Silicon Valley Redneck

Prediction (or, no matter who you vote for, the Government gets elected)

The Donald's first official act as President - he'll have the papers to hand at his inauguration, all ready to sign - will be to pardon Hillary.

For all you who fondly believe that Donald will clear the gouk's nest cleverly, forget it.  He's the Clinton family's backup plan.  (Johnson is their backup, backup plan.)  His set of government-connected cronies will prove to be the same as theirs, and if he actually tries to make any significant changes, the Deep State will interpret him as damage and route around him.

Bender's second-favorite catch phrase applies here.

Now, let me get this straight...

Financial markets were high ahead of the Brexit vote, as polls showed a certainty of Remain.  OK.

After the Leave result, markets took a dive, what with the unexpected outcome and proclamations of impending doom.  With ya so far.

But, the world having entirely failed to come to an end, markets have more than made up their losses in the last few days.  Aaaaand?

The central bankers are now talking about even more stimulus and lower interest rates in order to bolster market confidence in the post-Brexit era.  Wait, what?

When all you have is monetary policy....

Oh, well.  This crazy inflation of asset prices benefits me, as long as I get out before the music stops.

0225. Mnfxt.

Sometime around 0130, Huckleberry declared Playtime.

He was very persistent about it.

After half an hour of that, I decided I might as well crawl out of bed for a while.  Not sure that was a good idea, really.

Oh, well.  Looks like global financial markets are perking back up a bit.  Speaking of which:

I noticed a headline yesterday to the effect that Soros hadn't shorted the Pound this time.  Really?  So he was so wrapped up in the globalist ruling-class bubble that he truly believed that Brexit was inconceivable?

Funny how the overlords in their shiny palaces never quite get the message that the undifferentiated plebs resent having their lives micromanaged from afar by people they don't know and didn't vote for.

And, closer to home, that (and of course Identity Politics) is how you get things like the Traditionalist Worker Party.  Look at the front page of their web site, and their platform seems almost reasonable in the current political context.  (Mostly wrong, but reasonable.)  Dig a little deeper, and you get to the part where America is for White People, and I'm not White, and they want me to wear these parentheses, just so they know who We are, mind; there's no mention of putting me on the train to Happy Fun Camp.  Yet.

Enough randomness.  Back to sleep.  Maybe.  (Playful fuzzballs aside, I think my metabolism has shifted recently, and maybe I'm burning some fat and liberating stored caffeine.  Yes, I know caffeine isn't traditionally considered fat-soluble, so it's probably something else.  It's 0248, you expect me to make sense?)

Foggy financials

Here it is, nearly an hour after closing, and Google Finance and Yahoo Finance don't agree on the closing numbers.

It's not just the share price for Amalgamated Fuzz.  They don't even agree on the closing numbers for the headline financial indices, like the Dow.

The man with one newspaper knows what the Dow is.  The man with two newspapers is never sure.

Oy.

Eurasian financial markets way down this morning.  No bounce yet.

My assumption has been that the Secret Masters would try like tanj to keep the headline numbers propped up until the 2016 election, and that they'd have a fair amount of success.  But you can only haul back on the stick for so long before you run out of airspeed, and once that happens you begin rapidly losing altitude.

Old assumption: if the Democrats were halfway smart, they'd throw the election, and blame the post-election crash on the Republicans.

New assumption: the Democrats will be frantically blaming the Republicans for the pre-election crash, despite the Administration's habit of completely ignoring the R-controlled legislature.

And: the crash will (as always) be blamed on free markets and the distressing lack of government intervention and regulation.  Nothing short of full-on Fascism can protect us from trade cycles amplified by central-bank policy!

(Fun suggestion: if you want to stimulate the economy without amplifying market distortions, there's always the helicopter-drop approach.  Except that when Chimpy tried that one, it was foiled by debt; Joe Sixpack, instead of spending his $600 on a shiny new big-screen TV, sensibly and responsibly used it to pay down his credit-card balance.  The easy-debt regime creates problems on so many levels....)

Update: Mid-morning, there's a bit of a bounce, or at least the market indices are only down about 1%-ish at the moment.  Amalgamated Fuzz is actually up substantially, after starting way down... but it was down all last week, and is far below its early-spring peak.

