Screwball

94 years young. Munger was 99 when he went a while back. 

Another calendar thing that used to drive me nuts was the high school graduation stuff. Sunday, of Memorial Day weekend. The ceremony at noon. I get it, you have to have a commencement, but why then? Our little hick town school only graduated 40-50, but I guess that doesn't matter. I did it four times.

I escaped high school long before that and only went to ceremony because mom would have kicked the living crap out of me if I didn't. BFD. That's what your suppose to do. Life will be calling, this is fantasy. Giddy up.

It was also the same time as the Indy 500. Spit.

Weddings are nuts. I don't get it.

When my oldest got married the brides family were - let's say skeptical - about our family of crazy people. We liked to party and have a good time, but they were not into that stuff. The were as squeaky clean as could be. The reception got a little wild once their side found out they couldn't handle the booze, dancing, and kick ass music.

When we left, the maid of honor was sitting on the ground against a post right outside the front door where everybody left, after pissing herself (puddle running down the asphalt) while she held a beer asking someone to help her. I have fallen and I can't get up.

People are so funny.

4 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

Part of our decision (or my wife's) was that her parents wedding anniversary was 12/31. (Ours was 12/30). I'm sure her played a major role in that as well.

We did do it on a tight budget though. Her mother was a caterer, my dad while basically a lawn care guy before it became semi fashionable also had equity in a floral shop so he supplied the flowers. A simple reception in the church's fellowship hall. 

Our hotel room for the first night was the "bridal suite' at the Holiday Inn on the Virginia Beach ocean front (a whopping $25 a night)....

Some great memories though. Including my Pittsburgh relatives just beating my wife down the aisle. We had the audacity of having a wedding at the  same time as a Steeler playoff game. 

I'm only half joking, but doesn't anyone EVER look at a calendar when they plan that stuff? 🙂 I know, I know...

I think it was 2012. The Tigers were in the playoffs and I had to go to a wedding. Girlfriends daughter was the MOO. She told me about it, and the first thing I checked was the game times. Sure enough, wedding was OK, but the reception was during the game. I couldn't get out of it.

I warned her right up front - I WILL find a way to watch this game - just so you know. She was a Tiger fanatic so she was good with it. We get to the reception hall. Rectangle room with a partition toward one end. I went snooping behind the curtain and sure enough there was a bar and some tables back there. At the end of the bar was a TV. Oh, goody! 

So I wander in there expecting to get kicked out because the only people in there were the workers taking care of the food and drink for the wedding in the other room. Hi! I want to make you a deal. I really really need to watch the baseball game tonight, and if you can get that on for me you all will have a very nice night, if you know what I mean, as a threw a $20 bill on the bar.

They were all for that, so I sit down at the end of the bar, they turned on the TV, and we were good. I kept tipping them all night as they brought me beers. Everything was cool, and we were having a ball. Until... IIRR, close game, maybe 8th inning some jerk and his wife comes wandering back there. Guy says to one of the workers "hey, there is a football game on." I says, no there isn't. Yes there is. Nope. Yea, channel X. Nope not happening. I was getting worried. This guy was getting pissed. One of the workers comes over and tells this guy "we are not allowed to change the TV on orders by the boss so it stays on the baseball game."

Ha! Thank you very much as the guy left and I tossed another $10 bucks on the bar. Probably cost me 50 bucks to watch the game but I watched it. They lost...

And the rest of the story. Everything got over and I was, lets say, a little tipsy. I then find out, of no surprise to me, the car we rode to the reception no longer had a driver (these were highly educated people - go figger). Shouldn't be a problem until they figured out it was a stick and nobody could drive it. Can you drive a stick? Why yes, yes I can, but I am also 3 sheets into the wind. Well you are the only one who can drive a stick and these 4 people need to be taken home - all over Columbus, Ohio - no less. Thanks assholes...

I somehow made it. Don't ever ask me to a wedding again.

I was playing with my AI Aussie buddy tonight. I never expected this one;

You can't do that. I got out and got back in and it was fine. Short break I guess. Too funny.

Holy hockey stick Batman! 6 month chart porn by day. Up over 11% today, .025 from the high at close.

A little chart porn, courtesy of the Fed.

How ya like that hockey fans?

6 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

unfortunately, consumers don't have the option of spinning off their loses and leaving someone else holding the bag the way US corps do. They end up having to pay their bills sooner or later.

Debt, public or private, when interest is involved, turns into simple math. Exponents are a bitch.

8 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

My parents were members of a Moose lodge in their later years. They got into ballroom dancing and joined to go to dances. I also have a friend who works at Mooseheart, the residential school for children of Members of the Moose who's family is unable to care for them 

Mooseheat - that's a name from the past.  Years ago (many) a buddy of mine and his wife went to Mooseheart to visit someone or somebody, don't remember. It was there they ran into Art Carney of Honeymooners fame. He ended up at the same hotel and they sat in the room and drank and ate until 2 am. They said Carney was a hoot and a great guy. That had to be a ball.

