Future results. Yes, it’s something we’ve all read on our (dwindling) finacial statements. The firms we trust our savings to put that out there as a big disclaimer to get them out of any trouble for showing, 1, 3 and 5 year averages of return. They show you past performance to make you feel good about giving them your money and then slap a big old proviso on it just so there’s nothing that’ll get them drug into court if the future isn’t a perfect mirror image of the past. I wish the same was true of government.
However, it seems that in the case of our fearless leaders past performance is a perfect indicator of future results. Yesterday I sat down for lunch and flipped through the Wall Street Journal. I know its all day old news, but I guess I am one of the few that still does like to read the paper (although I am seriously considering ordering one of the new large format Kindles). My eyes immediately went to the top article
below the fold that explained to me very clearly that the Obama administration is proposing to expand the powers of the Federal Reserve to “to oversee the biggest financial players, give the government the power to unwind and break up systemically important companies — much like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. does with failed banks — and create a new regulator for consumer-oriented financial products, according to people involved in the process.” Read that again. I’ll wait.
There are three simple points that every American citizen with at least a dollar (earned or otherwise bequeathed) to their name needs to understand about history so you can understand the path that this change would put us on:
Despite its name / title, the Federal Reserve is notdivx beyond the sea a government organization. That’s right, it’s run by a board of private bankers with pretty well known names: Chase, Morgan, Rockefeller and Rothschild. This is not some rant about Illuminati, this is just a statement of fact. There is government representation on the board, but it is not run by government nor by extension the people. It has its own self interests at heart. It is not within our democratic system.
The federal reserve was created in 1913 after the banking panic in 1909-1910 to address banking panics. Again, I don’t want to get into a long history lesson nor do I want to ask you to don your tin foil hat. There’s plenty of pages out there that can help you with either. The simple statement here is that there was a recession in 1909 that caused a bit of a bank run and they politicians (who’s campaign donations happened to come from some bankers) “didn’t let a good crisis go by unused” and used the occasion to get the federal reserve act when most of congress was already on their way home for a recess based on the argument that the only way to prevent another recession was to have a central authority that could help regulate and provide reserve currency to all the other banks.
Here’s the payoff. The federal reserve is widely believed to have played a major role in prolonging (some say even causing) the ‘great’ depression of 1929 that lasted for more than 15 years. Even the current Fed Chairmen, Helicopter Ben Himself, has said as much himself.
That’s right, the one thing that the Fed was supposedly created to prevent, it actually made worse. Now that couldn’t happen again, could it? Let’s hope not or the last 18 months will end up in the history books like the recession and bank runs of 1909 did – overshadowed by a much larger, more painful event yet to come that the newly empowered Fed will be right in the middle of one way or another.
Overheard while waiting in line this weekend at the local auto parts store:
Customer looking for a part: “you have anything that looks like this?” (shows him a small clip)
Clerk: “let me look” (goes in back for a few minutes)
Clerk: “this doesn’t look the same, but it says on the label it’s the same thing.”
Customer: “Well, I tell you what, I’ll take these and try ‘em and if they work, I’ll stop back by tomorrow morning before eleven and pay you for them. If not, I’ll give’em back. Sound like a deal?”
It’s about a week later than I had planned, but as of today, my garden is in. Overall that’s pretty good since I started planning back in January. We’ve been trying our hand at vegetable gardening since before we moved to the farm, but it really went to a new level when we moved out here three and a half years ago. In our old house our garden was a few tomato and strawberry plants. This year I’ve put in strawberries, asparagus, beans, cantaloupe, sweet potatoes, red potatoes, gold potatoes, tomatoes, green and jalapeno peppers, eggplant, kale & collard greens, peas, okra, lettuce mixes, carrots, zucchini, cucumbers and corn. Clearly more land equals more things you can grow. However, there is one constant from the garden we grew 10 years ago and the one we are growing this year: regardless if you are planting a single tomato in a pot on your porch or putting in corn or wheat for a commercial grower project management is the key to success. Yes, compost and fertilizer and water and sun are all important, but without a good plan, you’ll never get out of it all that you can.
This year I decided to try a few new things both in terms of vegetables and in terms of methods. I added Asparagus in its own dedicated bed (they can last up to 25 years) as well as Cale & Collard greens. And while I have grown tomatoes for years, this year I sprouted all of the tomatoes in my garden from seed. No small task let me tell you. The main reason was to get some varieties that I couldn’t buy around here as plants, but a small part of it was just to see if I could. The tomatoes all sprouted fine and I had plenty to cover the 12 plants that I typically put out.
