From China to my property taxes

don't know why. And then I'm going to give you a reason. That's ridiculous. But in any case, I think the biggest problem I have is that I end up talking to my wife or somebody else. And I blow my wide there. So then I've already got it out of my head. So then I don't need to talk about it anywhere else. It's already out of my head. You know, maybe what I need to do is do this earlier earlier in the day. So the thoughts are still

there. And they're not they're not out because once I express them someplace, I just have no need to express them anywhere else. That's why the blog exists. You know, bae.c m, by the way, K E V I N B as i boy A E.com that, you know, y blog exists strictly for me to get crap out of my head. nd I've been doing it for a long time. And I've blown up that b og so many times. I've had Ke in Bae calm since the 90s. T e late 90s I believe it is. I rink coffee while I do this,

y the way. And that Scott Adams his is not coffee with Kevin ae . I just happen to drink coffee while I ramble on becau e my throat gets dry. And then start my voice starts to crack up. And it's like really sever vocal fry. So, yeah, I do I fin it extremely difficult to do th s on a weekly basis. And you k ow what? I think strictly becau e I'm, you know, I need to be am ed up to do this. I don't think I'm very good at trying to put s

mething together and then do it later on. Like what I was doing for the first, I think it was 1 17 episodes. I don't even remem er what episode this one is, b the way, today's Septe ber 20. So what I was doing for those first, I don't know, 1516 episodes, because I was just basically recap my blog. And it was fine, I suppose, you know, I would just kind of read what I posted. Maybe I would add in extra extra shit every now and again. Because then, you know, maybe some new thoughts would

come by. I was also trying to do it on YouTube. So this is nowhere live right now this is I'm not doing any video at this more at this point. For this episode, I may do it again. I don't know. I'm trying I'm really just trying to figure this out. Because I kind of enjoyed doing it. Once done. It's just the act of actually doing it as a problem. I don't know how podcasters who have done this for years. Sorry, I'm touching this microphone like crazy today. I really don't know

how they do this for years. On on a regular basis. See I am I retired from my job a couple of years ago. I was working for my family. And I left that gig. And so now I'm just kind of doing whatever I feel like and Maybe Maybe if I was still working every day on a normal normal job that I'm so busy doing that, that then I don't have to, you know, I'm not talking to anybody

really about politics or news or anything like that. And it would just kind of come out of me and you know, but I was I was still blogging then. I don't know, this is such a such a disjointed ramble. But I think what I'm going to try to do maybe is to discuss or talk about things, it's not really a discussion, because it's one sided. But maybe just talk about things that aren't on the blog. And shit that just comes to mind. So, you know, that's why I'm almost sounded like I was like,

I had Tourette's. But maybe that's why I need to do it earlier in the day, before I start getting wrapped up in a whole bunch of stuff. You know, cuz what I do normally during the day is I'm you know, I'm blogging throughout the day, just kind of catching up a new, they just keep the Wall Street Journal open, I keep Twitter open, you know, and I follow certain people on Twitter so I can get some, some news. And then, you know, I'm monitoring and working, my investments, you

know, that's where I get my income from. And I blog on my blog for that. And I also podcast for that, that one's easier to do, because that when I can recap what happened during the week, and go over what happened in in my various portfolios. But then I'm also doing other shit that I just feel like doing like this, this year, is our first full year in Georgia, after moving from Chicago, and there's a lot of

stuff to do in the house. So I was busy all the time, putting up shelves, you know, kind of customizing this house to how we like to live. You know, I also built a couple of raised beds in the backyard. So I could grow garden, I had a big garden back in Chicago. Oh, this stuff takes time plus, you know, doing

little repairs and stuff to this house. Things that the previous owner didn't do or should have done, you know, I'm busy doing stuff like that, like this house is on a hill, we're at the we're actually at the bottom of a hill in a cul de sac. But there's a steep drop off behind us. And it's another you know, we're at the I would say mid level part of the hill. So when the rain comes in all goes straight downhill and into a creek that's

about 60 yards or so from my fence line. So there's a there's a two story deck. It's not a double deck, but there, there's a deck that comes out from the kitchen and then you go down some stairs and it leads to a concrete patio with some doors that come out the basement. So underneath that deck, when it rains, it gets wet all underneath the deck. And water splashes up to the door and you get you know, there's a problem there where you because it's so humid here in Georgia, it never

dries out really. So much water ends up by the door that you get some rotting wood. So what I did was one of the projects I did this summer, is I sort of put a ceiling on that deck that diverts the water into a gutter and the gutter takes the water and takes it away and I did I did a decent job not not a great job but a job. Something that does what it's supposed to do not perfect, but it does largely what it's supposed to

