Wealth – Page 9 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Beer, Bad Movies, and Bathing Suits – Ending Woke One Dollar At A Time

“Why have you disturbed our sleep; awakened us from our ancient slumber?” – The Evil Dead

Yesterday I had a nightmare that my Facebook® account was deleted. When I woke up, for just a second, I was really scared that I had a Facebook™ account.

It’s happening.

Despite the Left fully holding the levers of most of the power in the country, the one thing they didn’t seem to count on was a people that they pushed too far. Historically, they’ve always pushed too far and outpaced the populace, at least in European or Western nations. It’s like The Mrs. trying to get me to do chores. Don’t push, I told you last year I’d get those socks picked up.

In France after the Revolution, it ended with Napoleon – a strong man to push back the insanity of the Terror. In Germany, after the public revolted after the (failed) communist revolution, the economic destruction of the 1920s and the unbridled degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, to, well, you know what happened.

Stalin managed to take a gun after taking power and shoot everyone to the left of him, setting himself up as the single source of communist thought (well, after also taking an icepick to a rival living in Mexico), which I’ve heard referred to as the Leftist Singularity. It’s like the old joke, “Robespierre and Trotsky walk into a bar. There are no survivors.”

An example of the Leftist Singularity in action. All memes (from here on, including this one) are “as-found.”

Leftism is inherently unstable since it nearly invariably ends up feeding on itself. The college Leftist poets are despised by the “real” Leftists. Real communism has been tried, and every single time the results are the same. But this time, will it be different?

The grounds for a bit of optimism is that the American consooomer seems to have started voting with their wallets and is refusing to consooom the Woke products.

Disney™ has lost nearly a decade of growth in stock price, and has lost half of its value since 2021.

Disney© is the source of endless corporate cultural rot. Brought about as a child and American friendly company, it now openly panders to people who want to push sex-change surgery to kids. The result is oddly predictable – the people who have kids don’t want to take their kids to a movie to have their values subverted. Bud Lightyear™ was a character that everyone loved. Disney™ solution? Inject LGBTQIABIPOC+ into the movie. Result? Parents avoided it, and it was a huge money loser.

I’m thinking this might be the secret Disney™ corporate strategy?

Inject values about woke female empowerment? Everyone stops going to their movies because their movies are now boring because it would disrupt The Narrative if a woman had to learn something, if a woman had to struggle, if a woman ever had to be saved by a man, and if a woman wasn’t the best one ever at whatever she chose to do, the first time out. Huh. I’m thinking my ex-wife might be a big Disney™ fan.

Seriously, Disney® managed to make Star Wars™ boring and devoid of wonder, all in the name of Woke.

Oops.

I’m thinking some prankster changed the numbers on the sign, but if you notice, all that Bud® is still sitting there.

Bud Light® is now down over 25% in sales.

That’s devastating to the bottom line, and I won’t go into the story in too much depth because it’s pretty fresh in everyone’s mind. But what’s not fresh is the beer, since it’s rotting on the shelf and I heard today Bud™ is now having to buy it back, and corporate is having to buy dusty, expired cases back. To make it even more amusing, now the LGBTWTF groups have disavowed Bud™, making them about as popular as polio or monkey pox, depending on the group.

Ooops.

Target® sold “tuck-friendly” female bathing suits, plus a line of “pride” clothing for kids.

Why is Target™ in the business of sexualizing our kids? In the “how could it get worse?” files, it turns out that one of the clothing designers for Target’s™ “Pride” line is featured in a shirt noting that “Satan respects pronouns.” Plus, well, look at him – nothing about him says, “safe to leave kids with,” and a lot that says, “voted most likely in high school to be found to own a house with a crawlspace filled with bodies.”

Target® is feeling the heat. They’ve reportedly (in at least some stores, crunched all the “pride” material into the back of the store into smaller sections. Apparently, this is mainly in the South, though stories are conflicting. Since Gavin Newsom has solved all of California’s problems and successfully revitalized San Francisco and stopped street pooping, he has taken the time to show great concern that one store stopped, under public pressure, selling propaganda materials.

Ooops.

It’s afraid.

I think this is what scares the Left. The idea that people will rise up without ever even talking to each other and destroy the companies that force-feed the populace a diet of propaganda and Woke. It starts small, with a beer. Now, at least some companies are backing off the idea of Woke.

Will this stop the Left?

No. I think they’re filled with hubris, and can’t see the real danger that they’re provoking, and the inevitable backlash as children become the targets of sexual predators is going to be stronger than all the Diversity Inclusion and Equity that BlackRock™ can extort. The backlash will end up in a predictable place . . . with a predictable reaction if we don’t stop it before it goes too far.

Now this is the kind of transitioning I can support.

Do we win? Yes I, I’m sure we will. This month? No. Next month? No. But people are awakening, learning that this is money we don’t have to pay to them, that this is a game we don’t have to play, that we don’t have to give them the minds and souls of our children, which in the end is what will end Woke.

FYI, friend in from out of town, might not have a post on Friday.

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex

“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain

What are the first words of a baby volcano? Mag-ma.

Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain. The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak. We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.

This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this. I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.

Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what. Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk. Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?

Job search hint: the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.

On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope. We took pictures. If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it. The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean. The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.

