Category: Random Stuff

71F and 80%RH this morning. I know! I had to confirm it with a weather site… Don’t know what’s in store for us today but at least it’s different.

Tomorrow the family packs up and flies to the east coast for our biannual visit with family out there… We’re mostly going to be on Cape Cod, although we will be spending a couple of days with family around Boston.

As usual, I’m not looking forward to the travel, or being away from home. There is absolutely no way to be adequately prepared during this trip. We are at the mercy of the airlines, relatives (who think I’m a paranoid fool), and unfamiliar places and people.

To add insult to injury, I’ll be there too early for the Pageant of Steam AGAIN! (and not really close either)

Meanwhile, the world continues to slide toward the future.

n

89F and 79%RH at 9am… so basically Nick’s rule of 10s. Should be 100 in another hour.

NYC lost power to some areas during a period of peak demand and people are screaming about it. Despite being warned it could happen. Despite it being normal for the system to be overtaxed on a hot summer day.

Preps people.

These same idiots are going to be calling for YOUR stuff and YOUR resources when something bad happens. Time to start tightening up your OPSEC and probably your physical security too.

And prep like your life depends on it, because it might.

n

90F and 70%RH this fine morning… sure got hot yesterday. I suppose we have more of the same coming today.

This is the first day in a while that I slept until I woke naturally. Feels good. Hungry though!

Kid is already bugging me about a play date out of the house. Jeez, she’s only been home a day.

I’m going to eat, and figure out what I need to do today, then do some of it. We’ll see how that goes.

n

86F and 85%RH this late am… Sunny and kinda hot. No one home but me and the dog means I get to sleep in. Felt good.

I can’t believe it is still July. Last month flew by so fast, but the two weeks since the Fourth have taken forever. I have to check every time when I write “July”.

This week I got some further work done on getting rid of stuff. In the process, I got some work done at my secondary storage location. I need to do a bunch more work there. Everyone should have stuff put aside somewhere other than your home. I got serious about it when I saw what the Oklahoma tornadoes did to houses. If your home is destroyed you need your preps more than ever. Make sure you have some somewhere else. Maybe you have a friend who will let you put a few bins in his garage? Maybe rent a small storage locker in the direction you’d be bugging out? Stack some food and a way to prepare it, some shelter if the spot won’t work, a change of clothes and some snivel gear, maybe even an encrypted hard drive or thumb drive with important stuff on it.

Other than the cleaning and organizing, I didn’t get much prepping done this week. My ebay sales were 0. My sellers are seeing more bankruptcy sales, smaller surplus sales, lower quality stuff in the sales, and other signs things are not going well in the broader economy.

Speaking of which, I better get started on my day today. Kids come home from camp tonight, hooray. On the other hand, this is my last day of freedom for a while….

n

78F and 97%RH. It rained on me in various parts of town all afternoon yesterday. It was like a black cloud followed me around and wanted my auction items to be wet. My wife said she wasn’t aware of any rain. Must have been little cells and I just happened to drive through a bunch of them. Stuff in the back of the truck didn’t get too wet, as long as you keep moving the airflow keeps most of it out of the bed.

Couple of interesting things in this story — https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-16/ex-fox-friends-co-host-flees-us-amid-ponzi-scheme-allegations
First, note that a guy who hosts on Fox is married to a woman who is a former news anchor with MSNBC. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. Then look at what the arrangement in question tried to do- profit by flipping and renting houses. Then the last line of the article – “As to why Clayton, Natali, and Whalen thought they could become stupid rich in flipping homes and renting them out for investors during a hiking cycle by the Federal Reserve and the eventual turning point in the economy that started in the summer of 2018 — is beyond us. All schemes tend to come undone at the end part of a business cycle. ” –Umm, they thought they could shear a few sheep before the bubble popped, or they thought they were too smart to get caught short when the bubble popped, or they didn’t believe it was a bubble. Bubbles always pop. I love how the author just casually mentions the end though, like everyone knows that’s what happened. Easy enough in hind sight.

And then there is this– https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-16/despite-best-first-half-decade-hedge-funds-fees-continue-fall-0 Hedge funds are supposed to be the smartest guys, Wall Street players. If you were a conspiracy theorist, it might look suspicious that the market is so high, yet all the smart guys are doing so poorly…

“Years of underperforming the market as a result of the Fed’s rigged stock environment where fundamentals no longer matter has led many investors to seek out less expensive alternatives, especially since central banks no longer allow even a modest drop in the market. But hedge funds reported their best first half in a decade this year as managers capitalized on the surge in stocks after their plunge late last year.

Even still, the 5.7% gain across the hedge fund industry paled in comparison to the S&P 500, which returned almost 19% over the same course of time. This came after hedge funds delivered their worst performance since 2011 last year.“

And another big fund is calling it quits — https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-17/woodfords-once-iconic-fund-begins-forced-liquidations-vows-no-big-discounts

“Woodford has left thousands of investors without access to their savings after suspending its flagship $4.63 billion equity income fund about a month and a half ago after overwhelming redemption requests.”