do. You know, so when I when I go through my morning ritual, and I'm coming up to my home office, and what I do is I look at the news, see how it's affecting my portfolios. You know, maybe I'll blog some news stories on on my financial blog. That's called chasing the yield.com by the way. And I might do that for a couple of hours just perusing the news, doing some blogs, maybe blogs, news stories as well on Kevin Bade calm and then maybe 11 o'clock depending you know it's

a little bit different, but somewhere around 11 o'clock. You know, I might go refresh my coffee. I might depending on what I'm doing. For dinner, I might start prepping, prepping stuff for dinner. I really get to position this microphone better. Um, you know, or do some of the various, you know, projects that I've got going or maybe we go out and, and go somewhere, I don't know. But I find it you know, if I don't, maybe if I, if I can't get this podcast done, at some point in

those first couple of hours, I lose total track of time. And by the time I get back here, it's like, you know, might be four or five o'clock in the afternoon. And then I just got nothing left to say like right now it's 6pm 6pm Eastern time. And I was

even now just struggling whether or not I should do this. But it's been over a month, and I do have some people that listen, nobody that has sent me any money at which by the way you can, if you enjoyed any of the stuff I did before, or you're like this random stream of consciousness consciousness now. There are donate links on my website. And as well, you can send fractions of bitcoins and some satoshis my way by using a one of the new podcast apps that are value for value enabled, so

this is a podcasting 2.0 compatible podcast. It's probably one of the least listened to podcasting 2.0 compatible podcasts out there today. That's my claim to fame. But if you if you listen with one of those apps, you can stream cryptocurrency to me in the form of satoshis. And anything you send would be shocking. So aside, aside from the stock market that was driving me insane today looked like it was gonna go down almost 3%. And it

kind of clawed its way back to maybe one and a half percent. We had the news about from the wall street journal about Xi Jinping. And his aim to rein in Chinese capitalism as if there was Chinese capitalism to begin with. If anything, it was a very soft socialist version of capitalism. where anybody who was paying attention knew or should have known that you can't confidently do business with a communist nation. And, you know, since the Clinton administration, the Chinese have

rapidly advanced their technology. They've grown rapidly wealthy, all at the expense of the American taxpayer. Now, mind you, we're not you know, the America or I should say, the American public, not necessarily the taxpayer. Now we've received goods for our money. But we've given a lot of way. We made China the manufacturing center of the world. They don't just manufacture bullshit, either.

It's not just t shirts and shoes. You know, they're manufacturing, high technology, high technology that we allowed them to manufacture that could have gone anywhere, could have stayed here in the US if the governments of the United States, you know, I'm talking about the states and the federal government, in particular states like California, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, you know, all up and down, you know, basically the coasts, the

coasts, and, you know, Illinois, they would get their heads out of their ass and get rid of things like the minimum wage that just ruins American competitiveness. Now, of course, it sounds cold hearted, get rid of the minimum wage, because everybody talks about the fucking minimum wage, as if it's some quote unquote, living wage. And that has no definition of

living wage has no definition whatsoever. Your your, you know, there are some people that could live comfortably on 10 grand a year and there are others that I have no clue how to squeeze that much out out of their out of their dollar. And not only that, but you have different standards of living in different states. It's a, you know, I came from Illinois to move to Georgia, the cost of living in Illinois is enormous compared to here.

You know, I left, I left a pretty decent income behind to come to Georgia, you know, I'm making probably about a third of what I was making, I'm getting a regular paycheck from my family, working in the family business. I'm probably making about a third of what I was making before. And my expenses, you know, haven't dropped by two thirds, is not that cheap to live here. But it's a lot cheaper I can, I can easily get

by the amount of money that I'm making now. For example, the house that we purchased in North, the far north eastern suburbs of Atlanta, about 30 miles or so it was almost $200,000 less expensive than the house we sold in Illinois. The property taxes are 1/3 of what my property taxes were in Illinois. So we were able to move here mail, buy a house and do a whole bunch of renovations, and still have a sizable chunk of cash leftover, the house here is bigger, the

lot size is bigger. But all the expenses are less. And that was my primary reason for moving is I wanted to lower my fixed expenses, my fixed costs, because my wife likes to travel. So the whole concept was, we would save a ton of money, we would be able to travel a couple times a year, you know, she

likes to go to Europe. And you know, just kind of bounce around a little bit, you know, we even are toying around with the idea of maybe in five years or so we sell off everything, and just go, you know, live a year here live a year there and just kind of bounce around. Somehow I'm looking at my computer right now somehow I went to my cost of living from talking about Jian, ping and

reining in the Chinese capitalists. I have no idea how I went from that, that to that went from one to the other how the train of thought goes from China, to my property taxes. Anyway, back back to Shishun Ping.

