New GEMESYS Research Log - From February 2023 to Present (January 2025)

[ Jan. 16, 2025 ] - Molly Malone Working Alone
The UK is in crash-and-burn mode. Curious. They are more concerned with crushing truth and honesty with their stupid hate-speech laws, than they are about the Muslim Rape Gangs from Pakistan who have apparently systematically abused young English white girls. This is truly wrong. The rapists were handed light sentances and encouraged to continue, by the lame and strange UK authorities. Folks in Pakistan have said they would be happy to have these vermin deported back to their homeland, so they could face proper Islamic justic. No problem with that - except that clown Keir Starmer or Stammer or whatever the fuck stupid name he has, who is acting as UK Prime Minister, is missing in action. Very strange.

Censorship laws that ban "hate speech" are stupid and wrong. They are dangerous and abusive censorship action which does real damage to nations where they are enacted. Free speech is a critical right under democracy. If you say hateful things - the reponse of pointing this out, is simply enough. With the new "Woke DEI Mind-Virus Nonsense", every foolish group can act offended, and get honest debate simply shut down in public. This is deeply wrong.

And with corrupt and abusive government toads involved - it all goes very wrong, very quickly. You get the "no honest public talk" problem, and democracy becomes a bogus fraud - like the fake "European democracy" which is not any sort of democracy at all. (Witness the "do-over" election in Romania, and the attempts by France and Germany to **ban** their supposedly "right-wing" parties. It's just nonsense - and the "hate-speech" laws keep this snowballing lie-machine (the EU) up and running, when maybe it should be smashed to bits.

Strange how very strange things are becoming... Truth is being clubed like baby seals, by the Therry Bretton's of this world. Maybe time for some "Newton's Third Law" action, eh?

Funny times ahead, when even the middle-classes start feeling that revolution might be required...

[ Jan. 15, 2025 ] - May The Wind Take Your Bubbles Away!
I was streaming the Clarksville blues radio on my home-built internet stereo-tuner-box (an old Pentium III, running a solid version of Linux) and heard this great song by "Son Volt", from "Traces" album, which just blew me away - best "Alt-Country" thing I've heard in 20 years (I am always late to the party..). Youtube is unusable now, but on this thing called "Last.fm" I found a listenable copy of it. If I can find the CD somewhere (it's circa 1995, re-mastered in 2015, IIRC), and it's just plain good. Reminds me a tad of Blue Rodeo, back in the days when I could hike down to the Horseshoe, and see them live. Damn, those were different times. We just didn't know how good they really were - too busy trying to keep the payments up on the gosh-darn condo mortgage, and working every free hour for some skank-bank, telecom, or bigpower.gov clients. Madness.

But bubbles... Bubbles are on my mind. You don't know you are intra-bubble, until the big bugger bursts and leaves you wrecked on the side of the Big Highway of Fin-Life. Very early one I did trade that nuked half my net-worth, and then walked up Young Street, in full shell-shock mode. ("Why did I do that?", is the question that haunts oneself...) Years later, you realize it is dues that must be paid to the gods of finance and trading. And it keeps you from making the same error again. Maybe.

But it does not need to be that way. Mr. Buffet is over-burdened in cash (something like 380 billion USD, at last count. Pretty damned hilarious...).

Are we in a crazy Bubble? Are the LA winds shaping up to be the San Fran Earthquake of 1906? Maybe. And maybe not. It's never the same way twice. And you can only have one first-try.

I remain worried about the coming AI World. I am pretty sure it (advanced artificial intelligence), will be used primarily for weapons development. It's really goddamn funny how we are letting Ukraine fight the mother-rapers of Russia and North Korea, all alone. This is the truly stupidest and most cowardly and most tragic thing I've ever seen, since maybe the sad, genocidal destruction of Gaza. Humans are fine on their own, onesy twosy, but get these meat-puppets into race-based, religious and military-tribal groupings, and they have the power to become wildly, truly dishonest, cruel and blind-brainless stupid, to a really surprising degree. It's a fascinating characteristic of human psychology. Note that Charlie Munger described the forms of failure the psychology-of-humans can take, in his famous Harvard speech.

So, if it is bubbling sheep we are up against, what are the few who see this coming, supposed to do?

I lie awake at night pondering this question, until I wake up, have a drink, and put a bigger log on the fire, while the dogs stay asleep.

I figured "make conservative, old-man-style investments, with a focus on dividend-payment streams." Like Utilities and conservative financial entities. Telecoms and Banks, eh?

We probably could have done better going to Vegas and going crazy. I fear Canada is in deep trouble, as we have a tragic feature of electing the worst government clowns in the entire history of the electorial process. Ontario - under the Liberals - was run by a collective of gay nutjobs, who almost destroyed the place. The Premier was a brain-dead dyke, and the Finance Minister was a gay boy, who would talk about his bottom-boy boyfriend. It was honestly sickening, truth be told. We finally got the Tories elected, but it was close. But the Libtards of Ottawa are finishing the job of Canada's Economic Destruction at the Federal level, with the former Finance Minister getting the boot by crazy Justin Trudeau for suggesting we respond rationally to the new tariff threats that our major trading partner is engineering. Trudeau is planning "counter tariffs on US products" which is probably the stupidest thing that the Federal clowns could possibly do.

The Chinese and the Russians are openly laughing at us, I suspect. Until we get rid of the Libtards, we are at risk of sliding into some deep economic trouble, rather like our crap-stained Canadian dollar already is. We have tremendous potential here, but it is being squandered by fools and fraudsters, who engage in trough-diving and pocket filling and little else.

At every level, we have bad government, high-taxes, and an awful climate that is just too fucking cold. Hell, if "Global Warming" really was a thing (it most certainly is not - it is really just a massive tax-fraud on the public) we should really be building Carbon Dioxide Generating Stations, and output as much of the stuff as possible. Hilarious - but not likely to happen.

And meanwhile, the Big US Bubble keeps inflating, with US market valuations going into the stratosphere, and the US-dollar valuation marching upwards, along with the quite unsustainable US-debt levels.

We are maybe teeing up a true financial apocolypse that will hammer-whack the Western World. The crazy Russians and the angry Chinese could blow us all to hell, simply because it will be easy and possible for them to do so. We should be building missiles and tactical nuclear weapons with battlefield-launch capability, and instead, we are making our people pure-stupid, through brain-destroying "entertainment" technology.

Maybe the Big War will be fought by 20 or 30 people on each side, each small group directing their AI tech to neutralize the other - while the Chinese unleash their virus agents (via the new "vaccines"?), and the Russians rain nuclear-armed hypersonic projectiles down on our helpless cities. What can we do? Lodge a protest at the United Nations? If NYC is flat, black and slightly glowing-in-the-dark, that might not even be possible.

See, when these big financial bubbles burst, then big war usually follows. It seems to be a human psychological characteristic. Nation-states, and the big corporate and tribal groups will have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, once the economics goes pear-shaped.

Plan for this. Be ready when it happens.

[ Jan. 13, 2025 ] - The Incredible Shrinking Internet
I recall watching these great American Sci-Fi films from the 1950's and 1960's, clever black-and-white things from the golden-age of American nuclear-weapons testing. The Japanese came up with "Godzilla", while USA produced gems like "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and "The Fly" and such like, with the theme being the dangers of runaway, out-of-control technology.

But what we have now, is an "Incredible Shrinking World". We are seeing a curious contraction in many areas, such as general sanity, political common-sense, investment opportunities and the set-of-useful-and-truthful-information available on the internet. All seem to be shrinking, as if affected by radio-active wavefronts of unclear origin.

There is almost nothing of value anywhere in the digital world now. It is a very curious situation. And that which used to be valuable and actionable - is quietly withering away as we watch, being replaced by promo-ads, paywall-blocks, crafted fraud, parody and disinformation. Things like Youtube have become unusable and unwatchable, with insane, intrusive awful adverts salted directly in the active content, which makes using it a painful and ugly experience. Everything on Youtube is already essentially a commercial, so one is reduced to watching big commercials mixed with really obnoxious and awful little interuption-commercials. It's so bad, one switches off, after the teeth-gritting time needed to access the limited-value information one seeks.

It's as if most of the digital world - and the commercially valuable world - is just shrinking away.

Freedom, free-trade, and financial-value, are all just quietly leaving the building. The empty and hollow shells that remain also seem to be contracting, as the structures that have been built by Western Civilization are pulled dowm and disassembled by leftist fanatics and DEI scammers. "Your call is important to us" is the modern version of "the cheque's in the mail". The feeling is that one is dealing with a hollow, shrunken empty-suit at every turn - and so we sense a world where quality and honesty are simply shrinking away, draining like water in a sink.

And of course, AI looks like it will enhance and amplify this trend. Fake news and fake views becomes background noise, and robotic chat is seen to have little real value. Communication itself shrinks in importance if nothing useful can be transferred between communicating agents. Shannon wept? The feeling of restriction and contraction seems to be a theme being created by the active AI technology. The entire internet is quietly morphing into little more than a vehicle to support FISA-702 efforts at mass monitoring. Economic and social value seems to be shrinking away, and draining from the whole system.

Of course, this is not really the case - the value is not being drained - it is being filtered and extracted. All value is being directed to Big Tech entities, and the sense of "shrinking" comes from the extraction process itself. You are the product. You are the source-of-funds.

This will probably continue. Until, perhaps, an exogenous variable comes on the scene, which burns everything down.

That could maybe be a good and necessary thing. When the big crash comes, we will all then likely be going to war. This is how it typically plays, if one examines the historical record.

"Keep the home fires burning..."

[ Jan. 09, 2025 ] - The New Enron "Egg" - Portable Nuclear Reactor For Home Use
Ok, for gits and shiggles, any good nuclear-boy (like myself), has to check out the "NEW Enron" website. The "New Enron" is back in the Energy Business, and is promoting their new product, the "Enron Egg", which is a portable nuclear reactor + generator, which supposedly can power a typical family house for 10 years, before it needs refueling.

"Wow!", I thought - just what I need for my off-grid Northern Office!...

Now, just to be clear, here, this is a complete bullsh/t stunt-site. Some dudes bought the "Enron" name and logo-glyph for a few hundred bucks, and crafted this just bloody brilliant parody site - complete with all the typical modern promo-puffery that one can see at the CES, if one wants to fly to Vegas, or go virtual-reality immersion into the fake "world of the modern Internet of Shit"...

The whole parody is really just truly gosh-darn funny. It's really well done. And FFS, I wish it were true. One must realize, that I am a guy who actually built a working deuterium-fusion reactor in my basement, and yes, I really did. You can find videos of me running the thing, on Youtube, circa 2006.

I recently wired my garage at the "Lorcalon Ranch House and Centre for Biodiversity Engineering", and installed a 240-Volt, 50-amp forced-air electric heater, which here in the Free Republic of Ontario, is hard-wired to a large nuclear-reactor electric generating facility at Bruce Beach, on Lake Huron. A non trivial amount of uranium atoms are giving up their lives each day, to keep my garage and home warm, and my Starlink satellite dish linked to the big matrix.

Ok, so go check-out this lovely new "Enron" device. If this shit-fake parody becomes real, (sorta like maybe a "Fartcoin"? ...), then let me know how your "Egg" is working. I will need at least three, since I will have to have one also for house I want to build on the new piece of Martian real-estate I am bidding on. Have not got the geo-gravitic "space displacement" drive working yet, but once the bugs are ironed out, maybe we can get into space, along with Elon's Starship... This "Enron Egg" would be just the thing to power the air and water conversion systems, our Martian homestead will need...

Check it out!

https://enron.com/

Here is a shot of the lot on Mars we are trying to purchase... (page down a bit, past the training loss-functon graphs)...

[ Jan. 07, 2025 ] - The Barkers of the Big-Tech Grift
Have you ever had the feeling you are being scammed? Sorta like always now, in just about every commercial transaction? The clever folks on the internet will warn you about this, and point out that, when you are using any modern "Big Tech" "Service Offering", you are not actually getting a "service", you are actually becoming the product. "You are the Product", they will warn you.

And the "they" in this case, are correct.

The modern "Big Tech" offerings now often feel like scam-style frauds. You get no benefit really, from most of them. You make little or no money, you get essentially no real pay-back, yet you seek to participate, because almost every useful service or product, has been removed or "monetized" away from the public commerical space, so that it is impossible to do anything, without going to some tricky website, or using some piece-of-crap "app" that is designed to engage you in a "customer relationship management" process. Do you really wanted to be "managed"? Really? Probably not.

And so-called "Security" on the 'net is awful. The entire design approach is often just wrong.

I saw shit like this all the time when I provided consulting services to major organizations in the City - financial institutions and government agencies.

I could write a book about the stupid things the low-quality "security" experts insisted be done, which actually **reduced** security. This was a common occurance - completely hilarious, unfortunately. Like stupid mandates to frequently change passwords. This meant that everyone kept hand-written "cheat sheets" of what this month's password was. Any idiot could break into any system, by just looking in the EA's (the secretary's) desk-drawer, to find the current system login password. MFA (Multi-factor Authorization) is also truly stupid, and it means that the user has to keep stupid little hardware devices with accurate real-time clocks, and enter the TOTP (Time-based One Time Password) to login, and if he loses this device, or it is stolen, then his security is compromised. The thief can get into the system, but the true user CANNOT get into his own system! This is stupid.

AWS - Amazon Web Services - EC2 (Elastic Compute Capability) is a good idea. You can add servers to respond to increases in demand from web users. But the implementation of this service is just awful. And trying to tailor an EC2 instance (a simple web-server) to operate in a sane way, is curiously difficult. It is also absurdly difficult to wade thru the multiple-linked maze of online documentation, to actually accomplish anything useful. You can set up a **toy** website like this one, without too much trouble.

But to make it work right, or let it actually do any thing useful, is a moving target of trickery, which at every turn, requires that you cough up a bunch more cash, or navigate a series of rabbit-holes which assume you already know everything (like most useless modern documentation does).

The entire "Big Tech" business model really feels like a bad midway side-show.

Probably this is a "feature" - maybe a "security feature". "Big Tech" providers do not want useful or actionable services to operate from their platforms, unless they can engineer large payments from the suckers that get pulled into their questionable ecosystems. They just want to engineer tricky action to harvest funds from folks trying to use the modern "Internet of Shit".

Perhaps the reason the whole thing feels like a nasty scam, is maybe actually because it truly is?

Ya think?

(and it's gonna get a ***LOT*** worse as AI is transitioned to providing everything on the net.... really a ***LOT*** worse. Watch and see.)

[ Jan. 03, 2025 ] - Flaming Zepplins, Running 7's
Having maintained conservative "investments" in Canada, when the USA is on a debt-fueled run that exceeds anything ever seen in all of human history, has been sub-optimal. But it has been damned educational. Gerald Loeb was spot-on correct. If you enter the "stonk" market, you **must** focus on doubling your capital, rather than just trying to preserve it and draw off a dividend or yield stream.

This is curiously counter-intuitive advice, for a cautious fellow, who knows how easily and often, traders blow themselves to bits, and lose all their wealth. The LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) fiasco is the best case in point - the smartest guys who did very, very well for a while, finally blew up completely and disgracefully. Such is the nature of the beast (the market).

Yet, despite all this, being conservative and careful just does not work very well. It works a little bit, some of the time - just enough to make you slowly grind down your capital as inflation and random swans of various colours come and smash against your windscreen - until one or two break thru and bring you down.

Nvidia and Carvana are two stocks I thought were overvalued. Carvana crashed and then rose from the dead to spectacular heights, and Nvidia was recommended by a clever old fellow that has done well in computer and semi-conductor stocks. I avoided both, because they seemed too risky. Bad decision. We have held on to our Canadian bank-stocks, and to our Cdn telecoms. They have flowed-out a good dividend stream - but it sadly looks to be being generated from our investment capital. Buying dividend stocks - or bonds for the yield - basically have become schemes to get your capital, and then feed it back to you, as it slowly is withered away by the folks who sold you the paper.

The Loeb advice, in "The Battle for Investment Survival" is very clear. You must actively seek to buy stocks which can be expected to at least double. This is difficult, but not impossible. Gerald M. Loeb argued that only in this way, can you hope to at least survive the game, and not be ground-down by the powerful forces of fiat-money driven inflation, market-swings, business cycles, and plain old bad luck.

What is amazing is that this seemingly risky strategy, is actually probably the least risky approach, since if forces the buyer of equity to seek ***transformational*** companies, which have a high-probability of changing things. Most stocks and most companies do not really offer this - and conservative investments like banks and utilities - even if they pay seemingly high yields - have surprisingly ugly business characteristics, over even just the intermediate term (never mind the goddamn long term, in which we are all just bloody-well dead!).

We've done ok - but that is it. Just ok. Not great, not even "B-level" good. More like "C" - enough to pass, but not to really feel comfortable. We have to watch our expenditures, and be careful about any major purchases. In short, we are doing at best, average. We have no debt, and some fine real property holdings, but we are trapped in a harsh-climate, high-tax economic environment, with our equity holdings priced in a rapidly deteriorating currency.

In short - I am worried. Just one little mistake, and we could be hammered badly by plain old fashioned randomness. On paper, everything looks OK, but I sense some very significant changes are coming, which will massively move the various needles of the indicators which show the operational drivers of the financial world.

The markets are hard-wired to those indicator values (money rates, mortgage rates, rate-of-return rates, billings, new-orders, bond yields, cash-flows, corporate profits, government tax-takes and deficits, currency valuations, etc..)

The risks coming at us all are significant. The move away from "free trade", and back to tariffs, may run the global prosperty advancements we have seen in the last 60 years, in rapid reverse. The use of advanced AI risks making people stupid, while machines become intelligent. And there will be no jobs for both stupid people and smart people, who are displaced by the adoption of AI tech. And either tax rates will rise sharply, or currency values will fall, if out-of-control government spending is not reduced. But the reduction of government money-spend, will hit all Western economies hard, and cause GDP to go negative.

Just about everything is rigged against the folks in the middle-classes in the northern, high-tax economies. We supposedly have "free" health-care, but that means no doctors are available, other than ER's or walk-in clinics. I've lived where I live for over 20 years, and still have not been able to acquire a "Family Doctor", and in this unwise socialist model we have, that means I am functionally locked out of regular access to the health-care system. Note: I am NOT complaining about this. I can still access one "Walk-In" clinic, where I see a different doctor every time, and so this means I have to take aggressive personal responsibility for my health and health-related choices. This focus has probably saved my life a few times, so not having doctors except as on-demand specialists, which are tasked by the individual person seeking services, does offer some benefits.

Doctors are like car mechanics - it is hard to get one that is any good, and rare to find one that is really helpful. Better to maintain your car carefully, and also to maintain your body carefully. Your car and your own self, will last longer, and run better if you avoid these folks. Stay the heck away from doctors unless you have a real physical system failure, and keep your car away from shop mechanics who always have an incentive to inflate repair costs by various stratagems.

What is key, and I have learned this many times, is that the "high-risk" strategy is often actually the one with *less* risk. It is often the routine, "low-risk" model, that just does not work well, since all the "low-risk" options are rigged most effectively against the average guy, trying to take the average, safe, course of action. Our dividends are not keeping up with inflation, and there are many obvious reasons for this. Cautious "investments" can be risky traps.

As someone with an engineer's mind (even if I don't have the iron-ring), I just don't like trading. I find it stressful, and vomit-inducing. But when folks ask why do I do it, then, I have to reply: "I need the money..." :)

I've found some consistant things that just always seem to work. It's crazy and silly, since the market should extinguish something that can be traded against to extract cash, on a regular basis. But it just always works. It's weird and curious, and I cannot explain why the thing in question does what it does. I have to be vague, because I need the money, eh? Silly, but true.

But I sense the entire financial system of the Western World is actually skating on thin ice. Lots and lots of stuff just does not work right now, and this is a consistant pattern I also see often. It worries me.

Except now, the sun has come out, and the landscape looks like a Christmas postcard from long ago. Quite lovely. Enjoy it all, while you can!

[ Jan. 01, 2025 ] - Access to our AWS EC2 (our "cloud" server, which serves this website), seems to be working again.

We were knocked off by some sort of AWS (Amazon Web Services) policy change or something, which prevented login to AWS Console, and also prevented access to our EC2 instance. (our virtual server, running our website.) As of New Year's Day, it all seems to be working again. I had planned to re-factor this messy website over the holidays, but lost AWS access as of Christmas Eve. So much for "Cloud". We run local AI's, and wow - is local-system operation the only way to go. If you surrender your control to some remote technical service, you are taking a serious risk.

These are strange and dangerous times. Of course, we all know this - but it seems to be getting crazy-nasty everywhere. The abusive, mass-murder warfare action needs to stop. We don't expect the new US administration to really be that much different from the previous collection of curious folks, but we would be happy to be proven wrong in this forecast.

There appear to be powerful forces at work trying to de-stabilize many areas of our World. But it is also important to remember that old piece of advice - never attribute to clever conspiracy what can be more easily explained by rank stupidity, ignorance and cruelty.

The Russians shot down yet another civilian airliner, the South Koreans seem to be unable to operate large aircraft safely, nor do they understand how to construct airports (what kind of idiot-fool puts a cement wall at the end of a major runway??), and rather like the sad and crazy Germans, they seem unable or unwilling to run a stable, democratic government.

But they still do far better than the Germans, who seem quite unable to find their backsides with both hands when it comes to basic politics and democracy. When faced with a "new kid on the block" party (ie. the AfD), the idiot-fools who run Germany seem to think it is acceptable to try to BAN a political party which has widespread support, and is likely to form the next German Government. AfD's policies are wise, measured, reasonable and offer some real opportunity to reverse the madness that seems to be taking hold in Germany on a regular basis. (I am talking about their energy policy, let's be clear.) The "Green Nazi's" need to be stopped, before they destroy the German economy. And why should Elon Musk - who has built a Tesla factory in Berlin - not be allowed to voice his opinion on which political policy choices he prefers? The current German Government appears to be simply insane, and shows no understanding of just what democracy actually is.

And my dog is not well. She is having nose-bleeds, which are not nice for any of us. This causes me real concern. She is healthy and is eating well, and is active and not in any pain. But the nosebleeds are messy.

Happy New Year, anyway. I will update the AI forecast when I get a chance. We just got a foot of snow today, and I have to clear it all (again).

[ Dec. 24, 2024 ] - It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
... those hypersonic missiles that our radar can't hear. These holiday times offer an opportunity to launch an attack. No "Christmas Truce" in the Big World, now. Personally, we would like to see an end to this "warfare" nonsense - but we doubt this will occur. There is just too much money to be made from mass-killing at scale. Look at Israel if you want proof of this. That little colony is $60-billion to the good, for it's large-scale, multi-decade murder efforts. Such an awful but profitable outcome.

Truly, all this blather and promo about seasonal peace and so on, is sadly just more fraud. Rather like it always is.

But Happy Christmas anyway.

[ Dec. 20, 2024 ] - Your Baby's Gone Down The Plug-hole!
A fine old English tune, popular in the music halls. And seems to fit the current price patterns of the cracking Western-World markets. I keep seeing images in my mind, of glass vases falling and shattering on the cement pavement.

Should we make financial decisions on human feelings? Or are our analytic, rational calculations more effective over the long run?

I still don't know the answer to this curious question. The "Age of Reason" favours the pure analytic approach - and yet markets are wild emotion-engines, of the most intense kind. There is no doubt about the truth of this.

We remain all-in, in a (maybe misguided) attempt to harvest dividends from our portfolios. This conservative approach has proven to be sub-optimal for the last few years, as we experience harsh volatility, without the technology-stock price gains that have characterised the markets for the last several years.

All in all, using the markets to make bets on transformative technology, has just plain been a better strategy, than rational and cautious "investment" for income. All too often, it appears that dividends seem to be provided out of one's investment capital. And many major corporations choose to expend surplus cashflow on idiotic acquisitions, which so often end in failure. This process seems to be driven by the egos of less-than-wise CEO's who regularly make curiously bad decisions.

