Author: cdwan

If you must whinge, hedge, and contextualize, please do so in comments after you’ve made up your mind.

In the spirit of _earthshine_s obsessive recording of workout details, here’s my observation for the day:

Weight this morning, post breakfast and all normal morning activities: 172.3 pounds
Hours of judo practice, including warm up: 1.5
Water consumed during and immediately after said workout: 4 pints = 4 pounds
Weight upon coming home post Judo: 170.2 pounds
Water weight sweated out: 6.1 pounds.
State of workout clothing right now: Soaked. Wrung out and hung to dry. Naaaaasty.

I do wish they would turn up the AC at the gym, just a smidge. That, or perhaps I need a lighter weight judo gi.

technolope, and capital_l came over last night, since we all collectively wanted to get together, but couldn’t muster the energy to make any sort of plan more complex than “we go there” or “they come here.”

On a whim, I had bought a pound of high-grade tuna that day, which we crusted with salt and pepper, seared, and sliced thin to share. technolope turned a bag of lettuce, a bunch of sun dried tomatoes, and a bunch of cilantro into a damn fine salad. Discussion ensued as to whether it was possible to have “too much” cilantro in a salad. It was decided that since a salad consisting entirely of cilantro would still be damn tasty, “too much” was not a major worry. We stretched the meal out with rice.

On a further whim I declared it time to dust off some bottle on the bottom shelf of the wine rack. I honestly had no idea any more what was down there, since we rarely drink wine at home and I know very little about the various appelations. The bottom shelf is allowed to sit quietly and age, basically forever, unless I take an active step to crack one of those mysterious bottles.

Turned out that we had a 1998 Chateau Latour Pomerol, which technolope declared to be at the “peak” of drinkability at 10 years old, because of some combination of region, style, age, and so on. Everyone agreed that it was a pretty darn good bottle, and it led to a mellow and wide ranging conversation late into the evening.

Life is good.

On a slightly shallower note, I just looked at the movie listings, and there are a bunch of movies that I want to see, in theatres, right now. These include:

* Dark Knight (duh)
* Wanted (even if it’s only a delivery vehicle for Angelina Jolie, I’ll accept that)
* WALL-E
* Kung-fu Panda
* Hellboy II (if you’ve ever wondered what those little mini-liquor bottles in the booze stores are for, it’s movies like this.)

Meanwhile, Iron Man is still in the AMC Lowes in Boston. Seriously.

I’ve really come to like Mike Sedlock’s blog on finance. I never used to notice the outright, blatent manipulations of the Fed, the SEC, and so on. He really lays it out. For example, yesterday the SEC restricted “shorting” on a variety of major lending banks including Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. “Shorting,” is essentially betting that the price will fall. Its an artificial way to get value out decreased prices. It works in a dynamic and rising market because there is lots of value to spare, and everyone wants an insurance policy. However when the falling value is driven by massive write-offs of bad debt … it’s not so good. It’ll only accelerate a death spiral as everyone starts to do it. Anyway, the banks on the protected list are the ones that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke says “need to rise in price,” because they’re an essential part of our home mortgage market … which it turns out is all that’s propping up the US economy anymore.

As Mike says “What of the others? Have they simply been thrown to the dogs?”

Consider for a moment: The core stability of the US markets appears to not be *production*, nor *consumption*, but an inflation of value in real property and the speed which which we can cycle money through our pockets and back to the banks. One can dance around, saying that the only way property values rise is if people have more money to pay bigger mortgages … but the terms of mortgages available artificially put a whole bunch of “value” into the economy.

If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what happened: Liars sold bad loans with low upfront payments to ill-informed people who couldn’t afford the real payments. The liars then sold those debts to banks, who promptly put the debts on their books. The banks then said “woo hoo! we’re flush with cash! lower those lending standards even more! Everybody makes money when we lower lending standards! Bonuses for all!” That happened all over the country, and really took off when people realized that since anyone could get a mortgage for basically any amount of money … price had no meaning. Even the common man got in on the scam, by “flipping” properties and doing nothing but riding the wave of imaginary money. Because the banks appeared to be doing well, they made large amounts of cash available, and this actually did accelerate the economy a bit, but not nearly as much as it would need to in order to balance out the housing balloon.

Housing prices approximately doubled between 1998 and 2006. The current slope of prices on the back side of the graph is approximately the same (though negative) to the rising slope. Therefore, we have about 10 more years before housing prices return to a reasonable level. Question for technolope: What controls that slope? Is there some external control, or is that an actual measurement of how fast the market (people) are willing to watch their house value drop / rise?

At first blush, it looked like just the people who got the most outrageous loans would be screwed. They would be left without a chair when the music stopped and lending standards tightened up. But then, the true horror was revealed: As those folks failed to pay their mortgages and instead started to default – the banks were short about a trillion bucks. So they started tightening up credit to cover their losses. Businesses that had hugely overexpanded (Starbucks among them) suddenly couldn’t support the stores that could only run with a high level of available credit. So now major, stable businesses that planned according to the idea that credit would be available are laying people off and closing stores … which only widens the circle of people who can’t make their mortgage payments.

