A Dysfunctional Family Saga that I greatly enjoyed

I just finished the audiobook version of this book:

I laughed out loud in spots and enjoyed the whole story thoroughly. It features flawed characters interacting over a spiral timescape from 1940 to 2011.

I'm afraid of spoiling the story if I say too much, so I'll just warn you: it's sexually explicit in a few spots (always germane to the story) and there is also a bit of violence.

Don't miss it, for the minor characters Pwnage and Laura doing their internal monologues, both LOL funny! The rest is satisfyingly tragicomic ...

Five stars! Don't miss it!

How I wound up with a Nissan Leaf instead of a Chevy Bolt

I've been driving the Chevy Volt since late 2011:

First I had a 2012 then leased a 2014 ... that I just turned back into the local Chevy dealer on December 22 of last year. I thought I was going to Salem Oregon to pick up a new Chevrolet Bolt:

GM was selling the Bolt into Oregon and California first, so I contacted Capitol Chevrolet in Salem OR and arranged to come down on December 30 to sign a lease and pick up an orange version of the Bolt. The last I heard from this dealership, the car was to be delivered on the 26th or 27th.

I showed up on the 30th as planned to be told that, gosh, the car wasn't in yet (they blamed weather in the midwest) but please go ahead and sign this paperwork ... They could easily have called me to have me delay a week, but no.

I walked out. This is my latest annoyance with Chevrolet and I was so steamed I decided I never want to set foot in one of their dealerships again. I contacted an auto broker to see if he could get one from Oregon for me ...

He eventually reported that the $349 lease deal that Capitol Chevy had dangled in front of me applied only to Oregon drivers. For me, from Washington, it would have been something like $708.

Thanks anyway ... at the same time I had been seeing local ads for the 2016 Nissan Leaf, which was being advertised at fire-sale prices:

This now has a 30 KW battery, rated around 107 miles. This is enough for me for the next two years, I thought, so I visited Bellevue Nissan, signed lease paperwork, and drove home with a 2016 Nissan Leaf S.

So far (2 days) I'm quite happy with it, and I am planning just to roll into Nissan's "Tesla Killer" in 2 years when this lease is up ... or maybe just buy this one at the end ... the residual is listed as $11000 but I'll be surprised!

Thanks, Bellevue Nissan ... and goodbye Chevrolet!

Peter F. Hamilton wraps up the Commonwealth and Void series (I think!)

I just finished a very enjoyable duology of Peter F. Hamilton's:

You'll need to have read at least three Hamilton's previous novels to really appreciate these two:

Pandora's Star
Judas Unchained

and at least one of the Void series:

The Dreaming Void
The Temporal Void
The Evolutionary Void

These books concern Bienvenido, another world in the Void that is not Querencia, the one described in the Void trilogy. It was also settled by captain and crew of a Commonwealth ship that was captured by the Void and devolved politically where the Captain and his successors hold most political power.

Abyss opens with a colony ship being captured by the Void when it was cruising well outside the Void on its way to another galaxy. Instead it finds itself near these structures that resemble trees and decide to investigate ...

That's when we encounter the Fallers, a monstrous species that entices humans (and others) close enough to its "eggs" to capture and "subsume" them ...

Nigel Sheldon's clone arrives in the second part of the book and "marries" Kyssandra, the young woman living on a farm near where Nigel's spaceship lands. She's just supposed to be sold into an arranged marriage with a local thug to pay her mother's debts but resists and wakes up from a drugged stupor at the altar not with the young thug ... but with Nigel! "Say yes," he says ...

Nigel runs rings around Bienvenido's powerful, engineering a political revolution and finally getting enough raw materials together to get his spaceship launched ... and to figure out what happened to the colony ship that was captured and to bring as much resolution as possible to that situation ...

Night continues the story ... if you finish Abyss and enjoy it, trust me and try this one. I found it one of the more satisfying stories I've experienced in years! Five stars!

3-6% (almost) risk free return?!

