JR’s SWAG

Sophisticated Wild Ass Guess

 

After watching the market tumble over the last few weeks, I thought I would stand back and try to get a better look at the bigger picture, and maybe do a little predicting and offer a fix or two. 

 

As an old design engineer, I am used to looking at charts and graphs.  Engineers get very suspicious when they see rapid and large changes in the line of any graph or chart.  Be it power consumption or temperature in an electrical circuit, light output of a laser, or any other rate of change of anything over time.  Looking at the Dow Jones average over the last eighty years, I was immediately alerted by the rapid change of this curve starting in the mid 1990’s.  To any good engineer, “This is a big RED flag!”

 

The birth and growth of the digital age from the early 80’s to the early 90’s can easily explain that up swing in the market.  Changing from the old analog world prior to the early 1980’s to the much more efficient digital age has probably permanently changed the rate of change. (Blue line in the next graphic.) 

 

 

The Dot com bubble of mid 90’s and the more recent housing bubble were both anomalies, and under normal circumstances should not have occurred.  Had the two bubbles and the digital age not happened then the Dow would have been something closer to the green line above.

 

Here is my sophisticated wild ass guess for the future:

 

The Dow will eventually come down to somewhere in the gray area of the second chart, and grow back up from there, but remain in the gray area for the next ten years.  It may, from time to time, make some jumps back above the gray area, but it will eventually stabilize somewhere within the gray. 

 

If the digital era can keep making products cheaper, and reduce the cost to do almost everything, as it has for the last twenty years or so, then the curve will be closer to the blue line.  If, on the other hand, newer digital electronics reach a saturation point where it can no longer enhance the economy with its continuing wonders, then the Dow will conform closer to the green line.  It simply can’t support anything like the following graph.

 

 

JR’s Analysis

 

This is somewhat of a long diatribe, and to be honest, I’m not exactly sure why I’m doing this – except maybe as a catharsis and as my way of making sense of this mess we find ourselves in today.  As an old design engineer I find it nearly impossible to look at a malfunctioning device, without it triggering in me the desire to understand and fix or improve the design.  I have absolutely no delusions that this article will ever be seen, or accepted, by anyone that can actually implement any of the design changes to our economic machine that I propose here, but I can dream can’t I?   

 

Feel free to wade through this dissertation, if you have a mind to.  If you feel the need to argue a point or two, or just want to comment, my email link can be found at the bottom. (All links on this page open in a new window. Close the window to return here.)

 

Most major manmade disasters like plane crashes, bridge failures, space shuttle losses and the like, are not caused by one independent failure or problem, but are the result of several overlooked errors in design, postponed repairs or errors in maintenance, and other little mistakes – any one of which, if corrected early or avoided, would have prevented the terminal failure. 

 

Like nearly all manmade disasters, the current credit and housing problem, and subsequent stock market plunge, didn’t start in the last few years, or by one single mistake, problem, or person  – but was the result of several errors in design, or changes in our economic system, that individually appeared innocuous – but over time, built one on another, to eventually cause our current troubles.

 

Like the post crash analysis of an airliner, it would be useful to try and track events back in time to try and identify what went wrong, and maybe what could or should have been done to predict or avoid the failure in the first place.   We can’t un-crash a plane anymore than we can un-crash the stock market, but with the proper understanding of the disaster we do have a chance of correcting things to avoid or limit future failures.  A little like the black-boxes of an airliner crash, and the aircraft’s maintenance records help investigators piece together the events that lead up to the disaster, it would be a great help if the stock market and our economy had maintenance records and flight recorders, so we could piece together the wreckage on the floor of the stock market, and discover what happened, why it happened, and what can be done to eliminate or reduce similar problems in the future.

 

The Black-Boxes of our Economy

The stock market and our economy do have black boxes and maintenance records!

These black boxes and maintenance records are called history.  If we look carefully at what was done and/or changed in our economic system in the past, we may be able to piece together the wreckage and come to some reasonable conclusions, and maybe even propose some changes that will fix things for the future.