Update 2: Half an hour past closing, Yahoo Finance and Google Finance can't agree on the closing price of Amalgamated Fuzz.  Yahoo shows $26.25 at closing, $26.54 after hours; Google shows $26.50 at closing.

Meanwhile, all the indices are down between 3% and 8.5%.  Is it time to start another war yet?

(I should really be getting some work done, but what with one thing and another I've been running on too much caffeine and not enough sleep, and my brain won't focus.  All I've managed to accomplish today is to establish that the half-ziggurat waveform my portable oscilloscope was showing me yesterday wasn't real (I moved the gadget under test to the lab and used the real scope, and it shows the expected square-wave burst), but now I can't remember why I was looking at that signal in the first place.)

Another reason it's worse than you think

Out walkies this morning, and pondering the eternal "but where does all that money go in a stock-market downturn?" question....

Well, it's an obvious question, innit?  You think of capital as moving around like water in the Glooper, right?  Maybe not perfectly incompressible, but there's a certain amount of it, and it doesn't just go poof and vanish?

Er.

This morning, I had a blindingly obvious revelation: the aggregate market value of all the securities that might be traded is currently (perhaps usually) much higher than the amount of cash that was put into purchasing them, and also far higher than the plausible cash value.

Disregarding for the moment such factors as finding a buyer who'll exchange cash for your shares and losses to capital-gains taxes, brokerage fees, and suchlike, ponder:

Consider the case of Amalgamated Fuzz, which closed at $26.56 today, with a market capitalization of $126.29 million, and 52,288 shares traded.

Dividing market cap by share price, we find that there ought to be 4.75 million shares, whereof 1.1% changed hands at something approximating today's price.  (And that number might need to be adjusted downward, if high-frequency traders are passing the same shares back and forth.)

Now, if something closer to 100% of shares were traded on a given day, or even in a given year, we might believe that the market cap actually reflected the amount of capital that had been put into those shares, and perhaps something approximating the cash value.

But... what if most of the trading volume, considered over a year, is some small fraction of the shares being passed around, while the majority are held by long-term investors, who just sit there collecting the nice dividends?

Like, suppose I'd bought Amalgamated Fuzz back in 1975, and my cost basis per share (after splits) ended up being $0.77?

Suppose further that I had a 30% stake in Amalgamated (1.425 million shares).  Apparent market value: almost $38 million.  Actual price paid: $1.1 million.  Nice capital appreciation there.  And I've been collecting the dividends all this time, but that's beside the point.

Thing is: the shares are trading in the $26 range because only 1% of them are being traded.  Try selling off any large chunks, and I won't get so much.  Try selling off my whole stake, and, while I'd certainly get enough to buy many cups of coffee, I wouldn't be buying that coffee plantation.

The key point for today: most of that money in the stock market doesn't exist, never did, and, in practice, never can.  It's the result of multiplying a low-volume price by a much larger volume.  (See also: Sears horsepower.)

And the illusion is enabled by the stodgy, old-fashioned, buy-and-hold investors: the kind we want to encourage, for a variety of good reasons.

Like so much else in the world, it's smoke and mirrors.  And a selloff, obviously, yields much less in cash than the apparent loss in market cap, because prices are falling during (and as both result and cause of) the selloff, and that affects the unsold shares as well as the sold ones.  So, indeed, a lot of that money does just vanish.  Poof!

Fuzzy-minded afterthoughts:

1. When you discover that your $1.2 million retirement account became a $265 thousand retirement account since last month's statement, it doesn't mean the banksters made off with your money (though no doubt they collected some nice performance bonuses on the upside).  It wasn't actual money to begin with, and, like fairy gold, it has now turned to dust.
2. The "market capitalization" for a company reflects neither the amount of money used to purchase its shares nor the amount of working capital available to the company.  It's a well-defined, easily-calculated number that doesn't mean much.  Sounds impressive, though.
3. Tulip bulbs, anyone?

Translation

Roger L. Simon points to claims that the English and Farsi texts of the new... agreement, or something?... with Iran don't match, in significant ways.

