Enronization

How, exactly, is it that Jon Corzine is not incarcerated at this moment? Wouldn't you consider him a flight risk? Apparently our Justice Department (or is it the Department of Justice?) doesn't assume that the ownership of a fleet of private jets and continued access to a half billion dollars of other peoples' money could be, in any way, shape or form, construed as risk-worthy.

A parallel: In our electric power industry we are [supposedly] bound by the North American Electric Reliability Councils (NERCs) reliability standards. One example: the loss of a single generator, transmission line, or transformer should not result in the overload of any remaining facility, in that we operate with sufficient capacity to absorb the loss of that one resource. Well, PacifiCorp did indeed have an issue in 2008 where a lockout relay failed to operate, resulting in 15 standards violations and the loss of a few hundred thousand customers. What I was floored by, in reading the report of this event, was how PacifiCorp was fined $4 million but did not have to admit to having failed to meet any of these reliability standards. They violated 15 standards, but do not admit having violated them! And NERCs position is that they didn't violate them, either! But $4 million was levied, $4 million was paid, and everyone's hands have been washed.

Corzine will be allowed to do the same thing, you watch. The SEC will levy a token fine in the coming years, say, fining his defunct company $50 million for having looted $800 million but also not having to admit to having done anything wrong or illegal...and most importantly, Corzine cannot be prosecuted for anything because he did not have to admit to having done anything.

Say there were a string of crimes committed here in Elk Grove. A murder at the Post Office, a kid caught for selling meth on a street corner and a robbery at the Safeway. I'm linked to all of them -- because I drove through that intersection where the kid sold the dope, was caught on the red light camera, as I was driving to the post office to ship a Christmas gift and to Safeway for a 6 pack. But instead of being charged, I meet privately with the county prosecutor and we cook up a deal -- I don't have to admit to having committed any crime, but I'm willing to spend the next 20 months under housal unit arrest with an ankle monitor.

What judge would sign off on that? Did I murder someone or was I just selling a dimebag on Franklin Blvd? Or was I innocent? But these are just the way these sorts of SEC fines are levied -- we don't get to know the true level of fraud committed, and clearly by accepting to pay a fine some presumption of guilt is assumed...but really, this is just the simple cost of doing business, having to work with such a regulatory agency. PacifiCorp did exactly that with NERC...and I argue that my utility SMUD should approach the levying of fines in exactly the same way -- treat them as any other cost of doin' business here in our grand nation where one-eye-open justice reigns on high.

Jon Corzine and MF Global -- if this one case doesn't provide you with all the ammunition you'd need to encourage you to take your money out of their criminal hands, well, continue to chase such hallucinated rates of return and prepare to lose the surplus wealth you think you "were entitled to" based on your "years of hard work." Here's a further example of how Enronized accounting is still a legal form of theft some fifteen years after Kenneth Lay (God Rest His Soul, May Peace Be With Him) started it. Indeed, ratings agencies gave sterling marks to MF Global right up until they declared bankruptcy.

If you can't see how this whole system is geared not to providing needed liquidity to producers and sellers but also to bilk you out of a percentage (yes, sometimes 100%) of your money, well, I'm glad you're there to lose it instead of me, to grease the skids of our wonderful free-market economy.

The Withered Leaves

Wa-hey! Elk Grove High School gets the honor of a visit by a Real American Hero -- NASCAR driver Robbie Gordon.

Really. Do you really think that some C- average high school senior is somehow going to suddenly spring up and realize he's been fuckering away his last 6 years in middle/school all due to some 35-minute paid-for-speech by a guy who makes consecutive left hand turns at a high rate of speed for a living? Really?

I wonder why Robbie Gordon was invited. Why not Kyle Busch? -- recently arrested for 128mph in a 45mph zone. Kyle would be a far superior motivational speaker at EGHS. Who wouldn't like to not be arrested and not have their license suspended after driving 3x+ the speed limit, huh? I'm pretty sure every damn senior at Elk Grove high, that's who.

I will read the first two minutes of speech notes as prepared by Kyle that would have been delivered, had he not been cockblocked by driver Robbie Gordon delivering his speech here in our small, humble village:

"Greetings, Elk Grove High! This is a day of national consecration. And I am certain that although I've had four vodka martini's just prior to taking this dais that I will address you with a candor and a decision which the present situation of my NASCAR career impels.

"This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from the honesty facing restrictions on our ability to speed today. The ability to drive recklessly will endure, as it has endured, and will revive and prosper.

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is not fear itself -- it's those godforsaken CHP pigs -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terrorists which paralyzes our need for speed. In every dark hour after beating the wife that we are not allowed to drive 3 times the speed limit simply to relax and calm down, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding -- we ought have the right.

"We face common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things such as a fast car that will shit-n-git with 20" rims and a pimpin' sound system that King George himself would find worthy. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

"But I ain't no fool, fool! I know how to drive fa-fa-fast! You shouldn't limit my right to drive 128 through your simple 45! My citation comes from no failure of substance. I'm stricken by no plague of locusts! Compared with the perils that our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, I have much to be thankful for. I didn't die like #3 -- plenty is at my doorstep!"

And so it goes here in NASCAR inspired Elk Grove. And so we will graduate several hundred drivers who will think Franklin Blvd. as their own private drag strip, as Robbie Gordon's message sinks in...

CCC-

I wonder how it is, that we at large somehow believed, even for a minute, that Herman Cain had any possibility of winning the Office of the Presidency...let alone the Republican nomination.

This slow-moving train wreck of a candidate is exactly why Obama will remain in office until 2016. Really. What would you think of a future President Cain, having to make a snap decision with the red button on the desk...when he can't even manage allegations of a consensual affair. A total waste of Republican energy, he was.

A complete, total sham. He had no real intention, along with no real financial support, to win the Republican nomination. An outsider like Cain cannot win the nomination, ever. Proof of this is former Louisiana governor Buddy Rohmer, running for the office who hasn't even been invited to debate, a candidate who's held office before, unlike Cain. There's no reason to wonder why he's an outlier, as he's campaigning against the monetary power structure that infects the current political process.

So you Republicans should focus your energies on 2016. Rubio. Christie. Who knows who else, but certainly not the dumbasses running in 2012.

What do you think this nation would have become, had Ross Perot not dropped out of the 1992 race because of some perceived "shame" to be brought upon his daughter's wedding by the Republican establishment. What a sham that was, too. Some sort of "disgraceful event" foisted upon the ceremony of an unknown daughter of an outside candidate is apparently sufficient to derail the candidacy of an up and comer for the office of President? What is this?

All of this is representative of the shallowness, the ineptitude, and the slow-failure of our once worthy American culture. I will argue (and have argued here on this blog) that we are past the point of no return. We are slovenly. We are lazy. We think of ourselves as entitled above all others. We treat the presidential election as an extension of any reality TV episode nowadays, where we mentally equate Brandi Glanville's most recent tit-job with the Republican field running for president.

I have been, am, and will likely continue to assign American culture a CCC- rating...if I don't rate it at junk-status in the near future. And...just as Standard and Poor's ratings...this is only a opinion...

PIIGS

A cunning array of protests going on both ten miles away in Davis, CA, and ten thousand miles away in Cairo, Egypt. People, seemingly, are pissed off at something.

I am one who is perpetually pissed off. But I lack the advantage of youth to drive me to join protests. If I were 20 years younger I might be responding to things differently than I do today. I ruminate on our energy intensive living arrangements, our cultural shallowness, and people who don't signal when changing lanes -- hardly things we'd gang together and decry in a public square.

Yet, for all my yammering and contempt for the American lifestyle, and for all my longing for a more European living arrangement such as walkable human-scaled communities, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (the PIIGS) are completely fucking broke. I am left wondering if bankruptcy is inevitable everywhere.

A hundred thousand are assembling in Cairo as I write this, facing down the unknowns of a fledgling, dictator-less government. A hundred thousand are assembling in Athens, too, facing down the unknowns of a lifetime of austerity brought about by financial industry malfeasance. A few hundred are assembling tents tonight in Davis, facing down 21% pepper spray more suitable as a bear repellent than human repellent, and facing 100% tuition increases just since 2007.

I happen to have little debt and depression-proof employment. I have little to protest about, and as such I'm able to comfortably blog about trivial matters such as the lack of a bicycle lane on 65th street. I'm not $92,000 in the hole with college loans. I don't owe more than my housal unit is worth. I'm not unemployed. I lack the perspective of many who are protesting, but they are all doing so because they, like I, believe that things ought to be better. But to what extent is all this our own doing? We've:

Complicity allowed corruption and avarice to take root in our political system.
Never once considered our own culpability in creating the hallucinated wealth bubble of 2000-2006.
Allowed government and public institutions to create unsustainable pension guarantees.
Grew our households over the last thirty years not through the accumulation of capital but the accumulation of debt.
Complicity engaged in discretionary wars to cloak our growing dependency on non-renewable energy.
Grew our debt in periods of growth and in periods of recession we grew our debt.
Allowed 135 separate federal programs for the needy to perpetuate dependency on them.
Cheerfully fuckered away our manufacturing base to save $0.35 on a box of Chinese matchsticks.
Allowed 20% of our GDP to be driven by financialization, where every florist became a real estate specialist and every housal unit owner a flipper.
Allowed ourselves to be classified as consumers, not as citizens.

