Casinos are inherently bureaucratic organizations: they produce nothing of value and simply take customers’ money. Thus, casino management is virtually always comprised of layer upon layer of bureaucratic departments whose entire purpose is maintaining the status quo. After all, as long as the lights stay on, no drugs are being dealt, and the employees remain relatively civil, why should anything change? The consequence of all bureaucracies is that strange, inconvenient rules seems to work their way into the organization and soon become just another annoying aspect of it. All casinos have these, but I think Hollywood Park’s HR department might deserve honorable mention in terms of its uselessness.

For one thing, you have to get by a security guard just to get to the department. So forget ever strolling there to fill out an application; Security would never let you get to it without an appointment. I remember multiple times telling him that I had business with HR, just for him to look at me, blithely, and ask, “You got an appointment?” Because if someone gets to talk with HR without an appointment, chaos would abound.

Which is another annoying facet of Hollywood Park. Security. You must have your government-issued badge displayed while in employee-only areas at all times. That’s fine for all other employees because, their badge is part of the uniform. House players on the other hand, typically carry it in their wallet. So, every time you go into the area, you have to have it out.

I once made the mistake of putting it away after showing it to the guard at the entrance only to get stopped by yet another one coming down the stairs. Of course, he stopped me and asked to see. And “Jesus,” muttered I, softly, while, again, I dug out my wallet.

And “excuse me,” he challenged.

“I said ‘Jesus’,” I said, unapologetically, while showing him my badge. He’s not a cop, and I’m not begin detained by law enforcement. I also probably make three times what this asshole does an hour. Quit the power trip. I already had to show a badge just to gain access to this hallway; do you really think I snuck in ‘Mission: Impossible’-style, only to be outdone by Deputy Dog? Besides, at some point, shouldn’t Security come to actually know who’s employed there and who isn’t?

And so, I make the overly inconvenient walk back down to HR to sign the paperwork and surrender my oh-so-special badge. “I’m sorry,” I had the nice lady tell me. “It wasn’t anything you did. We just needed to cut costs, and eliminated your position, plus the positions of two other house players. I’m enclosing a letter you can use to file for Unemployment.”

That might be handy – if I were actually unemployed. Seeing as how I’m not – it does nothing. “Can I go ahead and change my address?” I asked. I moved last month, and HR wouldn’t allow me to update it unless I showed them an updated government ID; because, you know, I might give them the wrong one. I have no idea why I would do this – but isn’t it a great idea to have this rule in place, so everything is as inconvenient as possible. Never mind that the California DMV always features a hellish line because of budget cuts. It seems that bureaucracies love to force you to deal with other bureaucracies. Besides, shouldn’t the goal of any HR division be to make it as hard as possible for anyone to actually do anything?

But I digress. Upon reviewing all the paperwork, they presented me with what was supposed to be my final check. Unfortunately, it didn’t include the hours I’d worked for the last two days. HR was mystified because they had thought that they had inactivated my employee ID#, thus preventing me from clocking in. But, bureaucracies and fast action do not got hand in hand. So my number had not been deactivated, and I was only finding out now that I actually been let go a few days ago. Or was supposed to be. So now they owed me more money. Meaning I’d have to brave Security once again (without a badge nor appointment) to get the money they owed me.

So I then returned to face my co-workers and tell them the bad news. Otherwise, my immediate supervisor would not have known that I was not actually working, because no one had told him.

“Are you working?” he asked me.

“Not any more,” I replied.

“Oh,” he paused. “I guess they got you too.”

I guess this is how business in conducted over there. It’s a strange way to do business. I’m not sure if I’m going to be missing the wages. They pay me $30 an hour to play cards, which is nice, but I didn’t often get to play in the games I was particularly good at. At yellow chip NL games, for instance, I’m averaging $25 an hour over the last 200 hours. That’s the other things about being a poker play. Just because you lost your job doesn’t really mean you lost your income.

This button, on the other hand, if for my international clients. It charges the same $35, but charges $15 for international shipping.

And this final button, is if you clicked the Buy-It-Now button for $49.99 and require an additional $15 International Shipping.

