Random Thursday Thoughts

--Less than half of the US is now in the Middle Class. NPR finds this shocking. Reason says, "It's not that big a deal-- there are fewer lower class, and more upper class." It's like the statement of the simple fact that there is a minority which is far over-represented in the prison and jail population. One extreme is to believe that crime is inherent within that subset of the population. The other extreme is to believe and assert that the system is inherently racist.

--Looking at my level of income, number of people in my household, and my level of education, I'm trailing behind.

--Caleb wrote the obligatory piece on our POTUS claiming that the no-fly list should be used to restrict guns from citizens. It actually opens the discussion to some very important questions, though. If we let a regulatory agency with the force of law make regulations that take Constitutional rights away from people, what is the point of having a law, or a legislative process? This has been a question of mine about the actions of the BATFE and the TSA for a long time. Let's embrace the discussion, and thank our Constitutional Scholar POTUS for opening it up.

--In three weeks, Texans who have Concealed Handgun Licenses (CHLs) will have Licenses To Carry Handguns. (LCHs) We in North Texas anticipate lots of calls from pearl-clutchers seeing guns on the hips of citizens in public places, for the first time. I'm actually a big fan of them being concealed, because concealment removes (or at least strongly reduces) the incentive for people to carry guns for the wrong damned reason. It needs to be a tool, not a statement.

--I got tired of Pink Floyd back in college, when I had a morose roommate who would put 6 Pink Floyd albums into the CD changer and set it to Random/Infinite Repeat, and turn the amp up to 11 while he maundered. (Amazingly, that roommate is still one of my best friends.)  So I've not played any Pink Floyd for, oh 18 years. Yesterday, I played "On The Turning Away," and found myself with tears in my eyes.

--It's worth remembering that we as a nation are turning away from helping a lot of refugees, which lot is comprised of over 50% women and girls, and over 30% kids under 11. Because we are afraid.


--We got a nice new Roomba for the house, as an early Christmas gift for ourselves. We immediately named it Consuela. A guy on a local buy/sell/trade page online had an older model Roomba that his grandmother no longer wanted, so I talked him down considerably, and bought it. Within 24 hours, we had two robot minions cleaning our split-level house. I named the older model Rosie, for Rosie The Robot of The Jetsons.  My artistic 13 year-old daughter sketched her image of Consuela and Rosie, which we of course had to put up on our refrigerator:

The kid's got an eye, IMHO. 

-- Both my daughters this year are asking to borrow control of my Amazon account, to buy their Christmas gifts. We've had more boxes and parcels and packages dropped off at the front door of my house in the past year than in the combined total of my life, theretofore. 

--I qualified with the Glock 42 on Monday. That is a REALLY soft-shooting little pocket pistol. I had purchased it with Trijicons on it, and 600 rounds, from a friend. It will make a decent BUG, and I've found online the vest holster that I want to get for it for work. I just don't have the $85 lying around at present, what with all the other expenditures, as of late. Maybe next week. Or after Christmas.  

--Another officer had a Glock 43. That is an interesting pistol to shoot. It's FAR snappier in the recoil than the soft-shooting 42, which is to be expected as it is a 9X19 in basically the same sized gun. I may get one.

--Last night I got the ingredients to make this Alton Brown recipe for eggnog. It's as if they said, "we'll shut down the circulatory system with fat and cholesterol! Wait, we wouldn't want the endocrine system to feel left out! Let's wreck the liver, and the pancreas, all at once, with a pint and a half of liquor, and a pound of sugar!"

--As I have dinner to make, and a board meeting to attend in half an hour, I have successfully avoided going to work out today, by writing this blog. (smirk)

Way to overstate the story.

MSNBC is all aflutter, because a bogus AP Twitter feed reported that the White House had been bombed, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a sudden but brief drop, before recovering.

Yeah, it took a little dip. But look:

This looks really bad, until you note the scale on the left.

Pardon my French, but Whoopie Shit.

