Jayscott.com - Project: Walkabout

Chuck Norris Action Jeans

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:14:30 -0700

I was cleaning up my overstuffed email inbox and found the below picture...thought it would be a shame to just throw it away, so instead I've posted it here for everyone's enjoyment. They won't bind your legs!

New pictures

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 04:06:00 -0700

Just an FYI, I've uploaded a dozen or so new pictures from the past couple of weeks while I've been over here in Europe. Not enough variety just yet, but if you click over to the Europe Media Gallery I've picked out some of the ones that turned out a little better than the others. Next week: Stockholm and Copenhagen!

The American Hologram

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:39:00 -0700

My attempt earlier today to express some of the frustrations I've been feeling of late regarding this modern life of ours didn't really resonate with me, so I went on a search for other authors that have perhaps expressed some of these issues more eloquently than I am currently able. (Writing takes focus and an absence of distraction, both of which have been in short supply of late.) I found the following paragraph which is an excellent start:

...the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel, the shopping channel, and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction. The economy becomes our life, our religion, and we are transfigured in its observance. [ link to story on AlterNet ] Let's boil that down a bit to a few key ideas:

The economy is, in all things, our #1 priority.
To be American is to accept this idea as scripture.
The system is self-reinforcing, in that any effort to think or behave outside of these ideas are rejected as unpatriotic.

These ideas are reinforced everywhere you turn -- the commercials on TV, which push you towards spending; the political process, which requires spending and is dominated by talk about spending or not spending; our entertainment, which is saturated with stories that embody these behaviors. The author goes on:

...we are the hologram, because we created it. In a relentlessly cycling feedback loop, we create and project the hologram out of our collective national psyche. The hologram in turn manages our collective psyche by regulating our terrors, cravings and neurological passions through the production of wars, whores, politics, profits and manna.We have lost control of our culture, it now controls us. I watched and read with fascination a little story about a retired steel worker whose pension and health benefits have been severely cut after his ex-employer filed for bankruptcy while protecting executive pay. At the Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday, Steve Skvara asked a simple question: "What's wrong with America and what will you do to change it?" It seems like such a simple and obvious question to ask of our leaders, but it was apparently one that people are poorly prepared to address.

Which leaves me with the question: if our leaders can't answer the question, how would I answer it? Or you? Who will answer this question? If a climate crisis, a constitutional crisis, an energy crisis, a real estate / mortgage crisis, and a food supply crisis haven't been able to generate enough willpower to address just one of these issues, what is the catalyst that will mobilize us all? Do we need to actually run out of food for a few days or be stranded in cars without gasoline for the weekend to disrupt the hologram?

Radio silence...

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 07:37:00 -0700

Sorry all for the radio silence for the past month or so, as I've been learning "walkabout" doesn't exactly leave to a steady rhythm in your life calendar. These days, I find myself thankful for the days when I have a stable Internet connection and a bed to sleep in that doesn't totally suck. I have many, many thoughts swimming around in my head right now about the state of economic affairs in America, but to be honest most of it leaves me feeling rather depressed when I think about it too much or take it seriously. Not exactly finding a reservoir of energy to tackle the issues at hand. So, instead I'm going to freestyle a list of things that I hope to see happen during my lifetime in the US of A. Please let me know if you think any of these are actually going to come true, so I can cancel my plans to emigrate...

Universal health care -- this is very different from universal health care insurance.
Repeal or reversal of the majority of the Patriot Act.
A balanced Federal budget.
Impeachment of President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Attorney General Robert Gonzalez.
Failure and cancellation of any show hosted by Bill O'Reilly.
Public awareness that you can't have a War on Terror and that the sources of terrorist aggression against the US and other Western nations are ideological / philosophical, not military.
People stop moving to parts of the country where water supplies are absurdly dependent on outside sources, such as the desert Southwest.
Public outrage, protests in the streets, the voting out of significant portions of both the Democratic and Republican ruling parties.
A shift from consumerism to sustainable consumption habits. How many Styrofoam hotel coffee cups do you really need to throw away in your life?
Reaffirmation separation of church and state.

By the way, if you're exposed in any way to the real estate and mortgage markets, I would strongly encourage you (not as a licensed financial advisor, only as a concerned citizen) to get the hell out of the way of the steamroller that's going to be the foreclosure wave over the next 12-18 months. I was griping about this a good 6 months ago and nobody wanted to believe it then, but the roosters are coming home to roost now. You don't have much time left to get out of any stock investments or to try to refinance your mortgage. It might even be too late to do a refi, depending on your credit, so let's be careful out there!