Now first days on the job are interesting, but I don’t know if it’s ever been quite like this. You see, casinos tend to be run pretty loosely, and that applies doubly so for how they treat house players. Most of time your “orientation” is nonexistent and you just start to pick up habits from other house players in a “monkey see, monkey do” fashion. And, of course, I’m coming from a different casino with different habits. At the Normandie it was appreciated if I helped out in running chips for players, because they ended up getting rid of their chip runners. Not that anyone asked me to, but often I was just sitting around anyway. Another related habit I picked up was “echoing” a call for player checks or food service so the designated people could more rapidly attend to the patrons.

So here I am, my first day on the job, carrying on my old habits. A player busts out, and I’m already calling for the chip runner. As I settle into a $3-5 No-Limit game,  I see one of the long time former hosts of Hollywood Park who has recently be made just another house player like me. You see, Hollywood Park used to have a group of three or four hosts on staff who were responsible for individual games. They would gather player information and call them up to get them to come in and play with them.  This particular guy used to be the host of the big NL game, and this was the first time I was really playing with him. I looked forward to playing some pots with him.

The first hand to come up was when I had pocket 8s in the cutoff. It was his big blind, so I brought it in for a $15 raise. He immediately raised it to $50. I reasoned that he figured me for a stealing hand much weaker than I possessed, so I called. The flop came 5 9 10, two tone (if I recall correctly) and he fires out another $50. I was expecting him to do this with his entire range, and I figure I’m ahead of all of his broadway hands, so I call again. The turn brings and Ace and he fires in $90. At this point, I don’t figure I’m ahead of much, so I laid it down.

I did file his aggression away for future hands. It seemed to me that he had inspired some other players in the hand to make squeezes from early position with what I term “elephant stomp” bets that were designed to end the action and take down the pot now, and they seemed to be a bit too large quite frankly. If it’s a limped pot, of all of $15, why make it $60? A smaller raise to $35 can get the job done for half the risk. I felt the table was making bet sizing errors I could exploit later.

Then this hand came up. I had about $250 in front of me when I got two red Kings in the cutoff. A player had straddled, everyone else had folded, and it was my rival’s big blind. I just limped along figuring that if squeezing action came later, that they might not give me credit for a high hand since I limped in from such later position. Much to my chagrin, the villain just completed the BB and the straddler checked his option. There was $30 in the pot, when the flop came Ad, Jd, 6h.

This was not a flop I was in love with as it had an Ace on it. They both checked and to me and I checked along expecting to bet the turn if they all checked again. The turn paired the board 6 with a 6 of clubs. The villain checked, the straddler lead out $20, which I called, when the villain (who had about $200 in front of him) raised to $80. The straddler folded, and left me with a tough decision to make.

Clearly the villain was an aggressive player when he decided to take charge of the hand, but the aggression in the hand seemed quite late indeed. I studied his beat sizing. Why raise $80 into a pot of $55? I called for time as I pondered the question. Clearly, to me, it seemed that this raise was designed to take down the pot immediately. I then asked myself with what kind of hand would he do that. It seemed to me that he had neither an Ace nor a 6, so I called the $80. The turn brought an offsuit queen and he showed all in for another $120 or so. I called and he showed me QJ for two pair, which meant my pocket Kings were good with the pair of 66s on the board.

A lot of people remarked their surprise at my holding as I was stacking the chips. I just smiled and went on about my business. The next day I was playing with him again and he mentioned that there was a particularly loose player in one of the games yesterday. I jokingly added, “Yea, and there was that calling station who called you down with damn near anything in that one hand.”

“Oh no,” he said. “I wasn’t upset with how you played that hand. I was upset by the result. I went home and analyzed that hand, and you just outplayed me.”

That was both good and bad to hear: good to to hear because it was a compliment; bad to hear because it implied he would be making adjustments to his play.

Still, people put stock in the pricing mechanism of the marketplace and see some wisdom in it. When gold was languishing in comparison to the US Dollar through the 1980s and 90s, the rational explanation was that people no longer felt it was a safe haven. Now, conspiracy minded Libertarians such as myself felt that there was a greater conspiracy at work on the part of the powers that be to get people to believe in the US Dollar as the ultimate safe haven rather than gold. There are certain strange coincidences, such as the decline of the spot price of gold in the wake of most major political news (such as the start of Desert Storm or 9/11) which would be occasions where you would thing it would go up.

