gwax's rumblings

I’m sure you’re all aware of safe deposit boxes but did you know they’re cheap and easy to come by? They can be had for as lit­tle as a few dol­lars a month down at your local bank. And I used to think it was silly keep­ing your money in a bank.

Ok inter­net, I don’t usu­ally talk finances but that’s because I don’t usu­ally have any­thing finan­cial to talk about. Today is dif­fer­ent though, today, we’re going to talk gold. Right now, gold is ~$630/ounce and I would put money down, heck I have put money down, that it’s going to be worth more. Now, when I say that gold will be worth more, I mean a lot more. The greedy reader will now being ask­ing where to sign up but the savvy reader will be want­ing to know where I’m draw­ing this notion from. Personally, I’m more inter­ested in the savvy reader, so here’s why gold is going to go way up.

There are three dif­fer­ent fac­tors involved in why gold is going to go up: gold is cur­rently under­val­ued, gold’s actual value is on the rise and there’s going to be a huge gold fad soon.

A big fac­tor in the under­val­u­a­tion of gold is that it hasn’t suf­fi­ciently caught up to infla­tion. The value of gold has gone up and down a lit­tle but has remained fairly con­stant rel­a­tive to the $USD since the mid-eighties in spite of a con­ser­v­a­tive infla­tion esti­mate of about 250%. On top of lag­ging behind infla­tion, gold has a very low value rel­a­tive to other com­modi­ties. Let’s take, for exam­ple, oil: since 1970, gold has aver­aged about 7 ounces per 100 bar­rels of oil but right now gold is about 10 ounces per 100 bar­rels of oil. Now, some of you might say that oil is a bad com­par­i­son because oil is expen­sive right now and to that I say that oil is expen­sive in dol­lars and that com­modi­ties prices are far more tightly inter­re­lated. Relative to the dol­lar, rel­a­tive to oil, rel­a­tive to every­thing, gold is under­val­ued right now; gold would have to get to about $1000 to be prop­erly valued.

Ignore any mon­e­tary value for a moment, gold’s appli­ca­tion value is going up right now. With China and India mod­ern­iz­ing, they will want and need gold. China and India will need gold to sup­port their boom­ing tech­nol­ogy indus­tries; gold is vital in elec­tron­ics and all sorts of other appli­ca­tions. On top of need­ing gold, China and India will want to flex their mus­cles in the world mar­ket­place, which will mean bring­ing their gold reserves up in line with the other big nations, which will increase demand and thus real value. Add to this that the con­sumers within these and other mod­ern­iz­ing nations will want gold items and you get even more value increase.

The impend­ing gold fad is where the real fun kicks in. The cur­rent US polit­i­cal cli­mate is mak­ing peo­ple fear for the future of the American stock mar­ket and US cur­rency, which his­tor­i­cally has dri­ven peo­ple to be inter­ested in the com­modi­ties mar­ket where they can buy real things, like gold. Gold has been show­ing very solid growth since 2001; it’s up %100 in the past five years and that tends to make peo­ple say, “ooh.” More than any­thing else, though, there’s been buzz about gold in places fre­quented by the every­man; it’s not a secret any­more. I may not be ter­ri­bly “hip”, or “with it” but I keep my fin­ger on the pulse of infor­ma­tion and cul­ture and when gold starts pop­ping up in strange places, I see it. So here’s what’s going to hap­pen: peo­ple are going to see some­one men­tion gold that usu­ally only thinks about stocks and funds or they’re going to hear about it some­where very unchar­ac­ter­is­tic, like digg, here or some other blog. Then, these peo­ple are going to look into what peo­ple are say­ing and real­ize that gold is hugely under­val­ued. Then, there’s going to be a huge over­cor­rec­tion and, before we know it, gold will be $2000-$3000/ounce before crash­ing back to $1000/ounce where it should be. This is my prediction.

On top of the fact that it’s going to be worth a ton of money, there are other rea­sons why gold is a good invest­ment choice, namely liq­uid­ity and taxes. Gold is almost as liq­uid as cur­rency and, for that mat­ter, bet­ter than for­eign cur­rency. Find a store that deals in pre­cious coins, met­als, goods, etc., walk in and buy or sell gold, that’s it. There will be a price spread asso­ci­ated with gold trans­ac­tions but it will be pretty small. Now, let’s talk about taxes; there aren’t any. Gold trans­ac­tions over $1000 aren’t taxed and that’s both direc­tions so, if you make a gazil­lion dol­lars profit in gold, that’s a gazil­lion untaxed dollars.