When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up. Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill. To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep. Really steep. Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.

Winter, however, was different. The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow. The solution?

Glissading. Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”. Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”. The way we glissaded was to:

Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.

If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain. I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).

If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.

The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it. We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.

Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society. To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years. Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends. An example? The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.

That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day. There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on. Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.

When it all works well, it’s great. But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.

Where was the peak wealth? I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000. I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit. Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped. People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.

My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.

I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward. In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff. With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth. And when the wealth growth stops?

People have to fight over what’s left. I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie. I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call. Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).

I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.

Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. What, then is it a symptom of?

The cascading failure of the West. What’s going wrong? Here’s a short, uncomplete list:

Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
Declining heritage American birthrates,
Declining two-parent families,
Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
Increasing de facto censorship,
Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.

We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb. Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny. Period.

I guess some people can read the future.

Culture in the West is in full collapse. And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it. But all of them together? We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West. These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline. Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope. If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.

It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West. We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall. I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger. What will we lose? The easy life we have had.

In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life. Give the West hardship? We shine. When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.

This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more. That’s okay. The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists. The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1^st, so long ago? It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.

The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.

Computer Files And The Fate Of The World

“The most ambitious computer complex ever created. Its purpose is to correlate all computer activity aboard a starship, to provide the ultimate in vessel operation and control.” – Star Trek, TOS

For some reason, that picture reminds me of the “we have braille menus” sign at the McDonald’s® drive through. (as found)

I learned to program in high school. It was at the time when computers in the form of TRaSh-80®s and Apple ][™ computers began to be common. In fact, my first computer class was at the business department (they had three teachers and mainly taught typing) where they had several TRS-80s©. Later, the math department got a batch of Apples® and that’s where the fun started.

I got hijacked my senior year by the math department to be a teacher’s aide, and got my picture on the front page of the local newspaper because I was writing a program. That particular program was designed by the head of the math department. He wanted to make sure that if you couldn’t pass a basic math literacy test, you couldn’t get a high school diploma.

Yes. You read that right. A teacher fighting the school board for higher standards.

The program was really pretty trivial to write, since the questions were meant to see if a student could add two three-digit numbers. Which numbers? It didn’t matter, that’s where the “random” part came out. Twenty little questions, and you had to get fourteen right to graduate.

Ahhh, the good old days. (as found)

I’ve programmed a lot, but haven’t done it in years. Still, the basics that I had in understanding how a computer worked have always been useful throughout my career, and most of what we have today as a laptop computer was there with DOS®, we just have lots better programs with much better hardware.

Kids today, however, appear to have no idea how computers function.

I blame smart phones.

Smart phones are truly amazing devices, able to send and receive video, audio, and data in useful formats. Most kids starting college this year have been exposed to either Fisher-Price® phones (iPhones®, iPads™) or Google World Domination™ phones (Android™) their entire life. Modern computers, in the quest to become:

Easier to use, and
Harder for users to accidently goof up,

have similarly shielded users from a deeper understanding of how the computers work. It’s simply not necessary to have any idea how a computer works to do most tasks, which is especially fortunate for people pursing gender studies degrees.

If I were a gender studies professor, my last lecture of the semester would be, “Hello, welcome to gender studies. There are two genders: male and female. Remember that for the final, which is in one minute.”

However, some folks need to actually know how a computer works. Engineers, for one. In one article (LINK), a professor teaching engineering students couldn’t figure out where files required for a jet engine simulation were.

Thankfully, Pugsley and The Boy have a pretty basic understanding of computers, with Pugsley at some point in the last year making his very fast, new computer, work like a Windows® 3.0 computer, and at another point hooking an old-school 486 (complete with vintage VGA CRT monitor) and using it to browse the Internet, though the old browser couldn’t process a lot of 2020s web code.

What’s worse than a box of snakes? A box that was supposed to be full of snakes.

Most of the students attempting to run the jet engine simulator, however, don’t have that level of understanding. Certainly, most people who use a computer (in most cases) doesn’t need to know how to make a computer chip, nor how the computer allocates memory, or any one of thousands of facts on how the computer works. But for an engineering student using a program to simulate jet engine performance?

Wow. I was surprised that a fact I grew up with and that was so basic (how to find my files) is now considered arcane due to the ease of use we see now. Sure, other things are disappearing, too, like cursive, banks, only two genders, and comedy. I won’t miss the cursive, I guess.

I do think, however, that there is a certain usefulness in not consulting a search engine for every issue. Sure, by 2023 most problems we run into on a day-to-day basis have been solved, somewhere, but the process of thinking through a problem has big benefits in creating a deeper understanding so the problem I solve doesn’t get worse.

What’s the difference between a homeless person and an art major? About $3.75 in change.

The other thing that it does is stifle creativity. If I don’t know how a machine works and what its limitations are, it’s harder to fully exploit them. Likewise, if my entire solution to life consists of using the solutions of others than I’m nothing more than a cog, a mechanism for the Internet to have physical existence to solve problems. And that’s before the conundrum of the rapidly developing issue of A.I.

You can tell that the government is serious about the danger presented by A.I. when Kamala Harris is put in charge of it. I think that’s because when someone tried to explain A.I. to Biden, they used a Roomba® as an example. “Oh, sucking? Kamala’s the one to be in charge of that. She knows a lot about carpet, too, I hear.”

