We came up to our country palace last night. Early this morning we enjoyed a heavy thunderstorm. We lost our main grid power. Our backup generator didn’t come on. I don’t know why. It has always worked.
Hence no power, no phone company DSL.
My Internet is now Verizon MiFi (see right hand column) on battery. Its battery will die shortly. Ditto for my laptop. Hence the only solution is to crawl back into bed with a good book — I’m reading Neil Barofsky’s “Bailout.” It’s the devastating story of the way the Treasury administered TARP to the favor of the largest financial institutions. Says Barofsky, “Treasury made almost no effort to hold them accountable, and the bounteous terms delivered by the government seemed to border on being corrupt.”
He continues, “For those institutions, no effort was spared, with government officials often defending their generosity by kneeling at the altar of ‘sanctity of contracts.’ Meanwhile, an entirely different set of rules applied for homeowners and businesses that were almost assuredly small enough to fail.”
I wrote the remaining material before the deluge.
In Oregon, truffles are no match for wet noses. You can now send your dog to a school in Oregon that will teach it to find truffles. Such a useful skill. Says the New York Times article:
Recent graduates of NW Truffle Dogs, a school in Oregon City, Ore., were fast becoming adroit hunters of Oregon truffles, native fungi that are among the Pacific Northwest’s most prized delicacies. The dogs and their owners are also pioneers of a sort, foragers at the forefront of a movement that seeks to improve the reputation of Oregon truffles, and their value in the market, by changing the way they are harvested.
For the full article, read here.
Watch out for emails from Yahoo addresses. There’s a deluge of them. They instruct you to visit strange, dangerous web sites. Delete these emails instantly — even if they purport to come from your closest relative, or nearest and dearest best friend.
If you have a Yahoo email address, close it down and open one on Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s new, excellent Outlook.com. Much safer.
Harry Newton who wonders about God. We certainly needed the water. It was real dry up here, 127 miles north of New York City. The local corn crops were dying. But, please God, we do need the electricity. I have to manually kick on the emergency generator? It would have been useful to learn this valuable skill and, for our wonderful contractor installer to have provided an instruction manuals. Yuch!
See you Monday when we have power and Internet again, maybe.
The mortgage REITs have bounced back. Miracles happen.
I'm sure on Monday Harry will tell us how terrified he is of Paul Ryan. But please Harry don't forget to write a couple of sentences pointing out just why you feel so comfortable with Big Joe. I smell a 1988 VP debate payback coming…….along with a Romney Rally in the market.
I wouldn't make that guess about what Harry is going to say about Paul Ryan.I listened to him today and was impressed with many of the things he said.
There is a good argument that backup generators at a vacation home should always be manual start. Do you want the GenSet to autostart and run out of fuel when you have an ice storm and no one is there? Do you really want it running for days with no one watching the oil level etc? Yes, without power the frig / freezer will melt and then re-freeze, but do you want to trade lotsa bucks in fuel and possibly a burned up generator for a hundred bucks of food that was probably out of date in the frig anyway? Just don't leave fish in the frig when you leave the vacation home. Never… I don't even have my primary residence on autostart. I want to know what's going on and be able to adjust the load (initially dump the AC). Autostart sounds a lot better than it really is. (Also, in my experience, GENERAC gensets have problems with starter batteries over charging when they are always in Autostart)
Look for another 60 percent down leg in real estate. Vacation homes fall fastest.
Wow. You really believe another 60% drop? Which part of real estate? single family homes, commercial office buildings, warehouses, apartment buildings?
Trust me Harry, worth a read:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/4710325…
You may even want to do a column on this story. My friend has been flipping homes priced under 100k ever since the bubble and he recently sold 26 homes to Colony Capital that was mentioned in this article. Big hedge funds are getting into the game of buying packages of these homes to rent out. Very interesting especially considering how Wall St. is finding ways on profiting from the mess they created.
Thank you for your honesty. You really do “go with the flow'. That's probably why you were successful in the IVR and magazine business. Readers are going to hack away at your day-to-day recommendations, because their egos can rely on you to provide them their daily fix of things to criticize, no doubt. But you exemplify the old adage “life is but a dream.”
Thanks for caring enough to put out the blog regularly. I read you for your perspective on life and business/political policy. I don't have the funds to be able to relate to your investment advice and such. But I have several blue chips and just reinvest the dividends, as a buy-and-hold investor. I took some good profits in 2003/2004 in order to make a down payment on a condo. I bought a lot of Corning/GLW back in the pre-2000 time frame when they were quite low. I also bought some dogs and rode them all the way down. But I have profited much more than lost. There don't seem to be too many bargains out there that I can relate to, which to me means the economy is doing well enough, as a whole. I have a BS degree, and the unemployment rate is under 5% for those with this or a higher degree. This may be a simple view. But it works for me.
I hope to leave my IVR programming job and become a contractor in that decaying specialty, while retraining on web skills on my own dime. I am already on a reduced work week, by choice. I dropped below 40 regular hours, but enough to my maintain benefits. I'm spending the extra day “investing in myself”, as I read here some years ago. I'm 47 and single, so I guess I have the freedom to do what many don't – grateful for that. I'm 1/4 of the way through a part-time Masters program (not a MBA).
Thanks for reading.
Excellent. I wish you the best of luck with your new direction. My sincere wish for you is that you learn software/web site programming and find a software / new business startup idea that perhaps some of your friends (and me) can invest a little in. Your own business is the way to go. You have my email address. Stay in touch.