In light of yesterday's passage of the latest incarnation of "health care reform" in the House, I had a conversation today with one of its supporters.

This gentleman informed me that everything I think I know about the founding of our country and its (former) guiding document, the Constitution, is wrong. Apparently the founders actually intended for us to be a socialist, anti-individualist collective society and that we have simply been getting it wrong for the last 233 years.

What can be done? When the other side believes this, unpersuaded by all evidence to the contrary that they are wrong, what is left? This is more than the stuff of mere disagreements about tastes, styles, etc. This is one way of life versus another: our way that seeks to live and let live, and their way that seeks to demand and command. The two are absolutely incompatible, and one can only prevail over the other through force.

I think we have reached the last stretch of the road. I can't think of another way to say it. Maybe there's an off ramp here somewhere, some fork in the road that's just around the bend that can't be seen yet, but I'm losing hope. I only hope I can get out of the way in time.

Watch for the bullets hitting the ground behind the deer. I'm still laughing at this as I put this post together.

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No, not the stuff that Han Solo was frozen in.

I'm talking about the online, remote backup service, Carbonite.com. It just saved me from losing tons of information from my main hard drive.

Yesterday started off well enough, but sometime in the afternoon my hard drive began clicking. It's a very old drive so I knew what that sound meant. The clicking became more and more frequent until finally my computer "blue screened" and was out. I then powered down, unplugged it, and opened the case to remove the dead hard drive.

About 20 minutes later I had a replacement drive in place and a Windows XP installation disc in my CDROM drive. When that finished, I got online, went to Carbonite's website, logged in and reinstalled their software. Within minutes my old files began to populate my new drive.

There was a delay overnight because my router refreshed its client list and apparently didn't let my computer back in (probably because of the new operating system install), but before I left for work this morning the last of my files had been returned to my computer. I then switched from the recovery mode to the backup mode and let Carbonite begin ensuring my new hard drive against failure.

I'm not getting paid to post this. I just want to recommend Carbonite because it just saved me a lot of time and money - all that Forex stuff I posted about yesterday... it's all managed by spreadsheets I've hand written that would be gone right now if not for Carbonite. It's about $55 a year for this service, or roughly $4.58 a month. That's cheap insurance, especially since it really works.

At 11:59 PM last night (23:59 -8 GMT), the USD/TRY/CAD live hedge carry account I created closed out its first full month of existence. Click here to read my post explaining how this works and how it is structured.

The quick way to describe what has happened: success!

Over the course of the month I witnessed the value of the account swing between a positive unrealized gain of 14% and a negative unrealized loss of %18. Growing the net asset value of the account is not the goal here, however, so these numbers should be looked at as a gauge of how well the pairs are tracking each other only (zero unrealized gain/loss is the ideal). There were times that USD/TRY short and USD/CAD long did not follow each other very well, but they did track each other enough to accomplish two things:

1) The account never hit a margin call, obviously;

2) The amount of available margin in the account was always adequate to allow for the monthly withdrawal from the account, which at present I am maintaining at $5 per $100 deposited.

Oil definitely seemed to be the trigger for divergence, what I call the periods of time when the two currency pairs stop following each other. Once oil exited financial press headlines again, things seemed to settle down. There are no doubt far more triggers than just that, but it is something to keep an eye out for. At present with weekend spreads at their widest the account is sitting at an unrealized loss of -8% with available margin sitting at roughly four times the present monthly withdrawal amount.

The total interest income generated in October was $7.42. During the month I added more funds to the account and I was able to find entry points for all of it, but the income contributed by those additional amounts is relatively small owing to their late entry. The original $100 block was generating roughly .21 cents per day, or $6.51 for the month, for an annual percentage rate of roughly 77%. Since I am drawing $5 per $100 deposited, this covers the withdrawal and leaves behind $1.51 to pad the account and lower its total leverage. Thus, each day that goes by this arrangement becomes more safe.

