Category: Uncategorized

“How can I think of romance when my bronchial tubes are collapsing?” – The Addams Family

How can I have a low credit score?  The bank says I have an “outstanding” balance.  (all memes today are “as found”)

Let’s talk about Michael J. Burry.  Burry studied economics on his way to a pre-med decree at ULCA, and then got an M.D. at Vanderbilt.  I think he got bored with medicine, and he decided investing was more fun than doing pathology, and 2000 started investing.  Besides, I heard that when he did a report on a deceased patient that he put, “cause of death: autopsy” that people weren’t amused, but that joke still kills me.

By the end of 2004, he was managing $600,000,000 dollars, and had made returns of over 50% shorting the Tech Bubble when everyone still thought that Alta Vista® was worth more than a box of slightly melted Milk Duds®.  In 2005, Burry started in reviewing the housing and, more importantly, the housing lending market.  He saw it was all junk.

To be fair, I made the same observation at the time, but unlike Dr. Burry, I only made about $80,000 with a stop-loss on my own house from when I lived in Houston.  In my case, it was a one-of-a-kind situation, worked like a charm, and it won’t happen to me again.

I made (or, in my case didn’t lose) $80,000.  Burry made $100,000,000.  Burry made that much personally.  But, it really it took him a whole year to make that much.  Burry also made his other investors more than $700,000,000 in profit at the same time Bernie Madoff was attempting to convince his investors that the money must be in his other suit.  Or maybe he left it under the bed.

Burry cleaned out the market, Madoff cleaned out his investors.

Guess which one is Madoff and which one is Burry.

Also, Burry is a little ‘spergie like your ‘umble ‘ost, and also is a heavy metal fan.  I think he and I would get along, except I’m sure his car costs more than my house.  And The Mrs. has a shirt that she had autographed by Dimebag Darrell.  I’m thinking I could convince her to sell it to Dr. Burry.  For a particular car . . .

Also, like me, he has correctly predicted seven of the last three recessions.

I’ll admit, I do tend to see the cracks.  There’s a reason I say, “Better a year early than an hour too late” because I understand a fundamental principle of life as first noted by the stoic philosopher Seneca (and expounded upon by Ugo Bardi – LINK):  things are only built slowly, but disappear quickly.  A house might take weeks or months to build, but (I was advised by a firefighter) if my house has been burning for more than a few minutes, they show up to pull me, The Mrs., and Pugsley out and make sure that other houses next to mine don’t burn.

Destruction is more powerful than creation.  This is a restatement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and just shows what any father knows – the lawn won’t mow itself.

But, I digress.  Burry sees the larger patterns in the world, and his autism is a superpower in pattern detection.  And he doesn’t like what he sees.  In fact, he just posted this Tweet®:

There’s a new version of music called bubble rap.  It sound’s a lot like pop.

Well, I wonder what he meant by that?  I’ll turn it over to the philosophers at /pol/ to explain using GrugTalk®:

Why didn’t the caveman cross the road?  Because he was dead before roads were invented.

The slightly longer answer than the GrugTalk™ answer is that this is the graph that shows the relationship between the S&P 500 and the Federal funds rate.  Grug is right, sometimes line go up, sometimes down.  And when things start to collapse the Fed® normally cuts the interest rate.  But, of course, in 2001 the inflation rate was lower than Madonna’s current attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10.

Now?  In late January, Burry had a one word Tweet©:

I sold my vacuum cleaner.  It was just gathering dust.

I wonder what he meant by that?  I don’t think we need Grug to translate.  Sell.  Burry is indicating he’s out.  The first graph shows that the Fed™ rate is approaching levels not seen since before the Tech Bubble popped.

But I think it’s going to be much worse, because inflation is exploding.  In 2001, life was better, and the real issue was the ludicrous level of optimism that caused money to flow into the tech sector.  Of course, the solution from the Fed™ was to pump in tons of cash and free up lending.  In the housing sector.  So, this graph represents how Burry made a lot of money, essentially shorting the Fed™ as it poured dollars from the Tech Bubble directly into the Housing Bubble which led to the Great Recession.

Guess some folks never learn.

This made Burry hundreds of millions of dollars as he profited from the tendency of the Fed™ to treat the symptoms and not the actual problems.  However, given that our debt, inflation rate, and business risk are going up faster than a Chinese balloon.  And then they’ll go down faster than a Chinese balloon.

