Google Founders Sergey Brin (L) and Larry Page

Google has spent money like it was growing on trees the past few years with one notable purchase of youtube.com for the paltry sum of 1.6 billion dollars. Which coming from the Internet industry I cannot see why that site demanded such a high price, they already had a pretty good thing going with video.google.com.

Regardless of their spending habits it is reminiscent of  the dot bomb days where people were spending investment money like they had earned it drew huge salaries like the gravy train would never end. Now it appears that Google may be heading in the same direction as the other dot bombs.

Google has been quite recession proof at least it appears in their stock prices. But how do you really value a company which has virtually no assets. I mean were talking a little bit of real estate in California and a room full of servers. There really is nothing tangible to justify the billions of dollars worth of investment.  This was very appear ant during the market crash of 2008 as google hit some lows just under 300.00 per share. Since that time it has recovered some but is now on a slippery slope once again.

After the announcement of the stock sale though the SEC last Friday the stock began to tank and at close of today Monday Jan 20, it had lost another 9 percent.

I dont think there will be much to keep this from falling through the floor. Maybe a government bailout after all google is too big to fail. what would we use as a search engine? Only time will tell and I could be wrong but I smell another stinker here.

Doesnt Mean Anything.

With over 10% unemployment and more and more people on the edge of loosing their jobs everyday. I can only say one thing. You did it to yourself. See, it turns out that it really wasn’t the gluttony and greed of wall street that caused the economy to tank. But slow protracted death from a million pin pricks of individual greed.

It all boils down to not supporting your fellow countrymen. When you decide to purchase an item, it usually is based on cost. The cheapest product gets your dollars. Not considering that it may not support or encourages growth here in the states.  Im sure a lot of you have heard this before, but refuse to listen. Nobody wants to blame themselves for a bad situation and that is your demon to deal with.

Point is since president Bill Clinton allowed the tariffs to come off of imported products the acceleration of the decline has increased where products are made so cheaply by children that work for 50 cents per day. There is no protection left for anyone’s job in this country.  Its unsustainable and its idiotic to think that when you buy a product made in China that it does anything good for America.

It has gotten to the point now where previously “apple pie” American companies are starting to outsource to Asia for their workforce which used to be here in the states. These are VERY BAD companies and your a straight up idiot for doing business with them. Every time you call XYZ company and end up talking to someone who cant speak English you are encouraging the outsourcing practice which is costing American Jobs.

Its not too late, and it will take some sacrifice on the American consumer to buy a bit less, but buy American. We can turn this around. But not if  we keep stabbing  our neighbors and friends in the back by buying items that are not Made In The USA,  At the very least Assembled In The USA, still provides someone here a JOB.

Do the right thing. If you Buy American, You provide Americans JOBS. you buy Made In China, Taiwan, Mexico etc. You Provide Them Jobs.

Its a sign on the times. As a side note of the current economic situation SPAM , Special Processed American Meat is making a new debut on the American table. Not since WWII have so many people been enjoying the familiar yet somewhat unidentifiable jelly covered mass.

Hormel the company that makes SPAM must be doing well as they are currently running advertiesments to show how “hip” and “exciting” SPAM can be.

Not everyone grew up during WWII when many creative ways to actually eat the meat besides fried or chopped up with potatoes. Hormel has a website www.spam.com which provides a few tasty ways to ham it up with SPAM.

Lest we forget that memorable Monty Python SPAM skit which showed some of the popularity it has in the UK as in my own opinion is about the tastiest thing on any traditional English menu.

Most people know about youtube and if you dont well you live under a rock. Youtube is fine and dandy for little video messages but does not lend itself well to full length feature films because of the 10 minute video clip length. Google no longer allows new uploads to their own video service. What was uploaded to video.google.com is still there and there is quite a few good full length videos there to watch but no new content will be added.

So aside from the clunky 10 minutes per segment video of Youtube there are a few other options. A lot of classical movies like what you would watch on TMC are available at the Internet Archive not only can you look up websites from yesteryear or look up what a website looked like 10 years ago but they have for some time been doing video and audio programs there. There are thousands of videos which are open source and can be watched as well as downloaded so you can then watch them on your computer or burn them to DVD. Also the video quality on most are of a high quality resolution.

You can search up movies by name or by genre or by alphabetical order.  The Internet archive project also has many audio dramas which can be listened to. Growing up I used to listen to the CBS radio mystery theater. A time by gone of when radio was, you can find many of the more popular radio dramas.

But the Internet archive is not the only place to find movies. Some of them not so legit, I say that because I am pretty sure they dont have the licensing to hold or distribute the media which they have. For instance one site I have seen has had some pretty recent video, although low quality handy cam taken in a movie theater someplace in Russia or other country (due to Arabic or Cyrillic subtitles). I can only assume that sites like these must be hosted somewhere beyond the long arm of the US copyright laws because some of these movie sites have been continually running for years now without interruption.  One site in particular is davidmovie.com and this is just one of many that I have seen or heard about  on the internet.