Sensible? This is the stuff I’ve learned from reading that blog. I recommend it. His comment at the end is priceless:

Insolvency cannot be cured by short sale restrictions and many of those companies are insolvent.

So, question for the smart kids in the room: Who is the fed acting to protect? Is it the US taxpayer, the homeowners, or someone else?

Quick note to let everyone know we’re home safe, and (gah!) going to work in the morning.

other than that, take a listen to technolope and shuffle your money around. Be smart! Right now is the time when real people are gonna start to lose their life savings.

Oh, and if you hear about someone with a quick scheme to make a bunch of money on this “financial opportunity,” please kill them on behalf of me, the US taxpayer. Thanks. In my tax-paying capacity, I’m already planning to buy all those overvalued homes at nearly full price when we bail out the mortgage industry. I would rather not bail out a bunch more people who got screwed by a-hole bankers as well.

Yesterday’s lecture was, mostly, on emptiness. This is the hard core, serious, “once you get this you’re probably approaching omniscience” material.

I did not get it. I thought that I got it a couple of times, but then I figured out that my brain was just desperately lowering its standards for comprehension in order to get me to turn off the fire hose.

To my credit, I saw a lot of people who were just pencils-down gurrrrrrrr by the middle of the session.

At one point, he even lost the mighty translator. This guy has hung tough through all the rest of the sessions, but at one point, about 5 English minutes into a 10 minute Tibetan discourse he paused and then (in unmistakable Tibetan) looked up at His Holiness and asked “could you please repeat that?”

There was no hope for the closed captioning.

Today, we wrap up and head home. Two more sessions. What a great experience.

I write this from the “annex” at redmeds parent’s house. Because of additional family members staying tonight, we’ve been given the pop-top camper for the evening. Camping! Yay! We even saw some local wildlife on the way in – sadly, said local wildlife was a LARGE skunk. Booo! No skunks are needed here.

At the teaching, we went through the entire second volume this morning. Admittedly, this one covers some fairly formulaic stuff, rattling off the six perfections, with various suggested practices for increasing altruism, generosity, patience, ethical discipline, and so on. However, even His Holiness admitted that we had, perhaps, moved a bit fast. The afternoon was covered by a public address to which we failed to get tickets.

In fact, here’s video of the public talk. I haven’t watched it, but I’m sure it’s worthwhile.

He was in a feisty mood today, cracking jokes and making merry. At one point he was citing from another text and mentioned that said text would provide great value to many people if it were translated into english. He thought that perhaps the professors (who accomplished the translation from which we’re reading now) might take a crack at that. Of course, the translation crew spent 9 years on the current text, and grew slightly pale (they’re all up at the front of the room) at the suggestion. Then he said that they should be careful, since “even my head spins a little when I read this other text.” He then told a story of the teacher who composed that text, who wound up driving his students away for several years – he was so absorbed and grouchy with his work. “So be careful. Take a big rest first.”

Spent the evening listening to redmeds grandfather tell war stories about building runways on small islands in the Pacific during World War 2.

And tomorrow: A whole day on “the perfection of wisdom.”

About the first half hour of this morning’s session was dedicated to answering my mom’s question. I can’t do it justice here, but I hope to start synthesizing some of this stuff in the near future. I’m up to 50+ pages of notes. Suffice it to say, he broke it down for us.

One question asked today: “What is the distinction between sentient beings and non sentient beings. Is it mammals? Insects? Plants? Where is the line, and why?” This is one that my dad and I have batted around more than a couple of times. He responded that the distinction is at the point where a creature can feel suffering and seek any form of happiness. The difficulty, of course, is in telling whether a very small and simple creature feels pain. He has decided, in talking with many people including scientists, that creatures that are capable of independent motion towards things that help them and away from things that endanger or hurt them are sentient. This means that amoebas are sentient beings. To much laughter he joked, “Yes, even mosquitos and bedbugs are sentient. Most of the time. However sometimes, when painfully roused from a deep sleep, there may be a moment when we forget!”

There were protesters, mainly from a subset of buddhists who say that the Dalai Lama has forbidden them from fully practicing their religion. I don’t understand the details, and I was trying to maintain my equanimity so I didn’t go near the shouting people to get their side. There were also a few Chinese with signs saying “Tibet is and always has been a part of China.” Things remained peaceful and well organized.

We had lunch with a couple of women from Canada who sit behind us. We all buzzed over to the local Whole Foods equivalent and picked tasty things out of the deli and salad bar. The audience really is made up of all sorts. One of these two recently made a formal commitment to become Buddhist, and the other “just is,” rather than being anything in particular. The man behind me recently returned from a year abroad that turned into a year of study and prayer in india.

We made it into the second book today. So, incredibly, we may make it through all the material.

And now, a nap, prior to going to see King Lear with the fam.

I want to share some still-fresh impressions from the teachings that I’ve been attending.

long post, number 1