Now I know most people find conspiracy theories rather hokey, but when you stop and think about this one it makes a lot of sense. The US Dollar is the financial underpinning of modern world. Of course, anyone who knows history knows that it can’t go on forever. At some point, some new system will come along and take it’s place. Put another way, history has shown that the long term value of every fiat money ever created is zero. Of course, the current powers that be have a very real vested interest in prolonging the lifespan of the current financial system as long as humanly possible. OF COURSE, they’re going to manipulate markets to try to bring these ends about. Given that it’s the stated policy of the Federal Reserve to manipulate the US Government Bond market to create the interest rate environment that the Fed Governors want, how naive to you have to be to think these same people wouldn’t be manipulating other securities like gold?

But I’m actually getting off track of what I wanted to talk about today, which is how US Treasury Bonds performed on the first day of trading after the S&P announced a downgrade for them. They staged a massive rally. Quite curious indeed?

Never in the history of the marketplace have I heard of a massive rally in demand take place in terms of a product or service when a legitimate organization announced their concerns about that particular product or service, but that’s exactly what happened today. Of course, markets don’t give a reason as to their price movements, so the rest of us are left to guess.

The way I see it, one of two things happened. One explanation would be that people were so spooked by the S&P downgrading US Treasuries that they immediately put their money into the very investment that was, in fact, being downgraded. The second would be the that Federal Reserve, an organization which already has a mandate to purchase US Treasury bonds, stepped into the breech and started snapping up all the Treasuries they could get their hands on in order to convince people they were still a good investment. It’s probably some third story that I’m unaware of, but, between the two, I know which one I’m putting my money on.

The earnings per share used to calculate the PE ratios came right out of Barrick’s Year End Statements or, for 2011, the statement for the second quarter. Note that for 2009, Barrick took a big charge to eliminate it’s forward seeing gold contracts, and so I was using pro forma earnings for that year. So let’s see what the data tells us.

Well it’s no surprise to anyone that gold bullion is going gang busters. For that matter, with the way the American government is spending money, no one’s really expecting it to stop anytime soon. So the stock market should absolutely love gold miners, as the increase in gold’s price translates leads to an amplification of profit’s in excess of percentage rise of gold itself. How amplified you ask, well over the years cover by this chart, bullion has risen from $625 to $1600- an increase of roughly 250%. Meanwhile, the earnings per share of Barrick has increased from roughly $1.39 to $4.64- an increase of roughly 334%.

So Barrick the company has been performing a bit like you would expect in bull market in gold; it’s earnings have gone up tremendously. Barrick the stock, however, has not done at all as you would expect for a company in a bull market in gold; it’s share price has gone up roughly 30% or so while it’s underlying earning’s have almost quintupled. Furthermore, given that all systems appear go for gold’s continued climb, future earnings should continue to grow which is what the stock market is usually factoring into the share price of companies to make them so lofty.

So what gives? Well it’s hard to say. Nothing in the company’s investor relations gives any reason for it’s stock performance. So it would seem the company is as baffled as we are. I did, however, read something in gold investing newsletter that does shed some light on this situation, and that’s that hedge fund managers like to be long on gold bullion but short on the stock of gold miners. They are “hedge funds” after all. They are supposed to “hedge” their bets.

If they are long gold bullion and the bullion market continues, then all is well. However, what if the market for gold goes down for some reason? Well, to protect against that, they take out shorts on the mining stocks figuring that a decrease in gold price would lead to an amplified decrease in the share price of the miners. So, they figure, they’re covered in case of a decline.

In one respect, they are correct. They are covered against a decline in gold bullion prices. However, what they are not covered against in a continued increase in gold bullion because, it SHOULD result in a far greater increase in the price of the miner’s shares. Were that to happen, whatever profits they would have realized in their bullion positions would be more than reduced by the shorts on the miner’s shares. So this position doesn’t make sense to me from an investing point of view. But, then again, hedge funds never made much sense to me from an investing point of view.

Hedge fund managers tend to be a bit of a herd. So if their competitors are doing it and it’s working for them, then they’ll want to get in on the action. This kind of herd behavior will work right up until it doesn’t. So, long story short, this to me represents a tremendous investment opportunity in Barrick gold. The stock of Barrick could be trading at four times the share price it currently commands. So that’s an investment with little downside and a great upside. I’ve been a longtime owner of this stock, but recently I’ve been selling my other positions to really load up on Barrck shares. It’s time to shove all in.