Yet, for all this, Italians too are entering an unprecedented era of austerity while having not engaged in a fifth of the reckless behaviors we have. Perhaps parallels do exist, and likely they too have promised themselves lifestyles they could not maintain.

Escape From New York

I am, most certainly, a doomer. I personally cannot envision any reasonable scenario where the next generation of Americans has a better standard of living than us today...or any scenario where the current generation of Americans maintains their standard or even comes remotely close to the hallucinated standard we had back in 2005.

Oh! To return to those heady days seven years hence! A new Escalade in every other South Sacramentan rental unit! And in those without the Escalade, a new plasma HDTV. $21/hour manufacturing jobs at the Kramer Carton Factory with benefits.

This nation has experienced stagnant wage growth for the last thirty years, save for many in the top 1% who have effectively stolen their 250% increases through political machinations. That we've had thirty years of stagnant wage growth is a good thing -- a good thing, because it will condition us for the next thirty years of continuing stagnant wage growth. We'll be used to it, and experience clearly is desirable in such things...it ought to count for something.

I carry no doubt that the working classes of the future will find themselves in a more precarious position than their parents. A father who spent his life working at a canned soup plant in the 1970s earning $21 in today's dollars will find his son working at a suburban Christian bookstore in a strip mall in the early 20s earning $12. The manufacturing of canned soup will have long since been transferred to Uruguay, where cake frosting is already being manufactured (yes, the tub in my fridge is from central South America). The only jobs available in 2022 (for those unwilling to carry $245,045 in college debt) will be strip mall retail workers, which, based on Elk Grove planning models, will be the growth industry over the next fifteen decades. Asian foot massage therapists and Christian book sellers and pool chlorine salesmen and 12-G network compatible iPhone peddlers and spring water kiosk tenders and mother's day card salesladies and seasonal Roni Deutch tax preparers -- all fantastic non-benefital $12/hour at-will non-union jobs.

I worked hard as a landscaper in 1991 following my escape from West Point. I landed a good, hard job and I was willing to work. I lasted five months, at which point I landed an engineering assistant position. Twenty one years ago we hadn't yet had the influx of Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants who today dominate that industry -- no, us white boys did that work. Today, if a white boy is found mowing a lawn in Elk Grove, some part of his upbringing must have broken down. Maybe his parents aren't sufficiently "successful" to afford to hire out that work to "the help." White Americans have become accustomed to "no more dirty work." Fuck filleting Alabama catfish for $11 an hour -- it's hard, it's icky, and that one can receive nearly perpetual entitlements for not working really means that the real wage is only about half of that advertised. The redeeming of Alabama food stamps means that one can buy nearly all the catfish one wants...without spending 10 hours a day/5 days a week in a cold, damp kill room.

I remember well several of the other white guys who worked in that landscaping outfit. One quit after three weeks to find success as a traveling Arkansas carnie. Another would work well only under constant supervision. A third was quite the loafer but quite the stand-up comedian, too -- he cracked Richard Gere/gerbil jokes all the way up until Friday afternoon when he'd suddenly jettison the comedy routine and bitch and complain about his shitty paycheck.

I did my job, got stronger, took the job seriously, and moved on quite soon to be sure. Glad I did, too. That job would have sucked the life out of me. I can't imagine today, can't even imagine, working a single 8-hour shift cutting asparagus or eggplants, let alone two consecutive shifts, let alone a week, or let alone a year. As a white, privileged, middle class male I'd refuse to take that job. Fuck that -- unemployment benefits would have to run out first, which would last me 99 weeks, or well into 2013. Then I'd tap all the social services my cousin in South Sacramento and his neighbors take advantage of, such as a one time month's free PG&E or SMUD bill pay each calendar year, or emergency room visits for common issues like staph infections or testicular swelling. And once all that runs out, sometime in 2016, I'll have learned how to correctly grow hydroponic marijuana and sell two pounds each month to buyers in the Bible Belt whose state's legislatures are holier than thou. Then, by 2020, I'll bank on my diabetes! You think for one fucking minute I couldn't apply for and be awarded lifetime social security disability benefits for my "chronic and acute suffering from this debilitating disease?" What, you don't think I couldn't use my last thirty years with this disease to all but guarantee perpetual payments for my 40 consecutive quarters of work? I'd be considered "totally" disabled by my hand-picked doctor, who will be forced to provide services for my "neuropathy," my "partial blindness," and my "inability to sleep."

There's no way you'll ever find this white guy filleting fish for $11 an hour.

No way.

Too Little Exponentiality

When the national debt first reached one million million ($1,000,000,000,000), there were no bloggers. The web was still a few decades away. Today it reached fifteen million million. And oh! To hear the conservative punditry! It's all Obama, who raised it four million million just over his term. And! We'ven't even yet hit the coming health care bill in full stride.

I argue here that the national debt is meaningless. $3 trillion meant nothing nothing! to my generation; we easily survived those "unpayable debts foisted upon our children" by our parents in the 1970s. My parents easily survived those "unpayable debts foisted upon our children" by their parents in the 1950s.

And so it will be with our children. $16 trillion is a meaningless number. I'd bet that less than 3% of our youth under 18 can even quantify the debt within +/- $5 trillion. A student in 1987, there was no way I knew what the national debt was; it was as meaningless then as it is today.

We constantly hear we need to grow, too. That if interest on our debt was, say, 3%, we'd better grow our economy by at least 3% just to keep up with the Kardashians. Growth is necessary we're told. But really -- why do we think we need to grow more? Aren't there already sufficient housal units for everyone? Water? Food? Why does my Elk Grove feel that we have to grow more? To the Cosumnes River and beyond? Following three decades of heedless suburban sprawl, can't we survive on what we've already built? My real question is -- at what point will we decide that we've grown enough?

Even 0.2% growth is exponential...yet apparently in our "advanced" Western economy even 2% isn't even close to breaking even with our perpetualized debt based economy. Look at the forecasts for 2012: here's one at 1.4%. Here's another at 3.3%. But really, think about four hundred years from now -- do you really think the next 25 generations can and should expect 3-4% growth? What would this fucking planet look like? Apparently, 0.2% perpetual growth ad infinitium is considered too little exponentiality.

But, grow we will try. We must try, for a reversion would fuck up the entire gambit we're currently playing. Lowe's has to build more tilt-up concrete warehouses filled with Chinese shit for American consumers -- to not do so would squander everything already created. Their shareholders require a rate of return above and beyond inflation. To not grow impacts everything already grown.

To rub salt into the collective wound of the 16% of you who hold no job, I'm up for a 2.3% wage increase in 2012 (after factoring in health care/unemployment insurance/dental/eye/life insurance rate increases)...which according to everything I understand, isn't anywhere close to nearly enough to cover the incremental cost of electricity, water, gasoline, sewer, federal and state taxation, cable, college tuition, garbage and property tax increases. In effect, I'm losing ground with a paltry fucking 2.3% raise. That the majority of the rest of this grand nation isn't even coming close to a 2.3% increase means absolutely nothing to me -- I don't pay their bills. I could care less about them. But me? I'm going to be suffering soon! I'll have to substitute my weekly 2# of sopressata salami with a generic genovese variety? Oh, the humanity!

Make Hole

I'll offer all sorts of excuses for my lack of activity here, from housal unit maintenance to garden tending to lack of "air-time" due to house guests, but the bottom line is I've really had a block of sorts...writing about the things that used to piss me off. Nothing has changed, really. I'm just finding it more difficult to develop an opinion. Many things continue to piss me off.

My own retirement, or at least a part of it, is tied into a long-held fantasy belief system that says that my contributions and my employers contributions should have 8% returns every year, ad infinitum. If CALPERS, prolly the largest retirement pension system in the world, can't get an 8% return on its own then the State of California covers the gap. Without knowing, I presume that when CALPERS was investing in hot-shit mortgage backed securities in 2006 and earning 15%, they didn't have to reimburse the state for earlier years' less-than-8-% returns. No, 8% guaranteed, and if it did better, well, good for them.

I question the wisdom of people who set up this fucking thing while GDP growth in the US has never, not even once, approached 8%. That CALPERS could invest in things that forever gained 8% while the broader economy at large plodded along at 3-4% (in good years) and that they thought it could be continued forever is unbelievable to me.

How can CALPERS gain on bonds when interest rates have fallen as far as they're gonna fall and can't fall any further? They can't...so my retirement gets sloshed into the stock market, the last and only hope for an 8% return in a 0.2% economy...which of course fuels all those fantastic two hundred million dollar Wall Street salaries.