Having zero Farsi comprehension, I can't evaluate this, and I'm not about to pester any Persian friends for help this time of the morning.

But, I really must ask: does the State Department have any competent Farsi translators?

I'm reminded of the beginning of the current administration, and the infamous Overload Button.  It seems that, at Hillary's age and supposed high-level international experience, she not only didn't have any Russian-speaking friends but didn't have a clue what Cyrillic writing looks like... but did the State Department also lack translators?  After all, the SecState ought to have had official translation resources handy, and any lack in that department at that time would have been an institutional failing inherited from past administrations.  (And wasn't there something about Jimmy Carter and a Polish translator?)

Or... did Hillary's personal staff hand the button thing off to a random intern?  And were the details of the Iran thing handled by interns, because the professionals kept having Opinions about it?

Are our betters in Washington actually good at anything?  Would we be better off replacing the whole hive of scum and villainy with the first n names out of the flyover-country phone book?

In case there was any doubt

To any who were paying attention, it's been obvious since she was Mayor of SF back in the 80s that Dianne Feinstein is a Fascist.

And yet California elected her to the Senate, and, despite everything, she still keeps getting re-elected.

Well, now she's calling for censoring the Internet, to remove, among other things, all copies of The Anarchist Cookbook.

Double-take.

Yes, that Anarchist Cookbook.  The pile of crap so wildly inaccurate that it's commonly believed that the CIA had a hand in writing it, with the goal of encouraging anarchists to blow themselves up or poison themselves, or at least to waste their energies on super-weapons that just won't work.

Ayup.  Fascism and aggressively malignant ignorance go together.  Not only does she not realize that the book in question is less than useless to terrorists, but she completely fails to comprehend that the Internet is international, and large parts of it are completely outside U.S. jurisdiction.

Unless she's proposing to bomb servers where offending content is hosted... or create a Great Firewall of our own?

Always believe the accusations!

No matter how absurd....

Remember the (literal!) witch-hunts of a few decades back, with tales of satanic ritual abuse of children at day-care centers?  With all the secret goings-on in a room hidden from passersby on the sidewalk by giant glass windows?  And the networks of tunnels so secret that they were never found?

Well, one front of the current many-pronged assault on due process is in the area of sexual misconduct, with no evidence required and unwelcome glances being conflated with forcible rape (remember: if you make a distinction between those things, you're minimizing).

This is scary stuff, and I'm having a flashback to a puzzling incident some time ago.

It began on a Saturday (?) night at a small local sci-fi convention, when I was in my early 40s.  Making the rounds of the parties, I found myself increasingly in the company of a pleasant young woman, who was nice, and attractive, but (a) awfully young, and (b) rather drunk*, so I kept my hands off, and eventually we went our separate ways.

Next morning, she seemed to be Avoiding Me.  Hm?

Next time we crossed paths at a con, same thing**.  Was she mad because nothing happened that night, or had she gotten too drunk to remember that nothing had happened?  Or did she just Definitely Not Have a Thing For Older Men, except when she was drunk?

A year or so later, she turned up at another con with a boyfriend in tow... and he seemed to have a ready-made, powerful grudge against me.  WTF?  Is this a reaction to "I met that guy over there at a party once, and we had a nice time, but I was drunk and he kept his hands to himself"?  Or had she been telling him some other tales?

If that went any further, it never got back to me, but: suppose she'd taken her irritation with me (whatever the heck it was) to someone in a position of authority, in today's climate?  Given a chance to present my case, I could certainly have found witnesses as to what happened (or didn't) at the parties, but I would have had no evidence that she hadn't subsequently followed me home.  Against a whispering (or shouting) campaign, with a strong presumption of guilt?

Guys: if there's any way whatsoever for the Social Justice Warriors to have power over you, you must pretend ISIS has won.  Never associate with women other than close family members.  Don't allow women in your workplace.  Don't attend mixed parties.  Never smile at a woman on the street.  These things only attract trouble.

 

* The alert pick-up artist would realize that her ability to buy alcohol from the official bartender implied that she was technically legal, but I've never been very good at this stuff, and I still figure young + intoxicated = off limits.

