altivo

But if I go to bed, I'll be up at three am, which won't help by this time tomorrow. Dunno why I'm so sleepy.

Still predictions of thunderstorms but nothing happening. Maybe that's preferable to what's going on in Texas and Arkansas right now, not sure.

I see in the news that inflation is picking up and could be cooking along at a fast rate by autumn. Just what we don't need in my opinion, but watch the Federal Reserve ignoring it and keeping these ridiculously low interest rates.

Current Mood: irritated
Current Location: Gloomy oak grove

The rain is back. At least this time it comes with entertaining lightning and distant thunder. My dog rarely gets up on the bed, but last night he did because thunder worries him a lot (even though he's 13 years old now and growing hard of hearing.) This afternoon we had severe thunderstorm warnings, though nothing materialized. First they said it would pass north of us. Half an hour later they changed and said it was headed right for us. It actually went south of us.

So the news says that General Motors has been dropped from the Dow Industrial "Average". This is apparently a normal practice. When a stock no longer performs well enough, it is dropped and something else put in its place. They replaced GM with Cisco. That's hardly a direct substitution. Seems to me a hardware manufacturer of consumer products should be replaced by another company that does the same. But this just goes to prove that the DJIA is antiquated and does not deserve the psychological "weight" that is assigned to it. The economy is very poor now, so we should believe that it suddenly got better because a healthy stock is substituted for a very unhealthy one in the measuring scale? In order for the average to be a meaningful value, the decline in GM's stock price should show there, should it not? But that's bad for business if you're a broker or mutual fund "pusher" so they redo the supposed measuring mechanism to make it look better.

This is like when, instead of raising prices, the seller changes the size of the container. "Now, less sodium than ever." Well yeah, because now there's less tuna in the can than ever. It only weighs 5 ounces instead of the 6 it weighed last year or the 7 it weighed when I was a teenager.

Your waistline is embarrassingly large? No problem, let's just use this magical tape measure that has extra big inches. Look, now you're only a 32 instead of a 48.

Governments have been doing this for a long time, so I suppose it's no surprise that the stock market pundits should be doing the same thing. "Hey look, unemployment has gone down!" (Because we stopped counting people as unemployed if their unemployment compensation ran out...) "See, there's no warming trend!" (Or at least you'll have trouble figuring it out because we just switched from Fahrenheit to Celsius readings. A 20° temperature sounds MUCH cooler than 68°, right?

Bah, humbug.

Current Mood: irate
Current Location: Home in the oak grove

Oil down $4 to under $50? Incredible. They say demand is off so much that the price just keeps dropping. Also incredible. I just bought gas for $1.95/gal and I honestly don't remember the last time it was below $2 around here. Certainly it's been at least three years. The rate of drop is more amazing, and in my entire life I've never seen anything like it. A week ago I paid $2.19/gal. Just one week. That's a 24 cent or 11% drop in just seven days.

In spite of my food price complaints, the Consumer Product Index is shrinking. This is, or can certainly be, deflation setting in. Dropping prices sound good at first glance, but when they drop too fast, too widely, that's deflation and it's a sign of economic disaster. Serious, persistent deflation played a major role in the depression of the 1930s. Cutting interest rates or printing more money is supposed to fight this off, but it's really not that simple. Like the falling stock market, what we are seeing is everyone tightening their belt. (Well, everyone except the CEOs of failing companies, who keep holding million dollar "conferences" and flying their private jets to Washington to ask Congress for money.)

Once deflation takes off, people quit buying things except for absolute immediate needs. After all, why fill your tank today if you can count on the price being lower tomorrow? Why stock up on groceries if prices are falling so fast that you'll save money by buying only a couple of days' worth at a time? The slowing cash flow causes more places to shut down and lay off employees, which in turn tightens the crunch even more. It's a feedback loop, and a tough one to break.

We still have those space cadets wandering around, of course. I mentioned the CEOs flying expensive private jets to Washington when they could have taken seats on commercial airlines or at least all shared one jet. Even at the local level, in Harvard, here's an example. I pass four gas stations between the city limits and the library, twice a day. It's been fascinating watching them change their prices, going down a penny or two between each time I drive by. Except... the BP station has had its price stuck at $2.35 for weeks now. No changes at all. And, now, no customers either. When the station right across the road is at $2.01 and two more a mile north are at $1.99, who is going to pay $2.35? Stubbornly, they persist, refusing to lower their price. I noticed this week that they are now closed in the evening. Presumably can't pay help to keep the place open that many hours. Doomed, obviously, but they just don't seem to get it. There's only one answer: take a loss if necessary, but lower that price to match the competition. No one believes that BP gasoline is that different from Marathon or Shell or whatever that it can justify a 35 cent price premium.

Overall, I'd say things are looking really bad. I've been trying to encourage my mate to stick by his retirement investments and wait for improvements, but yesterday he talked to someone at Fidelity and backed all the way out, splitting his remaining reserves between cash and government securities. He was already in the most conservative funds they offered. They asked him to rate his willingness to take financial risk on a scale of one to six, but before he could answer, they went on to say that he was already invested "like a one" and his only option that would be less risky would be to get out of the stock market entirely. I imagine others are doing the same, which doesn't help the DOW or S&P.

Argos status: Zipper installed this morning. A few straight line seams to be sewn and he's done. Some optional details can be added if I have time yet today.

NaNo status: Still at 21,556 words, but I should be able to start rolling again by tomorrow night at the latest.