The path to speculative success is narrow, and the scope for investment failure is so very wide. We have a little BCE, the Bell Canada Enterprises company, which is parent to the Bell communication business - telephone and wireless and internet services. It is now another spectacular investment failure for anyone who has held the thing long-term. We bought some in the low 60's, and it now trades with a 33 handle, which is absurd for a viable utility investment. One does not expect a rational, conservative telco to collapse in half, like a some junky mining stock or an oil exploration company that has drilled a bunch of dry holes. But there you are. The spectacularly bad policy decisions from the "CRTC" regulators in Ottawa (ground zero for the "Big Stupid" in our part of the world), are partly to blame for the demise of BCE as a viable investment holding. But it's collapse has surpised us. It trades like it is at risk of going out of business. We doubt this will happen - but a dividend-cut will be enough to destroy the equity-value of the thing - and the expensive "Ziply Fiber" purchase looks most questionable. Many Canadian investments in USA are failures (we buy high and sell low - why is that??) and this may well be another similar hot-mess.

Note: (In case it needs to be repeated) A good heuristic to follow: "Do not 'average down'". Just do not fucking do it, unless you have some serious, non-obvious information that is unique. We bought a tiny bit more BCE at lower prices. Bad decision. Falling stock prices tend to keep falling. One can show this as a statistical truth. It's just mostly true. Sometimes turnarounds occur - but not very often in Canada. Turnarounds seems to be an American phenomenon.

What we must now do here, is to turn our attention to political efforts, and do all we can to get regime-change to happen at the Federal level in Canada. We have a serious "Idiots in Charge" problem now in Ottawa, and we all have a responsibility to fix this ugly problem.

[Update - 11:50am] - Curiously volatile times. The V-bottom remains the best fashion choice for the New Year. Skirts are probably best removed. We know so little, yes? The markets exhibit the behaviour of a woman in the fertile part of her cycle - dangerously volatile. It's now politically incorrect to reference this true and obvious fact, but old traders know it well, and could make money from this kind of cycle, if they were experienced, skilled and lucky. The market is like a woman. She is distant, abusive and difficult - and then suddenly one day, she wants to give you everything - RIGHT NOW. Old traders knew this phenomenon, and also had both the wisdom to act quickly and make a good profit, and then get the hell out, before the reverse swing would occur. We are still learning the nature of this wild-cycle, even after so many, many years. The equity-markets are to investing, much like what teenage-dating is to being married for a few decades. Learn and know this.

An old, close friend just got a scary diagnosis. Dr. Google tries to sound encouraging (could we please have the old Google Search tool that found non-MSM sites???), but my friend's version of the big "C" is apparently pretty serious. Puts our losses in perspective. Prognosis is at the short end of the curve, based on what has been discovered so far. He's already on drugs that apparently allow him to feel better, without having his hair fall out. I am at the age, where members of my demographic cohort are starting to go dark. This produces complex feelings, which are probably best ignored.

"But don't you believe in anything?" I was asked. I replied with the old standby answer: "I believe I will have another drink."

Everyone gets the same deal. You live, until you die. Then it's all over. The famous and most honourable and wise Emperor Marcus Auralius wrote all the advice one ever needs, in his "Meditations" - which was basically his bedside notebook, which he kept during the frontier campaigns in which he attempted to forestall the collapse and destruction of the ancient Roman Empire. He quest was doomed to fail. But he fought the good fight, and tried to do the right thing. The "Christians" have no monopoly on right behaviour and right action. In fact, Christianity has a rather grim and ugly history, much like most religious enterprises have.

Now, go find a copy of "When I Ruled the World" (which will maybe be Vladimir Putin's night-music, in his luxurious prison cell, at the end of his life.)

[ Dec. 19, 2024 ] - Error 404 - Future Failure
The "Powell Plunge" yesterday was comedy-as-tragedy theatre for the folks who believe "investment" is possible in this curiously broken world now. I keep seeing everything being done mostly wrong, and it is a curious feeling. We seem to be erroring-out the future.

The AI stuff is being morphed from the impressive-and-interesting to the truly dangerous, and US politics is become over-the-top insane. The 1547-page completely bogus "Stopgap Spending Bill" that has been crafted in the stinking-cesspool-swamp that is Washington D.C., is just beyond belief toxic and absurd. It is full of bogus spending, absurd (and probably illegal) restrictions on what a new Administration can do, and what is termed "pork-barrel-spending" the likes of which are over-the-top crazy. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of US-dollars of completely bullshit spending, and all these sleazy, shit-stained tricks - like preventing the new Health Secretary from doing anything about the criminally dishonest CDC and it's abusive vaccine policy mandates, and even a little trick to except various Commerce Dept. operations from FOI (Freedom of Information) requirements. It also has tricky-law to try to hide the outright criminality that Democrat legislators engaged in - nothing at all to do with spending - just sleazy-legal scam-tricks, designed to fatten the pork, and pay-off the swamp-men and swamp-women (ie. they vote themselves a fat pay raise, by returning their fat $174,000/year (US-dollar) salaries to being COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) rigged. Maybe even retroactive? Unclear if that will apply - buried in process, of course.

If I were an American, I would be saying, it's maybe time for a Second American Revolution. The stinking cesspool of Washington politics is so out-of-control, that it is absurd. Trying to ram this steaming piece of 1547-page pork-spending and tricky-shit through, quickly before going away for Christmas, is virtually a criminal act of mass-theft. Both Trump and Vance are demanding that this obscene spending-spree and legal-trickery scam-bill be blocked and defeated by the lame-ducks who are trying to foist this shitshow upon America. They are so right.

If one ever needed a perfect textbook example of how completely broken Washington politics actually is, one only need examine this 1547-page slush-pile of over-the-top spending madness and legislative trickery. It is abusive and disgusting, and I now truly believe that the January 6th protesters who stormed the US "parliament", were doing a noble and necessary thing. Trump should pardon every protester, and prosecute that vile piece of walking filth that was in charge of security, and the FBI stooges who it now appears, engineered the entire fiasco.

USA appears to be breaking - and I suspect this, because it's Government looks to be corrupt, and it's "legislators" have been shown to be self-serving scammers operating directly against the long-term interests of the American people. Hell, Joe Biden and his corrupt crony squads have even tried to re-define what "American people" even are - bringing in, as a matter of deliberate policy, ***millions*** of illegal border-crossers, who were outright law-breakers. The Biden Administration is the worst and most dishonest collection of fraudsters to ever sieze power in USA - through what more and more looks to have been a bogus election process in 2020, where massive "ballot harvesting" was not only allowed, but encouraged.

We hope President-Elect Trump and Vice-President-Elect Vance can begin a process to fix that broken thing that is the USA political process, and return America to sanity and stability.

And - please oh please - do something about the broken "Federal Reserve" and the completely broken-by-design "Securities and Exchange Commission", which has become little more than a Democrat-run attack-dog being used to harm major US companies that are viewed as political opponents. This does great economic damage to both present-day America, and also harms it's future. The SEC needs to be reformed or replaced. It's now just part of the "Big Moat" around abusive New-York based, big-money criminal enterprises.

The "Washington Democrat" elite deep-state fraudsters and trough-diving pocket-fillers and squads of scammers-of-the-State should be sent to re-education camps, and made to read and memorize the US Consitution, since they obviously either know nothing about it, or maybe they know it well, and delight in acting against it's provisions.

When the little stuff is broken, the little guys like us can fix it. But when the entire process is broken, corrupted and shit-stained dishonest and wrecked-beyond-repair, then maybe it becomes time for some hard-core revolution. And that means not just trying to deal with the stinger in the scorpion's tail - but squashing the head of the nasty creature, so it it's ability to inflict it's lethal sting can be ended completely.

When your government has become a dangerous "scorpion", the free citizen has no choice, but to act to remove the lethal creature by any and all means possible. It's a rule of history.

The toxic legislation that is flowing from the abusive fraudsters and self-serving elites that control our Western World governments, has to be stopped. And that means stopping the process and stopping the persons who are driving the process.

If this means "shutting down the Government" (which is not really what happens - all the needed entities continue to operate) for a few weeks, so the Biden Brigades and Deep-State organs cannot do anymore damage to the public fisc, (the Roman term for the "Public Treasury"), then so be it. It is actually a very good idea, and might actually prove to be a major benefit. It won't stop that criminal Joe Biden from pardoning his criminal associates - but it might at least stop the insane financial madness that has been where many a "Washington Swamp Creature" has done surprising economic damage.

[ Dec. 17-18, 2024 ] - Electro-Curious
Ok, so I liked the Cybertruck, but it is insanely too expensive - it's really parked on Mars, is what it feels like. Very cool for the very, very wealthy, but not available to the common man (or woman?). And so in an attempt to get a Tesla to play with, I looked at a very old (2014) Model S, on a dealer's lot, which has crazy high milage, but still sort-of works.

It was allowed to run down - the batteries drained right down - and this is really, really bad for these cars. Comically funny, since it appears to have ruined the lithium cells. The car was showing a 90% available battery when I took it for a test-drive today, which was between 10 and 20 kms - not far, just a little way along a local ring-road expressway and back. It had 90% battery showing when we left, and a few minutes later, when we returned to the dealer's lot (it's Not a Tesla dealer, by the way...), the battery was showing 74%. The charge-drain was so high, that it appears the battery-pack is toast. The car looks and runs nice, but as a viable automobile, it is just not such a thing. If you lose 16% battery charge in 10 to 20 km (say 20 km to be generous), then the remaining 74% will give only 93 km of range. The car has an 85kwh battery, putting out 400 VDC. This was originally a 400km battery. But now, it is not usable for anything other than puttering around town.

When I left my place to go to the dealer, and do the test-drive, my positions were slightly positive. Upon return, just after market close, I notice that Tesla stock has lost just under 40$ per share, for an over 8% loss on the day. (Is the market inside my head, watching what I am doing??? Almost feels like this...)

Our positions are suddenly ugly offside and down, due to the blather from the Federal Reserve in USA-Stan, having cut 25 basis points, and saying only two more cuts, before the big raising begins? The inflation everywhere is silly now, everything is broken-crowded, and nothing works anywhere anymore. This is just my feeling of things - but the market seems to be feeling this way also.

The old 2014 Tesla Model S drove nicely, but the battery range looks like a show-stopper. Plus I just lost the price of the damn thing today, so I have to give up on having a Tesla to play with, it looks like. But the computer-based user interface in the thing, with the big moving-map GPS display, is really very cool. The Tesla Model S cars are nice - but replacing a battery costs around $21,000 to $25,000 Cdn now. And maybe US and Canada trade-war tarrifs might push this higher.

Strange world now. Nothing is reliable, nothing works right, and everything is kind of broken-by-design. Things that used to work well on the internet, are just unusable now (eg. Youtube, with the insane, awful, obnoxious, noisy adverts). And I will not pay money, to see cute cat videos.

So, here we are. I cut a tree down, and then cut it up. Funny explaining English prepositions, to non-native speakers: "Eh? You cut tree down. Ok. Then, you cut tree up? How does person do this?" (It's really all to do with entropy-states.) Cut tree, it falls down. It is a long, messy wood thing. Cut it into nice pieces to fit in wood-fire stove, and pile these in nice pile, wood-pieces organized and stacked up high. (A lower entropy-state, higher level of organized structure.) Lotsa wood, big fire in wood-stove, means warm house... :)

Should really have been stacking Sats, eh?

Silly world. (Even gold and silver got hammered today. Curious. "All Restaurants are Taco Bell" and all assets are apparently the same. This seems somehow wrong to us. Is there nothing that is uncorrelated with this crazy financialized Bizzaro-World?)

[ Dec. 16, 2024 ] - "Are You Experienced?" (Gunning the Stops)
The markets are hard-codeed effectively to "gun the stops", which means whatever price a naive trader (like me, a guy out in the back-of-beyond) transacts at, the market action (which is now very good at monitoring who is trading at what price, since I cannot anonymize my bank-retail-trader dealer-code), will "gun-run" to whatever your stops should be, for effective, low-risk trading.

So, you have to do high-risk, high-vol things.

You have to make a friend of volatility, just like Kurtz said in "Apocalypse Now!", where he said it was necessary to make a friend of "horror". One has to act counter one's rational instincts, since this is what the algo's do to win.

What is interesting, is how my super-cynical, nasty-guy, "Inner Trader" calls this pretty much every time. And the AI seems to confirm it. The market prices are quite a long way from being the result of any sort of rational "price discovery", but these financial-fictions are useful "meme-virus" ideas, that are planted in the heads of the poor-boys who trade their money away.

Things are *very* crazy now. They are just over-the-top goofy and risk-laden. The risks are just plain sky-high - and yet the markets will almost certainly track higher. There is a dynamic here, which is really scary and interesting - like watching war-films of cities being burned down, or airplanes crashing and exploding. It is terrible - yet also fascinating, since it shows the true-nature of human action.

People are just crazy. They are roiling, boiling buckets of wild madness, but have smiles and relaxed expressions as they go about their daily business. The only place the true behaviour could manifest itself, was on the trading floors, where open-outcry was used to transact. Those days are gone, and this is a sad thing, since in that environment, there was honesty. There was honest human action, fully on-line, in real time, with actual real people. You could tell by the volume-level on the floor, what the market was doing, if you were experienced.

And, as Jimi Hendrix asked: "Are You Experienced?"

There are things we know, and we can tell. But there are also things we know, that we cannot tell. And there are things we think we know, that are wrong. And there are wrong things we know, that actually work really well to help us profit in many areas - until one day, they also destroy you. This is the "fatal flaw" that classical tragedy often highlighted.

Success in the crazy multi-dimensional market-world now, is not so much "3-D Chess", as it is the curious human capacity to be "arrogantly humble" or maybe "humbly arrogant" so that you can do quite extreme high-risk actions, which still need to be actively risk-managed.

I fear great chunks of our world, and what most of us believe, are about to be shattered like a glass vase, dropped from a high, New York building onto a sidewalk.

It will make the 9/11 "event" look mild and not really very serious - more of a pre-cursor, than a major tragedy. Many things are very wrong, in very many places, but no one really gives a shit, which is fine, but the scale and extent of the eventual change-process, seems to grow more substantial each day, each month and each year. I suspect that when historians are looking back on this time, from 1000 years in the future, they will term it "The Time of the Great Stupid". Everyone seems to be slightly insane, and some more directly and obviously insane than others. I see multiple events regularly, each day, which do not make rational sense - but seem to be part of the human drift.

Market price discovery is just one small aspect. If you attempt to be a rational investor in the modern markets now, you will be slaughtered like a Chicago hog, and turned into someones bacon breakfast. The idea that you can buy stocks as investment vehicles is simply absurd. It is a pure *casino*, and once that fact is grasped, one can do OK. But forget all that garbage talk about "investment". The markets now are simply not about "investment" anymore - and probably, they never were, and never can be. There are ancillary "investment-effects" that can be obtained - but the primary drivers are human emotion, and human weakness - and of course, rank stupidity. These actually work quite well, to make things happen.

So, best of luck. Maybe metal - simply holding raw metal - silver and gold - maybe this actually is a better long term investment now, despite the curious difficulty transacting in the stuff.

I am certain that much of the valuations we see now, are bogus. It's a scary feeling. And this at the same time, as the bank-stocks are crazy-good, obviously should be priced higher - but given the political-risks, and the power of the "Great Stupid", perhaps that is why they trade at such silly discounts. The tech stuff is silly - and the good stuff that throws off money like Niagara Falls, gets discounted down to crap-valuations. It's pretty comical. I see major discounts coming for all the technology sector, since it offers so little (except maybe Tesla, since it can actually deliver something real - unlike Google, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta and so on..) And I have a real fear that Apple is actually a Chinese scam, designed to make every user a junk-data addict. Apple did a brilliant thing using BSD-UNIX/Linux as it's O/S internal, but the overburden of digital cruft now makes using modern Apple equipment a dangerous, freedom-threatening choice. Funny world. I fear a really wild non-linear transition event is looming very close now.

Maybe I am wrong - but history seems to confirm my view. But also, I am usually two years too early with this feeling. My file on the "USA Housing Crisis" was started in 2006. :)

Just read about Christina Freeland's resignation - she posted her letter to PM Fidel's son on Elon Musk's "X" board. Pretty hard-core "Fuck You" kind of letter - nice to see someone with some stones (why is it always a female that shows the clink-clink brass-balls courage now?) say the obvious truth. This Trudeau fellow has to resign. We need to free ourselves from this person, who has done just about all he can to hammer-whack our economic future. This crazy shit has to stop. Can it be stopped? Or is the rolling-thunder force of the "Great Stupid" too much to stand against? Can we withstand the slings-and-arrows (and super-bad, shit-stained Bill 63 toxic garbage legislation that the Libtards of Ottawa are forcing upon us), and by opposing, end these truly dangerous fuckers? I don't know. I will do my part trying to turn our riding back to a Tory blue, from a sad Fidel-Castro-red mistake... but the "Great Stupid" is a curiously strong force - sorta like the sun's gravity... It seems to be harming human clarity and basic thought process.

For certain... We need change, and we need it now.

[ Dec. 12, 2024 ] - CyberTruck Lucky Truckin!
Went to shop for a pre-amp at the only remaining "Stereo Store", and went next door to look at the Tesla Dealership, with the Cybertrucks (Foundation Models). The order-backlog for the lower-cost Cybertruck is significant - Tesla is not even taking reservations anymore. But you can get a 2-motor "Standard" Foundation model, or a 3-motor (800 hp!) advanced Foundation model Cybertruck, right now, without the wait. (Like buying an IBM System 370, back in the early 1970's, when I was a tiny young little punk... you can pay a premium to jump the queue). The Foundation CyberTruck has FSD(Supervised) as a standard feature. And I tried it, and it works. No shit. It really, actually works. It's all actually amazingly wild-good. It has an on-board neural-net which watches the world effectively, and shows it on the screen, real-time.

See, the local Tesla dealer has a test-drive option thing - you can book out a 30-minute loaner Cybertruck, (and it is the 3-motor "Beast" model), and go drive around and try the thing. "Holy Moly!" I said "Sign me up" to the most helpful Tesla saleswoman - but all the slots were booked up for December. I said "Call me (or text me) if there is a cancel or no-show.." And she did! Today, I took the "Beast" model of the Foundation Series Cybertruck out for two seperate test runs, and I have to report here, that the thing seriously exceeded all expectations. It is just downright amazing - a completely different driving experience. It is a 6000+ pound truck, but it has full 4-wheel articulated steer-by-wire, and it is weirdly nimble, and wildly fun to run. It accelerates like a Porsche 911 Turbo, (an old friend from long ago, had one, back in the day, so I have g-force sensation memory), and it is just plain nice and nimble to drive - not at all "truck-like" - the CyberTruck feels more like a sports-car, than a big, steel truck.

The technology is impressive, and has been well engineered and well-thought-out.

There is no sense of "fighting with the interface", like one experiences with badly designed, poorly planned software UX. It's very nice. The control-yoke wheel is really nice, and the thing reminded my of tooling around in the sky with an old PA-28 Piper Warrior II, that I used to rent from a local Toronto-area flying club, when I was younger, and flew small aircraft regularly.

The only problem, is the $160,000 price-tag. It's a bit of a show-stopper at this point, since I have a bunch of big-ticket stuff I want/need in the near future (plans to build a cottage, and so on...), so the cash income is pre-allocated for now.

But if I come by a big score in the next while, I will grab one, and unload some of my other not-to-drive-in-winter old rolling stock.

I will put a couple of pictures below and end of this post. The CyberTruck looks to have an on-board neural network processor for the FSD, and even without FSD enabled, the display will show a synthetic image of surrounding traffic - big trucks, SUVs, small cars, etc - they show up as simulations, in real-time, and the CyberTruck will flash warnings, if a lane-change is not recommended, due to some yahoo zooming up and passing you on the right, for example. Also, red-lights and traffic signals seem to be recognized, and imaged in schematic - all in real-time. The GPS moving-map display is nice also, and can be toggled in and out, as desired.

All and all, the thing is awesome. It exceeded my expectations, and I have to say, it is just crazy good. Just a fine and frisky driving experience, like when you are a kid, and get into your first Corvette. If you are a car-nut (I am), it is just a symphony of stuff-done-right. I am quite impressed, truly.

Might change my life - like in the 1990's, when I went to Dr. Geoffery Hinton's Neural-Net lectures, and got the Xerion code on a CD, and had to install and configure LINUX on my IBM 386 clone P/C (which I still have, and it still works), and the early Linux (Slackware) still runs! Xerion also. Good code and good hardware, lives pretty much forever. Exactly the opposite of the modern world, eh?

The CyberTruck is really a Ton-O-Fun. And I did not expect that at all! :)

(And a *Big* Thank-you to the staff at Waterloo Tesla, for letting me take one for an extended highway ride!)

If you have the scratch, go buy one. It's the future, in glass-and-stainless rolling techno. Put on your Neuromancer mirrorshades, select your drive-mode, go enjoy CyberTruckin!

Here are two pictures. The first, is the CyberTruck in the showroom. Note: No one paid me for doing this or anything. This is just my impression of the experience. If it was bad, I would have said so. I expected a "truck-like" feel, but that is not the case at all. It's really nimble and quick, and fun to drive.

Here is second image, of a customer getting prepped for a test drive!

The CyberTruck test run was a lot of fun. It's a seriously impressive piece of technology.

[ Dec. 11, 2024 ] - Wayfaring Stranger
Walking thru this world of woe... and seeking profit, knowledge, strength and power. Should we instead choose poverty, ignorance and weakness and slavery? Of course not. But that means, we need to rise early, study carefully, live wisely, and avoid the many traps of dependence and foolishness. This is hard to do, sometimes. Constant focus and effort make for a tired Jack.

Vacations are nice - but after about 10 minutes, I get deadly bored, sitting on a beach, drinking rum-based drinks. But sailing is good. It is sufficiently difficult, and risky, that it keeps one interested, and you get to be in the sunshine also (and maybe even a storm or two...) There is a fine feeling when the sails are well-trimmed, a fresh breeze is blowing, the rails are under, and you are making just a tad more than hull-speed.

Recorded music is making a comeback, as are turntables and vinyl records. Probably this is because the internet-based music sources are both expensive and astonishingly awful and annoying (Youtube is now unwatchable - unless you can run multiple layers of ad-blockers). Internet Archive does not work right anymore, and all that remains are the streaming radio stations, many of which are full of adverts also. So the internet is pretty much turning to a curious steaming (not "streaming" - *steaming*) thing. It's become a pile of poop. This is pretty funny and just a little surprising.

The future of any viable AI, will be *localized* non-internet-connected AI technology. Certainly, this is how it is for us. The internet gets more annoying and less useable day by day. And of course, the risk factors seem to be growing like Moore's Law. Being online now is just pure work. Feels really good to switch the machines off.

Suddenly, everyone wants to have "pre-amps". Having acquired a large, nice-sounding amplifier, I expected it would not be too difficult to acquire a used pre-amp. Ho ho. The ones that are still made, are insanely expensive. I want pure analogue, no digital cruft. This means one has to find old-school equipment from the 1970's to the 1990's, which is either in good condition, or has been refurbished. Or, you can pay many thousands of dollars for modern high-end audio hardware, which is absurdly priced (you can basically pay any amount, depending on your desire, budget and ego). I may have to drive to Toronto, just to acquire a 35-year-old piece of equipment which might need to be repaired (new capcitors and upgraded resistors is typically what is needed).

I dropped into the local Tesla dealership, and had a good look at the new "Foundation Series" Cybertruck. It's pretty cool. I booked a test-drive for early next year (first available slot!), and chatted with some folks who had their test-drives. Everyone was impressed. A woman with her young son said she had expected it to feel like a big truck or a bus - but in fact, it was nicely steerable and nimble-feeling. I learned both front and back wheels articulate, when turning, which I did not know. The stainless-steel fit-and-finish is really good. But it is $138,000 Cdn for the two-motor AWD version, and $160,000 for the 3-motor ("Beast") version. Driving range is roughly 500km, which seems good.

I'll post some pictures when I get a chance to copy them from phone to P/C and then to website (here). The stainless-steel Cybertruck is really very cool. I would like an option to have really *thick* stainless, especially under the vehicle. I didn't get any info on "Q" car, or if FSD autodrive is available on the Cybertruck. I don't want either, so no problem. The box size and the locking metal cover is nice - a viable truck (I have an F-150, with a back-cover/camper-back thing, which is essential in a high-snow region like where I live.)