I'm the 1%. At least, by working as a lowly electrical engineer for a quasi-public utility in California I'm actively taking your taxpaying dollar and funneling it directly to Morgan Stanleys' executors of multi-billion dollar CALPERS investments, earning a slice for each and every transaction along the way. Wait...does MS even still exist these days? I can't be for sure.

Morgan Stanley for decades, decades!, provided a reasonable service alongside the rest of our financial sector -- they used to provide capital allocation, or something that serviced the production of goods, to marry producers with consumers. But geez, the last thirty years has seen this service morph into a leech, skimming a larger and larger share off the economy at large -- through securitization, through high frequency trading, and credit default swaps entirely on margin.

I hear these dumbass right-wing commentators wondering aloud why the occupy movement isn't outside Mark Zuckerburg's office/housal unit, protesting his 1%. Perhaps because he, alongside the 1% from thirty years ago, is/were involved in the production of shit that people want, not involved in vacuuming up the "endless supply of loose nickels" to be had from everyone with a bank account for no net societal gain. Right wing commentators are most decidely in that 1%, and of course want every piece of the pie they themselves have acquired to which they are so entitled.

And I. I get to leech off you, too, Miss Taxpayer, by forcing you to "make hole" the CALPERS portfolio's earnings to 8% in an economy barely able to return 0.2%. Not make whole, make hole, because that's where your taxes are going, down the hole, right into my future condo with the fabulous yacht moored outside.

6 pc

This post is the last of my "6-6-6" series. 6% was the percentage of employees at my employer who own their homes with no mortgage.

I read yesterday that the entire city of Orlando, Florida -- the entire city -- is underwater. That is, the total outstanding balance of mortgages is greater than the total housal unit value for the entire city. I believe that the city of Las Vegas falls into this category, too.

That's impressive! And, it's exactly what keeps Wall Streeters earning twenty two million dollar bonuses, too. Without all those Orlandans fuckering away their next nine years of collective gross annual product on mortgages that will take that long just to break even, bankers would have to find other ways to garner such profits.

But no. Individually, we love to carry staggering amounts of debt so that we have a nice 3,200 sq ft starter mansion each with his-n-hers BMWs in the driveway and new iPads charging in the docking stations. Locally, our cities and counties are borrowing twenty cents for every dollar they spend, while our states are borrowing nine cents for every dollar they spend and the federal government is borrowing thirty cents on every buck. Government is simply mirroring what we do ourselves.

The housal unit, the pair of BMWs and the iPads all do nothing to add to the value of the Orlando family in this hypothetical example (hypothetical, but real; there must be over 450,000 of them!) -- or more correctly, they are all unproductive assets. They are not employed in any productive fashion, to earn the family income. They do not yield current income, nor will they yield future income -- they are trapped, dead assets. Yet the two wage earners owe $228,356 on the mortgage, $25,790 on the two Beemers and $2,430 on the credit card used to pay for the iPads. That is -- they are working today to service their debts...not their assets. They can most perfectly be described as debt-slaves.

None of the things, not a single fucking one of them, that people in Orlando buy are productive assets. None of them. A BMW is not productive, not in the least...not even when you consider it carries you to work. That $235 iPad with another $97 in accessories is only ever used as a toy, to socialize, to view YouTube videos, to play Angry Birds. And least of all is that housal unit, it is not productive in the least. Indeed, you will lose 6% to a realtor of it if you wanted to liquidate it.

I regard the purchase of tools, even if bought on credit, as an example of a fine way to increase one's productive capital. A hoe can be used to provide vegetables, or a hand plane can build furniture for your own or others' use, or a 15-mm socket can be used to save you $35 on an oil-change. But most Orlandan housal units owners wouldn't even know how to spell hoe, let alone know how to use one. Check that -- hoes as bitches, well, they probably know all about them hoes.

Socking away monies in the 401(k) like we're all taught to do is also a form of sunk, stranded, trapped capital -- we have no access to it to produce anything today, and certainly not to pay off any of those soul-crushing debts Orlando housal unit owners owe.

Orlando citizens consumers will be spending the next decade paying on underwater mortgages to bankers in Manhattan, just to break even on their "assets" and their debts. If this isn't the definition of debt-serfdom, I don't know what would be.

6 Months

I'd bet that if I were to apply for a credit card today I might well be denied. I am slowly losing my valuable "credit history."

Losing it, because I no longer make regular payments to anything. I've been mortgage free for six months, have no car payments, and don't carry a balance on credit cards. Six months is perhaps the time frame one might need, as a young college student for example, to establish one's credit. It's also, perhaps, the time frame one might need to lose it altogether, too.

Can you imagine? I spend fifteen years squirrelling away every spare nickel to get out of debt only to find that it will cost me more to acquire new debt because I no longer have a "payment history." A new car that might carry a 4.85% APR might cost me 7.35% because I have such "shitty" credit.

I don't believe for a second that this scenario couldn't happen; no, not in today's credit-score driven society. Thirty years ago this wouldn't have been an issue -- I'd offer to a local banker that I own a housal unit and he'd identify me as an acceptable risk and I'd get a loan. Today, the decision to deny me would be made within six milliseconds (6 mS) inside some Cisco server inside a football field sized server farm in Youngstown, Ohio owned by a too-big-to-fail East Coast based bank who, when they fuck up the lending standards as they will again do, would simply lobby upon Washington to force taxpayers to subsidize the losses.

The cost of assessing risk to a lender has dropped, what with a simple "credit score!" nowadays, a score that you have no goddamn way of calculating for yourself. It's a score...like it's some fucking game, and indeed it is! to those in the financial services industry. No longer does a local banker worry about your risk when he can just shuffle off the mortgage to Fannie Mae. Nothing about the securitization food chain that imploded our economy three years ago has changed -- lending standards are supposedly tightened, yes, but the bank still doesn't care about your willingness and ability to pay that back over the next 30 years -- they'll hold it for no more than 30 mS before it's tranched and sold into another mortgage backed security. These things have not gone away -- no, not even.

I should not want to participate in such a system where I'll be penalized for carrying no debt while trying to gain access to some. Yet such hypocrisy is what built the existing financial services sector into the "industry" it is today.

6 mS

Been fascinated by conservative pundits who assert that the OWS movement can't possibly not be motivated by some behind-the-scenes interest group. Something like a George Soros, or maybe ACORN, or any name-your-left-wing-propaganda group and insert here.

It's easy to assert, because it's hard to understand how a group of disparate, unorganized, non-violent citizens can act like citizens instead of consumers...where true citizens participate in protests, in voicing grievances, in participating in democratic action.

I don't really like to believe that the OWSers aren't really targeting correctly. It's convenient to protest against the top 1%, yes, but I don't know that it will be particularly eventful, even though it is meaningful. Unless and until this group can express themselves through political action, I don't see how or why the software engineers on the thirteenth floor of the building next to the New York Stock Exchange would willingly halt production on that new high frequency trading algorithm that's designed to fuck the upper forty floors out of a few mils each day, and a few hundred mils from other local entities each day, and a few hundred thousand mils each day from every productive citizen who "plays" the stock market.

You see, the closer high frequency traders are to the NYSE, I mean, the physically closer they are, the faster they can access those few mils before someone else. The thirteenth floor is advantageous to servers on the sixteenth floor. Consider a new $300,000,000 trans-Atlantic cable currently being laid to connect NY with London which will shorten digital transmissions by 6 miliseconds. 0.006 seconds...but hey, this means all the difference to the new breed of high frequency trader. Every 1 mS delay represents a $100,000,000 lost opportunity to a large international hedge fund.

It's a difficult thing to pull out of the stock market altogether, as an individual schmuck investor who thinks that if you just stay in for the long haul (as every investment advisor recommends) that you'll come out ahead, even in the face of such fantastically stacked and rigged odds against you. The financial services industry long ago traded in their function as a service to production and instead opted for short-term parasitic gains against that productive base for fantastic, immediate profits. I witnessed this first hand, while watching California electric ratepayers get fucked over every hour for three straight years by the Enronization of electric markets, companies filled with people who could care less about the long term (or medium term) stake in their organizations and instead self-imploded under their own hubris and greed.

The OWSers -- they can collectively do one thing, and perhaps most have already -- they all should strive to owe Wall Street nothing. It's fantastically easy for me to now say this as I hold virtually no debt, but really, Wall Street would cease to exist if people followed my example and paid off their mortgages instead of fuckering away all their discretionary income on new Acuras ever three years, or new 4S phones everytime Apple says it's time for an upgrade.