This brings me to my first lesson: have a plan. I knew I wanted to growing tomatoes from seeds and I knew they had to be in the ground by Mothers day if I wanted a chance to have the prized ripe Tomato in late June (prized where I live anyway…keep all your comments to yourselves residents of Texas, California and other sub-tropical regions). So back up from there and I had to get the seeds started in February. Now in my neck of the woods there is still snow on the ground in February, so this required me to figure out a way to sprout in freezing weather.
Fortunately someone else had solved that for me by inventing the cold frame, but now this taught me my second lesson: dependencies drive the schedule. Before I could plant my tomato plants on mother’s day, I had to sprout the seeds. Before I could sprout the seeds I had to have a cold frame. This put me back into starting the project in January (I am very methodical when I build anything, even a box with a glass top). Hoping to have home sprouted tomatoes and not thinking about it until March would have been a non-starter.
Now that I had a cold frame, I felt compelled to see what else I could sprout, so I decided to try eggplant, peppers, zuchini and butternut squash. The last two worked beautifully (squash is half weed), but the eggplant and peppers either didn’t sprout at all or never got beyond lilliputian proportions. This lead me to my third lesson: you should assume that some aspects of your project are going to fail and have contingencies in place. In the case of the minuscule peppers and eggplants the plan B was no more complex than going to the nursery and buying some fully grown starter plants there. I there had only been a plan A then I would be out those two vegetables (which I di actaully really enjoy so that would have been a bummer) for the season.
I am sure there are many more lessons that I am forgetting, but as I look a projects I have been involved with in business, these are the three that most often get forgotten and lead people into trouble. Great thing is to learn these lessons yourself, you don’t have to be on the back 40. While the planning might be on a smaller scale, you can learn all the same things trying to grow a tomato from seed in a pot on your patio. Good growing and if you do it right and startnext January, you’ll have the satifaction of having compeltly home grown tomatoes for your 4th of July picnic in 2010. I told you it takes planning!
Probably not news for any regular readers int he last few months, but I am going to finalize the split of my personality and from here on out put of all of my PLM related content on my company blog. Here’s my most recent entry. I’ll still share things out of broad interest on my del.icio.us feedbad girls from valley high divx movie onlinestargate the ark of truth onlinedownload keith movie , but otherwise if you were here for PLM stuff, you may want to redirect your reader over there.
The shell game continues. While our president continues on the campaign trail last night on Jay Leno (someone should really tell him that he won. Or is he starting already for the 2012 elextion?), the house got themselves busy enacting the highest tax rate on the smallest group of people known to man. The story goes that the bonus tax bill was the only justifiable response to the outrage the American people expressed at the bonuses given to AIG executives after the company has received so much bailout money. There are a few things I don’t understand about that story.
First, there was equal (if not greater) outrage when the various pork and debt laden spending bills were up for a vote. Where were the sympathetic ears then? Where was the mandate to not put our grandchildren in debt up to their eyeballs?
Second, we didn’t really bail out AIG. We bought them. We own 80% of the stock and when you buy stock and take an ownership position you get all of the good along with the bad. You get obligations that you might not want to pay, but they’re still obligations. You also get the upside – one day if AIG is able to make a go of it then we can sell that stock and get our money back. Maybe even with a nice little return. It may help to have the people around that were on retention to make that go of it and turn that profit. That’s called capitalism. But we don’t like to talk about that anymore. We like handouts, rules and ‘fair play’.
So if the popular story isn’t the real story, what is? The house reps saying that they are listening to the people is just the same old political game. They listen when it suits them and ‘do what they have to do’ (i.e. don’t listen) when it doesn’t. The recasting the buyout as a bailout is something much more insidious. A buyout comes with responsibility and ownership. A bailout is ‘free’ money with the strings of undeclared expectations. And the passing of the bonus tax plan is the worst of all. It screams ‘we don’t know what we’re doing…we can’ be expected to think of everything!’. And it sets a dangerous precedent. What if the next ’special tax’ gets passed for people who are employed by foregin employers rather than American companies (the keep it at home act of 2009)? or income earned from non-green industries (the keepin’ it clean act of 2010)? What’s more, what if they decided to apply the tax retroactively to the year 2000? That would be one sure way to fill in the social security hole! While some may raise their glasses in a toast to the fact that ‘we got them AIG guys’, this is one that will come back to bite us, that is if the Supreme Court has also lost its mind and allows it to stand.chicago download freedownload kill me later dvd
So I’ve been struggling with this post for a while. I think a few people that I work with actually do read my blog now and again and I don’t want them to read this post and take it as free license to slack. So, I thought I would start with this disclaimer: if you’re on my team you are not allowed to cite this post or any of the thoughts in it in the next few weeks (the half life of any post) as a reason for why you didn’t get something done.