With the average at over 14,600, the Dow lost 140, briefly. That's less than a 1% drop. If you were watching an analog dial, you would barely have noticed the needle drop.

Mountains.

Mole hills.

The cost of things.

I've told you that I'm not a rich guy. I'm not hurting for anything, really, but I'm on the lower end of the Middle Class spectrum. At a rough estimate, I've made around half a million dollars in my working life.

My parents would have been considered rather well-off, had either one of them been able to say the same thing at my age (the mid 1980s.).

I have never spent so much as $10,000 on a car, although most (not all) of the cars that I've owned did cost more than that, when new. Currently, all three of my vehicles barely would make that mark.

I have never owned a house that cost me over $100,000. My current house appraises at more than that, as did my last house that I sold for a tad under that. But I've never paid so much. When I was a kid, my parents bought a nice brick 2,000 square foot 3 BR 2 BA on an acre for $35,000. It appraises for $155,500 today, to different owners. (I note that it's had a 700'² addition put on.) 

So when I see a car that brings more than $35,000, it makes me think "that thing better have a bathroom and a pull-out bed in it somewhere, because that kind of money should buy a house." Of course this is silly talk, because that kind of money would by $133,000 worth of house, in today's dollars.

When I look at the Mercedes-Benz new G63 6X6 SUV, I think of that $457,000 price tag, and consider that it's almost equal to the number of dollars that I have been paid in my career in the workforce. Dude. It's just a truck.

Well, dang. I gotta get a loan.

We at Chez G have been living mostly within our means. This means that, when it was time to start looking at newer cars, we enjoyed the hilarity of driving up in our POS worn-out commuter cars, dressed in day-off grungy, and getting very little interest by the car salesmen. When we inquired about test-driving cars on lots, they then would reasonably ask to see our driver's licenses, and go "to make a photocopy." During that 10 minute photocopy, they also quickly checked our credit rating. All of a sudden, the car salesman would literally be jogging back up to us. Big smiles. Very friendly, as he suggested perhaps that we might prefer to look at this higher end model over here? 

Break 800 on a credit rating, and that kind of thing happens. But there's a reason that we do all right in the credit rating, and it doesn't come from spending money that we don't have. In fact, we've not made a car payment in eight years, because that's when we paid off our newest car. We know that moving to a car payment is going to hurt.

We decided to buy yet another used car. My wife wanted a Subaru Outback. That was not incompatible with my own criteria for a car. Thus if she wanted it, I wanted it. We ended up finding a decent deal for and '06 Outback on eBay Motors. We bid on it, and won the auction.

Apparently, we then had to get them $2,000 within 24 hrs. Done.

Now, I've got to go get a car loan. This is basically a foregone conclusion that I'll get it. but I HATE applying for loans. I break out in hives at the word "lien."

So, here we go. Sigh. This is me, getting up.

And we're off.

To get a loan.

Okay.

Bye.

Oh look, is that coffee? Just one more cup.

Those who can, do.

I work in the public sector. I've got a job working for taxpayer dollars. So, incidentally, does my wife. I have worked for private companies before, but I have never made a company, risked my money, and built it up.

If I had done so, I could claim that I had been helped along the way to any success. But I haven't, even though I've got a pretty decent education.

My wife's father dropped out of school in junior high. He worked as a mechanic's assistant, and bought a near worthless piece of land and put a salvage yard on it. To drag cars to his yard, he welded up an A-frame on the back of a pickup, and installed a winch. He got married. His wife (my mother-in-law) pointed out that he could always be making money if he towed cars for a living, and had him sell the salvage yard. He bought another piece of land, and fenced it. This was his impound lot. He began putting on barbecues, and inviting local lawmen (especially the constables) to it. He got a lot of tows. He bought proper purpose-built tow trucks. He hired drivers. Soon, the man had a wrecker empire. While buying wreckers, he bought an ambulance. He got his EMT certification, and began running it to emergencies, and doing transfers.