We may all well be forced to have health care at some future point...but as far as I can see, there is no law on the books that forces each of us to carry a credit card, and to carry a perpetual $5,975 balance either. There is no law requiring us to maintain a mortgage, or to go into $68,000 in debt to get an education. Without debt, Wall Street would cease to be revelant. Instead, we choose to, I dare say we choose to, and as a consequence the interest rate we pay on a mortgage is 0.03% higher than it would have been otherwise if Goldman Sachs hadn't intervened in some way to broker CDOs that digitally moved your mortage to a suite of foreign investors, and 0.02% higher than it would have been otherwise if AIG hadn't insured it against default, and 0.001% there, and 0.001% there, and...

Being debt free, and thus a free citizen, means that I don't have to occupy Wall Street.

Occupy!

I'm glad to see that there are scads of peeps marching on Wall Street in these three-week old occupy rallies. Glad to see it.

Take note that the tea party, which immediately chooses to distance itself from the occupy movement, was founded because of profound public resistance to the passing of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008 (among other things). Tea partiers recognized that taxpayers were going to foot the immense losses incurred by the financial industry.

But the right wing has the objectives of the occupy movement all wrong, in my opinion. They ask the ridiculous question to the protesters: "what do you want to replace capitalism with?" to which occupiers "respond with a deer in the headlights silence." They have no answer, conservative pundits suggest.

Wrong. It's an expression of the deep disconnect between government and the people, how influence by moneyed interests have enriched those at the very top. From Bruce Maiman this week:

In 1999, then-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm was chairing committee meetings on a bill to further deregulate investment and hedge fund banking. The bill contained language he didn't like and he couldn't get committee members to agree with him. Furious, he left the meeting, walked over to lobbyists waiting in the hall (a common practice in Congress), demanding they get Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill to tell Bill Clinton to call these committee members to get on board or "I'll kill the bill. You have one hour."

Sure enough, the calls were made, all was glossed over to the satisfaction of Gramm, the bill went forward and ultimately, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall and opened a door that allowed rigging of home loans through derivatives and CDOs by investment banking institutions, was passed.

Tell me that any of us can wall into the halls of congress to so much as voice our opinions with such influence others have.

It's not about destroying capitalism, it's about making it accessible to the majority.

In my opinion they are only protesting the symptom -- bankers -- while the real change must come from Washington eventually, such as forcing mark-to-market accounting standards. I'd bet that a large swath of European bonds are now only worth 40% of their face value but the face value stands and we continue to prop up banks that argue their assets are still at 100%. I'd protest that we don't give one more nickel to banks and let them fall on their own, which is something they might be doing soon, provided something like a Greek default occurs.

Banks have destroyed the living arrangements for Icelanders, Grecians, 2.3 million Chinese laborers and about 16% of the US working population. I'd argue that most of the "growth" of the last decade was hallucinated, yes, but if we never had a bubble we would never have had such a meltdown.

There are protests daily in Lisbon, in Madrid, in Athens, in New York -- all with the theme that the bailing out of financial institutions by politicians represents an utterly destructive system perpetuated. It harms many and benefits few.

They don't have a clear, organized message? This sign says it all:

$70,000 college debt
$12, 000 medical debt
I'm 22. Where's my bailout?

Just a loafer? Someone who doesn't want to work and wants to be supported by the system ad infinitium? Hardly. I'd march if I were there and I'm quite a producer. Most want to, too -- and I argue that the financial services industry essential produces nothing -- its role is to service those who do. As we will have fewer and fewer non-college jobs going forward as we fucker away our manufacturing base while the cost of college is rising at double digit rates, the only way to earn enough will be to service, to effectively take a larger and larger percentage from those who might still continue to produce.

Starter Vineyards

My company used to host an internal chat room. The topics were moderated but any employee could post on them. As is typical of the web at large, my SMUD utility also has its share of ingrate idiots, those few individuals who cannot or will not keep their homophobic, racist, sexist, slurish comments to themselves, and consequently the forum was permanently shut down a few years back.

It was fantastic! We used to host topics regarding energy efficiency, the coming smart grid, SMUD retirement issues, etc., and man, they were a source of excellent discussion. But alas, this couldn't last, as a few fuck-offs decided that calling Obama a nigger was more important than lively discussion, particularly when the discussion revolved around energy subsidies, or other such "leftist" policies that my company embraces.

I find it fascinating how talk radio uses the term "N-word head" when talking about a rock painted "niggerhead" on some Texan ranch somewhere that some people allegedly saw back in 1996. As if there's some moratorium on using the word nigger on the radio when every black rap artist uses it as every other word in a sentence. But there are apparently limits...and the moderator having to pull posts by public service employees using nigger on an internal forum is obviously over that limit -- because of the context in which it was used.

I, however, am not over any line here on this blog. My use of the word is apt, descriptive, and relevant to my argument -- it doesn't take long for any web forum, of any sort, to fall into a "nigga-this" and a "fuck-you-that" back and forth that destroys the value of what could be such wonderful forums for good information.

It's no different to fucker away such a resource than it is to have set it afire and destroyed it by arson, or to have smashed in the windows of a web-kiosk with a brick. It's equivalent...and it's too bad we can't find good discussion on non-moderated forums...anywhere...on anything. I can't go to a Ford truck restoration forum without some poster arguing that Fords suck and Dodges are superior. I can't go to a thrash-metal forum without scads of posts between two dolts bickering and leading to personal insults.

I should not be surprised. Indeed, it only validates my own long-held position that Americans are, by-and-large, culturally bankrupt. The web only reinforces such idiotic behavior that would occur in some other capacity elsewhere if it didn't exist there.

These days, my company's webmaster posts a weekly "poll," where employee's can vote on some random poll topic such as "what does the end of the NFL football lockout mean to you," or "how many employees will SMUD have in 10 years' time: much more, slightly more, the same, less, or substantially less than today." It's been reduced to a worthless, useless, meaningless statistic that cannot generate any discussion because there's no forum in which to discuss it. This is nothing different than our culture at large, whole segments of our "consumers" enraptured by "voting off" contestants on some reality TV-show that has no hint of "reality" about it and no form of discussion as to why actions played out the way they did.

Yet! Last week's poll question was unexpected (at least by your Monologueonian): "Is your mortgage underwater?" with the following limited, canned options for response along with the final percentages"

Yes. (34%)
No, I owe less than what it's worth. (33%)
No, I own my house outright. (6%)
No, I rent. (15%)
Other. (12%)

The percentages didn't appreciably change over the course of the weekly poll, which is indicative that the poll is accurate, indicative that there weren't outliers that drastically changed the results, while over a quarter of my utility's employees responded. The same percentages on this poll are in rough agreement with my own little work group. That is -- a third of my fellow workers owe more on their mortgage than what their housal unit is worth...if you extrapolate these 25% responses to the company at large. This is an amazing statistic.

SMUD employees likely average $85,000 per year (the best data Ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif could find), which is almost 70% more than the median salary in SMUDs service territory ($47,107) -- yet, a third of us are underwater. I will yet again argue that the more money one makes, the more one is likely to be up to their eyeballs in debt.

All that money made, yet all that money flowing directly to Wall Street bankers, those who hold the paper on some collateralized debt obligation of which some single, insignificant mortgage holder in Sacramento county keeps on paying to help keep it rated "AAA," the same rating as government issued Treasury's. One third (about 700 employees) who are staring down another one or two decades of payments just to break even.

A third. That's the same percentage of people as males who have erectile dysfunction. However, I wasn't surprised by this statistic. I look in our parking lot and see dozens and dozens of $40,000 rigs -- I know that many live in the beautiful gated communities of Serrano, or the majestic highlands of Folsom, or on 25-acre "starter vineyards" out towards Rancho Murieta. On an $85,000 salary? Come on, such lifestyles have been fueled by growing debt burdens over the last thirty years -- upper middle class wage earners are no different than those in the upper poverty class. The more people make, the more debt they carry, and I'd bet that the percentages are roughly the same between classes.

I do not consider myself "lucky" to fall in that 6% "loan is paid off" tranche. Luck had nothing to do with it. I neither inherited a housal unit nor an inheritance. I paid my down payment with US savings bonds I accumulated earlier, and I made massive personal sacrifices for 15 years to put every dime I had left over into principal. You cannot do this if you're buying new his and her Acuras every five years.

The past twenty weekends were spent on ladders replacing fascia and painting the trim. Today I'll be outside in about an hour finalizing the paint on the garage doors. I replaced my car's brake pads last Saturday. I smash my own aluminum cans. I mow my own lawn. These things in the aggregate are what allowed me to have the discretionary income to blow on my mortgage, not to blow on hookers and blow.

I hold no magic key here. Frugality and thriftiness are the sounds of my perseverance. I also know that I could lose it all in an instant, too; there are many unknowns that are coming, as there was and always will be.

The Bank For Americans

As if Bank of America charging another $5 per month to cover the "loss" of not being able to charge retailers $0.45 for a $1.25 debit card transaction is somehow "news."

It's not.

