I sorta have this peculiar love affair with Netflix.  We’ve been together on and off for 10 years.  The off part is because a couple of times I was lured away by other companies who offered me Netflix-esque services at a lower price.  I wanted to see if the grass was greener on the other side… so, yeah, I strayed.   But I soon saw for myself that the grass ain’t greener… it’s dry and wilted.  The others could not give me the selection of movies, quick delivery and great service like Netflix did.  I missed my Netflix and I wanted to go home.  But my pride would not let me go running back to admit I was wrong. But my sweetie must have felt my distress because he sent me a email saying if I returned home… he’d promise not to get upset about my affair.  He even said he’d give me a free month of service to prove that there were no hard feelings.  And like a love sick puppy missing her honey… I went back home!  Netflix and I are a solid couple now.  No one else will come between us. 

My Netflix has this sexy, monopolistic prowess that keeps him on top.  Others have tried to penetrate the online DVD rental market, but Netflix is a beast… he just swallows ‘em whole.  The fight to stay on top ain’t been easy.  Blockbuster knocked Netflix down once or twice… and for a second I even thought the fight was over.  But on the 9 count, my baby rose from the ashes even stronger than before… towering over and pissing on the wannabes.  (Pardon my potty mouth, but it is what it is…)

Netflix invents ways to retain existing customers, bring back old customers and create new customers.  Yeah, sometimes I get a little jealous that I can’t have my Netflix all to myself.  But I understand that aside from being my love, he’s also a business and having to share him with 8 million others is an unfortunate consequence.

A couple of years ago Netflix began letting subscribers stream movies directly from their computer.  Now subscribers can stream movies directly to their TV.  For a $100, I got Roku’s Netflix player… and voola!!!  the movie is on my tv.  I don’t have to wait for the mailman to deliver that adorable red envelope anymore… I have Instant Netflix… Netflix On Demand… Netflix All Day, Everyday… only a remote click away.  And if all goes well, my baby will start delivering movies to me (and you too I suppose *small sigh of jealousy*) by way of  Xbox 360.

Let me tell you… Netflix… my honey… is wheeling and dealing and making big moves. I’m so proud of him… he’s always giving me (and you too I suppose *small sigh of jealousy*) exactly what I (we) want… quality movies that are convenient and inexpensive. 

Have you tried Netflix yet?  If you haven’t, then you gotta check it out.  I’m willing to share him with my PFA family since ya’ll are always so kind to me.  But don’t sign up until I tell you how you can save some money. 

 2 week free trial offer

 One month free

 Never pay late fees

 Plans as low as $4.99 a month

 $4.40 cash back rebate

 $15 cashbaq for Netflix subscription

 $12 from Netflix to your Upromise account

 1,000 MyPoints

 Also, here is how you can win one million dollars from Netflix!

Summer is here, school is out, and already you’ve got Bart Simpson on your couch from noon until 2:00 a.m. playing round after round of Grand Theft Auto and eating up every salted crunchy thing in the house.

Not acceptable.

Trouble is, summer jobs are scarce as $2 gasoline right now, and it doesn’t look like things are going to change anytime soon. Bob Herbert laments this very fact on a much more serious level in his New York Times column today.

Even so, it’s also true that some jobs never have enough applicants, and others, while not the kind of thing your son or daughter might consider off the top of his or her head, are great for building future resumes and scholarship applications even if they pay little or no money.

So, without minimizing the seriousness the current economic slowdown, here are some ideas for summer work for teenagers that are relatively recession proof:

Landscaping, Yard Work, and Garden Maintenance

An old saying promises, “Learn to dig a hole, and you’ll always have a job.”

It’s true. I worked in the garden design/landscape industry for about seven years, and the fact was and is that between May and September there is always much more work than there are workers. The resilience of this industry is counter-intuitive: You’d think it would be one of the first places people would cut back, but the truth is, even if homeowners can’t install any new plant material, for at least four months the maintenance work alone is overwhelming. Landscaping installation and maintenance is one of the most recession-resistant occupations around.

Send your sixteen-year-old son or daughter around to all the local growers and garden centers with references and fliers volunteering their services for maintenance or clean up help. After putting in their applications for formal employment, they can ask to post the fliers advertising their services. Most places will allow them to do this. They should also ask about landscape firms in the area that might be hiring.

It’s hard work, in the sun. When I worked on site, I watched grown man after grown man quit after the first day. They just didn’t want to do the work. They thought they did, but after a couple of hours they decided they didn’t. I don’t mean I was standing around in my straw hat and sunscreen painting my nails pink and lamenting the dearth of ‘good help’ either–No, I was digging holes and sweating like a hog right alongside all of these buff braggarts who time after time skidaddled after we’d barely gotten started.

Put this as a challenge to your son, and perhaps he will pick up the gauntlet.

Girls can often find work repotting plants, or later in the summer, planting roses at growers. If your daughter knows a weed from a perennial flowering plant, she will have more work than she can handle all summer long, just weeding perennial beds for rich people. I’ve done it myself. Not glamorous, won’t kill her.

