Some Knowledge

Some places you can really tell it’s Halloween.  I went to the grocery store this afternoon.  The place was crowded.  I felt out of place almost because I wasn’t wearing a costume.  Not only were the kids dressed up as witches and convicts, the parents were wearing cat ears and antennae.  I got the groceries I needed and drove home thinking that maybe some people take the holidays too seriously.

I live out in the country.  Nobody comes trick or treating to my house.  I don’t think I will even bother to carve a pumpkin.  I had a good day just reading stuff online.  I think tonight I will watch TV for a while and go to sleep.  I don’t even know about any parties that are going on, nor would I go out to one.  It’s been a warm sunny day and that is cause enough to celebrate in this Fall season.  Maybe I will have some candy tonight after dinner as a holiday celebration.

I hope everybody who is celebrating tonight has a good time and is safe.  I don’t hold with the mythology that says there is something strange about this day or that the worlds of here and now and the afterlife come together on this day.  I don’t believe in ghosts, vampires, animated skeletons, or any other spooky nonsense.  If it is a clear night I may go outside and look at the stars for a while.  Otherwise, today is just a day like any other day, and if people want to dress up and beg for candy from the neighbors, that’s just fine.

We live in a world where a lot of people vie for our attention.  If you have a job, there are bosses and coworkers who all want us to do things.  Family members and friends all have things they want us to do.  With so many pressures, it is sometimes hard to know what we want to do ourselves.

To make a start on living your own life, you will have to know what you want out of life.  This is sometimes not easy to figure out.  There are always people telling us what they want us to do.  There are always obligations you have to do things for other people.  This does not mean you can not do what you want.  You might want to go to work to provide for your family.  You might want to start your own business so you can manage your own future.  It might be advantageous to write down the things that come to your mind about what you really want to do in life.

Living your own life means making decisions.  Where do you want to work?  Where do you want to live?  What do you want for dinner?  What are you going to wear today?  Answering these kinds of questions can help you define your life and what it will be like.  Letting other people decide these things takes your power of self-determination away from you.

Making decisions for yourself brings with it responsibility for your choices.  If you decide to drive faster than the speed limit you will be responsible for the speeding ticket you might get.  If you decide to quit your job and move to Hawaii you will be responsible for finding some way to support yourself and somewhere to live when you get where you are going.  You might make some decisions that lead to adventures, but you will be living your own life and not somebody else’s.

It is easy to get stuck in a rut in life.  Once you decide to work some job and live in some place, you might find all your days tending to become the same.  Look for little things that make each day unique.  Find something to do that will make your time interesting.  It may be something as simple as stopping at the park and taking a walk on the way home from work.  You might read that book you bought years ago and live some new adventure all in the comfort of your own home.  Sure, you still have to clean the house and take care of your family, but you can also do little things for yourself.  Maybe you can find some class or activity to improve yourself.  Life is full of many possibilities and does not have to be the same day after day.

It was 22 degrees outside here this morning.  Right now it is finally getting up around freezing.  The car windows were covered in white frost.  It is cold, but there is no real wind and no snow yet.  I guess it’s finally turning into winter.

There is a nice fire going in the wood stove.  The front room is toasty warm.  There are very few clouds in the sky and the sun is trying to beam through my bedroom windows.  Cars rumble by on the road out front.  I got some random email this morning from a site about auction management or processing.  It seems these people think you can get paid $13 for placing an auction on Ebay.  Very interesting.  When I get done typing here I might look up auction processing scam on Google.  If these people are making so much money managing other people’s auctions, why are they selling information on how to manage auctions?  The real money on the net is in selling information to people on how to make money on the net.

I had a pretty big traffic spike a couple days ago from this Alphainventions site.  Yesterday, I got one visitor from there.  Even though I have over 460 posts on this blog, my traffic has been going down recently.  It’s not like it really matters.  I don’t make any cash off this site.  I’m not selling advertising or plugging products.  I still don’t know what I want to do with this blog.  For now, I think I will just write my random thoughts and see where that takes me.  Maybe later I will find something interesting to write about.  For now I’m just going to say that it’s a cold morning and I’m spending the day inside for a while.