You know, we transfer to an enormous amount of wealth, not just in money, but in technology and brain power over to the Chinese is a huge mistake, they couldn't even launch a rocket they couldn't get rockets off the ground until, as I remember it, President Clinton allowed some vital technology to be sent over there to be shared. So microprocessors. You know, I

mean, they were stealing stuff to begin with. But then when we started actually manufacturing things over there of high technology, you know, where supposedly we control the manufacturing process and all the intellectual property. You're teaching people how to fucking make things. So when you teach them how to make it, they're not gonna need your

fucking technology anymore because you gave it to them. It made zero sense that you're gonna make that kind of a deal with a communist nation, a closed off communist communist nation, where while they, you know, they have make believe capitalism there. They can take and they can control any aspect of their economy. And the things that that produce goods, they can take control of it at the drop of a hat. Look what happened to Hong Kong. Hong Kong, went from a free country,

a UK colony to now basically a prisoner of China. They're not free anymore. They're free to To say anything, they're not free to do anything, whatever China says goes and China is just fleecing them. And they they've done that since they took over from the UK. But here's the bonus. And it's the way I see the world. Because I am, you know, I'm 54, I'll be 55 this

year. Officials, you know, to me, 55 is the official senior citizen age because you can get into a 55 and up Senior Living housing complex, where I can I can be with all the other gray haired people playing tennis. But I'm old enough to remember the Soviet Union. And I remember what Venezuela used to be like, I've never been there. But I'm talking about just reading about it in the news. And it is well known throughout the history of the world, that socialism and communism does not work. In

fact, it kills people, it kills millions of people. And that's not what is being taught in the United States today. What is being taught here is that socialism is some kind of utopian equity farm, where everybody's made equal, nobody starved. But that's bullshit. That's all bullshit. And maybe we'll be able to watch it. I don't know. You know, it took it took, what 30 years for China to crawl out of its out of its economic hole. You know, everybody, they their entire

country was poverty stricken. And through the economic trade with the United States, a great deal of their population has been able to crawl out. And you know, we talk all the time about, at least in the news about Chinese factories, underpaying workers, overworking them, where they're committing suicide and jumping off of buildings. But I tell you that there's no shortage of people wanting those jobs. That's why they've been able to be so successful. minimum wages, I

mean, shit there. They pay people, whatever, whatever is the going rate, that part for them is capitalism. If they if they start clamping down on that, suddenly, not so many people are going to be wanting to go over there and work. So if Xi Jinping does a true socialist crackdown on that country and starts taking actual control of these companies, you know, nationalizing them now they haven't done it yet, but they're

they're tightening the reins. Are you looking at what happened here in the United States during COVID, when the federal government declared eviction moratoriums, foreclosure moratoriums, they had to pump out trillions of dollars to keep everybody afloat. In order to utilize that mean that socialism and communism there, they de facto nationalize residential real estate. They didn't do it with commercial real estate, they only did it with residential real estate. And the entire, that entire part

is on the verge or was on the verge of collapse. Because they weren't allowing homeowners who rent out rooms, they weren't allowing real estate companies to kick people out. But yet they still had to pay mortgages, they still had to pay property taxes, and then you had the foreclosure moratorium that didn't apply to commercial properties that didn't apply to people who are renting out their properties that only apply to actual homeowners. And when a homeowner has a mortgage, they don't

actually own their home. It's owned by the bank. So the banks, which have a horrible track record, sometimes have I mean, just look at the 2008 financial collapse that was all caused by low quality mortgages being traded by banks, but you know, they were being bundled together and being sold off and traded. And then when people couldn't pay them, you know, and we're defaulting, it was just the House of Cards. This is what the US government is doing it if we would stop that. Free everybody

up. We wouldn't have to worry about China at all. You know, maybe we could do some more investments in Some Southeast Asian countries that aren't communist. Maybe we could, you know, maybe help out South America and I know South America has its own history and its own problem with socialism, communism, and into an antagonism towards the United States. But I think our energies are best focused in our own

hemisphere, in our side of the world. You know, we're maybe we can make people more free down south where they're more open to this, this style of government. And it's here. Those are my thoughts for today. Oh, by the way, I fucked this all up. I got a podcast rig. It's called the Patrick before and my SD card was full. So like an idiot, I wouldn't formatted it instead of just going and getting rid of the recording shows that I had on there. And so my intro music got wiped out,

I gotta redo it. So I had to open it up on my computer, and play it through there instead, so that's why I got to set up now. That's why I'm stalling because I got I can't just push a button now. I gotta go fix that. Anyway, that's all I had for today. That's all I got. We'll see what happens. The next time I record. And there's nothing god dammit. You know why? Because I screwed this up. So I I've got it muted. So hold on. Let's try this again. Now, that's all I've got.