I wrote earlier to let readers know about the availability of Libyan internet domains. There were a lot of open domains available at that time. There are still a good many to go, too. Taking on a $150 domain is a bit of a risk, however, so I hope you’ll consider the pros and cons before you act. I also hope that all of you who already took the plunge have had success.

A couple of weeks ago, I sold the “HO.LY” domain for $1,000 on ebay. While I don’t expect to get the same price for some of my other .ly domains, it’s been a valuable business experience as I’ve taken the “plunge” myself.

Some Thoughts on Domain Sales

Soon after my original post, someone accused me of being a bad person for snatching up the domains that I did and then re-selling them. I didn’t expect this reaction to be honest, although after some reflection, I can see why some people might be grumpy or upset. Perhaps it seems like easy and undeserved money when a domain sells above its registrar fee.

But grumpiness aside, the “mark-up” on ebay is profit taken for providing a service. It was actually a risk on my part to buy $750 worth of domains. I really didn’t know what they were worth—and neither did some of the appraisers I went to, for that matter. My service was to take a risk upon myself in order to find someone who would be happy to pay more than the $150 registrar fee for the domain. And as it turns out, someone in Florida was just the person. I’d like to think that without me, this fellow wouldn’t have been presented with the option of buying HO.LY and therefore may not have gotten the domain he wanted in the end.

I’ll continue to experiment with domain sales and other possibly profitable ventures. I’ll post about anything that comes up. And let me know if you have any ideas too, eh?

CNN Money is reporting that the U.S. Mint has begun circulating $1 coins. Canada did that quite some time ago and I think it worked out well. We’ll have to watch and see what the rest of America thinks

I was thinking about the other recent news about U.S. coins, too, and came up with a fun tagline: “U.S. Mint: We don’t make cents any more.”

Well, that’s not true yet. But it’s still pretty crazy how you can make a profit by hoarding the raw metal material in pennies and nickels.

Maybe this is a bit premature, but it seems odd to me that neither CNN, MSNBC nor Fox News (no surprise on that one, I suppose) is reporting on the hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters who gathered at Washington D.C. over the weekend.

Even considering that these mainstream media outlets are biased and inaccurate, how can such a massive protest be ignored? Am I missing something?

Isn’t this newsworthy??

Update: I’m still looking for verification on the actual number of people. The truthout video is the source of that estimate, while other sources claim it is in the tens of thousands.

I just received word that the small-cap gold and silver mine that I mentioned previously spiked today. Word is that trading for this stock was halted on the Toronto Stock Exchange, due to the 4-fold overnight increase. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that I can’t seem to get a reading on it today.

The source of this information said the price per share spiked to $5. We’ll see what news tomorrow brings.

So I bought Barack Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope” a couple of months ago, and I must say that I’m quite impressed with this guy. I’m no Democrat, but Obama’s got a sharp head on his shoulders—and an ear for listening, too. He might just be the one to bring this country together again. Or so I hope.

In the Nov. 13th edition of Time Magazine, Eric Murr wrote to the editor:

“I am a christian and conservative Republican, but I can’t help hoping that Obama will become our next President. I believe he is wrong about abortion, but he has acknowledged in a refreshingly Socratic way that he can’t just dismiss the views of those on the other side. That may be politicking to earn my vote, but if a pro-life Republican ultimately sends us into a third world war with status quo Republican rhetoric, a pro-life position is kind of pointless.” —Eric Murr, Greencastle, Pa.

I think Barack Obama’s life experiences have prepared him to lead a grassroots return to the America we were all proud of. His dad wasn’t a senator. His mom wasn’t a governor. He grew up in an average income home. He knows what it’s like to climb from the bottom to the top. My sense of Obama is that he, like few of the politicians in today’s scene, is a people’s politician—that rare breed that actually takes seriously the role of representing the people who elect him. He can sit between two fiercely divided ideals and actually make both sides feel understood.