Now that I’ve done my duty to the J.O.B., on to the post.
I, along with everyone else that isn’t independently wealthy or dirt poor, have been watching in horror as the global economy has crashed and burned. I’m not going to go all tinfoil hat here and rant about the reasons why we are in the state we find ourselves (I need to start another blog to do that ), but it has knocked me out of the daily routine a bit and forced me to re-evaluate the grand plan.
I formulated the grand plan over the course of the last 5 years. As I started to get a little money, realize that I wasn’t going to live forever and my kids started to be real people and not just babbling babies. OK, it really started when I turned 30 and realized that I didn’t want to do what I was doing forever (and that i wouldn’t live forever). The core elements of the grand plan were:
Get while the getting was good, even if you did like what you had to do to get it.
Make time for the important things along the way (family, kids, health, happinessss), but always keep one eye on the prize
The prize = ‘retire’ from the main job when the youngest graduates from college (2024 or 2025 depending on whether it’s 4 or 5 years) with the house paid off, no debt and $2M in the bank.
I will be 52 years old in 2025 and then the real fun was supposed to start – I was going to go into teaching. High school match and science. Maybe a little history. Summers off. Working with kids and seeing that spark when they ‘get it’. Doing my little part to get the US back to some level of proficiency in the area that has been so bad for so long. But now, I think the plan has to change.
The good is no longer, so the getting will likely fall off, whether I like it or not. Will things turn around? Who knows, but it doesn’t look like it will ever be exactly like it was before. I’m not sure when I came to that view, but I imagine I had to go through all the regular stages and have arrived at acceptance. Although its fewer every day, too many people are still in denial. Now that I have accepted a future view (may not be the right one, but it’s mine) I am re-visioning the grand plan. The core elements of the grand plan 2.0 are:
Do things I like every day – because I may be doing them for a long time.
Make time for the important things. (full stop)
There is no prize. There is no tomorrow, there is only today and now.
I actually like plan 2.0 alot better! Will I ever get to teach? I hope so, but in the end (hopefully still along way off) it won’t matter nearly as much because I’ll have enjoyed the trip alot more…the destination won’t matter as much. And in some subtle way I really appreciate the irony of the fact that it took the world economy going to shit for me to stop delaying gratification. Making me happier today that I would have been if things kept cranking along.
Well, despite my best efforts we are still sitting at home with 9 puppies. I am beginning to doubt my effectiveness as a marketer. I guess I will have to resort to late night TV infomercials next. In the mean time, take a look at this vid, shot last night:
Please spread the word and help me find homes for them…they will have to head to the shelter soon.
I put in my seed order over the weekend and soon a box will show up with all sorts of wonderful things. I am trying a few new things this year. For one, I am going to try to start a few things in cold frames before I plant them in the ground. That way I should get them off to a good start before I plant them in the ground and expose them to the elements. I’m also expanding the repertoire a bit as well: this year I’m trying potatoes (sweet potatoes worked great last year, so what the heck), a mix of different salad lettuces, mustard and collard greens, a bunch of different heirloom tomatoes. The big new one is asparagus. We love it, so I thought, why not try to grow some of it.
Most things I can’t plant around here until Mid-April, but I think I will be starting things in the cold frame in just a few weeks. The last thing I need to figure out if I am going to plant in the traditional rows, or break the garden up into beds (a la square foot gardening). Can’t wait for that first bean…and even more for that first tomato!
On the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, I got to thinking about people I’d like to meet. Certainly Mr. Lincoln is at the top of that list. But seeing as that isn’t going to happen there’s one other person I’d like to meet: someone that is actually in favor of the stimulus bill that just passed! I run in all sorts of circles – friends and work, around home, in the community. And amongst all my fairly diverse friends I have yet to talk to anyone who (A) knows what’s actually in the bill and (B) is in favor of it.
Sure there are a few that don’t seem to care, and others that don’t really know what’s in it beyond what they can get in 30 seconds from the McPaper (i.e. USA Today) or the nightly news. But I have yet to meet anyone who actually thinks what Congress just passed is a good idea.
So here’s a standing offer: the first person to leave a comment / send me a message who meets both criteria (knows what’s in it and is in favor of it) gets a free lunch. Of course there is a catch: at this free lunch you’ll have to explain your position to me in detail, so you’ll have to eat fast because you’ll probably have to talk a lot. For the rest of you, if there are any questions you’d like me to ask of this first responder, leave them in the comments below as well.
), but it has knocked me out of the daily routine a bit and forced me to re-evaluate the grand plan.