Tag Archives: business

Tossing the United States of Europe under a bus

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With the U.S. and Chinese leadership transitions completed for the current cycle, there’s a sudden rush to judgment about the state of the world.

This crazy Spaceship Earth…

Self-anointed leaders meet in Davos for dinner and a schmooze.

One political leader threatens nuclear attacks while another threatens to widen the moat mockingly called the English Channel as if it was a selectable station on the tellie.

Union membership reaches lows not seen in many a lifetime.

The number of employable Chinese citizens seems to shrink.

Official U.S. employment rate numbers seem to increase.

Of the seven-plus billion of us, which ones are actively climbing the socioeconomic status symbol mountain?

Opinions bounce down the road like tumbleweeds.

One planet, one species, one timeline.

“I’ve been your age, but you haven’t been mine,” said Joe, a friend.

POWER + BELONGING = IDENTITY, reminds a writer of the formula for the young adult lit market.

While this planet changes dynamically, our next-door planet statically waits for occupancy rates to increase.

This storyline waits for no one.

We have bid adieu to the constant concerns and praises of a species in flux so that the future can look back at us and tell us where we’ve been long before we’ll be.

As a friend realised, it’s the ornery character trait we inherit from our ancestors that gives us the grit and determination to push adversity out of the way on the way to our preconceived notion of destiny, arbitrary geographical political borders barely relevant.

TCO

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What is your definition of middle-class success?

$30/day income?

$100/day?

$400?  $500?

What about the costs associated with the standard of living you provide yourself and/or family on that income?

Can you afford your own car?

Let’s take one vehicle as an example of what its cost adds to your standard of living — the 2012 Toyota Avalon Limited (as detailed here):

5 Year Details

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 5 Yr Total
Depreciation $7,139 $3,502 $3,081 $2,731 $2,451 $18,904
Taxes & Fees $3,169 $441 $398 $362 $329 $4,699
Financing $1,175 $934 $683 $422 $151 $3,365
Fuel $2,249 $2,317 $2,386 $2,458 $2,532 $11,942
Insurance $1,480 $1,532 $1,585 $1,641 $1,698 $7,936
Maintenance $42 $404 $568 $919 $2,005 $3,938
Repairs $0 $0 $96 $232 $337 $665
Tax Credit $0 $0
True Cost to Own ® $15,254 $9,130 $8,797 $8,765 $9,503 $51,449

That doesn’t include a place to park your vehicle such as a one/two car garage, driveway or public carpark.

It doesn’t include the time you spend in the vehicle driving yourself through traffic as opposed to whatever else you could be doing in that travel time.

And that’s just one aspect of the life of a car owner, one small portion of a successful middle-class lifestyle.

If you didn’t spend that money on a car, you could spend it on yourself — a nice holiday getaway, perhaps — or on someone else — a loved one or a favourite charity.

When you say the life you live is the life you want to nourish with material goods, what is the cost to the future that you’re spending on yourself today?

The purchasing power of money is a responsibility, a benefit and a danger.

I don’t have kids.

My future is here and now.

I want my wife and myself to enjoy our days together while we can because we’ve seen couples where one spouse or the other died at an early age, including her brother at 51.

My wife and I turn 51 this year so it is an important one in our joint psyche.

We know we’re borrowing from the future to give ourselves some enjoyment today but that’s okay.

Sure, there’s a little guilt that we’re enjoying ourselves when her brother no longer can and that’s okay, too.

Life is what it is.

There may be kids starving out there somewhere but I’m not taking the world on to raise.

With total cost of ownership there is an emotional component as well as a rational mathematical one.

Today the two crossed paths.

Tomorrow we’ll see if we’re as happy today as we thought we’d hope we’re going to be adding a few luxuries to our motorcar collection.

[I’m behind in thanking others — time to catch up soon.]

Your Evaluation Version of Windows 8 Has Expired…

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…or taken its last breath?

What do you do if your credit score is in the top 90th or 99th percentile?

Rather, what have you done?

Living here 1000 years from now, with others who arranged it so, I ask myself if I should keep cracking jokes about this time period.

I have nearly recovered emotionally from the recent deaths of my mother in-law and father.

One estate has been closed, credit scores are in tip-top shape, and life presents many opportunities between now and 365000 days from now.

What about an event 13,622 days from now?

What will inspire me to move forward from this point, my wealth hidden from prying eyes/hands, my health in relatively decent shape and little in the way of wild-dogs-chasing-me, skeletons-in-the-closet-scaring-me or something-to-prove-prodding-me into the future?

Youth is in the hands of the young.  Young adulthood is in the hands of the leaders-to-be.  Leaders are in the hands of their followers.

Thus, I pause.

I do not have anyone or any subculture to compare myself against to justify my existence.

I am myself, the mix of cults and [sub]cultures which formed me.