I’ve been doing some online research today.  I got a ridiculously low offer on my 1985 Mazda RX-7 yesterday.  I sent an email back to this person telling him $300 is too low for this vehicle, even if it is not running well.  I’m only asking $800 for this vehicle.  So today I did some looking around online for parts.  I found one rear window for sale at a junkyard.  This guy only wants $100 for the window.  I priced these out before.  When you can find a rear window for that model they go for $750.  There is quite a markup on parts in the auto business.

I priced out the alloy wheels for this car.  One place has them on sale for $179 each.  Normally they sell for $380, each.  Granted, my wheels are not brand spanking new, but I did polish them up a while ago and they are in reasonably good shape.  I found a used manual transmission.  These sell for $915.  The car comes with a working transmission.  Rear end, radiator, fenders, windows, seats, radio, speakers, carpet, door panels, starter, alternator, distributor, all these parts are good.  All these parts sell for a good deal of cash.

The money in an old car is not in the entire thing.  A whole car is a pain to cart around if the engine is not working well.  Take the thing apart and clean it up and it’s worth a lot of money, if you can find the people who are looking for the parts.  Sure, it takes some work to break down a car.  Still, it’s worth a lot more taken apart and cleaned up than it is in one piece.

I spent some time looking around at advertisements for cars that are similar to mine.  I found one without a title going for $100.  Most of the ones like mine with problems and not running were going for $700 on Craigslist.  I put a lot of cash into that vehicle.  Still, I did not spend $15,000 like one person did who is trying to get $3800 for his project car.  Parts are expensive.  If you had to put together a vehicle from replacement parts it might cost you $100,000.  The money is not in the car, it’s in the parts.  Anybody who wanted to make money from the automobile would only have to buy a bunch of junk cars and take them apart and sell the pieces.  This is how junkyards operate.

I read some book a while ago about making money in which the author described selling a junked semi truck for $500 to a yard, then going back the next day and buying the engine out of the same wreck for $1000.  He got the idea that he should be buying the wrecks and selling the parts for a profit.  Apparently, this person got out of the trucking business and set up a truck part company selling parts from old trucks they took apart.  Sure, it took some work.  They hired mechanics to take apart the trucks and wrote them off as a cost of doing business.  This person went on to make his fortune as a junk dealer, or as they call themselves, salvage auto parts dealers.

I mentally added up the price of all the parts I looked up on the net today for my car.  Just on the ones I found and allowing for a decent 50% discount over the retail price, my car could make me a couple grand if I took it apart and sold it piece by piece.  Of course, I would need buyers for all the parts, but that’s what the Internet is for, communication.  The principle does not just apply to cars.  You can, in a capitalist society, sell any kind of junk for a profit, provided you’re not breaking any laws.  I looked up a book I bought some years back at a discount store for $4.99.  This book is selling now for $50 because it is out of print and it’s a hardcover.  Even used it’s going for a good deal more than what I found it for.  Then there are all the other things lying around the house that I bought that I don’t need or use any more.  I have a copy of Lunar 2:Eternal Blue for the Playstation 1 that is going for $180 on Amazon right now that I paid less than $30 for some years ago.  Apparently, I had expensive taste in video games, because a lot of the titles I bought are going for $100 and more online now.

There is money to be made in this world if you want to work for it.  A lot of the work is in finding people to buy the stuff you find to sell.  You can have all the expensive junk in the world and it will do you no good at all if nobody wants what you have.  That’s why the car manufacturers are doing so poorly these days.  They all decided years ago to build big, gas-guzzling trucks, and the cost of gas went up.  Now they are scrambling to design efficient vehicles.  If nobody wants what you have, then it will not make you any cash.  Consider the junk business as a model for the capitalist system.  Maybe nobody wants your whole car, but if you take it apart, there is probably somebody somewhere who is missing a rear view mirror who will be willing to buy part of your car to fix his own.