News is an interesting word, developed from the four cardinal points North, East, West, and South (NEWS). This ain't news. B of A indeed does encompass the entire U.S., from Seattle to Miami to San Diego to Portland.

B of A has no choice but to keep revenues flowing in...to keep their ivory towers in lower Manhattan (and elsewhere) filled with $425,000 vice presidents, et al. A vice president of operations. A nice fucking title, eh? Worthy of more than a half mil per year ad infinitum, making sure the flow of money from you to them keeps "operating." Year after year.

As our manufacturing base will continue to erode due to the lifting of the bamboo curtain that used to shield all us 467,600,350 North American/European workers from the 1,460,300,600 strong labor pool in China/Indonesia/Vietnam/Pakistan, we have no choice but to align out economy on services -- and particularly financial services. Talk about grift. Think of how profitable it is to vacuum up just a nickel each month from each of these 1,460,300,600 workers, along with the other 467,600,350 OECD workers, to provide them access to their own money. This is the base for why Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, etc. exist in the first place -- to suck off a share of the world's productive output as a form of "service."

And $5 per month. Of course, as long term (beyond 45 days) thinking is absent in our nation, we never think that this is $60 per year, just for the right to access your money, alongside the $110+ you'll lose due to their myriad ways to fuck you over with excess charges, etc., like processing large debits first and not in the order they were charged, to drain your account faster so you'll overdraft on multiple items instead of just one.

As a debit card user, do you not think I should have the option to have my charges processed in the same fucking order that I charged them? Wells Fargo has been, unsurprisingly, deluging me with requests to "modify" my debit account so that I no longer simply get "denied" at the local King Soopers for a half pound of salami and instead I'm allowed to overdraft, take my purchases, and pay $35 in overdraft fees for $3.75 worth of meat.

But think. If 7 years ago I were to have used...gasp!...food stamps at the grocery, the shame and humiliation from the other customers waiting behind me would have been unbearable while the clerk spends all that time pulling them from the coupon book, processing each one, etc. Unbearable...but [clearly] tolerable. Now, EBT cards prevent that public humiliation and shame -- they are innocuous, discrete; they make it look like I'm just any other patron paying with my own money. Imagine, then, a situation where...gasp!...your ETC/Debit card doesn't work. Oh, the public humiliation! The stares, the sighs, the foot-tapping of all all! those waiting in line behind you as you swipe that card for the ninth time through the scanner only to be denied again. One might, just might, be your neighbor! Horrors! The shame and humiliation would be so great that you'd gladly pay the $35 overdraft fee in secret just to avoid such shame. You'd only feel worse knowing it's your own money rather than funded from the government. Such shame!

Bank of America excels in this arena, knowing the psyche of the American debit card user, knowing that the avoidance of the shame of a debit denial is easily worth $35+ to most Americans. That's why they are the Bank for Americans and not just the Bank of America.

Early And Often

One fantastic benefit, at least to me anyway, to having designed and installed my rooftop PV array in 2007 was that I was able to buy solar panels built in Tennessee -- in the U.S. of A.

That I should have these things on my roof for the next 21 years means I should never have even considered Chinese manufactured panels...and indeed, the Chinese weren't major producers back then (like 2007 was last century or something).

Today, the Chinese have taken a significant share of the manufacturing away from the US, and for all you who only think price the sole fucking arbiter of value that should be welcomed news to you. Now you can enjoy solar for a third less than I paid (although the net price is the same, see below), even though you will blow that third on increased stealth taxation providing for jobless benefits and retraining programs to former solar panel manufacturers here in Tennessee and elsewhere...say, Freemont, Ca.

Now Solyndra -- I'm paying, along with you (if you live in California), unemployment benefits for 1,100 former workers for a single company that [presumably] couldn't compete against a flood tide of cheap Chinese panels from such stellar, reputable companies as:

Shanghai Woneng Solar Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd.
Suzhou Shenglong PV Tech Co., Ltd.
Jinhua Dokio Technology Co., Ltd.
JM Solar Technology Co., Ltd. of Hangzhou
Nanjing Baoao S & T Co., Ltd.
Xuzhou Oumeide Energy Saving Technology Co., Ltd.
Shandong Astun Solar Electric Technology Co., Ltd.
Wenzhou Dingwen New Energy S & T Co., Ltd.
Zhongshan City Zhengxin Lamp Decorating Co., Ltd.
and the list goes on and on and on and on and on.

Someday soon the cylindrical panels that Solyndra developed and designed will also find their manufacturing performed in Hangzhou, too, as this concept is probably too good to die alongside our $535,000,000 taxpayer loss on our ongoing losing effort to shore up American manufacturing against $3.50 an hour Chinese labor and 9% annual domestic health care premium increases.

I wonder when our government and its constituents will, once and for all, cave in and accept that our 11% manufacturing sector is destined to become 10% by 2014, 9% by 2016, 8% by 2019, to bottom out at some floor (I'd wager) at about 3-4% -- will stop blowing money on propping up manufacturing, and accept that the U.S. position in the global economy is to consume stuff, not to produce it.

And while we're at it, pin the fact that our consumers only give a fuck about price rather than quality and craftsmanship, and that we cannot compete globally because of this on gasp! Obama. An impeachable act of treason! Fine. Future solar will only be more expensive as this single event (representing one half of one percent of the DOE renewable-energy budget) threatens to kill off all government incentives championed by the Obama administration to build a renewable energy industry in the U.S.

Well, we were never going to get such an industry, my friend. You won't have the luxury of a $26/hour PV manufacturing job and instead will smile as you take in the dry cleaning for other dry cleaners on their days off for $13 an hour. No need to wonder why wages have remained flat for the past decade and will remain flat for the next -- Chinese laborers will likely see a 30-40% increase in that same time frame and they'll be even more grateful that you continue to fucker away domestic manufacturing to save a few more bucks on a plastic salad shooter.

Of course, as PV prices drop due to the continued torrent of Chinese imported shit, the federal and local subsidies will dry up, too, which is exactly how subsidies are designed to work. The net cost of solar is still where it was in 2007, yet I'd argue that with a few hundred thousand rooftops enhanced by Chinese panels the actual cost will be much higher in the long run -- decreased production, piss-poor mounting systems, cracking/shorting MC connections, panel/frame/lamination separations -- you know, the things cheap imported shit always does after a few months/years -- it fails early and often.

Solyndra will fall off the Republican radars in a month or so, some other Obama "scandal" will take center stage, and 1,100 more manufacturing jobs will have found their way over to Hangzhou by that time.

Swords and Tequila

I wonder when Greece will default.

When they do, they will submerge many French banks into a black hole, which will also submerge many U.S. banks into the same black hole particularly if the contagion spreads to other European nations. Unless, of course, German electrical engineers are willing to pay more taxes to bail out Greece which seems likely in the short term regardless. Along with the rest of Germanic output bailing out these failed institutions we'll see Grecian citizens pay through the nose with more property taxes, etc., in both the short and long term.

The wonderful life we all had between 2001 and 2006! When will we return to such prosperity and wealth?

It's all crystal clear to me how much influence the financial industry in every corner of the globe has over the political system, how much they can influence governments to force their losses onto citizenry. Austerity measures are heaped upon the working class in Athens, while 0.2% annual interest is unloaded on those of us Americans who save while still paying 14+% for credit. It is indeed a form of theft, but we handily accept this because we ourselves have never had any problem thieving from the future -- the many banks that hold stupendous amounts of Italian/Spanish/Grecian debt will simply recapitalize via 2 billion euro worth of "leverage" and we get to continue our charade for a few months/years longer, while these debts will still have to be paid by future production if they don't blow up the financial system before that.

It'd be a good thing for you yourself to limit your exposure to debt, IMO. I've worked for 25 straight years to do just that. I last Friday paid off another small debt, leaving me with just two other minor debts until I'm 100% free. Carrying no debt in a deflationary environment is king, as it is my expectation that deflation is the likely pressure we will face over the coming term.

And what of your equities when Greece defaults, huh? Do you think the markets will respond favorably when this happens, if it tilts us towards a double dip recession, if Morgan Stanley stock falls 22% in response to their exposure to French banks holding defaulted Greek bonds? As difficult as it may be at first, it's liberating to not ride the shock waves of the stock market when such events loom on the horizon. Sure, it's possible Athenians will be happy to pay another 1,300 euro in annual VAT and property taxes while engineers in Dusseldorf will equally be happy to pay another 1,450 euro to keep the system from falling apart.

Saving money is, in my mind, a double edged sword -- the more you save, the more likely you'll be legislated out of any future entitlements you've paid into during your working life. I think you'd be better off buying tequila to carry you through the fight.

The Lost Decade

I am truly fascinated by the San Diego power outage of last week -- fascinated, because it is my little belief that the root cause will not be addressed, will never be addressed, because to do so would ignite a political shitstorm that cannot be allowed to occur.

