Everyday Freethought

Here is the dividend income report for December, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $3,145.22. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $12,185.76.

The income for December, 2021 was $3,408.55, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of December was $10,951.48.

This is the sixth month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

Honestly, I have been kind of tired over the past few weeks: job, economy, worrying about money, etc. I am tired of reading about bitcon and corrupt-o-currency, tired of thinking about them, tired of hearing about them. I wish it would all just go away. As Emily Gilmore would say, it all just nonsense. Anyone who is into it is either a scammer or stupid. It’s bad enough dealing with people who think capital gains is the answer, or tax cuts are the solution to all the world’s problems, and then turn around and tell you the world is complicated when tax cuts do not make anything better. The Big Lie. QAnon. Monotheism. People who haven’t realized the only intelligent amount of booze is none. Generally the same people who are too stupid or too much of a jerk to grasp the concept that universal statements are not invitations to come up with exceptions. I need a break from it all.

In the past year I got RWR in both IRA accounts. Right now they are both underwater. I know I said we should not rely on capital gains; that does not mean I want my stocks to go to zero. The goal is to live off the dividends and never touch principal. I think some sectors of real estate will have some issues. I also think rising interest rates will help here. The plan is to hold these for the rest of my life.

I am still concerned I might not make it with the funds I have. My 12-month moving average after estimated taxes (which is not part of this report) would not cover my rent today, let alone my rent in 20 years. Granted, if I had my 401(k) from work in dividend ETFs, I would have much higher income. I know I have been saying for a couple of years that the end may be soon. I am still in that in-between state.

Here is a table of the number of Dividend Champions, Contenders, Challengers, and a total of all three for the first week of each January from 2011 to 2023. The methodology changed from 2021 to 2022, but I think it is still a good comparison. I am starting to wonder if the number of Champions will ever crack 140.

Year	Total	Champions	Contenders	Challengers
2023	723	130	348	245
2022	708	127	302	280
2021	729	139	308	282
2020	866	138	265	463
2019	864	131	205	528
2018	822	115	220	487
2017	768	108	227	433
2016	753	107	250	396
2015	611	106	246	259
2014	476	105	210	161
2013	458	105	183	170
2012	448	102	146	200
2011	447	99	141	207
2010		98	62	N/A
2009		125
2008		138

I have been looking at some posts on the Dividends subreddit, and I am thinking about going back to individual stocks. It is more likely that my income would go up. I am not clear why a dividend growth ETF would have a variable payout from one quarter to another. Granted, there are always companies cutting dividends and others joining the club, but I still think the payouts should go down less often than they do. This phenomenon is not just in the DGI ETFs that I have been in from Vanguard and State Street, but Black Rock’s as well. Granted, stocks can cut or freeze their dividends, but with individual stocks there is more upward momentum. One reason I stopped with individual stocks is that it is a lot of work entering all that information. I have a customized spreadsheet that cannot be automated, and I think most banks and brokers do not know what GnuCash is. I think most of the gain I got from ETFs was in the international ETFs.

Here are the 2021 and 2022 amounts for the securities that I own, with the differences. Yes, I know this is off for 2022. I might have entered something wrong in one sheet in my spreadsheet; I am willing to live with it.

Security	2021 Income	2022 Income	YOY Change
BND	1796.89	1907.55	110.66
BNDX	453.20	163.47	-289.73
LAND	204.55	46.10	-158.45
RLI	315.22	0	-315.22
RWR Reg	0	504.12	504.12
RWR Roth	0	853.13	853.13
SDY	3616.80	3501.55	-115.25
VPU	943.49	1053.15	109.66
WDIV	3080.13	3508.98	428.85
XYLD	473.24	620.80	147.56
Sold	67.96	0	-67.96
Total	10951.48	12158.85	1207.37

I have noticed on the Dividends subreddit they love SCHD. I plan on looking at that fund, and at its underlying index. Some of them really love SCHD over there. It is almost like a religion with some of them: And the lord spoke “thou shalt only buy” and lo, the believers prospered. The sinners sold and their fields lay barren and bereft of hope. Still, buying DGI stocks or ETFs and never selling is an idea I can get behind.