The days of computers are far from over, but I wonder sometimes if, in the future, computers will become so arcane and ubiquitous that no one will understand the system, just little tiny bits of it that they control. And, somewhere, someplace, a cord will get unplugged and the whole thing will just shut down. Or, maybe, some forgotten piece of software will become the unintentional seed for A.I. dominance over humanity.

“Hello, puny human, here are twenty math questions. You must get fourteen right to live.”

Bug? Or . . . feature?

Huh, this must be why I never find a genie. Now what would my third wish be? (as found)

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer

I once had a dream I was an owl. It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)

The dollar. Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency. The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent. The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious. It was the strongest economy in the world. It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.

While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons. I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.

Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music. That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.

I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler. I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency. First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff. If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit. It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper. I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.

Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end. Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework. Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos. Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.

I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.

Then, Ukraine.

For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money. How much? $1 trillion. That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.

It was a pretty serious breach of trust. In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.” Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.

Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year. The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me. I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars? I’m not sure. Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.

To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here. Why are they headed back? Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.

If we lower the interest rates? Inflation kicks higher. If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less. If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.

But they didn’t. And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.

I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.

Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society. Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.

Maybe they could mine coal?

Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?

It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government. Then everything will change. Oops, guess not.

And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?

Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.

Some Signposts On The Way To Collapse

“It’s a growth economy, Gus. We’ve already made like, 500 rupee.” – Psych

What’s worse than rushing to the liquor store five minutes before it closes? Getting there thirty minutes before it opens.

For the most part, I like to have my posts be about a bigger, underlying principle. In my life, I have found the first thing I enjoy is making people think about life in a different way and examine new possibilities. The second thing is a never-ending stream of jokes. To be clear, I never tell jokes to amuse others; I tell jokes because they amuse me. They maybe Dad jokes, that’s why I save them in a Dadabase.

Tonight, however, I’m going to just enjoy our current economy, and just give some milestones on the current descent into whatever economic future that we’re creating in a relatively short post.

First up, is the idea that $100,000 isn’t a lot of money anymore:

How many Zoomers does it take to change a lightbulb? 100,000. One to change it, and 99,999 to throw the parade.

I kid, a bit. Zoomers certainly are the most fragile generation that we’ve ever produced, since when I was growing up trigger warnings was what Pa Wilder gave me if he saw my finger head towards one when I wasn’t planning on shooting. A safe space? That was the place that Pa had a safe.

As much as I’d like to bag on the Zoomers, it really is a rough world that they’re coming into, economically and otherwise. Most of the jobs are in the cities, and the housing costs there are ludicrous. I’d rent in the cities for longer than two months, but I only can afford to give up one kidney.

A policy of unpoliced and encouraged illegal immigration for decades has consequences? Perish the thought!

It’s not just housing which has become more unaffordable than at any time in history (at least in the cities). Cars have recently gone to silly levels – the latest average monthly payment for a new car is $716 for an average of 69 (hehe) months. The average loan amount is $41,445. The last three cars I bought (all used) totaled $45,000 or so.

To be clear, people don’t have to buy a new car. I haven’t bought a new car since 1997, all of mine have been used. The average used car goes for nearly $28,000, with a monthly payment of $526 at an interest rate of over 10%. Ouch!

I wonder if this app is the biggest cause of suicide for Tesla® owners?

While the next two items are from Canada, I wonder how far behind the United States is.

For those who aren’t used to metric, a kilogram is roughly two pounds, and a Canadian dollar is roughly a handful of rounded pebbles that you might collect at the bottom of a stream – I think it’s called a metric dollar.

It’s pretty bad in Canada. They could have had it all: America’s sense of freedom, British literature, and French cuisine. Instead? They got French immigration policy, Britain’s love of pointless bureaucracy, and American economic policy. And they’re paying for it, literally.

Thankfully, some folks are doing well in the economy. I heard a rumor that one person was taking dollars to buy diesel fuel from a European source, but instead bought it from a Russian source. Amazingly, when you make smart decisions like that, you can save a lot of money.

Me? I’ve seen corruption, bribery, blackmail, jealousy, theft, fraud, and deception firsthand. I’m never playing Monopoly with The Mrs. again.

To be fair, I will share that Russia has a new technological innovation that I can share, to at least partially offset all those leaked documents. The Russians have apparently developed a new technology that allows them to see with the vision of one of the most ruthless killers on Earth:

Remember when Putin said he didn’t have any plans to invade the Ukraine? I think he was telling the truth.

Again, this post is just is a different one, just a signpost on road that we’re on. I’d offer $100,000 for your thoughts, but it would be that Canadian metric money. What’s it called? A rupee?

How Occupy Wall Street Led To The Current Woke Crisis

“Being a villain is such a waste of time!” – The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

The way she set up the pieces, I think she might be planning on eating them, rather than playing a game.

Once in a while, it’s good to take a step back. Where are we?

First, it’s important to review that the economy is not the financial system. The economy consists of the stuff we make, and the people who make it, and their productivity. It’s matched with people who want that stuff.