So then, on into month two! Only time will tell if this method will continue to be successful. My two game accounts that are running this model, one started in April of this year and another launched in May, are both still humming along and doing just fine. Since the per-$100 setup of this puts $68.75 into play, the resulting margin call level of $31.25 means that at a withdrawal rate of $5 per month, it would take 14 months to get back an amount in excess of $68.75, the portion truly at risk. Therefore, if any $100 block makes it to 14 months, I guess that is where "success" begins. I think the chances of getting that far and beyond are pretty good, but the risk of failure is certainly still there. It's like I often tell people about investing in general though: you are guaranteed not to win if you don't ever play the game.

I've learned through various news sources that the health care bill that Nance and her Merry Band of Comrades were crowing about the other day prohibits health insurance providers from capping lifetime benefits.

I'm trying to figure out how this will work. Basically, there is this thing called an "actuarial table," which is used to calculate the annual price of a plan based on expected lifespans versus defined total benefits, which is also how an insurance company determines what rate of return they must get on their investments so that they can sell policies at X amount. If the benefits are infinite, how do you determine the price of a plan?

The only way this makes sense is that Nancy Pelosi must know the secret of investing for UNLIMITED, GUARANTEED PROFITS! It's so obvious! Nance knows how to generate unlimited income through investing and makes infinitely profitable winning investment picks every time. Otherwise, her plan would make no sense at all, and she wouldn't make a nonsense proposal, right?

Nancy, give up the goods. Give me the secret of UNLIMITED, GUARANTEED INVESTING PROFITS! Clearly, you know it and I want it!

A bit over one year ago I wrote a blog post about my troubles with the One Step Update feature of Quicken, and in particular a few error codes I was getting, such as OL-221-A, OL-221-B, OL-254-B. Click here to read the original post if you would like to.

I generally receive a few dozen hits per week on my blog from people searching out those error codes, some variation on search entries like "one step update not working," etc. Lately, the frequency of these searches has jumped to several dozen hits per day. When I logged on this morning I saw the latest batch of them that had come in throughout the night, and now I am curious: what happened?

If you're here looking for the solution I came up with for my own troubles with the One Step Update feature, please let me know what happened to yours, when the trouble started, and if you installed any new software or changed anything on your system in general. My Quicken is still working just fine, but maybe I can help figure out what is going wrong with yours if the solution I used does not work for your particular problem.

There's much excitement in the markets this morning over the announced GDP numbers: 3.5% growth in the third quarter. Equity markets are in rally mode as I write this and the U.S. Dollar and the Yen are plunging in the foreign exchange market as people move from "safety" to "risk." And thus the headline:

Economy grows in 3Q, signals end of recession

But it's fake. These numbers are not reflective of actual growth. Check this out:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. economy grew at a 3.5 percent pace in the third quarter, the best showing in two years, fueled by government-supported spending on cars and homes. It's the strongest signal yet that the economy has entered a new, though fragile, phase of recovery and that the worst recession since the 1930s has ended...

...Armed with cash from government support programs, consumers led the rebound in the third quarter, snapping up cars and homes. [emphasis mine]

This isn't growth, it's redistributionism. Worse, that cash from "the government" is borrowed - the government does not have cash, it has what it steals from us, or what it borrows, debts that we are obligated to pay back.

Real growth happens when new wealth is created. Taking money from one person and giving to another, which that other person goes out and spends, is not wealth creation. In the long run, the person taken from says "screw this" and stops producing what is only taken from him, and the well begins to run dry. This "growth" is, at best, an illusion (and in truth it is an outright lie).

The next thing that will happen will be that unemployment numbers will persist at their current high levels, or go even higher, and millions of bewildered people will wail "what happened?!"

On the bright side - the Democrats have been claiming that economic recovery will not be possible without health care reform. Now that they're claiming credit for bringing about economic recovery but have not yet gotten their tentacles into health care, they have to admit they were wrong. Think they'll do that?