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| Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 | | 8:09 pm |
The low down
Annika wants everyone to post this... NAME: Gordon AGE: 46 going on 19 LOCATION: Seattle, WA - live in Shoreline, work in Kirkland OCCUPATION: game coder ("Technical Manager" to be precise) PARTNER(s): Gldngrrl KIDS: Dante. He likes baseball. His like of baseball is epic. Maybe he has a touch of aspergers when it comes to baseball. BROTHERS/SISTERS: Robin is a year older than me and lives in Spokane. She's been working at the same law firm since the early 80s. She and her husband Robert have 2 kids, Racine and Russell. Chris is 4 years younger than me and is a beach bum in Hawaii. He lives on a boat in a harbor on the West end of Waikiki beach. He teaches wind surfing, sells people disks of pictures of their surf lessons and manages 2 bars and a restaurant. He's single but may become something like a Russian bride - Japanese women buy dates with Hawaiian men. Richard is a 4 years younger than me and lives in Portland. He used to work for the City of Portand in the sewer, but now he works for a private company in the sewer. He and his wife Mary have 1 kid, Duncan. Kit is a year younger than Rick. He's a cop in Sandpoint, Idaho. If you sell someone drugs in a bar there and they arrest you for it, they might be Kit. He and his wife Mya have two kids, Jack and Morgan. Kit might spend too much time in bars seeing as he named his kids after booze. Chris, Kit and Robin are steps on my step-dad's side. Steps on my step-mom's side are Don and Rachel. Don is a trucker. Rachel is a chef, but I'm pretty sure she's a stay at home mom still. Rachel has a couple of kids, Michaela and Jarrod. I think Don has lots of kids, but I'm not sure. We don't stay in touch at all. PARENTS: My mom and step-dad just moved from Portland to Newport, WA (just outside Spokane). So instead of living near Rick, they live near Robin and Kit. My dad and step-mom live in Silverdale. We owe them a visit. It's been a while. PETS: We have a no-pets clause in the lease so we definitely don't have a rabbit and a guinea pig and there's no way we're going to adopt two more piggies. LIST THE 3-5 BIGGEST THINGS GOING ON IN YOUR LIFE: 1) My penis. ha ha ha ha ha 2) Maintaining the work-life balance. I prefer to think of it as the work-family-party balance. It's all "life." 3) My car's about to need another new transmission. Good thing it's paid off. It's approaching 100 thousand miles and the end of the battery life of the hybrid battery, so I really should trade it in. But I've been waiting for the Volt or the Leaf or some other affordable electric car. I might have to do another hybrid first, but that puts the electric off 6 or 8 years. | | Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | | 7:37 pm |
Stock market outperforms all other investment classes?
It's been a few years since I've been to one of those 401k meetings where we're told that the stock market outperforms all other asset classes over the long term. But I've been thinking about economics a lot lately and challenging all the assumptions. So I wonder... how well does the stock market do if you don't assume that dollars are a good measure of the value of something? What if you assume that gold is a better measure of the value of something?  Suppose that in January 1968, you bought an ounce of gold. It would have cost you $35.20. Suppose that you also bought $35.20 worth of General Electric stock (I chose GE just because it's been around so long and I was hoping to go back 100 years but couldn't find all the data). $35.20 wasn't enough to buy a share of GE in '68, but after splits and dividend reinvestment, that investment would have yielded 140.8 shares. It sure looks like stock is a better investment than gold. The thirty five bucks was worth about six THOUSAND in 2000 and even with the beating the stock market has been taking it's still worth a couple grand. Even with gold at a thousand bucks an ounce, the gold curve is measley compared to the stock curve. In dollars anyway. But that black line I call "adjusted close," that's the value of the GE stock in gold dollars. Gold dollars? Well... if you assume that a dollar should still be pegged to gold at 20.67 per ounce, then a rise in gold price in our dollars is really a drop in the value of our dollars. The value of gold is the value of gold and it's the value of dollars that fluctuates not the value of gold. So talking about the price of gold changing is looking at it backwards. So when gold trades at $20.67, a dollar is a dollar. If it trades at more than that, a dollar is worth less than it should be. So... if you take the value of the GE shares in our dollars and multiply it by 20.67 and divide it by the price (in our dollars) of an ounce of gold, then you've devalued it as much as our dollar is devalued. and that curve isn't so impressive. it's almost flat. And flat is exactly what the gold curve is in gold dollars - by definition. Or something like that. Although... maybe flat is impressive considering the devaluation of the currency... | | Friday, September 18th, 2009 | | 10:11 am |