PC Pimping, Episode 3

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 08:33:00 -0700

One more link for the few of you out there watching the web-reality PC Pimp Doctor show...Episode 3 is now online. This particular machine rebuild was the most difficult of the set, as there were some hardware failures along the way and time wasted readjusting furniture instead of building the PC.

[link]

Comparing real estate and cost of living: California vs. Missouri

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:31:00 -0700

For anyone living in one of our coastal cities, saying "houses are expensive here" is like saying "oxygen is nice." The cost of rent or a mortgage in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and many of the surrounding 'burbs spiked over the past several years to levels that are only defensible by banks and the National Association of Realtors. For example: The median sale price for residential real estate in California is currently about 12x that of Kansas. If you buy a home in San Francisco with a 20% down payment and a traditional 30-year fixed mortgage, your monthly payment is about 47% of median monthly income for the area. That's half of your pay going to the bank. At the other end of the spectrum, towns like Indianapolis, Topeka (Kansas), Springfield (Illinois) or Omaha are going to cost you less than 12% of your monthly take-home pay for an equivalent house. Or, let's say you're not ready to buy or can't qualify and are renting instead. Which cities have the highest ratio between a mortgage payment and rent on a 3-bedroom apartment? San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Ana, Los Angeles and Riverside claim 8 of the top 10 slots. (Data being pulled from housingtracker.net.) A mortgage payment for essentially equivalent living conditions can be as much as 2x the rent payment. And yet, with all of the household economics leaning heavily towards renting vs. buying, why haven't the residential markets crashed in California yet?

My personal belief: groupthink. It has been so long since even the slightest correction in these overpriced markets that we've forgotten that prices can go down as well as up. Mark my words, dear readers, there will be a day of reckoning where no amount of faith and willpower can keep prices from "reverting to the mean" (a fancy way of suggesting that for all markets, speculative bubbles collapse and decline until in line with historical growth patterns). I'm not going to try to out-write any of the other excellent analysts out there, just check out housingdoom.com or iTulips.com or lifeaftertheoilcrash.net for all sorts of links to interesting contrarian readings. If you agree with the Internet-led community that major changes are in the works for real estate, you'll enjoy their work. If you think they're all crackpots, well, you'll enjoy all of the ammunition you can find for bashing the conspiracy theorists into the ground.

But on more practical matters, consider the situation of a roaming vagabond such as myself. Presumably, I (and other free roamers) will eventually want to settle down again and find a safe patch of earth to call home. If you freed yourself of all constraints on this decision -- no property or large equipment, no geographical obligations to an employer, no restrictions due to family ties or relationships -- how would you go about finding your new home? Would you stick with the cool kids in the big cities on the coast and pay 10x national averages for that privilege? Would you turn survivalist and find 20 acres with a water source and hunting grounds? Something in-between? How do you prioritize the need for being fiscally responsible with the need for human companionship and social outlets? Would you be willing to move your career in completely new directions to achieve those goals, or would your career remain a Top 2 priority?

This is exactly the situation I find myself in. California has been good to me, and has led to many opportunities and like-minded people. But the economic equation is horribly unfair, at least for those of us not swimming in IPO money, and has perhaps reached a breaking point where all the 'good' things about San Francisco just aren't good enough. For as much as us San Franciscans like to think of ourselves as progressive thinkers, our actions betray the same patterns of groupthink common in most aspects of American society. We cannot provide sufficient funding for public transportation, but we can buy tens of thousands of Priuses in the name of environmentalism. We protest the war in Iraq -- as a group, of course -- but burn massive amounts of petroleum while we sit on clogged 5-lane highways. We are proud of our support of organic farming and farmer's markets, but disdainful of foreign communities and cultures in America's heartland.

And so, after spending a week in my old hometown of Independence, Missouri, I am reminded of my roots. I have seen beautiful homes on 2-acre lots that sell for less than half the price of a run-down 2-bedroom condo in a bad part of Oakland. I have also noticed the differences in population demographics, with San Francisco being the definition of diversity and many parts of the Midwest seeing diversity as accepting both Protestants and Catholics. In the end we all choose our priorities and accept those shortcomings that we're best able to tolerate. I am very curious to learn what my priorities truly are.

Pimp Doctor, Episode 2

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 21:21:00 -0700

Just a quick link: PC Pimp Doctor, Part 2 is now online. Looks like I may need to cut back my reality TV star plans a bit, though, it hasn't exactly taken over the airwaves just yet. But there are still 3 more PCs to build, perhaps the page views will pick up!