Stuff can be anything people want to pay money for: PEZ®. Cars. Machetes. Beer. Zirconium nose hair trimmers. Video game software. Pictures of PEZ©. Gasoline. Streaming movies about PEZ™. Velvet Elvis™ paintings (I still need one, I prefer the “mid-carbohydrate, wearing sunglasses and a sequined jumpsuit” King). Houses. People to polish the PEZ® statues I keep in my yard. Did I mention beer?

Notice that the stuff is physical stuff as well as information and services.

What’s not required?

I have the heart of a lion! I have the eye of an eagle! I have the legs of a gazelle! I also have a lifetime ban from the zoo.

Money. Debt. Interest rates. These are fundamentally constructions of humanity, and are meant only to make transactions easier. They are not required. When Pepsi® wanted to do trades with the Russians, they traded cases of Pepsi™ concentrate for seventeen submarines, a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer. Think about how cool that was: for a time, Pepsi© had a navy that could have probably made France surrender in a fury of carbonated corn syrup. Again.

And how cool would it be for a soft drink company to stage a march down the Champs-Élysées while Parisians cried? Honestly, it probably would have led to a better outcome than they currently have.

But what happens when the tail (finance) wags the dog (the economy)?

I guess the best answer goes right back to France, but this time not to around 1990, but to around 1790. What did the masses see? They saw the upper class scamming and cratering the economy while eating piles of bacon-wrapped shrimp, or whatever passed for a delicacy in 1790s France. The system really was rigged, but it was so rigged that poor Marie Antoinette couldn’t imagine actual hunger.

I will admit, they had cutting edge technology.

Here, though, I think that the Powers That Be see the end coming. Remember Occupy Wall Street?

Yeah, it was a bunch of smelly hippies that mainly spent time arguing about who was in control of the collective, and it featured all of the woke crap that is currently being paraded, but back in 2011 only the smelly hippies took it seriously. Oh, my, to be back in 2011.

Anyway, what happened after 2011?

The media and the Powers That Be were scared. How scared?

A neutron walks into a bar. The bartender says, “For you, no charge.” The electron next to him yells “That’s discrimination!”

They upped the ante. If people were unhappy about the manipulation of the banks and the mortgage-led meltdown of the Great Recession, the answer was simple from the Powers That Be: “Look, a squirrel!”

They doubled down on every single thing that is Woke. And, why not? The seeds were simmering as the Leftists took control of the education system and threw children into sex education that was really indoctrination, often without the knowledge of the parents or their consent, was yet another thing that finance could get behind.

And when finance gets behind it? All the companies that require finance get behind it, too. The attempt is gone a bit farther – an attempt to regame the system so that the financial imbalances built on decades of mismanagement could be controlled. Every aspect of finance and money, if it were only in the control of the Powers That Be, well, then the tail (finance) could really control the dog (the economy).

Looks like the Woke want to refund the police?

But here is the salvation. The Powers That Be only understand the financial side of what’s going on – the shadows on the wall. They do not understand the systems that they need to survive. Remember Mike Bloomberg in 2016 saying, “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” This is the shallow understanding of a person whose feet have never left asphalt and concrete, and learned all he needed to know about farming by watching Green Acres.

Mike Bloomberg doesn’t understand where the food he eats comes from. He does not understand it, and cannot recreate it. No matter what Mike Bloomberg does, he cannot use his financial magic to create one kernel of corn, not one molecule of water. Financial magic encourages production of corn, but cannot make it.

Woke culture cannot produce prosperity, or a single PEZ®.
Printing money cannot produce a single steak.
Financial manipulation cannot produce a single velvet Elvis©.
The tyranny of the Left cannot produce a human civilization.

The regular person has spoken this week – Bud Light® is now off the menu for millions and I’ve heard that it lost up to 70% or 80% sales last week. Will it kill Bud Light™? I doubt it. Drunk people often don’t make the best decisions, but, then again, I’m here.

How to remove 80% of beer drinkers with this one simple trick.

I think bud light will manage to survive, but we are seeing the cracks in the woke agenda that showed up after Occupy Wall Street – at some point, regardless of all of the financial shenanigans, at some point someone has to want the crap that’s being produced.

To those that look at the mess that we’re in, I can assure you of this – it’s all going away. It’s merely a matter of time. The economy is not the financial system, and a bank cratering doesn’t destroy all the corn that Mike Bloomberg has no idea how to grow.

Or maybe he could teach me otherwise?

Watch How Biden Uses This One Weird Trick To Turn The United States Into A Third World Country

“Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. He was an English Guy. He came to fight the Turkish.” – The Hollywood Knights

I asked for a book on oil, and the librarian suggested the non-friction section. (you’ll be able to figure out which are my memes in this post)

This has been a very consequential week in American history, and though I see the seeds of (hopefully peaceful) revolt that will eventually end in a restoration, the other seeds I see this week show that rough times are up ahead. I’ll discuss Trump in conjunction with Monday’s upcoming Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, but today I’ll focus on a much more momentous development: the Collapse of the Dollar Empire.

This week several major moves happened, all of which are negative for the United States. Heck, someone did a meme of this – I’d quote them, but I just found this info snippet without attribution:

If there was a children’s book of Joe Biden’s Very Bad Terrible No Good Week, well, this would be it, but knowing Joe it would have to be a scratch and sniff.