Fractional reserve banking
Over the past year or so, I've been reading a lot of pop-economics and capitalist propaganda. This includes The Tipping Point and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Sway By Ori Brafman, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, lots of economics lectures and anti-banking tutorials on youtube (including this entertaining cartoon series about the evils of fractional reserve banking) and even a blog or two like Stephen's Random Blts that blasts the banking system every now and then. The idea that fractional reserve banking is a scam in which money is created out of thin air and that we're doomed to financial collapse because of it is very compelling. Yet something has been bothering me about it. I think I've finally put my finger on what's wrong with money in general and perhaps not as wrong with fractional reserve banking as with the gold standard for example. There is a big difference between "making money" and making "money." There is a big difference between creating wealth and creating money. And there's a discontinuity between what we as employees and consumers think of as money, tokens for barter of goods and services, and what gets printed up by the treasury or recorded in banks. Suppose I were to buy a potato for a dollar, plant it in my yard, water it every day, and in the fall dig up twenty potatoes and sell them for a dollar each. I would have invested a dollar and made twenty bucks, creating wealth, "making money." But doing this would have no effect on the number dollar bills in circulation. If there were no growth in the money supply, if dollars were printed only to replace the dirty torn ones pulled out of circulation, then as the population grew, the average amount of individual wealth would decrease. If there were no growth in the money supply, population would be capped by starvation. If there were no growth in the money supply, then the entrepreneurial potato farmer's increase in wealth would only be possible with a corresponding decrease in the wealth of another, capitalism would be a zero-sum game. It would seem that the money supply should grow and that the growth of the money supply should absolutely mirror the growth of the population (increase in the size of the productive work force) and the success of entrepreneurial activity. When I sell my twenty potatoes, nineteen fresh new dollar bills should roll off the printing presses. As individuals create wealth, the economy as a whole actually is worth more. A world with 20 potatoes is richer than a world with one potato. If my potato rotted in the ground and never sprouted, the economy as a whole is worth less and a dollar should be removed from circulation. Back when we were on the gold standard, the money supply grew based on how much gold was mined or panned. Unless you were a gold prospector, your productivity didn't have any effect on the money supply, just on the size of your share of it. Back on the gold standard, the money supply grew much slower than the actual value of the economy and that led to rich-get-richer poor-get-poorer zero-sum marxist-revolution-might-fix-it capitalism. With fractional-reserve banking, the money supply grows based on loans being made. This might (or might not) be closer to mirroring the value of the economy than gold is, but it's still arbitrary and disconnected. Banks are motivated to write as many loans as they can and the money supply grows faster than the actual value of the economy. So, what we need is some sort of governing body to meter the creation of money, some sort of... central bank! And that's exactly what we have. But... the capitalists tell us that central planning never works. The economy is too large and complex for a central planner to be able to make the correct decisions. (The capitalists say this about soviet-style central planning of manufacturing, but the argument is equally valid applied to central banks.) Our current system at least takes a stab at a money supply that grows and shrinks based on the actual value of the economy. The Fed manipulates rates and reserve requirements to change the money supply in an attempt to keep the economy functioning. What is the ideal? If there were no Fed (and no central banks in each country doing the same job), who/what is to decide how much money is in circulation? I'll continue reading and reflecting on this stuff, but I wanted to share my "Aha!" about the whole wealth vs. money thing. Economics should be simple and obvious. | | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 6:01 pm |
I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike.