I am led to speculate here, as is everyone not involved in the outage, because the details of such an outage can never be released in today's electric environment. Too many lawyers and litigators are involved these days to allow for the release of detailed information that might help prevent another blackout. Data is now no longer made available for public engineering consumption (it's sensitive and confidential these days), so we will have to take the forthcoming watered-down FERC and NERC reports as our only source of information on such events -- reports that are not technically but politically developed. To prevent embarrassment to certain individuals or parties or organizations. To be careful about assigning blame. That sorta thing.

I can speculate, can't I? Here on a blog? I have no more information than anyone else, or so I think. One man's opinion. I can find scads of detailed data on the 1964 Northwest blackout, but I'd bet I will never be able to find one fucking thing about last week's outage, the largest in California history.

I believe that a single contingency occurred, perhaps the loss of the North Gila - Imperial Valley 500kV transmission line, that ultimately caused voltage collapse. I believe that the Southern California Import Nomogram (SCIT) either 1) wasn't followed, or 2) engineering analysis did not correctly evaluate this single contingency as capable of resulting in a voltage collapse under the operating conditions of last Thursday. It is my belief that if either were the case, they will not be made public. Imagine the bad press the ISO would receive if it was revealed that they failed to operate within established limits, or that they failed to correctly establish said limits! Post engineering analysis will be developed that will support pre-determined conclusions about the cause of this event. Oh, yeah, your ratepaying dollars at work!

We operate the electric system, universally I might add, such that all single contingencies and credible double contingencies do not result in voltage collapse, in instability, or result in widespread, uncontrolled outages. This is the work of transmission planning engineers and operations engineers. They develop the limits of operations, etc., such that we can withstand the loss of a single element anywhere, where the result does not cause uncontrolled outages. That is, if studies show that the loss of a single generator, or station, or transformer results in system instability during a hot summer day, we adjust the transmission/generation network at that point to not operate in such a condition.

Today, there are more transmission planning engineers and operations engineers than ever before, thanks to the duplicative nature of the California ISO which employs dozens and dozens and whose member utilities also have to employ dozens and dozens.

I believe that a single contingency caused the additional events, including the loss of San Onofre nuclear generation units. I do not believe that they occurred simultaneously -- that is, I do not believe that this was a multiple contingency condition that caused voltage collapse. It matters not how or why the original transmission line was lost (which according to news reports was some single guy in a substation who inadvertently tripped the 500kV line), only that the system should have been operated in such a manner as to be able to withstand its loss...which in my little opinion, it didn't.

And here comes my lynchpin opinion -- in much the same way credit default swaps and complex financial engineering led to more instability in Wall Street, the introduction of the CAISO and ever more complicated market schemes and mechanisms (including the smart grid) will only lead to more physical blackouts and system instabilities.

The loss of quality CAISO personnel may have been (and most certainly will be in the future) a contributing factor. Engineers who didn't correctly evaluate this single contingency, perhaps, or operators who failed to operate within procedures, perhaps. Just speculation, yes. But having worked at that fucking place for what I call my "lost decade" and knowing the low staff morale the day I left, and seeing my own utility bring in dozens of dozens of former ISO staff (including myself) and seeing other local utilities bring in dozens and dozens of former ISO staff, and the industry hiring generation dispatchers and transmission dispatchers who have never stepped foot into a power plant before becoming a grid operator, and developing market mechanisms for transmission congestion instead of developing personnel with hands-on transmission experience -- these simple things are lacking in today's dispatching practice, and in my little opinion, time will reveal how treating the electric grid like a casino (pull a lever, get a pellet) will ultimately result in more widespread outages.

We saw this in 2000, 2001, with the Enronization of the California electric grid. You can be assured that these same people are still out there, now a decade wiser, still trying to fuck you out of a little more of your ratepaying dollar, by creating complex virtual bidding schemes in forward markets, by endlessly vacuuming up all those loose electric nickels you left floating around thanks to all those NERC and FERC policies. The hiring of legions of lawyers to manage the litigation caused by these market policies is a "soft" cost, too. And if the end result is a grid operated under a patchwork quilt of myriad regulations that leads to widespread outages, well, those "costs" are also "soft," and unaccounted for by marketeers. Not to mention, I'd bet my next paycheck that the CAISO market was "suspended" during this calamitous event! See, even I'm getting into the casino-like spirit of electric marketing, by wagering my last two weeks' output!

I will never be made to believe that more complexity will lead to a safer, more reliable delivery of power. Never. It is an almost unimaginable stretch for me to make the claim here on my blog that complexity was a direct contributor to this particular San Diegan outage, considering I have no more information available to me that you do. But I do have a good sense of things, and I would most certainly welcome a counter viewpoint to argue that "firm transmission rights" and nodal pricing and market designers, and the hiring of thousands of IT personnel (not electrical engineers, mind you) to manage the nationwide smart grid will lead to the most efficient delivery of reliable power.

I close with a quote from the spokeslady from CAISO: "Someone who comes to conclusions quickly doesn’t know what he is talking about." That's me!

Bridges or Roads

Apparently, we can't have both.

I am interested in language, and how we always say roads and bridges, when clearly from an alphabetical perspective we should be saying bridges and roads...and aren't bridges just another form of roads in the most fundamental sense? All bridges are roads, but not all roads are bridges. But I digress.

Carmageddon, the fake media-induced meltdown that was to turn LA commutes into 5-hour long slogs never materialized. Neither did the carmageddon here in Sacramento when I-5 was shut down for three week stretches. But now, carmageddon has spread to the Ohio River today as steel manufactured in the 1960s (horrors!) is showing cracks as used on the I-64 Sherman Minton Bridge.

I don't believe this to be a toll bridge road. Yet think about how expensive it would be to replace this bridge, assuming replacement is the alternative -- what with unionized workers, steel from Pennsylvania, safety devices, environmental assessments, environmental impact reviews, modern concrete construction with as much reinforcing steel as in the original bridge, water diversion management, pile driving equipment costs, removal costs of the old bridge to include asbestos management planning, steel recycling, concrete pulverization, and the fifty six other things that I failed to mention. We got this bridge built chiefly through federal tax subsidies in the 1940's and 50's, but now the only options are likely public-private partnerships, with the private parts most certainly looking to install toll booths to collect $8 a pop for the 80,000 cars that will use this bridge daily. That's one of the fifty six other things -- a toll plaza.
I am not arguing for or against these things...they are just a function of our mod-durun world, things that were not considered important in 1964. They are today, and today the cost is three quarters of a million dollars per day to operate a bridge.

I would argue that the best course of action, should a bridge replacement be required, would be to ship 635 experienced Chinese bridge laborers over (not in container ships, jeez...but rather first class tickets on Singapore and United airlines), house them in government facilities in floating barges, provide them cots, three squares, and a dental plan, and pay them double what they are making building bridges at home which would be approximately $24 a day for an eight hour day instead of thirteen. In container ships, we could import pre-fab steel, concrete products, and specialized machinery from China (everything except bolts...no one trusts a Chinese bolt). Without the threat of walkouts and the like, the bridge would be completed in 13 months instead of 39, and we'd be millions millions! ahead. We'd easily generate enough "commerce" across that bridge to offset the government subsidies needed to bring in the Chinese to build it.

The Chinese are already building major sections of the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco. We saved $400,000,000 to do so because we weren't willing to pay $17 tolls and having to pay bloated American wages to build them, and indeed, we saved probably a lot more than that because we no longer have any capacity to build such bridge sections, and we would have had to create the tooling and fabrication facilities for just for this one-off project. That's why the Chinese were enlisted...because they have the specialists and the expertise these days for building bridges as they are building so many of them for their own selves and their own new cars.

Granted. I'm not considering the "soft costs" of howling unionized American workers and the costs associated with picketing Louisville's city hall, or the unearned wages that won't be spent buying bourbon and Fords and the additional GDP generated by DUI accidents, or the cost of unemployment insurance as we re-re-re-re-re-extend unemployment benefits on borrowed dollars, or the costs of providing emergency dental care to workers who no longer have medical insurance, or the depression in the Kentucky housing market caused by unemployed steelworkers (who were unwilling to work for $24 a day polishing steel) who are foreclosing on their homes and the cost of further Washington bailout programs used to shore up the housing sector, or the cost to savers now making 0.2% return on their savings, or the costs associated with the downward pressure on all wages by the importation of cheaper labor...

These soft costs might, just might, be a tad more than the savings by Chinese workers, making my plan truly untenable, but because soft costs are never calculated in the engineering economics of bridge building or in the economics engineering of Washington, my plan is fucking sterling.

Ninety Years

My Franklin Blvd. is falling apart between Florin Rd. south and "A" Parkway north. The roadbed is separating over the tire ruts and good-sized chunks are being slowly scattered to the right, towards the edges of the road...right where bicyclists ride.