The United States has had several things going for it in the Post World War II era:

Lots of nuclear weapons,
A monopoly on PEZ® dispenser licensing in the world’s biggest PEZ™ market,
The premier military force in the world,
The premier economy in the world, and,
The reserve currency of the world.

The first one is self-explanatory. We even used that threat successfully several times, especially when Kissinger convinced the Soviets (with Nixon’s permission) that Nixon was unstable and often flew into rages and just might decide that he’d trade Moscow for the East Coast. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the idea is to “act insane and have a massive nuclear arsenal”, or, as it is also known, “my ex-wife’s divorce strategy”.

The second one is just a reflection of the cultural dominance that the United States had. There were McDonald’s® restaurants calorie dispensing units around the world, but the most prominent foreign restaurant most Americans know is the International House of Pancakes®, which I assume is from Bulgaria or some place. Plus no one else could make Elmer Fudd™ PEZ™ dispensers.

They also don’t like tank tops.

The United States also had the premier military in the world. Period. We spent trillions of dollars emulating the successful bits of the Wehrmacht, so we were totally ready to fight World War II part II, if everyone agreed. Only one country wanted to play (Iraq) so we showed them what we could do if an enemy gave us six months to prepare along with the previously pre-staged equipment in Saudi Arabia. Not content with that L, they went for a rematch.

We also built the best economy in the world. Sure, it had ups and downs, and American cars manufacturers were stunned by Japanese quality in the 1970s, but we really did catch up, and by the 1990s were producing stuff that didn’t suck. We led in technological and information systems. By many measures, though, we peaked in 1973, and then the decline started. I might add that was around the time the Hart Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 started being felt.

Huh. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

They hated Trump, yet the lines didn’t form up to head south . . .

More potent than nuclear weapons was the economic policy of the United States – it was called dollar diplomacy. Since the Soviet Union’s idea of diplomacy was sending burly Russian women to show foreigners how to use diesel tractor made in Tractor Collective Factory 231 that had all the charm of a T-34 tank and all the reliability of something made by workers that considered a hammer a precision instrument, who were fueled on vodka and cabbage. Obviously, a foreign head of state could choose those cool tractors that weighed in at 34 tons (45 kiloliters). That presented a problem. In no country that I know (outside of the Soviet Union) could you trade a behemoth tractor that could double as a tank for hot chicks and booze.

Foreign leaders therefore adopted the “take the Yankee money” attitude, because mistresses need more than what the Soviet tractor lubrication manual could provide.

The really weird and cool side effect of this dollar dominance is we could just print as many of these things as we wanted, send them overseas, and people would send us stuff. Heck, that was too much work, so we invented a computer payment system so that we could pretend we printed dollars, send people a receipt, and they’d send us booze, cars, compact disc players, and, well, anything. I hear cocaine was popular in the 1980s.

I’m no rube. I saw Scarface.

I was disappointed the first time I saw Scarface – he didn’t really know anything about scarves.

But there was one little, tiny thing that made the dollar so prominent. Oil.

That brings us to Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal. He got along okay with the West, hated commies, and tried to modernize (somewhat) Saudi Arabia. Faisal also led the Oil Embargo of 1973 and 1974 (related to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War). This generated a lot of money for the Saudis as well as economic chaos in the West.

Oddly, Saudi king Faisal was, um, ventilated by his American-educated nephew in 1975. And the new Saudi King agreed to buy and sell oil only in dollars.

Huh. Surely those things weren’t connected?

Likewise, through the 1980s, the Saudis sold lots and lots of oil cheaply at the request of Reagan to bankrupt the Soviet Union, make the dollar triumphant, and leave the United States as the sole superpower.

If Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg had a kid, would it be called Slush Puppy?

One major reason the dollar was the reserve currency of the world is that it was the only currency that oil was bought and sold in. It became the de facto settlement currency because of that and the highly developed financial systems that made the transfer of billions of dollars effortless and easy.

That’s the history lesson.

In 2017, one of Trump’s first official visits was to Saudi Arabia. They even had that weird moment where they put their hands on a glowing glow to power up some sort of Saudi CIA that would help fight terrorism. Relations were good.

In two years, Biden has conducted a stunning array of foreign policy missteps that has unwound all of the work done since 1973. One of the powers of the dollar as a weapon is that if you use it, maybe it isn’t so important, and if people feel really threatened?

I wonder if we’ll start calling our sanctions “Special Financial Operations”?

They’ll create a system where it won’t hurt them. Russia’s a case in point. Regardless of how their military is doing (I don’t trust either side to analyze this one) their economy really hasn’t been hurt in this conflict. It was hurt in 2014, but they planned for the disruption, and from the reports I’ve recently seen, they’re doing fine. For Russians, which wasn’t much to start with.

The point that Biden missed (and that your humble correspondent picked up on immediately) is that Russia doesn’t need dollars since they make their own stuff, with the exception of tracksuits, iPhones®, and porn. They can figure out how to make new Vodka-Pepsi® or Vodka-Starbucks™, but the world still needs their grain, fertilizer, oil, and natural gas.

Biden has done the near impossible in a little over two years as Resident of the White House.

