Job categories that will shrink during hard-times

Jobs that won't fare well during hard times:

Personal Fitness Trainer

Reason: People will be walking six or more miles a day. We won't need the gym to get exercise. We will not need a "cheer-leader" to motivate us.

Exception: Massage specialists. There will be boatloads of people with sore muscles.

Internet Influencers

Internet Influencers exist to goad people in to spending more and consuming resources that the viewer didn't know existed. The tide will be running in the opposite direction during hard-times.

Event Planners

Events to commemorate rites-of-passage in our lives will no longer be a competitive sport. Weddings might be a handful of friends and a few family members from each side. Graduation parties might be playing disc golf in the park.

Lawncare specialists

Large lawns that are professionally cared-for are a historical anomaly. Some of the lawns will likely be turned into gardens or orchards. Some will be abandoned and allowed to revert back to native scrub or prairie. 

Please feel free to add to the list. 

Shorts

Today's goal is to get to a funeral in downtown Lansing.

My friend's father died. It was not unexpected. His father was 102.4 years-old.

Investing in semi-precious metals

A pretty good price for a good product. 

An even better price but they might not work for you. 

The word of the day

The word of the day is "eye-ballie". 

Used in a sentence: Bucks use their nose to explore the world. Does are eye-ballie and will bust you in a tree-stand quicker than a buck will.

The iron law of supply-and-demand

It is my perception that women often do not feel "valued" by men. They complain that men treat them as a fungible commodity like nose-tissues (aka Kleenex).

It is also my perception that most of the women making those complaints are in areas that have a gross over-supply of women vis-a-vis men. To be specific: College campuses are now dominated by women. Large cities are magnets for women. Some professions like HR, education, advertising and the social "sciences" are dominated by women.

If you are a woman and do not feel "valued", consider finding pockets within your society where women are not in over-supply. Adapt, improvise, overcome. Leave your comfort bubble. 

Women start looking like this when they are competing with other women.

No man ever looked at this and swooned "OMG! She is gorgeous."

Nope. We are far more likely to say "Do you need your EpiPen or should I call 9-1-1?"

Warren Buffet's thinking on "quality"

Warren Buffet was famous for his annual letter the the shareholders of Berkshire-Hathaway. He used those letters to explain his thinking in various investments.

In one of those letters, he explained why he opted for "quality" especially when the economy seemed to be hitting a rough-patch. Even though I present the following in quotes, they aren't actual quotes. Rather, it is my best remembering of his logic.

"I bought shares of Coca Cola last year and I was asked why I didn't invest in companies with stronger positions in the lower market tiers...companies like Shasta, Faygo and companies that bottled 'house-brand' soda-pop."

"The logic my questioners bring up is that people change their consumption habits when money is short. They expect consumers to shift to cheaper products and the "quality brands" to take a beating."

"My logic is that the pricing power of premium brands means they have a much greater margin for price decay. Coca Cola doesn't pay more money for sugar or flavoring than commodity brands yet it can command twice the retail price. That difference in pricing power falls directly to the bottom-line."

"Yes, they spend a lot more on advertising, but that is a discretionary variable-cost that they can temporarily economize on."

"When the price of a house-brand drops by a dime a bottle, they lose money. When the price Coca Cola can command at the cash register drops by a dime a bottle, they are still very profitable."

"The same thing can be said about Hersey candy bars, Marlboro cigarettes, Dior lipstick and a host of other comfort/luxury items."

Economic lessons from Bullwhip Griffin

---Disclaimer: I am not a Professional Investment advisor. This blog post is offered for entertainment purposes. It is your own money. Do your own research.--- 

In 1967 a movie that supplied profound insights into economic booms was released by Disney Studios. The title of that academic study was The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin. The book that was released was simply titled Bullwhip Griffin. The book is better than the movie.

The story is set in California in the early days of the 1849 Gold Rush. The underlying message is that the surest and most durable path to wealth is not the obvious path. For every miner who struck it rich in the gold fields there were 99 that could not pay all of their bills. Nope. The surest path was to supply the miners with tents, shovels, pans, apple-pies, pants, shirts, alcoholic beverages, fried oysters, quick-silver, lumber, barbering services, a hot bath and so on. 

A conversation with a friend

My friend is a pretty sharp guy and he shared a few investment insights with me yesterday.

Like me, he sees inflation as a major threat to the wealth he saved up through his working years. Unlike me, he can afford some very high-end analysis people to sort through the details.

The obvious AI plays, NVIDA, Microsoft, Open-AI, Oracle are over-bought and have very high Price/Earnings ratios. The every-increasing revenue that is reported by those firms is reminiscent of the washer-women in Hooverville who survived 1932 by taking in each other's laundry. The speed-of-money between those firms is an ever accelerating merry-go-round. 

Another complication is that it can be difficult to determine if a firm is a viable concern when capital is flooding into it. Large volumes of incoming capital will mask structural flaws and weaknesses in organic demand.