My balloon elephant wouldn’t fit in the back seat, so I had to pop the trunk.

Now, to be fair, Elon Musk has characterized Burry as a “stopped clock” who is right enough times to make him a few hundred million dollars.  Elon might have a point – as Burry and I wait for the cracks to form and Seneca to be proven correct, there’s a world out there, growing and moving.  You can live life, but living it always on the defensive will end up in a losing ground strategy.

I think Burry is right, and I wouldn’t bet against him.  But I’m also not going to spend to my life living in fear.  It’s a mistake, and has probably cost me additional growth on what I have squirreled away for the future.  That’s on me, and I refuse to feel bad about it, though if I were 20 or 30 I would be all in online.

As we get older, we often worry far too much about the destruction part of Seneca’s lesson, and forget about the creation, which is the important part of the story.  We will have failures.  Economies will collapse.

The world will recover.  We will abide.  But we cannot live in fear, nor in regret.

Unlike Madonna’s face.

“Darling, you have to understand, in Britain in the ’60s, you could be a sex symbol and still have bad teeth. It didn’t matter.” – Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery

Disney® acquired Austin Powers™ and is going to make him a Star Wars© character. Obi Have. (All memes today are “as-found”.

Today I read that Facebook® denied that trans-women are women. They announced that Facebook™ would allow pictures of naked breasts for trans-women but not for actual-women. So, once again, life has proven to be transphobic, just like J.K. Rowling, who has been hard hit by her “there’s a name for ‘birthing people’ – it’s women” comment. Sources indicate that instead of having $1.1 billion dollars, she has slightly less than $1.1 billion dollars.

I’m sure she’s crying. There was even a video of a trans-rights activist rebinding Harry Potter books to remove Rowling’s name, thus proving that these “trans books” were exactly the same, just with a different cover.

Ouch!

While this is a societal issue, for many reasons, that’s not the purpose of today’s post, just a symptom of a society that has been turned on its head by technology. In the past, probably 95% or more of “trans” people would have ignored the nonsense and lived their lives. Some exceedingly small fraction would have pursued sex-change operations.

Frodo became a vegan, because he heard meat is Mordor.

Now, in 2023, there’s a community for everyone online. Feel sexually attracted to toasters? Or floor tile? I’m sure there’s a group somewhere that will validate that degenerate attraction. In 1975, if a kid got horny looking at linoleum, they’d generally ignore it until it naturally went away because, OF COURSE THEY WOULD.

Now? They have zillions of followers on InstaFace© or SnapGram™ showing lewd pictures of naked 1980s vintage vinyl floor tiles. In one sense, the Internet has concentrated and supported that nonsense.

If it stopped there, it would probably be okay.

It hasn’t.

How I would change video games if I was still 12.

When I was a kid (under 18) finding a Playboy™ magazine was rare. I found one next to the band room once, and, um, liberated it when I was 12. I was like a dog who had chased that Panzerkampfwagen VI and having caught it, wondered what I would do when I finally caught a Tiger by the tail. (See what I did there??)

Yeah, I had a Playboy™, and there were pictures of hot women, but I was like an underwear gnome:

1. Get a hot chick,
2. ????
3. Fun!

I had no idea what Step 2. was. I just knew that looking at those girls made me feel funny. I was innocent.

Compare that to today. If I had been a 12-year-old in 2023, I would have had access to, essentially, every way that Step 2. could possibly be accomplished, including with midgets (no, in this context I’m not going to use “little people”), mobs, and MILFS.

Yeah, I’ve used it before, but it fits.

And I would have found a way to get there. There is absolutely no firewall that would prevent a smart 12-year-old from accessing all of the variations of what Step 2. means. The only solution would have been to cut the entire family off from the Internet.

I am lucky to have not been there. I’m certainly happy that I wasn’t a kid today.

When I was young, the market was different. Women might have wanted to have sex, but had to pretend like they didn’t. No woman I dated wanted to view themselves as the kind of girl who wanted to have sex. Why?

Duh.

They wanted love, and girls who had sex with lots of boys were tramps. Young men wanted sex, young women wanted love and commitment. Women were the gatekeepers of sex, constrained by being called tramps and being looked down upon. Men were the gatekeepers of love, and were constrained by the modesty of women.