You do need to exercise caution: Your teen should not be handling pesticides or any maintenance equipment more complex than a shovel. For guidelines on how to keep your teen safe at a landscaping job, check out the OSHA website dealing with outside summer employment.

Volunteer Work

Teenagers like money, and with college costs skyrocketing and financial aid diminishing, a paid summer job is almost a necessity. But if jobs just aren’t there, volunteer work can pay off big down the line in a number of ways.

More and more top colleges are reaching out to middle and lower class students who normally would not be able to afford tuition, and underwriting their education because 1) it’s the right thing to do and they can afford it, and 2) it rounds out their student body and gives them the diversity and breadth of experience that makes their school attractive to people who can afford to pay. They aren’t just looking for good grades and SAT or ACT scores, they are looking for kids who have been involved in their communities in active and creative ways.

A summer spent as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or a local nursing home or hospital can translate into thousands of dollars in scholarship money down the line. At minimum, it will result in business community contacts that make future employment more assured and look fantastic on a resume.

Encourage Entrepreneurship

Necessity is the mother of invention, and when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. And when life hands you a teenager with too much time on his or her hands due to a shaky economy, Inc magazine recommends that you talk to your teenager about lemonade stands and Horatio Algier and so on an so forth. Don’t rent “Risky Business,” but do point to other teens who have successfully started their own lucrative enterprises.

The Small Business Administration actually has a web page with descriptions of successful teens and their businesses and where those creative enterprises took them in adulthood. Your teen can also check out their video on how to get started and lots of other good ideas. Nineteen-year-old Boston University student Ben Cathers started his first internet business when he was 12 years old, and is currently launching his own software company while earning his business and marketing degree. Read a recent interview with Cathers and learn his tips for teens interested in business at the online version of Entrepreneur magazine.

The truth is, the jobs of the future will probably not be the jobs we grew up with, and they certainly won’t be the jobs our parents had. It’s tempting to fall into a funk because the opportunities for teenagers to earn wages bagging groceries or working at fast food places are being snapped up by adults this summer, but steering your teen towards experience in ecology and green industry, online marketing and research, or volunteer health or public service work is much more likely to inspire her to continue on professionally in one of those fields, and may well earn him a place at a prestigious college when that time rolls around.

A high school diploma, or even a college degree, is no longer a guarantee of a comfortable life. The colleges and employers of today are looking for young people who have gone beyond basic certification and taken the initiative to do interesting and creative things in the world of work. This summer may well be your teen’s opportunity to do just that.

Yesterday my internet server was down all day, but I actually felt pretty lucky about it, since while I waited for it to come back on. I whiled away the hours watching local news shows that featured brand new houses in Wisconsin sliding into raging flood waters, sink holes swallowing up cars with people in them (two people died near here delivering newspapers Sunday when their car disappeared into a 50-foot sinkhole), and various photos of trees on cars, cars on cars, houses on cars, cars on houses, and so on and so forth.

Right now, 11,500 people in the mid-sized Michigan city where I live are still without electrical power, and the dog and I have had to take refuge in the basement twice in as many days, but finally, as Jack Nicholson said in The Shining, “I’m b-a-a-a-ck!”

I’m waiting for the plagues of locusts that are sure to follow this summer, that is, once the tornadoes and floods get done with us this spring. That would be about right, since the only creatures around here that appreciate this year’s weather are the 21 tomato plants I put in our Victory Garden last week. They’ll make good eatin’ for those locusts alright.

It’ll be just like The Tomatoes of Wrath.

Recession? Oh yes, but the way, we are in a recession. Here’s a quick recap of the major recession issues of the past week, along with pithy commentary on each:

Should the Gas Tax Be Dropped for Temporary Price Relief?

No, God no. First of all, the gas tax is what helps keep our deteriorating roads and bridges from deteriorating even more. Second, the price break would be so tiny as to be gobbled up almost immediately by increasing demand. We would net nothing, and our roads would suffer even more. (Did somebody say, “sinkhole? ” God, what a horrible way to die, delivering Sunday papers and then just getting swallowed up by a the mother of all potholes. Does anyone doubt we are dealing with Divine Wrath here? And you think repealing the gas tax will help?)

Should the Federal Reserve Lower Interest Rates Again?

Lower them to what? A negative number? Look, right now Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, has two public roles: 1) Spin current events in such a way as to minimize panic, and 2) Lead us in prayer. He also has a private role: Print new money to keep some of the biggest financial concerns in the US from going belly up week to week (or even day to day) and thinking of other creative ways to prevent that same negative outcome, if he can. Yesterday Lehman Brothers, after posting a $2.8 billion loss, raised $4 billion and plans to raise $2 billion more, but this is not good news. Moody’s downgraded Lehman Brother’s credit rating yesterday from stable to negative. Its stock has plummeted 60% over the past 12 months. The bank where I work? Started at $5.81 yesterday, down to $4.51 at close. I may soon have more time to write.

Should the US Step Up Ethanol Production?