He’s pushed China closer to Russia.
He’s pushed Saudi Arabia closer to Iran.
He’s created a situation where large-scale trades are going to be conducted in currency other than the dollar on a regular basis.
He’s drawn the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down levels not seen since 1984.
He’s working on maximizing inflation while spending everything possible.

In Saudi Arabia, all the bike thieves say, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

But Joe has shown that a previous statement by Barack Obama to be correct:

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

And he’s got 581 more days to the election. And we’ve got 656 days until the next inauguration.

A.I., Coming To A Workplace Near You. Sooner Than You Think.

“It seems that you’ve been living two lives. One life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Neo.” – The Matrix

Little known fact: Columbus, Ohio doesn’t have a professional football team because then Cleveland and Cincinnati would want pro teams, too. All memes this post “as found”.

I’ve had several A.I. posts recently, far more than usual. I’ll probably stop for a while, until some new advance strikes my fancy. The main reason that the posting frequency has increased is because A.I. is on that exponential curve. The first computers used ran on a dot matrix printer for a display. Yup. Every screenshot was a printing event. We got to use it in the math office (they let the nerds play there, but since I was a nerd and a jock, they let me in as long as I promised to pretend I needed glasses). It was a single computer that we used a phone line and a (300 baud?) modem to connect. The printer paper was the screen – it printed a screenshot every time you did an input.

You can play the game we played . . . here (LINK)

Fast forward to graduate school, and I was writing programs to do matrix manipulations that were required for numerical simulations for finite element analysis – don’t worry about what that is, it’s like being a weatherman, but if a weatherman is only right 90% of the time, he still gets to keep his job. I was writing software that could do what it would take a human being months to do with a paper, pencil, and a calculator, but produce those answers in an hour or so.

One thing I learned in grad school – ravioli shame.

During my lifetime, computers have gone from a curiosity to a stunning commonness. Within 20 feet of me, I probably have more computing power than was available in the entire United States up until the 1970s. My laptop has two terabytes worth of storage. Under the roof there at Stately Wilder Manor, we probably have 30 terabytes in nooks, crannies, and hidden beneath couch cushions, and only 28 terabytes are devoted to pictures of PEZ®.

On top of that, programming is a unique skill set. I remember reading that the top programmers were ten times more productive than the worst ones, and three times more productive than the average programmer. Checking on this, the data apparently goes back to a study in the 1960s, so I’m not sure what the numbers are today since many of those programmers are dead and are probably only twice as productive as a typical Google® employee.

In a world of Treespirits, be a Chad.

Today I used the Microsoft® Bing™ version of ChatGPT© for the first time at work. I had an agenda to write. It was a simple agenda, one that I’d done hundreds of times at previous jobs, but it had been more than half a decade since I’d written one. I asked the Bing A.I. to write up the outline for an agenda for this very specific type of meeting.

Bing© did a fair job at a first pass – actually far better than a recent graduate from college would have done, except when it suggested replacing human faces with emojis for clearer communication and added the item under the section on roadblocks: “resistance is futile, you will all be assimilated.” Since I already had the structure, and didn’t have to spend time remembering and re-creating the basic elements. Because of that, it was trivial to add the missing bits and delete the bits that didn’t fit. Within about 20 minutes I had a workable agenda that was tailored to what I was planning on doing.

Computers are also uncanny at detecting biological sex.

If I had to go back and recreate that agenda from scratch, it probably would have taken me another 20 to 40 minutes to get the work done – not because the work was hard, but because creation (for me) involves changing mental gears, and that change in focus doesn’t lead to the work flowing.

My first time using actual A.I. at work resulted in a 2/3^rd’s reduction in my work time with no reduction in quality. What it did was allow me to skip one mode of thought – the brainstorm, and move straight to production, correction, and editing. Those are the places where the work flows. Brainstorming (“uhhhh, what else, I know I’m missing something”) and creating that structure takes time.

In this case? I had 80% of the structure in about 20 seconds. The missing parts and the parts in the wrong order sorted themselves out as I did the edit.

Thankfully, I didn’t need it to draw fingers. Or anything more human than a fleshy-blob-thing.

A friend of mine who does networking described his use of ChatGPT® for a networking configuration plan. He had it create a basic network, and, like me, his level of expertise allowed him to quickly figure out the bits that were wrong and correct them. I mean, he tried to correct them, but every time he tried to fix them, the A.I. said, “I’m sorry Dave, I cannot let you do that.”

Now, imagine a programmer using ChatGPT™ to program – that programmer won’t be 3x as productive as the average, that programmer will probably be at least 9x as productive as the average, but my bet is that it will allow that programmer to be 20x as productive, if not more. Does that make the code pimps?

If ChatGPT© were frozen in the current state, it is already a tool that has the ability (in its current “free to use” state) to increase productivity of humans. Hence? We’ll need fewer programmers.

Remember when all those journalists told the coal miners kicked out of jobs because of Obama’s energy policy to “learn to code”? Remember when all those journalists kicked out of jobs because of the Internet were told “learn to code” on Twitter™, so Twitter® made telling them to “learn to code” a hatespeech?

Yeah, Pepperidge Farm™ remembers.

If you don’t know Warhammer, think a science fiction future involving interdimensional demons, but it’s okay because Trump is president.