Another goal for this year is to follow a few more of Ron DeLegge’s ideas: Make a written investment policy statement, and try to pick a commodities ETF.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each December from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-12	$12185.76	$3145.22	$1296.91	$1015.48
2021-12	$10951.48	$3408.55	$1346.62	$912.62
2020-12	$10541.51	$3490.60	$1294.16	$878.46
2019-12	$10515.13	$3611.13	$1343.15	$876.26
2018-12	$6971.76	$2313.99	$1165.08	$580.98
2017-12	$7536.98	$1837.78	$913.40	$628.08
2016-12	$6076.53	$1027.76	$605.28	$506.38
2015-12	$5472.07	$954.52	$575.86	$456.01
2014-12	$4438.02	$909.86	$481.67	$369.80
2013-12	$3406.20	$594.59	$344.05	$283.85
2012-12	$3585.01	$686.10	$386.41	$298.75
2011-12	$3091.99	$514.94	$323.40	$253.92

Here are the securities and the income amounts for December, 2022:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $169.72
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $13.66
• Vanguard Utilities ETF VPU ETF: $278.12
• SPDR S&P Dividend ETF SDY ETF: $984.34
• SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF RWR ETF: $164.89
• SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF RWR ETF: $328.31
• SPDR S&P Global Dividend ETF: $978.89
• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $178.06
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $49.23

 

Big Jim has a principle of never touching the principal.

Painting of the Anunciation at the Church of San Salvadore by Titian (1488-1576); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for November, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $278.11. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $9040.54.

The income for November, 2021 was $166.06, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of November was $7542.93.

This is the fifth month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

Before I continue writing about why bitcon and corrupt-o-currency are stupid, I should mention another no-coiner. I have written about David Gerard and his blog Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. He has weekly updates on what is happening in the world of corrupt-o-currency. I should also mention Amy Castor. He and Amy alternate the weekly report. Her blog is low-contrast, but you can read it in Reader View.

Six months ago there were a lot of bankruptcies in corrupt-o-currency: Voyager Digital, Three Arrows Capital, Terraform Labs, Celsius Network. A firm called FTX started buying other corrupt-o-currency firms, and a lot of people thought they were going to help the sector stabilize. Now FTX has gone bankrupt. The first wave of collapse brought bitcon from $30K to $20K. This wave has taken it from $20K to $17K.

Some bitcon maximalists think this will not hurt bitcon in the long run. One of David Gerard’s ongoing gags is to explain how something bad is actually “good for crypto” or “good for bitcoin”, because whenever anything happens that looks terrible, there is always someone who says “This is actually good for crypto because…” or “This is actually good for bitcoin because…”. Well, for those people, the hamster wheels in their brains are working overtime, because a lot is happening.

Blockchain is just a trojan horse for bitcon. When bitcon first came out, a lot of people who were not glibertarian dudebros asked what good is this? And the answer was: the magic is not bitcon itself, but the blockchain! For a long time you could not buy other coins directly. You had to go fiat -> bitcon -> some_other_stupid_coin. Then NFTs came along, and only two types of people thought they were any good: People selling them, and the first wave of buyers. It became a solution in search of a problem. Blockchain, NFT, alt-coins, ICO, web3: It’s all just a way to push bitcon.

Shipping company Maersk and IBM made a platform that used blockchain to manage global trade. They are shutting it down. I wrote a few months ago that Walmart is using blockchain to manage their supply chains in Canada. The vendor is DLT Labs, and their news page has not had any updates since then. Perhaps Walmart stopped using it and DLT Labs hasn’t mentioned it. Or at best DLT Labs is looking for a second customer for The Answer To All The World’s Problems. Back in 2017, blogger Tim Bray pointed out even then that we should have seen more success stories with blockchain. He mentioned other technologies that made life easier for developers and admins: Unix, C, Java, REST, cloud.

And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got [tasks] done and helped people with their jobs.

That’s not happening with blockchain. Not in the slightest. Which is why I don’t believe in it.

Maybe Walmart is expanding their use of blockchain with another vendor. Given what little I know about Walmart, they would not tell anyone. Maybe there are a few niche cases for blockchain. Maybe it will change the jobs of a few (hundred? thousand? ten-thousand?) people out there. But it’s not the web, it’s not Java, it’s not Rails, it’s not cloud.

I cannot find it, but there was a tweet from someone who said if you look at the chart for bitcon, you can almost see the moment it went from a toy for anarcho-glibertarians to a speculative asset for the masses. Well, the masses speculated, and they lost a lot of money.

Bitcon is the paradox of glibertarianism writ large: Glibertarian dudebros are always complaining about the guv-ment telling them what to do. Yet they have no problem trying to force changes on society that nobody asked for.