Sure, if we can make it out of switchgrass and not use any of the land dedicated to food production to do it. Otherwise, no, we have bigger fish to fry than that, and possibly no cornmeal soon to fry them in. At a time when the US really needs a bumper crop of corn and soybeans, both are already suffering badly, and the recent torrential rains in the Midwest will almost certainly wipe out a certain percentage of these crops entirely. It’s too late to replant, and the poor outlook has global consequences that make our gasoline complaints look like very high class worries.

Should We Drill in Alaska, or Off-Shore, or on the Moon?

No, no, and no. What we need is any energy policy. We needed one 20 years ago; still need one. Buy a bicycle, take public transport, work from home, plant a vegetable garden (watch out for the coming locusts though), and hang onto your hats. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

And yeah, that goes for Toto too.

When writer Christiane Jory came up with the idea of creating a cookbook of gourmet recipes using only ingredients purchased at her local dollar store, she struck a nerve. Who hasn’t been drawn into these stores? I confess I can’t resist dropping in to browse every few weeks, just to see what’s new. But as most of us who have entered these establishments know, it’s not ‘all good’.

Some of it is really good, some of it is passable, and some of it is really, really bad. You have to have an eye for what will work in your household, and then, when you see it in stock, buy up plenty of it. Some days you won’t find much of anything you’d even want to feed your dog, much less cook for yourself. Other days you hit the jackpot and find imported off-brand Kalamata olives, something you’ll easily pay $6.99 for at the grocery store for an 8 ounce bottle, for a dollar. Yay. Still, you could bring them home and discover they taste like little brown mildewed sponges. Boo.

In other words, shopping at the Dollar Store is a bit like gambling. You win some, you lose some. I happen to enjoy that. You may not. If you are the kind of person who thinks showing up at half-off day at Goodwill at 8 a.m. when the store first opens is more fun than a chocolate binge, you’re probably the kind of person who enjoys poking around dollar stores. If, on the other hand, you wouldn’t wear a K-Mart t-shirt to save your dog, Dollar Store grazing may not be for you.

The burning question before us here today though is, does cooking with Dollar Store food really save money?

I heard Jory on NPR one afternoon and checked out some of her recipes at the NPR website. You can listen to her interview at the site too. One of the featured recipes there is for homemade chicken pot pies made with canned Dollar Store chicken, canned Dollar Store gravy, canned Dollar Store veggies, canned Dollar store biscuits, and a few other things. Four chicken pot pies came to around $9.99.

To my way of thinking, that’s no bargain. Sure, it’s less than the $4.69 per pot pie you pay if you buy Pepperidge Farms or Stouffers in the freezer section of your grocery store, but you can do better without ever entering the Dollar Store much less buying Jory’s cookbook.

Go to your regular market, buy one stewing chicken, a bag of frozen off-brand mixed veggies, a quart of milk, and an onion, and make sure you keep flour, baking powder, and margarine or butter on hand as staple ingredients, and you can make those same pies for less than $1.00 a piece by making a basic white sauce, mixing in chicken chunks and chopped onion and frozen veggies, then pouring it all in individual baking dishes, and topping with homemade baking powder biscuits or homemade pie crust. Plus, if you make the pot pies that way, you still have a chicken carcass with meat clinging to it that you can use to make stock for chicken soup or chicken and noodles. If you’re very creative you can get three meals out of that one chicken: roast chicken with sides the first night, your pot pies the second, and a pot of chicken soup the third. This is no miracle. It’s just old-fashioned home-cooking; something we haven’t had time to do much of these past ten years. Our mothers and grandmothers did it all the time.

I don’t begrudge Jory her cookbook or the idea. It’s clever and fun, and you can tell she had a lot of fun writing it and making up the recipes. But what bothers me a little bit is the ’slumming’ flavor of the whole idea. Lots of people do ALL their shopping at these stores, and it’s a bad idea. They do it because they are poor and think they are saving money, but they aren’t necessarily saving anything: sometimes they are just buying inferior food. Often they could do better at a regular grocery by learning to cook and learning some basic nutrition.

I like the idea of good cheap food. I’ve always liked this idea. Dollar Store cookbooks are fun and can be useful, and shopping at Dollar Stores can be a good cheap adventure you don’t have to feel guilty about having. But what I’d really rather like to see is a move towards old-fashioned home cooking again; not just because it’s way cheaper and healthier than the way we’ve been eating as a nation in recent years, but because it bonds families and friends together in ways that eating out just can’t, and it connects people to their neighborhoods and each other.

The Dollar Store is fun. But it can’t do that.

Summer is almost here, and the heat of summer is not far behind.  That means higher electric and water bills for the coming months, and this year, both utility bills are likely to be higher than ever. Electricity has to come from somewhere, and if that somewhere is a coal-powered electric plant that depends on trucks to deliver the coal to produce the electricity, then the same pressures that are spiking oil and diesel gasoline prices will begin to impact electricity prices too.  Water is already so scarce in parts of the Southwest and Western US that a serious crisis is already well under way.

So what can you do to keep your personal utility bills as low as possible this summer?