MFF status: Weather concerns. My room mate

goldenstallion has to cross Indiana tomorrow to get to the con, and currently the forecast calls for as much as sixteen inches of snow between now and tomorrow morning. Not good. No snow on the ground here, but it's darned cold and windy. Good fursuit weather, I guess, though I think in this I prefer to stay indoors even in suit.

Oh, and one other thing. Instead of an artist type character badge for Argos, Gary embroidered a black sweatshirt for me with a white wolf and the name "Argos" on it. My con badge will have "'Tivo" on it, of course.

[Edit 4:20 pm] And the Dow closed down another 444. Enough with the "pep talks" and promises, I say. Time for the supposed experts to either admit that they don't know what's going on or that this really is more than just a "two or three quarter recession." I don't see any way that even half the loss will be recovered in that time. Six years of recovery from the post 9/11 slides have all been wiped out now. I guess I'll go scoop manure and stop thinking about it...

Current Mood: worried
Current Location: Frozen oak grove

Only indirectly felt, but it's becoming more and more obvious that the mortgage lending fiasco is only part of what's been going on. It's amazing to me that so many people are still walking around with their fingers in their ears saying "La la la, can't hear you."

Gasoline prices here are within a couple of pennies of the lowest they've been in probably three years. The lowest I have recorded is $2.08/gal on January 27, 2007 (it had been declining at that point and was much higher for the six months prior.) Since just two days ago, we saw another drop of nine cents here, to $2.10. Obviously, demand is way, way down or they'd never be going so low. However, for the moment people seem to have learned a lesson. They are not rushing out to buy more American gas hog cars and trucks, which means that all three US automakers are sinking rapidly (since they declined to invest in fuel economy the way they were told to do, and fought off government pressure to do so, now they have no viable product lines to speak of even if they are willing to lend the money to buyers themselves, the way Henry Ford did a hundred years ago.)

The impact of auto manufacturers closing dozens of plants would really kick the US economy into the sewer.

The tech fields are shrinking rapidly too. I see Sun is planning to lay off thousands, Intel's profit is down because chip sales are down, which means that manufacturing has slowed because there are backlogged inventories of PCs, laptops, and, presumably game consoles.

I went to the supermarket this morning and food prices are still rising. Fortunately, I know how to eat a fairly healthy diet from the least expensive of sources, though it takes a lot more time in the preparation.

I am beginning to be even more confident that the bad monetary policies of the past decade or two, combined with bad planning and a lack of vision in several industries from banking and finance right down to manufacturing and agriculture, are going to trigger a huge recession now and perhaps even a depression. Price deflation and currency revaluation seem more and more likely.

Whomever you decide to try to blame all this on, don't try to pick Obama. He wasn't around in national politics when it started in the 1980s, and he wasn't elected to the Senate until the slide was already picking up speed, yet I'm already seeing people trying to blame him for current economic situations as if he had any power to do anything about it. I'm not his biggest fan by any means, but this kind of thing is absurdly unfair. The policies of the Reagan administration and Bush Sr. started the ball rolling downhill. The stubborn fiscal conservatism of a Republican dominated House of Representatives during the Clinton Administration helped to keep the ball going until the second Bush administration kicked it into high gear with deficit spending and further deregulation (or failure to enforce what regulations remained.) Remember too, before you yell "Socialist!" at Obama, that Henry Paulson's handouts of unrestricted cash first to banks (who refuse to say what they are using it for, but certainly it isn't being lent) and now proposed to go to foreclosees and possibly the auto companies, are every bit as socialistic as anything Obama has suggested.

There seems to be a funny definition of "socialism" going around. Socialism is when somebody else gets a handout, but if I get the handout it isn't socialism. Right. Sure.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Location: Home in the oak grove

By now everyone knows that the US markets are sliding rapidly again, companies are announcing intentions to lay off thousands more, etc. As I pointed out to someone today, it is incorrect to blame the rotten economic situation on politicians who haven't yet been elected, so if Obama becomes president, do not try to blame this recession on him. Speaking of recessions, it's also high time for everyone to stop referring to "the possible recession" and admit that we are in a recession and have been for a while now.

I read in one spot this afternoon a statement that the S&P 500 has declined by 6% or more in a single day only 36 times, and 32 of those declines happened between 1929 and 1933. Today it declined by 6.5%. Draw your own conclusions if you care to do so.

It is no surprise that oil prices are dropping as the demand declines. Things are seriously slowing down. Even agricultural futures have been declining, though oddly enough the price of food keeps rising at an inflationary rate.

The crazy heating system here in the library is totally off its rocker today. In one zone, it is running both cooling and air conditioning simultaneously, and reports that the output air being pumped into that region is at a temperature of 113F. Yes, it's warm there. Supposedly the heat is off, but it's taking in air at 84F and putting it out at 113F. In the area where I work, the temperature is 69F. The heat is supposedly on, but the system is taking in air at 69F and putting it back out at 55F.

Of course, the computer that reports all this to us and supposedly monitors and adjusts the HVAC is running Windows ME so no real surprise. We called the company that services the system. They had someone here just yesterday and he adjusted valves somewhere. I suspect his "adjustment" has gone very much askew. He's coming back tomorrow. I'll bet they charge us $700 for the return visit, on top of $700 for yesterday, too.

I'm about to give up on the moving jaw for the fursuit, at least for now. I can't keep the teeth aligned when the mouth opens and shuts, and I don't have time to mess with it. So back to the fixed jaw for the time being. I must get ears and fur onto this guy.

Current Mood: irritated
Current Location: At work, alas