a l l _ y o u _ c a n _ s a y . . .

Every once in awhile I am tempted to pull some money out of savings and buy a stock or two. My current savings account (ING) is at 3%. But my interest checking is at 5% (weird, I know – can’t bring myself to xfer from savings to checking though). Good, but maybe there.s more out there – some additional green that I am missing out on. The market is down – this should be the time to buy!

Then I start reading stuff (on the intarweb, of course, but also periodicals like Fortune). So there’s all this exampling and postulating and forecastifying. And then it makes me go check my IRAs and 401Ks. I try not to do this too much b/c it’s supposed to be long term, right? It’s all mixes of funds – risk spread across various equity classes. Last thing I had done, about 9 mos ago was move money (not all of it) out of REIT fund and into small cap int’l fund. My thinking was weak dollar and slagging real estate market. Oops. The REIT stayed relatively flat (down single digits), but the int’l fund tanked.

My other funds also tankered. Overall, in the last rolling 12mo period, I.m down 30%. Erk. Now I’m too fearful to check my other retirement accounts ( I have similar allocations at the other 2). I also have 30 shares of Dell that I kept from the bubble days as a reminder. I bought at $35. Oops. I have the actual shares sitting here in a drawer.

So, I guess I’ll be keeping my non-retirement shit in cash. Not b/c it makes sound financial sense, but b/c I’m a wuss. Also, seems like many of my company’s largest customers are having difficulties. If I get laid off, liquidity will be key.

Of course, yes, I realize that it’s this kind of group-think that creates this trends that escalate and cement and then take much more group-think in the opposite direction to undo. But I have a mortgage to pay, and soon some college tuition. When theory and practice thoe-down, practice kicks theory’s ass.

I’m guessing that I am in a minority. The way market dynamics work, the stuff that people like, and therefore want to buy, is the stuff that the market produces and distributes. So people apparently like boring music. Boring music is really easy to find. It’s on the radio – even satellite radio. It’s on iTunes, it’s at amazon.com, it’s in the stores – it’s everywhere. Even walking around the mall or sitting in a restaurant – they pipe the boring shit all over the place. Vaguely melodic noise. I can’t stand it. I’d much rather have silence.

There is non-boring music – it definitely exists. But getting it almost seems like work sometimes. And the thing about even good, non-boring music is that even that eventually gets tiring. I can listen to the same thing for awhile, but then I need something new. I got an account on emusic.com, which bills itself as a vast repository of indie music. This brings connotations of unique-ness. It’s made out to be all the great stuff that you’ve never heard of, that the market maybe didn’t accept, presumably because it was just that: different and unique. So I’m all over this thing. And actually, for the first little while I did find a bunch of stuff, although admittedly it was stuff that I had meant to buy or check out and happened to find it amongst emusic’s catalog. Eventually I found all that old Fugazi and a few Bad Brains and Daniel Johnston that I probably had on some 8 inch or crappy cassette someplace at some time. But then I was left to try and wade thru lots and lots of stuff to try and find something new.

Here is what I learned: finding music that is appealing is hard work. Not hard in the sense of developing callouses on the mouse finger, but tiring none-the-less. Find a genre, pick something, read the blurb, download the samples, maybe find something that might be good, download a full track, find out that it’s boring. Repeat.

They try and revive some of that old Napster magic from the good old days, much the same way that Last.FM also tries. That is, “We noticed you like XXXX, another member on here also likes XXXX and he likes YYYY too.” This works okay on Last.FM because you are listening to “real” music – that is, music everyone’s already heard of. It’s tougher on emusic because the catalog is pretty narrow. So it’s really hard to just get to that “We noticed you like” part”. Even then, I haven’t found that to be very helpful for me. But then, the Last.FM thing tends to just tell me stuff I already know, stuff like: you listened to Fugazi, you might like Helmet. Yeah thanks, but, I already knew that – in fact, here’s some Helmet on the old HD right now, but I’m actually already bored with that. Napster was kicking of the ass because you could see the whole freakin collection of that other dude whose songs you just downloaded. You could judge for your own self how closely your musical tastes might align by just reading thru the bands and tracks. Then you could start grabbing the ones in between – the outskirts of the Venn Diagram. It was a beautiful system – too good to last.

Pandora works really well, but I tend to just listen to it – which is fine. Sometimes I rank something up, I often jump over to the PC to rank something down (for some reason, my choosing of multiple HipHop tracks leads Pandora’s algorithms into thinking that I don’t revile R&B with a burning passion of disgust). But I only rarely have the presence of mind to note down the occasional new artist that I hear and find appealing. I need a voice-activated Pandora. So then I could just shout “Sucks!” to give a track the thumbs down or “Fuck yeah!” to thumb up and then a “Buy it” to the good new stuff. Although, as cool as this idea sounds, I can see problems developing as a side-effect of this already. I’d be shouting out Sucks and Fuck yeahs at all kinds of inappropriate times whether music was playing or not.

I posted the following on a forum many years ago and I’m re-posting it here because this is an election year and blogs should have political crap in them, right?

Partisanship. It’s all really just about how you divide up the money. There are some idealogical disparities thrown in there, mostly (I think) for entertainment value and as a distraction.

Democrats: social services, lowest common denominator, “safety net”, give the money to the poor (and/or lazy).

Republicans: corporate incentives, loopholes, contracts, defense spending, etc.

I think welfare is rife with waste and abuse. However, welfare is chump change compared to say, the missile defense program.

It is ironic that the welfare recipients don’t even friggin’ vote. But Dem dudes do get the votes from rich whiteys who feel guilty driving to the polls in their Bimmer.

What I do find interesting, at my particular local level, is the level of corruption on the Dem side in terms of kickbacks, shady deals, doling out contracts, etc. But that may just be b/c I live in a Dem controlled city.

I guess the summary of my little pile-on here is that, for me, it’s not Rep/Dem, it’s politicians and the incentives in the system. We have what we have because that’s just the way it’s set up.

And besides, do any of you wanna be a congressman? I sure as hell don’t. The system attracts a certain kind of person, shuffles them to one side of the aisle and the incentives push them to pass laws that make things more of what they already are: welfare teat-suckers and corporate fat-bellies. And between the 2 a gigantic pile of programs and tax codes…..

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