The following ideas are borrowed directly from the heating and cooling web page at the US Department of Energy:

Install Ceiling Fans

Using a ceiling fan will allow you to raise the air conditioning temperature by 4 degrees with no reduction in comfort. When the temperature is mild enough, use the fan without the air conditioning and open the windows for ventilation.

Install a Programmable Thermostat

These are inexpensive and you can install them yourself in about half an hour (or less if you’ve done it before). You can set the air conditioning to go to a higher temperature when you are out of the house at work and then cool back down just before you come home.

Replace Antiquated Window Conditioners

Installing an EnergyStar labeled product can save you up to 30% on your electric bill. If you are running a dinosaur air conditioner, consider spending your tax rebate on an energy-saving replacement. You can find retailers near you who sell these products at www.energystar.gov.

Install Solar Panels On Your Roof

Solar panels are not cheap, but you can take a tax credit for a portion of the cost of purchase and installation, and some states offer low cost loans to homeowners who want to go solar. In states that allow excess electricity generated by private solar systems to be sold back to the energy company, you can even receive and energy credit instead of a bill once your system is up and running.

Insulate and Seal Your Home

Make sure you aren’t trying to air-condition the great outdoors. Seal and use weather-proof caulk around doors and windows, check the insulation in your home and make sure it is at least the recommended depth and R-value to keep warm or cold air inside, where you want it.

Get Rid of Energy Vampires

Many appliance and electrical convenience items use energy even when you are not using them. Some of these items include programmable coffee pots, cell phone chargers, TVs, stereo equipment, and personal computers. Most people find it inconvenient to go around unplugging all these items every time they leave the house, but an easy and fairly inexpensive solution is to hook them all to a master switch (your ‘vampire switch’) that you can just flip on and off when you leave or go to bed. You will likely want to hire an electrician to set this us for you, but it isn’t a major expense and can save you tons on your electric bill.

Plant Shade Trees

This won’t help you immediately, but it will help you, and its good for the environment too. New suburban construction tends to be especially guilty of planting only small flowering ornamental trees, landscape shrubbery, and yews, all for decorative value only. Invest in a couple of well-placed, slow-growth hardwoods that are hardy in your part of the country to shade your home and ease some of the burden on your central air-conditioning.

Smart Meters

Utility companies in some parts of the country offer what are called ’smart meters’ that allow you to communicate with your energy provider in real time about your usage patterns. Often this will enable you to schedule certain activities to off-peak hours and save money on your bill.

Hang a Clothes Line

When I was a kid everyone dried their clothes outside in the summer months. If you also use cold water in the washer instead of hot, you save even more on your electricity bill. In my two person household, these two steps alone knocked $15 a month off of our electric bill.  That’s $180 a year. Who cares what your neighbors think?

Use Gray Water

Gray water is dishwater, bath water, and other waste water that doesn’t include human waste (such as your toilet water). You can use this water on garden plants and lawns without harm. Dish soap is actually an effective and frequently recommended insecticide. It’s not toxic for people but it keeps caterpillars and other bugs off your plants.

Check Out Xeriscaping

Xeriscaping is method of landscape design that uses only plants with very low water needs, combined with attractive hardscape elements such as patio tile, brick patios and paths, flagstones, and hardy decorative prairie grasses. If you live a part of the country where water is scarce, or even if you don’t, ask yourself if it is really worth the expense and effort of maintaining a lawn when the cost of everything else is going up so rapidly. Lawns are ‘monocultures’; meaning they are comprised of one plant only and so are susceptible to disease and damage, and require constant maintenance, lots of water, and lots of chemical fertilizers and insecticides that damage the water table and pollute rivers and streams.  They are labor intensive, wasteful, and very expensive right now.

Install a Rainwater Barrel or Cistern

You don’t have to be fancy about this. Any large barrel that you can allow to catch the water that drains off your home during a rain can be placed near your garden and used for outdoor watering.  This water, while not drinkable, is free, and perfectly safe to use in your yard or to wash your car.

Conservation is always the first and easiest way to save money on energy. Try to be aware of little things and see if you can change personal habits. Do you let the water run while you brush your teeth? Or do you wet the brush, turn off the water, brush your teeth, then rinse the brush? How about when you do dishes by hand? Do you let water run to rinse them in, or do you wash them then spray to rinse (which used much less water)? Do you leave lights on when you don’t need to? Little things add up. While energy was cheap, we could afford to ignore little things, but now that it’s at a premium, just paying attention can shave quite a bit off of your monthly utility bills.

Before you rush off to retrofit your 1950s home with solar, wind turbines, and what have you, take a look at how you habitually use energy and see if just breaking wasteful habits doesn’t help plenty.

For more great ideas, check out the DOE’s free material on Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at http://www1.eere.energy.gov/consumer/tips/.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created after the Great Depression to prevent bank runs. FDIC insures your personal bank deposits up to $100,000 per titled account. In other words, if you have $100,000 in a savings account in your own name, Joe Schmoe, and another $100,000 in a CD in the name of the the Estate of Joe Schmoe, your money is insured for $200,000 because the accounts are different and they are titled differently.