** The avoiding bit, that is.  Not the making-the-rounds-of-the-parties thing.

Still more trouble ahead

Not so much for me, but for the younger generation.

See here: the employment scene is moving to short gigs, piecework, and the like, and away from nice predictable incomes from steady corporate jobs.

Add this to the concerns I mentioned here, and factor in the easy-debt economy that's grown up since the 1980s.  What do we have?

A generation or two conditioned to the Industrial Age steady-job paradigm, carrying a heavy debt load (college loans, credit cards, E-Z Credit on that new car), facing the old reality of irregular cash flow.

Kinda makes it hard to keep up the payments, huh?

I've basically been living in the gig economy since the 80s (when I started working for a small consulting company with irregular cash flow), except for summer 2000 through summer 2004 when I had that job in Corporateland, so I'm used to this sort of thing.

For those who adjusted their lifestyles to the good times, and have never lived in the unpredictable world of small business, it's a likely disaster.  And for those institutions that have been lending them all that money?

Aaah, don't worry about the institutions.  They'll get bailed out.  Again.  And bailouts are good for the economy, right?

Drone attack at White House! ZOMG panic!!!!

Seems some diabolical thingy landed on the White House lawn.

Possibly a drone.  Or a toy airplane.  Or a frisbee.  Or a model rocket carrying a frog in a silver suit.

The reaction, naturally, is total panic.  Because it could have been a hostile act!

Uh, right.

Yes, there are certain chemicals and pathogens which could be nasty when delivered by itty-bitty toy aircraft.  They're not that easy to come by, and effective delivery is another question entirely.

But the allergic reaction to this sort of thing - that is to say, an overreaction, by the immune system, which does far more damage than the outside threat ever could have - points up the ease of using the security state itself as a tool of disruptive terrorism.

I'm reminded of an incident in the Bay Area back in the 1990s, before the emergence of the Homeland Security monstrosity.  One of the bridges, if memory serves, was shut down for several hours after someone spotted an unidentified white powder on the bridge.  Turned out to be flour, but doctrine dictated a full-on HAZMAT response.

And if some group of uncouth smelly hippies decides to shut down capitalism with a coordinated flurry of "unidentified chemical dispersal" strikes in the world's financial districts?  Or "drone attacks" with COTS toy airplanes at high-profile events and sensitive facilities?

Yup.  Totally overload the emergency services, and get streets and airports shut down, at very little cost to the attackers.

Only they won't do that, of course.  Two reasons.  One, the smelly hippies are a lot less smart than they fancy themselves to be.  Two, their strings are pulled by the Establishment, to provide a channeled outlet for outrage and to make the Establishment look good by comparison.  So they won't do anything effectively disruptive, nor will they show up Homeland Security for a bunch of hysterical clowns.

Worldview-dependent interpretations

Staid establishment publication The Economist goes on at some length about the distressing emergence of a durable American aristocracy based on the heritability of braaaaaaains.  Because human evolution operates meaningfully over a span of a couple of generations, and is rapidly producing the New American Übermensch.

Uh, yeah.  The aristocrats are intelligent?  And well educated?*

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Meanwhile, it's left to the knuckle-draggers, e.g., here and especially here, to hint, in their subtle fashion, at the true heritable trait for success: insider social connections.

Yes, it's all very well that you can get an education at Harvard or Yale.  But!  You can also build up a social network while you're there.  And, given that a degree in a soft subject (no math required, please!) from one of those two institutions has become a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a presidential candidate?  That's the kind of social network that can make a big difference in your career, especially if you're basically a social animal and your parents taught you how to buy a suit**.

Then figure that if one or both of your parents attended a given university, you'll be given preference in admissions... especially if the ancestors have been making large donations to the alumni fund... and the opportunity to acquire the particular social connections needed to succeed in a crony-corporatist economy looks very heritable indeed.

The progeny of Davos are destined to rule the Universe not because they're particularly clever (they're not; any given one is easily outwitted) but because they form a closed group, don't regard anyone outside the group as being the same species as themselves, and give each other jobs in highly influential positions.

Throw in the ability to retire at 35 from the more lucrative positions (to go off and spend the rest of one's life doing something Socially Meaningful), and we end up with the New Silicon Valley decision-making class, which includes no one who was an actual adult during the Dot-Com Bubble 1.0.  Hence, no lessons learned, and we get the same investment and planning mistakes writ larger.

