Self-Improvement

I ran across this video and had to share it, because it shows that the principle of inflation is so basic it can even be explained to children on a cartoon like Ducktales.  The end of the video suggests that deflation won't occur with the Federal Reserve system that we have; that we will be stuck with inflation and its negative consequences.  This is probably true, since we now have "Helicopter" Ben Bernanke as the chairman of the Fed, a guy who has promised to go as far as releasing money from helicopters if necessary to fight off deflation.

It used to be that you could only get truly, TRULY passive income in the paper sector -- dividends or capital gains on negotiable instruments.  Which is all well and good; I have a bit myself.  But the richest people in the world got there by building businesses.  Even Warren Buffet built a business around buying other insurance businesses.

Most people are caught in the trap of not understanding the economy, not understanding business, and not understand personal finances.  These are the people that live paycheck to paycheck -- even if they ARE saving for retirement, it's a flawed strategy to exchange your time for small amounts of money because there is no leverage.  They work for 50 years making their boss rich, making their banker rich, and making the government rich -- instead of using the idea of creating value = creating wealth.

There's a Pro-Ron-Paul meme going around, to the effect that 2008 is the new 1964; i.e. that on the premise—debatable in itself, of course—that the GOP has no chance of winning the presidency next year, conservatives should run a Goldwater-style insurgency to remind the party we're here & set up some influence for 2012. Bruce Bartlett floated the meme here.

If you've read any of my writings before, you'd know I have a pretty dismal view of our present situation in the US, especially economically.  Our monetary system is based on nothing, the mere illusion of confidence and there is every reason to believe the inevitable end which must come will come quickly.  Our educational system has more propagandized indoctrination than it does education.  Our culture has become one of apathetic indifference and instant gratification.

Some people have some pretty funny ideas about what the term "web 2.0" means.  Many people are even coining their own definitions for web 2.0, saying that it refers to a "semantic web" or a "machine learning web", etc.  This all stems from the fact that many people hear the term, but don't know what it means.  The term actually originated from a progamming method called AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML) that was the first widely-adopted way of programmatically getting around the limitation of waiting on page reloads to and from the server as you navigated around a website and performed searches, form submissions, and other operations.

Most businesspeople know that McDonald's is a classic example of a business system that is extremely well-built, efficient and profitable.  I ran across an interesting video game the other day, that lets you try to run your own virtual McDonald's franchise, complete with such business issues as employees, inventory, sales, production, marketing, and more.  It lets you control every aspect of the business (even some that you would not normally control in a franchise), from the usage of land for cattle and grain production to selecting national marketing campaigns to win the approval of a board of directors.

This website serves two main purposes.  The first purpose is that of any weblog -- to document and narrate the progress of a person, organization, or group, with a focus on building a community of readers based on the expertise of the author.  To this end, I use this website to keep a detailed record of my main personal goal at this time in my life: to become financially independent and establish a secure base of passive income streams to allow me to achieve my goals during the next phase of life without regard to financial restrictions.

The status page has the same statistics I use to measure my own progress in building the passive income streams that compose my growing website network.  You are looking at the same screen I look at to determine how I am doing. Here is a quick rundown of where I get the numbers and how the derivative statistics are calculated:

I spent $100,000 on a first-rate college education, and the most important thing I learned is this:  the worst way to make money is to sell your time for it.  Time is finite.  It is in limited supply, and we all only have so much of it before it runs out.  On the other hand, money is infinite.  Money is nothing more than a representation of value, and if you can create value, then you can create money.  You can make money out of nothing -- some of the most valuable things in the world are ideas.