Hello pezz, report, Boxing Day, December 26th, 2010.
I did enough work for today and for just about all the days of 2010 leading up to today.
I am taking off the rest of the year, to relax, reflect, and rejuvenate.
My 6-years young daughter coconut and I have come to our favorite island. We will gather with her best friend Paul, and his dad, and my Vancouver pal and his young adult daughter. Yes, a no-wives-allowed holiday, wonderful, is it not, the best of all worlds.
I have trained my coconut well, to pack not as her mama would, but compact, thought-out, practical, and like father like daughter, packing her own iPad. Coconut uses her iPad to manage her Piggy Bank, note her Secret Diary (coconut is making weekly entries, complete with tagged photos and manipulated drawings), practice her Chinese characters, do math, paint, draw, look up facts, and discern the truth. Wonderful.
Even better, we did not have to suffer being groped by good-for-nothing-else cretins empowered by wastrels and acquiesced to by tax-serf sheeple who for strange reasons believe they are the electorates and in charge; but I digress.
We do not have our usual house on the beach, but are situated a few feet away on the same beach a bit closer to our favorite restaurant on this island.
We ordered provisions a few days ago, got the house staff to get busy, and stocked enough for the entire group of six until 2011. While at the hong kong airport we spontaneously exchanged some credit for goodies at a geewhizbang specialty shop the motto of which is "creators of fine gastronomy, passion for life, obsession with excellence, guardians of traditions, designers of the future".
Usually I would have collected another gold coin per my airport tradition, but this time we spent a coin's worth on grocery as one would at any supermarket, remembering that one must give back some so as to receive more. There seems to be some unfairness built into cloud ATM system.
Who can know, once the revolution gets under way all goodness may just go extinct, and if not, the globalization that fails to drive our planet to revolution may instead cause wild inflation of a kind powered by 2 billion people empowered by double digit annual and seriously real income gains.
Another worry. I understand that china is now providing outsourcing services to make efficient the day-trading arena of USA domain. This is worrying. For if the USA market is made 'efficient' - meaning looting reduced from fat to meager, or shutdown altogether, the cloud ATM schema would suffer greatly. A worry indeed.
Offsetting the worry is gold, naturally.
Ten years ago our very small bag of groceries carried onto the plane would have cost us about 30% of today's price. Given that gold has gone 'up' about 4-5X in the mean nasty time, I say gold has done its job, as it is supposed to, ordained to, and thank goodness did. I cannot think of a lot of reasons why the next ten years would be different from the last ten years. Can you?
In the greater scheme of arrangements gold has done well, averaging an effectively tax-free 10% return per annum since 1971. I cannot think of many investments doing that well with so little fuss, and no management fees ! Can you?
Investment is difficult enough as it is, and there should be no reason to decrease the odds by putting faith to .... Well, never mind, past is past.
Over the next few days let us expend some synaptic cycles to the future.
Cheers, tj |