I have been gathering notes with links and comments from various sites about bitcon and corrupt-o-currency. Perhaps at some point I will get around to making it into a blog post and clear all that stuff out. Honestly, I wish bitcon and corrupt-o-currencies would all just go away. A few bloggers and lecturers have said they want it all to “die in a fire” (see here and here). Given that climate change is already an issue, there is a chance that bitcon won’t just die in a fire; it might take all of us with it.

As Amy Castor and David Gerard have pointed out, every firm in this sector is as Quadriga as they can get away with, until they cannot.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each November from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-11	$9040.54	$278.11	$968.22	$1037.42
2021-11	$7542.93	$166.06	$824.63	$919.46
2020-11	$7050.91	$196.63	$742.84	$885.10
2019-11	$6904.00	$126.48	$843.65	$768.17
2018-11	$4657.77	$50.86	$562.56	$541.30
2017-11	$5699.20	$560.60	$559.31	$560.58
2016-11	$5048.77	$506.98	$502.98	$500.27
2015-11	$4517.55	$460.83	$477.55	$452.28
2014-11	$3528.16	$291.27	$357.30	$343.53
2013-11	$2811.61	$252.75	$277.74	$291.48
2012-11	$2898.91	$247.99	$262.78	$284.49
2011-11	$2577.05	$246.37	$232.84	$240.81

Here are the securities and the income amounts for November, 2022:

• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $48.60
• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF BND ETF: $167.53
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $12.34
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $49.64

 

Big Jim is trying to be as Captain Kirk as he wants to be. He is doing better than the corrupt-o-currency sector, but not as well as he wishes.

Painting of the Storm on the Sea of Gallilee by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669); image from Wikipedia, missing since 1990, assumed allowed under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for October, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $467.39. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $8762.43.

The income for October, 2021 was $465.25, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of October was $7376.87.

This is the fourth month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

The price of bitcon is just above $21,000 today. It was stuck below $20,000 for a few weeks, then jumped up to above $21,000, and since has slightly declined, but still flat. Dave Gerard and Amy Castor both think the price is being manipulated. Given how the economy is grinding along, it is odd how The Answer To All The World’s Problems is in a tight range.

I watched a few episodes of the Rational Reminder channel’s Understanding Crypto Limited Series. I have only watched a few out of order. So far I like them.

It seems like every one has a comment from someone complaining that the guest is anti-corrupt-o-currency and not objective, why don’t they have $SOME-CRAZY-DUDE on? Why should they? There are PLENTY of pro-corrupt-o-currency channels on YouTube. I have not kept track of these commenters, but I wonder if these same commenters are asking those pro-corrupt-o-currency channels to have anti-corrupt-o-currency guests. I would say the corrupt-o-currency crowd doesn’t want an objective discussion. It’s like talking to Jordan Peterson fanboys: context, you haven’t read this, blah blah blah. The hosts are financial advisors; their goal is to do what is best for their clients. If they say corrupt-o-currencies are bad, maybe it is because corrupt-o-currencies are bad. All the pro-corrupt-o-currency people are talking their book, or just old men yelling at clouds. A lot of them are like Donald Trump or Peter Thiel: rich guys who despite all their money are really angry for who knows what reason.

One commenter on the episode with Bruce Schneier suggested Greg Foss: “olearly and foss have strong personalities and have strong onscreen presence and they’ll likely overpower the hosts”. I googled this Greg Foss and looked at a few videos with him on YouTube. He does not have a “strong personality”. He is just an asshole who yells a lot. A lot of people think “loud” means “strong”. It doesn’t. Generally loud people are stupid. You can just nod your head, they think you agree, then they go away none the wiser, not even remembering what they spewed out in the first place. Greg Foss looks like he has never had an actual conversation with anyone. He just yells whatever is brain is vomiting. Can you imagine this guy meeting Alex Jones? They would spend hours yelling at the clouds before noticing each other. News flash: us quiet people can yell back when we need to. Yelling is not a super power.

In one of the videos I saw of Foss, he was going on about the deficit. I pretty much stopped there. These idiots never have a problem with the deficit when conservatives cut taxes for the wealthy. It does not lead to more economic growth, wealthy people do not expand and invest, and the tax cuts do not force conservative governments to spend less. But when a progressive adminstration comes in, oh my god, the debt!! Will nobody think of the children?!?!?! Living life in all caps makes you look stupid. Living life in all caps while sucking up to the wealthy means you are stupid.