The movie industry certainly has to know about these people who are doing these websites and the people who are uploading the videos but is not doing too much in the way of changing it or enforcement. It could be also related to another blog I posed about the piracy paradox where that may be the case of the piracy creates a market for the material.

In my opinion it would certainly make a case for Hollywood to make better movies. If everyone can view the movie, and then decide if its worth going to the movie house to see, that would create an incentive to make worthwhile movies. It is in much the same regard that video rentals can create a justification on if a video is worth purchasing and adding it to your collection.

Solar panels in a summary statement are really cool devices. they simply convert the suns energy (although not very well) to electricity. In my book I discussed a few ideas for solar panels and their use but digging around I found a place where you can make some good money with a solar array.

Usually when people get solar power they get it for “green” and “warm fuzzy” reasons which usually entail a system that will supplement the power to their house. But I seen someone selling a 750KW solar array on eBay the other day for grid inter tie use. This bad boy doesn’t even hook up to your house it hooks right up to the utility system and feeds power to them while the sun shines. Great idea especially since the heavy power use is during the day when people are running air conditioners.

The price tag for this system was somewhere around $800 grand. An expensive solar array for sure. So how would one go about making any money of a solar system like that?
Checking into it I found out that most power companies have to pay you for the power you generate and put on their grid. This figure is about 1/2 of the rate they normally charge a customer. so if you pay about .07 per Kilowatt hour then you can figure the utility will pay you the wholesale rate of .04 per Kilowatt hour.
Considering an average of 9 hours of sunlight per day 320 days of the year the net result of your very expensive solar array is $86,400.00 per year. It would take you 9.2 years for a return on your investment. Solar panels also degrade over time and that you might want to replace the whole array in 20 years. Okay well it might not be a terrible deal but not a super sweet deal.

So I did a little digging around and found someplace where the power you generate is pays very nicely. Turns out this place is in Hawaii on the island of Kauai. Here, there are rules which state the utility company has to pay you the equivalent of what it costs them to generate the power. Because they use Diesel or Naphtha for the fuel for their power plant, its very expensive power. This equates to .27 per Kilowatt hour that they have to pay you. In certain areas the sun shines almost all day with very little rain towards the west side of the island. so you can get a nice 10+ hour day nearly 340 days of the year.

Get this that’s over 2,000.00 per day or 689,000.00 per year. If you throw in the land you should have a return on your investment in 2 years. After that its all cake! So Think solar Think Hawaii!

They were not really fully dead. If you shined a flashlight on them you could just almost see an icon or two where the flashlight was which meant the cold cathode fluorescent tubes were not lighting up. I had seen an article of someone who had taken their dead LCD monitor screen and mounted in front of an old gutted CRT monitor case with a Compact fluorescent bulb in there to provide a replacement light and I decided that might be a good choice to do on this one.

When I opened up the nice little Viewsonics I noticed something interesting, something I had seen before. Lets crank the old wayback machine up for a second so you can get the full aspect of what the problem. It seems that a few years ago was the start of a capacitor plague . This plague effected a lot of electronics a few years ago and from what I am discovering still is a major problem. I used to repair Tv’s VCR’s and such many years ago and rarely was there a problem with capacitors. Yes Electrolytic capacitors can get dry and loose their properties but it used to be a rare occurrence. Now they are dying like flies

Ruptured electrolytic capacitor

So anyway back to the LCD monitor I have, It also had some of these cheap capacitors which had vented. There were actually two 16V 220uf capacitors which had met their doom. Replacement of the bad capacitors made the monitor shine like new. On the second monitor it as well had the exact same problem.

I had a 42″ Big screen ILO LCD which was also dead. I began to wonder if it might be experiencing the same problem. well as it would turn out it also had a 16V 220uF capacitor on the main logic board which had outright exploded. Yes a small detonation inside my big screen caused it to die a premature death at only 1 year of age. It actually took longer to disassemble and re-assemble the LCD’s than to fix the silly little problem.

It may be possible to replace all the cheap capacitors with some nice Panasonic brand but I don’t know if the price/time payoff will outlast the life of the cold cathode tubes in the LCD itself. These monitors do have a maximum lifetime use, but it certainly is longer than one year.

So don’t throw that flat screen away, My bet is its bad capacitors and an easy fix for anyone with just a medial amount of soldering skills.

Why buy property now if the market is in a free fall? Well aside from the speak of the economic experts who cant seem to torture the numbers enough to show the economy is on the mend. In actuality it is not. There are a few reasons I think this is the case.

First off, and for the most part the United States does not really build anything anymore. We manufacture a few cars, but all but a few industries are still here. In fact almost everything is made in another country. In the past 20 years we have gone from a nation of builders to a nation of consumers.

