Word of the Day: Decadence

Now this is NOT a word that would be associated with Hurricane Katrina victims, the coming victims of Gustav (Katrina Part 2), or the New Orleans area in general.

How did this come to my mind, you ask? I was watching an episode of Oprah on Friday (they advertised Bill Cosby as the guest, but it turned out to be a rerun). I sat through the first 15 minutes or so, and then moved on because I already saw this show when it first aired. However, Bill said something very powerful in that first 15 minutes that I had completely forgotten.

He said people didn’t bother to evacuate from the hurricane because of decadence.

This made my hair stand up, because it seemed like the incorrect usage of this word. But when you really think about it, it’s PRECISELY the correct analysis. Look up “hedonism” and you get a better understanding.

There were scores of people (and still are) in that area who live their lives with everything handed to them—Uncle Sam pays welfare and food stamps for them to eat, provides subsidized housing for them to live, provides (through state subsidies) transportation, basically everything except wipes their asses and works their jaws to chew. It wouldn’t surprise me if Medicare covered home health aides just to do these jobs for them—it would be expected in a place like that.

Then they breed, and Uncle Sam picks up the tab for their births. This hedonism continues for countless generations until this is the only thing known as a way of existence. Then something happens, and they’re waiting for someone (meaning Uncle Sam or a state-level person) to come to their house and whisk them away in luxurious air-conditioned comfort. Then, they expect to MAINTAIN that luxurious air-conditioned, government-subsidized, handed-to-them lifestyle wherever they happen to wind up.

This is the normal definition of decadence turned on its head. There are no silver spoons, limos, mansions, or yachts involved here—only FEMA trailers, purposely misused FEMA debit cards, welfare, and corruption as far as the eye can see.

As we speak, there’s a CNN report of a woman who complains about the bus pickup point arrangements—buses provided by the state to evacuate the carless, the elderly, the sick and injured, and those who got the shaft last time around. FREE BUSES, and this woman is still complaining, because her elderly mother is in a wheelchair, her sister is pregnant, and they had to stand out in the hot sun waiting for their bus to arrive. According to her, “handicapped people and pregnant women should’ve gone first.” Where would that leave HER, I wonder—she wasn’t pregnant OR handicapped, and those buses she was complaining about WERE the first wave of evacuations, along with any hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes/senior centers requesting evacuation.

The complaining begins already, and the storm hasn’t even hit yet! This lady was really saying “me first.” How decadent. You'd think she'd remember to bring an umbrella for shade, but no.

Then the storm hits, and all of a sudden, this becomes a way to get new stuff—Red Cross hands out food, clothing, hot meals, water, and a few other essentials. Other organizations hand out more stuff after everyone else has left the area. Uncle Sam brings in fully-furnished and stocked trailers, furnishes and outfits temporary homes in town, and/or picks up the tab for hotels, temporary housing in town (usually at exorbitant rates), or whatever shelter needs are warranted—it’s like Christmas. Then, the cycle of welfare, food stamps, and Medicare/Medicaid-funded decadence grinds on, only with a new address. Some of these people will be going from one disaster (and all its booty) to another (getting all new booty), never knowing true suffering and sacrifice unless you count the times they had to stand in line for something without any air conditioning. Is that hedonism or what?

It's what they've come to expect because we've given it to them for so long. As the band The Dead Kennedys would say, the comfort they've demanded is now mandatory. It also explains the throw-away society I experience here every day with apartment complex residents throwing out or abandoning perfectly good stuff because they don't want it any more, including fathers walking dirty cloth diapers up to our dumpster because they don't know how or don't want to deal with them.

My former neighbor here was from New Orleans (well prior to Katrina), and she told me that some women join retail theft rings so they can get free designer clothing, or to steal everyday stuff for resale at so-called "lingerie parties" or on E-bay. This would be the one thing NOT provided to them by Uncle Sam—clothing, much less designer duds, unless they abuse a FEMA debit card or steal it.

So what’s the difference between the normal hedonism and this style? Both are don’t-make-me-move-or-even-turn-my-head lifestyles, but one is paid for by the participant, and the other is paid for by you and me through taxes. I’m tired of paying for this end of the hedonism scale, aren’t you?

Hurricane Katrina helped New Orleans clean out some of the hedonists, and hopefully Gustav will get the ones Katrina missed, as well as destroy the area so they can’t return.

Ted Nugent said something very insightful about welfare On Glenn Beck's show last Friday: "If I ran the country, welfare wouldn't exist. I've advised federal and state-level committees on what to do about welfare--end it completely. If someone is hungry, they can go to the nearest church. With their gold and jewels, maybe they can make you a sandwich." Go Ted!

Two More Games You Don’t Need

You probably don’t participate in any of these, but lots of other people do, and for no good reason.

