Re: Trading markets
Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 11:05 am
Well, looks like Curtis was right (often the case). I didn't check my email til it was too late to do anything yesterday, but I'd been selling a bit of this and that anyway, which I'll go and correct/edit in the log. I trade such weird stuff anyway, some of it is highly green today despite a huge tanking in the indexes, so I'm seeing only a "sigh" amount of losses against recent winnings. Happens pretty often when my pals see a big market move and say one of "you must be real happy/sad" -- but most of the money I make is on moves that don't affect the major indexes much -- I don't play those anyway, except in exceptions. Most of the time, it seems I make the most when the market averages are more or less flat.
Most of my net worth is tied up in other stuff too. All this land (about 50 acres now), which is about half trees, and half of the grass is pretty sloped for cropping, good for cattle, which is what it was used for before I got it. Buildings, tools, toys, vehicles and so on. Of course, most of my wealth isn't money -- it's people like those here, and oh yeah, I have a little money besides.
Gotta go run and sell the green stuff at least, while it's still green. I'd like to hear from Curtis if he thinks this is "it" or the beginning of another serious dip, or just a bad day because of Cisco etc.
I can't see how one guy+wife could really be self sufficient here -- we are trying for the game of it value, and the fun value. But the only way we could do it at our ages is with considerable help from gasoline powered tools. I think a chainsaw might be the best use of gasoline there is, really takes advantage of the energy density to do what amounts to harvesting energy gain from the woods. I get enough from just dead things or things I need to thin to keep the woodlots healthy, so I'll never run out of that unless climate changes quicker than the species of trees I have can adapt, or some pestilence shows up that kills a lot of them. Having said that, my favorite chainsaw is a 3 hp electric one I can run off the solar system or a small generator when in the woods.
Slightly more setup, but much more productive once going -- never have to start it, tune it, just sharpen it and use it, it has more torque than most gas ones that weigh twice as much, and it's fast. I may rig a generator on the PTO of my tractor and get rid of that need for lugging another, but usually just put one in the tractor cart. While not as slopy as W VA here, it's still a challenge to get around in any vehicle, including 4 wheelers -- they tend to be too wide to get between the trees, and can't handle the steep and deep gullies the creeks run in. But that tractor is a narrow Simplicity hydro-drive with weight and torque like a big one, and it goes anywhere -- need a road? It will make one. I commonly use it to pull big trucks out of the ditch when some idiot thinks a 4wd will get them out of anything. Not here! They all laugh at the tiny thing until I ask if they want out of the ditch or not, and then pull them out without even putting it in low gear, engine at idle.
I agree the base problem is simply too much human density, but I have zero clue how to address that one in any way that people would think of as "good". I think Malthus was right, just way too soon -- none of the things we are facing would be any problem with a lot less people. But, how to reduce, and who chooses? Very nasty territory to get into, philosophically.
And strangely (or not) we are already in trouble due to the reducing population growth anyway, with our systems that have the young caring for the old -- not enough young to do it with a decent loading on the young, which is inevitably going to lead to "issues" down the road a little. Our government for example, has stolen the money for our social safety net -- all those accounts are simply full of IOU's we can't pay. All that did is speed up the problem, it would have happened anyway at some point.
But we eat a lot more than we can decently grow without that being a more than full time job. We have water here and there in springs and small creeks, but getting it to where the crops would be is a real hassle, for instance -- the good spring is half a mile from where I sit and keeping a system working from there to here is so much work I gave up and just go over there with a tractor and haul it back as needed. Mostly we garden to get the very finest quality food available, it's clearly better than what you can buy in stores, tastier and of course very fresh.
What concerns me is that issue of productivity per man hour -- it's at an all time high at this level of unemployment which is in the 25% range when honestly measured. To me, this means that those laid off are the unproductive ones, and just having them in the workforce also costs productivity for the good people -- so this way might be more efficient? I know that when I look for help, I don't get the good quality I used to be able to find -- all those guys still have good jobs, so I've quit looking for now -- I get a flood of very nice looking resumes but in person, nah, all losers. So, what do we do with them? If we just cut them off, we got riots and crime. If we feed them, then it becomes attractive to become one of them, and causes ire among those providing for them. It's just a really hard question. We used to have things like world wars which seemed to handle that, but that's a pretty icky way to do that too, and it's not properly selective, though it does tend to cut down the "naturally violent" types ahead of the rest (who tend to volunteer), probably good that way if there's anything that can be said that's close to "good" about all that (not really).
I'd love to hear thoughts on that one, but probably on another thread here in water cooler. I spent a few hundred pages talking to "bionerd" about this in email, and she couldn't solve any of it either -- that's one square&level-headed lady, btw, we really covered the map with it all, and no one got emotional about it (which is unusual), just honest attempts to discover a solution to it all, no luck, but we both came away with a better understanding of the issues to be sure.
