-Caveat Lector- COMRADES: cory hamasaki's DC Weather Report September 30, 2000 - Y2K plus 272 days. - WRP140 http://www.kiyoinc.com/current.html - Final - $5.00 Cover Price. (c) 1999, 2000 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and reproduce this newsletter as long as this entire document is reproduced in its entirety. You may optionally quote an individual article but you should include this header down to the tearline or provide a link to the header. I do not grant permission to a commercial publisher to reprint this in print media. This entire document is a Year 2000 Information Disclosure as defined in the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, S2392. --------------------tearline ----------------- In this issue: 0. WRP information 1. The Bully of the Bay 2. Winter's Here 3. Intel 4. So what's the deal with the market 5. CCCC --WRP Information-- Most of the WRP material is now flowing through our listserv. It's still open to all and subsidized by the members. I'm cutting back on the web WRPs and concentrating on the listserv. Join the open Weather Report mailing list, Click to subscribe to dc-y2k-WRP When you get there, you should select the digest option. At some point, we might close the list but for now it's still open. --The Bully of the Bay-- There's a major threat to the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay. This living disaster is ripping the eco system, digging the sea grass, and beating up on the ducks and other birds. What is this horrible savage beast, an alligator? A giant rodent? A toothy sea going gar? No. The name of this monster is the Mute Swan. The Mute Swan, graceful, silent, poetry in motion but not a native to the Chesapeake, it's crowding its way into the ecology, eating everything in sight, pushing aside smaller sea birds, and they're all smaller than the Swan. Two local environmental groups have gone public about the Mute Swan, kill it, KILL THE BEAST, get rid of it, we don't want its kind in our neighborhood. The solution is simple. I have pals who'll hunt anything that moves, autoloading shotguns, radio controlled dogs, jet propelled boats, just declare open season on the Mute Swan and the ecology will be saved. They'll want a BIG deep fryer and what, three pounds of corn meal and five gallons of peanut oil? Things are not always what they appear to be. --Winter's Here-- Winter's starting right on schedule. Massive snow drifts out west, rain where it's warmer. We've got night time temps in the 40's in DeeCee. The TeeVee news reported upper 30's in September! Meanwhile, Prince Albert trying to get out of the can, begged Maximum-Bill to release the emergency oil from the Strategic Reserves. And amazingly, he's doing it. Makes sense to me. No problems with oil, gas was plentiful all year, no inflation but as the election gets closer, the possibility that you might be inconvenienced slightly becomes a National Emergency! You mean, I might have to pay an extra 20 cents! Shocking. Did you have trouble buying oil or gas? I didn't. Well, I did goggle at the pump numbers. For a few weeks, I drove a truckasaurus, a Dodge Ram 1500 4X4, 4 door, Magnum V-8. I drove it down to Paul Milne's place, it was fun. The truckasaurus took $38 to fill up and I was using the cheapest regular that I could find. Big difference between the truckasaurus and the cory-mobile, an economical 4 cylinder sedan with a 5 speed transaxle. The cory-mobile gets 30+ mpg and it takes about $18.00 to fill the 13 gallon tank. The Baron's Jetta TDI gets 45 mpg on Diesel. But winter's here. If this is a half-way exceptional winter, I'll see my monthly heating bill triple and so will everyone else. Our Yuppie pals with their 5 bedroom tract mansions and inefficient all electric heat will drop into "resistive back-up mode" when the air temps fall. They'll see their bills quadruple, quintuple, or n-tuple as we say in the computer science business. Some of them could see one month's heating bill exceed one thousand dollars. Here's the reason. DeeCee in recent times has had fairly warm winters. In the 1970's, I saw the Potomac River freeze solid and that winter, a pal with a gas heated mega-size townhouse had a $600 heating bill. In historic times, DeeCee was much colder. There's an ice house under Monticello, Jefferson's mansion south of here in Virginia. Where did he get the ice from? He got it from ponds. It used to be colder. If the temperatures stay above 40, a heat pump is a pretty good compromise heating system. Our winters have been above 40 for decades, there were one or two exceptions but they were brief. The indications are that this coming winter will be colder than normal. This is not scientific. This is just my weather sense. It's little clues like, August temps in the 50's, September temps in the upper 30's, the snowstorm out West. I call this a clue. A religious person might see 7 scrawny cattle. Since the ground isn't heat-soaked, it will give up the little warmth that it has by the end of October and we'll be in full winter by November. If this happens, all the yuppie, heat pumped mansions will kick in their back up resistance heat. This is the costliest form of heat there