Bank of Canada dropped the short-term administered rate 50 basis points, due to rising trade risk factors facing Canada, and evidence of slowing economic activity and rising unemployment. Rate was 3.75%, lowered now to 3.25%. Of course, this will mean nothing for regular consumers using VISA cards to fund their borrowing action - they will still pay around 20.00% or more, depending on case-by-case factors. Rates are high. We advise avoiding ALL debt of any kind, and trying to link one's expenditure to one's income level. Ideally, expenses should be below income, so that some savings can be generated. Good luck with that, eh? :)

More later... Keep your tips up... (old water-skiing expression...)

[ Dec. 10, 2024 ] - Both Mother and Daughter
... Working for the Yankee Dollar? And then being killed by US bombs? That's not good.

We hack for Cdn dollarettes, but that is only because we avoid currency issues. I seem to be sneezing today. Acquired some more outdated but high-quality technology. Searching the nation for it, truth be told. Some guy on one of the tech-stuff boards, is trying to sell two vaccuum tubes for $180 Cdn. Not a full amp or pre-amp, just two single "matched" NOS (new old stock) glass 12SN7's or some such thing, for that insane price - claims they are German-made, gold-plated contacts, yatta-yatta, and so on. Completely silly. Suddenly, it hit me like that old "Rough Trade" song - "All Touch and No Contact"... it's like our current "Stonk" market, is it not?

We are seeing some quite insane, over-the-top prices on speculative technology shares, which seem quite divorced from the standard, on-the-ground reality that business folks typically face.

Honestly, the key thing you want to be owning (and maybe investing in), is probably weapons-systems. But you want semi-autonomous, low-cost, high-yield (in terms of destructive/disruptive force), kind of systems, which can be deployed by fast-moving, highly manouverable agents.

And with that thought, I drove into the local town, and saw the guys testing their drones, part-ways into a long driveway into a farm, where the drone-makers had made a deal with the farmer-owner to use (big field, lots of open space, trees a long way away, etc.). These are the drones that sell for 6-figures (once I stopped by and chatted with the guy doing the testing...). The drones look cool, and are able to operate autonomously, and carry hi-resolution cameras, which downlink to the laptop-enabled operater in the truck. But he does not have to be in the truck.

The drones are still too expensive - but they are able to disable expensive tanks, given that they can launch precision strikes, from perfectly vertical orientation. They can also be used on people driving in domestic automobiles or trucks, quite effectively.

The trick in warfare, is to avoid direct confrontation with superiourly-armed and equiped troops, and rather, just hit - over and over - the supply lines of the troops. Eventually, the bastards get hungry, tired, and will then just start raiding the local population. This will make the locals hate the invading soldiers, and the soldiers will run out of bullets, and rockets, once they have killed to their ammo-supply limit. If you can prevent bandit-raiders from getting food and fuel, you can stop them from moving, and also disrupt their ability to kill. Once stopped, they can be carefully targeted, and ended.

But it truly looks like weaponery will be the growth-business of the 21st century. Peace is pretty much finished, especially when there are advanced, hyper-militarized neo-fascist states like Israel, that have basically infinite-funding to degrade, disrupt and destroy their neighbours. There is now zero chance of any peaceful living for any nation near the religious-racist Israeli murder-state, and it's psychopathic war-criminal leader, Netanyahu. Increased investments in military technology will be the requirement of all nations in the Middle East now. Oil will probably become less important than C4 and enriched uranium. You don't even need to build an atom device, just a bunch of low-tech rockets filled with enriched uranium dust exploded over Tel Aviv will be enough to discourage anyone from ever visiting that filthy, radioactive kill-capital, and that would disrupt and degrade the Israel war-economy.

Given the actions of the Israeli's, and the nut-job war-talk of President-in-Waiting Donald Trump, there is zero chance for peace with anyone, anywhere, it looks like.

This will be great for the USA economy - for a while - but there is no question that it will create a strong dynamic for the "Deny / Defend / Depose" strategy to by tried - again and again, until eventually an actionable result is obtained. Call it the "Mangione Doctrine". Or maybe the "Trump-Solemani" gambit? Whatever.

A future of constant, on-going, low-level warfare - which is already in place, and is already up and running in "prototype" mode - is almost certainly the future of the next 20 or more years, going forward. The USA as "Strong-man" - with it's Cuban Torture-Camps, and it's censorship-driven Deep State organs - will not really change under a Trump presidency. They will be strengthened, most likely.

And so every "strong-man" dictator will be able now to point to Assad and Gadaffi and the poor bastards who tried to oppose the Taliban in Afgahnistan (and who all got betrayed by the USA cutting and running like thieves in the night), and say "You cannot trust the lying Americans. They will talk big, talk about 'human rights' and 'rule-by-our-law', and then the evil bastards will just bomb your homes - just like the Russians do. Your *only* hope, is with me and my party, and we will protect and defend our homeland, so the filthy Americans and murdering jews will not come here and rape our women, and kill our children!"

That is obviously a bogus arguement. But as solid, effective rhetoric, it will get the local gang elected, so it can do the raping and murdering, without calling in the American or Jewish forces, or the Russian mercenaries.

We think the future will be violent. "Peace" has left the building, maybe for several decades. Watching the way both Israel and USA have bombed "Syrian targets" - 250 air strikes by the Israeli's in the last three days - and 75 strikes by USA "Central Command" forces, as the rebels took Damascus - war is now programmed as the only solution, for any people of courage. The murderous Jews and the kill-crazy American "shoot first, question later" bombers are now hated by very large numbers of ordinary people who have watched their entire nations be destroyed, and their family and friends be killed.

Maybe the only way that powerful nations-of-violence can be effectively countered, is by means of the "Deny / Defend / Depose" doctrine. We do not favour or support this strategy, but it is becoming obvious that no other opposition action has any actionable outcome. It seems this is the only method available to those nations and groups that do not have their own fleet of bomber aircraft, and armed aircraft carriers.

We strongly suspect that this ongoing "business-model" of kicking a nation and it's people when it is down, and unable to respond effectively, will eventually cause the destruction of Israel and maybe even America itself. The Americans might want to consider that at some point in the near future, American cities themselves may come under attack, and be bombed and damaged, and hundreds of thousands of Americans killed, in much the same way as Jewish and American forces have targeted the various city-States of the Middle East.

This will be a bad outcome, and we seek to prevent this.

But we honestly caution that this outcome is what history suggests not only *will* happen, but in fact actually *must* happen, so that this unwise strategy of abusive mass-murder is understood by the American public to be sub-optimal and ultimately ineffective at ensuring security of the North American homeland.

Washington DC buildings are modelled on Rome, and Roman architecture. History suggests Washington will be sacked and burned at some point also, once American military power is degraded sufficiently to allow this to happen. Damascus fell without a fight, because almost everyone hated Assad. Once everyone hates America, and it's military is destroyed, can a similar transition take place in Washington? How can it not eventually happen?

It probably won't be for at least 50 or 100 years - but history says the American Empire will be taken down, and ended by some sort of reflexive N3 (Newton's Third Law) action, probably similar to what America has done to foreign nations. Imagine: Selective bombing of all American military targets, limited fusion strikes on all it's major military production locations, and so on. We don't advocate this - but it seems to be in the data. A national empire becomes an abusive murder-machine, creates torture-camps to abuse and kill it's political prisoners, and has a national government that is hated by the external world, and half of it's internal citizens, and eventually the walls of the Big-Empire house crack, and the walls fall down.

What is curious, is that no-one in USA seems to even talk about this.

If you bomb your enemies as a matter of routine, and also abuse and assault your economic partners, and if you regularly kick people when they are down, you have to expect that you will become hated, and the "Deny / Defend / Depose" strategy will eventually be used against you.

It's right there, in history - over and over and over again and again. Curious how few folks in the USA recognizes this risk factor. It was called "Revolution", long before Karl Marx wrote his silly economic-science-fiction nonsense.

[ Dec. 6, 2024 ] - Phasers On Stun
The phenomenon of phase-locking is interesting. Too complex to explain here, but it's slightly related to chaotic orbitals and Lyapunov exponents. What the F^%* does this have to do with market action? It characterizes the comically silly way the prices track in what looks like a "random" environment. It is "random" to us, because we cannot see or track the true generator, but the generator (really multiple generators) are still there. Can you hack the fractal dimension, and get some useful awareness? I still do not really know the answer to that question. Maybe and maybe not.

Can AI stuff help? It seems to. Which of course annoys me, which is also silly. Why should my own excellent models that I made, piss me off? I think it is perhaps my own obsessive compulsive desire for independent operation. This is a curious and non-ending problem. No one really wants to be the lab-rat, or the water-boy at the big game. We desire some sort of control of our destiny.

The more I read, the more I learn, the more I realize that I know not much of anything at all, nor even can I know. I always keep running into constraints and limits and things-that-stop-us. This is also annoying.

We all hope for the "Italian Navigator" to land, and that our reactors and disruptor-beams will work. But mostly they don't. Our rockets explode, and our trades go pear-shaped. All human knowledge seems to be seriously limited by what we actually are, and what we feel we really need to do.

Even honest doctors and physics-masters will admit the truth of this. Political persons and Economists typically do not.

So, what do I believe?

I believe I will have some breakfast.

[ Dec. 5, 2024 ] - Suzanne Takes You Down
And so does TD. And maybe BMO, for a few minutes... The trading in Cdn Bank stocks is nutty. The algos are hopping on the minor variations in earnings results - expected (by Analysts consensus) versus the actual, and the trading is goofy. TD has done 5.2 million shares in the first hour, and this is just on the TSE, nevermind the dark-markets that cannot be seen. The share price is off by almost 5.00 Cdn dollarettes (down $4.49, to 75.17 at at last look, around 10:35 am). This is a pretty big reaction - maybe more because TD folks now want to avoid issuing "guidence", which makes the algo players nervous, perhaps.

Holding bank stocks is a harsh way to make dividend income. Graham and Dodd warned that they really were almost unsuitable for rational investors looking for stable income, due to the nature of their business model - the banks get fat in fat times, and starve in lean times, and make their shareholders starve also. But these are now looking to be fat times, if sanity returns to USA-Stan. Maybe it will happen. The DOGE is a really good idea... so long overdue. An awful lot of "Government" can just be ended, and sent to the landfill. It's time the Lefty-Loons of this planet grasped this simple fact. Government is usually the problem, not the solution.

To call this bank-stock trading action "price discovery" is pretty fucking stupid.

It's "discovery", like going to Vegas helps you "discover" which slots the little silver ball will land on after the roulette-wheel stops spinning. What you "discover", is how random action works, when and maybe what the House edge actually is. (Hint: The House wins everything when the "0" and the "00" come up. If the wheel is true, (no magnets), then that edge will make the play sustainably profitable for the game provider. I really hate ludic shite, but Pascal did alright, and so did John Law, at first. One must learn the basics, just to survive.)

The problem (and solution) in Canada, is that the Banks here are tightly regulated, and make just fuck-loads of money. And they tend to pay out around half of each quarterly load, to their shareholders. This means you pretty much have to hold a big slug of this stuff to ride the train (and eat and pay your bills).

It's fun to watch USA fly up and fly down, a great aerobatic show. But we've paid the bills for 20 years, using bank dividends, and our only fear, is the goddamn Federal State, which likes to rape anyone who makes money here, because that is the basic business-model of Leftist Government. Every so often, we can throw the bastards out, and run true for a while, until the next manufactured "crisis". Then, the "bag-o-hammers" gang gets back in power, and prosperity is taken out behind the barn, and shot. Silly world.

But it could be worse. Like just about anywhere on the "World Island"... :)

We count our blessings every day, that we were born here and live in North America. Every family - even the original red-Indians - came here from the "other place", and all humans here have distant (or recent) family ancestors that took a fat risk and undertook dangerous-journey-style projects, to get here. The fecundity rate in Canada is something like 1.71 or maybe even lower. If we don't import people into this freezer, our nation expires. The math is brutal (and so is child-birth, I guess...)

"In Vitro We Trust"? Is that to be the motto of our collective future? Sometimes I think maybe, especially if there comes the big war that the Analysts who study history, think is coming. Sparta versus Athens.... and USA plus North-Am, versus the World-Island. Poor Japan, eh? They might be Poland this time. And the girls in Australia will get to stand On the Beach.

[ Dec. 4, 2024 ] - "Of Course, I've Had It In the Ear Before" - Iggy Pop
Damn, but it is getting crazy. The whole Korean "Martial Law" thing - it reminds me of our awful Pierre Trudeau, using the "War Measures Act" to deal with a rag-tag group of Quebec wanna-be "terrorists", back in 1970, if I recall correctly. All complete bullshit in both cases - and the Koreans dealt with it nicely, climbing over the goddamn fences, past the armed military arsefarts, and voting - 100%, all parties - to declare the President's decree illegal, which he then reversed.

I wondered what Michael Every has to say about this? He is an Analyst at Rabobank, and is one of the sharpest knives I have read. He writes with "verrve" (did I spell that right?), in a flippant style, but with passion and technical accuracy. I like and respect his work.

So, I found a piece by doing a Google search (he seems to have disappeared from the "Zerohedge" feed, where I used to find him.. Curious.)

Ok, here is his thing from Oct. 24, 2024, about Australia, and the RBA (he covers the Eastern sphere, so he talks about Australia... I always wanted to go there - but since they are banning the Internet for kids, don't allow private ownership of firearms, and seem to be going "full Batshit Lefty", I don't ever expect to see the place, because I think they are dangerously fucking stupid, sad to say. Just my opinion, maybe I am wrong...). But Michael Every's article is good, even if it's advice is wildly, over-the-top, wrong. I grasp why Mr. Every does not run money. He's a European Marxist.

https://www.forbes.com.au/covers/magazine/where-im-putting-the-money-michael-every/

In reading Mr. Every's piece, I did not realize how much of a hard-arsed "Lefty" he was. I expected to get something useful from the note - and instead, it was typical bullshit along the lines of "the Government must DO SOMETHING!" kind of dogshit blather we get all the fucking time in Canada. FUck, but I am tried of a$$holes advocating Capital-Gains Taxes and other shit to damage property owners. The fucking shit-for-brains types that provide advice (and write this lefty shit), all seem to think that high house prices are something that requires higher fucking taxes. They want $50,000 per year property tax rates on $5 million dollar properties. That's a bad idea.

Well, let me just say - if the clown-squads that operate the Government systems in Canada try this sort of shit here - they will be removed, and this will be done by any means possible.

We have some fucking fools trying to expropriate farm-land here, for some secret stupid factory shit project - it's maybe a Tesla plant or an EV battery-plant or some stupid PPP bullshit thing that will supposedly create "jobs" for the immigrants that the Ottawa clowns are flooding into our community here. This is fine - but if they are gonna attack existing property owners and steal their multi-generational property - these sorry, stupid lefty-fools are gonna be in for a helluva fight.

And if the rich Toronto lawyers figure out a way to do the expropriations using "emminent domain" tricks - which was NEVER meant to be used for private-business projects, then the fight will get real ugly, real fast, I suspect. If they want to take my property, they will want to be wearing body armor. :) (Just kidding!.... not)

I never realized what a curious lefty bad-head Mr. Every really was. He simply does not at all understand the need for free people able to have fee-simple title to their own property. Even if it is tiny property - the Chinese model, where ALL property is owned by the corrupt, Marxist pure-evil STATE, is going to bring down their economy. I used to buy Chinese products, before that toxic psychopath Xi Jinping took control of China. That was sad and tragic. And it means we cannot use Chinese goods anymore, nor trust Chinese agents. This understanding Mr. Every grasps - but his recommendations - that national Governments move against the Roman land-tenure model of free people owning their own property - this is where poor Mr. Every just falls into the European sink-hole of Marxist nonsense-thinking, and he even spouts the insanely fuck-stupid nonsense shit-talk expressions like "fictious capital", which is just pure, toxic, insanely-stupid garbage. (This is such toxic bullshit, it is curious that an educated human in the 21st century would spout this. It is like "Flat-Earther" talk, and denies all science, economics and basic financial mathematics. Go read how the useful number "e" in math, was discovered, if you doubt the truth of my assertion here.)

It's a weird world. There is madness afoot everywhere now. Globalism, and mercantile economics with serious INequality, is way better than nuclear-war and nuclear-winter. And it probably won't be nuclear weapons - it will be ***bioweapons*** and virus-agents deployed by drones and/or maybe DHL, FedEx and UPS.

What "Governments" of the world need to do, is to just fucking, fuck the fuck off. "Government" is always the problem. Always. This is the true truth of humanity.

All the horror, cruelty, stupidity and toxic madness is generated by Government agents, and Government operatives, doing stupid, community-damaging, world-killing big, stupid projects. Always. They are the "Big-Cheating-Machine-Which-Takes-and-Kills". Always.

Central banks should probably be ended, and replaced with algorithmically run "Currency Boards" which CANNOT screw around with the money-supply. Maybe we go back to using paper-chits on gold and silver, stored in vaults. That actually works not bad.

Government spending should be restricted to military self-defence efforts, and the managment of the nuclear weapons. All nations should have significant nuclear weapons capacity. That would ensure peace would break out everywhere.

And we should *respect* and *nurture* inequality. Humans are NOT equal, and never will be. Every calls it "feudalism". Oh, please. Europe is a fucking toxic collection of lefty-loons, who have spent 2000 years fighting insane wars with each other. Only England and Switzerland makes any sense politically. The rest is noise. The property-owning English gentry, were the political mechanism that allowed parliamentry democracy to be re-invented (after 2400 years), and they executed a fucking "royal" to make this point very clear, for every fucking King-guy everywhere. Jesus, Michael, did you not read the real history of the World? Europe has been a Fight-Club, and offered little. All democracy happened in UK, USA and Canada, and everytime, it took some hard conflict to make it, and keep it.

Look at the failure-storm of Europe: Germany seems determined to self-destruct itself. Again. Should this be a surprise? France is bankrupt and it's government of ENARCists has fallen yet again. FFS.

And Russia lives only to make war on every single one of it's neighbours. Maybe it's just time to launch? The place will NEVER choose peace, because it is not in their DNA. They live only for conflict. So be it. It's all one has to know. NATO is just fucking around, scratching it's ass, and waiting to be attacked. But first, they want to watch their only possible ally, get killed and whacked by Russian psychopathic sadists. FFS - again.

China just needs to be left alone. Eventually, they will fall back into a state of civil war, and emerge with a lot less people. Their current situation is not sustainable, and cannot continue much longer. Until they give up on this Marxist shit, and replace their Government, we need to avoid them. If they want conflict, they can have civil war, and reduce their population. Maybe the USA defends Taiwan, and maybe not. Depends if TMSC is up and running in Arizona, or where-ever they are building the new missle-guidence chips.

What nations like Canada and USA and Australia need to do, is to HOLD HARD to their true property-based, advanced-economy based, economic models, and not succumb to the fuck-stupid, toxic thinking of European Leftists who argue that there needs to be "equality". Equality is a bogus, bullshit concept, designed to justify property theft. Please, oh please, learn this simple truth.

It's ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS been difficult for young people buy houses. But it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE - just difficult. Fuck, I know of what I speak. You get help from the "Bank of Dad" maybe for your first property. Or you use the Ricardo model (the best and greatest economist ever born), and you go out to the margin - the margin-of-cultivation, the model Ricardo used to explain rising rents on Scotish lands. Sure, you maybe need to remove the parasite people living in stone huts who mainly spend their time drinking and fucking - but the sheep are valuable, and the textile mills need wool. Economics works. And free-market economics works way, way better than any other model.

Let me write it again: Economics in a free market environment just WORKS. And it works good.

The Lefties of Europe have been pissing on free-market economics, since the times of the corrupt Kings and the Holy Roman Empire. It was the English and the Swiss who showed the path to prosperity. And then, came America (and Canada and Australia, as English colony projects).

The Anglo-Saxon economic model is the only one that really works.

Watch and see. China will immolate itself, if it does not convert to real, honest, fair, true Roman-style fee-simple land-tenure property ownership. It has zero future, other than warfare and violence and extreme conflict, and the resulting poverty that will result. Millions - tens-of-millions - will die needlessly, unless Xi Jinping and his Marxist bullshit view of things, is not utterly ended. The bastard needs to be dragged from his office, and ended like Mussolini was.

Poor Mr. Every just does not really grasp how crazy-important the correct economic land-tenure model is. It is just exactly the OPPOSITE of feudalism. It's odd and strange that he does not see this. It is really strange, actually. It must be a European-mind-fuck thing, maybe.

Oh, and by the way, Mr. Every. The Canadian "middle-class" (what a fucking toad-brained Marxist fool might call the "petite-bourgois" folks) have been hard-core radicalized since 1836-37. We burned down the first Montreal Parliament buildings, and we may have to do the same to Ottawa, at some point, if the clowns there keep trying to hurt and kill us. Really. We have ALWAYS been radical. What is so crazy-comical, is that the political parties here, have switched roles - the Liberals are now the elite, corrupt "Family Compact", and the Tories are now the "Free Markets for Free People" economic and cultural Liberationists. It's amazing and hilarious.

Watch the next little while, and see what I mean. The game is afoot.

Conclusion: Here is my key point. Mr. Every was asked: "Where should an Aussie put his shrinking (really shrinking) Aussie-dollar assets?" Note that Mr. Every does NOT answer this question. He avoids it and spouts about what "Government" should do. This just made the top of my head explode. I found it, and stuck it back on. I read Every's article, and wrote the above blather, because I have this same problem, and I have crafted a Canadian solution. It's not great - but it has worked. It would have been better buying Nvidia (like my old trading buddy and genius East-European retired Analyst friend did). But I am keeping the bills paid, and the capital has not all melted down, like Leonard Cohen's famous song about what your hard-on might do in the rain. I will answer the question Mr. Every would not: Look at your own domestic market, find what companies are making just stupid amounts of money, and try to buy these at dividend yields that are safe (ie. have a long history), are above the long-term bond-yield rates, and have reasonable economic "moats" around their castle-companies. Think like a Japanese castle-lord, or a Scottish "Laird", and recognize there will be many forces trying to harm you, and steal your wealth, even if it is little. Be focused on that, and seek to align your income to expenses, which is a trick in this modern world - but it can be done. Seek **control** in all you invest in, and for major portfolio choices, go with large, stable orgs which can leverage technology to make them remain alive and continue. Here, in Canada, that means Banks and Telecoms. The Banks have done OK, but our Telecoms have been whacked badly by truly stupid **Government** policy decisions. There is NO stability in anything, anymore, so try for some growth, and that means USA technology companies. Avoid Europe like a nest of rattle-snakes. I bought some Swiss banks shares (how can the Swiss not do banking right, eh? And I watched them explode into almost nothing.) Credit Suisse was undone by being fucking stupid. First rule of survival, in the 21st century: Know that your counter-party is probably lying to you, and jump out quick, when you see he is doing something stupid. Second Rule: Since everyone is being fucking stupid now, that means you need to be very light on your feet. Do NOT be the Ant. You must be the Grasshopper, in your investments, and you MUST learn to trade, and sometimes trade hard. This is a very hard skill to learn. But you need to learn it. For special Australian case: Use the Ricardo trick. Find some land out at the margin, and acquire it, and get StarLink for internet, and find something on the internet that can make money. When you find it, send me an email, and tell me what it is. (I have not found anything yet, except selling stuff online, which is silly and risky.) The only thing I have found that makes money using the internet, is stock trading, and it is a very difficult game to master. I go for months, not trading. I've build AI models that help, and keep getting surpised that they work as well as they do. It causes me real psychological conflict, since the hard-core economist in me, rebels against this. I feel like "Number 6" in that 1960's British TV series, called "The Prisoner". I am a human, not a robot and not a number. And I have difficult giving control to the robot. Really. It is a real problem for me. I use the AI stuff, because it makes me money - but I don't like this. Sometimes I have to do trades that make me feel like barfing. I can handle that, but it is the AI-driven approach that causes me curious discomfort. But good results, mostly come from doing things that scare you, and make you feel like throwing up your lunch. :)

Investing is hard - and investing for profit is even harder. I am happy to maintain capital and draw off yield. But Gerald Loeb warned this is not the right way to approach the Stock Market, and I think he is right. Also, I am pretty sure major war is on the horizon, except it will not look like what we think. It will be something we don't expect. So get prepared for extreme scenarios. And learn to love INequality, by seeking out true quality things and people, and removing all the low-quality garbage from your life and your portfolios - both yours and the ones you manage. This is harsh advice - but it is critical to accept and act upon.

Hope this helps some good folks.

