2-4200, 240p FBDIMM, ECC, Fully Buffered, 1.8v	688ms-688	$59.95	In Stock
4GB ECC Kit	2048MB-533MHz DDR2-533 PC2-4200, 240p FBDIMM, ECC, Fully Buffered, 1.8v	689ms-689	$99.95	In Stock
8GB ECC Kit	8GB Kit 533MHz DDR2-533 PC2-4200, 240p FBDIMM, ECC, Fully Buffered, 1.8v	786ms-786 <	$264.95	In Stock
1GB ECC Kit	1GB kit -667MHz DDR2-667 PC2-5300, 240p FBDIMM, ECC, Fully Buffered, 1.8v	735ms-735	$29.95	In Stock
2GB ECC Kit	2GB Kit 667MHz DDR2-667 PC2-5300, 240p FBDIMM, ECC, Fully Buffered, 1.8v	736ms-736	$79.95	In Stock
4GB ECC Kit	4GB Kit 667MHz DDR2-667 PC2-5300, 240p FBDIMM, ECC, Fully Buffered, 1.8v	737ms-737	$149.95	In Stock
8GB ECC Kit	8GB Kit 667MHz DDR2-667 PC2-5300, 240p FBDIMM, ECC, Fully Buffered, 1.8v	791ms-791	$279.95	In Stock

I ordered the 737ms-737 option – clearly labeled as DDR2-667 PC2-5300, so i clicked on that option again:

4GB PC2 5300 DDR2 667 FULLY Buffered 4 GB Dimm Kit  Precision Workstation 490 Memory RAM, Memorystock Part No: 737ms-737
Description :	4GB Kit of(2pcs x 2GB ) PC2-5300, DDR2-667 667 MHz, Fully Buffered ECC DIMM.. Compatible memory for Precision Workstation 490
We carry many major manfacturers compatible memory upgrades for the selected model  Please choose and order your desired brand memory:
Brand   Sale Price   Qty House-Brand $149.95 Check quantity discount   Hynix $164.95 Check quantity discount

Again, the DDR2-667 PC2 5300 is confirmed.  Not wanting the house brand, I chose the Hynix option, where I see:

Your Shopping Cart

ITEMS:1

Items

Qty.

Price Each

Total Price

Remove Item

Precision Workstation 490 4Gb ddr2 fully buffered kit - 737ms-737-H   Details

$164.95

$329.90

The Details link displays the model number again:

As you can see, the part number in the email sent to me matches the memory model i wanted.  So why would the sticker be there?  Why would they be so quick to point me to the RMA department when all I asked for was to verify the model number?

They must be a rip-off organization…

We need better software

As I continue my quest to become a GTD master, I'm starting to realize that computers and software can sometimes cause bottlenecks and may even be getting in the way of you getting things done.

For example, let's say I'm writing code in Visual Studio. I need to store some data so I open up SQL. My app is web based so I open a browser. I am concerned about browser compatibility so I open other browsers. I find an issue that requires research so I open Stack Overflow. I learn something important so I open Evernote to store it. I realize that I need to fix several things so I create a project in remember the milk; then Crash hollers at me "dude, read that email I just sent you".

Each time I leave an app to open another app the context is lost. If I were to go to lunch and come back to this mess of open applications, I really don't know why remember the milk is open and what that has to do with the line of code Visual Studio focused on. It's take time to read the content of both and rebuild the context in my brain again.

This seems inefficient. I want to keep a so called story of what I'm working on. I want to know that the line of code I'm on directly relates to the RTM task I just created, and not because I named the RTM task something obvious.

Make sense?

** Update **

This software partially fits the concept I'm describing. If I could take this concept and make a fluid tie directly into the applications I use daily, it would be perfect. I'd have a single piece of software that satisfied my daily needs for contextual workflow.