In the society that existed, there was a strong pull toward monogamy. Divorce rates jumped with the pill, and that was not a positive for society. Additionally, as abortion was normalized and rationalized, tramps could tramp and not pay any sort of social price for killing their baby.

This was a bad situation, but salvageable. Probably.

Men and women a different. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. If there’s a war and 99% of men are killed, that 1% of men can impregnate the 100% of women that are left. Women are, though, tied to their children. Men can cut and run. They can leave the woman and child penniless, without support, and they might starve or die.

Except the laws changed. Men can’t cut and run because of child support. And if the woman can’t or won’t name the man, the government will pony up for both of them. Incentives matter, and that moves the tramp-o-meter pretty far to the tramp and/or gold digger side.

I’m sure it was because of a deep and abiding love.

Again, even that might have been salvageable.

But then we added in Tinder®. That made Step 2. all too easy for women, and gave them access in their prime to a wide variety of men. As noted above, women will engage in Step 2. like Hunter Biden on crack unless constrained. Now, they can be validated in ways that were previously impossible.

Men want sex, women are the gatekeepers. At the peak of sexual attractiveness, women can get their pick of dudes in 2023. A woman 5 can get a 10 guy, for a night. Why? Women, being tied by biology, want to have the kids of dudes that are upward on the scale. An 8 woman wants to have the kid of a 10 guy. A 10 guy? Unconstrained my morality, he wants to have sex with all the women. It’s 2am and the bar is closing?

A 5 will do.

Thus our 5 woman on Tinder™ who gets a “date” where she is one-night-standed by a 10 now believes she is entitled to a 10. Prior to Tinder®, people met in church or work or through friends. Now? It’s a match for the evening, where every woman is a 10 for a night.

So, who has the power here?

But it’s a lie.

Chads won’t settle down with Betty 5. If they settle down, it will be with an 8 or 9 or 10.

Then, Betty 5 gets to be 30. Chads won’t even acknowledge her.

This mismatch means that dudes who are 8s, 9s, or 10s get all women when the women are in their prime, but the women then get rejected when they pass their prime.

The consequences are that a majority of women in their best years for having kids spend their time drinking mimosas, making PowerPoints® for $39,000 a year, and meeting with Chad for “dates”.

The women hit 30? 35? 40?

I’m sure she’s happy.

They are ready to settle down. And all the men who have been abandoned along the way are their targets. But, deep in their hearts, they still are looking for more.

To be clear, Tom Brady got dumped.

Is there any way this leads to a functional, stable society?

No.

Zoomers in their 20s are checking out. They can’t get dates, so they don’t care. They have no incentive to improve, hit the job, be aggressive, and try to climb the ladder. It’s easier to hang home, do the least amount possible, smoke some weed, and play Call of Duty®. At least in Call of Duty© they have a challenge. At least there, they can be someone.

Women in their 30s wonder where all the good men are. The answer is simple, they’ve abandoned them in their rush for Step 2. gratification with Chad and become widows to men who never thought any more of them than as disposable play toys. Then they are told to “man up” and wife up tramps who will forever pine for the one night they spent with Chad.

Yup, dumped it all. And from what I’ve seen? Still single and collecting cats.

When looking at the Millennial and Zoomer generation men, understand their situation. They’ve been placed in a desert, but all they see is water. So, they gave up. A combination of Tinder®, laws, and lack of religion led them here.

When looking at the Millennial and Zoomer generation women, understand their situation. They’ve been lied to that they are special and that they can have it all: Chad, the mansion, and mimosas while making PowerPoints© for $350,000 a year. Sex and the City? It’s the big lie. Women change themselves to become an ersatz version of men, just like the “women” who can now post breast pictures on Facebook®.

This cannot last.

So, it won’t.

On Friday, I generally try to remoralize you, dear reader. If you’re reading this, you’re part of the solution. I don’t think I have many Millennial and Zoomer readers. That’s fine.

You (and I mean You!) need to help them. Encourage them. Bring them along. Encourage young women to be chaste. Encourage young men to improve themselves, to be the best that they can be.

This situation cannot stand. It leads to collapse.

And then, once again, men will become men, and women will need them.

And families will flourish.

This will happen because it has to happen, so do not feel dread, do not be discouraged, because we will win. And the ideas of virtue will never perish.

Ever.

So get to it. Help a kid today. And remember who can always help them.