So, with the caveat that I’m no finan­cial pro­fes­sional and you should do your own research to see if every­thing checks out, I really think that peo­ple should get into the gold mar­ket. Further, I think you should get into the mar­ket right now or pretty much any­where up until it hits around $800-$1000/ounce.

So I was dri­ving down the road and I passed three cars in a row that each had one head­light out. Being as I was in the car by myself, I was think­ing out loud and I said, “Three padid­dles in a row, what’re the odds of that?”, rhetor­i­cally of course. Then it occured to me, if I had Data or C3P0 around, they would’ve rat­tled off the odds to me in annoy­ingly cliche form. How awe­some would that be?

Valkyries

Ok Internet, it’s time we had a lit­tle dis­cus­sion about the chicken and the egg. There’s a long­stand­ing pseudo-philosophical debate as to which came first: the chicken or the egg. The debate rests on two sim­ple prin­ci­ples: chick­ens come from chicken eggs and chicken eggs come from chick­ens. The whole debate is wildly cir­cu­lar and peo­ple like to make it anal­o­gous to other, (less pseudo-) philo­soph­i­cal debates.

Now, because this is a stu­pid argu­ment, I’m going to set the record straight. The egg came first. Now some peo­ple will launch into stu­pid debate with me and say where did the egg come from and to these peo­ple I say, learn some evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy. The cur­rent chicken gen­er­a­tion (gen­er­a­tion n) hatched from eggs laid by the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion (n-1). Generation n-1 hatched from eggs laid by gen­er­a­tion n-2 and this goes back for a long time. As you con­tinue to go back, dif­fer­ent vari­eties of chicken con­verge and we find, for exam­ple, that the Bandara chicken came orig­i­nally from an egg that was laid by a White Cornish or by a Gimmizah; in other words, the first Bandara egg was not laid by a Bandara chicken. Just as Bandaras can be traced back to eggs that are not their own, so too can chick­ens be traced back to an egg laid by some pre-chicken crea­ture. So there you have it, the egg came first, now shut up about the damned chicken or egg debate.

It will have to be noted that this solu­tion is the­o­ret­i­cal and that exper­i­men­tal tests sug­gest that the chicken came first. Having run only one trial, the results can not be guar­an­teed to be sta­tis­ti­cally significant.

As a side­note, the infor­ma­tion about the Bandara chicken came from a Breeds of Chicken site that google got me to.

For those of you unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept of a true name, basi­cally, if you knew the true name of a spirit you could use it to invoke said spirit and have power over said spirit. An exam­ple you may rec­og­nize is that of Beetlejuice, say­ing the name “Beetlejuice” thrice invoked him or dis­missed him and so on and so forth.

It occured to me recently that a cell­phone num­ber is very much con­cep­tu­ally akin to the mys­ti­cal con­cept of a true name. If you have someone’s cell­phone num­ber you can call them any­where and the­o­ret­i­cally invoke them as well. You are granted power over an indi­vid­ual by being able to con­tact them at any time. Also, just as with sum­moned demons, if you invoke peo­ple for stu­pid rea­sons they will take it out on you.

My cell phone has this won­der­ful lit­tle game called Falling Numbers that I play occa­sion­ally when bored. The basic con­cept is that dig­its fall from the top of the LCD and you have to push the cor­re­spond­ing but­ton on the phone. If you push the cor­rect but­ton, the num­ber goes away and you get some points. Fail to push the cor­rect but­ton and the num­ber will fall to the bot­tom, where it will explode and you will lose a life or some­thing. Push the wrong but­ton and you lose a life. Lose two lives and its game over, input your score and you’re done. Also, every so often you will com­plete a level and then the num­bers will fall faster. Eventually you hit a level where the num­bers are falling ridicu­lously fast.

Now that you under­stand what Falling Numbers is, let me explain where the Zen comes into things. When you start play­ing you kind of fum­ble around until you fig­ure out where all the num­bers are then you start fid­dling with hand posi­tion and things like that until you find the opti­mal way to hold the phone and push the but­tons. After you’ve got the logis­tics fig­ured out, the mind game starts. When I first started to get the hang of things I was iden­ti­fy­ing the dig­its for the num­bers they rep­re­sent, then say­ing them in my head and, finally, push­ing the cor­re­spond­ing but­ton. It turns out to be very dif­fi­cult to bypass this iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem and get to a style of just push­ing the cor­rect but­ton as soon as you see the digit on the LCD. If you can not find a way to bypass this sys­tem of think­ing, there is no way to man­age the higher lev­els of the game. It is not easy to explain how I man­age to bypass the think­ing occa­sion­ally but I can tell you that it can increase my scores from ~15000 to over 20000 con­sis­tently. One of the things that seems to help is to focus on my breath­ing while I play (took this from Zen and the Art of Archery).

