Mishalak

Huh. So I own a house. Yeah, Fannie Mae holds a lien against it, but I own it. That is different than last year. It is not all hugs and puppies, but I think this is a good change for me. I now enjoy beer in my own little slice of Denver while watching the steam/gases from the stack of the Zuni Station on a cold winter's night. And my Brussels Sprouts were good tonight. I have a long, long ways to go, but I am content for now. My next step shall be to fix the pipes and hopefully that will be the last practical purchase for the house and everything else will be "as I can afford it" fun things like apple trees and fresh paint.

And it is nice to finally be in a year where it seems natural to say "twenty something" instead of "two-thousand something". And I will get to be an old codger in the years to come. "Remember the Spring Blizzard of Oh Three?"

Well that is a pretty bad signal, it turns out. Eight years ago I posted that I was worried about Hewlett-Packard due to them putting on some commercials that did not actually promote any particular product, but were just vague "HP brings you nanotechnology" spots. This one, N is for nanotechology is one of the ones I was talking about. But looking back now on the performance of HP since then it seems like it was a very poor predictor of the success of HP. Now, this year, they are taking a big fall and losing there direction, but that is an awful long time between prediction and result. So I think that the vague "we're cool" ads are not as good of a signal of what a company is doing as I thought. Looking at HP stock price they only stumbled a bit in the year after I posted about that advertisement.

Too bad... it would have been a useful thing to be able to point to.

I bought this cheese on an impulse. It was labeled by Sunflower Market as "Wisconsin Blue Cheese, Bulk Cut". It was good cheese, but not great. Parts of it seemed almost Monterrey Jack Cheese like, very plain in flavor. But where the veins penetrated it was nice, sharp, and crumbly. I think I would buy it again, it is not extraordinary, but it is nice.

I sometimes think about why I am typically uninterested in big media properties like Star Trek, Batman, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Doctor Who, etc, etc, etc. This is not to say that they are bad, I just do not get terribly excited about going to see the big summer/Christmas movie as I did when I was young. Even when it comes with big huge updates to it where everything, you know, is wrong! In contrast I was interested in and excited by the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica a few years back. I did not like where it ended up, but that could have happened with any series.

What I think is different is the degree of change and the feel of what they were doing. When I read the phrase, "endless second act" in a post about the new Spider-Man I said to myself, "That is it. That is what I do not like." For all that they try to get readers and viewers excited about the big changes that they have in store for us nothing changes very much. Instead the "daring material" are things that would have been controversial ten years ago (and to be fair still are controversial among a set of white males with no social skills, hi Sheldon). The big changes always come with some some sort of reset button to take things back to the status quo. My metaphor for this is comparing them to a forest that has reached an old growth/climax equilibrium. There is change, but it is cyclical, slow, and usually limited to adding additional growth rings rather than anything actually radical.

Over time the changes will accumulate, but there is not room in the forest for more than the occasional new tree. Also the changes that do happen tend to be of the tragic fan-fic turn of events variety. Oh, poor Spock who is now without a home world. Tragedy off screen, millions dead, and no actual changes to the characters except to make them more Mary/Marty Sue like, but if people do not like it there is a built in reset button. More time travel for everyone!

On the other hand the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica was authentically radical. Rather than just a new iteration with enough updating to bring it to a new audience with more explosions and battles it actually told a different sort of story from the original series. The new series seemed, to me, to be more about cold war paranoia and technological fears instead of swashbucking in space. It kept names and some of the props, but came up with new reasons for them and new themes. I think if Battlestar were revisited again it would probably be a climax property, it would be once again about paranoia and technology because the new series is beloved in a way that that the old was not and the owners would restrict what the writers could do because doing something too radical could turn off the fans. And, unlike a most established property, they could do things that raised authentic moral questions instead of giving pat answers to settled areas of social morality. Old Trek, likewise, could have an interracial kiss when that was hugely controversial and only deal in platitudes when it was Next Generation.

I am not interested in just another "untold until now" story about characters I loved when I was 13. I want something new and preferably without an excessive number of battle sequences. Burn the forest and let something come up from the ashes! Well okay, you do not have to burn the forests (to save them), but I will be off busy looking at newer series rather than revisiting the old with a new foil variant cover. Alas, it seems for me this summer there is nothing like a Pan's Labyrinth set to be released. It is all remakes and reunions as far out as October.

I was listening to Fresh Air and they had on a guest talking about online dating. Having done it for years my advice to you if you are a young person is not to start and if you are older, quit. In fact if you are over 35 and still single stick with it. You, like me, are too old to start living with someone. It is a little sad that the opportunity has passed you by, but that is life. Opportunities escape us all the time. If I had been nicer, or actually nice at all, when I was younger I might have paired off with someone for the long term. Especially if I had put myself out and gone out to meet and make friends instead of drifting off into the sterile online world.