Krugman’s rantings are rather formulaic, and as he is Keynesian Socialist, you know exactly where he stands on all issues before he even opens his mouth. In fact, I’d say you can make you own Krugman rants by simply mixing and matching the following arguments:

• The free market is an unstable system that will tear itself apart without strong government intervention
• Depression is the logical result of an unregulated free market, and the private sector could never get out of a depression on it’s own.
• Instead, the government must spend money counter cyclically to “stimulate” the economy
• Private enterprise harkens back to our more primitive natures when it was a dog-eat-dog and we had to fight each other over scare resources. Bureaucratic action tends to be far superior because it is arrived as through consensus and often developed with the benefit of more enlightened minds like… well, him!

That last point is not really overtly stated as implied. But keep in mind, he’s got an Economic prize issued in Memorial of Alfred Nobel. It’s a shame I don’t have my old post on what I thought of Krugman’s Nobel Prize, but I’m sure you can imagine what I would have said about a prize that had nothing to do with Alfred Nobel’s foundation regarding a “science” that is precious little basis in fact.

At any rate, let’s check Krugman’s latest rant and see how we did here. Hmm, well this one’s about how the terrible Republicans have sabotaged the Democratic process by demanding the government spend less money. With all the Republican bashing, I guess we can safely establish that Krugman is a Democrat. Oh wait, I already said that. See earlier where I said he was a Socialist.

The notion of curtailing government spending makes Keynesian Socialists apoplectic. Certain cultures revere certain ideas to the point of worship. They’ve lost all abilities to think critically when it comes to these cherished ideas. Muslim Fundamentalists have Sharia Law; Catholics have Virgin Mary; Hugh Hefner’s got naked ladies. Can you really imagine how anyone would react to a notion that these scared ideas might actually be harmful? And so it is with Krugman. Discussing the notion of cutting government spending is akin to an act of killing his deity.

For Krugman, government spending is the milk of human kindness from which all that’s good and right with the world will flow. Asking the this flow be restricted is the work of evil doers and lunatics. Caving in to these lunatics as, according to Krugman, President Obama has done is simply neglecting your office. How dare these evil doers demand that the spending stop, and how dare a Democratic President not stand up to them!

That’s really all that we have in this particular piece. There’s precious little fact to it. He merely recycles Keynesian tidbits I outlines earlier, which have never worked for anybody. FDR and all his Socialistic policies did not end the Great Depression. Japan’s nonstop government spending (which has gone over three decades and garnered a total triple it’s GDP) has not stopped it’s depression and brought prosperity to the land. In fact, if you examine history, you’ll discover it is only the expansion and contractions of credit by the banking system that leads to the business cycle. Furthermore, it is only because of government interference in the economic downturn that we get a depression. In this as in most things, government is the culprit, not the cure.

One respondent to my last Susan Green blog was Becca Wahlquest, an actually an attorney here in Southern California whose client had received a shakedown letter. She contacted me, and we exchanged information. She shared with me (and gave me permission to pass it on to you) that Susan Greene will go away and not bother you again once you stand up to her. This has also been my experience.

A few people have asked for the exact response letter which Ms. Wahlquist sent to Ms. Greene. I asked Ms. Wahlquest if her client would be willing to provide the actual response letter she sent, and, unfortunately, the client declined. However, Ms. Wahlquist has seen her way clear to provide to general gist of what her response letter contained. Furthermore, given that the San Diego Small Claims Docket shows that Ms. Greene has only filed four claims in the past year, your chances of actually being sued by her are quite small. Indeed, Ms. Greene indicated that she was going to sue both myself and my mother and nothing has been forthcoming. So know in dealing with her that you are dealing with a toothless lion: her roar may be ferocious, but she really lacks any bite whatsoever.