I’m pretty sure that the con­cept behind Zen is this sort of removal of the think­ing stage from all aspects of life, and oh man that would be fuck­ing awesome.

I’ve been read­ing some of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism And Freedom and, although I dis­agree with a lot of what he says, he does have a few good points. In read­ing some of his sug­ges­tions for a good sys­tem of tax­a­tion, I have got­ten a few ideas and come up with a sys­tem of tax­a­tion that I like:

	T=(I-C1)*C2

It’s a very sim­ple sys­tem, (T) is how much money you have to pay in taxes annu­ally, (I) is your annual income, C1 and C2 are con­stants to be deter­mined by some­one more under­stand­ing of eco­nom­ics than myself. In essence, you can earn up to C1 with­out being taxed and then any­thing beyond that is taxed at rate C2. Key issues with this sys­tem are that is must be taken as it is exactly and there must be no excep­tions made; it does not mat­ter where your income derives from, how many chil­dren you have or any­thing else, just your annual income.

One could also con­sider a dif­fer­ent approach to the under C1 realm and use a neg­a­tive tax scheme where indi­vid­u­als are paid a frac­tion of the amount they need to reach C1. For exam­ple, take C1 to be $50,000 and C2 to be 50%: indi­vid­u­als mak­ing more than $50,000 are taxed half of what they make beyond $50,000 and indi­vid­u­als mak­ing less than $50,000 are given half of the dif­fer­ence between their income and $50,000.

I would say that the sec­ond inter­pre­ta­tion is a more “lib­eral” or “social­ist” approach and can be taken or left based on that fact alone but that the first inter­pre­ta­tion would make for a very good tax scheme that would be well liked by quite a few peo­ple. Personally, I’d like a C1 of $200,000 and a C2 of 50% but that’s just me.

It some­times seems as though I never have free time when I want it and I never want free time when I have it.

“Plurality should not be posited with­out neces­sity.” Such is what is com­monly referred to as Occam’s razor, which, I have to say, is a great lit­tle piece of phi­los­o­phy. It turns out to be a cen­tral ele­ment of the the­sis in a paper I’m in the mid­dle of writ­ing for my Justice class. My the­sis is essen­tially that John Stuart Mill adds no neces­sity and a bunch of plu­ral­ity to Jeremy Bentham’s util­i­tar­i­an­ism and that Mill’s revi­sion should be discarded.

Occam’s razor is really great for argu­ing things like this because it’s so well known and not too many peo­ple will directly argue against it. People are more likely to argue against your appli­ca­tion of the razor instead of the razor itself.

Oh man, I love writ­ing phi­los­o­phy papers.

I was think­ing about titles ear­lier and how much I need more of them. The prob­lem with get­ting offi­cial titles is that you need to earn them or you’re just a hack when you try to use them. I’ve been think­ing about var­i­ous dif­fer­ent titles that I want and what I would need to do in order to earn them. I fig­ure chances are pretty good that I’ll be get­ting a Ph.D. at some point, which will get me the title “Doctor”. I fig­ure that I’ll have to find a way to get knighted, which will get me the title “Sir”. I’m also going to have to become a preacher so that I can get the title “Reverand”. Becoming a judge would get me a “The Honorable” as a pre­fix. If I can buy or marry myself into some sort of lord­ship, I can get the title “Lord” at the begin­ning and then some sort of fancy suf­fix like “Duke of someplace-or-other”; how­ever I’m inclined to believe that Lord and Sir are mutu­ally exclu­sive. Then, if I spent some time in one of the armed ser­vices, I could get my hands on some­thing like “Commodore” or “Brigadier General”. Certainly there are other nifty titles that would be great, but I think that I’m pretty far along the way to mak­ing my point.

The end result of all my work would be that I would offi­cially be The Honorable Lord Reverand Doctor Brigadier General Waksman, Duke of someplace-or-other and that would just be flat out awe­some. Oh, and think about the let­ter­heads on my stationary.

I think that I’ve got my life set out for me now.

Pistachios are one of nature’s trick­i­est dou­ble edged swords. On the one hand, they are ever so tasty, but on the other hand, they lac­er­ate your tongue. This isn’t any sort of fun lac­er­a­tion that I’m talk­ing about either, not that there really is such a thing unless you’ve got masochis­tic ten­den­cies. Anyway, the point is, pis­ta­chios hurt your tongue if you eat too many. If I’d known then what I know now, I still would have eaten all those pis­ta­chios because, in a gains and losses kind of world, pis­ta­chios are so totally worth it.