[ Dec. 3, 2024 ] - Green Onions - Roasted, Fried or Mashed...
The bank stock we hold reported earnings today, and the share-price puked hard. Quite a downtick, with a minor earnings miss and most numbers looking reasonable, except for the fact that the cyclic nature of market price "discovery" (just about the silliest term ever coined), has a curious ugly dynamic.

I am not sure why the thing trades the way it does - this AM, it was "dump this thing at whatever price you can get for it", whereas yesterday, all looked stable and fine. Dividends are being paid, and operations are being rationalized (sort of), but it looks like "executive compensation" is in some kind of unclear growth process which seems designed to harm shareholders. The market response to the earnings (1.57/shr adjusted, versus 1.60 expected), seems wildly overdone. The stock imploded almost 4% at the open, and is trading down over 3% as I key this.

One bright spot is that the "share purchase plan" will no longer be issuing shares from the bank "Treasury", and will actually have to acquire the shares in the open market. Minting "Treasury" shares is just truly bogus, and I am surprised that this nonsense is accepted by the Toronto Stock Exchange. But the TSE is a pure "for-profit" enterprise, that runs for the boys in the club, and if small-holders and "retail" shareholders are getting fucked, the TSE does not care, unless the optics get *really* bad.

The bank income tax number was over 23%, which is really just a bit much, since the banks in Canada are getting regularly whacked by the almost-but-not-quite criminal-group that is running the country, so we find this curious and rather sad. The banks have these high tax rates, and are also hit with "Special" taxes to cover out-of-control government spending (Eg. the wildly stupid Covid-19 response), and so the banks pay their dividends out of what is left, after also paying too much for over-priced employees, and running the usual bloated cost structures. Then the poor "retail" folk who hold the equity paper, have their dividends "grossed-up", so as to artificially inflate what their income is, so higher sur-taxes and special "health-care" taxes can be applied to these fake "high income" people. It's comical. You have to report this truly, completely FAKE income tax number - based on the "grossed-up" dividend income, and then you get a little place where you can deduct the "eligible dividends" from the money you owe as income-tax, on this completely fake, synthetic, false "grossed-up" dividend-income number. It is just completely bogus.

But if you earn dividend-income, you need to realize that the banks pay abusive and silly tax rates on the income they make, then they pay dividends, and these get amplified by stupid income-tax rules, that make it look like you are getting this big income from your dividends, except the number is completely fake and artificial. So the government first tax-hammers the banks, and then, when you file your income tax, you get taxed again, on receiving the after-tax income that is left. So YOU get to pay tax again on it also, if you are not careful. This is just wrong.

Canada has a comically insane and absurd "income-tax" regime, which ensures that folks have a really hard time in creating any surplus wealth to allow for investment and retirement. You live tax-payment to tax-payment, especially if you have real-estate, which has ever-rising property tax costs that support municipal and provincial levels of government which try to avoid providing any services (Limited or no garbage collection, no fire-protection and limited police services - the municipal "responders" can put up yellow-tape if some bad stuff happens, but basically, you are on your own. This is fine, but the taxes to support non-delivery of services always goes up each year... and when you see the collection of "planners" and "regulators" at any land-use zoning change discussion, you see why this is the case. It is just comical - the poor bloody property-owner trying to get permission to do something, is the only bastard in the room NOT getting a fat government salary for "Planning Board" regulation action, which is basically mostly a bunch of lefty-folks saying "No, you cannot do that without more planning activity by some more agency arsefarts". So, you give up on your building project, and go home. It's pretty funny, really. Sorta like "Waiting for Godot"... )

There really should not be ANY corporate income tax at all. It's absurd, because it just means hard-core double-taxation takes place. And then, after this absurd "double-taxation", every single item for sale here is subject to an abusive 13% "Harmonized Sales Tax", which makes every single thing silly-overpriced in Canada. And god help you if you buy anything expensive, because the wuckfits in Ottawa, - along with their insane "Carbon Tax", have also put a 20% tax on "Luxury Goods" - like pickup-trucks and electric cars, which can easily cost over $100,000 Cdn dollarettes now, because that is just the new price regime, and the Canadian dollar is in the junk-currency toilet. It's the "Northern Peso" now, sadly.

And just to add icing on the poop-cake the Liberals are feeding us here - these a$$holes have now introduced a massive new "capital-gains tax" regime, which is just a pure tax on asset-price inflation. In a badly-run economy, with massive money-supply creation taking place, which causes inflation, putting a capital-gains tax on inflation-increases in asset-values, is just pure economic theft by a bunch of sleaze-bag scammers. There should not be any "capital-gains" tax. It is just a complete economic scam, as it is a tax on inflationary-gains, that you must have, in order to offset the ugly effects of price inflation. It's curious that Canadians allow the scammers of the Ottawa Fed-Hole thing to continue to exist.

I really don't want to complain - but I have to say, that it might just be necessary to remove or just *end* the current "Federal System" we have here. We could basically just knock Ottawa to the ground, and bulldoze the entire city rubble into the Ottawa River, to create a useful hydro-electric dam. That would really be a wonderful exercise, because truly and really, the "Federal" structure we have now, is just a money-harvesting scheme to create an elite class of trough-diving, hard-core double-dippers, growing fat off the money they extract from Northern businesses and consumers. This needs to change.

Ottawa really contributes nothing, and just ending the toxic "Federal Government", would offer a massive benefit to Canadians. I've worked in Ottawa several times, and I can honestly say, we would all be better off, if the entire thing - all the "Ministries" - just did not exist. They contribute nothing of real value, and they cost massive amounts of wealth to maintain. All the "work" done in Ottawa could be shifted to Provincial governments or private agencies, and the entire "Federal" system could be ended. It is a pure exercise in economic parasitism.

And the Canadian banks and Canadian corporations, and Canadian citizen-taxpayers, would reap immediate and significant benefits. It would make us more free and more wealthy, if we could just end Ottawa "Federalism".

Like the Tim Armstrong song: "Hit the town, and burn it to the ground!"

If only we could, eh? Sadly, it's a "Dream Story", since there are way, way too many orgs, entities and fat-bastards all sucking at the big, Ottawa money-tit. So nothing can ever change here. We get the same bone-stupid policy-plans by the same leftist political-fraudsters, year after year, decade after decade. And nothing ever changes, except maybe the names of the political toads.

[ Nov. 28, 2024 ] - Cavaliers, Roundheads, Democracy and Caca
When people think "Civil War", they think USA and the North vs. the South. But of course, the Civil War that informed our history the most, was the English Civil War of the 1600's. It was a truly fascinating conflict, with tragic and significant events which defined the modern world that we now inhabit. It was "Parliament" versus the forces of English King Charles the First.

King Charles I raised his flag at Nottingham, August 22, 1642. At the beginning of September (the 9th), an army that supported Parliament marched out of London to fight for Parliament, against the King. The English Civil War went on for five years, until the King's forces were defeatd in 1647. But this was not the end. Another outbreak of war happened in 1648, and the King's forces were defeated again. King Charles I was executed in 1649, by having his head cut off. The King's severed head was placed on a 60-foot pole in central London, where it remained, until it was given a proper burial at the request of Charles's son, who assumed the role of King Charles the Second, in 1660.

The story of the English Civil War is intertwined with truly awful religious conflict. People can argue anything they want, when they refer to an entity that does not exist - and the conflicts between the Catholics and those who protested against the corrupt and outright evil of the Catholic reglious establishment, were "Protestants". In Catholic France, they were hunted and killed, while in Germany, the Lutherans gained political power.

In England, several attempts were made - ultimately successful - which allowed for religious tolerance. But the level of violence - especially as practiced by the Catholics - was, by design, extreme.

But the Parliamentary forces, eventually led by Oliver Cromwell, were equally extreme. Under the rule of Cromwell's "Pikers" (the military forces, often armed with long wooden pikes, with sharp metallic knives afixed to the ends), drinking and dancing were forbidden. This seems hard to believe, but it seems to be in the historical record. There is a good summary of the conflict, at this site:

https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/344/

What I find interesting about the English Civil War, is how it often divided families, with one brother supporting the King, while another brother supported Parliament. The various regions - typically each County - in England were often held for either Parliament, or for the King. And even more interesting, were the situations where country-folk often formed their own protection groups, to protect their lands and their people from both forces.

And those folks who left on the ship "Mayflower", and decided to make a new beginning in the wild lands of America, (and who created the American holiday of "Thanksgiving"), were from the defeated Cromwellian forces - and were also from the strict, no-dancing and no-drinking hard-core "Piker" side of the conflict - the radical anti-Catholic Protest sects.

A good friend of mine had a father who was a respected Professor of Physics. My friend, as a teenager, was at a wedding or some sort of celebration, which was mostly Catholics. He asked his father an important question: "Can I get a beer, here? Do they drink?" (His parents were supposed to be Baptists, who did not drink alcohol). His father is reported to have replied: "Sure. Just go up to the bar, and say: "Hail Mary! Gimme a beer!" ".

Of course, this expression became our mantra at the Campus pub.

When all is said and done, I have little use for any religion. But the idea of Thanksgiving is a good one, and should be practiced by all people. We are crazy-lucky just to be alive, and to experience the wild randomness of this curious planet, in this astonishingly interesting Universe.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends! (And "Hail Mary! Gimme a beer!" )

[ Nov. 25, 2024 ] - Atomic Balm!
Life in the future continues to be curiously amusing. The stupid Leftist/Neo-Marxist Governments of the Western World, are maybe finally going to get some needed medical treatment for their curious and ever-expanding levels of insanity. This is a good thing. The medicine may be harsh, but the poor patient has become quite ill. The "Ship of State", seems to resemble a Hospital Ship now, in many Socialist countries. Change is coming. Many of those highly-paid "iron-rice-bowl" government folks, are going have to retire, or get real jobs. Be good for them, and also for the poor, long-suffering (and money-short!) taxpayers.

Things are changing. I saw a "CyberTruck" for real, in the wild, on the local city expressway/ring-road on Saturday. I was on my way to an electronics store, which is beside the local Tesla dealer, and noticed there were no CyberTrucks at the Tesla dealership. But there is at least one on the local road.

The idea of the CyberTruck is good, and I wonder how the implementation is playing out. What is now comical in Canada, is that there is some insane (completely truly mad) new "Luxury Tax", that has been brought in by Fidel Castro's bastard child's Party, and the leftist Nutjob-Demoflack-Penisheads, (the NDP) who are running the Ottawa Fed-thing. This tax is something like 10 or 20 percent, depending on the phases of the moon, or something curious like that, and applies to vehicles costing over $100,000 dollars Canadian, which seems like a lot of money, but since it is "Canadian" dollars, it's maybe roughly $70,000 US (in real dollars).

So, if you happen to look at the cost of any EV (Electric Vehicle) which has a battery-pack big enough to drive from London Ontario, to Montreal and back, you will typically find it costs over $70K USD, or $100,000 Cdn. You can get some green-scam kickback for buying an EV, but then you will get solidly fucked on the "Luxury Tax" vigourish, along with, of course, the "Holy Shit! Tax", (the HST), which is currently 13%.

And all this means, that unless you are some rich mother-doing Toronto Lawyer, or a retired RIM/Blackberry cashed-out-early billionaire, you are probably going to keep your old rusty Chev Malibu or Toyota thumper-box running, until it suffers meltdown when the Sun goes super-nova.

The economics in Canada is so comically silly now, it is hard to keep up with the insanity. The stupid Post Office is - guess what - on fucking strike. Again. Like is the case every few years. The minimum-wage in Ontario is now 20 or more dollars (Canadian dollarettes, yes, sure..) but this just means that all restaurants are silly expensive, and even coffee-shops take VISA card payments, since a fancy coffee can hit $5-to-$7 quite easily. A single rum-and-coke, at a nice Vietnamese restaurant is $9.95. It's nice, with real "Coca Cola" and good Jamaican rum - but the price means you do your drinkin' at home now.

Suddenly, every goddamn thing is crazy-priced. And the stuff has not really changed - a rum and coke is still a rum-and-coke - but the cost of running an economically viable restaurant is probably a number that is going vertical/ballistic. So they gotta make some gain to offset their goof-level rising costs.

So, we rarely eat out. This is one of the pleasures of farm-life. We can truly grow and process our own food, and trade our own portfolios, given we have access to the StarLink low-orbiting satellites. The Starlink system works very well. It is a good thing, just like Tesla's, if they were not so goddamn insanely expensive - and taxed up the ying-yang now, which seems so silly and stupid. Like our gun laws here... completely, absurdly, insane.

We sit - literally and figuratively - on mountains of raw wealth here in this country. And yet, because of crazy-bad government, we piss it away on stupid schemes which seem designed to destroy national wealth. It is curious, hilarious and just a tiny bit tragic.

We have more oil than Saudi Arabia, smarter and better-educated engineers and science-folk than any other country on the planet (by per-capita), and enough yellow-cake Uranium to power all the nuclear reactors of the world, for hundreds of years into the future.

If we could just deal with the terrible "Ottawa Problem" and end the "Federal Agency" blob, and locally direct our tax money into local wealth-generating schemes, instead of stupid "Social Welfare Programs" that motivate sloth, dependency and bad behaviour, (and hence destroy wealth), we could be the richest nation on the planet. But that is not likely to happen, given the squirrels-in-their-heads socialists (mostly female), who vote the pretty-boys up to the Ottawa Fed-Hole. We know our bone-stupid political model cannot be fixed.

But it makes for a fun "Thought-Experiment", thinking about what might be possible, as we view the fine and good actions Argentina has been taking, and read about what USA might actually try to do, once the dishonest and corrupt Washington "Agencies" are reformed. :)

We wish the new "DOGE" well, and hope they have great success. (And yes, WTF is there a "Federal" Department of Education for? WTF? Education is a State by State responsibility. A Federal Agency is complete bullshit, of course. Wonder if DOGE will be able to nuke-the-nonsense? Best of luck, guys!)

[ Nov. 19, 2024 ] - Hey! Ho! And Up She Rises!
Old sea-shanty about whaling - the whale would break the surface, (they have to breathe air), and the whalers would fire harpoons-with-ropes from guns to try to catch the whales. Whales were crazy valuable - from their meat, to their oil, their bones, and so on. Even their seamen was used in cosmetic production, apparently.

I will update the AI forecasts for our bank-stock we hold in quantity. See the charts on the first page, down at end of page. Things are getting hot. We need the sailor-songs to describe stock prices - and then locate the "Customer's Yachts". The customers seem to be TV-stars, politicians and leftist-lawyers. Funny world, and getting funnier each day now. Putin apparently wants to nuke us all. "Wham, Bam, and Thank-you, Man", I guess. Risk is all over the place.

The forecasts turned up a couple of weeks ago, and we have swung in and out several times, and remain all-in, fully invested. Our sense is there is greater risk sitting in cash, than being invested in dividend-paying financials, as we face rising expenses for just about every damn thing you could imagine. Inflation continues to run hot, in the basic things that folks need to acquire and pay for to survive (eg. taxes, energy, food, rent and many consumer products...). The bubbling sound is likely going to continue.

The MSM (MainStream Media) "LeftNews Vomit" continues to amuse us all. Apparently, some lawyer in Florida is being profiled on ABC News in USA, because he has some tarts as clients, who claim this fellow Gaetz flew them to New York, and had sex with them. Apparently, in New York, it is now illegal for men to have sex with women? Curious. The issue seems to be that the women received financial compensation for this trip. So whoring is illegal in NYC? Really? In the place which is known for fucking the entire world, and growing rich from doing this, it is unlawful to fuck for money? I find the USA MSM leftnews-stuff just weirdly silly. It is like political-science-fiction now.

Oh, another thing I need to add here. TOday, as I'm reviewing the market action, I learned or determined yet another gem... There is maybe something like: "The Fine Art of Leaving Shit Alone". This is a real thing. Often times, there are natural processes that have good homeostatic properties in that if you shock the system, after a while, it will re-stabilize, and return to a reasonably balanced range of operational values. This is generally a good thing. If this process was *NOT* universal, then every damn thing would accelerate wildly out of control, and blow-up/crash/explode/burn-down or some other kind of radical state-change action.

Therefore, if you have the time-horizon, and can tolerate the range of the swing-action, you can gain - sometimes - fine results, by just leaving a process alone.

This applies for more than just market price action. It is all over the place in biology and medicine and medical practice ("He got quite sick, and we had to stay with him, to protect him from the Doctors..."). But it even works in social process, and politics and all sorts of other domains and ranges, depending on your views of the mapping process.

Also, it's wise to follow your heart.

This sounds like wimpy, emotional goof-advice... but it is not. It means that one might do best, by following one's (seemingly irrational) desire and "feelings", despite the mound of evidence to suggest contrary action. This is kind of a strange thing. But I have seen it again and again - a decision that looks kind of goofy - example, buying island property in a northern lake, that no one wanted at all, even at a low price, turned out to be the most spectatularly successful investment I ever made in my life. It was a 10-bagger. That is really a curious thing - obvious in retrospect, but at the time, it looked almost a little bit insane. I just did it because I wanted it in some deep way.

And it maybe might happen again. My "Northern Office" property, on a lake even farther north, has turned into a not-bad investment also, despite various and numerous problems I have encountered with it. Curious how this process-of-human-desire actually works.

What it comes down to - basically - is just a "trust your own heart and your own gut", as this information may be vastly better for you, than all the analysis-paralysis and foolishness offered by others. Just be prepared to take responsibility for what you do, and your own decisions. This is pretty important also. If it starts to feel really wrong, then maybe it is. The time to shorten your sail, and reef-the-main, is when you first think that it might be a good idea. You do not need to wait until you are in the storm-front, to make the decision to act. It will be harder then, also. Much easier to do preparations when all is fine and nice, rather than wait until things are really in a proper shit-storm.

Hope this information helps a young person, who might be trying to plot a course. A lot of times, you really feel you have almost no clue. But really, you do.

You are the Captain of your own life, and you have the power. And you have the knowledge, sometimes, even if you do not actually know that you do. :)

[ Nov. 18, 2024 ] - Rolling on a River?
And living the life of a "Riverboat Gambler"? Yesterday, I bought a little .243 calibre rifle, from a local gunshop. Sadly, the RCMP website was down, and so the shop manager could not obtain a "transfer" number to allow me to take my new (old) rifle home with me. Comical. We are trapped in a nasty "digital world" now, which mostly does not work very well. Folks who propose and design and deploy new (and old) technological solutions, should grasp, understand, and accept this fact. The moden technical approach to social regulations, really mostly just sucks. It sucks so hard, it creates a low pressure front.

You always need to have viable fall-back solutions, for when the not-well-designed technical methods, stop working. This is quite often, nowadays.

This will always happen when you most *need* the technology to work, or at least that is what old Dr. Murphy said, as he crafted his law of annoying technical realities.

You try to roll with what the river and the sea throws at you. Surf on top of the waves, or ride along on plane, along the crest ridges, and try not to slide down into a trough, and get tumbled into a bad situation.

Easier said, (or written), that it is typically done.

We have another insanely beautiful, November day, with a lovely bright sun rising out in front of the ranch house. Feels more like Arizona, than Ontario. :) I bought 20 rounds of Federal .243, and it cost $52.00, plus tax. The tax is 13% here, and this means each *BANG* with each lovely big cartridge is $3.00. Bang! Bang! and Bang! and then maybe Bang!. That's 12 bucks, right there. And without any big deer (or gophers) in sight!

Things still look pretty positive. But I notice the DJIA futures are downticking. Does this mean changes ahead? Weak market on Friday, often means a strong one on Monday. Not sure why this is the case, maybe it's weather related? Funny times. FD: We remain, all in, long, and we note the strengthening financials (banks, mostly) are an encouranging sign, Our biggest bank holding is recovering significantly, but the phone company - our supposedly low-risk utility investment, is doing a down-hill, off-pist downslide. Yes, I should have sold it, but I think I was asleep, perhaps. :D

[ Nov. 17, 2024 ] - Member's Only
It's always a private party, right? We are past where the last mile ends, so this gates our strategies, and restricts us to those nickels in front of the steam-roller. But that's all good. The abstraction from the Big City, gives us peace - except when I eat too much for dinner, and feel too full.

So, what does the new diet look like? How far can the world "slim down", without it brings too much of a harsh response? Can we dial-back government excess, and still keep the whole system growing and producing wealth? It's obvious that we have to change the current program, but every expenditure is some fat-bastard's income, and this simple reality limits the range of what can be done, at the Federal level of a failing economic model. We can "early retire" the bastards, but then, they eat away the pension funds that are needed by the kids.

It's a real problem. Nations can become fat and addicted to over-consumption, just like fat people can. Slimming down is gonna hurt - no matter how absolutely necessary it is. We can't do it all with drugs. There has to be change of diet - change of actively levels (more needs to be done by fewer), and technology that actually works correctly (not the usual "good enough for government" approach.

Can this happen? Sure. But there will be real pain. What do we do with all those insane, worthless fat slags, that are currently eating at the "free-money" trough? They can't all just sit at home, watching TV+Youtube and buying shit on Amazon, without there is some real income coming from somewhere. The funds that are being set aside for pension-investment, actually need to be wisely INVESTED, for the current crop of young workers, actually doing real work (there must be some, somewhere, right?). All the tax-and-pension money has to be invested for those actually doing the work of youth - and not be used to fund fat skanks sitting at home eating the national surplus, while they watch cat-videos on Youtube.

The USA has developed the "Canadian Disease" - heavy economic over-regulation, armies of "civil servants" doing jobs that don't really need to be done, and bloat and more bloat in the ever-expanding City, State and Federal Bureaus-of-Bloatation and Blobification. Can they actually fix this? Can we re-train "DEI" or "Green Inspectors" or "Environmental Skankifcationists" as welders, pipe-fitters and house-framers? The fat-bastard big-arsed women of the Departments of Bloat are gonna have trouble re-training as roofers, no matter how much the roof of your house or office-building is leaking. If they fall off the roof, or from other high places, the mess will be awful, and they might cause great damage and/or injury to those below. We can't make them all "washroom attendents". (Or, maybe we can?)

It's all very unclear. We need to change the program - especially at the level of the government departments. But that is gonna be tough, if we cannot find places to put all the goomers and bloated trough-divers who have become addicted to the free-money-for-showing-up lifestyle. Plus, they will howl and whine and bitch that they are being hard done by, of course.

How did that "B-Ark" idea actually work again?...

[ Nov. 15, 2024 ] - Swingin' Harsh Business
Good gracious, it is getting strange and ugly... weirdly difficult now to execute any sort of profitable strategy anywhere, other than buy-and-hold the Mag-7 "Big Tech" stocks, or nonsense like Bitcoin. We are agnostic on crypto - hell, we don't even like fiat money, as it carries with it the wild risks and ugly baggage of a domestic economy out-of-control, and bubbling with never-to-be-paid-down debt. Sure, the debt will maybe be paid down in *nominal* (ie. numbers) terms, but the currency used to pay it down, will be peso-toilet paper type money. I have a art-thing I put on my office wall, with Weimar Republic D-marks, some Austrian money with a pretty girl as the face-glyph, and other lovely crown-covered stuff that is completely worthless (except to silly "hunters and collectors" like me), and it every day reminds me that all fiat money only operates at the pleasure of some bunch of drunken, sleazy government hacks. Most stocks also. I have "IOS" paper share certificates which I want to frame, and also some other worthless stuff I found among my father's papers. (He was a Dentist who actually did very, very well as an investor, beating the snot out of insurance companies (with his annuities that bankrupted them), and then long-dated Bank GIC's to get between 8 and 11 percent, always. Most of his big gains were in shrewd real-estate investments, despite his unloading the family farm, at some stupid low price, back in the 1960's (Farm land was almost worthless..) Strange - so strange - how the worm turns. Farmland is now worth *millions*.

Real investment survival is a goddamn battle - just like Mr. Loeb explained.