In practice, most of us rarely worry or even think about this because 1) most of us don’t have $100,000 in all our deposit accounts combined, and 2) no one worries about bank runs anymore. At least, no one used to worry about bank runs until Bear Stearns, an investment bank, tanked literally overnight. Bear Stearns failed due to what was essentially a bank run: its investors wanted to cash out, immediately if not sooner, all of them at the same time. The day before Bear Stearns failed, Jim Kramer of TV’s popular Mad Money stock tips program, was confidently proclaiming to all his viewers that Bear Stearns was inviolate, that it would be around for eons, that it was solid as a rock.

Whatever, Jim. I guess you win some, you lose some.

People are forever spouting off about the stock market, and why not? It’s fun, it’s entertaining, it makes you look like less of a jerk (somewhat) than talking about Vegas all the time. It’s mostly guessing though. Some would go so far as to say that playing the stock market is gambling. Whatever you personally believe about it, while all the talk continues, you might be interested to know that F.D.I.C. is quietly hiring back retired employees and beefing up its staff in anticipation of as many as 300 US bank failures in the coming two years.

According to the F.D.I.C, at particularly great risk are large regional banks that were left holding lots of mortgage backed securities when the housing bubble burst and everyone scrambled to unload their questionable products. As the housing market continues to deteriorate, the next wave of credit defaults is already gathering on the financial horizon: the construction loans, helocs, home equity loans, traditional second mortgages, debt consolidation loans, boat loans, motorcycle loans, and even unsecured credit debt. This impending wave of defaults on non-mortgage debt will cause yet another liquidity freeze that will hit smaller banks hard. F.D.I.C. keeps a list of about 70 banks already in danger of failure, and watches them closely.

One common tactic used by distressed banks to raise capital when money is not forthcoming from other investing institutions is to offer attractive interest rates on deposit accounts such as certificates of deposit (savings accounts locked in for a predetermined period). IndyMac Bank, one of the regional institutions at the top of the F.D.I.C. watch list, has currently been promoting some very high-interest CDs, as has National City Bank, a large midwestern commercial bank heavily invested in subprime loans that does business in states with high foreclosure and unemployment rates. Both banks are on the F.D.I.C. distressed list.

If you have over $100,000 to invest and you are attracted by a great CD rate at a bank you are not overly familiar with, it isn’t a bad idea to do a little research on the health of the institution. Sure, your money is insured by F.D.I.C. up to $100,000, but if you put that much money into a bank that subsequently folds, do you really want to go through what it will take to get your money back? Wouldn’t it be easier just to keep your money in a reliable institution?

We don’t hear a lot about bank failure in the press, because people are already upset and nervous, and everyone knows you don’t want to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, not even if there is a fire. Panic only makes matter worse.  But I have always loved playing Cassandra, so I thought I’d put this out there.

Watch PFA for a future list of the top 10 healthiest banks in the US and how to find their best rates on CDs and other good, safe deposit accounts.

Until then learn a little Latin if you can:

Caveat Emptor!

Poor Microsoft. One minute they’re a towering colossus-cyclops striking terror into all rivals with a take-no-prisoners, get-er-done first and get-er-done cheap strategy that blows everyone else right out of the water. A few anti-trust suits and international wrist-slaps later, and suddenly they’ve got upstart ingrates and whippersnapper smart-alecks like Apple and Google kicking them in the shins and laughing all the way to the bank. And as if that all wasn’t humiliating enough, the next thing you know even Yahoo is telling you to go take a long hike off a short motherboard and stuff your billion dollar offers where the sun don’t shine. Well. Excuse us for dominating.

What’s a mega-corporation to do?

How about teaming with PayPal and creative young tech company Jellyfish to offer cash back on purchases made by using the Microsoft Live Search engine instead of stupid-face Google or ingrate-snotnose Yahoo? Customers love cash back, right? And how about souping up the Live Search shopping function with lots of cool extras similar to tickets, prizes, and other swell stuff nerds can already earn just by using Microsoft’s Live Search Club for Gaming? Announce that, get it in front of the public, and pretty soon people will be saying stuff like, “What’s a google?” And, “Does Apple still produce Beatle Albums? Or did you mean Fiona Apple? My mom has an apple tree. Do you have an apple tree?”

So Microsoft announced the new grand plan. Here is what they had to say about it:

On Wednesday, we will be announcing a major new initiative that our search teams have been driving. We are getting better and better with our core algorithmic search, and at the same time, we are investing to differentiate in vertical experiences and to disrupt the current model. You’ll hear more about our plans Wednesday.

Great. I think. I mean, I kind of nodded off there for a minute so I’m guessing what they said is in fact a good idea. I figured I’d go check it out myself, so I went to MSN expecting to learn all about it and maybe buy some stuff and make some cash back too (yay!) but guess what? It seems to not quite be there at all… yet. I guess they aren’t done differentiating to invest in those pesky vertical experiences. Yeah, I know how rough that part is, that vertical experience part. Bastard verticals.