is. Factor in the fuel adjustment charge as well as normal utility greed and we'll see yuppies crying like never before. Boo-hoo-hoo, by the way, where's my $3.00 cup of Starbucks coffee? Newsweek reports that sales of woodstoves are running twice as high as last year, selling at a panic rate as the sheeple realize that oil is in short supply and expensive. --Intel-- We saw a 22% fall in the price of Intel on Friday, September 22. It fell another 5% on Monday, September 25. It's still falling and it can't seem to get up. "Help me up." Big deal, it's still well above the 12 month low and doing better than my meager savings which are parked in money markets, CD's, and passbook savings accounts. Another way of looking at it is that Intel has a lot more to fall. So does Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon.com, and lots of others. The market has been going up, down, sidewards with great speed, this is a thrill ride. Goodness gracious. On Tuesday, September 26, Kodak took an even bigger fall. The market always goes up, it's a sure thing, you gotta play to win. The Kodak executives and the financial talking heads were on CNN screaming in terror, "We didn't know we were in trouble. All the numbers were good, up until this month's report. No one could have predicted this." Why should a company lose track of their bottom line 6-9 months after Y2K? Only a hysterical alarmist would have expected problems like this. After reading John Kenneth Galbraith's book "1929", this looks like a stock market out of control and a bubble about to burst. I'm typing this on a computer powered by a 200 mHz IBM-Cyrix Pentium clone. I paid about $40 for the CPU a few years ago. This machine is plenty fast. I have the parts to upgrade this, I have a couple 350 mHz AMD CPUs on the shelf. I just don't feel that I need the speed increase. Intel and AMD don't make a CPU anywhere near as slow as the 350, much less the 200. I think the slowest parts coming off their lines are about 850 mHz. I'm a power computer user. In 1983, I bought an IBM PC for $2,000. In 1984, I upgraded to a $5,000 XT. I build software for a living. Somehow, the technology has shot past what anyone needs to get a job done. I have another P200 that I use as a Fax machine and a P150 Internet terminal that gets a few hours use a week. A lot of the time I use my IBM 701C laptop, it has a 486 CPU and it works well. I suppose someone will buy all those 850, 900, 1.2 parts but it won't be me. I have three 1 gig disks on the shelf that I bought last year for $21. I still haven't filled up the ones in my systems so I won't be buying disks for a while either. We're in a Post-PC era now. I don't need or want a faster computer. I will get one when the price is, oh, 35 dollars for a 950 mHz CPU. If enough people have this attitude, the market value of Intel, Dell, etc. will hesitate, fall suddenly, bounce back up for a short while, and fall again and again until their share price accurately reflects their revenue potential. Instead of $500 parts and $2,000 computers, their market is $5 and $10 parts and $200 computers. Instead of a $60 share valuation, make it $6 or less. Maybe even 60 cents. This is neither good nor bad, it's just economics and the cycle of business. No one needs a $2,000 computer, few demand 1.2 gHz power. A $200 computer on the other hand, has a terrific market. We're following the decay curve of micro-electronics. The first scientific hand-held calculator the HP-35 was $400. I'm not counting the Bowmar Brain as a scientific calculator. I just bought an HP-6Solar for $9 and it does more than the HP-35. Graphing calculators are $80. Few need the power of a graphing calculator. I bought the HP-6Solar because for $9, I couldn't pass it up. It has transcendentals, statistics and even does hex, octal and binary. Where does this business cycle touch you? It's this. If we're seeing the tech companies on a glide path, get out of their way and out of their stock now. This also means, moving your mutual fund money to more conservative investments. On the other hand, if you see a hot market for $600 CPU chips, $2,000 computers, and an ever increasing demand for more powerful computers than 950 mHz, or maybe higher bandwidth, then certainly, keep your money in tech and growth funds. It can only go up, guarenteed. What feels right to you? What are you buying? Have you got your eye on a $2,000 Dell powered by a $600 Intel Pentium III 950 mHz? Or is a 9 dollar calculator or a wireless Internet email terminal more your speed? -- So What's the Deal with the Market? -- These are guesses. Unless Maximum-Bill and Prince Albert manage to divert Social Security money to the stock market, the rate of increase is not enough to drive the market up. Here's why. A couple of my boomer-buddies have retired. The leading edge of the baby boom is bailing out of the workforce. Sure, these are the exception, they have a million or two in stock and think they're rich, "Why cory, that's more money than I'll ever need." Well, no. Two of them were recently squeezed by specific stocks tanking. One lost twenty grand in Intel. Another lost a couple hundred grand in another firm over the last 6 