 

The space shuttle is considered by many to be the most complex machine ever designed and constructed by mankind.  Commercial airliners, and even the humble bridge, are also very complex constructs.  These manmade devices are designed, constructed, maintained, and operated by some of the best-trained and tested professionals on earth.  Before each flight of the shuttle, hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other professionals spend thousands of hours testing and retesting every nut, bolt, and screw.  After launch more hundreds of professionals watch every second of the shuttle’s flight, and after returning to earth, more professionals do a post-flight evaluation to insure everything went as planed.  If even the smallest thing didn’t go 100% perfectly, designs and procedures are adjusted to move the performance, of subsequent flights, closer to perfection.  In this way mankind’s creations are incrementally improved, and disasters are avoided, or at least minimized in frequency and severity.

 

The Very Basic BASICS of Economics

Feel free to skip this section, as it truly is very basic

Many think the economy is at least as complex as the space shuttle.  It might jolly well now be, but it didn’t start that way.  Like the shuttle has its roots in the simple kite like airplane of the Wright Brothers, our modern economy was born in the earliest human villages. 

 

Before villages, folks who raised chickens would trade some of their surplus birds to the folks down the road that grew and had a surplus of grain.  The King, not being a chicken rancher or grain grower, had nothing to trade but his protection scheme.  The King, in order to eat, would once or twice a year send his tax collector around to the ranches and farms to take some of those folks production.  This supposedly insured other bullies would not bother the little folks, or have their hovel burnt to the ground by the King.  Much as the Mafia sells protection to the merchants of today, the Kings of old traded the protection for some of the peon’s goods.

 

As villages were created, some folks had forsaken growing their own food and opened blacksmith shops, and other service based businesses, they found dealing in chickens and bushels of grain, in trade for their products and services was a royal pain.  Keeping the chickens out of the grain, the cats protecting the grain from the rats, and keeping the cats away from the chickens became a real headache.  One enterprising merchant thought he could create a stand-in for chickens, grain, and other goods and services, and invented tokens that represented all those things.  Much easier to store, and transport, the new invention of money started making the world go around much smother and faster.

 

Like all new inventions that start simple, but as more needs and uses for the invention are thought-up, they mature into more complexity.  It took hundreds of years for the Gutenberg printing press, of the 1450’s to mature enough to finally produce cheap paperback books for the masses.  Slowly over many hundreds of years, folks other than merchants, wanted to get into the money business so started accepting your surplus money, with a promise to pay it back to you in the future plus a little more.   In order for this new merchant, called a banker, to be able to pay back a little more than what you gave him, he needed to make the money grow while it was in his custody.  Since this banker was either unable or unwilling to produce anything of value, he had to get other folks to do his work for him.  He would then loan some of the money to the guy that wanted to expand his farm or store, at a rate higher that what he was willing to pay the original guy that gave him the money in the first place.  This then gives the banker some surplus money that he could keep for himself, or use to trade for food and other goods, without actually doing any work for it.  This abstraction between grower and consumer created the first of many new jobs that would allow someone to make a living without doing the actual work of making a living.

 

The new banker class of merchants did pretty well for themselves until the first major disaster hit some of the folks he had loaned the money to.  Shortly after the recipient of the loan spent all the money to build a bigger store or plant more crops, a fire, flood or other disaster destroys the investment.  Now, of course, the banker will not get the money back to repay the original depositor.  As the banker was usually the richest person in the village, and had the ear of the King, his knee-jerk reaction to this problem was to have the King pass a law that jailed the debtor if he couldn’t repay the loan.  Not a very satisfactory solution to the problem, in that jailing the borrower will make it difficult to repay the loan.  The best it would do is force the borrower’s family and friends to try and pay the loan for him, and spring him from lockup.  As bad as this system was it persisted for a very long time.

 

As time passed and other folks who wanted to make a living, without actually getting their hands dirty, came up with another money idea.  Insurance was invented, by charging the borrower a little money to keep him out of jail.  This scheme could be even more lucrative than banking, assuming this new insurance guy had enough borrowers buying his insurance and few disasters to cover, as he never promises to pay the borrower back anything.