Then he paved a five acre strip of land, and put up storage buildings, to make a U-Store-It facility. Then he passed away, sadly before I ever got to meet the man. Before he died, he had taken a modified pickup and a scrap of land and turned it into three businesses worth an accumulated million dollars, on an 8th grade education, by the late 1980s. Oh, he rightfully shared his success with someone: his wife. She minded the house, reared his kids, handled the office, performed vehicle releases, insisted on cash payments at night while he was on a call-out with a Beretta .32 in her robe pocket. There is little doubt that she was an indispensable keystone to his business success. She was his spouse. His partner in all things.

But I don't think that our president was talking about your marital partner, when he told us that our successes in private business are derived not from our own labors.  Sorry, Bernie. All of those countless times that you got out of bed to go impound a vehicle for a deputy making an arrest, or to pull out a car that went too far on the shoreline-- THOSE don't mean as much as your high school English teacher. You know-- if you'd ever gone to high school.

File that under, "Probably no longer a problem for you."

Anthony Hardwick was bummed, because his job with one of the nation's biggest retailers required him to work on his anniversary, which happens to fall on the single biggest shopping day of the year. Because he also worked deep nights, that meant that he was going to have to sleep on Thanksgiving day.

So he started a petition! Right on, Tony! Power to the People, babe! He's gotten 80,000 signatures to his petition entitled: "Tell Target to Save Thanksgiving,"

But hey, it's all good. Because now:

"Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said Hardwick is not currently scheduled to work on Thanksgiving or Black Friday."

Or, most likely, any other day, either.

See, despite what you may have heard, Target doesn't owe you a job, Anthony. They're trying to make their nut for the year, just like their competitors are.  And here you are, joggling their elbow, when they're trying to do that.

While I have long been disgusted with the whole Black Friday shopping construct, I am also fiercely in favor of letting capitalists sell their wares whenever they feel like it. If you joined up to work at Target with visions of sleeping in over the long Thanksgiving weekend, sir, then I believe that you were mistaken. What did you think that the job entailed, petition-boy? Just modeling your own rendition of red over khakis on free afternoons?

Then, too, perhaps I'm just having trouble mustering much pity for people working away from their family on holidays, because I've had to do it for so long, myself.

Pardon me while I get a little defensive for our state.

You know who we see moving here in Texas? Californians. They marvel at the low (read: realistic) cost of housing. They like the lack of state income taxes. They buy a house here, enroll their kid into our schools, and then get busy complaining.

Not enough services. Our schools are rated too low. Texas is made up of a bunch of hicks. (That last one's pretty general, and, to a great extent, true. But we hear the complaint a lot.)

Funny thing, though. You Californians and other immigrants to our state seem to be complaining about our state at the end of a conversation that started with "Where's the nearest U-Haul dealership? I need to turn in my moving van."

I can't blame you for fleeing Cali. If it weren't for Miami, you guys would have "top five crappiest towns in the U.S." locked up.

As for schools, I have often wondered how anyone could miss that 1254 miles of our 2000 mile border with Mexico is the Rio Grande River. In my personal experience, the Rio Grande averages about a foot or two deep, most places. So we get a few international immigrants, too. It is estimated that we have 70,000 undocumented aliens in the Texas school system. In the college system, most of the 12,000 aliens in Texas receiving in-state tuition are illegal.

We educate about 700,000 ESL kids a year, at an average cost of around $7500 per kid per year. Count the zeros. That's a good five billion bucks. Which we come a lot closer to paying than the folks in California do.


Hey, your revenue is welcome. And if you'll give it a shot, you might just find that you like our redneck ways. But if you're running down your new home as soon as you get here, that's just foolish.

You incoming folks have already run up the number of digits on our license plates to seven, just like you had it back home. Maybe that'll feel more homey to you.

I don't think I can say it any better than that.

My friend LabRat, over at Atomic Nerds, is more than just "bright." I got to meet her at a little get-together in SE Colorado, last November, and she's not one of those poor folks (like me) who is pretty inarticulate without a keyboard in front of them. She's a quick wit, but some of the things that she says have the weight of words spoken after heavy thought as been put into them.