— I wonder why those ‘sophisticated investors’ want their money back? They need it to cover something else? They need it for current expenses? They’ve lost faith in the fund?

I’m convinced more than ever that it’s a casino. Rule number one is “if you look around and can’t see the patsy, the patsy is YOU.” If you stayed in, take your gains and get out for a while. If you ‘let it ride’ you are going to leave the table busted.*

In politics, maybe now some chickens will come home to roost–

“Is Somalian-born far-left ‘squad’ member Ilhan Omar ‘married to her brother’? Trump makes extraordinary suggestion about one of his Democrat tormentors

President Donald Trump suggested Rep. Ilhan Omar was ‘married to her brother’
Reignited an explosive rumor that first emerged during Omar’s 2016 campaign
He made the outlandish claim to the press before heading to a rally in NC
Omar has failed to fully disprove the claims of bigamy and fraternal marriage
She has called the rumors ‘baseless, absurd’ and amounting to Islamophobia”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7258833/Trump-claims-theres-lot-talk-Ilhan-Omar-married-brother.html

She got an “islamic divorce”. Alt-media has followed this story since it began. MSM is late to the party.

And that should be enough to kick off some discussion….

nick

*(nothing I write should EVER be considered investment advice, and is for entertainment purposes only, past performance is no guarantee of future performance (and that goes for past bad advice too-even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut.) )

79F and 90%RH this morning. It did cool off a bit after the sun went down yesterday. Not much, but noticeable.

I’m beat. I’ve been moving heavy stuff and staying up late. I went back to bed this morning again. Didn’t help much. I’ve got more of the same on deck for today too.

Ugh. I’m sitting here and just zoned out.

In the news, I had a surge of hope when I read this headline -“Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens Dies At 99” -but he’s already been retired and replaced. Dang.

Zoned out again. Jeez I’m tired.

I should make some breakfast and coffee.

n

80F and 98%RH this morning. Stayed a tiny bit cooler yesterday with overcast, but was still hot and humid.

Anyone else notice how much of our economy is people living off the ‘skim’?

From Greg yesterday-

“The record companies in the US have definitely stopped trying and are content to pocket streaming royalties from the last five decades of material in their vaults.”

It’s not just the record companies. Youtube’s whole model is getting paid for other peoples’ work. The entertainment industry in general does this, with the creative talent, the ‘artist’, often getting little or nothing for their efforts.

Amazon skims a little off of every third party transaction. Ebay and Paypal too. Google and facebook get paid for something quite different from the ‘service’ they provide to their users, interjecting themselves into the process of buying and selling, skimming a tiny bit from every potential transaction.

Doordash, grocery shopping services, delivery in general, all make their money off of someone else’s transaction. There are fewer and fewer primary creators, making things for people to buy.

The internet may have disintermediated some commerce, but it introduced a whole new crop of companies that interjected themselves BACK into the ‘value stream’. The end result is the ‘maker’ gets less, and all the new intermediaries all get a little bit more out of each transaction.

The financial industry is all about skim. All the algos are skimming from each sale, frontrunning and driving the cost up for the end customer. Interest and other financialization tricks are skim. Gambling in the stock markets is skimming money out of the pool….

.gov does it directly with taxes and regulation. Regulators are the first of the skimmers, adding cost, producing nothing. And of course the ‘taker’ class lives entirely off the skim from ‘makers’ and the earnings of the ‘skimmers’.

Huge chunks of our economy have been financialized, or become dependent on .gov.

Take a second or two and consider what happens to an economy built on skim when it contracts… What happens when there is no room in the price of a good for 4 extra intermediaries? What happens when people decide they really don’t need someone else to pick up or even make their dinner?

That’s when the downward spiral starts in earnest.

nick

I’m sure it’s hot and humid, but I’m cool and comfy in my bed. I LIKE air conditioning. If the collapse happens, I’ll miss AC an awful lot.

Got through yesterday and got a couple of things done. Monthly non-prepping hobby meeting. Grass cutting. Garden weed and water. We had the hamster funeral in the late afternoon, just before the rain, and the kids made concrete ‘stepping stones’ with decorations for headstones.

I tried to get the petcock installed on the rain water barrel I bought at auction some weeks ago, but despite a box full of plumbing fittings, I couldn’t come up with the right combination of hardware. I KNOW I have other hose bibs somewhere, but I couldn’t find them yesterday. I know I must have the right adapter somewhere, but I keep the plumbing supplies in the garage attic, and I just couldn’t spend much time in that heat looking. I’ll try again today if I have time.

Both girls are going to Girl Scout sleepover camp for the week. Part of the day will be devoted to driving them there, and getting ourselves back. Maybe we’ll go out for dinner…

Meanwhile, weird stuff going on. NYC blackout, guy shot outside detention facility, crazy people running around…

I’m putting this up in the queue and heading to bed, see you all later.

n