I went to see a presentation last night by this guy who bills himself as Leverage Planners:

I was curious about the word leverage, as to me it means "trading with borrowed money."

The presentation started with an area that I'm familiar with from watching TastyTrade, the crazy and often hidden fees in many investment vehicles like mutual funds. I appreciated this, as well as the discussion of the standard pitch that most advisers give ("stock market always goes up over the long term; diversify with bonds as you age") and how this doesn't apply right now as the stock market it back up near its record high and the bond market is high also but under pressure from incipient interest rate increases.

 The main pitch was for fixed annuity products that are supposed to return 3-6% per year on average, sometimes more (capped around 15%) but which cannot lose money.   The investment isn't in the market, but instead is essentially lent to an insurance company. These companies have large capital requirements and the money has to come from somewhere ... this is one way they do it.

It certainly looks worth a look for anybody who's risk-averse with at least a 10-year time horizon. (I still think I can do better trading futures and options; we'll see!)

This company is local to the Seattle area; if you're elsewhere (hi Lucy!) you want to look for a financial planner who's a fiduciary, meaning he or she will be acting in your interest as first priority.

Basic your risks are two:

• The insurance company could go out of business
• You could need a big chunk of the money sooner than you think

The first one you can handle by dealing with only A rated companies, which your planner should be able to help you find. The second you deal with by only investing money you're sure you won't need for the 10-year period the money will be tied up. (You can take 10% out per year with no penalty in the plans the guy showed us last night.)

I hope this works for you, risk-averse friends!

Natural Gas: not a 100-year supply after all?

I was in Cle Elum, Washington at a coffee shop with a Little Free Library, where I found this book:

Basically the author goes through a lot of data that seem to show that the natural gas supply estimates that have been discussed in the media the last few years (particularly the "100-year supply") are wildly overblown.

Aubrey McClendon and Boone Pickens were two of the promoters of the "100-year" idea ... McClendon died earlier this year in what looked to be a suicide (single-vehicle car crash) the day after he was indicted for bid-rigging shenanigans in the leasing of natural gas fields. Pickens is still alive and still promoting natural-gas-powered cars ...

There's somebody near Cle Elum promoting this book; I got a copy from the Cle Elem library and read it while in Leavenworth at the Sleeping Lady  ... where I left it in the library there.

We stopped back in Cle Elum on our way home ... and there was another copy of Powers' book on the shelf!

So a possible trading idea: Buy natural gas futures (/NG) and sell calls against them, at least until nuclear fusion starts to work :-)  (See Tastytrade for more trading ideas ...)

Phenibut: avoid at all costs!

My Lovely Wife has often has trouble sleeping and an alternative health provider she was seeing recommended Phenibut:

She has tinnitus and found that Phenibut was aggravating it: moved the sound from a lower tone to a high, piercing sound. So she stopped.

At that point she found she couldn't sleep at all for several days until finally trying the natural form of the same sort of substance, GABA:

Only then did she start reading about the Phenibut withdrawal and side effects: not only aggravation of tinnitus but on withdrawal all sorts of stuff up to and including psychosis.

If you have trouble relaxing or sleeping you might try GABA, but avoid Phenibut! Check out the Reddit thread on this for further horror stories!

A book I wish I'd read $600,000 ago

I finally read this book too late:

I had the largest loss of my trading career yet in July 2016, after the market zoomed up after Brexit and I was short. I couldn't believe it wouldn't go back down, and it just didn't for way too long ...

Mark Douglas lost everything he had trading: job, house, car, wife. He then looked into the psychology of trading losses and came up with insights that I think have gotten me off the losing track, finally.

I strongly suggest any trader would benefit by this book so I won't leak more of the contents except one of his principles that spoke most loudly to me:

Anything Can Happen at Any Time

I should have known this as I've been trading since 2009, but I just didn't have it installed uppermost in my belief system ... where it is now.

Thanks, Mr. Douglas and best of trading to all you traders out there!