Chunks of asphalt aren't bothersome to a truck or even a Mini-Cooper but to a bicyclist it's bad news. I tend to ride in the lane these days to avoid these obstacles while motorists tend to skirt the nominal tire ruts and ride either with their driver's side wheel on the median or their passenger's side wheel on the bicycle lane marker. When they do the latter, there's no room at all for bikes.

I suppose this sorta think will become more commonplace over the next few years as Congress and the President fail to do anything meaningful to fix our "crumbling infrastructure" -- and remember, infrastructure means one thing and one thing only to Americans -- Roads. They will continue to deteriorate, methinks.

I got all around Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg a few weeks ago and noticed how it looks just like Greeley, Colorado, but with more humidity. A set of cities completely and totally dependent on imported petroleum and the motorized private vehicle. I didn't see one fucking person walk the entire week I was there, and indeed, neither did I walk. We spend how much to build handicap accessible ramps, push buttons for crossings, digital illuminated red-hands and a simulacrum of a white man walking, and thermo-plastic painted pedestrian lanes? Seems to me that Florida should just simply pass laws that forbid walking in the public realm and by doing so should save a few tens of millions annually by not having to install and maintain such public infrastructure sinkholes. No one walks in August in Tampa -- everything is done indoors under air conditioning, powered by coal or natural gas or nuclear.

I spent Hurricane Irene underneath the foot of the Verrazano Narrows bridge at Ft. Wadsworth on Staten Island:


Interesting to see it shut down, silent, and interesting to have had the opportunity 12 hours before the storm to drive across it without having to pay the $13 toll. This bridge was finished in 1964 and cost $366,000,000.00. I just can't possibly imagine what it would cost to rebuild this bridge, with labor unions scrambling and negotiating for time and a half and night premiums, with whole sections being fabricated in China and shipped through the Panama Canal, with safety measures, with political infighting between the two boroughs causing untold delays -- it's a good thing we knew how to build good shit forty years ago, and we knew how to build them without $3,545,600,000.00 cost overruns. If the toll is $13 today for a bridge built 40 years ago, it'd cost $42 tomorrow if a new one had to be built.

I would suspect that the Narrows bridge will likely never see any major replacement in my lifetime. I'd bet that we'll get a good 90 years of service from this beast if we don't neglect its maintenance. That, however, might prove to be difficult, as maintenance is increasingly difficult to come by these days and I suspect will be even more difficult going forward.

Ninety years. It's just a guess, but try to think of anything around you that was built on or before 1919...there are still some levees that were built by farmers that are still holding up, yes, but I really can't think of much else around here. Most of our big ticket infrastructure was really built up in the 50's, 60's, and 70's...or before. Replacing that work will be ugly and decidedly unsexy to the new crop of Americans who think that five bars on the smart phone represents the ultimate in advancement: New water mains. New underground 230kV electric cables. Flood control measures and new dams. Electrified trains.

It's just that we have no money to build shit like this anymore, nor do we have suitable fabrication facilities in this nation anymore to build bridge sections (why we are outsourcing them -- not only is China cheaper, they are among the few nations with the capacity to build such big items these days). Imagine having had to build a set of facilites just to build the bay bridge sections without any expectation that there would be future work available. Imagine the cost of the bridge, then.

Debt Horizon

A Jobs speech is coming. No, not from the company with the largest market capitalization, Apple, no -- Steve Jobs is gone. No, a speech from Obama on jobs.

What, do you suppose, a government can do to spur job creation? I am hardly one to know...but I do know that the postal service is set to shave several tens of thousands of people here by 2012. Apple created jobs for the same reason the postal service is hemorrhaging -- a change to a digital economy where no one has to work anymore, where pixels on computers represent the only wealth many of us make claims to...and in my little opinion, pixelized wealth that many of us are making the same claims to.

That a company that produces toys is the largest, most valuable company in the U.S. is telling. Admit it -- iPhones and hot-shit apps are nothing but electronic adult toys (not electric adult toys, he-he). I traveled the East Coast for 2.5 weeks and Lake Comanche for Labor Day weekend without one of these toys while I absolutely required a company like Exxon-Mobil, the company who recently lost the top spot to Apple.

No, we can't find jobs here because we intentionally fuckered them away over the past thirty years, as we migrated from citizen to consumer; as we accepted warehouse mass-merchants at the edges of our towns over myriad local in-town businesses; as we gained an excess 35# on average through the consumption of factory-scaled subsidized dairy and soybeans while requiring 1,500 more calories a day just to get the base level of nutrients we needed in 1975 due to over-fertilization and can't afford double digit health care increases; as we gamble away our wealth today and future tomorrow by building casinos and family entertainment destinations instead of investing it into our own communities.

We've not only a whole generation, but multiple generations, who are now adorned with random tattoos (as some odd display of status? of prestige?) along with attire resembling either the nursery or prison. Whole generations who have lost the capacity for meaningful work. Most jobs are no longer craft in this nation -- all that's available are those that support the ongoing consumption of toys, recreational drugs, or jobs that support the directing of said consumption into landfills -- forklift operators at K-Mart or chip-sealers for the acres of unused WalMart parking lots.

As if Obama wanted to spend $1.6 trillion more every year than the government takes in, but he has to to keep the system from falling apart, while the consumer continues to be funneled towards that debt horizon, the end game of an economy based on ever expanding credit. It's neither Obama's fault nor is it Bush -- it's the American consumer, who cheerfully lost his own job building quality toaster ovens at $16 an hour to a Chinese factory worker making total pieces of shit for a tenth of that. The 600,000,000 of us who were sheltered from limitless cheap labor behind the bamboo and iron curtains have now refused to accept that there are another 5.9 billion who strive for a lifestyle with indoor plumbing, cooking fuel and basic transportation. The American consumer, who refuses to pay $55 for a good domestic toaster oven at a local merchant that would last two decades, and instead climbs into his foreign made SUV and drives on subsidized roads to the WalMart to buy a $19.98 imported piece of shit every three years.

The jobs speech will come and go, with no meaningful results.

Fifty Bucks

The lowest building in Lower Manhattan is a Wells Fargo building. Looking to retrieve just a few of my dollars I hold there (the singular purpose of a bank is to gain access to your own money, isn't it?) I entered the building this last Monday to a security desk clerk who explained that this was a corporate office only...not a bank in the traditional sense...and was directed to the nearest ATM which was seven blocks away.

I've come to the realization that I'm fuckering away an awful lot of fees, tariffs, charges and tolls to support a bank that puts up a big goddamn sign outside a building but won't offer commercial services inside, and to support the legalized grifting of several million people by vacuuming up an endless supply of loose nickels floating around in our accounts.

I very rarely need direct access to money remotely. These days I can do it all locally, mostly. I plan on going local, finding a local bank here in Sacramento that, while siphoning off fees, yes, won't be going to support the contract limousines of executives who have long refused to take the subway and 60-foot high marble interiors and bigleaf mahogany paneled elevators in an office building 3,200 miles distant that won't let me in to access a measly fifty bucks.

Thurman Heights

Franklon presumably shot up my cousin's apartmental unit the other night in South Sacramento. At least, that's what the guys who are being shot at are saying.

I've been bicycling through that area for over half a decade and no, I never feel particularly safe, but geez, to sit inside the apartment this afternoon while talking thrash metal, looking at the CSI bullet hole measurement stickers, I really didn't feel good about it. It took a good three beers to settle down, to sit instead of stand inside a doorframe. Yet about that couch I was sitting on -- it wouldn't offer protection from another .38 coming through the door or window. An odd feeling, yes.

But, something that Mr. Cousin has recently brought into his world, through associating with the neighbors across the way, recent renters (recent being 8 months). That world isn't just filled with chronic chemical dependents and loafers anymore, something I've been chatting about here on these monologues...no, add street thugs to that list, now.

I wonder. As we continue our slow march towards debt deflation and as our collective actions to address it will most certainly mean even more extreme wealth concentration, I consider the increase in social unrest that will inevitably result. I am increasingly of the opinion, particularly as I chose today to ride through Thurman Heights, that to not throw bones to those who have none is a bad way to operate, particularly when immigrants tell me this, too.

I can choose to stay as sheltered as I can, I suppose, in white suburbia (well, make that white-feeling suburbia), while this shit continues around me, and simply work harder to keep as far removed from it as possible. I don't like to think this is an option...but unfortunately, it's about the only one that will likely ever play out, based on the way we've built things here in this nation.

I'm hardly advocating living in gangland, but I do think that social policies that ensure economic segregation also ensure the creation of whole swaths of people who will never know the pride of work, who will never have something to strive to attain, who will never understand the value of purpose.

Usefulness

A notorious slowdown as of late here on The Franklin Monologues. Too many things pulling me away from my business of complaining about everything.

Two weekends ago the high-tank toilet installation took the entire 48 free hours allotted to me. Leaks, leaks, and more leaks...but come 8:00 PM Sunday I was able to wrestle the connections together and since it's been flowing nicely.