[Previous link: Episode 1]

Zion, the Matrix, and the Reckoning

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 06:37:00 -0700

I'm embarrassed to admit that it's been almost a full month since I last journaled about my Walkabout experiment. To an outside observer trying to deduce what the radio silence on this site means, it probably resembles the thousands of other blogs out there that simply died on the vine due to author neglect. Either that, or my car got stuck in a ditch somewhere and I've been trying to hitchhike back to an Internet connection.

As has been said by others and in more eloquent fashion, even the best laid plans are foolish expressions of optimism. Such is the dilemma I now face with Project: Walkabout, my experiences on the road over these past eight weeks, my intentions for this website, my intentions for this journey, for my life. While I haven't been completely alone during this time, I have had much more time in solitude than in the company of modern society; in the beginning the silence feels like a priceless gift but it quickly turns into a one-sided conversation. Or sometimes, talking to yourself. After talking and listening to myself (and the silence) I've come to realize three things about my adventure:

Planning is irrelevant in a lifestyle where you are not moving towards a goal.
Walkabout's founding principles of self-sufficiency, anti-consumerism and localism over globalism make much more sense after you detach yourself from the first-world social system.
Abandoning the core tenets of modern capitalism and faux democracy is personally liberating, but frightfully foreign to others.

To use a film analogy, consider the movie The Matrix. If you squint hard enough and attempt to fit modern life within the movie construct, there are three drastically different worlds all coexisting in the same physical space. First, there is the 'real world' of the matrix, which includes all of the modern marvels we've come to love and lust such as automobiles, mass media, convenient and worry-free food supplies, representative governments that (despite the bickering) are there to protect our collective interests, affordable housing, etc. This world is where most of us are born, live, mate and die.

If the first world is real life, then the second world of the Matrix is that of the architects and administrators of the real world. I'll refer to this group as the 'ruling class.' Members of the ruling class have very different priorities and concerns from that of the working class, though I can only speculate since I've only observed from afar. Where the real world trades in goods and services, the ruling class trades in influence and power. The tangibles of power evolve over time, but for the past several centuries it has been money and finance that have defined kings and generals. Actions taken in this second world are focused on creating effects in the second world (such as changes in leadership, dominion over competing factions, etc.) but also are designed to have a trickle-down effect in the first world. As a middle class citizen, I can observe and react to currency exchange rates or central banks or global events; I can express my point of view at the voting booth or by spending my money or coordinating with other middle class citizens. The impact is negligible: the amount of money moved by consumers is minute compared to the multi-billion dollar transactions orchestrated in the second world, and my vote matters little when all major political parties (and politicians) are essentially cut from the same cloth. From a distance, American democracy is not terribly representative and seems to be better suited for creating the appearances of a democracy.

What is the third world, then, of our modern-day Matrix? It is the stubborn, determined, grossly outnumbered resistance faction holed up in Zion. For people born neither into the ruling class nor the comfortably distracted working class, the realities of the world are as transparent as a sheet of low-cost imported Plexiglas. Unlike the unified army from the Matrix movies, however, today's Zion is highly fragmented in its goals and methods. Beyond the militiamen and the environmentalists and the spiritual collectives, there is a quiet contingent that expects a major conflict to break out in the ruling class' second world in the near future and are simply trying to position themselves to weather the storm (or to profit from the chaos). For convenience, let's call this power struggle "the reckoning."

The more you look for signs of the reckoning, the more plausible it all seems. After all, America's dominance for the past 100 years comes from both economic and military assets (which are bought, of course, with money that we borrow from other places). Before the US, England had a very nice run as the world's financial capital and floats a respectable navy. London rose to power through the creative application of something called debt -- there was a time when governments couldn't spend money if the gold wasn't sitting in a tower somewhere -- but before London major private banks (owned by horrifically wealthy 'ruling class' families) called many of the shots. In a capitalist world, capital is power. Sadly for the US of A, there are dark times ahead for both the US economy and the global dominance of the dollar as the trade currency of the world.