 

As more and more folks tried to figure out ways to get money without actually producing a product, they invented things like stock markets and derivatives 

 

Definition: A derivative is a synthetic construction designed to give the same profile of returns as some underlying investment or transaction, without requiring the principal cash outlay. They are called derivatives because they derive their value from the performance of the underlying instrument. ...

 

Money is simply an abstract of real goods and services.  It stands in for chickens, grain, and all other real goods and labor services.  As money is abstracted even more from real goods and services, more prosperity can be gained from a limited amount of the original goods and services, but at a greater risk of troubles.  To fend off troubles laws and rules have been created to try and manage and control these layers of abstraction.

 

Please do not misunderstand.  Some layers of abstraction are absolutely necessary in a modern society, and especially if the society wishes to grow beyond what it could if money was still directly based on chickens, or gold and silver – as it was, in this country, until the 1930’s. 

 

Remember that first ever banker?  He had a little trouble getting folks to trust his new invention of money.  Telling a depositor that his money could be redeemed in chickens or grain was of little comfort, especially to the chicken rancher – who had plenty of those birds.  So the banker promised his money could be redeemed in some precious metal or other rare and valuable substance.  Thus he gave his money credibility.  The downside to this is limited growth.  The banker can’t accept more deposits or make more loans than he can back-up with gold or silver.  This is the main reason most currencies are no longer backed by anything other than goodwill and trust.

 

So now we have yet another layer of abstraction between that artificial stuff called money, which is standing-in for real goods and services, and those who want to obtain some goods or services.  Each level of abstraction causes more complexity, which in turn, requires even more laws and regulations to keep things moving smoothly. 

 

Back to the space shuttle and other technical devices created by mankind, which MUST be designed to conform to the immutable laws of nature, such as drag, lift, thrust, gravity and others, or they will not work whatsoever  - The economy has no such natural limitations or requirements in order to function.   Everything about the economic process is completely artificial and wholly created, controlled, and governed by us mere mortals.  There are no natural laws in which the economy must conform in order to function.  If, in order to make something fly, you were allowed to re-write the laws of aerodynamics, it would be a simple matter to modify the rules in such a manner as to allow a flight to orbit by your automobile.  Obviously this orbital dream is nonsense, but in many ways our economy is much like this.  With a simple economy, simple rules suffice.  As an economy evolves more complexity, more and more rules must be developed in order to keep things working smoothly. 

 

Here’s Where the Problems Start

“Unintended Consequences”

Creeping Complexity Breeds Unexpected Problems.  “Or why your computer crashes once in a while”.   A little like our economy, computers work by a series of rules.  The computer’s rules are called the Operating System.  Operating systems, for the earliest computers, consisted of a few thousand rules, and only two or three people wrote these rules.  Our modern computers have operating systems consisting of many millions of rules, which were written by hundreds of programmers.   The rules in the modern computer are, in some ways, nearly as complex as the rules for our economy.

 

Hundreds of people writing millions of rules; be it for an operating system, or an economy, simply can’t keep track of everything the others are doing, and how all the rules interact with each other.  This is the primary reason that your computer crashes from time to time:  A rule in one part of the operating system comes in conflict with a rule in another.  A little like the joke business card that reads “The statement on the other side of this card is true”, and when you flip the card over, the backside reads, “The statement on the other side of this card is false.”  To us humans, this card is simply nonsense, we smile and ignore it.  In a computer, these kinds of conflicting rules cause the machine to stop and, in a figurative way, the computer can do nothing but flip the card over & over until it is turned off or reset. 

 

Microsoft, and all other software companies, attempt to avoid these kinds of pitfalls by doing literally thousands of hours of testing and simulation, before they release their product to the public.  They are not always successful, as evidenced by our less than perfect computers, but the testing and simulation reduces the chances of a crash to a minimum. 