Personally, my advice is to ignore her. However, if you find yourself in such a position whereby you absolutely MUST interact with her (say you’ve been hired to represent someone who’s receiving her threats) you need to keep in mind the relevant facts and time line. I’ve prepared a nice summary for you below:

• On Aug. 2, 2010 in the case Kinder v. Allied Interstate, the California Appellate Court ruled that one James Kinder had no legal claim to suit anyone under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act because he had an “assumption of risk” in maintaining a number that computers tend to call. Furthermore, the court issued a permanent injunction against Mr. Kinder for ever suing anyone again for calling this number.
• Exactly two weeks later, on August 16, 2010, James Kinder enters into a rental contract (which you can read HERE) with Susan M Greene to rent her the use of this number. According to Ms. Wahlquist, since she is only a renter on the number, she is not a proper party to make TCPA demands.
• On September 8th, 2010, roughly three weeks after renting this number, Ms. Greene filed her first two (of only four) small claims against Chrysler Financial and Santander Consumer.
• On October 20, 2010, roughly six weeks after filing her first two small claims suits, she files two more suits against Sears Home Services and Access Insurance Company.
• Of the four cases she filed, she loses three of them. Chrysler did not show.
• On December 20th, 2010, a full two months after filling the last of all of her small claims, Ms. Greene finally decides to actually becomes a notary.
• If it were not obvious enough that Ms. Greene is renting this number purely to shake people down, know that Ms. Greene made no efforts to advertise her notary business with the number (619)999-9999. After Ms. Wahlquist called her on this in mid may, she created the website SusanGreeneMobileNotary.com to try to legitimize her efforts at maintaining (619)999-9999 for business purposes. Note that according to Godaddy.com, this website was created on May 24th, 2011.

At any rate, a simple presentation of these facts should be more than sufficient to maker her go away. Of course, in my case I got one of her cronies calling me at home on the telephone telling me “we know where you live,” but I suspect that’s simply because I have such a charming personality. If any of this information was helpful to you, please consider making a financial donation to me using the Amazon button on the right.

Kevin, who’s consistently my only reader, brought this to my attention off of David Cherryholmes’s Facebook update.

Jesus H Christ on a popsicle stick! Where did this man learn his history? “We didn’t cut our way to fiscal prosperity,” he claims. Oh really Tom? Can you explain this graph that comes courtesy of our very own government? It clearly shows that this nation was not running deficit spending for the rest of the 40s and for the entire decade of the 1950s. Oh wait. I’m sorry, apparently Tom Hartmann really wanted to talk about the ideal tax rate for the top bracket of earners. Strange that he’s conflating two separate issues here. Along the way he massacres the history of the Great Depression while he’s at it.

Apparently, according to Mr. Hartmann, it real cause of the Great Depression was leaving the rich with too much money! If they hadn’t foolishly gambled with all that money, then the Great Depression would not have happened… or so he seems to say in his whirlwind condensation of two decades into 20 seconds. I’m about to react to this steaming heap of ignorance when Hartmann goes on to at least suggest if not outright lie with some the real whopper: government spending INCREASED during the 1950s. WHAT?!

Hartmann spends most of his video implying that the government spent more in the 1950s than prior, but I figured like any good spin doctor, he wouldn’t actually say it. If he did say such an obvious lie, anyone with a search engine and a touch of common sense could disprove it in a heartbeat, and then where would Hartmann be?

Turns out, my faith in Mr. Hartmann to only lie via insinuation was misplaced, because he really does come out towards the later part of this video and say that the government spent more during the 1950s than during the 1940s. Wow. OK fellas, I’m gonna need a moment while I reflect on the ignorance of the American public to not come unglued when they heard this one.

But, really, the spending habits of the US government in the 1950s is not what’s at stake here. We’ve got an election coming up. Somewhere members of Obama’s re-election committee are coming up with talking points for all good Socialists to hammer home. I’m guessing by watching Mr. Hartmann’s little talk here, that it’s: we need higher tax rates and more labor unions. Yes, despite couching his talk in a discussion of national spending, what Mr. Hartmann is really on the stump for are more labor unions and soaking the rich. I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s hard to argue that labor unions make us any more competitive. That’s another one of those things that I think people inherently know to be false. Of course, Keynesians what us to believe there’s this great multiplier effect that the more you pay labor, the more we all prosper. “Henry Ford paid his laborers so much so someone could afford his cars,” they’ll tell you. This is, of course, yet another Keynesian lie, but who really cares. I’ll let this one pass rather than turn this blog into a long winded dissertation about organized labor.

But notice how Mr. Hartmann is slanting history here. According to him, we must tax the rich in order to balance the budget and prosper. Over and over again in his talk, he points to tax rates as the way to control deficits and no the more obvious solution of cutting government spending. In fact, he went out of his way to suggest and, at a later point, out and out lie to tell us that we could somehow spend more than we make until we were all rich! Furthermore, he tells us that we’ll avoid any more huge depressions, which are really just caused by those evil rich people and how they foolishly chose to invest their money.

This, of course, is an easy argument to defeat. The 1800s had no economic downturn on such a massive scale as did the 1900s. Furthermore, it was the most prosperous and highest growth period in American history. What policies did the United States observe during that 1800s:

• An across the board income tax rate of 0.0%.
• The only time in history when the national debt actually reached zero.
• And a economic policy that discouraged accumulating debt except in times of war.

So there ya go. If you want a good lesson for prosperity, look no where else but the 1800s. It featured no Great Depression, negative inflation, and, with the notable exception of the Civil War, no great accumulations of government debt.

Case closed.

How did I learn all of this? Well, that’s quite a strange story. The beginnings of which are even stranger. You see, this story started in 1991 when George W. Bush signed the Telemarketing Consumer Protection Act. As part of that law, any company that called someone on the “do not call” list or any company who ended up using an autodialer to dial a cellphone or pager number is in violation of the law. As such, according to the law, the offending party owes the owner of the number compensation. Honestly, the idea that a consumer was due personal damages for the crime of a phone call bothered me a bit at the time, because it seemed possible for someone to make it there living to go after people who call them on the phone. It turns out that one such person was James Kinder. 

In order to avoid retyping another news story, I’ll just refer you to the San Diego Reader where you can learn that:

• James Kinder was a former California Attorney who later resigned rather than be disbarred for numerous ethical offenses.
• In 1996, Kinder got the pager number (619)999-9999.
• He was immediately flooded with collection calls. As it turns out, in the age of computers, if a data entry clerk doesn’t know a number, they will tend to enter all 9s. Later the autodialer will actually dial the fake number.
• Mr. Kinder then decided to start suing the pants off of everyone who called his number. According to the story, he set up a sophisticated computer system (which he calls a pager) and keeps track of every single call made to this number by party calling, time, and date.
• After the 2006, TCPA Kinder had even more ammunition to go after people. He starting filing lawsuits by the hundreds. Of the cases that went to trial, he lost well, all of them as far as the story reads. However some parties would settle out of court for a few hundred dollars and that was enough to satisfy Mr. Kinder.

Fast forward to last week. My mother’s business, Market Research Dallas, gets a notice from a Susan M Greene who controls a certain phone number in San Diego. Yep, you guessed it: (619)999-9999. Someone at my mother’s firm (allegedly) called this number and here comes the shakedown artist. Except this time instead of James Kinder, it’s Susan M Greene.

Now here’s where I enter into the story. I begin an email correspondence with Susan Greene who started out alleging that Market Research Dallas violated the TCPA. She later conceded that there was no violation of the TCPA, but she was going to sue anyway for “negligent interference with perspective economics relations.” In a later claim, she added on some emotional distress, just for good measure.

Clearly, this is a shakedown, but curiously it’s not by Kinder. So what happened here. Well, as luck would have it, Susan M Greene emailed me this document which explains EXACTLY what happened here, as it appears to be the contract between the two of them. This document sets forth that Ms. Greene has agreed to pay James Kinder $1000 for the use of the number as of August of 2010, plus a monthly charge of $200 plus $.25 per call placed to that number. Not only that, #2 of the document states that Ms. Greene has entered into this deal because her business was “not doing well in the present economy.”

So this document details what anyone by now would have intuitively guessed: James Kinder has outsourced the dirty work of shaking people down to Susan Greene. Lovely. Well as you can imagine, I told her that on no uncertain terms would she get any money from us, when I get a strange phone call at my personal home number this afternoon. In it, a man identifying himself as Joseph Click tells me my phone address, what states I reside in, and that they are doing a search on what properties I own so that they can come after me.

Wow. That’s really something. At any rate, I’m sure this is a bunch of hot air. Furthermore, people that know me know that I’m not the kind to be bullied like this. Still, it’s a strange world. I posting this information here so that future parties can be better prepared to deal with this harassment.

The reason they finally got him