This past summer a buddy of mine, to help conclude his bucket list, jumped out of an airplane. Small craft. He was attached to another guy who had the parachute and another guy who filmed it. Cost him $500 bucks.

5 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

Interestingly enough the height aspect never really bothered me even though I'm nervous on ladders. I was a traffic reporter. The chopper pilots were veterans, the airplane guys were basically kids working to collect enough hours to get a better aviation job. 

We had a couple of :"incidents" that in hindsight give me pause (declaring an emergency into the old Navy Airfield north of Chicago to avoid a thunderstorm). A about a year or so ago wife and I took a trip to Las Vegas. The trip included a helicopter trip to the north side of the Grand Canyon, basically tribal territory. I enjoyed it tremendously. We landed in an area near the Canyon, and had a chance to go walk on the Glass Bridge over the Canyon. That was a bit nervy at first, looking at that big drop below (We were safe, but the illusion was interesting.

Back to the flying experience. Chicago does an Air Show every Summer on the Lakefront. One year some promotion person had the bright idea to have the "Air 78 Squadron" do a flyby down the lakefront. I'm not sure how they managed to actually get that passed the FAA. They did make us fly single file only along the route (3 Cessnas and a twin engine plane from the flight crew). During this I was supposed to "chat" with the radio station anchors doing the radio "play by play"

Anyway we're heading down over Lake Michigan at about 500 feet and I'm describing whai I'm seeing. One of the producers tells my wife who was managing the broadcast "he sounds good" Her reply, "he's ****less" 

I have seen pictures of that Grand Canyon glass bridge. I can't imagine!!! I think it would be a ball, but I just can't...

Funny, the first time I flew was about a week after the 1982 crash in DC when the plane went in the river. Had to fly into the same airport. Oh goody!

We know they are going to come down, that's a given. We don't always know how. And over the years my flying experiences have not been very good anyway.

Then, you have people that jump out of them. Are you nuts?

16 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

I spent about 6 of our 10 years in Chicago in the back seat of a Cessna 172, 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. Filled in occasionally for the guy who was the "passenger" in the Jet Ranger. Not sure which was worse, cold weather or wind gusts over Lake Shore Drive. What really scared me was flying directly thru O'Hare airspace (over the tower) when I had chopper duty.

Easy work, but in hindsight 25 years later not one of my favorite experiences, 

I cannot imagine. I think it is all about how you deal with heights. Some people can, some can't. I'm a can't. I went to the top floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago, but was petrified. I guess now they have a transparent floor you can walk out on. The key word there would be 'you.' 🙂

I have a buddy who did a chopper ride over Hawaiian volcanoes , which I'm sure was spectacular, and memories of a lifetime. No way I could do that. I did have to fly for work, but I hated it. Always bought aisle seats.

I had seats at a Tiger game one time in row 2 of the second deck right behind home plate and almost had crawl down the aisle. 

2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

I remember flying to Cleveland a few times (don't ask why the company flew us from Det to Clev....) in these little twin engine turbo prop Convairs that seated about 15 - door to the cockpit open (not sure they even had a cockpit door actually), flying low and bouncing all the way there. Way more flying 'experience' than I ever needed.

I used to get some of those twin prop amusement park rides from Detroit to Toledo. Wasn't my money, so I booked it that way. They were wild. I was scared ****less, but I didn't like planes anyway. I figured it was worth it. I could be sitting at a bar three blocks from home after spending a week at an ass kissing extravaganza. 3 hours if I had to drive, not counting getting out of DET. Half hour joy ride saved me two hours.

I would no way, no how, get in an airplane today, maybe not even drive under one if I can help it. 🙂

6 hours ago, GalagaGuy said:

Greg Biffle's jet crashed and 6 people are confirmed deceased.  Seems to be Biffle, his wife and their two kids.  I assume the other two are the pilots.  

I don't know the details of this yet, but he was a pilot. I don't remember when it was but when NC got flooded he took his own helicopter to help people who were stranded. Sad story, seemed like a great guy.

How former NASCAR driver Greg Biffle helped Hurricane Helene victims

That has been going on for quite some time. I can only imagine how far it has come today (I've been retired for over 6 years). If you can automate a process and eliminate people, they will. I'll give you a couple of examples.

1) I worked for a tire company. I was in the mold division. We made the tire molds that made the tires. They were made out of aluminum (sometimes steel but those were different animals). Our raw material was a big round piece of aluminum. It was a large ring. It would come in on a truck and the shop guys would mount it on a large plate. From there it was turned, shaped, and machined with boring machines and 5 axis CNC machines. Once mounted to the plate it was never touched again by human hands until the final assembly and  placed in a shipping box. This was going on in the early 2000s.