 

 

Rules Upon Rules

Conceived by Amitures  -  Tested by Us

 

Unlike computer programs, that are written by professionals, most of our economic rules are written by members of Congress, a decidedly amateur group of folks.  No pre-release testing is done; they are simply looked over by a few human eyes, for gross errors, and then released to the public.   As an example of just one small part of our economic rules, a quick look at the size of our Federal tax code says it all.  Remember, this is just a very small part of the economic rules of this nation.

 

US Government Printing Office, offers a complete set of Title 26 of the US Code of Federal Regulations (that's the part written by the IRS), all twenty volumes of it, at the bargain price of $974, shipping included.  According to the US Government Printing Office, it's 13,458 pages in total. The full text of Title 26 of the United States Code (the part written by Congress--available for an additional $179) is a mere 3,387 printed pages, bringing the adjusted gross page count of the US tax code to 16,845.

 

Conflicting Goals

Since the beginning of our republic, two primary and totally opposing goals for the function of government have been promoted.  The people and leadership of this country can be roughly divided into two groups; those who think government’s purpose is to help the lesser of its population by taking from those who have and giving to those who have not, and the other group who think the government’s duties are simply to protect our shores, deliver the mail, and stay the hell out of our way.  Obviously, this is a gross over-simplification, but serves to define the two major groups in this country.  These two goals are mostly incompatible, and trying to craft rules that satisfy both goals is very difficult, and may be impossible.  Our current set of economic rules attempt to encompass both goals, but in doing so creates many conflicting problems, similar to the joke business card above.

 

 

Mid October 2008 – The Mess Gets Messer

A depression is fueled by fear and uncertainly.

A couple of weeks ago our government passed a nearly trillion-dollar (That’s with a “T”) bailout bill.  This was supposed to fix the housing loan problem.  It is now Saturday the 12th and word is that our “leaders” are meeting today to try and figure out how to bailout the banks.  This is distinctly separate from the previous bailout bill.  In my opinion, one bailout bill after another won’t do anything to solve the problem, but will do everything to convince many that our free-enterprise system doesn’t work, and should be changed.  This floundering around by our less than stellar Congress is sending mixed signals to all involved; the banks, manufactures, regulatory agencies, investors here and abroad, and our citizens.   In my opinion, this will be no different.   The public will see this thrashing around by our elected officials as incompetence, and cause even more uncertainly in the minds of all us.  At best this will delay the recovery, and at the worst, cause a full 1929-size depression.   You will know for sure that we are in or headed for a full-blown depression when the stock market is closed for a day or three, or maybe even a week or more.  At that point, start a garden and raise a few chickens, so you and your family don’t have to beg from your better-prepared neighbors.

 

I fear that if our government keeps messing around with the foundations of our free-enterprise system, we will end up looking like the European Union, or worse.

 

The Perfect Storm

For years, there have been rumors that not just the radical Muslims want to see us fail, but maybe a few of the world’s Islamic governments would also like to see the west tumble into total failure, so they can reform the world in their image.  Many of the Middle Eastern nations hold vast amounts of western money and investments.  Should one or two of these major economic stockholders chose now, during these unstable times, to bailout of the western economy, a perfect storm will be created.  As we find ourselves in more and more economic troubles, the entire worldwide system becomes more and more unstable.  As this continues, smaller and smaller events will be required to cause larger and larger disruptions.  Historically, bad economic times trigger wars and revolutions.  Smaller nations, who have been kept in check by concerns that the major western nations will intervene, should they start beating on their neighbors, get a lot bolder when they see the west sidetracked by other events.  Should our economic problems continue for any length of time, I suspect we will see a lot more turmoil in the various smaller countries of the world.   This will grow like a cancer to other parts of the planet, eventually taking all of us down.

 

 

How Do We Fix Our Economy?

(Assuming we can dodge the perfect storm)

From this engineer’s point of view, where fixing something simple like the space shuttle or a computer, that has but one goal - fixing our economy, while retaining both the liberal and conservative goals will be much more of a challenge.

 

If we could eliminate either one of the two conflicting goals, would instantly reduce the size and scope of the problem by 50%.  This, of course, is totally unrealistic, so we will have to work within these two major constraints.