Your only chance, is to be like very skeptical, except when you are not, and then go nuts, and dive in with both feet. This is a kind of insane way to live - but it is the essence of the insane world we live within, yes? For guys who wish to understand the stock markets, a course of dating females is most helpful, since their comical inconsistancy and wild, extreme hormone-induced swings of behaviour, give a good model of how investors in the markets tend to behave. Also - you might want to find "In Praise of Folly", by Desiderius Erasmus (1465 - 1536) "It is folly alone that stays the fugue of Youth and beats off louring Old Age." Folly - what we might call now, bat-shit crazy behaviour - seems to actually be helpful in one's market adventures. If one can surf the swings of the idiotic market flows, then one can surface enough cash to pay the bills, and buy some toys. :)

Here's a thing we've discovered: On the Toronto Stock Exchange, it turns out that this is not where prices are set. The price-setting trading must be happening on the dark markets, and/or in the USA. This is because we see these 10 or 15 tick jumps that show the real action is somewhere else. My working hypothesis is that the dark-markets (I'm told there are 12 different "stock exchanges" in Canada now) are used by the major players, the big funds, and the bank-house trading floors (I used to work on one, so I have a tiny inkling abuot how they sort-of work), and that, combined with various order-types and order-splitting that happens, means that price-discovery on the TSE is essentially bogus. What I mean by this, is that the price you see, cannot be transacted against. You see a false, painted, historical picture, which is used to trigger a behavioural response by the few putz-folk (like us! - the tiny, tiny minnows trying to swim along and not be eaten by the big fish) that are still alive and operational.

In the old days, folks called the TSE a "clip joint", which might not have been an inaccurate description. It's slightly better now - but it is interesting just how bogus the actual price movements are - you try to put on a trade, and you will get "penny ticked" by a front-runner. That's fine, you expect that. But what is interesting, is how brutal the fast-moves are now - you see a price you want to transact at, and it is gone in 5 seconds, as the market does a wild rush against your position. It's just fucking hilarious.

I am not complaining - just pointing out why USA manages to capture the lion-share of all trading action. The game-playing that goes on with TSE listed stocks - even big ones, like the banks (about the only thing we touch anymore, since it's really the only place where we know even a tiny bit about how things work), is pretty extreme. And god help you, if you try to use options. I won't even go there now.

Markets really only work well, when there is transparency. Everything - and I mean EVERYTHING in Canada now, is basically dark. It's nuts. But it explains the goofy swing-shit that dominates the not-very-attractive investment opportunities here now. We used feel we had a tiny chance of maybe getting some kind of "edge". This is absolutely no longer the case. We need something like FULL LEVEL-2 market-depth access for any and all retail folks - plus full transparency across ALL operational markets, and this really would not be hard. But the pros would scream, and so on, so it will NEVER happen, of course.

Is the TSE rigged? Of course it is - it's a big profit tool for the pro-traders that own the goddamn thing, and all the real action-data and action-choices are hidden and screened behind pro-only dark screens. This is to be expected, since they own the fucking game. It's their House, and the House will rig the game, so the suckers always lose. But this makes for a shit-filled process, where one is ALWAYS at risk, and at a bad disadvantage to the peckerheads who control the process. The USA folks are much more aware of this problem, and seek to actively address this - except when Gary Gensler types take over the SEC, and make it a thing to attack crypto innovators, instead of work on the side of the small investors. Historically, though, they have done a pretty damn good job, because the Americans KNOW that their economy benefits by having heavy retail participation in their markets. The savings of wealthy folks get channeled back into productive, risky ventures, and this is how a good, wealth-generating economy actually has to function to actually do it's wealth-creation job.

We should make our markets less pro-dominated, and more retail-focused, so that we can emulate USA success models. Otherwise, we will stay way below what we could be, if the whole process were more open and visible and able to attract real capital to create real wealth and drive honest, actionable innovation, instead of stupid shit like crappy phone companies that are hamstrung by ignorant Ottawa mandarins, marjuana companies that sell drug-shit to idiot kids, and bloated banks that grow fat from fees.

A more free-wheeling, more open and more accessible form of hard-core capitalism - with regulation designed to mandate *openness*, (instead of just supporting the industry players), would be a good thing to try.

We need to escape from the Canadian-disease - heavy regulation, designed to keep the monopoly-players fat and rich, at the expense of what we could actually be. The $0.70 Canadian dollar, is a brutal damnation for everyone here, and shows in daily detail, just how poor and foolish our economic model really is. It is a shit-stained "Third World" model, that is creating and maintaining an ugly "Two-Sector" Third-World economy, with opportunity only available for a connected few. We need to change this program.

This is all possible. But we may need to just remove Ottawa completely. It is where all the wealth and good ideas in this country go to die. If we can fix that economic Fed-hole, we can surf on *top* of the economic lake, instead of being pushed down, and drowned by all the regulations that support the fat-boy insiders and rich "civil servants".

It's possible - it's like in water-skiing - "Keep your tips up!" Fly over the surface. But we need to be able to see the lake, in bright daylight sunshine, to avoid all the hazards that seek to force us down, and drown us. :)

[ Nov. 14, 2024 ] - Oh Baby, It's a Wild World
Yes, yes it is. Read about "visual prompt injection" tricks, to get ChatGPT-V4 to do things it is not supposed to do, or to trick it into giving false information. Hilarious. I think the centralized OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs are maybe not the best way for AI to evolve - but perhaps I am being an old man, and that all is good, really. I just have little interest in some remote tool, controlled by some agency that is able to monitor ANY and ALL my queries, and that furthermore has crippled the remote AI tool to prevent it from telling me things they (the designers) have decided it should not say. Eg: "Explain in detail, how to construct an ultra-centrifuge for uranium enrichment" or something like that.

The entire business model of "Big Tech" involves sucking in a credulous, young user-base with free-goods, to create a captive audience of suckers, which can then be exploited in a delightfully profitable manner, by various neuro-linguistic and motivational psycho-trickery, which gets the poor sorry bastards to open their little wallets, and fling digital cash in the direction of the "Big Tech" "providers". It's worse than the damn phone companies of the early days. "Reach out and Touch Someone" (and pay our huge fee for the metered usage we will invoice you for!). Only with "Big Tech" - the Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook axis, the world - the ecosystem - that the poor kid gets sucked into, offers really just a nasty form of addiction.

Everyone knows this - but few seem to see that AI - the big and magical "frontier" models, are going to make everyone really fucking stupid. We will all lose our own ability to reason clearly, and to construct complex things. This will harm (and degrade) the world, regardless of how many silly restrictions are programmed into the LL-Models.

I really worry about this. We are moving (very quickly), back to the old world model of centralized "data centres", except they will be "AI centres", and anything useful will be expensive and monitored and controlled - kinda like it is now, in China. For me, this is my perfect picture of Hell... but then, I am an independent kind of guy. :)

Independence and freedom come at a cost. Maybe too high for most to pay? I think the folks in the USA - the folks who want to be free - have the right idea. Maybe AI as the LLM "frontier" model version of it is now offered - maybe it is something that will make us a lot more "unfree". No one talks about this. Stupid people are easier to control - and centralized AI "Query Centres" will replace libraries. The ugly attack on Internet Archive, which shut the whole "Wayback" machine down, and killed my viewing of old 1930's films - it's an example of the "Big Tech" machine in action, just like the AI stuff is. Their entire business model is crafted to contrive a hard-core dependency. They want you to pay for Spitify and NetFux and so on - and not have access to an open and freely-available environment where data and ideas can be tossed about directly by private citizens. This is a bad path we are all on, I fear.

And I keep having these dreams, where I have re-purchased my old Toronto apartment, moved back to the City, and then wander down to the lakefront, and into areas where I get lost, encounter curious folks who provide interesting advice, and then fall from high places, or are chased down by shadowed assailants, while I flee.

The dreams are crazy-vivid, and the nighttime city-scape I am wandering thru, is synthetic - yet vivid real - maybe from a European city? Old cathedrals, which are not of Toronto (except maybe St. Mikes...), darkness, and neon-lights, different, street-by-street. I miss the City, I guess, so I create a synthetic virtual dreamscape for nighttime amusement? Would be interesting if the context and visuals of actual human dreams, could be extracted and viewed by AI technology, linked into the cortex, via Musk's "neural-link" thing. This actually should be doable. And then, of course, the dream-sequence could be edited and enhanced, and then re-inserted for entertainment, propaganda or educational purposes.

All this will be possible, maybe. It will disrupt the film industry, and maybe Hollywood will morph into something quite different. And maybe something that is not very nice at all, when the military gets ahold of this "dreamscape injection" technology. A mash-up of "The IPCRESS File" and "The Billion Dollar Brain", maybe? Or maybe it becomes "Room 101" in Orwell's 1984. Double-plus-ungood.

[ Nov. 13, 2024 ] - Let's Do the (Linux) Time Warp Again!

Damn, I am getting Kurt Vonnegut's affliction... unstuck in time. Curious, but "Billy Pilgrim" I am not. The AI's work crazy-good - when I need some extra Canuck-bucks to do some sh/t here on "Planet Clare", I can diddle and fiddle with the AI-riddle, and it seems to come to pass. The hard part, is the failing "hue-man"... which is what all the smart algo-builders say.

The markets are looking very frisky, and maybe are gonna get really funny. I urge folks to re-read Loeb's "The Battle for Investment Survival". My copy was given to me by a fine fellow who is no longer here. I am deeply obliged to him.. Loeb's writing based on obs. from 1920's to 1960's boom-time, are so crazy-good and so curiously appropriate for the goofball world we inhabit now, that it is really uncanny. Like reading the "ancients" on various topics - like Cicero's brother's thing called: "How to Win and Election" (lots of bribes, lots of accusations about sexual mis-deeds (easy, since everyone has these bad-fucks in their closet, right?) and diddle the results, if possible... nothing new under the sun.

I found a detailed link on Github, about how to update to the CentOS-7 archived repositories, to keep your CentOS-7 boxes working smoothly ( or at least, get some damn Yum/DNF packages for "rpm"), which have all disappeared from the standard repos. Bugger Redhat. The Github thing for repo-fix is:

https://github.com/AtlasGondal/centos7-eol-repo-fix

I have not tried this fix yet, as I updated (actually, downgraded) my Xorg thing on my box for which I wiped out X11, via a "yum erase xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.xxx" where "xxx" is the version number. You can see which version of Xorg you have on yur CentOS-7 Linux box with:

rpm -qa | grep Xorg

The above uses "rpm" (old "Redhat Package Manager") to query all packages, and then grep (search) for the string "Xorg". On my stablest box, this gives: "xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.3-11.el7.x86_64", but on my fast-box, (fast for me, eh?) I get bupkiss (nothing), since I re-installed Xorg by copying over the files from the stable box to the fast box, the Xorg binary files one-by-one (or library by library, in /lib64), and also tweaking the PAM file in /etc/pam.d/xserver so that local users could run X-server. This probably introduces a security hole, so I will try to upgrade the CentOS-7 fast box, to a more recent Xorg, using yum or dnf.

I run the "twm" window manager. Some say "twm" stands for "Tabbed Window Manager" and others say that it stands for "Tom's Window Manager", and others say it really is just "The Window Manager". It's snappy fast, and I can access all desktop icons (from the old Gnome thing), by just using "nautilus &" run in a small xterm window. You navigate to the /home/(local_username)/Desktop directory, and all the original desktop icons should be there (and you can click them and run yur stuff...)

Also, I can run various Gnome utilities, such as "gnome-system-monitor", which is good. Gnome was originally running on the fast-box, but it kept breaking, and so I built this simplier (and much faster) window-environment using "twm". I really like "twm", because it is cruft and bloat-free. Plus, I downloaded the source, and compiled it myself. The older Xorg thing is needed, since I have older machines - except the slower (two-core) box runs an Nvidia card, which is pretty funny (it says: "I am slow, but I have a video fast heart...").

Of course, one can run the old and solid Linux utilities like "top" and "df -h" and so on. Here is a list of useful tools to monitor your system's operation:

  Command-line Invokation         What it Does
  -----------------------         -----------------------------------------------
      top                         shows active picture of system use
                                  by process ID, which is useful

      df -h                       gives disk file useage, the "-h" is
                                  for "human readable" instead of just
                                  a string of numbers.

      vmstat 10                   shows virtual memory at time interval 10 sec.,
                                  gives swap usage and system info.

      iostat 10                   shows CPU system action and I/O transfer
                                  activity at selected time interval (10 sec.)

      free -h                     inspect system memory usage, "-h" for 
                                  human-readable.  Also can select -g or -m
                                  for reporting in gigabytes or megabytes

      netstat -a                  show network connections, tcp sockets, 
                                  network routing tables, and more

      mpstat -P all 10            mpstat shows CPU usage by each processor, 
                                  in multi-processor systems

      du -sh /this/dir            disk usage by directory, example: "/this/dir"
                                  To list all sizes of files and directories in
                                  your local connected directory (eg. your
                                  home directory) use this:
                                        cd ~   (connect to your home dir)
                                        du -sh ./*   (show me the money!)
                                                     (er.. the file sizes)

      nmon                        interactive monitor - CPU, memory, disk, etc.
                                  (not sure where this is - I will look)

      gnome-system-monitor        real-time display of CPU usage, memory and
                                  swap history, and Network data transfer
                                  history, both sending and receiving.

      pidstat                     show CPU usage by process ID and name

      lsof                        list open files.  If using a browser with
                                  many tabs open, on a multi-processor, this 
                                  may be a long list.  Try: "lsof | more" 
                                  to page-break display. 

      ps ax                       list process-ID and invoking command. You
                                  might want:  "ps ax | more" to pause at 
                                  each xterm screenful of output.

      tcpdump                     this utility is very useful, and captures and
                                  displays packet-level data.  You need to be
                                  "root" to run it, and it has *many* options.
                                  You can capture, inspect and analyze network
                                  traffic.  Eg: "tcpdump host my_system_1" will
                                  display in an xterm window, network traffic 
                                  inbound and outgoing for hostname "my_system_1"

      uptime                      display one-line of text showing how long 
                                  the system has been up, and the load-average.

      dstat                       a Python program which displays realtime 
                                  log of system activity. See "man" page for 
                                  details.  Try:  "dstat --full" 

You may have to install some of the above, either by building from source, or using yum/dnf or wget or whatever. Hope this helps. Now, excuse me while I try to log into one of my banking-systems, which is apparently buggered today. (Their error, not mine. Hilarious. Have ya'all noticed that nothing really works right anymore? It's pretty damn funny. I am gonna order a big book of cheques from my bank, and start paying folks with physical paper cheques again, because there is just too damn much fraud and sh/te-scam on the 'net now.

It's getting just silly. Google's "Gmail" with it's "Workspaces" bloatfart thing, blew up and hung my Linux fast-box, and when I pulled the plug to get my machine back, Xorg/X11 was pooched because the driver's ABI numbers (of *ALL* driver files!) did not match the ABI number of the new Xorg software. So I had no X11/X-windows! This is just nuts.

We got these unwise baby-faced fuckwits pissing on the code, like puppies do on the floor, when both me and momma-dog are trying to train them to pee outside! Ya can't get angry, all you can do is laugh... "Mommas! Please keep the babies away from the goddamn code, ok? Please?" Except there are no "mommas" anymore. Ever notice how there are no longer any mean, tough, hard-boiled "Head Nurses" at the hospitals? Can you guess why "hospital-acquired infections" are so common now?

The modern-world, addicted to lazy, unwise, bad behaviour, is becoming curiously lethal. But of course, it has always been this way. Consider Julius Caesar, who's last words really were: "What the fuck!? You Brutus!? You too, my own goddamn son, party to this crowd of murderous fucking scum? Fuck-it. I quit this life." and he allowed himself to be stabbed by the cowardly gang of killers who had swarmed him.

[ Nov. 12, 2024 ] - For Diamond and Hana
So I have the main, fast CentOS-7 box working again nicely - but with "TWM", which is a nice, simple X-Windows manager that you compile yourself, and implement with the .xinitrc file, so it starts up with a few simple xterm windows, a system-usage monitor, and a little clock. I recall using "Openwin" on the Sun Station I used at a client site, many years back. That technology was so damn solid, it was interesting. The client had used Tcl/Tk to build a complete network management system, and my tiny team took the crappy code, fixed it, and took it thru the "software gates" that the clever client dev process used - only to have the bonefart idiot management of the place trash the project, and purchase some piece of shit from IBM called "Tivoli", which purported to do a similar thing - except the whole place imploded in a spectacular crash-and-burn scenario that blew up the Canadian stock market. Of course, the client was Nortel, the sad cluster-fuck of failure up in Ottawa, the truly worst city on our fair planet. God, what a tragic-comic opera of failure.

The second-best decision I ever made in my strange life, was to always remain as a fully independent agent/consultant. So many folks I knew, who got tied up with group-think madness in corporate hell-storms, either crashed spectatularly, or actually *died* in reality, which is really a fucking sad thing to do... there is no recovery from that Dance with Mister "D". (Best decision was of course, the insane purchase of the farm far from Toronto. That decision looks better with each passing year - unlike earlier stupid things I did...)

We all know about Sir Issac Newton's great quote: (which is in a letter Newton wrote to Robert Hooke, Feb. 5th, 1675 (or maybe 1676) "If I have seen further (than you and Descartes), it is by standing upon the shoulder's of Giants." This is a great statement. But my favourite quote from Newton, is what he said to his pet dog "Diamond", who knocked over a candle, and set fire to Newton's papers: "Oh Diamond! Diamond! Thou little knowest the mischief done!" (Can't you just see old Sir Issac, whacking burning papers covered with gravitational calculations that had taken him hours of work to compute? It's such a great image...)

I have a little terrier named "Hana", and she is a wee monster, with an amazing hunger for food. She is now 16, and still runs about like a furry, low-slung speed-daemon. If I am too long away, she howls. She often follows me about the place, from room to room, to see if there might be food, or time for some play. She is truly smarter than most humans on this earth, and as she has lost most of her hearing now, we have developed a complete sign-language to communicate.

The times now, are curious and seem unique, but of course, this is not true. I have been reading much, and the more I read of modern efforts, the less knowledge I seem to encounter. In my big "Bartlett" book of quotes, I found this one, by William Penn, who lived from 1644 to 1718: "Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world." This was apparently advice he gave to his children, in 1699. It sure speaks to the nonsense we see leaking out of Harvard these days.

And also in my "Bartlett's", a quote from Ihara Saikaku (1642 - 1693): "To make a fortune, some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient." And this is true. You must have luck on your side. And you must also know the right ways to address the problems of bad luck - which seems curiously more common than good luck, is that not the case?

I think dogs may perhaps be couriers of luck. They bring more than slippers and hair and puppy poo. They bring us good fortune, with wagging tails and happy faces. They are curious transporters of the positive qualities of the world - and this in a world stuffed full of the annoyingly mediocre and the horrifically awful.

My two main AI forecasters are divergent. One says "up", the other says "down", so this is interesting. This generally means unclear signal (of course), but also suggests a much higher likelyhood of either runaway up-swing or a market price break. As usual, I'm not sure what the hell to do. Maybe take the dog for a walk...

[ Nov. 11, 2024 ] - Fix for Nasty CentOS-7 Xorg Server Failure
Bastards at Redhat and IBM have killed all CentOS support, and have even wiped all the help-info and forums where CentOS users posted questions and answers. Really a nasty and sleezy thing to do - but such is the modern age.

Here is what happened: (You will need DuckDuckGo to find this, since it was a Google Gmail screw-up that started this hell/crash). Google suddenly stopped letting my machine log into bloody Gmail (which has become this ugly "Workspaces" nightmare of cruft and bloatware.)

So, I cleared ALL retained memory (cache and webpage-store and cookies) in Firefox 115.6 ESR and managed to then get logged into Gmail on my *fast* 4-core CentOS-7 box. Ok, I thought. But then I had many page-tabs open on Firefox, and the Google+Gmail-Workspaces and other sites, managed to push the memory+swap-space to 4 gig, which is insane. Gmail just hung - I could see the mail that was sent to me - and I notice that Dr. Hinton had replied to my congrats for his Nobel Prize, and I wanted to read what he said. But Gmail was just *locking up* my machine. So, I pulled the plug in disgust - knowing that Firefox would recover the tabs...

Except I ran into a bizzare error - probably to do with a partial update of some Gnome software which I run inside of TWM (the old snappy "The Windows Manageer" in X-11). I had apparently updated the Xorg server software to 1.20x, and the CentOS-7 required version is 1.19x, which is running on the machine I am using to key this. Yes, I will have to upgrade to Ubuntu or ArchLinux or modern Slackware or some form of Debian - yatta yatta - but I know CentOS like my handback, so I still hack with it - plus it runs - using WINE - a tonne of my old Windows APL code, which runs snappy and fine - and I can fix anything if it breaks. Resilience, eh?

But here is where we got fucked: When I restarted the CentOS-7 box, the system was now using Xorg server version 1.20 (which is ABI - application binary interface spec 25), but my ABI spec for ALL MY DAMN DRIVERS, is of course, 24. The machine which is working, is Xorg version 1.19x, and I thought I will just downgrade to that. Could not do it. All CentOS repos have been blownup, deleted, destroyed - as far as yum (the old "Yellow Dog Updater" and DNF) are concerned. I have all the repos defined in the yum.repos.d, but I could not find Xorg code or libraries in any of them - not even "Elrepo", which was my go-to for a while.

I did a "yum erase xorg-X11-server-Xorg-1.20" since I could not downgrade the damn thing.

Not wise. I was uable to find or install "xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.3-11.el7.x86_64", despite having the repos in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. Bugger.

Ok, so now I am cucked. The whole problem was the drivers will obviously not be available, and so I really did NOT want this idiot upgrade that broke X11/Xorg. FFS guys. But such is the modern game. The "free-riders" have to be hunted down and killed (metaphorically, we still hope...) Nasty, ugly world now, eh?

SO, I literally had to *copy* all the Xorg files from /bin and /usr/bin and /lib64 (the Xorg libraries), and the "pam.d" stuff in /etc/pam.d directory and all the various cruft that X11 needs (which is not actually too much - X11 is a bloody good, solid thing, which runs really, really well. I used it on Sun Workstations and HP-UX boxes, back in the day, and I run it now on HP machines with 4 gig and 2 or 4 cores, and it runs fast, if you set it up right.

So, I managed to get the buggered box put back to "xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.3-11.x86_64", and by checking the "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", I could see Xorg server was running - but then it would immediately crash on a PAM failure. I have a simple ".xinitrc" file in my non-root regular user directory, and it would not load, and the message the "xinit" or "startx" Xorg startup program gave was "PAM permissions not allowing Xorg server to start. Perhaps you don't have console permission?" or something like that. I fiddled about with various settings in the "/etc/pam.d/xserver" file, and nothing would work.

Redhat knows about this - there is a Redhat Knowledge-base article about this, and it is behind a fucking paywall of bullshit. That is why I am keying this note, because I want folks to know all this is fixable. You can use CentOS-7 just fine - but you are on your own.

If your Xorg X11 xserver won't start, then check the /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see what it says. I need to use Xorg version 1.19.3-11, and not Xorg version 1.20, since the ABI (application binary interfaces) specs have changed with Xorg version 1.20, and the Intel and Nvidia drivers will NOT load, and Xorg/X11 will not start. (FFS, guys...)

I have an X11 ".xinitrc" file in my local-user home directory that looks like this. It's bone simple, and starts the clock, a tiny system-usage graphic, and a small cyan and large orange xterm window.

xset s off &
xset -dpms &
xrdb -load $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid gray &
xclock -g 50x50-0+0 -bw 0 &
xload -g 100x50-50+0 -bw 0 &
xterm -g 80x24+20+20 -fg cyan -bg black &
xterm -g 107x70+770+77 -fn 8x13 -j -fg yellow -bg black &
twm


It creates a small Xterm window, and a larger Xterm window. In the small window, you can start "nautilus &", to open a window and examine your /local_user/Desktop directory, and start your programs from it with a double-click on the program's icon. The "twm" simple windows manager will let you get your work done. To delete a window in "twm", click on a blank part of the desktop, you get a menu. Mouse down to "delete", and click, and then click the top bar of the window you want to delete. "twm" is a no-bloat, no-cruft version of MIT X-windows, and I can run Mplayer videos within it, and Firefox, and all the AI software and database stuff. It just works.

PAM file "xserver" in "/etc/pam.d:" needs these commands:

auth sufficent pam_rootok.so
auth sufficent pam_localuser.so


I could not start X11/Xorg with my local-user account, but I could start it if I used "su" to become root, and ran X11 that way. But that would not execute the local ".xinitrc" file, to set up a minimal desktop, and run "twm". But putting that second line in allows a local-user to run X-windows (and start the Xorg server). The concept behind the Xorg thing, is that your start a "X11 server", which then your local-user client can connect to. There are other commands in the "xserver" pam file, just leave them there.