BTW, a self-back-patting fiction here in the USA is that we rose to dominance because we are something kind of special. I don't really feel that way -- we rose because the rest of the world except for us had just been bombed into the stone age -- while we had been building factories for the war effort. That made it kinda all too easy...
Most of my net worth is tied up in other stuff too. All this land (about 50 acres now), which is about half trees, and half of the grass is pretty sloped for cropping, good for cattle, which is what it was used for before I got it. Buildings, tools, toys, vehicles and so on. Of course, most of my wealth isn't money -- it's people like those here, and oh yeah, I have a little money besides.
Gotta go run and sell the green stuff at least, while it's still green. I'd like to hear from Curtis if he thinks this is "it" or the beginning of another serious dip, or just a bad day because of Cisco etc.
I can't see how one guy+wife could really be self sufficient here -- we are trying for the game of it value, and the fun value. But the only way we could do it at our ages is with considerable help from gasoline powered tools. I think a chainsaw might be the best use of gasoline there is, really takes advantage of the energy density to do what amounts to harvesting energy gain from the woods. I get enough from just dead things or things I need to thin to keep the woodlots healthy, so I'll never run out of that unless climate changes quicker than the species of trees I have can adapt, or some pestilence shows up that kills a lot of them. Having said that, my favorite chainsaw is a 3 hp electric one I can run off the solar system or a small generator when in the woods.
Slightly more setup, but much more productive once going -- never have to start it, tune it, just sharpen it and use it, it has more torque than most gas ones that weigh twice as much, and it's fast. I may rig a generator on the PTO of my tractor and get rid of that need for lugging another, but usually just put one in the tractor cart. While not as slopy as W VA here, it's still a challenge to get around in any vehicle, including 4 wheelers -- they tend to be too wide to get between the trees, and can't handle the steep and deep gullies the creeks run in. But that tractor is a narrow Simplicity hydro-drive with weight and torque like a big one, and it goes anywhere -- need a road? It will make one. I commonly use it to pull big trucks out of the ditch when some idiot thinks a 4wd will get them out of anything. Not here! They all laugh at the tiny thing until I ask if they want out of the ditch or not, and then pull them out without even putting it in low gear, engine at idle.
I agree the base problem is simply too much human density, but I have zero clue how to address that one in any way that people would think of as "good". I think Malthus was right, just way too soon -- none of the things we are facing would be any problem with a lot less people. But, how to reduce, and who chooses? Very nasty territory to get into, philosophically.
And strangely (or not) we are already in trouble due to the reducing population growth anyway, with our systems that have the young caring for the old -- not enough young to do it with a decent loading on the young, which is inevitably going to lead to "issues" down the road a little. Our government for example, has stolen the money for our social safety net -- all those accounts are simply full of IOU's we can't pay. All that did is speed up the problem, it would have happened anyway at some point.
But we eat a lot more than we can decently grow without that being a more than full time job. We have water here and there in springs and small creeks, but getting it to where the crops would be is a real hassle, for instance -- the good spring is half a mile from where I sit and keeping a system working from there to here is so much work I gave up and just go over there with a tractor and haul it back as needed. Mostly we garden to get the very finest quality food available, it's clearly better than what you can buy in stores, tastier and of course very fresh.
What concerns me is that issue of productivity per man hour -- it's at an all time high at this level of unemployment which is in the 25% range when honestly measured. To me, this means that those laid off are the unproductive ones, and just having them in the workforce also costs productivity for the good people -- so this way might be more efficient? I know that when I look for help, I don't get the good quality I used to be able to find -- all those guys still have good jobs, so I've quit looking for now -- I get a flood of very nice looking resumes but in person, nah, all losers. So, what do we do with them? If we just cut them off, we got riots and crime. If we feed them, then it becomes attractive to become one of them, and causes ire among those providing for them. It's just a really hard question. We used to have things like world wars which seemed to handle that, but that's a pretty icky way to do that too, and it's not properly selective, though it does tend to cut down the "naturally violent" types ahead of the rest (who tend to volunteer), probably good that way if there's anything that can be said that's close to "good" about all that (not really).
I'd love to hear thoughts on that one, but probably on another thread here in water cooler. I spent a few hundred pages talking to "bionerd" about this in email, and she couldn't solve any of it either -- that's one square&level-headed lady, btw, we really covered the map with it all, and no one got emotional about it (which is unusual), just honest attempts to discover a solution to it all, no luck, but we both came away with a better understanding of the issues to be sure.
BTW, a self-back-patting fiction here in the USA is that we rose to dominance because we are something kind of special. I don't really feel that way -- we rose because the rest of the world except for us had just been bombed into the stone age -- while we had been building factories for the war effort. That made it kinda all too easy...