Every person finds connection with others in one way or another, collectively called generations.

Generations of kids are led, lead and create their own mass identity.

My generation helps form world opinion from many perspectives, politically from the White House, reshaping mass identity.

The purchasing power of money buys opportunity, which may transform one’s emotions into a state of happiness.

Cultural shifts are painful to someone(s) comfortable with the way things had just become from the way they were before.

One needn’t stay in sync with the zeitgeist to be happy.

The absence of the knowledge of one’s relative poverty to another’s relative wealth may or may not make one happier than those who are not ignorant of such, including absolute differences of purchasing power.

Catchy phrases are memorable but not necessarily wise.

A pink cherry tree blooms at the end of the street on the 18th of January 2013.  I am happier for seeing its blooms in the depths of winter but sad for the insects who will later suffer from the absence of its blooms when they are ready to feed on cherry tree flower pollen.

Life out of balance — where does one’s ability to adapt to change affect one’s happiness?

= = = = =

With my evaluation version of Windows 8 having expired, do I purchase the commercially released version or switch back to Ubuntu Linux on this five-year old notebook PC?

= = = = =

Tomorrow’s blog entry: the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO) and TCO’s impact on one’s standard of living’s impact on the future 1000 years from now, subtitled, “When you live in a retirement community on the Moon, who picks up your garbage and washes your windows?”

Poe’s Law and Creationism

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Are you familiar with Poe’s Law?  From wikipedia:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

The core of Poe’s law is that a parody of something extreme by nature becomes impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism. A corollary of Poe’s law is the reverse phenomenon: sincere fundamentalist beliefs being mistaken for a parody of that belief.

I guess what I’m saying is that I grew up in a community where creationism and the scientific method lived side-by-side.

So did parody and solemnity.

I quickly learned that creationism was not so much about the “reality” of a young universe as it was a set of code words we used to dupe those who made fun of creationism.

While smartypants were talking smack about the dumb creationists and their fundamentalist religion, the creationists were running the factories and businesses in town for whom the smartypants worked.

Creationism was established to delineate the true members of a subculture from the false members and/or outsiders.

The scientific method was as valid a laboratory tool for creationists as it was for noncreationists to create new plastic polymers.

But again, it was the set of code words used during coffee breaks and lunch periods that showed who was willing to suspend their disbelief in order to belong to one group or another.

Code words as ancient as our species.

So, the next time you hear someone debating just how old the universe and our planet are, remember Poe’s Law — you should pay attention to what they’re really saying, not what their words mean on a superficial level.

Outsiders and those without a refined sense of humour will miss the nuanced reasons used by those who espouse creationism as their core belief set.

Do you belong to a particular community?

What would you do to maintain your position in a social setting?

Would you repeat the community’s code words without question or a smidgen of doubt?

Not every subculture uses tattoos, piercings and the breaking of social taboos to define themselves.

Some use words and respect the boundaries that taboos provide.

Back to the drawing board again for the very first bored time

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In the mail yesterday I received a book called IDRAWCOMICS SKETCHBOOK & REFERENCE GUIDE by Matt Marrocco, which finally came because I financially backed the creation and publication of the book through KickStarter.

I also received a BIC pen with the IDRAWCOMICS logo as well as an IDRAWCOMICS sticker — better late than never, or better slate than clever.

I am no famous comic strip, graphic novel or webcomic creator but I like to draw doodles.

Time to put my doodling to the test of time and see if I can convert my text sketches (i.e., blog entries), which are readable by the blind, into something with more visual impact while keeping the text blog entries for my blind readers.

If you tell stage performers to break a leg, do you tell comic sketchers to break a lead?

Two views of poverty-vs-work ethics mentality

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Do you view the poor as a drain on the economy or unfortunate casualties of modern society?

Whatever your view, consider these two approaches:

1. Georgia on my mind…
2. Singapore sling…

Should families once again be held responsible for supporting their own, rather than depending on external sources of funding to provide them not only the basic necessities but also the luxuries that our mass media monstrosity depends on selling back to us to support its cycle of prosperity selling?

Who is the Golden Mouth, St. John Chrysostom, and do his views apply here?

This storyline dives deeper into the saga of the Ruralites and the Urbanskis, pitting them against the desire for a meaningful place in society for the Suburbanians, Entitlementists and Provisionists.

In these recent days, when we debate the desire by a very few [mentally ill by community standards] to kill without permission from their government/society, can words that been translated from thought into writing centuries ago and then translated over the years into and out of context have meaning here? I search my subculture for advice:

1 Corinthians 6:9-11: “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers — none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

1 Timothy 1:9-11: “This means understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers, fornicators, sodomites, slave-traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.”

The afterlife is all fine and good for the dead but it is the living toward whom these stories are written — where in our exploration of the cosmos will our subcultures find common ground?