substitute

kniwt was kind enough to point out that I was right in March 2007, and others have been kind to point out that I was right in July 2003 about the oncoming subprime mortgage tsunami.

I'd love to call myself a prophet, but most of us in Newport saw that one coming. Too bad the financial journalists didn't get to reporting on it until it was too late. Wonder why that happened?

I've been to the pharmacy twice in the last two days, once to leave off a prescription and once to pick one up. Both days the line has been at least 15 people long to pick up and about half that to drop off. This is maybe 3 times as long as usual.

The employees said "sorry, our hours are cut." When I came in today I turned around and walked out because I didn't have an hour free to wait. Fortunately I didn't need the prescription right away.

If upper middle class people with good benefits in a resort town in Southern California are now waiting an hour to get their prescriptions, because the drugstore chain has cut hours way down, what's it like right now in Wal-Mart land? My guess: not so great.

I've also noticed discounters like Target carrying less inventory and less variety. If I don't get to Target before noon on a Saturday the chance of finding the lightbulb I need is halved.

Something went down at the bank in the same shopping center the other day and they have an armed security guard now. That's new.

It's not the end of the world, especially here. But if I can notice the quality of everyday life slipping here? It must be getting really special in poorer bits.

Today I had to submit a financial form to the office. I work remotely, so I couldn't just fill it out and drop it by the finance person's office. The question was: how to get it there?

The form was an Acrobat PDF. Nowadays, many of these can be filled out as forms onscreen and then printed or emailed or faxed, making them easy to fill out and easy to read. Not this one. So the problem was: how to get it to the office without driving 50 miles in heavy traffic?

As I realized what was necessary, a tear rolled down my cheek.

I printed out the document and filled out both pages in black pen. Then I took them to the scanner/printer device at the other computer. I scanned each one in, which had to be done separately. The first go scanning them in greyscale produced an illegible grey smudge like a 1980s drugstore copy machine. I redid it at 48-bit RGB color and the greyscale document came out right. What the...?

Now I had two scanned-in .PDF documents, each one half of the previous .PDF document. I used Adobe Acrobat Pro to combine these into one document so that I could send it as one fax.

Now it was time to fax. This involved connecting to the other computer and using its modem as a fax printer. It should be simple, but it rarely works the first time. It's never clear how to find the modem/fax/printer in the first place. Decisions about long-distance prefixes and area codes have to made by trial and error. Feedback from the computer sending the fax is almost nonexistent. To make the whole thing perfect, I was doing all of this over a wireless network.

Because of these things, the promise of faxing over the network with ease is a cruel lie. I walked back and forth at a ratio of five times per page trying to see the status of my fax, hear the fax modem dialing, figure out if it had been sent, etc. The first go was a failure because I'd been given the wrong fax number. The second try vanished ambiguously from my computer, but showed as "sent, okay" on the machine actually attached to the fax modem.

I decided that it had been sent, and fired off an email to the recipient, because of course anything can and will go wrong with the fax on the other end: paper jam, paper loss, toner failure, and inexplicable failure to receive a document or notify anyone that a problem has occurred.

Finally I sat down with relief to do some actual work. This was not to be. From the other room, I could hear an insistent beeping. Perhaps the fax modem hadn't hung up? Sometimes they decide to stay on the line and one has to manually kill the connection.

I went into the other room to find the fax modem trying manfully to send the first fax, the one with the wrong number. I called up the dialog window to see fax jobs and deleted it. I went back to my desk. Three minutes later the beeping started. I marched into the other room and once again deleted the job. This time I stayed and watched. The same thing happened three more times.

Looking at other system preferences in desperation, I had to unlock one with my administrator password. A light suddenly shone upon me, and I saw the problem. Administrator privileges were required to remove a fax job. Sure enough, after I'd proved I was entitled, the fax job stayed removed. The system never told me that I wasn't permitted to kill the bad fax without admin privileges: it just cheerfully removed and reinstated the bad fax job, forever.

Now I'm back at my desk, waiting for the email saying the fax was never received.

If anyone has extra peacock plume pens and pots of India ink, I'd be grateful for a loan. I have parchment and papyrus already.

There were a few news items about the mortgage catastrophe today. Instead of saying "hey everyone the so-called subprime market was usury and fraud and soon it will all collapse and we will pay and pay and pay," they said that there was "increasing concern" about the "dip" in the "subprime market" and that foreclosures were occurring. Also, big time Democratic Senator Dodd was intoning that we must save the American homeowner and punish "predatory lending" since he had just discovered the other day that the mortgage business was being run by actual burglar-type criminals.

I assume that this will result in a huge S&L style bailout eventually. The homeowners will be "saved" by a "public/private partnership solution" in which taxpayers foot the bill for yet more mortgage bros to refi everything. Five or six egregious offenders will be convicted of fraud because of "predatory lending," and everyone else will refi their rap sheet and continue.

Get out your checkbooks everyone. You're about to pay out for the last fifteen years of appletinis, Humvees, shiny shirts, big watches, square-toed Italian shoes, blowjobs, cocaine, Harleys, Las Vegas, more cocaine, Mexican resorts, Dave Matthews Band tickets, still more cocaine, and one more appletini for the road.

You may have seen these things, I get a couple a month. A check arrives in the mail. Sometimes it's an actual negotiable check, or if not it's a binding voucher of some kind. It's for a large sum of money, made out to me. If I cash it, it turns into an unsecured loan. I've always been curious why everyone wants to loan me $5000-$8000 without security.

I always shred these, since I don't need any more debt. But I can imagine getting one of these and saying "Okay, I sure do need five grand right now" and cashing/redeeming the thing.

I looked at the latest one more carefully. The "check" is bilingual; they sent it to me Spanish side out. It's for $6,000.95 (love the 95 cents). I can redeem it at any HSBC office. I have then taken out a loan for this amount at 29.980% APR. Because we still have some vestiges of government they have to tell me this in bold type, and also tell me my payments, how many payments there will be, and the total finance charges. This is a five year loan with monthly payments of $194.08 and:

The total finance charges are $5,643.85.

So that's why they're happy to loan that much.