Listen, can we talk for a minute? I mean just you, dear reader, and me, smart-mouthed blogger, just the two of us, mano et mano. I just want to ask you one question:

If you were stranded on a desert island with two nerds and one of them was Bill Gates and the other was one of the Google kids who plays video games while hauling down a zillion dollars a year at their awesome corporate playground, who would you trust to get you off the island if you could only pick one guy to get you off? (So to speak.)

Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’d pick the Google guy too, maybe marry him or something, or at least get a job lead as we coasted safely into home territory. Meanwhile, back on the desert island, I’m guessing Bill would still be trying to get past Vista on his handheld. He might also be back there smashing things with coconuts. Hard to say.

Microsoft knows it is in trouble and knows that it’s heavy-handed bullying approach to mergers and acquisitions isn’t likely to help it against forward-thinking Google and Yahoo, neither of which cry many tears over love lost between themselves and Microsoft. The internet is rapidly evolving into a new entity, one in which the lousy operating platforms designed by Microsoft and shoved down the throats of frustrated PC users are right on the verge of becoming obsolete. Already Google is offering its own online business software and services, and innovative companies are appearing faster than baby shrimp at spawning time. Some are reaching maturity before they can be gobbled up.

Competition can be great for customers when competition is spurring innovation, price declines, better service, new jobs, and new money. If Microsoft can keep up, especially if they can keep up by offering cash back on purchases just for using their search engine, that’s great. I’ll be there in a heartbeat.

If they can’t, oh well. Winning at any cost always works for awhile, but most of the time it quits working right about the time the initial idea gets old. At that point, all the bullying in the world won’t do much except confirm your reputation as a big bully.

I’m waiting. As soon as they work out that vertical whatever, I know I’ll get my email and I’ll be off in a flash to buy a case of black currant tea online, and I’ll buy it on Microsoft Live Search and post my cashback reward right here at PFA. Until then, I’m finishing off my hazelnut coffee bought right here in the real world. I’m ready though. I’m an open-minded kind of blogger.

Stay tuned.

The price of oil briefly hit $135 a barrel today, causing the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based policy advisory group for industrialized nations, to start revising its longterm estimate of world oil supplies. A consensus is now building worldwide that the recent upward spike in the price of oil is not being driven by speculation or recalcitrant OPEC nations, but rather by increased worldwide demand in the face of genuinely shrinking oil reserves.

For a moment, the ghost of Stan Meyer hovered in the air as the market and lots of other worried people all held their collective breath and believed with all their collective hearts and minds that Tinkerbelle is still alive. All we have to do is believe!

Well, she isn’t. And neither is Stan Meyer. And, um, we have to do a little more than that…

Stan Meyer, the rogue Midwestern inventor who claimed to have invented a device that could convert an automobile to run on ordinary tap water, died in 1998. He was either poisoned by dark underworld multi-national government operatives, or he died of a cerebral aneurysm caused by his chronic high blood pressure shortly after eating a meal in an Ohio restaurant. In the 1990s, Meyer claimed he had converted an ordinary Dune Buggy to run on tap water and had sold contracts to various individuals (for $25,000 a piece) that gave them the exclusive rights to sell the vehicles once they went into mass production. Stan Meyer was found guilty of “gross and egregious” fraud in a lawsuit filed by the investors in 1996, and was ordered to pay them back their $25,000 each and every one.

The water-powered car either absolutely did work, or was never witnessed as having worked by anyone with any knowledge of the topic who could confirm Meyer’s claims. Meyer’s brother now holds the many patents and plans for Meyer’s work and refuses to share them with anyone.

Did OPEC murder Meyer and his water-powered car? Did NASA or the US military murder him? Both were said to have approached Meyer repeatedly and to have offered him large sums of money to use or not use his knowledge, and/or to threaten his life. It all makes for a great story, especially if Gillian Anderson could be in it in some role (she’s so pretty), but I just have one question:

Where is this water-powered car?

Habeus watercar-us, you know?

Run Your Car On Water Today

I think what gives the Stan Meyer story ‘legs’ is that we see elements of truth in it, and just enough uncertainty to allow our imaginations to run wild. It is true without a doubt that a car that runs on anything besides petrochemicals is a real threat to the oil and energy industry, and viable cars have already been pulled from the US market at least once in recent years. (See “Who Killed the Electric Car” by Sony Pictures.)

It is also true, however, that if a viable, cheap means of extracting hydrogen from water had already been invented, some geek would be driving one around Southern California at this very moment, showing it off to his friends. Lots of people do create their own electric car conversions and even sell then on E-Bay (they’re getting pretty hot too, so if you want one, don’t dawdle and bid high), but where are all the kit-version hydrocars?

Right, I haven’t seen any either.

It’s likely that the coming months will get uglier and uglier due to the oil situation. That’s not all bad: We probably won’t change until we have to, so now we will have to. But it’s also likely that anyone who can put their money where there mouth is will get very rich very quick, and OPEC and Dick Cheney will not be able to shoot ALL those people in the face before they get their products to market.