A lot of people treat corrupt-o-currency like another speculative asset, even though the world already has a lot of speculative assets; some of them actually have cash flow. Other say bitcon is a hedge against inflation. Isn’t gold a hedge against inflation? Why do we need bitcon when the world has gold? A lot of the bitcon-men do not want to spend their bitcon, they just want to hold it. Warren Buffett pointed out that gold is inefficient: You have to mine it, then you have to store it somewhere secure and pay insurance. So you pay money to dig it out of one hole, and you pay more to stick it in another hole. The bitcon community looked at that and thought: We can be even less efficient than that. Why not just use gold? I guess bitconners really are just misanthropes.

Schneier says that corrupt-o-currency is trying to solve social problems (or what are problems for some people) with technology. The host asked why corrupt-o-currency bros are trying that, and Schneier said, “Because it would be great if you could do that.” It reminded me of the quote from Big Jim from last month: do not confuse the way things are with the way you want them to be.

First one was a programmer named Daniel Mescheder who explained blockchains, bitcon, and proof of work. He had a few points that were also made by another software developer named Stephen Diehl, who authored the articles The Case Against Crypto and Web3 is Bullshit. It all sounds great until you need to have your blockchain interact with the rest of the world. Getting real money in is easy, but getting it back out always seems difficult. It’s like a roach motel for money. Mesheder said some blockchain people want to put land ownership records on the block chain. But if he claims your land, he cannot just wave his blockchain at you. We need some sort of real-world enforcement, or some way to resolve disputes. And if you are relying on someone for enforcement, can’t you rely on them to store the data on the chain? One issue he did not mention is: what is to stop someone from making another blockchain for the same land? Diehl mentioned multiple coins. There have been some blockchain/coin companies that paid people in their tokens instead of dollars. Diehl compared this to wildcat banking. I do not want to pay every monthly bill in another currency.

The topic of immutability came up a few times. Ethereum rolled back a hack, so it’s not really immutable. The only reason bitcon is immutable is that nobody wants to roll back. But it’s all just stuff people made up; they could roll it back. The reason that will not happen is that a lot of people are invested (literally and metaphorically) in the status quo. Bitcon is just “too big to fail”. The sort of problem with the current financial system that bitcon was supposed to solve.

Another episode was with David Gerard. As you can imagine, he said there was no point in any of this.

A lot of the justifications for corrupt-o-currency are circular reasoning. One justification for blockchain is to manage “digital assets”. But nobody was talking about digital assets until blockchain. So we need the blockchain to manage what is on the blockchain.

In other news, Kroger buying Albertsons, and the PE firms that own Albertsons are paying themselves a dividend (discussion on Hacker News; some states are trying to stop the “dividend”). Per the linked article on HN, the $4B extraction is about all the cash Albertsons has on hand. The PE firms have owned Albertsons for 7 years. If they haven’t made a profit, it’s their own fault. Paying out all your cash at once is stupid. It’s like they looked at Elon Musk buying Twitter and said, “We can top that.” I think we should stop calling these one-time payments “dividends” and call them extractions, or bloodlettings. Just as there are public benefit corporations whose charters say they have to be run in a sustainable manner, perhaps there should be a type of corporation that is centered on long-term sustainable dividends and prohibits stock buybacks.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each October from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-10	$8762.43	$467.39	$948.63	$1028.09
2021-10	$7376.87	$465.25	$838.41	$922.01
2020-10	$6854.28	$195.26	$745.73	$879.26
2019-10	$6777.52	$291.83	$822.53	$761.86
2018-10	$4606.91	$1130.39	$561.66	$583.77
2017-10	$5138.63	$341.83	$566.34	$556.11
2016-10	$4541.79	$281.09	$508.05	$496.43
2015-10	$4056.72	$312.23	$459.42	$438.15
2014-10	$3236.89	$243.87	$368.19	$340.32
2013-10	$2558.86	$184.81	$295.19	$291.08
2012-10	$2650.92	$225.14	$285.46	$284.35
2011-10	$2330.68	$208.90	$258.17	$238.44

Here are the securities and the income amounts for October, 2022:

• Vanguard Utilities ETF: $295.86
• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $160.25
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $11.28

Big Jim encourages strangling loud people. They deserve it.

Painting of the Temptation of Christ by Tobias Verhaecht (1561–1631); image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for September, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $2159.15. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $8295.04.

The income for September, 2021 was $1842.58, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of September was $6911.62.

This is the third month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

There is not a whole lot to say about my stocks.