I’m crossing my fingers in hope that his black and white roots help rather than hinder his campaign. In my world view, a white president is just as good as a black one. But I know that in some parts of the USA, things like what color of skin you have can still sway votes. If all goes well, the blacks who care if he’s black will see what they want, and the whites who care if he’s white will see what they want. In this sense, and with a little luck, he could be doubly able to heal the divide and bring our country together again.

Aaron Krowne, a math whiz and economic blogger, writes that the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is between 9% and 13%—more than twice the official headline of 4.5% that was recently announced—due to factors such as the shuffling of unemployment categories and the enormous prisoner population in the US (2.2 million).

What does this mean? I think that the recent surge in the value of the U.S. dollar is inflated and temporary, based on shoddy statistics. While 4.5% may be a nice number to party about for the new year, it’s not going to hold for long.

Some commodities may still be in for a downward spike, such as oil (crude) and copper, according to Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis. Gold and silver are still looking good, in spite of this week’s setback, however.

I just installed Spam Karma 2 in the hope of reducing some of the spam load coming from the ol’ blog here. For some reason it’s become more popular to advertise viagra in the comments. No thank you.

Apologies to anyone whose comments may have been lost in the recent surge. It should be easier for legitimate commenters to get through now (let me know if you experience any problems).

As my thoughts have turned to economic and political things, I realize that some of you are wondering if you want to continue subscribing here. There’s a lot of opinionated stuff coming through the pipeline, and while I apologize for my ignorance in some areas, I feel no regret for having shared some of my journey as I’ve sought to answer questions that have troubled me.

Some of you have expressed varying degrees of approval and disapproval. I understand that. We all see the world through our own constructs (to use a George Kelly term). I’ve had several comments about this site in general:

Thanks for your blog. I come here for rails blog posts, but I find your political posts sobering and just as good to read.

Any chance we could get separate feeds for your ruby/technical stuff and… everything else?

I find your view disturbing. Are you Iranian by any chance?

Given that this blog’s audience is on one hand growing in its diversity and on the other, more technically oriented in its foundation, I want to provide a means for those who are strictly interested in the technical blogs to feel comfortable. If you wish to subscribe only to technical categories, use these links:

Ruby on Rails:
http://blog.inquirylabs.com/category/ruby-on-rails/feed/

Textmate:
http://blog.inquirylabs.com/category/textmate/feed/

Mac OS X:
http://blog.inquirylabs.com/category/mac-os-x/feed/

And of course, if you’re interested in all categories, use the main feed:

http://blog.inquirylabs.com/feed/

I hope all of you get from this site what you’re looking for. Thanks for visiting!

Update: I’ve adjusted the settings over at rubycorner.com so that those of you who aggregate there will find the content more ruby-related (Thanks to Anon for pointing out the disjunct)

By my best estimation, we are about to see a “hard landing” for the U.S. economy. I’ve been watching the signs for several months now, and in the last two weeks there have been some Big signs of imminent disaster. The stock market may be able to maintain its speculative climb in to insanity for a month or two, but sooner or later things are going to come down.

The possibility of economic uncertainty first reached my awareness earlier this year through articles written in international publications such as the UK’s Indymedia— “Why the Dollar Bubble is about to Burst” —and Canada’s Maclean’s magazine— “Is America Going Broke?”

A little while later, I heard about the trillion-dollar housing bubble. Low interest rates in the early 2000s gave rise to an investor buying frenzy, along with ARM and other exotic loans to higher-risk individuals. In the first quarter of this year, the residential housing bubble burst and has been “falling off the cliff” ever since. If the “commercial construction trails residential construction” trend holds as it always has, then we are now about to see the commercial real estate bubble burst as well. According to CalculatedRisk, this translates in to a loss of half a million jobs over the next 6 months.

Then I heard about the dismal auto sales. General Motors and Ford announced they would each slash 30,000 jobs at the end of last year. Ford hired a new CEO to try to pull the company out of its slump. According to the New York Times, significant drops in auto sales have predicted recessions 5 out of the 6 times America has undergone a recession, and concludes, “[a significant drop in auto sales] has never warned of a recession that did not occur.” Auto sales are definitely falling.