The less obvious investment plays are to buy stock in companies that mine or smelt copper. To buy stock in companies with proven reserves of rare-earth metals. To buy stock in utilities that serve states with a permissive, regulatory environment toward nuclear or fossil-fueled plants. Even if AI collapses, there will still be markets for copper wire, rare-earths and for electricity.

If you aren't comfortable buying individual stocks then another way to balance your investment risk is to move some of your savings into a mutual fund that focuses on "Value stocks". Value stocks are typically boring, mature (i.e. not rapidly growing) businesses that generate profits the old-fashioned way. 

Why not sit on cash?

Well, that would be a great move if you could predict if/when the stock market will crash.

But history tells us that inflation and deflation can exist within the same economy and that the inflationary parts of it will vaporize the wealth that is stored as "cash".

Wait a minute. How can an economy be both inflationary and deflationary at the same time? 

Consider the Wiemar Republic in the early 1920s. The nominal value of a producing apple tree or garden full of potatoes or a cord of firewood sky-rocketed while the nominal value of certain luxuries like musical instruments, fancy clothes and pensions dropped to zero. Some sectors went up (way up) and other sectors collapsed.

The ones that preserved wealth were assets that served the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy. The assets that collapsed were ones that invested in the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy.

Even if you lose money investing in productive assets, you will lose even more buying power if you squirrel away all of your assets as cash.

This observation comes with a caution. You need to have enough cash-like assets on-hand to pay your taxes and currency-denominated debts like your mortgage. 

A final word

The movie contains a "fight" scene where (seemingly) prissy "Bullwhip" Griffin beats the hell out of a street-brawler. Hence his new nickname "Bullwhip".

There are times when the only viable coin-of-the-day is to be able to vigorously defend what is yours, your honor and the honor of your woman. 

Some days are like that...

Today was off-kilter right from the beginning.

Most kids wait until their teenage years before they start pushing their parents' buttons.

Last night, Quicksilver, now three-years-old, played with Southern Belle's alarm clock.

Consequently, Quicksilver and Southern Belle showed up in my driveway exactly an hour before I expected them. That set the tone for the day.

Mrs ERJ had appointments all day long, so I was the one to drive Quicksilver to her Tuesday play-date. I also got to pick her up and she kept me company while I did various errands in the early-afternoon. She fell asleep for about 20 minutes in the truck, so of course she didn't take a nap once we got home.

Over the course of our multiple in-and-outs of the truck, I misplaced her "bunny" and that had consequences. Fortunately, I had plied her with a cheeseburger and had cookies to distract her with. 

It is a good thing that I had today penciled in as a "recovery day". It wasn't so much a tragic series of unfortunate prat-falls as it was a high-speed, syncopated hobble as we staggered through the day.

Some days are like that.

Maybe I can kill something tomorrow. 

 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Edvard Axel Rosenberg was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1858 and died in 1934.

His artwork captured the special quality of the low, slanting light of winters in Scandinavia.

Thanks to Lucas Machias for recommending this artist.

Another day at the office

 

Looking north out of the office about 45 minutes before "legal light" ends. The dusty-beige weeds are the tops of goldenrod. The goldenrod is about 3' tall.

Looking west out of the office.

So, there I was in the Orchard stand. I had been there for three-and-one-half hours. The wind-chill was a balmy 40F but I wasn't very well dressed. I wasn't hypothermic but I would not have wanted to be any colder. I had already popped-open two of my "body warmers". One was in the pocket of my tee-shirt and the other was in the pocket of my flannel-lined jeans.

Yes, Virginia, I was wearing a coat and a hat. 

The light was rapidly fading. I was watching the time like a hawk. I could hear hooves crunching through the leaves in the swale east of me. I still had five minutes of "legal light".

Then I saw blobs 120 yards out, but only one-or-two at a time.

I did not want to take one of this year's fawns. I wanted to shoot a wall-hanger buck or a mature doe. I could not see any antlers nor could I determine if any of them were larger than the others.

Finally, they started moving in my direction through the frost-killed goldenrod.

I was tracking them with my scope. That is generally considered bad-practice because folks will do that to ID targets they are not certain of...but I had already ID these animals as Whitetail Deer and they were definitely not humans.

Two minutes of legal light left.

I could see their ears. Still no antlers. There were five of them. Three of them were might have been small. Two of them might have been "shooters". I look at the size of their ears relative to their heads. Like a dog's paws, a deer's ears get their full-size early. If the ears look large relative to its head, it is a small deer. If the ears look small, it is a large deer.

I looked and looked and looked. I could not make out their bodies as they moved through the goldenrod. If I can't see their bodies then I don't have a target. Some people take neck-shots but I avoid them because heads bob around and move, making the shot a time-urgent thing. 

They passed within yards, YARDS, of the base of the Orchard stand.

Alas, the clock ran-out and legal light ended.

I waited several more minutes for them to clear the area before exiting the stand.  Perhaps my luck will change. Maybe their alarm-clock will go off a few minutes earlier another day.

They call it "hunting" rather than "shooting" for a reason.