More specifically online dating is not intended to find you friends or mates. It is intended to separate you from your money and/or time. The longer and more you spend on the site the more they win. If you go online and immediately find "the one" they lose. Do not be fooled by the success stories. It is no different than accidental successes with any other placebo or scam. It is likely they they do not even know they are a scam. A hell of a lot of worthless remedies are promoted by the discoverer in the honestly mistaken belief that he or she is doing good as well as getting money.

Instead of looking for someone else out there who will make you happy you need to find the thing that will make you happy-ish. None of us are happy for long, humans are not built to be perfectly happy all the time. If you are happy-ish and have friends that is the best that can be expected out of life. If the close friendship that is a relationship happens out of this you are lucky and it is wonderful. If you do not have it, stop worrying about not having it and work at being happy-ish by yourself.

Right then.

Disregard any notices or rumors about me moping about saying, "Oh, I am not going to get my house. The deal is dead because of the damn sewer line." This thing is on due to the seller agreeing to fix the problems. All of them. So now I am a home owner and all that implies. Like being a responsible adult. So I suppose that I can no longer be known as Irresponsibility Lad and so I shall need a new nom de cape. Besides Irresponsibility Lad sounds too much like a hero's name and everyone knows that I am a villain at heart.

There are lots of fun things to distract me like trying to decide what sort of trees to plant, but since that will not happen until spring really I ought to be paying more attention to moving issues and how to arrange my furniture instead of dreaming of cedar and apple trees.

I do fully intend to live in this house for the next 30-40 years with my end coming there either being carried out quietly or in a blaze of gunfire and the classy, "You will never take me alive coppers!" But, of course, even the villains of the piece still need to have home owner's insurance and kowtow to the bank. At least until my mind controlling ale reaches the market, bwahahahah!

So what is my new name?

So. I am in process to buy a house. I hope to the stars that I have not bitten off more than I can chew. I did not think I had when I started, I even came in much lower than my initial estimate of how much I could afford, $95,000 instead of $120,000. The thing is that there is so much work to be done on this and additional things that would be useful. Like money to buy a shed to store things in, which are much more expensive than I would have thought.

On the other hand I tried an excellent new recipe for roasted chicken.

Gold is of very little intrinsic value. There are no major industrial uses. Gold is almost entirely used for personal adornment and investments. A reasonable approximation is that all the gold ever produced is 5,450,000,000 troy oz of which about 4,650,000,000 troy oz are still available for use. That gives around 68/100 of a troy oz of gold for every person currently living.

If gold mining continues at approximately the current rate and population growth estimates are correct the gold ratio will increase to about 80/100 of a troy oz for each person by about 2050. Thereafter the ratio would shoot up quickly with the decline in the world's population starting in no later than 2080. Eventually, even without new disruptive technology increasing the supply, gold will reach a critical tipping point where investment demand will no longer be sufficient to support the price of gold.

What is that number? Silver may provide an answer in its decline in value relative to gold at the end of the 19th Century. Then the total annual silver production shot up to a high of about 120 million troy oz a year and a total supply of about 7.5 billion troy oz. World population was much lower then as was world wealth. World population reached 2 billion in about 1927 when the world silver supply was about 10 billion troy oz. Silver had already come under serious pressure by that point so the change came at around 2-5 troy oz per per person.

Gold, in contrast, is only mined at about 72 million troy oz each year with a much greater world population to absorb it. So the answer on when gold will collapse is, in my opinion, not soon. Even assuming increases in gold production each year what I guess to be the critical ratio of around 3.5 troy oz per person will not be reached any time soon. Though we would be well on our way to about 1 ounce per person by 2050 if the low UN population estimates are correct.

The big difference with gold is that it is not consumed by activities like photography. Something like 85% of all the gold ever mined is still around, not lost, not made unrecoverable. So even with a lower mining rate we could start to reach the point of collapse by the end of the 21st century even without assuming disruptive technologies unexpectedly increasing annual gold production.

But for now you are all safe being gold bugs. Unless you are buying this year. Gold may still go up to $3,000/ troy oz, but I would not bet on it.

I do not directly recall when I joined dreamwidth. According to the system it was on the 9th of June in 2009 and the entry from that day is about cooking salmon with marmalade. I was in the middle of my breakup with Richard then so it is coming up upon two years for me now, but I do not remember why in the middle of that I joined Dreamwidth. Apparently I started posting here right away, but did not stop posting over on Livejournal. I think I have managed to lose some comments that way, but over all I think moving was the right thing to do since I do not know that I trust Livejournal.

I got to thinking about this due to three weeks for dreamwidth, which I had not noticed until tonight. It has been a strange few days for me and a strange two years.

No, no, not like that. I am listening to The Decemberists most recent album thanks to the Denver Public Library (lucky stars shine on them!). I like most of it and you should give it a listen if you like folk-rock. At this point I think there is nothing on the album that will become a new favorite song for me, but it is pretty solid. It has more of a modern country music flavor than their previous music, though they are not singing about trucks or dogs.