I love spring and almost every­thing that it has to offer, but there is one thing about spring that I sim­ply abhor: mos­qui­tos. There was once a time when the lit­tle bug­gers didn’t bother me, though I don’t know if that was truly the case or is sim­ply the way that I remem­ber it. Life is a funny thing when you think about all the things that you have done and that at one time it was the present. No, life’s not funny, time is. I was orig­i­nally going to write about the sea­sons and mos­qui­tos but I think that I’d rather wax philo­soph­i­cal about time, so I’m going to.

About the only thing that any of us can say about time is that it passes. Though that’s really all we can say, we don’t need to say it in so few words. The present is some­thing that is ever present but can never be caught. The moment you think that you’ve laid hold of the present, it’s already the past. We know that there once was a present, but that’s only through mem­ory and if you really try to delve down in your own head some­times you can almost relive mem­o­ries as though they were just hap­pen­ing. The prob­lem is that the almost bit is the key bit; mem­ory is like an ana­log recording–technically is one–and every copy is worse than the last. That is all that mem­o­ries are, an imper­fect copy of what was once the present. The dual­ity of the present, in that it never is but always has been and in that it always is and always shall be, is an odd dual­ity, but if one con­sid­ers how many odd dual­i­ties there are in all of real­ity (I wanted to use the words nature, life, the uni­verse, exis­tence and a few oth­ers here, but real­is­ti­cally have to choose one so I went with being but then real­ized that real­ity was a bet­ter one and changed it after I fin­ished this par­en­thet­i­cal expla­na­tion [I also changed the tense of the sec­ond word of the greater par­en­thet­i­cal from want to wanted because that tense seemed more appro­pri­ate once I had fin­ished]). I appol­o­gize if you found the par­en­thet­i­cal of the pre­vi­ous sen­tence to be cum­ber­some, but, when I get myself think­ing about time, I can get recur­sive like that. In the case of most dual­i­ties it is pos­si­ble to see things from either one of the two sides but rarely to see both sides at the same time (ex. those opti­cal illu­sions that have an old woman and a young woman, IHTFP [MIT stu­dents and alum will under­stand], the radi­a­tion of our sun, etc.). All of my life I have seen time from the side that says that the present has always passed and is in mem­ory; I won­der if it is pos­si­ble to see time from the other side of the duality.

There is a part of me that would like to know what it is to see the present as some­thing that always is, if it was even for just a brief moment. There is another part of me, a stonger part of me, that wor­ries that if I ever expe­ri­enced such a moment it would be so spec­tac­u­lar that I would spend the rest of my life seek­ing to relive it. That last sen­tence made me won­der some­thing per­haps a lit­tle more fright­en­ing, if one man­aged to see the present as some­thing that always is, it might not be pos­si­ble to return to see­ing the present as some­thing that’s always passed or it might be too glo­ri­ous to ever return. Of course, it’s prob­a­bly bet­ter not to be fright­ened by the idea, but it’s prob­a­bly good not to search for it either.

So, in short, time’s funny and I have a real dis­tate for mosquitos.

I went back and looked over some of my blog entries and I couldn’t help but think that I’m rather imper­sonal in all of them. This got me to think­ing about this whole blog thing and I don’t really know which way I want to take things.

There have been a few entries in which I related things that weren’t wholely imper­sonal and I remem­ber feel­ing a lit­tle appre­hen­sive after hav­ing posted them. My appre­hen­sion must stem from the same damned place that my aver­sion to say­ing any­thing about how I feel to any­one. I know that some part of it is a fierce desire to do absolutely every­thing on my own, which is, itself, a com­bi­na­tion of a desire for inde­pen­dance and not want­ing to impose on any­one else.

Methinks, from a cathar­tic and self-improving stand­point, that my desire not to con­tinue and pub­lish this entry is pretty indica­tive of why I really should fin­ish it. Perhaps I should use that as my sort of divin­ing rod of blog; the less I want to say some­thing the bet­ter it is that I say it. Funny con­cept, that would be, lis­ten to your­self and then do the oppo­site of what­ever you decide. Funny, yet some­how log­i­cal when you know that your par­tic­u­lar deci­sions on a mat­ter are almost invari­able the wrong ones.

Funny that all this should be sparked by see­ing some­body else com­plain­ing about being lonely on their blog. Just got me think­ing, what’s the point in keep­ing a per­sonal jour­nal if I’m not going to say any­thing per­sonal; it’s not like the events of my life are inter­est­ing enough, on their own, to jus­tify peo­ple read­ing about them.