fyl's blog

In case you didn't get that, it is a reference to the folks on "Ship B" in Douglas Adams' Hitchikers Guide to the Universe. Ship B was sent on ahead of the other ships and was filled with the important people to colonize a new planet. It included marketing executives, hair stylists and telephone sanitizers. For those who don't like Science Fiction, I highly recommend these books as they make fun of Science Fiction with Science Fiction.

Every time I go to BANPRO (since the competent manager was transfered to Managua) I remember why I hate to go there. Today was no exception.

I have an account there that was for a now long-defunct S.A. I would get monthly statements and then they stopped. Why? BANPRO inactivated the account for lack of activity. Not particularly abnormal. Well, today, as ex-President of the ex-company, I went to BANPRO to close the account. I even filled out the "log book", their new way of doing what should be "take a number".

While my Budgets blog post was pretty depressing, Porter Stansberry just managed to make it look I was way on the low end. This is not from some hippie left-wing publication. This is for people who buy stocks and bonds.

I was just explaining to Ana what the U.S. government budget looks like. That, of course, required a translation into per capita costs. Once I did that, even I was scared.

What I read is the new budget is $3.8 trillion dollars. Well, that worked out to about $1000 per month per person. Every person from age zero on up. As we debate whether the Canasta Basica should be $250 or $300 for a family of five here in Nicaragua, we see government overhead numbers in the U.S. of 20 times that ($1000 x 5).

The end of January is not when it is supposed to rain around here. But, it did. Not a downpour but enough that things are actually wet. It's like the weather is "two months late" around here.

Also, two days ago were were in San Nicolas and were caught in a 30-minute downpour. Nothing up here on the hill but probably an inch of rain there. All very strange.

Note that while the weather station seemed to be sending updates to wunderground during the rain, there is a 3-hour gap in the info out there. Must be Pepe Lobo controlling the region. :-)

I guess that was to the point. I read enough ads here for people selling things that I figured I was "entitled". In any case, I live at CoolTop and really have no use for a house in Estelí. You can read the story at http://sites.google.com/site/estelihouse/

(Apparently necessary clarification: The house is in the city, about five blocks from the public market and walking distance to both bus stations and most things in th ecity. It is not in a suburban sub-division.)

While our usual political mudslinging (that is, everyone to the left of Atilla the Hun gets called a leftist) has slowed down a bit, there have been some really strange posts in the last few days. Maybe it was a serious FdC weekend for a lot of people—I just don't know.

Here are but three examples:

This post is partly to explain where I was yesterday, partly dealing with burning plastic and such, partly dealing with being remotely grumpy with someone in Thailand and partly because I sometimes like being grumpy.

First, why was I not on-line yesterday? Well, I didn't have an Internet connection. I was working on other things and by the time I realized I was really broken, I just didn't want to deal with it. So, I pretended I wasn't supposed to have a connection on Sunday.

I have recently watched two very interesting movies, Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist Addendum. Both are available for free on the Internet. I wrote up a review of Addendum on fylz.com.

The movies and, in particular, Zeitgeist Addendum, are about what is wrong with how the world works today and how a conversion to a resourced-based system would address most of the problems. The movie is only political to the extent that is explains why there is no political

I have not seen a positive post by you about Nicaragua in ages. Aside from your posts, you have directly complained to me about other issues. Clearly you could pick a different place to live. Yet, you live here and continue to invest in "infrastructure" here.

So, what's going on?