It’s a cold, windy, cloudy day.  There is a forecast of rain mixed with snow for tonight.  Winter is fast approaching.

I took some time this afternoon and wrote a poem about walking by the sea.  I just took a trip into my memory and thought about a time I went to a beach in Georgia years ago.  It was the beginning of February, so the sand was cold, but it was not cold enough to wear a coat.  I thought it would be a good subject to share with the writers group tonight, since the weather has been so cold.

When I published my new poem on my poetry blog I noticed traffic coming immediately from a site called Alphainventions.com.  I checked out this site and they seem to be some kind of real time blog update promotion site where you submit your blog url and they post a link to your blog and a page image whenever you update or leave a new post.  I got a few visitors to my poetry blog right away as soon as I posted my poem about the sea.  If you are looking for more traffic for your blog you might want to check out this site.  There is a rather long-winded and confusing explanation of what this site does on a WordPress blog that you can get to by clicking on a link at the alphainventions site.

I posted an advertisement for my old car yesterday on Craigslist but the only response I have so far is three spam emails for a trade in value website.  The listing is buried under a lot of other advertisements now and I’m not sure if I will see any response to this.  I was fairly honest about the problems this car has, but I also know the value of the vehicle because I looked up the price of a 1985 RX-7 in a book a while ago.  In any case, I can always sell it to a wrecker I found advertising on Craigslist for junk cars.

I got the chimney swept out on Saturday and the wood stove has been burning well for the last couple days.  It really hasn’t been that cold outside, but it’s nice to have a warm fire to keep the house comfortable.  It’s also good to make sure the chimney is clean so there is no danger of a fire from too much creosote in the flue.  There really wasn’t too much stuff in the chimney, but I ran the brush up and down the thing a lot of times just to be sure it was clear.

Maybe tomorrow I will do some research and find out about something interesting to write about.  I really haven’t felt much like writing lately.  I looked up prices on some of the old video games I have this morning and was surprised at how much some of the playstation 1 games I have are going for.  For a while I thought of selling some of my games, but seeing how many are not getting bid on at Ebay really made me think twice.  I suppose there is always the need for a customer when you are talking about selling stuff.  Slowly I am learning about capitalism.

It’s quarter to five this evening and already it seems to be getting dark outside.  I think this is just about it for my post today.  Right now I’m going to get ready for dinner and then go out later to talk about writing.

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately.  Yesterday I took some pictures of my car and this morning I posted an advertisement for it on Craigslist.  I figure since I haven’t driven the thing in three years and since it needs work I might as well go ahead and try to sell it.  Winter is coming and it’s taking up space in the driveway.  Besides, I could use some money.

I spent some time this morning looking at various sites about affiliate marketing.  It seems like there are a lot of people in the business of selling information on how to be an affiliate marketer.  All you really need to do this is to have a website and be able to post links to various offerings.  You can find out all the information you need to get started in this by reading the websites of the different organizations who have and run these programs.  You do not need to buy ebooks from people to tell you how to market as an affiliate.  You might want to read the terms of service for these different programs before you go signing up for any of them.  Some of these places claim copyrights to any information about their advertisers you might post on your own site.  Then there is the business about money.  If you are a lawyer it might be good practice to read through some of these agreements.

I’m not looking for any traffic for my blog here with any posts I’ve made recently.  There’s no point in me posting a link to my car advertisement either, because chances are pretty slim that anybody from the local area would see this blog.  I think I am going to go back to surfing the web and find something interesting to read.  That’s all for today.

CNBC was going nuts this morning when I switched on the TV.  They froze futures trading when the market dropped 550 points.  It seems people are cashing out of the stock market today.  This is not just an American phenomenon.  Markets have fallen all over the world.

Anybody who invests in the stock market gets what they deserve.  Stocks are just a legal way for everybody to gamble.  You buy a stock and supposedly you get a piece of the action from whatever company you invested in.  What you really get is a piece of paper that may go up or down in value depending on how many other people want to buy that piece of paper.

The stock market is all about raising capital for companies to operate with.  Public corporations issue stock so they can sell it to a lot of people and raise money to buy stuff for their business.  How it is supposed to work is that if the company makes money, they will pay profit dividends and the price of their stock will go up because they are successful.  How it really works is that people gamble on which stock is going to increase in value and the price of the stock depends on how many people want to buy it.  This is not a free market economy.  It is a free for all market economy.

A lot of people make money on the stock market.  A lot more people lose money.  This is how the system works.  The people who are really making money on the market are the brokers.  They get a fee for every trade they do.  The banks don’t have enough money to fund all businesses, so business turns to the people and sells them slips of paper.  Paper costs about a penny a sheet.  Paper is cheap.  The price of paper depends on who wants to buy this paper.  Governments do the same thing with paper money.  In reality you are trading one kind of paper for another.  Whether the paper you buy has any value is largely determined by a random process.  Random processes are how gambling operates.  If you invest in the market and lose money, you have made a losing bet.  Gambling is not a sound business principle, unless you are running the house.

I’m sure you could get as sound advice on investing from Homer Simpson as you could get from anyone.  “Stock goes up, stock goes down.”  If the whole industry of a society is based on a random process like people’s confidence in the value of pieces of paper, it should be no surprise if the whole mess comes crashing to the ground.  You would probably make more money if you invested in apples and sold them in the street than if you buy stock these days.  Maybe it’s time for people to stop believing in the lies told by the financial sector and find their own security in their own businesses.

The sun is shining brightly this morning.  It is cold outside again, but the house is comfortably warm.  I wake up in the morning and get some coffee.  If I have a morning ritual, it is the coffee pot.  I sit and watch the idiots on the news or CNBC and try to figure out if they are saying anything that affects me in any way.  Usually it’s just talking with no purpose.  Still, it’s interesting to hear people talking about things they think are so important.

I tend to watch TV first thing in the morning and last thing at night.  I don’t know why I bother.  In the morning I am not awake enough yet to process any complicated information.  At night I’m tired from a long day reading.  I got so sick of the poor excuse for programming on the tube last night that I turned off the TV and read an essay in a book.  The essay was about TV.  This was in Cosmic Trigger III by Robert Anton Wilson.  In this essay he talked about some people who find a TV and try to figure out what it’s all about by observing it.  One person finds a door to the TV studio and observes the people making the shows.  One person theorizes that the TV evolved as a random collection of stuff that appeared after billions of years.  The essay was not all that profound, but it beat looking at reruns on the tube.

I’m working on my second pot of coffee right now.  I am still not fully awake.  I think I may spend part of today in the library reading some of my large collection of books that I’ve accumulated over the years.  There’s a limit to the quality of information you might find online.  A lot of the stuff people post on the net is very basic and inane.  A lot of the so-called information on how to do simple things like set up a business is nothing but cheerleading fluff.  There are also a lot of books that have passed copyright, but there is only so much old information I can read.  Still, the net beats paying a lot of money for bulky paper books.

I guess I shouldn’t be so down on TV.  It takes a lot of effort to get writers and directors and producers and actors and technicians all together to produce a program.  On top of all the management issues, they have to appeal to a market where they are trying to sell things.  That is how TV makes money and stays in business.  They sell advertising.  In a way, any TV program you watch is really just a long-winded sales pitch for some collection of goods or services.  Even public TV is sponsored by industry.  Don’t think for a minute that those cooking shows you watch on PBS are not trying to sell you foods and cooking appliances.

I’m just now finishing up the morning coffee.  I have a few things I need to do today, like sweep out the chimney, but overall it should be a pretty calm day.  I don’t really have to go anywhere today or do anything but a few chores.  For now, I’m just going to take a few minutes to relax and think about what I have to get done, and then start doing things.  Maybe later I will do some more writing, but for now this is it.