1. Direct deposit of your paychecks to a debit card through a check cashing place—I just saw a commercial for one of our largest check-cashing businesses offering people direct deposit to one of their special “easy breezy” debit cards. Here’s the downfall of this little scheme: just as they take a percentage of your check upon cashing it, they will also take a percentage of your paycheck before depositing it onto your card. Depending on how often you get paid, this percentage can add up to a tidy sum of guaranteed income for the check cashing place.

By belonging to a real bank or credit union, you can get your direct deposits sent to your ATM card for free.

2. The much-touted T. Boone Pickens “oil salvation” plan—you may not know that T. Boone Pickens (“Boone” to his friends) has had the natural gas market cornered for some years now, because he no longer makes money from oil (even now). The sticky part of Mr. Pickens’ plan is that getting the power from his magnificent wind turbines (some 35x more power than we run through the grid already) are under protest by greenie-weenies. This means we won’t see any of that magical wind power for at least 10 years, but the abundant and domestic natural gas PLUS massive car conversion to burn it is just what the economy ordered for a failing auto industry and securing an already-made fortune for an ex-oil tycoon-turned-Swiftboater.

The existing electrical grid cannot handle the massive load of incoming wind-generated power, whether in raw form or stepped-down to a transportable current (we currently get power through our lines at 400volts, which is stepped down to 220 volts at substations, then stepped down again (at neighborhood transformers) to 110 current for household use—this means that 390 amps are lost from the power source to our houses each and every second of the day, but this is what it takes just to get 110 power to your home. Now multiply this times the number of households in America (and some businesses as well), and you see exactly how enormous the power loss is. By introducing a new, vastly more powerful source of generation without the necessary new grid, substations, and transformers to handle it, it’s a giant waste, not to mention probably chalking up to be a bigger leak in the transmission of energy to your house. This is why the greenie-weenies are up in arms about the new transmission lines, besides the fact that they don’t want them in their backyards, or running through public lands (which belong to ALL of us last I heard).

Also, have you noticed the lack of brown-outs and black-outs we’ve experienced so far this year? A cooler summer in spite of global warming is the reason for that. It looks as if our ancient grid is performing the task quite nicely in spite of the doom and gloom from well-heeled politicians and wannabes, and our “energy problem” is really more market manipulation than over-demand.

Next time you watch TV, notice the latest T. Boone Pickens ads no longer include wind energy images and talk. He’s finally starting to come clean about his “plan for clean energy”—he and several high-ranking congress-critters (Nancy Pelosi for one) are invested in natural gas, and intend on making MORE money off our transportation backs. Boone already has the natural gas market cornered, and is trying to create more demand for it by using fear and intimidation. It doesn’t help that the natural gas market has plummeted from its recent market highs.

MY solution to the "lack of future fuel" mess? There are companies operating RIGHT NOW that make diesel fuel from trash and E. coli, and I say we wait for those to come online. They're already making this fuel for the military overseas (Iraq is proving to be a fertile experiment ground), and it will eventually trickle down to us as all other commercially-viable things do. The military and NASA brought us such useful things as Velcro and zippy bags, so it won't be long now.

Two Games You Really Don't Need

I recently succumbed to two things: checking out the Grocery Game and visiting a Trader Joe's store. Both places had mass appeal online, so I took a dive.

Here's what I found:

1. Trader Joe's is all private-label, so you don't really know where your food is coming from, and have nobody to contact if a problem arises. Sure it's cheap, but it is ORGANIC? Other than meats and some produce, no, and it's all loaded with more sodium than salt itself. The produce is all pre-packaged stuff, so you really aren't saving much there. Trader Joe's is a FINANCIAL HEALTH store, and only for Trader Joe, whoever he is.

2. The Grocery Game (found here) is a pay-to-play version of what I already do on my own. My problem with it is they promote too much in the way of convenience foods and unnecessary items as savings areas. I save more just in per-unit prices, using basic items, and keeping the shopping list short than they tout in "savings deals." This game is obviously for working people who otherwise don't have the time to stay home, do the math, and cut the coupons.

3. The Drugstore Game (found here) is basically the same as the Grocery Game, only with rebates thrown in--again, I can do better on my own.

UPDATE: Just for fun, I visited the big-name drug stores near me and got those rebate books to look inside--as I suspected, they were filled with brand-name items I don't use, which tells me the rebate is how much they overcharge in the first place! Why buy a rebate item just to have to wait for your own money back?

Marketers are also playing into the grocery and drug store games to rack up sales for their products--the major pitfall of these games. All it takes is $1 for a 4-week trial membership, and that's plenty of time to see how it works and form a product marketing plan around it.

If you keep a price book, are diligent with your unit pricing, and willing to down-shift to basic materials (baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, large cuts of meat, uncut produce, etc.), you do better than these games will ever save you, and cut out a whole lot of administrative work to boot. I'm just appalled that someone actually had the gall to make one of them a business--most stores have online sales flyers, and you can do your own loss-leader, coupon, and rebate match-ups for free with less paperwork. I guess some people need spoon-feeding in these tough times.