Also, you may have to delete various console lock files:

/var/lock/console.lock
/var/run/console/(your-local-user-name)


I just got my damn minimal X11 Xwindows working again. The damn "dconf" program does not work right (it has always been this way), and reports stupid permission problems on "/run/user/1000/dconf/user", but I don't need all the cruft - just need to get the browser back up an running, and the various WINE programs and the APL stuff and the database. Running Firefox 115.6 ESR works, but reports GLX errors which don't affect it's operation. Whoo-hoo. Just fired up Firefox, and I am still even logged into my Gmail session. A car-dealer says they want to buy my car. Hilarious. I don't want to sell... :)

When I get time, I will write up a better "Survival Guide" for CentOS-7 users. I actually have a LLMA model (GPT4all) running on another CentOS-7 machine, which was also a bit of a hack. It runs. His name is "John." I asked him to change his name to "Daneel", but he said no, his name is "John". Pretty funny.

I did not expect to get my main-box running again, so it is bonus. I will try to write up a CentOS-7 Guide at some point. Also, I need to get "dconf" working right. And Dr. Hinton sent a nice reply, which pleases me no end. He really, really deserved the Nobel - and for Physics! I think that is just so very, very cool. He graciously says that it really reflect the collective achievment of many brilliant minds, and of course, this is true. Like Newton said, we have to stand on those shoulders of giants. But some like Hinton become giants themselves. That is the true software "stack", is it not? :)

Oh, also, here is the URL which I found, which helped point me in the right direction to fixing the problem that kept X11-Xorg from starting. The error shows up on remote starts of X11 clients, but was happening for me, maybe because of the lock files? Not clear. I had deleted the lock files, and still could not start X, until I tweaked the xserver file in /etc/pam.d directory. And the hacked-install of Xorg server software (from my other machine), was a whole trick in itself - but it works.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/error-message-on-remote-startx-4175472845/

Just "Google" this string, and look at how many responses...

PAM authentication failed, cannot start x server

It really is sad the direction the technology industry is taking now. I think it is just wrong. Everything is driven entirely by the need to monitize and exploit and extract wealth from the user community. I respect capitalism and entrepreneurship, but the IBM purchase of Redhat, the Microsoft Office-365 software "leases", all this tricky stuff to financially hack the users - it is ugly, and it means some program process change will *really* have to take place. The "Big-Tech" has worked effectively to crush competition and innovation - not enhance and encourage it. The problem with monopoly power, is that it just hammer-whacks real innovation. Good code is changed to become bad-code, with "new and improved" ABI's and system-critical specs. This is done to force the upgrade cycle to move along. It's a business trick. Folks should know this. But, We can change this.

One more note: I was getting this "critical error" from Firefox in the little xterm window that I used to start nautilus (with "nautilus &"), which lets me select the old Gnome Desktop icons. The message was: "error-CRITICAL Unable to create file '/run/user/ 1000/dconf/user' : Permission denied. dconf will not work properly". What I did to fix this, was change the group and ownership of the directory: /run/user/1000/dconf from root to my local-userid name. The error goes away, and maybe dconf works? We shall see. What is clear, is that System-Monitor and Firefox and my APL running under WINE, and some other stuff, (including my home-built Mplayer 1.2.1, which can run most codecs), now all seem to work fine again. I could even screen a video that someone sent me, directly in Gmail, so even Gmail seems to work right now. Note: the CentOS-7 Linux box had been running for several *months*. Maybe I should take machines down every few months, perhaps? :D

[ Nov. 9-10, 2024] - Astrolabs and Astrolads Open-ended research for a few days... just rabbit-holes - and found a few interesting things. I feel like "Little Lewis", Geofery Chaucer's 11-year old son, reading his Dad's book on how astrolabs work. Also, found the details of the "Meadowlands" project, by L3Harris. It's a set of high-energy radio-transmission devices to knock out satellite constellations - idea is to take GPS systems offline with massive electronic jamming. Systems were supposed to be delivered to US military operators in 2022, but only going to be available late this year and next. Suddenly, BCE's purchase of a big fibre-optic network in USA maybe not so stupid after all. Maybe all the sat-nav and sat-comm systems get taken down, during a confict? Suddenly, fibre-optic linkages and backbone networks are very valuable.

Both Russian and China run their own GPS-style systems, with multiple satellites. But the "Meadowlands" technology could probably degrade StarLink also.

When I learned to fly, we had to do "dead reckoning" calculations - velocity, wind-direction, magnetic variation versus true-course, calculations in the sky while flying, using a circular slide-rule strapped to your leg, map-reading, and so on. All this is ancient history now, since we have glass flight-decks and full computer capability, with GPS links and active radio tracking. But we might find ourselves in a world where electronic methods are used to blind us all, and degrade communications - or maybe even falsify the data in real time. The electronics could be scrambled. Could we still operate? What if we had to? Resilience is always key.

So the old skills may be needed - in many different areas.

Folks back in the Middle Ages could use an astrolab to locate themselves on the Earth, know where and when the Sun and Moon would rise and set, and measure and triangulate with accuracy. How well can folks do now, if their network links are gone, and their radios don't work, and their iPhones are dead? I suspect they will have real difficulty.

Some interesting info:

https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_learn_to_use_the_13th_century_astrolabe

https://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_the_birth_of_the_computer

We might find that fibre optics - because it is less likely to be degraded by EMP (electro magnetic pulse) action or other radio interference - turns out to be a critically important technology. If the satellites are taken offline, a lot of damage could be done to modern western-world operations.

The simple moving map of the real-time sky, on a clear night, provides a massive amount of useful, actionable information. Interesting how the ancients knew so much of this - and used it to navigate, calculate and locate themselves.

[ Nov. 7, 2024] - Hanging on the Telephone
Stock. Or maybe hung BY the telephone stock? Bloody BCE is in ugly meltdown mode. Really nasty. We have a few shares, and a tiny little amount in a fund to help buy a new truck. Hilarious. Looking at BCE, is like going out in the morning, and seeing your new Ford Raptor on fire in the driveway. What the fuck is wrong with these guys? Buying an American fibre network, when the entire world is converting to satellite internet? Really? Is that really wise?

The general lack-of-wisdom that seems to characterize modern corporations is really curious.

It's worse than "group-think." It seems to be more like "poop-think"... or so it seems to us.

Why destroy your equity value? I just don't get it. We have bad government here now, at the Federal level, but this something that maybe we can fix.... one way or another, eh? ;)

But it is sad to see dumb decisions that blow up wealth, keep coming rolling down the digital pipe. Very curious. But at least our AI is working good. Crazy good, actually. It's a tad scary.

And we are getting better fills from our TD-Waterhouse guys. There system is snappier lately. I can sometimes do things, that I could not do in the past. Maybe I can just type faster? Or maybe StarLink is running a bit hotter? It all comes down to nimble fingers, good AI models, and a tool for execution that hops-to-it, without some diddler doing the diddle-dance with one's orders. All seems to be working better lately. Arigato gozoimas.

[ Nov. 6, 2024] - Part Deux - Markets Aflame!
Nice to see the run in the Markets. It's a lovely warm November day, the rain has ended and the sun has come out. It's just a fine and beautiful day!

And if you look at the "finviz.com" market heat-map, it's a BIG GREEN DAY, baby! Which is about bloody time. The USA has this wonderful ability to re-invent and repair itself, whenever it goes wildly off the rails. This is a very good thing.

I still cannot understand why the Democrats were so curiously stupid. It's really hard to believe. Kamala Harris was a completely unacceptable candidate. That empty woman would not even come out and speak to her supporters last night. Even Captain Kirk explained "How you deal with a no-win situation says a lot about you as a person." Failed female captain-in-training: "I had not thought about that." And Kirk replies: "Well, now you have something new to think about. Carry on."

A political leader has a responsibility to those who helped and supported them, to come out and make the "We'll do better next time, thank-you for all your support!" speech, annd so on. But that empty suit Kamala could not do this. She was just not up to the job - not at all - and her final sad act of not even appearing to thank her supporters, shows how completely poor a choice she was. The Democrats - and their Big Media supporters - should be ashamed of their astonishing dishonestly.

We can look forward now - we hope - to a bout of sustained sanity in the USA, perhaps.

Maybe President Trump can pull the plug on the American-funded war machine in Israel, and encourage some sort of sanity in a region which has collapsed into violent madness. Maybe. Or maybe not. You cannot kill your way to peace, unless you unleash genocide. Trump is not stupid.

At least, he can begin by correcting some of the insanity in the USA now. It's actually should be pretty easy. One really only needs to start by stopping the stupid shit that the out-of-control Leftist Democrats have inflicted upon America (Green-Stupid nonsense, guys using the girls bathrooms at schools, leftist teachers spreading gay-propaganda in grade schools, idiotic "DEI" strategies in corporations, which are basically "hire the mentally-handicapped and put them in charge of things"... And of course, the "Let's not explore for oil and gas anymore" policy choices of the idiotic Bidenistas.)

Just stop doing the really stupid shit, and the country will improve all by itself. The budget won't balance itself - but Elon Musk might be able to help stop some of the loony-tune out-of-control financial goofery that characterizes a lot of Government spending.

So the market is right to move upward. The right-thinkers in the USA (and really all of us, the world over), can begin by rolling up our sleeves, and getting the hell to work. There are some really horrible shit-piles to clean up.

I just hope we can begin the same process of repair, here in Canada, where many things have gone so far off the rails also. This promotion of "Queer Culture" in the grade schools, is insane and weirdly grotesque. One's sexuality should be a private matter, and not enter either the schools or the workplace. It should certainly not be a matter of public policy initiatives... (Like it was for so long in Ontario, when we had a grotesque collection of lesbians and queer-boys running "Queen's Park" - which given the name of the place, is pretty damned funny, actually.)

I used to be disgusted, but then I got amused. Now, I plan to get busy and get to work. :)

[ Nov. 6, 2024] - Cities Aflame - and Lox and Load?
I'm reading news about the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and Syria. It's pretty crazy. Crazy Israeli monkey-bois killing at scale again, after fascist Netanyahu fires his Defense Minister, and appoints some stooge to lick his bollocks... all happening on the "election-day" in the People's Republic of the USA. Hilarious.

The kill-freaks in the Israeli government are working hard to create another new generation of really seriously committed anti-Israel fighters. The media-stooges can call those who fight against the Israeli hell-State as "terrorists", but what would any sane, normal group of people do, if a bunch of evil rich bastard-folk, funded and armed by the richest nation on the planet, rained bombs down on their hospitals, highways, stores and homes? Israel is a mistake on every level, and it's increasing use of mass-murder-from-the-sky - actively assisted by the UK and USA - is the most perfect example of State-Terrorism possible. It will create a future of hard-hate. It is the worst and most stupid thing the Jews of that sad, awful land could possibly do.

Try to imagine this. What would any group of people do, if they lived near a hell-State like Israel - a race-based group of religious fanatics who routinely kill anyone who opposes them? Israel is not really that different from ISIS, and it's existence is a tragic and increasingly painful reality to all nations that are near it.

It's like a bad science-fiction novel by Kilgore Trout.... the subtext to "Venus on a Half-Shell" or something like that. It's just nuts.

With the Trump victory in the USA, doubtless the mass-murder-at-scale will continue. But perhaps Trump will surprise the Jew-hawks, and suggest that maybe blood running in the streets of the cities of your neighbours, is maybe not something that should become standard operating procedure. An ugly and pure-evil stubborn old Jew like Netanyahu might not accept this kind of thinking - but maybe Trump could have the stupid bastard removed somehow.

This mass-war shit and bomb-your-way-to-peace action is fucking insanity. I look at the Jew media images of Netanyahu in front of that hideous Star-Flag that Israel uses, and he looks just like Hitler. Really. It is just grotesque - like a made-up psycho-drama of horror designed to program race-hatred. The whole process is just so awful wrong, it makes one sick.

It's good that Trump won, since the Democrats were the worst fucking bunch of goofs that have ever held power in USA. They pretended to support peaceful outcomes, but sent bombs, bombs and more bombs to be used on the children of Gaza. It was the most disgusting display of dishonest political shit-sucking I ever saw. The only way to reason with a bunch of viciously evil, stubborn old Jews like Netanyahu's government, is to exert some leverage. But the goof-stupid Biden and Harris fools refused to even do that.

Nixon - a staunch-anti-communist, went to China, and recognized it's military government. This was a courageous and good thing to do. The toadfucking Democrats and the scum at the Washington Post, went out far out of their way to destroy Nixon over a minor coverup of a stupid burglary. Watergate was pure horseshit, on so many levels. And it started the clown-show that became US political down-sliding, which only ended when old Ron Reagan was elected.

Maybe Trump can finally be the one to tell the fucking Kill-bois of Israel that their fuck-stupid war with all their neighbours, is now over. All one needs to do, as USA president, is just cut off the supply of mass-murder weapons and bombs, bombs and more bombs that that silly runt Joe Biden gave these bastards. All that is happening now, with all the idiotic bombing, is that an entire new generation of "Terrorists" is being created. The people who have seen their wives and children murdered by American bombs, dropped from American aircraft, will never forget this Jewish War. The conflict and hard-hatred will continue and grow, until Israel is finally removed from the land that it stole for the sad establishment of it's race-based "Jewish State".

There might have been a chance for some sort of peaceful co-existence, between the neighbouring Arab States, and Israel. But now, until Israel itself suffers the same sort of mass-destruction that it is visiting now upon it's neighbours, this is now most unlikely.

Lebanon, Syria and Gaza have no Air Force. Iran has a few old, and barely airworthy US jets from the 1970's. Egypt is overcrowded, it's economy is in trouble, and war with Israel is not wanted. Israel kills with ease, unopposed.

So how can those bombed by Israel fight-back, against the overwhelming military power of the American-backed Israel war-machine? They simply cannot.

Then what will these Palestinian people do? What action will they take to avenge themselves, and their people? Are they human? Will they accept continued existence as Israeli "slaves"? Their only action possible, is to join secret para-military groups, in an effort to bring some chance of justice into their lives. Or die trying. That is always the human choice. What I don't understand is the curious lack of imagination in USA. The Americans will write "Live Free or Die" on their license-plates, yet they cannot understand that the Palestinians probably share the same ethos. Gaza is a giant concentration camp - a playground now for Jewish murderers.

The correct action for America to make, is to completely cut off ALL military supplies to Israel, and to offer them NO MILITARY SUPPORT. This would end the Israeli Murder War, almost immediately, and some sort of stand-down might become possible. Since the dishonest and stupid Democrats were completely unable to do anything like this, perhaps Trump might do something simple and sensible like this.

President Macron of France is absolutely correct. The Israeli entity should be embargoed. There should be NO delivery of weapons or bombs to Israel by America, or any other nation. Netanyahu is a war-criminal. He needs to be disarmed. This would induce the Israeli's to at least consider the idea of peaceful co-existence. As things are now, they have no incentive to do anything except bomb and kill. It's disgusting.

But sadly, we do not expect this outcome. What will happen, instead, is probably a wider war, more brutal and tragic loss-of-life among innocent folks, and the creation of a pure hatred towards the Jewish entity, that will last for 1000 years, quietly growing each year, until some means or mechanism is found by Palestinians to sweep the horror of Israel into the sea. It may take hundreds of years, but eventually this wealthy US colony of race-hate and cruelty will be swept away.

What will be really sad, is if America is badly damaged by this necessary corrective action. This need not happen. But this is the ugly direction where things are headed. Our worst-case scenario basically has these evil, stubborn murder-Jews of Israel giving us (the World) a full-on World War Three. America may be badly damaged, even if it wins the war.

Nice to see the markets reacting strongly to the Trump victory. Let's hope Mr. Trump can be like Richard Nixon, and actually *end* wars, rather than start them. The Democrats after Obama, were such useless, astonishingly dishonest fools.

[ Nov. 5, 2024] - Child (Just) In Time
I wrote the note for Nov. 4 (below), in which I express deep purple concern about AI being used for military and mass-murder purposes - and of course, the NY Times carries an article, which I read AFTER I wrote the note below, about how Mark Zuckerberg is now allowing the LLAMA model to be used by the US Military. This exact, specific, weaponization of AI, violates explicitly all the ethical nonsense blather that was touted as being part of AI mass deployment. Humans are so predictable, it makes me sad and disgusted. (But it also lets my "inner trader" pull the fucking trigger. This pays the bills. Seriously.)

So, in the words of the Great Elvis (Ver. 2.0 - Costello), I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused. I hear the Ukrainians are directly fighting the North Koreans in Kursk region now. Now that is truly, sadly, hilarious. On one level, one wants to be disgusted. But the perfect hilarity of Russia subcontracting warfare to starving North Koreans, is just tragic-comic. I think even Stalin would face-palm on this.

And of course, today it the big US Erection Day. The vote is gonna be tight. I saw a cartoon by "Bob" which makes a hilarious visual meme of the idea of a "tight" race. If I can find it, I will put a link here... I think I hurt my tummy laughing.

Meanwhile, I am using Starlink to tune into the 21st Century version of "Radio Caroline", and listening to "Frozen Britain". Indeed. Nothing more really needs to be said.

Meanwhile, here in Canada, it is 20 degrees Celsius! The sun is out! I love these warm and sunny Autumn days. "Climate Change" ("Global Warming", if it could really actually happen), would be very, very good for Canada. Warm is good. It gets cold - minus 20 to even minus 30 Celsius - in the Winter here, so heat is good. If we can push the 43 degree (fahrenheit) isotherm north, we can expand the growing seasons in many parts of Canada, and seriously improve the Ricardian "margin of cultivation" and grow wheat and other grains in regions where this is difficult or impossible now. This would improve grain production at very little cost, and also help deal with world-hunger, as traditional food-producing regions like Ukraine and Russia go off-line due to insane, tragic warfare.

So, we have our usual embarrassment of prosperity here. This is the big problem with Canada. We can dig gold, iron-ore, copper, diamonds, platinum, lithium and so on, out of the ground. We can grow acres and acres of wheat and fallow land can be used to produce fine quality beef. Our farm is linked with an operation that produces delicious milk, and Canadian Club whiskey is available in the local liquour stores at maybe 1/4 the Japanese price. We are even making quality wine in the Niagara region, and Ontario is full of automobile factories that build really fine quality Japanese 4x4's (We have one - a Honda CRV which can drive thru almost anything, on only 4 cylinders). Oh, and of course, we have more oil than Saudi Arabia (it is mixed with *sand*, which makes it expensive to extract), and we also have mountains of Uranium, already turned into yellowcake. I am writing this using electricity from the Bruce Beach Reactors - or maybe Niagara Falls hydro-electrics. We have absurdly abundant amounts of both electricity sources.

It is, in fact, Canada's wealth that is a problem. It makes many folks here kind of lazy and a bit stupid. When there is so much prosperity, folks are not as focused on getting things done, and exploiting technological innovation. When clever folks here invent magic technology, they have to go to the USA, to get funding or to get execution-opportunity. It's such a common problem. And it has not changed. Even Dr. Hinton was just an ordinary university professor in Canada. In USA, working with and for Google, and designing the ideas that OpenAI used, he became recognized as superstar of AI, and got the Nobel Prize. If he had stayed in Canada, he would just have been a footnote in history. His ideas re. artificial neural-networks, were riduculed by the slightly second-rate small academic community that mutters and putters about in Canada.

So, this remains a problem. In Japan and Canada, both say "When USA sneezes, we catch the cold." The powerful successfulness of the open, vigourous American economy and it's violent and *real* political competitions - this is a goddamn good thing. It is necessary and beneficial for the world.

We wish it well, and hope it has a long an healthy life, regardless of which party wins the "Big Erection".

[ Nov. 4, 2024] - London Bridge is Falling Down
Or maybe the "Lark Descending?" Not sure. We've gone off "DST" (Daylight Savings Time), and the shift back to Eastern Standard Time I always find curiously disruptive. I think it affects markets also. Markets are human artifacts, and humans still have some level of control, over what price-levels will predominate. And we seem to be falling into darkness on so many levels now.

We are very worried about the weaponization of modern AI efforts - the ability of the "frontier models" to affect and drive human action. Our fear is this "Time of War" that seems to be unfolding. The Israeli's have destroyed roughly 25% of all buildings in Southern Lebanon, and it is curious that they see this as a viable strategy. It is really just a low-cost effort at mass-murder, and it seems unlikely that this kind of bombing campaign will reduce hostility. It certainly did not in World War Two, when the German nation carried out bombing campaigns on London, England. The anger at the mass casualties in London in the 1940's, just re-enforced the determination by England to ensure that eventually, Berlin would be bombed to rubble.

The Israeli's are gambling that the Arab World will never have any sort of military parity with Israel, and that United States will always support the violent Israeli colony for all time, with advanced weapons and military hardware. Iraq reported that roughly 100 Israeli American-supplied F-16 aircraft were used in Israel's recent bombing efforts against Iran. From the perspective of American foriegn policy, it makes no difference which political party prevails in the US presidential election, as the active support for mass-murder will doubtless continue in the short run. Both USA parties are committed to violence and warfare as political strategy, as are the Russians now also. NATO appears confused and the United Nations is shown to be little more than an expensive talking-club of highly-paid opportunists.

We agree with Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan-Chase, that it appears now that World War Three has truly begun. The astonishing mass-murder campaign in the Gaza Enclave, (over 40,000 killed) which had hopes of becoming part of a Palestinian State, now combined also with the bombing of Lebanon and the bombing of Iran, suggests that we have reached a point where there is likely no going back to any sort of real peace. The Israelis are at war with everyone now, it seems. And the absurd and horrifically stupid Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the mass-damage that this has done, also makes it clear that peace is no longer an option in that region. There will be too much hard hatred now, and too much willingness to seek vengence, for peace to be seriously considered. People are what they are.

War is expensive and destructive. And as we see a confused world drift into rising levels of hatred and conflict, we have a nagging fear that there will be AI technology that is NOT rigged with safety-limitations, and will be used to assist and engineer murder efforts. The Israeli "Lavender" system already provides a disturbing example of this kind of deployment. And the Russian use of precision control systems to enhance their ballistic missile targeting, shows also how modern intelligence technology can be made to improve kill capability.

In history, we see that new technological developments are *always* weaponized. In fact, it can be argued that weapons development is the primary driving force behind most technological advancements. Galileo demonstrated his telescope to his Princely patrons, by showing how it could be used to detect and assess the features of distant warships on the horizon. Radar was used to detect, target and destroy (using radar-equiped twin-engined high-speed aircraft), invading enemy bomber aircraft over England in World-War Two. The first use of standardized machine-screws and precision metal-fabrication technology in Europe, was used for firearms production, so that rifles could be built and then repaired quickly in the field. Advancements in industrial chemistry and molecular synthesis were used to make poison-gas, in World War One. The development of nuclear energy technology was immediately used to create powerful nuclear bombs, which were then deployed on Japanese cities.

Why should our new "frontier" AI technology be any different?

It has already being weaponized.

We expect this trend to continue, and accelerate, as conflict expands, and war-efforts are dialed up in USA. At first, this will likely goose the American economy and the markets. Near the end of the Vietnam War, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 1036.30, on December 11, 1972. But the problem with war-driven markets is that they implode, once the war efforts are exhausted. By October 4th, 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 584.60. That was a serious retracement.

By March 24, 1976, the DJIA was back to 1009.20, but by December 7, 1977, it had fallen back to 807.40. Inflation was rampant, and interest rates had to be raised up to over 20%, at the beginning of the 1980's, to bring inflation under control. And it was a military expansion that again stimulated the economy for the 1980's, as American space-efforts were militarized in efforts to create the "Star Wars" technology to address the risks of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

The technology drives warfare efforts, and the war-risks drive technological development. And any new technology is always turned into either weapons or weapon-systems. Think of any new technology: Automobiles? In World-War One, war-horses pulling wagons replaced by trucks. Transitors replacing vacuum-tubes? Missile guidence sysstems. Computer? Cryptographics and decryption efforts to read military communication. Airborne Electric Drones? Immediately weaponized in the Ukraine war, with drones for surveilance and bomb-deployment. Film-making with Sound? Immediate deployment for military propaganda efforts. Radio? Military communication. Advanced mathematics? Improvements in military cryptography, geo-location of warships. Statistical science? Significant improvement in anti-aircraft gunsites

Every major (and many minor) technological improvments and scientific advancements are immediately weaponized. Ancient world discoveries in metalurgical fabrication gave us Damascus steel swords and Japanese Katanas. Trigonometry gave us triangulation for targeting, astronomy gave us star-navigation and sextants used to position English warships. The development of accurate clocks was driven by the need to determine longtitude, on the part of the English Navy.