Go read her very brief take on the current illegal immigration situation in our border states. I'll wager that she wrote that in a few scant minutes, while distracted by two other stimuli at minimum, yet I'll sign off on everything she said there as Truth.

Giving a little something.

Look, I'm a poor man. And, I'm a pragmatist. I've got mine, you know?

But I'm sitting here in my climate-controlled sun room, drinking decent coffee out of a clean glass, typing away on my magic elf box. My stomach is full, and I'm about to register for Spring 2010 grad school.

I may be a "poor man," but I ain't really hurtin'.

And, if you're reading this, neither are you. You're reading this on your computer or your super phone or your netbook or your cybertronic feed or whatever. You're probably seated comfortably. You probably aren't too worked up about where you're going to get your next sip of clean water.

I just sent $10 to the Haiti earthquake relief effort, and it was about as easy as I could imagine. Open your cell phone. Text ""HAITI", and send this message to phone number 90999. Press "Send." This goes to the Red Cross.

The text is free (as in, you'll not be billed for making a text). Your phone bill will be charged $10. You'll get a (free) text message asking you to text "Yes" to confirm that you really want to. You reply "yes." Then you get a text confirming that they got it, and offering you the chance to cancel.

This is about as easy as it gets.

I'm about to do it again.

Here's an interesting video of before and after satellite pics of Port-au-Prince. It appears that, if we get some dozers and earth moving equipment in quick, and clear the roads, real relief could happen quite suddenly.

____________________
EDIT:
Here are some other organizations you can donate through.

EDIT:
There are some hoaxes out there, I understand. This is NOT A HOAX. I researched it thoroughly before I did it, and before I posted this. I wouldn't steer you wrong, friends.

Getting credit the old fashioned way...

When my wife married me, I had a couple of credit cards maxed out with payments for school. Yep, I was paying minimum balance on 19% APR revolving debt, on a few thousand dollars. Terrible. She sensibly enough asked me if I were going to, you know-- FINISH my degree, and when I answered timidly in the affirmative, she had me get some school loans at cheap rates, and consolidated my debt down to a nice tiny rate, deferred until I graduated. Good stuff, and a smart move, that was.

We bought a house, with that debt sitting there.

We sold that house, and bought another one, with that debt sitting there.

Nowadays, I pay a bit every month on that debt, and it's still there. I figured that this would make my credit look kind of stale.

Apparently not. We just got locked in a nice rate for our house that we bought last year (international bank of Mother In-Law), and which we would like to pay off. The rate was astoundingly low, at 4.75% for 15 years, and I'm pretty happy about the tiny size of the payments. I asked the banker lady about our credit, and she snorted. Near perfect. She showed me the credit reports, and my jaw dropped. I'll be honest: having never really studied the whole credit thing very much, I didn't know that the numbers went that high. I was vaguely aware that over 700 was pretty good.

I'm not bragging-- all I did was marry a good wife who takes what little I bring home, and manages it effectively. She also says "No" a lot, which means that we don't have a lot of expensive white elephants that I would love to have around the house, but which would drain our finances and ruin our credit. And she can cook. And... well, there are other benefits.

Okay, maybe I'm bragging a little. I married well. But I've mentioned that, I think.

We're in your southern fly-over states, making your money.

Traditionally, the nation's economic engine rooms have been on the coasts.

Not so much lately. Seems that the economy is favoring the warmer parts of the country. Texas showed to have a surprisingly high number of booming cities on this list of the best local economies in the U.S.

Embracing capitalism with a capital C.

My wife and I have decided that we hate being poor.

We have very little faith in our retirements being there for us, as managed by our employers, or by our government. We would like to save it ourselves.

But at the rate the dollar is shrinking, simply "saving" it is madness. Might as well use cash for home heating. So now, as is most of the time, it is a good time to invest.