Right now, governor Jennifer Granholm is busy making my home state of Michigan the mecca for green energy and innovation. When water-powered vehicles are available, we will almost certainly have them first right here. I’ll take a photo. I’ll drive one around. I’ll post a video of me doing that.

Until then, I’m looking forward to the next X-Files movie. God I miss those guys.

George has gone begging to the Saudis again, “Please sir, can we have another bowl of oil?” And once again, their answer was a semi-polite “I don’t think so.” George was gravely disappointed in his old friends, telling the American people:

“I said very plainly that you’ve got to be concerned about the effect of high oil prices on some of the biggest customers in the world.

“As the (Saudi oil) minister said yesterday, Saudi Arabia has increased the number of barrels of oil by 300,000 a day and they’re increasing refining capacity which is not enough.

“It’s something but it doesn’t solve our problem…Our problem in America gets solved if we expand our refining capacity, promote nuclear energy and continue our strategy for the advancement of alternative energies.”

I hate it when George goes begging to the Saudis. He’s kind of embarrassing even when he’s being arrogant and saying dumb things, but when he’s fawning for oil he’s hard to watch. It’s just painful. He reminds me of that famous tape of Tony Blair fawning over him at some state dinner while he sat there talking with his mouthful and shooing the guy off like he was a housefly, not the the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

I know the White House staff has to be just worn out to the bone after eight years of non-stop damage control. So in the interest of the future of the US economy and to help them out a bit, I’ve compiled a list of Ten Ways Not to Bring Down the Price of Oil. George can either avoid these 10 things and bring down the price of oil, or he can target this things to insure the price keeps climbing.

Just trying to help out.

1. Go Beg from the Saudis. Ick. So lame. What kind of cowboy goes begging for Arab oil? We really should not have to witness this obsequious behavior and listen to tough talk about Iran at the same time, as if we have any bargaining power at all in either case.
2. Bring Democracy to Iraq. As nearly as I can tell, ever since we decided to do this, we haven’t been able to lay our hands on so much as a pint of Iraqi oil. Where is that oil anyway? What good is it to invade an oil-rich country, get accused of doing it so we can seize and use their oil, and then not seize and use any of their oil? We never hear about Iraqi oil anymore.
3. Drill New Wells in Alaska. Haven’t we made things hard enough for polar bears? The real issue though is that any oil we get up there will take the edge of our oil hunger for at best a year or two, and then we’ll be right back where we are now.
4. Stop Sending Oil to the Strategic Reserve. This was one of those unanimous symbolic gestures that George and all of Congress could support precisely because it affects nothing and no one–including the price of gasoline–until the next major natural disaster (Katrina?) or the next terrorist attack. At that point, everyone in Congress will claim they were against it all along.
5. Build More Nuclear Power Plants. I’m not saying this is a bad idea. It’s probably a good idea given the current situation regarding energy in the US. But will it bring down the price of oil and eventually gasoline? Not unless Ford or GM or Toyota starts mass producing electric cars that run on the power from the nuclear power plants.
6. Ignore the Railroads. Shipping goods and food across the US by truck is horrendously expensive even when gas is under $4 a gallon, but now that it’s sailing right past $4 a gallon (and diesel has been over $4 for months) it’s just plain nuts. There was a time in this country, and not that long ago either, when all this stuff was shipped by rail. Passenger train travel has already increased by as much s 30% in the a single year in many areas. By all means, don’t encourage any more of that.
7. Ignore Public Transit. This is America. Everyone is entitled to their own SUV, preferably a Hummer. By no means should we waste any time making public transit easy, cheap, and available.
8. Don’t Subsidize Alternative Energy. This year, while Congress was fighting over big issues and not accomplishing much except new mountains of pork, several tax cuts for things like buying hybrid cars and other forms of alternative energy were allowed to quietly expire. By all means keep this up and make it nearly impossible for ordinary people to generate their own energy off the grid using existing technology.
9. Keep Suing States that Pass their own Tougher Emissions Standards. Those upstart states! Who do they think they are anyway? Especially California, damn tree-huggers! Teach them a lesson and make them stick to the lazy federal standards until the whole country shuts right down. Show ‘em who’s boss!
10. Harass and Intimidate Green Groups and Protesters. These traitors obviously have no real concerns, so make sure to shut them up. Don’t let the American people know about what kinds of technology and ideas are out there right now, or the next thing you know they’ll be thinking we can actually live without oil.

November seems like an awfully long way away lately. I have noticed, however, that the American people are starting to disregard their fearless leader and take matters into their own hands, which is probably not a bad idea. Sales of small motorized bikes and scooters have jumped off the chart here, public transit and train usage is up dramatically, more people are biking or walking where they need to go, and just about every other person I know is thinking how to heat their home through the winter of ‘08 without home heating oil. What other options are there? People are finding out on their own, with little or no help from their government.

So keep it up, George. You’ve only got six interminable months left to secure your legacy.

No, it isn’t.