But they all have the social connections.  And that's what matters.  At least, to the important people***.

 

* And the "grown-up alternative" for President is "another Clinton or yet another Bush", forsooth!

** Go to one of the approved tailors, and throw money at him.

*** "Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor – at least no one worth speaking of."

'Tis a strange time, indeed.

This week, the Mathilda Monster has been extra hungry and demanding vehicular sacrifices.  Sometime around Tuesday, as I was heading out, I passed the aftermath of two, count 'em, two wrecks, on opposite sides of 237 and opposite sides of Mathilda.  And how anyone managed to be moving fast enough to do the sort of damage I saw, under the traffic conditions that time of the morning...?  Then, next day, I checked traffic as I was inbound from morning walkies, and there'd been another crash (which had been cleaned up by the time I actually got there).

This morning, for no adequately explored reason, traffic was light, the regulars on the trails mostly seemed to be on shifted schedules (either much earlier or much later than I usually see them), and the Dread Guardian of the Farm was behaving oddly.  And: the curbside parking around SVR HQ is almost empty today; usually, it's almost full.

Further, spam volume is way down today, suggesting that a lot of company computers are turned off... consistent with the light traffic.  Are people taking a long weekend for Change a Pet's Life Day*?  There's no Google Doodle for a holiday today.  It's not Chinese New Year yet, and it's nowhere near Zoroastrian New Year.

And: on Wednesday afternoon, there seemed to be an awful lot of people driving with their headlights on.  Did the Ear Leader call for people to drive with their headlights on for energy conservation or something?

On the way home from walkies this morning, I needed to swing by Trader Joe's, so I exited 85 onto El Camino, stopped at a red light at (consults map) The Americana, across from Shrill Petrol, noticed a gap in the line of cars across all the lanes to my left, and:

Gee, look!  We gots a new fountain!  I never saw that one before!

Oh, and that fancy pricey small-footprint debug cable that arrived Wednesday?  Seems to have undergone a sudden and unexpected total existence failure.  Or maybe it looked too much like a cat toy.  I expect to see the manufacturer next week; must have a word with him about that.

Should I just go back to bed now, and pull the covers over my head?

 

* That name has me thinking of My Pet Wookiee.

Social Justice Warrior claims to be mentally ill

So she can't be blamed for anything she's said or done, apparently.

Apparently she also "was" a racist.  Was.  Riiiight.

This is one for the DUH! files.

If you actually know anything about anything that the SJWs get bent out of shape about, look at the claims they make that fall within your area of expertise.  Do they have any connection to reality?  Are these the statements of a person who is not mentally ill?

Of course not.  And it's not just lefty SJWs, of course.  From frat-house gang rapes to satanic daycare centers to peasants being turned into newts, there's never been a shortage of madfolk to make outrageous claims.  The mad tales that serve the interests of the current rulers are taken seriously (at least for public consumption).

And so we hang the old woman who gave young Nellie the evil eye, and the Church inherits her cottage and lands.  And, in these more civilized days, tech companies buy indulgences for not having the approved ethnic and gender balance, and then treat themselves with a course of leeches.

Which is the War Party, again?

Today's headline:

Obama authorizes more sanctions against North Korea in Sony hack

This despite evidence that the Norks had nothing whatsoever to do with it, and that the perpetrators were disgruntled Sony (ex-)employees intent on financial gain.

Clearly, the soon-to-be Republican majority in both houses of Congress is to blame for this executive action.  The President's hands are tied!  Tied, I tell you!

Afterthoughts:

Apparently the Administration is using the same standard of proof it insists on for campus sexual assaults, i.e., Factual Innocence is No Excuse!

As for sanctions, well: When you starve with a tiger, the tiger starves last.  The already-starving peasants get the worst of it, and Big Bad Uncle Sam gets the blame.

I still like the idea of Blintzkrieg, i.e., carpet-bombing poor hostile countries with food.  Though blintzes, per se, might not be appropriate.

The Constitution requires equal protection of the law, but big enough campaign contributions can buy one some gloriously unequal protection.