Currently we aren’t consuming. In fact some of the things that have been going on have made people start paying off their debt load as soon as possible because a lot of credit card companies are doing terrible practices like hold your payment until its a day late so they can jack your interest rate up to 24%. People are getting caught with their pants down and are not liking it at all. In fact studies show that people are also starting to save their money now. Somewhat of a new trend for the average American. So if you couple people not buying, job losses will increase. Big box electronic store cant afford to keep the lights on if your not buying that shiny new big screen TV. A ripple effect for sure.

So recently we have seen the stock market rebound by leaps and bounds. But keep in mind that this is a bear market rally which means that it is not being sustained by any real economic recovery data. So the false sense of hope from the stock market is going to be a flash in the pan. Oh, I suppose I could be wrong, I have been before but I don’t think so this time and let me tell you why.

First off The banks still have a whole mess of “toxic” assets which they cant or wont unload and there’s more on their way. There is such a backlog of house foreclosures that haven’t even been processed yet because the banks are just inundated with them. there is more coming too. The next round of ARM loans are about to reset and the bulk of these homes will be worth less than what they are on paper. Most people who gambled on an ARM loan figured they would be able to sell the house or refinance the home before the ARM resets happened. In those cases the house didn’t sell and because the loan was more than the current value of the property.

People in these types of loans have no vested interest in the house. In a lot of the cases there was no down payment required to buy the house so they are not loosing anything but a torturous house payment if they walk away.

Now the next factor to play in here is that whole consumers not buying and job losses. After this bubble of house foreclosures we have to deal with a ultra massive commercial property bomb. Commercial property is on the same track because business is in a slump people are not able to keep their businesses open and that is setting the stage. Sometime in 2010 we should see the commercial property foreclosures coming into full swing. Once that happens who knows? We could see the complete unhinging of the economy.

We will have to wait to see what will happen then. My guesstimate is that its going to be ugly. which if your buying property then at the true bottom your going to have a wonderful opportunity to make some killer buys. If you buy now, you may loose your butt.

I love the Hawaiian islands but it seems that eco terrorists have taken over there. Here is the general thought about the damage the ferry would to the “delicate” ecosystems of each island. Certain islands harbor certain invasive species to each island. For instance the mongoose (more info) is one which is of high concern for the residents of Kauai. Which feel that the moment the ferry would dock thousands of these little critters would come swarming off the ferry like Noah’s ark after landing. I am paraphrasing this a lot because you can find websites which seem to use fear mongering to persuade the public opinion.

Not only the invasive species aspect but, everything but the kitchen sink from the eco nut jobs. Global warming, save the whales, too expensive, rush hour traffic, drug smugglers, ferry crime sprees, you name it.

Never once did these guys think, Any of these things could happen already with the current forms of transportation now, Insects and frog eggs can hitch a ride with the inter island air traffic. All invasive species can get on inter island shipping very easily. BUT NONE are scrutinized like the super ferry. Why is that?

Hawaii is a chain of islands, what the hell are they thinking? no ferry system? In the words of Mencina, Retarded!

If the Eco nut jobs were really worried about saving the islands they would buy some .22 rifles and go a hunting for mongoose a few thousand people scouring each island for a week or two wold guarantee virtual eradication of that animal. While your at it take care of the ferule cats and dogs too.. Maybe its time you introduce a few natural predators to the invasive species or, maybe load up a few DC-10 sprayers and nuke the whole island with chrysanthemum oil. Wipe out the mosquitoes and all the other creepy crawlies.

Oh yea I forgot another thing, one of the most important, what about the 250+ people who are now without a job? In these times, a job means more than just about anything else, If you have money and dont have to work, well a job is not your top priority, but to those it was a means to make a living and provide for their families. Ever notice that Eco Terrorist are usually the uber wealthy no job having fools?

Well good thing is, Most of the residents of the islands did want the ferry, lots of mom and pop farmers would have loved the use to carry their produce to the other islands. some people might just want to take their own car with the family for a nice ride without having to have TSA do a rectal exam before boarding.
Its these residents which are pushing Hawaii legislature to change the Impact statement laws to be a little more lax on the requirements of needing an environmental impact statement.

The price of admission for a wind generator of your very own is quite minimal or quite expensive depending on how much power you want to generate. The model Air-X 400, is actually quite small but so was my budget and will charge a few deep cycle batteries without a problem as long as there is a decent wind blowing. Sure it wont run everything I own but with a good inverter I can run quite a few of my household goods for as long as the batteries hold out.

I have noticed that now I catch myself paying extra attention to the NOAA weather forecasts to see how much wind I should expect. It has been a bit of an obsession to imagine how much free clean energy my generator is making while Im not looking at it. Obsessive? possibly but until you get your very own off grid power system like this either wind or solar I dont think you will fully understand the unusual line of thought that goes along with it.

Now all I need to do is get a few solar panels to help charge my batteries when the wind is not blowing and I will have a perfect setup.
Get Your Own Wind Generator