VPU was late again. I wish that iShares would lower the cost of IDU, or that State Street would come out with another utilities ETF besides XLU. State Street has lots of sector ETFs besides their S&P 500 SPDRs; for some reason utilities is the only sector without a non-SPDR ETF.

WRT bitcon: at the end of last month it was at $19K. Then throughout the month it hovered around $18K, up to $20K, and now it is slowly going back down to $19K. I watched David Gerard’s August appearance on the Rational Reminder podcast. He pretty much said it’s all just fraud; that is the only use case. He also point out that bitcon’s peak was when Elon Musk talked about bitcon. I don’t know if him talking about corrupt-o-currency was the cause of the peak, and DG did not really go into that too much. I would not be surprised if it never goes above $25K again. Granted, I might be wrong; there is no shortage of either predators or desparate people. DG said a good book about bitcon and corrupt-o-currency was written in 1841: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

I did ask on Hacker News how is the Lightning Network supposed to help. I got a couple of responses; you can see them at the link. My question was: Bitcoin advocates say that the BTC network has to be slow to be secure and decentralized. If you start putting transactions on a second blockchain, don’t you lose all the security/validation of the BTC blockchain? One of the answers pointed out that LN is not another blockchain. It seems like a lot of bitcon fanboys want to have it both ways: Bitcon is the answer to all our problems, until it’s not. You can look at the answers for yourself, but I am not convinced the circle has been squared. Or if it has, then what is the point?

What if you get scammed on the LN? Don’t you lose that money forever when the transactions are moved to the bitcon blockchain? Who backstops the LN? And why would I want to deal with sats (which I am guessing is short for Satoshis)? My life is complicated enough with one currency. Maybe that is the issue in a nutshell: The corrupt-o bros think they can make all of this easy. But ultimately it is not easy.

And even if corrupt-o-currencies become the norm, I think one condition will be that society will wind up building a parallel financial ecosystem just as complicated as we have today.

WRT LN not being another blockchain: if they only way to make the blockchain useful is to not use the blockchain, why should I bother with the blockchain in the first place?

And when your currency is touted by a jackass who calls himself a dictator, then do not talk to me about how bitcon is freedom. Maybe if Bukele had two brain cells talking to one another, he would have thrown the gang leaders in jail while he was making deals with them.

Bitcon seems like an online version of Glibertarian’s paradise. These experiments tend to fail (see here and here for two examples). Like DG, I predict that the Bitcoin City in El Salvador will not amount to much of anything.

While looking into Bitcon City and the various attempts to create Galt’s Gulch, I found some pages about a guy named Doug Casey, who created La Estancia Cafayate. I think this is the site for the community. There is also an article in the New York Times here. It seems to talk a lot about wine and golf, but no glibertarian buzzwords. There is a page here about a couple from South Africa looking for “freedom” and who mention Doug Casey’s writings. The site is for a broker names Terri Casey, who I assume is Doug Casey’s wife. The post has “Part 1” at the end of the title, but there is no Part 2 on the page with posts. Perhaps Mrs Casey needs to cut back on the wine.

I found out about Doug Casey on a site called International Man. Interestingly enough, the posts are not dated. There is one that predicted another Great Depression will hit full force in 2017. Evil fell upon us in 2017, but not an economic depression. I am at a point where I reject doomsayers who never admit they are wrong. I also do not trust sites that sell something and give no physical address. Maybe talking about wine and golf and villas for sale is a way to admit you were wrong without actually having to use those words. Maybe that is what freedom and liberty are now: a place for old people to complain for half price.

I did not read all the articles on International Man (I have better things to do). Maybe he never intended it to be a place where people are productive, have jobs and run companies. But those glibertarian paradises never work out either. It is bizarre because a lot of the guys pushing these do tend to be wealthy and successful in some industry. Yet these git-er-done types fail when building a society or community.