How dare you!, you may be thinking. How could America be vulnerable? We are the world's only superpower! While the American military engine is the deadliest in the world, it also happens to be the world's single largest consumer of oil. There are entire countries that use less oil the the US Army. This places the American ruling class in a very uncomfortable bind: to maintain the seat of power, they must either ensure the cheap and steady flow of oil from faraway lands or drastically reduce the energy cost of waging war. The first option means a permanent large-scale military occupation in hostile lands. The second option involves radical ideas like the willingness to use nuclear weapons as a deterrent. In either case, the world's energy supplies are becoming rapidly insufficient to power an Industrial Age at a global level, let alone an Information Age. Until radically different systems can be put in place to feed populations and to create goods and services, every year will be more expensive than the year before. For everything.

So what if things get more expensive? That's just inflation, it's how things work. This is true, but I am using the word expensive in a different way. Milk will get more expensive as a percentage of what we produce each year, because it will cost 3x or 4x or 10x to transport from the dairy to the refrigerator compared to times long past. Prescription medications will require a greater percentage of our energy supplies to manufacture, because energy supplies will flatten or contract. The inflatable swimming pool you used to buy for one day's salary at Wal-Mart will require two weeks' worth of income because it's made from plastic (derived from petroleum), manufactured in China (and transported on boats across the Pacific) and then shipped on 18-wheelers for 1,500 miles before reaching your local store. Solar energy, ethanol, nuclear power, hydrogen fuels, hybrid engines, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Iraqi oil fields, off-shore drilling, and hydroelectric power can only (slightly) delay this change. The amount of energy that modern civilization consumes is immense.

If on reading this there is a voice deep inside starting to tell you that an important bit of truth is here for the taking, then congratulations! You are either already in Zion, or somebody is trying to unplug you from the Matrix. What you do with your new knowledge is up to you, but I would advise against dragging your feet on this one. Members of the second world are already placing some very large bets in advance of the storm, and if us groundlings can even start putting the puzzle together then you have to figure it's beyond a stage where the powers-that-be care what we do.

The other possibility, of course, is that I've been spending too much time on the Internet and need to plug myself back into the Matrix.

The PC Pimp Doctor is in...

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:57:00 -0700

Just a heads up: the first episode of GamePro's Pimp My PC reality show is now online. You can check out the video over here, where yours truly gives a few lucky people brand new high-end custom computing gear.

In the first episode, we meet a father/son duo who want to do some high-end PC gaming but only have a machine from circa 1999. They would also like to be able to connect it to their Xbox 360 and to their HDTV in the living room (hey, why not?). Oh, and I've got six hours while the son is away at school...and a machine that's overheating at 190 degrees...no problem!

I believe the show is being structured into eight episodes, two per build. Before you ask, no, I don't know if there are going to be future episodes so don't ask how you can get a free PC. But if you like the show, leave comments on the videos and over here so we can show the feedback to the sponsors!

EDIT: That picture was a lot bigger than I realized. Buh-bye, picture!

Money is not wealth

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 16:28:00 -0700

While catching up on some reading of reliably depressing Life After The Oil Crash, I came across a very thorough article in the Asia Times about how currency devaluation destroys wealth. Anyone not in the financial sector (including myself) can easily get confused about the relationship between currency exchange rates and inflation and whether all of these bumps up and down are good or bad things. I then hit one sentence that, if I can remember it, will always keep things straight in my mind:

Money itself is not wealth, only a generally accepted measuring unit of wealth. Using a more approachable analogy, let's pretend that money is measured in distance. So 10,000 US dollars are actually 10,000 inches of money. The Euro, then, expresses money in centimeters (damned metric system!). The currency exchange rate is just the ratio between inches and centimeters.

Here's where the analogy gets really interesting. When the exchange rate goes up or down, it's just the size of the ruler that's changing -- your 10,000 inches of money now look like 11,000 inches, or 9,000, or whatever. Your wealth (your purchasing power, what you can afford to buy) hasn't changed at all, only its measurement.

Now, let's pretend that there's a third ruler that measures the various stuff you can use your wealth for. When you convert your inches or centimeters into this third unit, you've just traded it for something like a car or corn or water. For the past several decades, the exchange rate between wealth and stuff has been increasing...i.e., it takes more inches of money to buy stuff now than 30 years ago.

"Well, duh, that's called inflation," you might say. Fair enough. But the speed at which the 'stuff ruler' has been expanding is consistently greater than the speed at which the 'money rulers' have expanded. Whether your money is in Euros, or dollars, or Yen, or some other currency, they all are worth less stuff than before. Some have fallen slower than others, which is good if you're interested in owning stuff.

The last observation: Imagine a fourth ruler that measures work -- the amount you earn through wages and effort. The 'work ruler' has also been expanding slower than the 'stuff ruler'.

Food for thought...