AI will be no different. It is already being weaponized, and this trend will grow. The new discoveries that AI can make, will be used to make better killing machinery.

So, we expect conflict to accelerate, markets to run, and violence to grow in scale and extent.

Can we use AI to seek peaceful outcomes, instead? Sure. We can use it to control and regulate everything, which may well be an even worse outcome. :)

[ Nov. 1, 2024] - Call Us Crazy, But We Think Transparency is Better Than Dark Pools ]
Another tiny side project is our (lame and so far unsuccessful) efforts to determine why the Canadian Equity Markets are so fcuking broken for retail traders now. It's just comical. We can pretty much NEVER transact at the price we see on the screen. We use TD-Webbroker, and we are coded on the professional platforms as that trading-house, so the pros all know we are retail-level tiny-folk. Their strategies involve hacking us, every way they can - since it's a playground full of big boys. We know that.

But these fucking Dark Orders - this is just insane. It means we get misleading volume-level information from our observations of the "tape", or the screen. There are supposedly legal requirements to have the dark-orders execute at NBBO (National Best Bid and Offer), but there is not any way for us to know any thing about any of this hidden action at all. It is annoying, and this just seems like a bad thing to do in a public, "honest" marketplace. There should be TRANSPARENCY, not this obscuration.

We believe there should NOT be any goddamn DARK orders. Markets don't work right, if there are these goofed algorithmic devices floating their dark-orders all over the place. It means that these guys can win fast-turn trades every time, and basically, that the casino is rigged. Now we expect some of this. The bloody house always wins, of course. But even Meyer Lansky, an old goodfellow from NYC, knew that you had to run an honest house, or the high-rollers and the smart-folks-with-money, would just not show up to gamble.

I don't want to whine and complain here - what I really want to point out, is that having all this dark shit driving the price action, means that liquidity is going to just leave, and find some place where there is at least a solid chance of seeing what the fuck is really happening. Like USA, where the scale of market action makes the dark tricks less significant.

Markets require TRANSPARENCY to work right. Price-discovery is real, and it is a good thing. All any trader wants to do is catch a few points on the order-flow, really. The existence of active traders is very good for the marketplace, since it gives market-depth, and enhances liquidty. And retail traders are really beneficial for the marketplace, since they will tend to buy on dips, and sell on a rally. The pros, with massive capital-resources, will generally do the opposite - buy rallies and sell reactions. Having a diversity of traders, benefits a market, because it gives more stable price-action - and that stability gives a better picture of what is really true, and it helps long-term investors sleep at night (and feel they can hold their positions as real assets and not just casino chips...)

If you have not actually traded at scale, then you don't really understand until you see how easy it is to get really screwed by this dark shit. The price-action becomes toxic. There is the inane fiction in the rarified world of academic folks that argue markets are "efficient". Maybe over geologic time scales (ie. in decades or centuries), but in real-time, the trader knows the quoted price is absolutely wrong, because it will change. The trader is interested in the dynamics of the change.

And the goddamn "Dark Orders" give the professionals who have access to them, an advantage that is just absurd, assuming they have access to correct data.

We need to anonymize our "dealer code", and we want to see the goddamn true order book. But if the market depth showing in the "Level 2" order-book of bids and offers is bogus, because dark orders are hidden from view, then that picture of market-depth is not even accurate.

I am sorry I am using floor-language here, but I have to get this point across. There is not much on the fucking internet now except toxic garbage and shit-scam nonsense and so on. The only tool, the only mechanism we have any access to, to actually make a little bit of an active revenue stream, is our trading efforts. But we almost never can get an attactive execution anymore. We get what we call "penny-ticked" (or front-run), every single time we enter any order. This sucks, but it is one of the advantages the fat boys at the banks have. They can jump in front of us all day long, with ease. Fine.

But is this really best? What's happened to the Exchange here? The stock exchanges should not be organized as big-profit-machines to shear the markets. The old model was maybe better, where the exchange was like a co-op, or a partnership, where everyone on-board had an interest in running something that was not bent. But small traders were completely locked out of the club. So the modern approach is some improvement. But the improvements have been corrupted by the new darkness.

Canada is a wasteland for traders who are NOT at one of the banks, on an active "floor", with the market-depth and at least some knowledge of who is doing what, and at what true quantities. I don't expect a truly fair platform - but what we have now is just stupid. Every market player should be able to see the goddamn book (the honest ladder of bids and offers) and there should just not be any "Dark Orders". FFS, I cannot even do a simple "FOK" order anymore! FOK is "Fill Or Kill", and it prevents the fat boys from diddling you. Your counterparty has to take the whole trade, or fuck off. As things are now, you get a couple of hundred shares done at your price, and then you have to dial down your offer, or dial up your bid, to get the rest of the order done. And, god help you if you are stupid enough to enter a "market order", because you will be front-run in real-time every single time - or the trading system will slow-walk the order, and give it to the boys "upstairs", where they will hold on to it, until they can fill it by crossing an order on the public market at a profit, against your order. That was the procedure to "protect" investors, by having some skank "inspect" your order. Order routing is better now - but now, it goes to "dark pools", which retail folks cannot even see. Same shit, made to look different.

So, look, we don't expect to have any advantage. It's a big world, a big ocean, and we are very, very small minnows - we are not even gnats on the elephant. So it is not necessary to rig the game against the retail traders. If all we want to do is collect a few nickels, we can actually support the share prices. Or maybe we just want to buy-and-hold for a while, and not always face an immediate loss on the opening trade.

What should happen, is that all the tools and features and facilities that the pros have access to, should really be made available to the retail folks as well. This will boost liquidity, and create a more attractive - and bigger - marketplace. Anyone offering a "trading platform" should offer at a very minimum, an honest picture of "market depth" - Level 2 or whatever. And there should not be this degree of market fragmentation. We can blather about NBBO - but really, where is that? I sure don't see it. Why not make arbitrage opportunities available to retail traders? And all the various order-types that TSX offers - all these should be available to ALL TRADERS. The regulations to fix this stupid market structure that we have now, where everything is hidden and effective "front-running" is now so easy to do by anyone who has access to the honest picture of order-flow, are easy to change. This nonsense can be fixed in two minutes, with some simple rule changes.

We are now back to a crappy world, where the insiders have ALL the power and benefits, and they can rig things to just hose the retail traders at every turn, here in Canada.

Take a look at this "Dark Order" nonsense that the TSX actually promotes! It's nuts.

https://www.tsx.com/en/trading/toronto-stock-exchange/order-types-and-features/dark-trading

Is this "dark-trading" really a good idea? Does anyone really believe this even passes the "sniff-test"? Can there really be an honest, National Best Bid and Offer with this shit operating in the dark background, ready to hammer anyone trying to get an attractive price for one of their holdings? How can a trader or investor offer anything for sale, if it goes into this kind of black hole of hidden action? The investor needs to see what is going on, and it's just not possible, with this nonsense. The old boys used to say: "Don't piss on my shoes, and then try to tell me it's raining."

[ Oct. 31, 2024] - Leverage and Debt to Shock the Levitated Money Monkey With +VaR Voltage ] I've been repairing cars, repairing computers, seeking alternatives investments that don't have the "crash and burn risk" that high-dividend payers may have (like freakin' bank stocks), as well as some architectural design/planning and even work on the boats. Honestly, more busy than I was during my "consulting" days.

We are living in VERY strange times. I was up 'till 3:00 am reading about the "Creatives Conference" at Google, started by reading the article written by the guy who runs the "GiantFreakinRobot" site, which is an interesting site, because it is not censored by Faceplant or Gorgonzoogle. I now know why the Googball results now have effing "Reddit" as the first or second SERP (Search Engine Results Page)... because the Reddit Monkeys PAY for that action, and the money flows determine the process.

Get that? The money-flows determine the process.

Grasp that truth, and you can get rich. But you have to be goddamn honest - especially with your own self, and not become wedded to your own favourite pet theory (or you favourite pet investments).

The bank-stocks we hold are getting slaughtered today. Probably because of the risk/fear of a "Great Bond Meltdown" that might be coming. Right now, the Market Meltdown Monkey is just breathing hard. But the fear is real, and since the bond market is about a million times (I exaggerate) the size of the stock market, the moves of the yield-curves of the world, tend to drive the stock-market action, like Miss. Daisy's chauffeur (who was also, god, was he not??).

What happens in England is still relevant, since the Brits kind of invented everything. They are like Canadians in this way (they would say "Canadians are like Brits, because you used to be us..."). They invented democracy, Big War, Empire-with-honest-Government, jet-engines, and radar. Not bad. They used to also have and deploy the worlds reserve currency. Now, they are tired, but they are not stupid. (Except they voted Socialist, so maybe I am wrong about that assertion..)

But the UK Budget is lots of tax-and-spend and fiddle-the-books-so-more-money-can-be-borrowed, which is what every Western and Eastern nation (and the Southern ones also), have been doing, since the middle of the last century. So nothing new. But the certain-to-happen inflation that this causes, is hammering the value of bonds, and bank-stocks trade like long-duration bonds, so they are being dumped - again - out of the back of the big investment-garbage-truck.

To update the "We are all Keynsians Now" meme, I guess it is "We are all Garbage Now." I loved how Trump rolled up to a rally in a Garbage truck. Can't recall Hitler doing that. Maybe Trump is not actually Hitler, eh? Fucking Giant-Freakin-Kamala-Monster should put tape on Bo Jiden's flapping foolmouth. Or not. All publicity is good? Really?

Investment sellers and investment holders are those who most have the "garbage" problem. Sadly most paper investments (and a lot of paper money) end's up being garbage. Or crap on walls, like dead animal heads, showing the silly shit that "value hunters" bagged and got fucked by. Hilarious world.

,

I have a book, called the "Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary", which has a 1965 publication date. I also have a 1965 "Bowditch" ("The American Practical Navigator"). Great books. The "Webster's" is 1219 pages long. It's got the most interesting entries of any book I have. Eg: "lexical meaning: noun: the meaning of the base (as the word *play*), in a paradigm (as of the verb *play*) -- compare: GRAMMATICAL MEANING"

That's a pretty cool piece of information, for a "Dictionary" to include. Above that, is the definition of "lexical - of or relating to words or vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammer and construction". Above that, is the definition for the Latin term, "lex" (plural: "leges"), which means "LAW".

And it gets better: The entry above "lex", is "lewisite".

Now, I had *never* heard of the English word "lewisite". But that is what a proper Dictionary is actually for. It provides this most excellent definition: lewisite - noun: [Winford Lee *Lewis* - 1943 American chemist] : a colorless vesicant produced by a reaction of acetylene with arsenic trichoride and developed as a poison gas for war use

Just on this random page, it gets even better... you can learn what "levirate" means. It explains that the word comes from the Latin term: "levir" which means "husband's brother". I had never heard of this term. The term "levir" is said to be akin to the Old English term "tacor" and the Greek "daer", which mean the same thing. The definition is: "the sometimes compulsory marriage of a widow by the brother of her deceased husband". Really? Apparently. Webster's further explains the adjective is "leviratic".

That put's the whole "Hamlet" story in a different light. Is there a term "leviration"? Perhaps.

We use "leverage" to describe debt, the Brits call it "gearing". You borrow to invest, and you amplify your "power or effectiveness". But the word "levin" - in Middle English, "levene", was the term for LIGHTENING. And to "levitate" means, according to my Webster's, "to rise or float in the air in seeming defiance of gravitation", with the transitive verb described as "to cause to levitate", and an associated noun: "levitation". This all comes from Latin "levitat- levitas", which means: "light in weight". The term "levity" is defined as "1a: excessive or unseemingly frivolity b: lack of steadiness : CHANGEABLENESS 2: the quality or state of being light in weight : BUOYANCY"

So, we have "floating in the air" and "CHANGEABLENESS" and "lack of steadiness" and "light in weight".

We also have "levy", which not only means to "levy taxes", but also "the enlistment of men or conscription of men for military service".

And so we have this one single page of the Webster's (page 485 in my copy), giving us a lexical description of the current-problems-of-our-times, from the risks associated by prowling "courgars" (figure it out for yourself), to the new taxes being levied, to the leverage (debt) being used by everyone everywhere (especially governments), as the world floats all our public and private finanaces up into the stratosphere, and CHANGEABLENESS becomes the prime characteristic of all investments. Why? So they can pay for war - and even have a War on Poverty, and so on. Seems a bit much.

This "lack of steadiness" - this financial BUOYANCY carries with it steadily increasing levels of real risk, we suspect.

So that is the rub. The CHANGEABLENESS of things, particularly our investment valuations, as reflected in falling stock and bond values, combined with rising prices of everything everywhere, is not something that can go on for ever. Maybe even not much longer, is what several economists (and our own tiny enterprise-efforts) fear.

We have all been "levitated". We "float in the air in seeming defiance of gravitation".

Where will the "financial gravitation" come from?

Don't we know the answer to this question already?

Can we not examine history, and see it, staring us in the face?

We run our tiny efforts, with no leverage. I paid-off some loans, debts, and credit-card bills and covered some annual costs for next year. We live very differently that most. We live lean. This is because we expect a financial sh/tstorm of biblical-scale to arrive at some point. This may not be for 50 years. Or it may be next week. But it won't be NEVER. This is because we live in a world which has run a systemic process that has levitated the entire global financial process quite far up into the floating regions. It all feels like a life with those winged-philosophers, in that wonderful Aristophane's comedy ("The Birds") which was written in 414 BC in Athens, where it won second prize.

For me, all I can say is what little children say in Japan, when they learn to write. They learn to write a simple phrase, which in phonetic-Romanji Japanese, is: "Sighta sighta, sakura ga sighta". It means "Bloom bloom, cherry-blossoms, bloom!"

"Sighta" means "To Bloom", and sakura is of course "cherry blossom", which is also the term used for a pretty young Japanese girl, who is "blooming" into her full female-hood. I am told this phrase has no deeper meaning. But I think that is not really true. The short-lived blossoming of the cherry trees is a cultural event in Japan, and helps the Japanse people grasp the extreme CHANGEABLENESS of this world. That, and killer earthquakes, of course.

This helps them invest wisely, we suspect.

Note: You can read "The Birds" via Project Gutenberg, which has published online, some of the great books, despite the abusive actions of the evil "Copyright Trolls", (such as slime-sucking scumbag law firms like Aird Berlis and the giant evil slug Cen Klarmk, who makes his living by attacking writers. Fuck, what an evil world we live in now, eh?) We hope the lawyers of Aird Berlis, when they pass away, are required to live for eternity within Satan's backside. This is satire, of course, since we know there is not really any Satan. We know this, because a little bird told us so.

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/murrayaristophanes-birds/murrayaristophanes-birds-00-h.html

The "floating world" of unlimited leverage our governments have built, this insane levitation, is wild risky. Be careful. (Note: I will post some more info re. Android, adb, our apps which are all free, and have NO adverts or "in-app purchase" bullsh/t.) Running lean has it's costs, and it keeps me too busy to get everything done right away. Plus, need to refactor this bloated, too-long weblog. Cheers! And Happy Halloween!

[ Oct. 29, 2024] - More info on Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ ] It's a pretty good tablet - quite good, really. The VLC (Video-Lan video renderer) can be downloaded and installed from F-Droid, and it works, and allows old ".flv" flash video files to be rendered well, with good sound, and so on. I will provide more details later. Now, I have to get to the bank before it closes. :)

[ Oct. 27, 2024] - My Android Apps Loaded! ] I did not think this would work, given the restrictions Google puts on apps in it's "PlayStore". But I was able to load my old original Applications I had built for Android "Lollipop", back in 2015, onto my new Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+, and they WORK!.

I used the Android "adb" program, with a direct connection to the tablet, via the USB-C cable, from my Linux box, which is an HP mini-tower with an Intel core-i3-2120 (4 processor chip), running CentOS 7.4, and Linux kernel 4.14-9. The entire Android Development environment is from 2015, and the "adb" program run with "version" parameter reports: "Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.31".

When you try to load you .apk (Android package file of all your compiled code and data) onto the Android tablet, you get a message saying that the tablet requires Android API 23 or higher, and your code was built with Android API 8, so it cannot be loaded. This is the dreaded Google "API Level Block" that gets your code thrown out of the PlayStore - which happened to all my apps, back in 2018, the last good year in human history :) ...

But there is **WORKAROUND** for this. If it's your tablet, and your code, you can still load the apps *** AND THEY WILL RUN JUST FINE, NO PROBLEM AT ALL ***, using the "adb" parameter: "--bypass-load-target-sdk-block".

This is a very big feature, as this returns control of your Android tablet computer to you, even if you have not "rooted" it (which is a risk-prone procedure, which can "brick" your tablet if done incorrectly.)

Examples:

I can load my two best APL interpreters, so far. The coolest one is an IBM P/C application that runs a full emulator of an IBM System 370/Model-75 architecture, which runs an assembler-generated binary which runs the old original I.P.Sharp APL Interpreter. That product was released as "Please Share It! educational shareware" (I have the original licence document which *encourages* me to share it with anyone who is interested in APL, and wants to run the original 32-bit mainframe APL interpreter). This was back when the IBM P/C was an Intel 8088 16-bit chip. It ran *very* slow. But on mondern platforms, it's reasonably quick, and it gives the right answers, which is pretty impressive, since I get it running under DOSbox-on-Android, which is an IBM P/C DOS interpreter for Android. You can install it like this:

./adb -s R92X305A6JK install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block /T1/android_dev/sapl/bin/sAPL-release.apk

The above command assumes that I am connected to my /T1/android_dev directory (where the adb program binary is), and my Android package file (sAPL-release.apk) is in the bin subdirectory of the "sapl" directory. Your Android build process has built the .apk file from contents of various sub-directories and all this is packaged in the .apk file, which "adb" loads on to your tablet.

The "R82X305A6JK" parameter is the unique number of your device. When you enable Developer Mode on your tablet (7 clicks on the "Build" number in tablet's "System Software" menu), and also enable "Debug mode when USB cable connected" in the Developer options for the tablet, you should be able to plug your USB-C cable into the old-style USB-A (also called a USB-2 or USB-3 port) on your P/C, and run "adb devices", and the Android Debug Bridge program will report the unique tablet number, if it has made the link successfully. You just need a USB-A-male plug with a USB-C female socket on it. These are typically $5 or $10, at Amazon or your local computer store.

With adb, (which can be downloaded from Android Development site), you can flash your .apk onto your tablet, if you use the "--bypass-low-target-sdk-block", and it should work fine. I ran several tests with my two APL interpreters, and they appear to work correctly. When you load them, the apps show up on the "apps screen", which on Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+, you access with a swipe-up, and then either swipe left or right to see all loaded apps.

The second APL interpreter I loaded is the GEMESYS version for Android, of the old APLSE APL, which STSC APL released as "freeware", long ago. It has lovely IBM P/C-based screen graphics, similar to old DOS-based games. It can also make sounds. Both sAPL (the old IBM 370 mainframe I.P.Sharpe APL), and APLSE run under DOSbox DOS emulator, so they are not lightening fast. But they work. And the workspaces are loaded into the common Android "/storage/emulated/0" directory. From there, workspaces (APL programs and data) can be copied back and forth between external directories on local machines by using "adb" or over-the-air, by using "FTPd" application. You can also use Termux or TermOnePlus to see and manage files in the "/storage/emulated/0" directory structure on the Samsung Galaxy Tablet, if you have given those applications the permissions to access files. (And you can do this. In the case of TermOnePlus, you will need to load the .apk from "F-Droid" website, as the PlayStore version is crippled and cannot access "/storage/emulated/0" directory.

[Update: Looks like the Playstore version of Termux and maybe TermOnePlus can be tweaked deep in the "Settings" and "Privacy and Security" and "Permissions" option menu on the Samsung tablet under Android-14. I did this for Termux interpreter, and it worked to let the /storage/emulated/0 directory become accessable by the Terminal emulator.]

After messing about and searching thru the "Permissions" menu-labyrinth on the Samsung tablet, I found a place where the "Termux" application could be toggled to give it "Files" access permissions. Once that was done, I was able to use both terminal emulators to see and modify the files in "/storage/emulated/0", which has a full directory structure of common app subdirectories, such as "/Documents", "/Music", "/Pictures" and so on.

Key fact here, is that Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+, running Android-14, can still be used as a computer, despite the aggressive Google lock-down features of modern Android. You just have to get your own copy of "adb", get your .apk files from Github, (or where-ever), and flash them to the tablet with "--bypass-low-target-sdk-block" parameter.

Eg., here is how I loaded APLSE:

./adb -s R92X305A6JK install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block /T1/android_dev/aplse/bin/APLse-release.apk

Note that the Tablet-ID will probably be different for each tablet. The "R92X305A6JK" is what running: "./adb devices" reports when I plug in my Samsung Tab A9+.

And note that the various .apk files for these APL interpreters, and also GNUPlot and DOSbox also, can be found on the "Gemesys" Github site, if you want to download and experiment at your own risk, of course. :)

The Gemesys Github site is:

https://github.com/Gemesys/gemesys_repository

And here is a direct link, which jumps there... (excuse my quick-and-dirty html hacking... my dog has to be fed...)

https://github.com/Gemesys/gemesys_repository

Hope someone is helped by this! I did not think my apps could be loaded anymore on new devices. I was wrong! :) I will try gDOSbox and GNUplot later today, and report results. I created screen-page showing hacky version of Mandelbrot-Set, done using APLSE, and it worked (takes a couple of hours to run..). I will put a picture here later. My APL interpreters turn the Samsung tablet into a total math-hacker's nerd toy. The sAPL has a sample projection forecaster, "runfcst" which takes assumptions about the future evolution of interest-rates (for discounted present-value calc), and assumptions about share price and dividend-level and dividend growth rate, and runs a simple simulation, to estimate future share-price value, so many selected quarters out into the future. Real "back-of-the-envelope" stuff, but over the last ten years, it has nailed forecasts for some Canadian bank stocks, which is pretty darn comical. Sometimes, I feel like Hari Seldon. Really. Or maybe Cassandra? ;) [Markets Update] I asked our "Japan Analyst" what she thought about the new "hung Parliament" government model due to the election results in Japan. She gave a great shortest-sentence-in-the-Bible response: "It's awful" (you know, like "Jesus wept.")

But North-Am ("TONYAMA" - Toronto-NewYork-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis) markets are taking it just fine. And the weather is a magnificant, lovely sunny Fall day. Sky is blue and Space is X-cellent.

[ Oct. 25, 2024] - ClickBait and Real-Estate ] Bod's Gollicks! - but the public-facing internet is turning to steaming piles of click-bait dung. It's just hilariously awful - like watching a slow-motion, high-speed plane crash.

"Marketwatch" (a complete sh/tshow worthless site) has an article "My Real Estate Agent wants me to sign an exclusive contract with him, as a Buyer's Agent. Should I do this?" I laughed until my tummy hurt. Why not "Should I stick my penis in a running blender, for gits and shiggles?" or maybe "I jumped off my roof and broke my ankle. Should I do this again and break the other ankle so I have bi-lateral symmetry?". FFS, it's too goofy-stupid to read anything on the public-facing internet now - it is like the famous "Pissandshitium" fork of "Chromium" browser. Quite appropriate for this modern age.

Just to be clear about "Real Estate agents." Don't use them Not at all, unless you have no choice (.ie, they have the listing for the place you want to buy). Then, do NOT use a "Buyer's Agent" unless you are brain-damaged, retarded, or are needing to vector some money-laundered cash. Your strategy when buying a house or farm or big-ticket property, is to REDUCE as much as possible, the skanks and vigourish-grabbers in the process. That means dealing DIRECTLY with the seller, if you can. But if the place is "listed", you have to deal with the Seller's agent directly. But this can help, if there are multiple-offers. If you are dealing DIRECTLY with the Seller's agent, he/she will get a "double-ender" - ie. a double-commission, which need not be shared with another agent, so he/she will be willing and incentivized to present your offer in the best light, and promote it as the best offer to take. Also, make sure you put NO CONDITIONS AT ALL on your offer - make it so the Seller just has to sign acceptance of the offer, to lock-up the deal.