It was cold this morning.  The field across the street was covered in frost.  The temperature dropped to 28 degrees.  I am not ready for winter.  I miss the hot summer sun.  Still, the change of season is interesting.  This morning three bluejays were at the bird feeder.  The clouds are drifting away and the sun is beaming.  I guess the cold weather is not so bad.

I haven’t been posting much to this blog.  It’s taken a while for my fingers to recover from typing too many words.  I posted a new poem to my poetry blog yesterday afternoon.  I think I may dig out some of my older poems later on and start posting them there.  I may as well post my poems for free on a blog, as there is little to no chance that I will ever make any money on selling them.

Yesterday I had an email attack.  I got 13 emails which were long-winded tricky sales pitches.  I spent three hours going through them all to see if they had any real or useful information.  I watched a video on how to be more productive.  When the second video came, I became more productive after watching ten seconds of this thing by deleting the email and stopped wasting time.  This morning I did some cleanup on my email subscriptions.  I unsubscribed to about ten different newsletters.  There’s no point reading useless information that is mostly just sales pitches for some overpriced information product.

I had a good time last night at the Ann Arbor Writers Group meeting.  There were a lot of interesting stories and I got to read my poem about power failures and get some feedback on it.  It’s interesting to sit around for a couple hours once a week and listen to people talk about writing.  I think I am going to shift focus with my writing and concentrate more on coming up with some decent poems.  Maybe I will find a theme in poetry that is missing from this blog.

I suppose I could look up some popular subjects on Google and write some pointless small evaluations of stuff that might get some web traffic.  Right now I am just not interested in doing this.  This blog is becoming more of a personal space for me to write down my thoughts.  These posts don’t get a lot of traffic, but in general this blog is nothing much in the way of a popular site.  I think I am going to take it easy here for a while and just post some random thoughts every day to keep the blog current with where I am at the moment.  For today, I think this is all I’m going to write here.  For the rest of the day I may work on poetry and see where that takes me.

I woke up this morning at about eight.  The bathroom lights did not come on when I flipped the switch.  The sun was just coming up, so I could see in the dim light that filtered in through the curtains.  There was no storm or other foul weather, so the power company must have been working on the lines.

The first thing I did was get dressed.  Then I got on my coat and went out to the barn and helped Dad get the generator going.  The engine started right up and the power was back on in the house in a few minutes.  Unfortunately, there was a problem with the generator.  Too much power came on all at once on one side of the 220 circuit and half the circuits dropped out.

I went back out to the barn to check the circuit breakers on the generator.  They were not blown.  I went back inside and got the circuit tester.  I checked the circuits and sure enough half the generator was not making voltage.  Either the breaker blew out or one side of the windings burned out.  Since the breaker was not out, it was probably the windings.

Luckily the generator is still on warranty.  After plugging in the kitchen refrigerator to a live circuit with an extension cord I decided to check on the Edison.  The power was back on so I switched over to the power company circuit and switched on all the breakers.  Everything seemed to work, so I went back to the barn and shut down the generator.

Dad and I got the generator onto the truck and he drove it back to Tractor Supply to exchange it for a new one.  If there was an overload it should have tripped the breaker and not blown the windings.  That’s the whole purpose of having a breaker in the circuit.  Maybe the breaker was defective.  Who knows.  In any case, I’m going to have to set up another generator this afternoon and make sure this one works.  With any luck the power won’t go out again for any long period of time.

Like anything you get used to having, power is something you don’t fully appreciate unless you lose it.  We have freezers full of food and refrigerators and it’s getting cold so the furnace has to run.  Then there are computers and TV and lights, all the things you don’t think about every day that all run on electricity.  I have to say that the power company usually does a pretty good job of keeping the current on.  At times you have to live without power, and it makes you appreciate the conveniences of modern society.