 

The first, and by far the easiest thing to do to help prevent future economic troubles would be to test all the rules and regulations before they are implemented.  With the millions of current rules, finding conflicts, loopholes, and all the other bugs in them, by hand – as they do now, is simply beyond human ability.  I propose that an elaborate and comprehensive computer program be developed to model and run the rules through all possible permeations to check for flaws.   This will require some our best programmers, economists, and accountants, and much work to implement and debug, but once it is done it will function much like a flight simulator that tests aircraft or spacecraft before they fly.

 

An economic simulator program cannot fully simulate the emotions and trading habits of people, but it could at least prove the rules and regulations are sound and have no major flaws.

 

Each time our country finds itself embroiled in some argument over what our government should or should not be doing, I refer back to the founding fathers and their thoughts on matters during the creation of this great country.  Be it arguments about how to extend freedom of speech to modern times, such as the Internet, or other topics like the second amendment, war, welfare, or others, I have found all the answers we need in the writings of those great men.  See http://www.liberty1.org/wrdocs.htm Following our founders same frame of thought, gives us a superb path to the best answers to even our modern questions.

 

When the Constitution was written, only white male property owners could vote.  In 1870 the 15th amendment gave the vote to black men.   In 1920 the 19th amendment gave women this franchise.    The only US citizens that currently can’t vote are minor children, felonious criminals, and in several states, the legally insane.  (There are several movements to return the vote to felons and the insane.  But that’s something for another discussion, and won’t be addressed here.)

 

I have no argument with blacks or women voting, and due to the fact that a large percentage of our population are not landowners, the original voting restriction to only those who had land, is no longer a viable or fair restriction. 

 

Corporations are, like our form of government, republics - in that the members (Stockholders) of a corporation are given votes.  But unlike our country, where it’s one citizen – one vote, a stockholder’s votes are based on the number of shares they hold in the company.   This makes perfect sense as the more someone has invested in the company, the more they should have a say in how its run.  Should we not consider something similar for our elections?

 

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse* from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over lousy fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world’s great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to Complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.” - Alexander Fraser Tyler - Cycle of Democracy (1770)

 

* Largesse [lahr-jes] The gift or gifts, as of money, so bestowed.

 

Citizens should have a vote proportional to the taxes they pay.  One vote if the citizen pays the average tax amount, of all taxpayers in a given year.  If they pay 10% less than average, their vote would by 90% of a whole vote.  If they pay 125% of the average, their vote would be worth 1.25 votes, and so forth.

 

OK, now all the whiney bed-wetters can start flaming me with their screaming, yelling, and gnashing of teeth.  (My email link is at the bottom.)

 

More to come….   Stay tuned!

 

 

 

A little more background, and a list of some of the current bad guys

 

I’ll spare you the tedium of all the gruesome details leading up to the great depression of the 1930’s, but I do want to briefly touch on a couple of points, before and during that event. 

 

Prior to the 29 crash, we saw many major and minor market crashes.  In 1913 the Federal Reserve was created as a moderating influence on the market, and through their study and adjustments was supposed to eliminate future market problems.  A little like the invention of the modern computer, the Internet, cell phones, and the digital age, over the last decade was a large contributing factor to the recent explosive market growth - in the mid 1920’s the invention of radio, telephone, intercontinental and overseas telegraph, and the automobile caused a great up-surge in the economy of that time.  In late 1929, as the market started to get unstable, the Fed in their infancy and with very little experience, steered the economic airliner into the crash instead of away for it.  Like our current troubles, the 29 crash was not the entire fault of only one entity or action.  Yes, the Federal Reserve was a contributing factor, but so were many other people, agencies, and regulations, that all came together to create a “perfect storm” of inevitable failure in October of 1929. 