Truthfully? It's a GREAT time to invest. Stocks are low. The dollar hasn't bottomed out. The upswing will eventually come, when the panic sellers realize that it's time to pull their heads out of the sand, dust off their hands, and get back to business. There are bargains to be had out there.

The one that I look at a lot is oil. This country, along with the world, runs on the stuff. And for all our happy nattering about reducing our dependency on it, the world market is thirsty for it. But right this minute, that lovely commodity has fallen from over $120 a barrel to under $48 a barrel. (Gone are the days when a character actor formerly known as Major Nelson could create a huge stir by proclaiming at a convention that this nation would soon see $50 a barrel, as in the early '80s.) I'm trying to decide between futures or shares in oil companies. But I still won't ever own Exxon stock. Screw'm.

Then, too, we look at mutual funds, like Vanguard. Sure, they've taken a kick to the huevos, lately, but in the long run, they perform. The thing is, I don't want to buy a single share of a company that took bailout money from the feds. We cops think a lot about the old "fruit of the poisonous tree," and I don't want any. I also don't want to do business with banks that took bailout money from the government. You know how there are those "ethical funds," that only have stocks in green, fair-trade, no rain forests endangered, free of animal testing companies? I want to buy shares in a "No Socialism" fund. I'd buy as much as I could afford.

We're looking at buying in little steps at a time, say $2000 per purchase. When the bucket fills back up again, we'll buy another $2000.

We're ready to spend some money to make some money, here.

More proof that money doesn't buy happiness...

...it just buys the THINGS that make us happy.

About a week ago, I remarked to my wife that our second-hand, 11 year-old mattress was just about worn out. I had been waking up with some knots in my back, and was noting that I had to climb up out of the trough in my side of the bed, and up from the rather low bed edge (20" off the floor, by my tape.).

We started talking about how to finance a bed. Local place had a deal for no interest, no payments for a year, or even two years, if you spent enough. We began talking about it, in a leisurely fashion. Beds cost several hundred dollars, and in my house, such purchases are not made without due consideration.

Then, this Saturday, my wife said, "Uh, honey...? Come look at this." My wife, a week before, had bought a Texas Lottery scratch-off, on a lark. We both consider lottery tickets and scratch-off tickets to be a voluntary tax for people who are bad at math, but we also both agree with Robert A. Heinlein when he said, "Of course the game is rigged. But don't let that stop you. If you don't bet, you can't win." Last year I think I bought a single lotto ticket, and my wife estimates that she bought $16 worth. I believe her; I've NEVER seen any evidence of her purchasing them. No crumpled up tickets or scratched cards in the trash or in her purse, or in her car. I've seen her once or maybe twice buy one with a soft drink at a convenience store, to swap turns scraping off the silver coatings from the hidden numbers. Purely for occasional entertainment, and nothing else.

Well, this ticket had a set up where "three of a kind for each hand wins." There were four hands of 5 playing cards, and each hand had a dollar amount next to it. My bride presented me with a card with 3 of a kind in all four hands, and the combined amount was... $2000!!!

I said, "Bull! We're mis-reading this." I read the fine print, front and back.

Then I questioned the card's authenticity.

Finally, we saddled up and bought us a Sealy AirSpring pillowtop mattress with box springs, delivered, with old-bed haul-away. It arrived Sunday afternoon. We sprung for the non-crinkly, breathy kind of dust mite cover, and a memory foam pillow for me.

My wife collected the very real check for Two Thousand Dollars & 00/100's from the local Texas Lottery Commission place today, and declined to have her picture taken by an annoyed clerk, who told her, "If privacy is a concern for you, then next time buy your ticket in another town." Yeah. Will do, chief.

It's our first-ever brand-new bed.

After my second sleep on this bed, I can categorically report that this is the best purchase that we've ever made for us as a couple. And the leftover cash paid for the last of our superwasher.

The lesson here? Well, I don't know if there is one, other than that a new bed brings good sleep, and good sleep makes Matt a happy man.

"A jar of whiskey for my drunken friend!"

The Fed is bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Removing market forces and corrections helps us... how, exactly? In the long run?