Now, in the festive Christmas season when nobody is watching, the Treasury/OMB released the Financial Report of the United States Government in which the Comptroller states (p. 152):

Despite improvement in both the fiscal year 2006 reported net operating cost and the cash-based budget deficit, the U.S. government’s total reported liabilities, net social insurance commitments, and other fiscal exposures continue to grow and now total approximately $50 trillion, representing approximately four times the Nation’s total output (GDP) in fiscal year 2006, up from about $20 trillion, or two times GDP in fiscal year 2000.

As this long-term fiscal imbalance continues to grow, the retirement of the “baby boom� generation is closer to becoming a reality with the first wave of boomers eligible for early retirement under Social Security in 2008.

Given these and other factors, it seems clear that the nation’s current fiscal path is unsustainable and that tough choices by the President and the Congress are necessary in order to address the nation’s large and growing long-term fiscal imbalance.

4 times the GDP! Can you imagine a sane bank manager offering a loan to someone whose “fiscal imbalance continues to grow”? Foreign lenders, like banks, will very soon be calling the same stops on the U.S. government. As the risk of investment increases, so will their demands on interest rates. (See also the commentary by Chris Martenson, “The United States is Insolvent“.)

As if this news weren’t foreboding enough, some shady things are also going on. The measure of how much cash is available in the world economy, a statistic published by the Fed as “M3“, was discontinued in March of this year. From what I understand, it’s possible to put M3 together using the still-published M0, M1 and M2 statistics (plus some other pieces, I presume), and someone has done just that. According to this calculated M3 stat, the real inflation rate of the U.S. dollar is closer to 8 or 9 percent.

My last observation, and the one that convinces me that we’re really in for a big dip here, is that everyone is starting to catch on. There’s an elephant in the room, and we know it. And people are talking about it all over the ‘net. It’s on Digg and Reddit. It’s in blogs. The international papers have long ago covered the topic, and are continuing to do so. And, cautiously, our U.S. news outlets are making mention of it too.

What should you do? Get out of debt. Invest in gold. Invest in silver. Diversify your currency in to the Euro, Swiss Franc or some other foreign currency that isn’t heavily tied to the U.S. dollar. And scoop up some stocks in mining companies or indexes such as NYSE:GLX. I’m also invested in some smaller startups like American Creek Resources in Canada.

If the U.S. dollar collapses and is replaced by something like the Amero, you don’t want to trade dollars for Ameros. You will get a very bad deal.

So I’ve been keeping this under wraps for a few days, hoping that a slight advantage could turn in to some profit, but I’ve decided to let everyone in on it (you’d've found out anyway): LibyanSpider.com, the official registrar for the .LY top-level domain, has re-opened for registrations to the general public after a 2-year hiaitus. I found out early because I had previously tried to register the domain Fami.ly (already taken, as it turned out) and got on the mailing list.

My experience so far has been that it takes them 5 days to actual.ly processs your order and get the domain registered for you. (I received a note from Hadi Naser, one of the guys making it all happen, and he said that he has received a big list of requests for .LY domains, so they are obviously stretched to capacity). With such cool names as quick.ly, emi.ly and dead.ly, though, isn’t the wait worth it?

Oh yeah, guess what? As of this writing, all of the .LY domains I’ve mentioned are still open, and more. I have a small budget for experimenting with domain sales, so I’ve left a ton of great names unregistered. They are, after all, $149.95 U.S. each. I’m sure some people will argue that’s way too much, while others will think it’s way too low. Anyway, here are some domain name ideas I’ve had:

As of the time of this writing, all of the above are available.

So what did I grab? 5 domains:

• ous.ly,
• eternal.ly,
• saint.ly,
• like.ly, and
• ho.ly (now up for bid at ebay)