Remember the Maine!

Turning and turning in the widening gyre...

... The idiocy swoops 'round again.

Remember the Snowden files?  Or was that all year-and-a-half-ago?

And the NSA was snooping on Angela Merkel?  And this was a great scandal?  (C'mon, spying on foreigners is what spy agencies are supposed to do.  Leaking information on which foreigners are being spied on is a bad move, though, especially when they're heads of allied governments.)

Anyway: seems the spying-on-Merkel thing may have been a fabrication.

?

And what did I say, way back in June of last year?

Now, let's consider the Snowden Files.  They're computer documents, released to the public by a person of dubious reputation.  They look official... but how many among us know what actual official NSA documents look like, and would comment on the matter in public?  And how many of those could verify the actual authenticity of the documents, or even the plausibility of the content, even in general terms?

Right.  Hardly anyone.

But!  We now have metadata.  Specifically: various government departments have been sending forth directives cautioning their employees not to look at the classified documents (or not to do so on government networks reserved for unclassified material).

And now the Germans are telling us that at least one of these totally authentic documents over which the government went into such a tizzy... was a forgery.

So, is the German prosecutor doing the cover-up that our own government forgot how to do?  Or is our government so incompetent that it can't even tell that a document dump is fake, and it took this long and a foreign official to figure it out?

Cluemeter reading: negative.

Hey, look!  You can shut down a major transportation hub just by choosing a silly name for your smartphone's WiFi hot spot!

And some of the comments on the story... oy.  These bozos should go work for the Boston PD, motto "Bombs are covered in blinky lights, therefore anything with blinky lights on it is a bomb."

And the Penguin's henchmen always wore thug uniforms that said "HENCHMAN" on them, so....

Afterthought: Maybe I should change the SSID on my phone's hotspot from "NSA HONEYPOT #360971" to "Ebola patient tracker CA6892" or something.

Insuperable barriers to commerce

Argh.

Comes time once again to renew my update subscription for a CAD package I use for work.  Actually, it lapsed over a month ago, but there's a discount on offer, ending today, so it seems like a good time.

The usual routine is: try charging it to my business credit card, have it declined, try again with one of the personal credit cards on another bank, have it go through, get a call a minute or two later from a human at the fraud-detection department asking whether it was legitimate.  Well, I'm trying to make a payment to a company in a Central European country via an international payment processor somewhere in Western Europe, so it does look rather suspicious, even if it is something I do almost every year about this time.

This year, though: first one declined, second one also declined, then I get the call, from a robot, I confirm that the charge was legitimate... and the robot tells me to wait 10 minutes before resuming use of my card, then hangs up.

Eep?

So, now that I confirmed that the charge was legitimate, will it now be retroactively authorized?  Does that result in money disappearing into the payment-processing system and the software not knowing how to route it to the actual vendor?  Or what?

Will international commerce become so safe you can't do it at all?

Update: Per vendor suggestion, I tried again but used InternetSecure instead of WorldPay.  Worked first time, with the business credit card (the one that usually doesn't work for such international transactions).  Guess the banks have some problem with WorldPay.

Paging René Magritte

From a tale of school-admin idiocy:

The school district says it has a very strict policy forbidding students from wearing any clothing that has a weapon on it….

Has a weapon on it?  We're not talking mini-revolver belt buckle, here.  The article of clothing in question was a T-shirt with a picture of a weapon on it.

If the school administrators can't tell the difference between a picture of a thing and the thing itself, maybe we should give them a picture of a school to administer and get some new administrators.

(Via Insty.)

Would you like to buy a clue?

Seems the National Forest Service intends to require permits for commercial photography in wilderness areas.  (Via Popehat on Twitter.)

Aside from all the snarky comments promptly directed at it, there's this:

By contrast, the Forest Service is giving its supervisors discretion to decide whether a news outlet's planned video or photo shoots would meet the Wilderness Act's goals.

"If you were engaged on reporting that was in support of wilderness characteristics, that would be permitted," Close said.

So... it's a discretionary permit, and may be issued or not based on viewpoint?

Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?  Anyone?  Any distinguished ConLaw scholars out there?