Yes, Wall Street has been in a much better mood lately. Stocks have rallied, and amid the doom and gloom some good news has been seized upon and celebrated. Inflation was not as bad in April as expected, though it was in fact pretty bad. The cost of gas is still skyrocketing, but food is pausing ever so slightly to gasp for breath before another steep ascent. Home fuel oil is down a bit, but it is May after all and with diesel at well over $4 a gallon, this cannot last.

More quasi-good news: Mortgage giant Freddie Mac managed to temper its quarterly losses by doing a little accounting magic in order to minimize the effect of huge losses on its bottom line in print. Remarkably, this also cheered Wall Street and sent Freddie Mac stock soaring, even though by all accounts, including its own overly-optimistic ones, Freddie Mac is poised to lose over $7.5 billion due to foreclosures and bad mortgages over the coming two years, and is already in a heap of trouble over its past uses of creative accounting. CEO Richard Syron acknowledges that the lending behemoth needs to raise $5.5 billion in capital ASAP, but sees no real challenge in that and looks forward to future success.

Sure he does.

Toll Brothers, one of the largest homebuilding companies in the US, expects to lose another 30% this year. And foreclosures and personal debts gone bad continue to increase.

Not to be a Killjoy, but a substantial dark cloud is still mushrooming behind the sporadic silver linings Wall Street loves. Yesterday Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, said in a speech that while credit markets had stabilized somewhat thanks to emergency measures by the Fed (such as rate cuts and emergency Federal Reserve loans to prevent credit from freezing up completely) the current market situation is still “far from normal.”

Today, Merrill Lynch announced that starting June 1, it will require its financial advisers to rate at least 20% of all stocks as ’sell’ as opposed to the 12% rated that way now. That is a huge step for an investment bank whose symbol is a raging bull, but remarkably, 20% is still an overly optimistic number. When Merrill investigated the performance of stocks in the MSCI world index and the US Standard & Poor’s index, it found that between the years of 1997 and 2007, somewhere around 37% to 40% of its recommended stocks lost money. Did it advise its own clients of this fact? Well, not exactly. But it decided to do it today.

What Merrill and other investment banks and brokerage houses are now facing is a huge crisis of confidence on the part of consumers. it seems we have ‘trust’ issues with these guys, and for good reason.

Banks and brokerage houses exert lots of pressure on employees to make big money over short periods of time to pump up their quarterly results. The result has been a delusional pool of salespeople who seem to have no grounding in any kind of reality whatsoever. Why? Are they just insanely happy in an over-medicated way due to their own personal failings and personality quirks? Or is it more the case that, by requiring them to push stocks no one should buy or hold stocks any sane person would sell, the policies of the investment houses themselves have created this mess?

As Michael Douglas shouted in the famous movie Wall Street, “Greed is good!”

I think what we are about to see, slowly but surely, are some splashy announcements of self-regulation by major investment banks and brokerage houses, with Merrill leading the pack as of today. Why? Because if they don’t do this, and do it loudly and with expressions of genuine concern (practice it in the mirror guys, you can do it), then sometime after this coming November they know they will be looking at the ‘R’ word.

I’m not talking about ‘recession’. (That ‘r’ word is so last-week’s-news on Wall Street.)

I’m talking about REGULATION.

AAAAARRRRGH! Run for your lives! The Democrats are coming!

Yesterday the leader of the world’s largest bond fund, Mohamed El-Erian of the global firm Pimco, announced that US policy makers “do not have good policy tools to deal with the destabilizing combination of asset price deflation and goods inflation.” In other words, the Fed can’t save us; something Bernanke knows but doesn’t want to say out loud. El-Erian continued, “This comes at a time when regulators are trying to play catch-up with a financial system that has morphed into something that does not fit neatly into existing frameworks and mindsets.”

No real news there, I mean, of course. You’d have to be in a coma not to notice. But then El-Erian dropped the real bomb,

“The longer the delay out of Washington, D.C., in implementing fiscal measures to stabilize the housing sector, the greater the risk that the higher collateral damage on Main Street will induce a politically driven regulatory over-reaction with unpredictable economic outcomes.”

I think this is absolutely on target. And we aren’t exactly seeing Congress move with lightening speed on this. The current bill designed to allow FHA to refinance homeowners facing foreclosure is facing a Bush veto, but more problematic is the fact that even if passed it would require lenders to voluntarily eat 30% of the bad debt on homes about to be foreclosed.

So far, mortgage lenders have been loathe to do this on their own, preferring instead to go through with the foreclosure, then buy the house back for pennies on the dollar themselves, thereby making their books look better. In other words, more smoke and mirrors. It is unclear how the new bill in Congress, even if it were passed (which it looks like it won’t be) could compel them to do something they’ve refused to do all along.

The truth is, regulation is almost certainly the right response. Will we see it? That depends on quite a few nebulous ‘if’s, ands, and buts’ that will likely not play out until after the next Presidential election.

Will Democrats get a better majority in Congress? They will need it to pass financial industry regulatory measures. Will the economy collapse so badly by then that we have much bigger problems than banking regulation? That could happen too. Will huge financial firms regulate themselves to head off the kind of sledge hammer approach El-Erian fears? Hard to say.

Stay tuned. You will almost certainly not be bored.