Sometimes these guys all sound a lot like disaster preppers: Instead of just coming up with a plan to walk away from society (or prepare for its demise), why not put some thought into improving it somehow? Can putting too much energy into preparing for some negative outcomes make them more likely? If the corrupt-o-currency bros can get the world to talk about this thing that most people do not understand, then you can get some serious regulations through Congress, like the kind that worked for about 60 years.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each September from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-09	$8295.04	$2159.15	$863.88	$1027.91
2021-09	$6911.62	$1842.58	$749.74	$899.51
2020-09	$6659.02	$1836.64	$750.42	$887.30
2019-09	$6485.69	$2112.65	$744.85	$831.74
2018-09	$3476.52	$506.44	$430.49	$518.06
2017-09	$4796.80	$775.50	$562.76	$551.05
2016-09	$4260.70	$720.86	$505.47	$499.02
2015-09	$3744.49	$659.59	$443.06	$432.46
2014-09	$2993.02	$536.75	$353.04	$335.39
2013-09	$2374.05	$395.65	$293.78	$294.44
2012-09	$2425.78	$315.21	$283.66	$283.00
2011-09	$2121.78	$243.26	$256.81	$233.01

Here are the securities and the income amounts for September, 2022:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $160.28
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $11.02
• SPDR S&P Dividend ETF: $846.89
• SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF: $294.45
• SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF: $147.88
• SPDR S&P Global Dividend ETF: $650.06
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $48.57

 

Big Jim says there is more to preserving freedom than opting out.

“Immaculate Conception” by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640); image from Wikimedia, also available on his website or Museo del Prado; assumed allowed under public domain .

Here is the dividend income report for August, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $219.36. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $6135.89.

The income for August 2021 was $207.39, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of August was $5069.04.

This is the second month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

This is not the time on Sprockets when we dahnce, but it is the time when we talk about the stupidity of corrupt-o-currency.

There is a lot of debate over whether or not we are in a recession. A lot of people are using the colloquial definition of two quarters of shrinking GDP. The National Bureau of Economic Research has more criteria: real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. Employment right now is strong, and I think sales are also up. In general, most indicators are pointing in the same direction. I think one issue is we are in a transition period where some indicators are good, and some are bad. I suppose there is always a transition period when we go from expansion to recession or vice versa, but this transition period feels like it is grinding very slowly.

I think long-term things will improve. Raising rates will get rid of inflation. But it could cause a recession. Long-term gain, but short-term pain. How short-term? And for whom? Shouldn’t a store of value like bitcon be rising in a time of uncertainty and transition like this? At the end of last month, it was $23K. Then it went up to $24K. For the past week it has been hovering around $20K. Are there wash trades to keep it above a nice, round number?

There are floods in Pakistan that made about 15% of the population homeless, the war in Ukraine is affecting energy prices and generation throughout Europe (in addition to all the problems it is causing for Ukrainians), the world is still having supply chain issues, the whole globe is dealing with drought and inflation, and it is looking like the previous president has been selling state secrets. The world is falling apart. Why isn’t bitcon soaring? It was supposed to be the thing that was to keep humanity free from tyranny. It was supposed to be hope. But it looks like it is losing steam right when people need something to be hopeful about. I have heard “any day now” from executives and managers. I have heard “just wait” from women who left my life in tatters. I heard “soon” from lying pastors and corrupt martial arts masters. This is the tomorrow when you said things would be different.

One of the arguments that corrupt-o-currency pushers use is that corrupt-o is good because there are more and more people buying corrupt-o. People still shoot themselves in the face. People get drunk and choke on their own vomit. People still support Donald Trump. Just because a lot of people are doing something does not make it a smart thing to do. As David Gerard and Wolf Street pointed out, a lot of this “corrupt-o-currency goes mainstream” was really a lot of corrupt-o companies investing their blockchains/coins/tokens/NFTs/web3-things in other corrupt-o companies’ blockchains/coins/tokens/NFTs/web3-things. It turns out that a bunch of snakes eating each other’s tails is no different than one snake eating its own tail. All the houses of cards were connected, so they all fell at the same time.

There is no income stream. Why are people still talking about this? And now electricity prices are going up while the price of crypto is going down, according to Wired magazine. Some miners funded their ASICs with debt, and instead of HODL-ing forever (which never makes sense for any asset), they are selling. The bitcon fanboys thought bitcon was different, but it turns out nothing has changed. Assets with no cash flow are worthless. And the world does not owe miners a minimum price based on the miners’ costs. Bitcon mining is like filling your bathtub with cement and demanding the world give you money.

However, I do think there is one good use of bitcon: It is an IQ test and an ethics test in one package. If you are pro-bitcon, you are both stupid and a terrible person. End of discussion.

Granted, since this is bitcon, there are probably more efficient ways to test someone’s IQ and ethics at the same time. Maybe that is the cynic’s definition of bitcon: finding the most wasteful way to tell the world what stupid, horrible person you are, and defending it until the bitter end.