2) Assembly plant. This one happened to be washing machines. This is where the automation really pays off. Any repetitive task is target for automation, robots, whatever. They have X amount of assembly lines with workers adding parts at various stations along the line that might be a quarter of a mile long (or longer). The parts come from a warehouse on little trains pulled by a little truck like vehicle. The truck would pull 4 or 5 wagons behind it full of parts. They would go from the warehouse to the proper line, and proper line station, get emptied by a person, then return for more parts at the warehouse. This went on all day every day. There were dozens of these things all over the plant. They were driven by a person.

Not anymore. They put something in the floor so the train could follow because they put sensors under the train. The sensors followed the path in the floor. The slowed them way down for safety. You could walk faster than the train but they never stopped except when unloaded and loaded. This eliminated every train driver for each train for each shift (3 a day 7 days a week). This was over 10 years ago. That was by far not the only push for automation. Anything and everything that could be automated will be automated, period.

The rest of the story, and kind of funny. The workers could see the future and what this automation/robotic push was going to do. So the natural thing for them, and maybe the only way to fight back, was to sabotage the automation. By accident, they found out a simple bag of potato chips could stop a train. Turns out, a bag of chips bought out of the vending machine had a reflective (silver looking) inside. Guessing it was to help keep light out of the bag. An empty bag of chips with the bag fully open sitting in the aisle where the train ran would make it stop. The reflecting bag messed up the optics of the robot sensor and it would stop dead in the aisle. They would have to call maintenance or someone to come fix it and send the little guy on it's way again. In that world the LAST thing you want to do it stop the line.

One day I was there and the process guy told me they had to tell the vending machine people to remove all the potato chips from the vending machines because it was causing too many line shutdowns. Too funny - take that automation.

Maybe they should learn to count. 🙂

Yea, let's take a peek a some of them. First ORCL

How about NVDA

The MAGS ETF is holding up, but a big red candle today;

They are suppose to go from the bottom left to the top right...

3 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

every dollar the Federal government spends on healthcare for ordinary people is another increment in the political necessity to start seriously controlling health care costs in the US. That's a big gravy train you are threatening with billions of dollars of campaign contributions connected to it. Now I'll grant you that is not an argument about the public's interest at all, but since when did that matter in  modern US politics?

Today it is everywhere and always about the campaign money. 

They piss away enough money each and every year - and have done so my entire lifetime - to give we the people the same health"care" as these worthless pukes who inhabit DC are fortunate to have. The money we pay on the interest on our debt alone would do wonders... Money is fungible, so just an example.

Anyone who thinks these worthless ****s are going to fix this cluster **** (of their own making) has their head firmly stuffed up their ass.

How about some chart porn. First the S&P. Since the recent highs from interest rate euphoria the S&P is now back inside that long candle from back on October 10. Yellow arrow are the rate cuts.

And then there is this one - Silver.

The June 24th bubble at $35.195 to today at $67.18. What a ride! That's almost a double in 7 months. 

4 hours ago, Deleterious said:

When billionaires day drink.

 

A fine line between a genius and an idiot... If Space X IPO's at some point, he might be our first trillionaire.

3 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

 

I plugged the exact same string into Google's Gemini and got this:

Just for fun, I did it again;

Not good.

Venezuela is all about oil. Simple as that. That's been the plan since we needed oil. Also why the POS Marco Rubio was confirmed 99-0 as the person to make that happen.

For every unit of growth, it takes a unit of energy. And now we have all these data centers!!! Git-r-done!

No energy, no growth. Physics can be a bitch.

Funny, from that EIA report:

Quote

Electricity demand associated with U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations in the United States has grown very rapidly over the last several years. Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.

I had a little AI conversation with my Aussie buddy. What kind of numbers are we talking about. Somewhere between .6 to 2.3 percent of US annual usage according to that EIA report. How much is that and what does it to?

That sounds nuts, but that's what it says.

EV investments. Needs infrastructure to scale. Don't forget the crypto mining uses uses lots one may never consider. Add the data centers and the demand that comes along with them. Remember the "going green" push to use renewables and new tech for power? How long will it take to scale, if it can?

Tracking electricity consumption from U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations - from the eia.gov

How Much Additional Power Will Data Centers Need by 2035?

Crypto is a small percentage but I would guess location may matter for a grid.

The company mentioned in the article above is CoreWeave who IPOed in March. Ticker Symbol CRWV if you want to have some fun. It has, as the article stated, almost doubled this year, but it did take a 10% hit on Friday. Somebody with brass balls can trade that prick, I want nothing to do with it.