Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Cleaning up; accidentally went to Children's Arts Festival in State College

I've been having severe fatigue.  It's been so bad that I decided I had to do a decontamination today.  So I changed the washcloth and the towel in the bathroom and used totally new ones, and I also cleaned out the bottom of the bathtub.  Then I went to Goodwill and got a couple of items of new clothing so that I can quickly have something clean to wear.  I instantly felt better after showering in the clean bathtub and using the clean washcloth.  I've been handling a lot of things with drug residues and other residues on them as I've been moving my stuff into storage, and I spread some of the residues around onto clothing that was supposed to be kept clean, so I had nothing left to wear, and I was getting exhausted every day, wiping the residues all over myself with the dirty washcloth and then putting on dirty clothes.

On the way to Goodwill, I saw that State College was full of people, and I realized that the Arts Fest was still going on, and I had forgotten to go walk through it.  I had meant to do it a couple days ago but never did.  So, after I finished shopping at Goodwill, I parked the car in town and started walking.  Very quickly I saw that the booths were full of children's arts and crafts, not the 'adult' arts and crafts that I was expecting.  I walked through the whole thing, and it was all children's.

There's nothing wrong with that, it just wasn't what I was expecting.  The 'real' arts fest was over several days ago.

I was glad to see so many children, because I've been noticing lately that children never play outside anymore.  They're never visible.  They never actually PLAY OUTDOORS.  Not here, anyway.

A woman was carrying a little boy on her hip.  He might have been about two years old. This is the way that I believe children should be carried, not in a stroller. The child looked secure and trusting.  This woman was walking in front of me. The little boy turned his head, looked into my eyes, and said 'Hi.'  I smiled, said 'hi' back very quietly, continued walking past her, and burst into tears.  I only cried a tiny bit.  The feeling of grief went on for a whole minute.

Seeing the children's art brought back my own feelings of frustration with art.  I had often wanted to make and sell art, but I always had the feeling that the world doesn't really want to pay for yet another homemade beaded necklace or bracelet.  There were hundreds and hundreds of homemade jewelry items.  I didn't want to buy something 'just to be nice to the kids.'

I started thinking of homemade items that I could sell at a crafts fair.  Because I've been learning about socionics lately, I looked at it from a 'sensus profiteor' point of view.  The crafted item must be useful and practical.  It would be some kind of a tool with a purpose.  I never buy 'art' just because it's pretty.  I like to buy things that are useful.

So I imagined making electronic items out of wood.  I would make wooden cell phones, wooden computers, wooden laptops, wooden calculators, and other things.  Of course, if I were making a computer, I would want to program it myself with its own operating system, so they would be limited-purpose small computers designed for doing only one or two things.  And the semiconductors and stuff inside wouldn't be made of wood, obviously, just the external case.

Last night I was thinking about pricing. I was calculating just how much it costs to make and sell a durable good that sits in inventory a long time before it sells.  The price has to be very, very high.  If you want to use the income to produce another object, then you have to charge slightly more than twice what it cost you to produce it.  If it cost me $100 to produce something, then I have to sell it for slightly more than $200.  That way, I will get back the $100 it cost, plus I will have $100 more to produce another one, plus a small profit on top of that.  (This is a non-debt business model!!!  The debt-based businesses are totally different from this.)

A debt-based business isn't really 'totally different.'  But it is somewhat different.  You have a longer time during which to screw up, mess around, waste money, sell products and services at unsustainably low prices (thereby underpricing all the local mom-and-pop businesses and shutting them down), and have office parties with all of your employees before you go bankrupt and shut down your business, leaving an empty town that now cannot buy any products from you OR the small local businesses that you destroyed.

The only reason that I'm saying all of this extremely basic obvious stuff is because there are some people out there who are horrified at the idea that you might sell something at a price which is several multiples of what it cost you to produce.  They say 'Oh my god! Look at that profit! They're millionaires!  They're evil!'  Meanwhile, in reality, that business might be barely scraping by, or on the verge of bankruptcy.

I have an extremely pessimistic view of debt-based businesses, but in reality, if you know what you're doing, then technically it's possible to start a business with debt, and survive.  But don't be surprised if you go several years without making any profits.  To some extent, in the beginning, the money has to come out of your own pocket, and you can't quit your day job.

Anyway, so I was fantasizing about making wooden electronic gadgets that would run on my extremely simple operating system.  The whole theme of the devices would be simplicity, quality, convenience, ease of use, effectiveness, and being bug-free. There would not be tons and tons of complicated features that only a tiny percentage of people need, all in one computer.  Instead, you would buy a very specific, limited device that could only do a few very restricted activities.  Like a calculator:  it doesn't play video games, it doesn't play multimedia files, it doesn't surf the net - it just calculates numbers.  The cell phones would do nothing but make phone calls, that's all!

Oh, I did think of something having to do with Peak Oil.  The price of oil is determined by many factors beyond just 'supply and demand.'  The 'supply and demand determines the price' fallacy misleads people into believing that if the price is rising, we must really have a shortage or less of something.  Supply and demand are only one small factor among many other factors.  The word 'factor' is Gulenko's word for Se, extraverted sensing.  It is a force that moves something else.  There are many such forces influencing prices.

