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Disaster has befallen the two Golden Bowerbirds whose bowers were easy to find.  One bower was less than 100m from the homestead but the essential horizontal branch where the male hopes to lure the female has rotted away.  5 years work went into making his bower and the heart of it was the horizontal stick around which the sticks were most carefully arranged, and where he puts his trophies of lime-green lichen.

The other bower just off the red track, was even more impressive in the classic shape of two towers.  That one had a tree fall directly across the horizontal branch and mostly demolished one tower.  Of all the rotten luck.  It must be like having a bachelor pad, but the bed destroyed and no hope of replacing it.  The male plays no part in nest making or rearing the young.  His sole purpose in life is to lure a female and have his wicked way with her.  But she will give his life-long efforts the closest scrutiny, and canvass all available bowers before bestowing her favours.

Like trying to woo Cinderella, but instead of a glittering palace, all you have to offer is a tent and a bed of hay.  I think both bower birds have accepted the total loss of their lifelong assets, and with the best spirit they can muster, have started again.  The bird with the rotten stick in his bower has not added any of the lichen trophies.  I think the season has started but the old bower has been abandoned.  He has started to build a bower about 15m away though I think he has a long way to go before being able to impress a female.  I don’t think he will be able to explain “I had this really great pad, but it fell down”.  Wouldn’t even work in the human context.  I feel his pain.  If he has the tenacity to keep plugging away, he might have a presentable bower after about 3 years of celibacy.  In the animal kingdom, I don’t think there is such a thing as a ‘charity fuck’.

 

I think he has learned the importance of the horizontal stick.  It is stout, nearly as thick as your wrist, and it is a live vine.  It will not rot away.  These vines can trail 500m through the trees.  Bowerbirds certainly do have instincts to build to a bower, but I think from my observations, it takes refinements through experience and checking out the opposition.  I have followed science through my education and inclination, and I am aware that reality is always more complex than the scientific models constructed to explain them.  Assumptions and simplifications are made all along the way to make the models susceptible to mathematical analysis.  Real life is just too messy.  And I think the behaviour of birds is more involved than I had imagined.  The other male whose bower was destroyed by a fallen tree took another tack.

Instead of relocating,  The other bird decided to build on existing assets and use the remaining tower and start a twin tower beside it.  He had the fortune that the all important horizontal stick extended past his bower.  Smart choice.

Half the reconstruction effort required by our first bird.  The tower on the right is the remaining structure and he has started another tower on the left..  I think he fancies his chances because he has decorated the new bower with the prized green lichen.

I wish both these beautiful birds success with their different strategies.  If they have no luck, I doubt it will materially effect the population.  I know there are several more males with bowers on the property, though I would be hard pressed to locate them again.  I doubt the females have such difficulties.

So the tragedy I alluded to in the title was a personal tragedy for the males.  Not a threat to the species.  Those of us with failed relationships in human affairs are prone to grasp some defining theme or moment, and a fallen tree, quite beyond our control, would be a convenient excuse to explain our failings.  Birds don’t do that.  They pick up the pieces and try again.

I receive daily newsletters from “The Daily Reckoning”.  It is a libertarian inclined economics/share pundit/wealth advisor.  It can be quite technical, but this reposted quote is more philosophical.

“This ‘Wealth Confession’ Will Probably Shock You

By Bill Bonner in Delray Beach, Florida

Dow down 116 points yesterday. Why?

Airstrikes against ISIS…Ebola…inversion crackdown…housing slowdown…record stock high prices…Alibaba?

The smart money knows what to do. From Bloomberg:

‘American companies have seldom spent more money than they are now buying back shares. The same can’t be said for their executives.

‘A total of 7,181 insiders bought their own stock this year through Sept. 12 and 23,323 sold shares, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Washington Service. The ratio of buys to sells is near the lowest since 2000.

‘At the same time, corporate repurchases reached $275 billion in the first half of the year, the second busiest since S&P Dow Jones Indices began tracking the data in 1998.

‘Share purchases by executives are becoming rarer after seven straight quarters of advances pushed valuations in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to a four-year high.

‘While companies are pouring money into their own stock because they have nothing better to do with it, officers and directors aren’t – and that’s a bearish signal for share prices, said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network.

‘“It doesn’t say anything very good about the growth prospect for the business,” McMillan, whose firm oversees $86 billion, said in a phone interview on Sept. 18 from Waltham, Massachusetts.

‘“Who would know the business better than an executive in the middle of it? Even though executives are buying on the corporate level, their hearts are not in it personally.”

‘Insiders buying stock have dropped 8% from a year ago, poised for the fewest in more than a decade, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Bethesda, Maryland-based Washington Service. Monsanto Co. and Cisco Systems Inc. are among companies whose executives have done less buying even as corporate repurchases increased.’

They say they don’t ring a bell at the top of a market. But we hear alarms going off all over the place.

Corporations are buying back shares with borrowed money…pumping up prices. Then the pumped-up shares are awarded to managers as performance bonuses.

What do the managers do with them? They dump them.

Pump the market with zero-cost credit… Push up share prices, shifting trillions of dollars in wealth to the richest people in the country… Draw more naïve Mom and Pop into the stock market…

 

 

Homage to poverty

But let us put that to the side and continue with our series on ‘How to Get Rich’.

We’re still in the first part, titled ‘Homage to Poverty’.

Yesterday, we pointed out that often a person gets rich and finds he is no longer doing what he likes doing.

We talked about a chef who likes cooking. His restaurant is packed every night. So he opens a chain of restaurants. Now he’s really making money. But he’s no longer cooking.

In other cases, he simply retires…or sells out. Now, it’s even worse. He has nothing to do!

In our case, we have continued working. But our avocations have suffered.

An amateur builder for the last 40 years, we got the most pleasure from scavenging for building materials and creating nice living spaces with little money. We did so because we liked it. But we also had little choice; we had to ‘make do’ with what we could find.

Now, we don’t have to ‘make do’, so it is hard to justify poking into dumpsters or picking up discarded furniture on the sidewalk. It’s hard to do the work ourselves, too, when we know we can hire a professional who will do it better.

We still build things…but some of the fun has gone out of it.

A few years ago, for example, we decided to build a gypsy wagon. They are delightful and fanciful antique versions of today’s Winnebago.

Built of wood, which you can decorate as elaborately as you want, they are fun to look at. And they can be very charming and comfortable inside, depending on how much work you put into them.

You use one in your garden as an ornament…or put it to work as an office or a guest bedroom.

I found an abandoned hay wagon to use as the foundation. But before I started work, the question inevitably came up: Why not just buy one instead?

But buying one would have deprived us of the pleasure of building it. So we went ahead and built it ourselves (we got the children to help). And we’re glad we did.

Still, without necessity driving us onward, we felt a little frivolous. It was just a hobby.

Money frees you from the need to do anything. But when you ditch Mother Necessity you become an orphan. You are alone in the world…with no one to tell you to get up in the morning, stand up straight and polish your shoes.

Pretty soon, you can look like a homeless person.

When you have no one to answer to but yourself, your boss can be a moron. Then you can slip into the existential abyss. When you don’t have to do anything, it can feel as though you have done nothing worth doing. Life can see pointless and empty.

Then what?

You can make a life out of being wealthy. You can hang out with other rich people…buy a big house in Aspen…give money to the arts and charities…and eventually blow your brains out.

Aspen has a suicide rate four times the national average.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
For The Daily Reckoning Australia”

There is a note of nostalgia in the article, back to a time when satisfaction was the just rewards of achieving something out of necessity.  This piece struck a chord with me because I realise there is every reason to avoid poverty, but there is no reason to pursue wealth as an end in itself.  Many wealthy people are game addicts I think.  They are so wealthy they realise there is no point in adding to it.  Warren Buffet and Rupert Murdoch come to mind.  Rich beyond the dreams of avarice, they labour still to increase their empire.  I don’t do games, but I am sure there is a game on the net called ‘Empire’.  I think they are the lucky rich people who have found purpose in the process of money making rather than the results.

I prefer to battle on.  Thankfully far from poverty and far from riches.  With necessity still my master, and satisfaction still my reward.  Creating value from little input.  Solving problems with meagre resources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is that time of the year again when Possum Valley is in the grip of drought.  36 days without rain!   Dust behind cars!  Having to water pot plants!  Well, I’ve got one.  Not being able to wash the car!  Well I could, but as I’ve never done it before, this seems not the time to start.  In the picture you will notice the grass has gone from its usual emerald colour to a faded green.  Come back leeches, all is forgiven!

I am aware that I am whinging over nothing and deserve no sympathy.  In the next week or two I will suffer the minor inconvenience of having to fit a smaller nozzle on the hydro as the creek dries up, and I will get a bit less power.  It wont make much difference as I have a large surplus.  I wont ever run out of drinking and washing water.  I know that most of Oz suffers horrors of devastation from drought that denude the country and has the bony stock collapsing from starvation.  Other parts are ravaged by fires I have seen on the television, and I have to admit would scare the shit out of me if I ever found myself in one.

I have been to the central part of Oz, middle east, India and east Africa and seen the hardship and suffering from the constant struggle to get enough water.  Try to imagine how sparingly you would use water if you had to send your 9 year old daughter 5km to queue up at a well then carry it home.  Have you ever tried to carry 20 litres of water 5km each and every day?  Me neither and I’m not 9 years old.  I bet it hurts.  It would take half your day.

And here in Cairns we have the G20 economists trying to inflate the rich world’s trade with hot air, by passing memorandums of understanding and policy initiatives, contracts and bilateral trade agreements that are directly intended to keep the money and power in the hands of the established elites.  That is what the G20 is about in the first place.  Are they there to distribute wealth to the most needy?  I don’t think so.

I am getting increasingly frustrated and angry with the steady accumulation of power and wealth by first the developed countries, and within them by the powerful elite.  Even as it being touted worldwide as the paradigm of state governance, democracy is falling apart due to the stealthy takeover by old money.

Personally, I think I have come to terms with the concept of ‘enough’.   I have no debts, and I have good food on the table every night.  Apparently, this is not enough for some who’s boundless ambitions for wealth have corrupted governments, democratic and otherwise, around the world.

So while those elite and highly protected captains of finance try to jawbone the world economy into top gear to benefit the elite, I personalise it down to a girl in Africa who has to labour for her family to survive.

So this ‘drought’ reminds me that I have a wealth of fresh clean water that is literally on my doorstep.  It is wealth that can’t be created in a computer by some central banker in the G20, and is not governed by them.  Yet.