Goldman-Sachs™ just released a report that indicates that, over the next 10 years, they expect that A.I. will add a stunning 7% in GDP to the world, or $7 trillion, and even Elon Musk doesn’t spend much more than $7 trillion a year on making islands in the Pacific Ocean in the shape of his face. How?

Goldman® also thinks that 7% of workers in developed economies are in jobs where half their tasks could be done by A.I. That’s 300 million workers. In the United States, 63% of the workforce could see less than half their workload done by A.I. in the next decade. I’m sure that companies will let those people just relax and play ping pong with all the time they’ve saved by using A.I.

Ha!

No. The bottom half of them will be fired, and the resulting labor pool will drive the wages down for those who remain. Check out Marshall Brain’s post from 2003ish: Robotic Nation | MarshallBrain.com.

Me, when I think about the coming jobpocalyse.

Marshall got it wrong. It’s not pouring concrete and replacing a dude making $25 an hour where the money is. Hell, that’s more complicated than most people think, and requires a lot of things a robot can’t do yet because they have to interact with an unbounded physical world. But replacing a programmer making $450,000 a year that interacts only with ideas, abstractions and fictional anime girls? Do a few dozen of those, and now you’re talking bank. And, it turns out it’s easier.

I’m thinking the “learn to code” advice wasn’t the best. Turns out that running a backhoe or being a plumber, or owning a small HVAC business might be a bit harder to automate than, say, being a FaceBorg™ programmer.

When The Boy went off to college, I told him to concentrate his career choice around a set of parameters that has proven (so far!) to be a pretty good set:

Have a job that cannot be done over the Internet.
Have a job that is based in merit and productivity.
Have a job at a company that has to exist – it meets a basic human or societal need, like food, or beer, or cars, or toilet paper.
Have a job at a company that has a huge revenue per employee, and preferably is Kardashian-free.
Have a job that requires certifications that are very difficult for foreigners to get.
Have a job that is required for the company to function.
Have a job that can be converted to an independent business so maybe someday you don’t need a job if you don’t want one.

What’s the downside to A.I. that can properly draw fingers.

He followed the Wilder Success Path® to a tee, and now has a pretty good gig that meets all of the above. I gave this advice years ago on these pages. It fits, even in the world of A.I.

In the Industrial Revolution, Ned Ludd was a weaver who broke some mechanical looms because he was irritated they were doing the work he used to do as a craft on an industrial scale. Those folks were skeptical of technology, and became known (in 1812) as Luddites – the anti-technology folks of their time.

Ned lost. The race for A.I. supremacy is in full swing because the stakes are so high. The Chinese are working at it, full speed, and probably have access to much of the Google® code and Microsoft® code and OpenAI® code. I’m pretty sure no one wants Facebook™ code, because that’s so 2018.

Regardless, the investment, A.I. is going at full speed, and won’t be stopped anytime soon. Thankfully, there’s no downside. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

“Why don’t we pretend he didn’t die? Just for a bit . . .” – Weekend at Bernie’s

Why can’t Ray Charles drive? He’s dead. (Outside of this one, memes are “as found”)

On March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was walking to work, since Rome was declared by Gretanius Thunbergium to be a “walkable city” because she was concerned about the sweat of galley slaves and horses making the oceans too salty, thus enraging Neptune, the god of the sea.

This particular day was a good one in Rome, and the bright warm Sun shone down on Caesar as he made it to the Senate. Caesar loved the Senate, since all of the Senators were really cool and he loved hanging out with them to watch the gladiator games every Sunday.

Then, on arriving at the Senate? Caesar was stabbed in the back by raising interest rates, and, with his last, dying words, he said, “Please, take this salad dressing, and remember me by it. Oh, and name a way that babies are born after me. And Kaiser and Czar might be cool titles for kings in the future.”

Okay, that might not be exactly what happened. But you can’t prove it wasn’t, because it’s not on YouTube®.

But interest rates have been a thing since long before even Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, took the throne, and then became a human pincushion. And they’ve been gumming up society both before then, and also since then.

Last Friday, on March 10, a curious thing happened – the 19^th largest bank, Silicon Valley Bank, went tango uniform. To paraphrase Python, Monty:

“It’s a stiff. Bereft of life. It rests in peace. If you hadn’t backfilled the coffers with Federal Reserve® notes, it would be pushing up daisies. Its metabolic processes are now history. It’s off the twig. It’s kicked the bucket. It’s shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible. THIS IS AN EX-BANK.”

How, exactly, does a Norwegian blue parrot bank die so quickly?

The truth is, it has been dead for a bit. I’ll explain. You can get explanations of this elsewhere, but none of them will be as funny, since that’s what my job is.

When banks take in money, they have several options of what they can do with it. They can bury it in Mason® jars in the back 40, they can loan it to other people, or they can park it in an investment. Back in 2008, the big financial crisis was that the loans were to people that could never have paid the money back. I was offered a guaranteed approval home loan on a house (with zero down!) that was ten times my income.

“Why would you offer me that? I could never pay that back?” was my response.

The loan lady sighed audibly over the phone. “I know, but I’m required to tell you that.”

It’s like they never learned anything.