I've been riding my bike work 2 or 3 or 4 days a week - just about every day I don't need a car. There's this cool site that lets you map your route with a google mapplet and it generates a graph of the elevation changes. The part of the ride between Lake Forest Park and work is always the same. 10.71 miles and mostly flat except a little hill that the office sits on overlooking a lawn farm. It's all Burke-Gilman and Sammamish River trail except about a mile on 124th between the trail and Willows Road. The machine powered vehicles fly through that stretch, but fortunately there's a nice wide, well paved shoulder. When I head in to work in the morning, I take the back roads from the North City Safeway to Lake Forest Park. There's not a lot of traffic. It's all 25 MPH and strictly enforced - probably the principal revenue source of the City of Lake Forest Park. And it's a really nice ride - downhill all the way. When I do encounter a car on my side of the road, I have to break to stay behind them otherwise I'm flying down the hill at 30 MPH or so. On the way home, I only tried those back roads once. That hill is brutally long going the other direction. The first alternate route I tried was 155th street from the trail to Lake City Way. I did that for a week or so, but the hill is absolutely brutal. Climbing 125 feet in a block (0.16 miles). So lately I've been braving the traffic and going up Bothell Way from Lake Forest Park to the cemetery. The bus lane is nice and wide and I'm off the road before dusk. So, if you're a crazy stalker, now you know where I live! And if you want to kill me, now you know where to run me over! | | Monday, December 15th, 2008 | | 3:43 pm |
The winners
The winners of the unicorn coloring contest... First  Second  Third  Weirdest  | | Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | | 9:13 pm |
Use it or lose it
The turkey's been in the fridge a week now, so it's got to be used or tossed. I had some leftover turkey noodle casserole for lunch and there's turkey soup in the freezer for another week. Tonight's dinner was Turkey Stir Fry! Never tried that before. It came out much better than one might suspect - the stir fry sauce overpowers the turkey flavor so it tastes more like stir fry than turkey and yet a bit of turkey comes through. The real test is that I didn't tell Anna that it's turkey. She's off in Gabe's room watching Digimon. Will she eat it???? Actually, I didn't watch her serve herself, so it's possible she just grabbed rice as she sometimes does. The biggest drawback of stir frying with leftover turkey is that the turkey is pretty dry and tends to stick in the bottom of the wok. Maybe lots of extra oil is the secret. In a bit I'll whip up some turkey pot pies with the last couple of cups of turkey. Those'll go in the freezer for use on some future night. If you freeze a pie for baking later, do you half bake it first? I bet google knows. Oh, speaking of google... have you seen "Google Alerts?" If not, google it! They're pretty cool. I set one up for "Gordon Ludlow" and so far none of the hits have been about me, but if anyone ever does mention me on the internet, I'll be the first to know! | | Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 | | 9:12 am |
Atlas Shrugged - My Car Failed
I've been listening to books on CD from the library on my commute. It's been a great way to catch up on the reading I never seem to find time to do. But I think Ayn Rand is cursed. At least when it comes to my car. Atlas Shrugged is about 50 disks, so it takes a while to get through. The first time I put it on my hold list, there were about 75 people in front of me, so it took a while to get. And once I got it, it took a while to listen to. When I was about half way through, my transmission failed on I-5 just north of Olympia. That was a few months ago. I couldn't renew the book, because other people had placed holds on it, so I had to return it half way through. Finally, I got it back again last month. Within a couple days, my car wouldn't start. Just a dead battery. No big deal. Yesterday, I started on the last disk of the book. And in the middle of the night a drunk driver plowed into my parked car. | | Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 | | 11:43 am |
| | Thursday, October 9th, 2008 | | 6:22 pm |
| | Friday, September 12th, 2008 | | 6:11 am |
| | Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 | | 12:26 pm |
| | Monday, August 4th, 2008 | | 12:38 pm |
| | Friday, June 20th, 2008 | | 2:48 pm |
Solstice picnic
Happy Solstice! I grabbed a sammich at QFC and headed off to St Edwards Park for an unplanned picnic lunch. It was about as much of a workout as you can get with less than an hour of walking. The route I took I descended 1200 feet on the 1.3 mile Water Tower / South Ridge trail and came back up on the 0.6 mile North Trail. It was gorgeous there today! Cool woods, sparkley lake, blue sky, warm and breezy. | | Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | | 10:48 am |
| | Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 | | 10:42 am |
Could be worse
Eating and drinking to excess and not exercising at all for 3 or 4 days only cost me a few pounds in the march toward the weight loss goal.  | | Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 | | 10:06 pm |
| | 12:51 pm |
I was wrong
Spokane gets a fair amount of snow in the winter - enough that I avoid driving over there during the holidays. But I had the impression that all of eastern washington is blanketed in snow all winter. Cross the pass, you're snowed in. Turns out, tri-cities gets a lot less. It's about half way between Seattle and Spokane. Here's some data: Seattle gets 4.9 inches of snow a year. Richland gets 7.8. Spokane gets 10.7. And Goldbutte Montanna gets 64.5. Another half-way-in-between number is the average snow depth in January. 0 for Seattle, 1 inch for Richland and 2 inches for Spokane. Now.... why did I think it was feet? | | Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 | | 1:16 pm |
95% fat free
I'm shooting for a high protein diet. So instead of 60-20-20 where 60% of the calories are carbs and 20% each are fat and protein, I'd like to skew it more toward the protein (but still low fat). This brings me to a 95% fat free lunch meat that I picked up at the grocery store Monday. It's Oscar Meyer Smoked White Turkey. The nutrition label on the package is NOT the same as the one on their web site. On the web site, they claim a gram of fat per serving and on the package, it's a gram and a half. I'll believe the package. The front of the package is the same as depicted on the web. It boldly proclaims 95% fat free. Of the 30 calories, 15 are fat calories. Wouldn't that be 50% fat? 50% is a little different than 5%!!! OK... let's assume that they're claiming that it's 95% fat free by weight rather than by calories (I think that's the way it really works in the world of food packaging). There's 4 grams of protein, less than 1 gram of carbs and 1.5 grams of fat per serving. Wait a minute!!! 1.5 grams of fat in 6.5 grams is 23% fat. Oh... but the serving size is 28 grams. 21.5 grams is water and/or non-food turkey parts. 1.5 grams of 28 grams is 5.36% so the product really is 94.6% fat free which is 95% give or take a percent. (probably close enough in the world of food packaging) Hey... wait a minute! Fat has 9 calories per gram. So there should only be 13.5 calories from fat. If there's 15 calories from fat, that would be one and two thirds grams of fat. One and two thirds divided by 28... That's 5.95% fat. Is 94% fat free "close enough" to 95% fat free? In any case, it really isn't a high protein, low fat food. It's got the same number of calories from both. So, 95% fat free isn't all it's cracked up to be. | | Friday, January 4th, 2008 | | 1:35 pm |
Resolutions
My New Year's resolutions this year are:
- Get the debt under control
- Get in shape
I've been better about not spending money quite so far beyond my means for almost a year, but slipped over the holiday season. Last Spring, I started an Excel spreadsheet to track the balances of my dozen or so credit cards. The line graph of total debt is encouraging when it's dipping and motivating when it's not. Before that I mostly lacked the discipline to restrain myself from buying whatever I wanted at the moment. And when I was good, there wasn't any feedback. Tracking does wonders.
In 2006, I got serious about weight loss (again). When I went in for my physical, the doc pointed out that I was up to 200 lbs from 185 the previous year. So, I started working out 90 minutes day. 30 on the elliptical, 30 on weights, and another 30 on the elliptical. And I watched what I ate. I was crunching a lot at that time, so I was eating dinner at the office. Instead of the usual pasta and giant Claim Jumper entrees and such, I'd just have a salad or an appetizer for dinner. Between the diet and exercise, I was down to 175 for my physical in 2007.
Over the holidays, I got lazy about that as well. From a low of 165 lbs, I'm back up to 185. I can't really work out for more than an hour a day these days. There just isn't enough time. But I'm going to really start hitting the weights and switch my diet to high protein, low fat, low carbs. I'm going to build as much muscle as I can and lose as much fat as I can. My goal is to be back into 32 jeans, where I was in my skinny high school days. Last year I was down to 33, so that's a completely reasonable goal. (Now, the 34s are a bit tight so I'm back in the 36s.) In my high school days, I weighted 145 lbs, but I had no muscle mass at all - just skin and bones. So
I think my goal weight is going to be somewhere around 165.
So... no beer for me! It works against both goals - frugality and slenderness. Wish me luck! | | Monday, February 27th, 2006 | | 6:15 pm |
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