Been Busy June 20, 2013

Here, take a look at this.

I’ll take WTF for $500 Alex.

I Am A Ray Of Freakin’ Sunshine February 23, 2011

In the previous post Geoff tries some strategic optimism in the comments to help get me out of my “panic”. However, as I gaze into my dark, little crystal ball I have deep forebodings.

In the middle-east we have nations falling like a bunch of falling things. The latest of which has an ugly, oddly-dressed man who is threatening to torch his own oil-fields in a desperate bid to save his reign. Meanwhile in Egypt I think it’s likely that the government (and thus the Suez Canal) will fall under the control of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, who I think will use it to extort money from the Infidel nations. With either of these things alone the price of oil / gas will skyrocket. Both can easily come to pass.

I live in Not-So-Fabulous-Lately Las Vegas. This is very much a boom-town that had explosive growth from late 80’s to about a few years ago. For all of those years Vegas was very good at two things: filching money out of the wallets of the tourists who came here to party (and maybe get rich), and converting desert into neighborhoods and shopping centers. Those were the two very powerful legs of the economy here. One of those legs (construction) has been lopped off mid-thigh and the other one is hopping on the unstable national economic ground. Drastic rises in fuel prices will almost certainly sweep that leg. If that happens, Las Vegas will be devastated. This is a terrible place to try and weather any economic storm now, much less the hurricane that I think is coming.

In my own personal circumstance I have a fairly cushy and stable employment with a local quasi-governmental utility. The organization has long-term plans and will continue with them for the present which means steady employment for me. Of course, this was all based on models with only growth in the size of the city for the next 50 years. The picture becomes very different if the casinos start laying off people and perhaps even closing. Most of the people here came from somewhere else. I can easily see thousands of people flooding out of the city every month to return to where they came from and where they have family & friends. This will be a crippling blow to the organization’s revenue, and I can’t see that they will have any choice but to cut extraneous services (and departments) to preserve its essential core service and nuts-and-bolts infrastructure. My department is in the business of trying to get our customers to use less of our product and even paying them to do things to help them do this. Do you really think we’ll continue to do that in this scenario? Yeah, me neither.

On top of all this we have 0bama & Geithner’s bizarre financial gyrations and the Mt. Everest sized debt they are piling up. The Zero is already building his  high-speed WTF bullet-train to financial destruction. Yes, it’s nice that Wisconsin and New Jersey are trying to do things to take on public sector unions and whatnot. I wish them all success. And Yahoo! We have the GOP in charge of the House! Still, I get the feeling that it just isn’t quite enough.

I hope things don’t turn out this way. I really don’t look good in assless chaps.