If you want to play with coupons, here's a strategy that makes use of coupons by month and not just week. Add this to your Grocery Game (or personal strategy) and watch the savings compound even more!

TV D-Day: Will You Need a Converter Box?

You may already know the answer: yes. But some of us don’t think we really need one, because we’re already on the cable system.

Surprise, surprise! Just because you already have cable doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. You’re not even safe if you have the cable going directly into your TV.

According to Red Tape Chronicles, the only people who WON’T need converter boxes are those who are already using digital subscriptions. Some cable companies themselves are making the switch over to digital so customers won’t lose any of their channels, but others (like Cox) aren’t making the move—they expect YOU to make the move by buying a converter box or switching to their digital service. They'll still be broadcasting in analog format, and have no plans to change.

Individual channels themselves are also making the switch so viewers can still receive them, but a lot aren’t—they’re making YOU do the converting work, which means you won’t receive those channels after February 11, 2009, without a box, a digital subscription, or a TV designed to pick up digital signals.

Any channel you watch now that isn’t hi-def crystal clear NOW means you may lose it after February. They’ll still exist, and they’ll still broadcast, but you won’t be able to watch them—they’ll still be in analog (like the Sci-fi channel, and others). You may think this is all right, and that losing some channels is okay because they’re excess anyway, but YOU’LL STILL BE PAYING AS IF YOU’RE GETTING THEM.

Basic cable (with no box and no other adjustments by you) after February 11 will include local channels and just a fraction of the channels you receive now (the ones who bothered to make the digital broadcasting move), while special channels that require a box now (HBO, Starz, etc.) won’t be affected at all—the existing box will do the converting. All those newly-blocked-out channels will still continue to show up on your bill even though you can’t access them, and the cable companies expect you to either shell out for a box, shell out for a new TV that’s digital-ready, or bump up your cable service to digital channels.

It’s bad enough we all get charged for 50-some channels when we really only watch about 10, and if we want those 10, we have to get basic cable, but sheesh! This amounts to a price increase in many ways just to watch TV.

Okay, you may be thinking you’ll just go internet for your TV, but it could be costing you more than your cable may come out to be—for example, let’s take The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: on the internet, he used to charge .99/show (which would've been $20/month just for his show), but now they’re free with a 48-hour time delay. Some TV shows will charge a fee per episode, while other will have a time delay to let the TV broadcasts happen first. How fast will those individual show fees add up to surpass your current monthly cable bill?

The cheapest way out of this mess is to buy a converter box while the government is still in the subsidizing mood. Otherwise, it’s cha-ching time for the cable companies and the electronics stores, and guess what the hot Christmas gift will be this December?

To make things worse, that converter box will monitor your viewing habits just like TiVo, and keep a record of what you've been watching (or not watching, in the case of ads) so advertisers can more closely tailor ads to something you WILL watch. Big Brother also gets into the act by knowing who's receiving possibly-subversive channels (heaven forbid you get a Muslim station in your own home, or even BBC). How will they know, you ask? The Patriot Act, of course!

I guess you need to ask yourself if this is the time to wean yourself off TV altogether, or how you're going to make the move to a digital channel array--box, new TV, digital subscription, or internet with time delays or possible fees?

Why are we even having to go through all this crap, anyway? Because the military wants your UNHACKABLE analog channel bandwidth to run their unmanned military vehicles on. So far, we have unmanned drone planes, unmanned submarines, and soon will come unmanned tanks. Even NASA is reaping the benefits of much older technology--unhackability (to date, nobody has hacked into the shuttle or space station computers).

UPDATE: Apparently Cox has had a change of heart, because now they're running a PSA that they WILL broadcast their lineup in digital format. Call your cable provider to see if they intend to leave you twisting in the digital wind or do the converting themselves.

UPDATE: Kill the cable box and get free TV.

Cheap Diesel From Trash

Never mind Al Gore, never mind Boone Pickens and his gas/wind market-cornering attempts, and never mind drilling in Anwr--a company called Rentech is making jet fuel and clean diesel out of TRASH and they're doing it RIGHT NOW!

Article about their clean synthetic diesel fuels--they just might be saving our airline industry single-handedly.

Trash is free, and since this company's already in business, all we need to do is buy their stock to facilitate expansion. Why diesel, you ask? Diesel cars get 30% better mileage than gas cars. Expensive windmills won't have to be purchased, land won't have to be ought or otherwise commandeered for the windmills to go on, and we won't have to endure another stall tactic from Congress--Rentech is already working for the military, so they already have Congress's blessing.

No EPA roadblocks, no environmental weenie objections, and no expense other than expansion should come from this as far as I can see--it's the ideal solution. We may have to start IMPORTING trash, but otherwise, this may be it.

Investors: this stock trades on AMEX under the ticker RTK.

Where did I learn about this? The Glenn Beck show last night. Why isn't anyone else talking about this, especially Congress? I think they either want this to be a surprise, or knew about it all along and are waiting for reports from the military as to effectiveness.