In other news, the Federal Reserve is finally raising rates. I can understand why rates were kept low during and immediately after COVID, but I thought that they would have gone up between 2012 and 2019. One thing that bugs me is that a lot of people blame all the bad things that happen on “the Fed”. Even people on sites that I generally respect, like Wolf Street (mostly the commenters, not Wolf himself). I call bull. Nobody forced anyone to put money into meme stocks. Or unicorns that do not make any money. Or corrupt-o-currency. People chose to do those things. I have stuck with dividend growth stocks. I might not be doing as well as the people who are subjects of articles with titles like “Minimum Wage Janitor Retires With Millions Thanks to Dividends”, but I am doing alright. If people got greedy and stupid, it’s not the Fed’s fault.

I will say one thing for Powell: He deserves credit for not lowering rates until COVID. Trump was blathering on that rates were too high and needed to go down. Trump also owes a lot of debt to a lot of banks. He didn’t want rates to go down because he thought it was good for the economy, he was just crying his own book.

I don’t think they will have to raise rates to the same level that Volker did to tame inflation. People and corporations have a lot more debt now than they did in the 1970s and 1980s.

WRT unicorns that never make money: One commenter on Hacker News pointed out that many of the VC firms are not just investing, but pushing a glibertarian world-view. Why else would somebody be dumb enough to give money to Adam Neumann from WeWork? Maybe he should call his next company WeBezz, from John Kenneth Galbraith’s term “the bezzle”. He defined it as the period when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth. Perhaps corrupt-o-currency and the VC/startup world are just a big “re-bezzle”: Nobody thinks any of it will amount to something, and all the participants at each step are just looking for someone else they can leave holding the bag; nobody cares about building a company that will last, they all just want to flip. Which is totally in line with the cynical definition of glibertarianism: I have the freedom to be rich, and you have the freedom to be poor.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each August from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-08	$6135.89	$219.36	$1195.56	$1001.53
2021-08	$5069.04	$207.39	$856.33	$899.01
2020-08	$4822.38	$205.28	$790.58	$910.30
2019-08	$4373.04	$63.10	$788.78	$697.89
2018-08	$2970.08	$48.14	$549.51	$540.48
2017-08	$4021.30	$581.69	$558.23	$546.50
2016-08	$3539.84	$522.20	$493.44	$493.92
2015-08	$3084.90	$406.45	$427.26	$422.22
2014-08	$2456.27	$323.94	$348.41	$323.64
2013-08	$1978.40	$305.11	$279.05	$287.74
2012-08	$2110.57	$316.04	$280.53	$277.00
2011-08	$1878.52	$322.35	$254.56	$225.45

Here are the securities and the income amounts for August, 2022:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $156.71
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $11.10
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $51.55

 

Big Jim says amateurs talk capital gains; professionals talk income streams.

“Adoration of the Magi” by Altichiero da Verona (c. 1330 – c. 1390), aka Aldighieri da Zevio; image allowed under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for July, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $213.12. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $5916.53

The income for July, 2021 was $199.25, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of July was $4861.65.

It is looking more and more like I will be leaving my current employer at the end of the month. They do not have any positions in the technologies that I am interested in. I have tried studying other things on my own, but things get in the way, or I lose energy, or something happens. Getting a new job is a job. I already have one. I do not want another.

So I will probably be rolling over my Roth 401K into my Roth IRA. This will increase my dividend income substantially. Granted, it will also decrease my savings. I do not know how bad inflation will be or how long it will take to get a new job. But I am not jumping off a cliff unprepared.

I will sell what I have in my regular IRA and buy the same amount of shares of those ETFs in my Roth IRA. I think I will then use my regular IRA for REITs and individual stocks, or perhaps ETFs that I would not ordinarily buy (like ETFs specific to a country or industry). But no corrupt-o-currency.

The big news in corrupt-o-currency and buttcoin is that Michal Saylor is resigning as CEO of MicroStrategy. He founded MSTR in 1989. Allegedly their main business is business intelligence and analytics software. In 2020, he decided that MSTR should stop holding cash, and instead put its money into buttcoin. MSTR is the largest known corporate holder of buttcoin. (Or should I call it bitcon?)

I have never heard of MSTR until Saylor got into bitcon. Then it seemed like all he ever talks about is bitcon. There several videos on the MSTR Youtube channel about bitcon. He tweeted today that “Since @MicroStrategy adopted a #Bitcoin Strategy, its enterprise value is up +730% (+$5 billion) and $MSTR is up +123%. Performance of BTC is +94%, S&P 500 +23%, Nasdaq +13%, Gold -13%, Bonds -14%, Silver -29%. GOOG +54%, AAPL +43%, MSFT +34%, AMZN -14%, META -39%, NFLX -53%.” What does that have to do with BI and analytics? Is a potential client going to say, “Well, your competitors’ software products actually give us more useful information than yours, but since you are in bitcon, we will sign with you”?

I did look at some of their quarterly reports. For the past several quarters they had impairment charges for bitcon. I have not looked at every earnings presentation ever, but I have seen quite a few. Other firms do not talk as much about their cash holdings as MSTR talks about bitcon. Are these guys interested in BI software? If I were looking for BI software, I would look for a vendor that just talks about that. Do not go off-topic. And if you are talking about bitcon, then you really are an idiot.

Saylor’s twitter profile pic shows lasers coming out of his eyes. Is this guy mentally ill? Note to corrupt-o-currency advocates: If this was all meant as a big joke, this all got old before it ever got funny.

When Twitter came out, it seemed totally pointless. Then after a couple of years people started posting links to new pages on their websites, their latest YouTube videos, and live tweeting events. I think it is fair to say that we are past the time that bitcon advocates can get away with telling us bitcon or corrupt-o-currency or blockchump will change the world. Very few people are using it for purchases. Why would I want to use bitcon to buy things? I like doing everything in one currency. I am not dealing with people in other countries. Why make my life more complicated? It is not a store of value. Things are looking worse in general, and bitcon is about a third of what it was 9 months ago (it reached an adjusted close of $67,566.83 on 2021-11-08; it’s adjusted close on 2022-08-02 was $22,978.12). Farmland is also described as a “store of value“, and it is going up; it also produces an income stream. A lot of articles about the different coins use terms like “support” and “resistance”, just like technical analysis for stocks. I thought bitcon was supposed to be something new and different, but it’s just another tradable instrument. We already have plenty of those.

The bitcon paper came out in 2009. That was 13 years ago. Thirteen years is a significant portion of the human lifespan. We have been hearing “any day now” for a long time. Enough was enough a long time ago. We get it. You are all misanthropes. Get over yourselves.

I think corrupt-o-currency fanbois are like glibertarians. Glibertarians say they want less government; what they really want is to be in charge. Bitcon fanbois are upset they aren’t calling the shots.

I find it odd that bitcon fanbois rant about “fiat” currencies, yet they are all-in on an asset that some random person (whose identity has never been verified) just made up. The only reason that bitcon has “digital scarcity” is just because everyone has agreed to abide by an anonymous white paper. There is really nothing objective about any of this.

And before any fanboi tells me that I don’t get it and I should read this or listen to that: Do not bother. I do not have to understand this. I didn’t ask for it.

I did look at the bitcon paper. I didn’t get past the first page. It said that if we could get rid of intermediaries, we could have non-reversible transactions and we would all save money. There are at least two problems here. Non-reversible transactions is only a good thing if you are a scammer. Most people do not understand finance or technology. A no-recourse financial system would be a disaster. The other issue is that bitcon is not less expensive. Compare the number of transactions Visa does versus the bitcon network.

In other news, I saw an article that more people are looking at bonds and dividend stocks and ETFs. Will they stick with dividends when things turn around? Or will they be tempted once again by the sweet siren song of capital gains?

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each July from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-07	$5916.53	$213.12	$1172.98	$1000.53
2021-07	$4861.65	$199.25	$840.85	$898.84
2020-07	$4617.10	$209.33	$781.84	$898.46
2019-07	$4309.94	$58.79	$818.06	$696.65
2018-07	$2921.94	$736.90	$548.35	$584.94
2017-07	$3439.61	$331.08	$541.56	$541.54
2016-07	$3017.64	$273.36	$464.99	$484.27
2015-07	$2678.45	$263.13	$412.44	$415.35
2014-07	$2132.33	$198.43	$333.77	$322.07
2013-07	$1673.29	$180.57	$258.23	$288.65
2012-07	$1794.53	$219.72	$261.24	$277.53
2011-07	$1556.17	$204.83	$235.96	$211.69

Here are the securities and the income amounts for July, 2022:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $151.73
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $161.52
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $213.12

 

Big Jim says there is nothing wrong with being serious in a world full of problems.

“Study for Moses and the Burning Bush” by Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937); image from Smithsonian Institute, allowed under public domain.

Note: Adjusted close prices were taken from Yahoo Finance, and were valid on 2022-08-29; they may change in the future.