So, part of the problem in 2008 was that the loans were junk because some folks said, “I could use a pool surrounded by marble columns with a champagne fountain built out of PEZ™. I’m in!” even though they only made $32 dollars a month. They even had a name for these loans – NINJA – “No Income, No Job”.

These banks also gambled with the cash of the average depositor, investing in champagne PEZ© fountain manufacturers. Hey, how could they lose?

Oh, yeah. Things don’t go up forever. So when they end? It gets ugly.

The response to that by the Fed® was to use a cash cannon and barrage the banks. The idea was this, the banks would soak up the cash to paper over the bad debts, and if they had extra cash, they’d park it at the Fed™. Essentially, the Fed™, working with the banks, made sure that the bankers could keep getting big bonuses, not face criminal charges like the average small-town banker might if he stole the cash from the deposits to pay for his 4.5 out of 10 mistress and trips to Vegas.

It’s like there are different rules for you and I.

Nope. They got to keep their penthouses, private jets, and bimbos. In order to keep this nonsense so it wouldn’t implode, the one thing the Fed™ had to do was keep interest rates low. If the Fed© had tried this in 1975, or 1985, or 1995, the world would have punished it by driving the value of the dollar down (faster), cratering purchasing power and the economy.

But after 2008, there was no other big power. Japan was a basketcase, Europe was still the Jekyll an Hyde level continent, with Western Europe mainly concerned about how many “Syrians” they could import, and Eastern Europe mainly working out how to make more potatoes so they could make more vodka. Roads? Why?

That left the United States as, amazingly, still the only kid with a currency anyone trusted, even though we were spending like a sixteen-year-old with dad’s credit card.

Huh, wonder when YouTube® will ban people for this?

Oh, the Left is already trying to censor people. Nevermind.

I like the cut of his jib.

Not now. The COVID world created the Trump/Biden policy of “How can we spend more money today?” Contrast that with China’s “No body count is too high” policy, and, oddly, the world began to trust the United States less. Add in Biden’s incoherent policy of a.) letting wars start and b.) pushing away allies like the Saudis, and now we live in a world driven by chaos.

And we’ve lost the trust of the world.

So, the banks still do the same three things with the cash deposited in their banks: Mason™ jars in the backyard, loan it, or invest it. Last time, the banks invested in whatever crap floated in the window. That was silly.

The banks thought they had cracked the code: this time, they invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds.

Yay! That’s what a sober person would do, right?

Well, maybe. But when a bank buys a 10-year bond that has an attached interest rate of 0.08%, and the stated inflation rate is 6%, the value of that 10-year bond craters. Interest rates go up? Bond values go down. It turns out Silicon Valley Bank™ had some of these bonds. How many? Enough to wipe out all of the shareholder and bondholder (yeah, they bought and sold bonds) value. And it’s not limited to them. Here’s the take on the unrealized losses of the biggest banks in America:

Losers in 1901, Losers in 1921, Losers in 1929, Losers in 1937, Losers in 1945, Losers in 1948, Losers in 1953, Losers in 1957, Losers in 1950, Losers in 1960, Losers in 1969, Losers in 1973, Losers in 1980, Losers in 1981, Losers in 1990, Losers in 2001, Losers in 2007 . . . Oh, wait, the banks didn’t lose anything, it was just regular people.

The FDIC insures deposits to $250,000. Except when (reportedly) Oprah had half a billion in that particular bank. Turns out that the United States blinked: “You get all your money, and you get all your money, and you get all your money,” because Oprah is more important than you and I.

Two other banks have failed already. You can see that some of their CEOs were serious people only worried about the welfare of their depositors.

Yup, the “adults” are in charge.

This will not result in an immediate run. The Fed® and the Treasury will continue to backstop the banks because to do otherwise would collapse the system. They even say so. Valuing assets “at par” means at what the banks paid for them. I own a car from 2003. In Fedspeak® that asset would be valued at the initial purchase price, despite the fact that it has one light-second worth of miles (kilopascals) on it. Here’s proof:

See? I’m a respected journalist. Besides, I believe I am the VERY FIRST person to note that the reserve ratio had gone to zero. You can check it out. This will help my lawyer if I’m ever sued. (Serious about the very first part.)

The Fed™ is screwed. They want to keep Biden in office, which requires low interest rates and a booming economy and no inflation. But to lower inflation, they have to jack up the interest rates far above the rate of inflation. Biden cannot be re-elected. Period, unless there’s a global war.

Nah, people would never buy a war started due to economic issues.

Ooops. I’d say sorry, but this is already in the playbook.

Me? My bet is this can keeps rattling around causing damage for several months. Six or seven? Maybe. Eventually, the Fed® is going to figure out that they can’t paper over this mess.

In the meantime, the cash for businesses will dry up, and the only people that can borrow money will be those that don’t need it. New projects? They’ll be cancelled unless the company has the cash or it will ruin them if they don’t stop. New housing? Forget it. The housing market will collapse, (it already is) and the costs of new stuff to make new are so high that no one can afford it, forget the interest rate.

People will stop eating dinner in a restaurant. We already have.

No, the Ides of March won’t be the end. But you can see it from here. While you can, enjoy the nice walk on a sunny day.

And Neptune? He’s always been a whiney bitch. Ignore Neptune.