Last weekend took me to screw maintenance -- the need to organize a collection of free nuts, screws, bolts and the occasional washer, something I'ven't done since 1994. I will gain more hours in the future not looking for things, having spent eight of them Sunday organizing them...or so I think.

These things are free. These don't cost money to perform; at least, provided the materials are already paid for. My neighbor who rides the bus with me, the one who I fixed a few leaky sprinkler valves last summer, had a recent toilet problem and was quoted $650 to have a new one installed. $650.

I have to think that I've been able to pay off my mortgage and keep some cash in reserves simply because I've not had to resort to paying such money to others to do things around the housal unit. Indeed, I haven't taken a weekend wine/bed-and-breakfast/mudbath spa extravaganza to the Napa Valley in some time, either, because I'm too busy fashioning leak-free gaskets for the new [already leaking] supply valve on my disc sander.

These are the tradeoffs we make. I am fortunate to have learned early on that self-sufficiency is among the most valuable economic traits one can take on as you minimize the number of on-call visits by professionals to fix things.

Can I install a toilet as efficiently as a plumber?

Hell no.

Yet, I can do it.

The thing is a work of art, something worth having in a housal unit. Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Oldsmobile Ohm

I enjoy criticizing both political parties in this hallowed nation. I criticize...and vote third party. Always. This way, I can never be held accountable for voting in some Republican or cretinous Democrat; I vote third party to never have to worry about what my actions might have done to wreck the nation. It's the equivalent of having not voted at all, and I sleep quite well at night.

Which supports my positions regarding the two major parties quite aptly. I am a personal fiscal conservative, yes, but I cannot support a Republican party hijacked by moronic Christian religionists. I am a dyed in the wool liberal with respect to social policies, but cannot support unfettered "tax the rich" and massive government programs that perpetuate an entitlement state.

I vote third party, along the platforms that most represent the bulk of my interests, and while these represent unelectable candidates at the moment, perhaps they might someday. I'm not holding my breath.

I mention this, because recently we've been subjected to a new 54.5 MPG standard for automobiling by 2025. Not immediately, no, but over time. In fact, over fourteen years -- by the time I'm a decade from retirement fourteen years from now, the standard will require hybridization and all electric fleets to meet the standard. It's not as if we will build a better ICE engine; no, that will slightly improve, yes, but the CAFE standards will be met by allowing a sixth generation 18MPG Yukon to be offset by an all electric Oldsmobile Ohm, or a Chrysler Couloumb, or a Mercury Mho, or a Suzuki Siemen, or a Hyundai Hertz, or a Jianghuai Joule, or an AvtoVAX Ampere, or a Mitsubishi Maxwell, or a Geeley Gauss, or a GMC Weber, or a Volkswagen Watt, or some other predictable, greenish, electric-ish name.

In the same way that the carbureted engine simply couldn't match the performance characteristics of fuel injection, ICE engines will concede to electrics...in my little opinion. I just hope, really, that we don't have to suffer through shitty worksmanship and piss-poor production, that we'll have the ability to buy a car that will last twenty years of mild use and get better mileage.


The thing to remember is that increased efficiencies will not, I repeat will not, lead to less foreign energy consumption. It will only result in more energy use. Only more. If American families will save $8,200 on fuel as touted by the Obama press release, please note that each family will simply go out and buy another fucking vehicle with that savings, so Billy and Martha, both teenagers in the same middle-class suburban familial unit, won't have to share one vehicle but will instead have one each. This is what efficiency gains give us -- more energy use and a "better" standard of living, per the metrics used to gauge such things in this consumeristic nation of ours. Take note -- increased efficiencies have only ever, ever!, led to more energy use...never less.

Because Billy and Martha have never lived in a community where the family vehicular unit(s) weren't requred for every facet of living, from mailing a letter to a treat at Baskin Robbins, they will never be able to live without one or two or three of their own, and yet we tout "MPG efficiencies" as somehow decreasing our reliance on foreign energy.

This is among the biggest lies of them all...but one that's been told by every president since Nixon, but it's no longer a lie if even the constituents believe it, is it? Our dependence on foreign oil has only increased every year since. Our dependence on foreign manufacturing has only increased every year, too. Our dependence on foreign nations purchasing our debts has only increased every year as well.

The Oldsmobile Ohm won't, I repeat, won't reduce our dependence on oil.

Fit And Finish

So. Consumer Reports, the arbiter of all things consumeristic, has declared the new Honda Civic unworthy of a rating.

I could have told you that. Indeed, I have told you that, here on this blog. My little Honda Civic, while a fantastic car regarding fuel efficiency, is a complete piece of shit regarding fit and finish.

The obvious problem is the American Consumer. Any consumer who wants a well-built car also doesn't give a rat's ass about fuel efficiency; if they are willing to pay good money for a vehicular unit the cost of operating it is immaterial and the manufacturers know this. The most fuel efficient cars are also the worst built.

You will never be able to find a 45 MPG car whose windows won't fail to retract in a few short years, or whose roof paint won't completely disentegrate in five years' time, or whose radio will inexplicably short out and fail to work in hot weather, or whose cheap interior vinyl trim won't begin to crack, or whose road noise at 57MPH isn't equivalent to a 1979 Ford F150, or whose rear shocks won't whine in protest over every pebble in the road, or whose trunk fails to open with the manufacturer's specified key. No. You won't. To buy a car that gets 45MPG means it's gonna be shittily built.

All these things are currently in play with my Honda Civic, and it's not anywhere near 45 MPG. More like 31.

Against the backdrop of an Obama administration that's mandating 52MPG by 2025, I know that these future cars will all be completely fucking worthless based on the way the world builds fuel efficient cars today. There is no ability to buy a 40 MPG car today without it being built of the cheapest pot-steel and inferior Burmese rubber components, because any American willing to buy good things doesn't give a shit about fuel efficiency.

And, consider how every well-to-do American immigrant seemingly buys the most expensive rigs known to man. That someone spent the greater part of their lives working and educating themselves to escape the living conditions of their former nations means that fuel efficiency is about as low a priority as a snake's ballbag. Status is all that matters -- and indeed, if you were to take the median vehicular unit's price driven by the 45% employees at SMUD who are foreign born, I'd wager it's close to $39,000 -- far in excess of native born employees, and a harbinger of where developing nations are headed.

Going forward, I still won't drive all that much, not with my biking and my bicycle commuting, but I will refuse to buy a cheap car again. My Honda Civic represents a throwaway, consumerist, economic paradigm that I will refuse to continue to support, and I will spend my money on something that is simply built better...and that means something that ain't gonna get great miles per gallon as I see things going forward. So be it. Environmentalism isn't just pinned on MPG -- it's as much about only having to buy eight cars over your lifetime rather than nine, or simply not driving as much.

Fragiled

I've been arguing for three years on this blog how the national debt means nothing to no one...yet for whatever reason the debt is taking center stage now. Why now?

An interesting political dynamic is going on, and it has nothing at all to do with reducing the national debt. I maintain that we will never never! pay it off. We can't possibly fathom fifteen trillion dollars... fifteen million million; $15,000,000 million; $15,000,000,000,000,000.00. And it's not at all appropriate to pay it off in any event -- debt powers America, it's a place for investment institutions to park capital, and it's become a number so large that we simply have no capability to manage it.

And today we're supposed to be frightened of gasp! Moody's, downgrading our sovereign debt? The same agency that rated Lehman Brothers as sterling just before its public bankruptcy? The same agency that is rendering a simple opinion on our treasurys, nothing more, an opinion not to be indicative of a security's suitability as an investment?

We're supposed to be frightened because debt might, just might, cost a little more to carry? Here's the same Bush-era fear-mongering about Iraq coming to roost with the debt ceiling...the cost of borrowing for a new housal unit or vehicular unit may increase? Dear God!

Well...good. Interest rates have been artificially kept in the dirt as a consequence of the financial "crisis" and it'd be good to see them rise again as I carry no debt, and that I might get more than 0.2% return on any savings I stash. For whatever reason, we elect to ignore the positive side of higher interest rates and make the bold claim that it would kill our fragile economy.

Our economy has been systematically fragiled over the better part of my lifetime, with securitization, with the destroying of our manufacturing base, with our reliance on debt fueled bubbles as the only things providing value to our markets these days. Fifteen trillion in public debt and thirty trillion in private debt while destroying the productive base of our nation means, in my little opinion, that bankruptcy is inevitable.

Today we're embattled with the idea of our national debt simply because a supposed black liberal is in the white house, nothing more, and white Republicans don't like it. Didn't give a fuck when Reagan raised it seventeen times while in office, all as a matter of public financial housekeeping, and neither did they when Bush Sr, Clinton, or Jr raised it multiple times either. Didn't give a fuck that the debt doubled following the crisis of 2008 just as Obama was entering office...but now, whoa. Can't raise it again.