People mistakenly believe that if the price of something goes up, people stop buying it, which causes the price to then go back down or stay at that level without going higher.  Rick mentioned this when he said that the peak oil people had predicted that the price of oil would go up and down.  I knew there was something wrong with that.  That is their 'covering their asses' maneuver.  If peak oil were real, you would expect the price to just keep going up and up and up without stopping.  It would go up faster and faster.  But instead, the price fluctuates in a somewhat random way, sometimes going up for a while, then suddenly crashing, then going up a little more and down again.  'Supply and demand' isn't what's causing all those price changes.  I've been trying to find this idea for a while - it is something I've been trying to articulate in my argument against peak oil.  The peak oil people are covering their asses by saying, 'Yes, yes, I predicted that the price of oil would go up and down in a random, unpredictable way.'  My response is, No you didn't - you predicted that it's going up and up forever!

While I was thinking about this, I realized that I could not argue about it with Rick, because Rick is 'just the messenger.'  He picked up this fallacious idea from someone else.  I have to go straight to the source and debate with the hardcore peak oilers who are truly responsible for these ideas.  They would be able to articulate responses to my counterarguments better than Rick would be able to do.

I went to the forum during an attack of mania which, by the way, was probably caused by the puppeteers on purpose.  I remember what caused the attack.  They made a drug-using co-worker borrow my sweatshirt, and I became manic every time I wore the sweatshirt thereafter, for weeks and weeks, until 'they' finally accomplished their purpose (destroy Nicole and Rick's relationship) and told me that the sweatshirt was contaminated and that I must stop wearing it.  I know nobody would believe me about this - it's totally 'Adjustment Bureau' - but I have indeed been repeatedly manipulated in exactly this way for years and years as they control and destroy my relationships.

That mania was the reason why I originally decided to attack Rick in the forum and debate Peak Oil with him.  But I still continued to be interested in peak oil afterwards.  I noticed one forum post where he listed three scenarios: 1. there are no limits at all on oil production (and he commented, 'if you believe that, then I just don't know what to say :)) 2. there is a limit, but it's farther in the future 3. there is a limit, but running out of oil won't have much impact on society because of X.  I wanted to add a fourth scenario: 4. We will stop using oil before it's even all gone, because we will make a substitute.  There are other logical possibilities too.

He's actually not at home right now - he goes away traveling and hiking for the entire summer.  This is what you can do when you are able to earn a lot of money and save a lot of money all year long.  He has an inexpensive lifestyle most of the year.  The rent is relatively low where he is.  I won't get into the envy thing right now because I'm running out of time online, but basically, I wish that I had had better schooling at an earlier age, and I wish I had never gotten a dental filling which made me go crazy during my teenage years, and I wish that I had not been constantly surrounded by pesticides during that same time period, because all those years were wasted, I didn't learn anything worthwhile in school, and I grew up and began floundering as an adult, which I am continuing to do now, as I have no skills that people will pay for, other than my ability to cook and clean.  All the rules that I've made up since then, all of the 'do this, don't do that' rules, are designed to protect young people against wasting their lives the way I have.  If all those things had been done with me, I would be healthy and well educated today and I would be somewhere else making more money.

I'm at the library and I have to disconnect soon...

Anyway, there are some things that I could have prevented in my life if I had known about them beforehand, such as dental fillings and poisoning by pesticides.  But I could not have prevented myself from being attacked by the murderers who are surveilling and harassing and stalking me constantly and interfering with my sleep and all of my thought processes all day long.  That is something that I do not have control over, and neither do the government or the police, as some of it probably comes from within the government/police itself, or their mafia buddies who are allowed to continue doing what they're doing.  Being attacked wasn't preventable.  That is the main reason why I have stagnated and been unable to succeed during my thirties - I simply can't sleep at night and can't think or make any clear decisions.

Still... in a few weeks, I will be living in my car.  I will make some changes in my lifestyle at that time and won't be paying rent anymore.  After I've saved enough money to do the things I need to do, such as fixing my car, then I will be able to work fewer hours at work, and work longer hours at home projects, such as learning bookkeeping and looking for work as a bookkeeper once again (I had to abandon that project temporarily).  I have been planning and planning what I will do as soon as I'm out of this apartment, deciding when I will work on which particular project, when I will cut back work hours, and so on.  I'm always eager to start doing things right now that I'm not ready to do yet.  (I disconnected and reconnected, so I'm going to write for a couple more minutes).  For instance I accidentally got jealous when a co-worker (who is in the 'just a friend' category) was flirting with another co-worker.  I couldn't help being jealous.  It made me feel a much greater urgency to do the project of looking for my own boyfriend so that I would not have to keep being jealous of people.  But I am not yet ready to be looking for a boyfriend.  Any attempts to do so will fail at this time.  I am concerned with nothing but getting out of this apartment.

Anyway I will disconnect now.

No comments: