Inferior Goods

Inferior good are cheaper alternatives for the same consumer need. For instance, Reeboks fulfill the same need as Nike (running shoes) but at a cheaper price. The price of rice is not just a phenomenon of fiat money; it's a function of a consumer shift to inferior goods.

The pivot point has begun.

I suspect it will be inexorable.

I'm eating dinner in Belltown, which is suddenly respectable with a speed that surprises even me.
And then back to the sex club, I suppose.

(posting from the blackberry is a bit harder than I expected.)

Sex Club Post-Coital Report

wow.

that... was a bit much.

however, I did manage to create one orgasm.

holy frickin cow.

The Eye

I walked through Capitol Hill, the black cotton of my t-shirt was cool and comfortable and I was glad I'd worn my gray pinstrip pants, equally cool and soft. I tried to change almost two years ago but perhaps you have to set a baseline first and then circle back around to get your bearings. I''m so out of place here. I was then, too, but now it's so obvious that I can't ignore it. This is the right city for a new me. Perhaps now it's also the right time and situation. I passed into the hurricane. But have I only passed through the eye?

Off for my first visit to the sex club. I have no more time for the strange brew of Myopics of the past few years. The Game can determine their validity, but I walk away from them for my own peace of mind. They're immaterial.

Awesome

She had five orgasms in two hours.
Only one lamp and one shirt were destroyed during the making of this video.

I Am Awesome.

That is all.

6.5 Million Foreclosures

Credit Suisee predicts 6.5 million foreclosures in the next five years. Sigh. I still remember when predictions of 2 million were "outlandish" and "ridiculous". Six and a half million foreclosures is dangerously close to a Tipping Point. Historically, 5 to 10% of the active citizenry with motivation can bring down financial systems and overthrow governments. My prediction for riots from Sept of 2007. Doesn't look quite so kooky now, hey?

It's all history.

Greenspan is a liar.
So is Bernanke.
And that's how history will remember them.

i can post from my blackberry

I can post from my blackberry!

Sympathetic Frequencies

"Bet you got it all planned, right.
Bet you never worry, never even feel a fright" - Spoon, "Don't You Evah"

He was well-dressed, particularly for a Sunday afternoon. Asian, about my age, graying hair a few shades lighter than his dress flannel shirt. What caught my attention was his son, almost identical in dress and mannerism. Do we want our children to be clones of ourselves? Perhaps during a short-sighted (and hopefully short-lived) egotistical impulse. And we'd like them to respect and adopt most of our beliefs. But a realistic parent doesn't expect that and like generals, parents are always fighting the last war, the battle of their own upbringing in a changing world.

I continued through the mall at a measured pace, remembering the advice of Double Your Dating; that measured, steady, almost too leisurely motion tends to attract female attention. And today it was true. The patterns moved around me, the matching stride and shoe style of a young couple, a mother and daughter moved in genetic tandem except for mom's suspicious glare at my apraising look. The men's suit display at Nordstrom's was an artwork of differentiated styles enclosed in a conformist network of orderly racks. I searched for discordance among the shirts and ties, but they lacked courage.

Clones & conformity. Dissonance and differentation. My themes for life, it appears. I've conducted a fair number of information experiments over the years. It's possible to disrupt simple, conformist systems in unusual ways with simple meme patterns. Diversity (aka differentation) works as an attenuator on positive feedback memes. Systems develop stability through diversity in reaction to the power of memetic flows. Memetic reactance of the internet is a measure of that diversity. However, a phased meme, an intelligently designed meme which changes state and shape, could circumvent most of that stability. I think.

A designed meme could create a set of sympathetic frequencies, each wave resonating at a different frequency, spawning another new wave subject to different filtering criteria.

Brandy

She was in her mid-twenties, short and small and weighed in under 100 lbs. Her brown hair was pulled back to expose a pale, oval face with too much eye makeup. Brandy feigned disinterest but betrayed herself by reacting too quickly to my motions.

It was probably the $1.50 I'd left as a tip before I started the pool game. Or perhaps it wss my haircut and clothes. Ragged men with shaggy hair filled the bar but then again, that's the Seattle norm. She was aloof and distant with me but friendly with regulars but one finally commented on her attitude.

"What's wrong with you tonight? You're so snooty", an older man taunted. "I've never seen you so snippy".

Was it me?
Or was it coincidence?

Barmaids often eye men as potential prizes, I've noticed.
However I am far too old for that game now.

She replied, "I have a dark side, you know." And now my interest piqued. How dark? She seemed too young for S&M games but... these days you never know. I knocked out a few games of pool, catching the occasional furtive glance from her. Then I finished my drink, dropped a $3 tip and set off explore three or four other bars in Renton.

SFO

Interviews in San Francisco...