 

And a few words about the era between World War II and the present:

 

In late 1941 we were thrown into a world war, which can be argued, pulled us out of the ten-year depression.  In the late 40’s when millions of men came back from the war, and industry switched back to domestic production, and new products, which were spin-offs from the war, came to market, our economy took off like a shot, and did well for twenty-plus years.  In the early 1970’s the price of gasoline shot up about 30%.  This came as a shock to most, as through the previous twenty years it had been almost the same price from one year to the next.  The gas price went up as a result of the creation of OPEC “Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries”.  The Arabs got to gather and raised the price of oil.  Sound familiar?  At that time, the Carter administration, bowing to pressure from the masses, put a price limit on the retail price of a gallon of gas.  This caused long lines at the pump, as the gasoline suppliers had plenty of fuel, but were unwilling to sell it at a loss.  This is a prime example of government tinkering with the economy, which never works as planed.  The economy works best when government controls are the lightest.

 

After about a year of suffering, the price controls on gasoline were lifted, and overnight every gas station in the country had plenty of fuel.  We had to pay a little more for it, but we no longer had to wait in line for our allotted 10 gallons on odd and even days.  But we aren’t talking about the fuel problems of yesteryear.  We are trying to understand the problems of today.

 

 

The Dirty Dozen + 2

A partial list of those who had a hand in this latest mess: (Pick your favorite bad guy)

 

1.  Fanny Mae:  Founded as a government agency in 1938, and chartered by Congress in 1968 as a government sponsored enterprise (GSE). Fanny Mae, and to a lesser extent Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, and other semi-government agencies

 

2.  ACORN:  The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley's National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s and early 70s invaded welfare offices across the U.S. -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. 

 

3.  Carter Administration & Housing:  In the 1970’s the Carter administration started the ball rolling on today’s problems by making it a little easier for low income folks to have a home of their own, which appeared a good idea at the time. (This required the writing of new rules and regulations for the credit and banking industries)

 

4.  The Federal Reserve: Lowered interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst.

 

5.  Barney Frank: A Democrat member of the United States House of Representatives. In 2003 Frank opposed Bush administration proposals for creating an agency increasing oversight of the mortgage lending industry.  Frank has collected tens of thousands of dollars from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in campaign contributions - $42,350 since 1989. Also, Frank's former boyfriend, Herb Moses, was an executive at Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, where he helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing lending programs.  Frank pushed for reduced restriction on two- and three-family home mortgages in 1991, the year Moses was hired by Fannie, even though they were defaulting at two to five times the rate of single-family home defaults.  As Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee beginning in 2007, Frank "sits at the center of power". In my opinion, he should be in jail – JR.

 

6.  Home buyers:  Just regular folks who took advantage of easy credit to bid up prices of homes, usually by the process called flipping.

 

7.  Real estate agents: Earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes, so of course many pushed buyers into too much house for their budget.

 

8.  Congress: Continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses. 

 

9.  Mortgage brokers: Offered less-credit-worthy homebuyers sub-prime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates. (In most states mortgage brokers need absolutely no training or licensing to hang out their shingle.)

 

10. The Clinton administration: Pushed for less stringent credit and down payment requirements for low-income folks.  (A nice fuzzy warm feeling, and gets votes, but by the application of all the above changes, set these folks for a big fall.)

 

11. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan: In 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

 

12.  Wall Street firms:  Paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities, and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

 

13. An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.  (Who made this accounting rule?  You guessed it!  Congress.)

 

14. Collective delusion: A belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

 

The good guys: (Maybe)

 

The Bush administration, and John McCain, among others, who tried but failed to get congress, and the money industries, to make some needed changes.  As they saw the writing on the wall, but couldn’t get enough others to listen.  

 

 

CAUTION

Don’t bet your future or fortune on my SWAG!  It is after all only one man’s opinion, and I may jolly well have it all wrong.  If the economy conformed to the laws of nature, like nearly everything us engineers deal with on a daily basis, I’d bet my last dollar on this analysis.  However human nature and the market seem to have very little in common with reality.

 

 

“Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?”  - Kelvin Throop III

 

“If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.” - George Bernard Shaw

 

“Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.” - Groucho Marx

 

 

 

Cheers!  -J.R. Whipple   JR@JRWhipple.com

 

 

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