months. B-b-b-but that's just a paper loss. Paper, shmaper, for Boomers who quicken their accounts every weekend, that loss is as real as losing a twenty dollar bill. Out of my small pool of pals, I know two who are retired and not only are NOT contributing to social security and their 401(k) but they're also drawing down on their investments for gas, food, clothes, Depends, Ensure, Viagra, Rogain, etc. If someone, a typical boomer, has a couple hundred thousand dollars in their 401(k), the additional 5,000 that they pitch in is not enough to drive the market to higher levels. Here's the rational. $5,000 of $200,000 is 2.5%. This is close to the "load" on a fund, the cost of operating the fund, renting the office space, printing the prospectuses, running a few odd ads on TeeVee, buying drinks for the office. There is no such thing as a no-load fund. All funds have a cost of operation. Some have an overt load or fee, others hide the load in the details of the accounting and the transaction engineering. The other part of growth is an increase in productivity. Not so much market share but actual increases in productivity such as: "goodness, that factory is making cars using garbage as raw materials." I haven't seen a real, accross the board, productivity increase. I have seen computers get cheap, cell phones get cheap, consumer electronics get cheap but other things, cars, raw materials, oil, energy, living space, have gotten more expensive. Some of the increase in productivity comes from exporting jobs to third world countries. The last cory-mobile was built in Mexico. There are negative as well as positive productivity factors. As for the run up in the market just at Y2K, I'd guess that cheap oil contributed to that, like a nice jolt of speed for a nag in a horse race. Unfortunately, this race goes on and on and on and our nag is in oxygen debt, spitting foam, and rolling its eyes. If this horse stumbles, we go down with it. So what will happen? Energy costs are a big hit, we are yet to feel that impact in the stock market. The yappers on TeeVee are yapping about the new economy being impervious to such trivia as the cost of fuel and electricity. In some cities, electricity tripled in cost. Tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars are being sucked out of our economy. Factor in the amount needed to drive the market up, add in the few leading edge Boomers who are drawing down, and we're looking at a side-ways market at best and possibly a deflating bubble. Then there's the real hit. In the late 1990's I used to hear stories about "making it big" in the market. Yups and Booms used to drop comments in conversation about option plays, Microsoft, Cisco, and other sure things. It's been about a year since I've heard such stories. I knew a guy who rode Microsoft up using options and margin accounts. I haven't heard boo from him recently. No surprise. Imagine that he put $5,000 into Microsoft in the early 1990's. Leveraged using options and margin, he might have turned that into $50,000 in a couple years. In another few years, he might have had a quarter million. By the end of the 1990's he could possibly have had a million dollars in a margin account. If so, the deflation of Microsoft in the last year takes his investment back to... $5,000. Such is the power of options and margin. The fall is much faster than the rise. It takes lots of doublings to go from $5,000 to a million dollars but only one half'ing to go from a million to $5,000. Do you feel lucky today? Well. Do you? The real hit is psychological. They've stopped yapping and are looking over their shoulders Late update, Thursday, September 28, both the NAZ and the Dow are up a bunch. Happy daze are here again. Summary - In the 1980's, IRAs, 401(k)'s, as well as state and federal pension plans pumped money into the market. Unfortunately, like a Ponzi scheme, it takes an ever increasing cash input to keep the price up, to pay for the TeeVee ads and the fancy stock brokers and their girlfriends. These ads, brokers, and what-not bleed off money like a slow leak in a tire. At some combination of dynamics, the inputs will not be able to keep the bubble fully expanded, much less expand it further. It's a leaky bubble at best. The more inflated the bubble, the harder it is to expand it further. The signs of the end times are irrational rises and falls, high volume but no increase in price, a market that goes sidewards. Dow up, NAZ down. Dow down, NAZ up. Both up one day, way down the next. Can't you make up your mind. The retirement of the Boomers draws money out of the market. For each Boomer who takes $50,000 out to live on, ten Gen-X'ers must put $5,000 into the market, plus a little more for the broker's girlfriend. --Lucky World-- Lucky World was an Korean supermarket in Falls Church. I stopped by to buy a couple sacks of rice and some snacks but they've closed. Stores come and go, nothing is permanent. I'm building up my "preps" because if the weather gets bad, if we have a "DeeCee is shut down by the ice storm", I want to stay at home, slip on my socks and make some chili and rice. SNIP SIG HEIL! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om