Email

Email trickles into my blackberry throughout the night. Sometimes from Pune, sometimes Bangalore. Sometimes about a project or company announcement, an update, a question. My work day was a monolithic chunk of eight hours but now it revolves around transition points; early morning because Indians are still awake as Americans begin their workday... and late night because Americans are still awake as Indians start their workday.

At night I drive past nine skycranes by Microsoft, their arc lights bright against dark sky as I skim over the wet sheen of black asphalt. I run over two thousand cell phone minutes per month on more than thirty conference calls, sometimes doing four in a single night.

I fly into Fremont. The airport is crowded and I sit quietly, feet perched over my travel bag, laptop in my lap. I type and read, now I coordinate instead of code, I demonstrate instead of debug. Then I fly home.

Tonight I joined a sex club.
We shall see what we shall see.

The Long Wave

The Long Wave exists for a reason. Theoretically, money is a symbolic representation of goods, services and the ability to produce more goods & services. But money & production live within the context of cultural values. And money influences reality just as reality defines money.

The Long Wave is a reflection of the shifting delta between old culture and new culture. On the downslope, the investment horizon of the average person shrinks, resulting in behavior geared towards immediate, short-term satisfaction. As a result, long-term investments run below their long-term cost. To mainain profibility, companies and individuals plunder the past to pay for the present... until the present quits working.

Governments will not be able to reverse the direction of long-term interest rates. They can delay and buffer and mask the inflection. But they can not stop it because interest rates are a fundamental reflection of investment.

Nothing is free.

The #1 mistake of system analysis is not understanding why the legacy system works as it does. This is also the #1 mistake of each incoming generation.

Pax Americana

Drawing to a close.
Founded on fake money and flawed ideology.

Various governments are trying desperately to keep interest rates down but nobody wants to cooperate.
Perhaps that ocean of fake fiat money is responsible.

Food riots.
Rising rates and costs going into a recession.
History will label this time as an era of madness.

Building massive transportation channels of steel and oil to move raw materials all over the earth, so they can be processed into intermediate goods which are shipped all over the earth, then assembled into final goods and shipped all over the earth for final sale, often back at the point of origin of the raw materials.

Madness.
And the most amazing part is how ignorant the great majority of Americans are.
How completely clueless.

Diogenes

I am the Diogenes Of Love.

That's who I was before I married, too. Over and over, I ask what I did wrong. How could I have made better decisions? I wonder why it had to be this way. What is so wrong with me? Why is everyone else seem mediocre? How much of it was my fault?

So many things were wrong.
Year after year.
So much wasted effort and money.

The Diogenes Of Love. A 3-sigma misfit. Of course, 3-sigma misfits founded the movie industry, music industry, even the computer industry. But those were the 3-sigmas of the 3-sigmas.

I should start a club.
The 3-sigma NOTs of 3-sigmaville.

Slowly the tide turns. She was blonde and preppy, brazen, with large breasts accentuated by a wide belt around her upper-waist. This blonde gave the performance of being blonde but a crafty intelligence peered out behind her wide, mascara-stained eyes. She tottered on four-inch heels in a short black and white summer dress but what I first noticed was her tattoo. It occupied most of her right shoulder, its pattern revealed by broad, strapless shoulders.

"I was seventeen and drunk and stupid", she grimaced.

The wrong question. Attention on something she considered un-attractive. I thought it was an interesting design, though. And it sent out silent warning about her belligerent attitude before she'd spoken a word.

The tide turns slowly. She was sexy and interesting, tanned and fit with an attitude to match. So I held up my lantern and looked her over. But she wasn't the one.

Hungry Hawk

I descended into the desert city like a hungry hawk, snatched up my evidence and then fled back to the water.

My Wiccan friends believe in magic, which spans a wide variety of circumstances. Most things have a price and as I sped through the desert, I came upon magic of my own making. I saw the pricetag and it depressed me.

I still believe the majority of Americans can think but choose not to; a natural inclination to minimize mental transaction costs. Read through blogs and comments and you find the material is simple, easy, based on current events and banter. There's a second, amaller group who sense deficiencies in their fellow man; who try to expand mental horizons with thought-provoking material. We call them "artists". Still, most of them also succumb to banal stereotypes.

A third group analyzes that lack of thought in the first group and the failure of artistic provocateurs. We call them "philosophers" and "politicians".

If magic is the symbolic manipulation of reality, then memzymes could be a form of magic.

Ballet Followup

Who would have guessed that ballet could be erotic? Surely not me. Now I wonder how many women concur. Perhaps regular ballet would bore me but this performance was interesting. Each of the nine performances was choreographed in a distinctive color scheme... aqua, red, white, black & white, etc. I'm not sure if it was purposeful. I need the program guide to write more, dang it.

The past few weeks have been... fun.
The most fun I've had in... years.

I leave for the airport in about an hour.
What a strange period of my life.