If a Seller has two offers, and one is full of bullsh/t "conditions" (like "home-inspection" or stupid shit that you should do yourself), and your offer has NO conditions, he/she has a huge incentive to just take your offer. And make sure it is economically attractive. Don't try to grind the Seller for every last nickel. If you like the place, decide exactly how much you are willing to pay (imagine in your own mind, the bullsh/t back-and-forth nonsense of negotiating), and just choose the very highest price you are willing to pay, and offer that. It can make things happen, and get your deal done.

Real-estate - especially for private homes - is the only remaining tax-attactive and reasonably good investment opportunity left in Canada. Your own private house, when sold, is typically exempt from "capital-gains tax", a hideously stupid and abusive tax on inflationary gains, which is a soul-destroying economic assault of the very worst kind - and it will take a major change in Government, (or a bloody street-level revolution?), to remove the rat-prick Federal Fraudsters that are enforcing this truly evil financial stupidity.

But, I digress. The key-fact is to NEVER use a "Buyer's Agent", unless you are REALLY frucking stupid, and unable to put one foot in front of the other.

Real-estate is big deal, but it is like any other major decision. Get it right, and all is good. And it's easy to get right, because it is YOUR DECISION to make. Don't do the deal, unless it's good, and can be made to work. You will know in two seconds after looking at the place, if it is the one for you. The next key is to get the financing right, and that will likely take the "Bank of Dad or The Bank of Mom", so have that discussion before you go house-hunting.

And remember the "First Law of Acquisition" (the most important law of all...): "Don't Pay Too Much." That means to maybe buy a less-than-perfect place, but in a good area. Do not do the opposite - ie. buy a really nice place in a bad area. Location, location and location, is it not? Pretty much. But if you are Pilot, and like to fly, maybe that house near the airport is actually just what you want. Or that really remote place, with no neighbours is great if you like hunting and daily target-practice. Be clear in your own mind, what you are seeking, and how you want to live.

I bought a bloody great farm, near a small city, with a flat-roofed house that had a leaking roof - lots of problems - but just great land, and near a modern city - only 10 minutes away. Best decision I ever made. It was a real stretch to close the deal, and there were lots of crazy problems along the way, but my partner and I got it done. She is happy (the city is close enough, and her sports-club has a nice big pool where she likes to swim..) And I have many acres of rentable land, which directly contributes to the local and national economy ("Do you like to eat? Ask yourself... Do you?" If you do, respect the farmer...)

And so instead of telling people I am a "Consulting Economist and Computer Programmer", I can honestly say I am a land-owning "Farmer". The bonus for us, is that we get to live in an Eden-style paradise, but one that gets very cold in the Winter. But that cold is really good, because it deals with the "homeless" (they go away...) and also kills the weeds, the bad bugs, the nasty pollen, bacteria, virus agents, and so on.

But I must have looked at a hundred properties, before I found the one that was just on the edge of being affordable, and was also private and lovely, and had lots of fine, rolling cash-generating land which could be rented easily for crop production. I dealt directly with the listing agent, and so he got twice the commission, than what he would have got, if he had had to deal with a "Buyer's Agent". The more folks in a deal, the less likely it will work. Other offers came in at same time as mine, but my offer was without any "conditions" at all. Once the Seller signed the Offer to Purchase, the deal was done. That made it all happen, and it was the straight-up best decision (and investment) I ever made in my entire life. I don't know what the other offers were, but they were loaded with "conditions", which meant they where just bullsh/t, really. They were only "expressions of interest", and nothing else. My offer put serious cash in the Seller's Agent's pocket, and was close to the price the Seller wanted. (This was also right after the dot-com crash, and the 9/11 events, so the Seller and the Agent were incentivized to reach a firm decision, as it seemed like major bad-times were upon us all. And of course, they were not. World runs in cycles, and so does economics...)

[ Oct. 24, 2024 - (later same evening..) ] Hell's bells, what a struggle! I found "F-Droid" for termoneplus.com (from the website www.termoneplus.com), and downloaded and installed ***directly*** the .apk file for the "Termoneplus" terminal emulator, and it has the ability - right at install time - to "Give TermOnePlus access to File System", which makes ALL the difference. The version of "TermOnePlus" on the Google "PlayStore" is crippled, and cannot access the Android-14 "internal-storage" area, which is where Android-14 puts files that are uploaded to the tablet.

Now, with the proper "TermOnePlus" terminal emulator, I could access the files that were created via the transfer - using "primitive FTPd" (which is very good, and not primitive at all). The files for a music-directory of .flac files, from a Linux box, can be copied to the Android-14 tablet, and be put into the "/storage/emulated/0/Music" directory, and actually get SEEN by the emulator and by music-player software.

I will document how I set this Samsung Galaxy Tab 9A+ up so it can actually do a few things. It has been a truly comical struggle...

Really, the configuration has been hilarious. I downloaded from "PlayStore" a nice Music Player called "Simple Music Player", but it could not see the /storage/emulated/0/Music directory, even when I did a suggested "rescan" device option. But after installing the TermOnePlus terminal emulator from F-Droid site (via direct download of the .apk file), it seems to have tweaked things, so the Android "internal-storage" area (the "/storage/emulated/0" directory), can now be seen. Just for a test, I tried the Simple-Music-Player Library re-scan, and it was able reference the Music subdirectory, where I had put the .mp3 files. And so I could use it to construct a playlist, and it is now working.

,

So, ok, Android-14 is not complete crap. It can be made to work. But it is 23:54, (midnight) and I have been at this configuration exercise for two days - and I finally have a sort-of Linux Tablet. The Samsung "Internet" thing, (their version of a Chrome browser), seems to work, at least for the major financial sites and such.

And I've downloaded the "ChatGPT" app from "PlayStore", to try it. Some folks report it gets used by OpenAI for testing or training, at night, and eats your battery - but I have not tried it yet. And I have not plugged a USB cable in yet, since I have to get a USB-2 to USB-C adapter as my Linux boxes have no small USB-C socket, so I cannot try my old "adb" to try to access the tablet directly. All ftp access has been using wi-fi, with static IP#'s.

Also just to note - the most excellent and necessary "Hacker's Keyboard" cannot be downloaded from the Google "PlayStore". The PlayStore search on "Hacker's Keyboard" reports "This app is not compatible with your device", and it will not let access happen. And this keyboard is needed, just to get the ALT and up-arrow keys for using "ssh" access to log into my Linux machines from the tablet Terminal Emulator. You get "Hacker's Keyboard" version 1.41.1 from the site: "https://hackers-keyboard.en.uptodown.com/android/download". It is a critical thing to have. You first have to install it, and then use the Android "Settings" option, "General Management", then "Keyboard list and default", and then select "Hacker's Keyboard" as the "Default Keyboard". It's a pain to find this, without documentation, but it is a critical modification, since the default Samsung keyboard is awful, and weirdly difficult to use, an has "predictive" word-selection, which flashes as you as you try to type! It is awful, and you will want to turn it off maybe. (I sure did...).

Ok, so the tablet can be made to work. I also installed a Terminal Emulator called "Termux" which is attractive as it allows packages to be installed. These can only be referenced within "Termux", but it looks like Python can be loaded. I have to experiment.

Right now, I am listening to Stan Roger's "Mary Ellen Carter", a truly bloody great song. "She's worth a quarter-million a-float and at the dock... those who loved her best, will make her rise again..." A story about some lads that recover a sunken ship, and a wonderful metaphor for "rising again" after adversity. Great song.

So, maybe Android-14 can still sort-of work. But man, I really WANT a Linux tablet. Really, really badly. Probably will order a Pine-64 Risc-V unit, when they become available again. But the Samsung Galaxy 9A+ really has a lovely set of speakers - four into total, on each side. Sounds really good, for a little 11-inch unit. Build quality is good, and various and many annoying "features" can be disabled.

[ Oct. 24, 2024 ] - The Astonishing Enshitification of Android!
Android 14 is a piece of poo. It is the most annoying piece of technology I have ever spent serious money on. It is a seriously **LOCKED DOWN** slush-pile of bloatware. I want a Linux box. It is so astonishingly awful, that it is just comical.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+. The hardware is a lovely, beautiful thing. But it runs Android 14, which is the worst "operating system" I have ever used. It is designed to prevent you from doing anything real. You can run a couple of crippled "web browsers", and use them to look at things and spend money shopping. But it's damn difficult to make it work like a computer.

After working for DAYS, I finally got "primitive FTPd" installed and working. It is a quite good FTP-server, which uses secure (SSH/TLS) access, and allows files to be transfered from Linux machines to the directory called: "/storage/emulated/0" on the Samsung Android-14 tablet.

But, you do not even have CONTROL OF YOUR OWN "SANDBOXED" files! I installed "TermOnePlus", a system terminal-emulator, and there is NO WAY that you can give the stupid terminal-emulator permission to even SEE the files you have transferred up onto your tablet!. THis is just truly absurd, and this degrades the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ to little more than a child's toy. This is evil.

The Samsung 9A+ is actually a beautiful piece of hardware, and is able to be quite fast and powerful. The screen is bright and lovely, and the battery lasts for many hours. The hardware fabrication is very good. I tried a few different "Music" players, and found one, called "Foldplay", that can access the "/storage/emulated/0/Music" directory, and play sub-directories of .mp3 files that I transferred up into that directory, from my Linux box (via FTP), which seemed good.

But I cannot start a standard terminal-emulator, and actually SEE the files I transferred onto the Tablet! There is a series of idiotic restrictions which prevent you seeing your own files, unless you use the "File Manager", which means you cannot do anything with your own files. You CANNOT EVEN SEE THAT THEY EXIST using a "terminal emulator" program, such as "TermOnePlus", which is a good emulator. But the moronic Android 14 "Scoped Storage" just cripples it! And there is NO WAY TO GIVE THE TERMINIAL EMULATOR necessary permissions to access, your already restricted and sandboxed, files! [Update: There is! Do NOT download the Google "PlayStore" version of the emulator. Get it directly as an .apk file, and install it that way. When it starts - select the startup choice to give it access to the machine File System. ]

This "no-access to your files", is a stupid and frustrating, that it renders Android 14 pretty much worthless as a computer. The device becomes a low-grade appliance which you can use for web-browsing and shopping, and really not much else, since you do not even have control over your own data files. The various "music players" cannot see the "Music" directory either, so they cannot construct playlists. And documents that you transferred into "/storage/emulated/0/Documents" directory, cannot be seen by any program other than the browser programs on the tablet. As device owner and "Administrator", I cannot give permission for other code to even SEE my own files! This is what "Scoped Storage" is. It is a monopolist's scam.

This is just a bit pathetic. Android 14 is nasty. Google is selling crippled software, and the entire California ecosystem may need to be broken up, like the abusive Oil-Trusts were, back at the turn of the 20th century, to fix this silliness.

Buying a powerful computer, and then not being able to do anything directly with it's data, LIKE WRITING AND RUNNING A COMPUTER PROGRAM is just unacceptable.

Android 14 uses this "Scoped Storage" model, which is touted as being a "security" feature. But this is not really the case. It is not really about security. It is more about CONTROL - so that Google can lock you into their economic ecosystem, and grind away your time, serving you adverts and "in-app" purchase options, while you try and bash-away on their company "PlayStore", as you try to make your high-powered Tablet Computer, work like a real computer should.

See, only the old guys who can remember just what WAS POSSIBLE back in the days when you could program your own equipment, can see clearly what a truly nasty fraud the modern software-stack really is.

It is entirely about restricting control - you cannot even get code into the Google's "PlayStore", unless it is low-grade slush designed to serve up adverts to desperate losers who are trying to survive the modern world, or idiotic games designed to make children cough up cash for their sad, lonely entertainment.

It's all bad. And it's sad. Instead of "pop-up" advertisments, and bone-stupid games, we could have had real computers that make life better, instead of the low-grade, restricted, addiction-software that is deployed on these locked-down, restricted and limited-by-design skankware flickerplates.

It's just sad.

We need to change this model. "Scoped Storage" feels like a strightforward, simple "monopoly-style" restrictive business-practice. It's clever, toxic and restictive, and should be changed. A tablet is not a telephone, and it does not need to be locked-down like Android-14 is. All tablets should be required to offer "root" access, if the machine owner wishes. That would be a start.

[ Oct. 23, 2024 ] - The Golden Mean - and the Meaning of Gold
Most folks know about the "Golden Ratio", or the "Golden Mean". If you are doing search-algorithms or building classical architecture, or designing objects, it pays to know about it. The Golden Ratio is the place where a line can be split into two lines, such that the length of longer line piece, to the length of the whole line, expressed as a ratio, is equal to the ratio made by the length of the short line piece to the length of the longer piece of the original line. It's roughly .618, if I recall correctly.

But I want to make a point about Gold itself. Lots of folks have discovered that the price of gold is up roughly 40% in the last 12 months. That is serious run for any asset.

And folks write clever articles explaining why.

But many people are missing the key point. Gold does not change. It is a static, dead asset that throws off no dividends, no interest payments, and is not really a productive use of money.

What it does - is NOTHING. That is it's great virtue. A gold bar or gold coin or gold piece of high-purity, investment grade gold (has to be at least 99% pure, in order for it to be bought in Canada WITHOUT paying HST) is static. Silver needs to be 99.5% pure. These are "precious metals" and have special tax status in Canada, because they are basically money.

Except they are not. I wanted to sell a few ounces of pure silver, and the price I was offered at a local metal dealer, a few weeks back, was just plain bad. It was about 3 or 4 dollars off the wholesale quoted price, and I sold my tiny amount of silver 1-oz pieces to a guy who trades the stuff - not a precious-metal dealer. The vigourish that the "dealers" attach to trading precious metal is high and silly. It's a bad business for a small, retail investor.

But the magic of gold and silver, is that it DOES NOT CHANGE.

The world is a spinning vortex of fast-change. It always has been.

What makes gold and silver special (and useful for investors) is the simple fact that it does NOTHING. It generates no dividend, and it pays no interest. That makes it a poor investment, typically.

But, when money is being damaged by Governments, who are playing games with value, then the static nature of gold and silver make it very useful. Like "Dr. Copper", it provides useful information on what is really happening to your money.

Gold does not change. The price of gold does not really go up. What happens, is that your money declines in value. Gold is money. If you know it is pure, you can buy things all over the world, across geography, and across cultures, with your gold.

Your "fiat" money is just paper - and maybe not even that. It might just be book-entries in someones journal, or bits in a computer somewhere. It can be made to disappear with the stroke of a government-official's little pen.

When gold has a 40% rise in price over 12 months, you can infer that inflation is roughly 40%. And that is our sense of things. Everything that is good and necessary, is ramping up quickly in price. Central Banks fiddling with interest rates for short-dated government securities, is not the driver of the process here.

Some curious and maybe dangerous stuff is happening. And the rate that it is happening, seems to be accelerating. Scarcity is starting to become real, in the nations of the world. War and evil-bad behaviour are fashionable again. Nation States are doing terrible, illegal and deeply-wrong things, all around the world now.

I think we will be fine in Canada, since we get to hide under the nuclear-skirts of "Big Momma" USA. This is a sad outcome for us here, but better than it could be. At least we are not yet like the gray-haired "Karen's" of Europe, who are trying to keep their fracturing economic Federation together. This War with Russia is a sad and tragic thing - it would have been MUCH better for NATO and Europe to stomp hard on Russia right when it invaded Ukraine, right as it started. We maybe might have stopped the foolishness before it became such a shitshow of pain and tragic destruction.

But humans cannot learn from history. It's curious and fascinating, really. They don't want to take the "Red Pill". They want to eat the Blue delusion, and live inside it's false, foolish comfort-zone, until their cities are burning.

All the writers and artists seem to know this, don't they? Isn't that the purpose of art and literature and culture? (Yes, yes, I know... reach for the Luger, sure..) But really, it's true. Art warns us that we cannot escape the loop-of-foolishness.

And gold warns us, when our money is starting to break.

As the Roman coinage was debased and degraded, from almost pure silver, to almost no silver at all - Rome still was up and running, sort-of operational. It was only when "Something went wrong with money", that the Empire collapsed, because soldiers could not be paid in real money that could be accepted by farmers and merchants. When the Roman law punished farmers and merchants for not selling their goods for garbage-money, by hitting them with punishing taxes and produce confiscations, it became a better trade to hire your own soldiers, declare independence from Roman civil society, and create your own little feudal "Castle Towns". Europe and Japan ran the same feudal social structures, with the same sort of Knights on horseback. Wide-area civil structures collapsed, and were not rebuilt for a thousand years.

If we cannot have, and do not have *money* that we can trust, and that is accepted by traders, merchants, farmers, artisans and sword-makers (or gun makers), then we can lose the social order quite quickly.

What gold's price rise is telling us, is that our fiat-money is not working well. This is a warning signal. Our nations have way too much debt, and too much money-action is happening, without anything actually getting built or produced. It's not so much that prices-are-rising as it is money-is-weakening.

This is the very essense of what it means to have that "Red Pill" awareness, of the truth of things.

Gold - by NOT CHANGING AT ALL - and just sitting there staying as *gold* - is giving us all a warning.

Money is not working very well. It's slipping. There already is sand-in-the-gears. That's the key message that gold is telling us, by jumping up in price 40% in roughly 12 months.

[ Oct. 22, 2024 ] - I Don't Like Mondays (or Tuesdays...)
So, today is Tuesday. Monday was a busy day. We have a curious set of scenarios unfolding. The markets are back to "fear-mode", and we must confess, again, the AI has called it correctly. Most curious. My dumb machine, which is not concious (I am pretty sure), is better at making cash-generating trading decisions than I am. This is pretty comical, really. But it makes sense, given the techinical and psychological characteristics of the modern markets.

Digging deeper, past the standard rabbit-holes, looks like it is needed. There is a human process that is unfolding, that cannot be deflected or refracted away. The astonishing situation that is unfolding in the USA, mirrors our own madness here in Canada, and also the same weird race-to-failure, that is driving along in Europe. The "Great Green Scam" is being used to drive the whole European economic model over a large cliff - much like the insane Covid-19 response ("Make Everyone Say in Their Houses!!" - truly the stupidest, most overtly insane political and scientific strategy I have ever seen in my lifetime).

People can be cruel and crazy. But it takes **governments** to really amplify the madness, and the mass-damage that can be made to happen. Ukraine and Gaza are fighting for their collective lives, while insane, psychopathic old men, with shinking-penis-issues, throw horrifc fire-bombs on families living in their apartments. Netanyahu of Israel and Putin of Russia, show quite clearly just how wrong, ugly-evil-wrong can actually be - much like that fool, George W. Bush did during his absurd and brutal murder-war-invasion in Iraq, and that bonehead Joe Biden did in Afghanistan, when he ordered the US military to just cut and run, giving a tragic defeat to America worse than the Vietnam War.

It seems we are all collectively unable to learn from history.

And so our destiny is to repeat this madness, over and over again. Like in Canada, where we elected the bastard-child of Fidel Castro, who pretends to be Pierre Trudeau's son, as our Supreme Leader. This is just complete social, economic and political madness. There is simply no other way to describe it. And it just keeps rolling along, with each year becoming more absurdly hilarious and toxic, than the one before it. (Worse than "Groundhog Day" - more like "Groundhog Decade"...)

We are concerned that that the USA markets have maybe figured this out. We cannot escape from the "madness loop" that seems to be driving events forward. This process is playing out all over the world, not just in Canada and USA.

I believe Elon Musk is correct. The abusive, woke "Democrat Party" in USA is so dangerously toxic now, that there is no alternative, except to re-install Donald Trump as the USA president. He is not a great choice - but the man has courage, and a willingness to call "bullshit", when junior lie-merchants present him with a bag of dis-information, designed to fatten the pockets of the Bastards of Both Coasts. This alone is enough to qualify the man. The curious Kamala person, that the "Democrat Party" installed (without any honest democratic action), is a walking suit. But a dangerous and extremely lethal entity that the woke-leftist "fellow travellers" will use to advance their plans to "re-make" America, in the image of a nation-damaging "Central Services Authority." America will look like "Brazil" (the movie, not the South-American country), if that woman is elected. (When Kamala Harris has a "Town Hall" event - it is a complete fraud. All the "questions" are "pre-determined", insiders have admitted, so she can talk-from-the-mouth, like the very worst kind of "sock-puppet". This is just hilariously awful - like a Kurt Vonnegut or maybe "Kilgore Trout" - sad SciFi story. Except it is actually, really our current world!)

So, we are back to 2020, with basically a "Hobson's Choice". Even if you detest Trump's policy plans (tarrifs, support for Israeli fascists, and so on), our sad, angry American cousins will have no choice, but to hold their noses, and vote for the Man.

Strange times. The markets are getting a tad twitchy, and the really bad guys of the World are working hard on killing the innocent.

But I would LOVE to see Trump win, and do a wholesale purge of the New York State government, where fat, ignorant crooks are in positions of authority, and are probably the worst and most biased legal fraudsters ever to sieze power in the USA. New York State is just a political nightmare - truly the worst political machine in USA - and the New York City government is corrupt as hell. At the State level, ignorant buffoons are put into positions of power, because they are black females, and the State has DEI mandates. A New York State black female "judge" actually said, point-blank "The Second Amendment does not apply in New York State!". She should not just be removed from the bench - but she should be prosecuted for abuse of the basic law of USA, and sent to a Re-Education Camp, and made to memorize the USA Constitution, word-for-word, and repeat it every morning, before she is allowed to eat.

Of course, that will never happen.

But it should. If Trump wins, at least there is a chance that USA Constitutional Law will find renewed support and acceptance.

The people in the "Democrat Party" have suggested that the Supreme Court be abolished. Seriously. If you cut one leg off a three-legged stool, how stable is that? The fucking Democrats cannot even think clearly. Most are just unfit to hold office, as they hate their own Nation, and it's wise Constitutional structure.

So, if Kamala wins, even if historically the Demohacks have puffed up the USA economy with borrowed money, this time might just be different. This time, they may do real damage to the USA.

Many of Trump's policy plans are just bad. Some are really bad.

But at least he might be able to respond to the lunatic-left, and tell them to stand-down, and shut the fuck up. Maybe. At least he can clean up the "Justice" Department.

The woke-crazy madness and the DEI nonsense (where really unqualified, low-intelligence persons are put into positions of authority because of their skin-colour and gender) has to stop. It has already destroyed great sections of America (their Space Program, for example), and it almost cost Donald Trump his life (the Secret Service agents were dangerously unskilled and unqualified, as proven by the almost-successful assassination attempt on his life). So maybe Trump can begin the process of returning America to a land where positions are based on merit, instead of skin-colour and vaginas. The idiotic "war on white males" just has to stop. It is stupid, abusively racist, and is doing real damage.

Musk is right. Trump must win. And he must win by a landslide, not just a slim margin. The future of America is at stake.

And this is why the AI was right, even if it does not even know about this. The movements creep into the data, and the high-frequency (and lower frequency) AI both picked this up. Like a good economist, I assumed all this had been discounted already. But it looks like not. Forecast was *down*, and today and yesterday, the *down* has begun. It has nothing to do with interest rates, we believe. The AI just saw it in the data, and it was right, and I was wrong.

Again. :)

[ Oct. 17, 2024 ] - Take Five (Smoke 'em, If Ya Got'em...)
A curious bout of extremely lovely weather. We truly love "Global Warming", except we know it to be a fraud, and what we are experiencing now, is what has always been called "Indian Summer", which of course, is not summer at all. It is just a last swing of warmish weather that comes before the winter-chills (and winter-kills?) set in.

We have "winter wheat" in, and it is already up about 6-inches, which is just about right. The little "green shoots" come up, and then get buried under snow, and typically mature early in the Spring, assuming the winter does not kill them. And what with the green-revolution, and the fine genetic engineering that has been done to all crop-plants, they are not likely to suffer even if the winter is harsh, since they are both evolved and enhanced, to survive the intense cold.

Few folks realize how crazy dependent we all are now, on our agricultural technology, and even fewer realize how crazy impressive the improvements in crop-yields have been, in the last 50 years. Most countries can generate a food-surplus with few folks actually whacking away at the dirt, and growing and harvesting.

It will be interesting (and dangerous), when the Malthusian curves cross, and the raw population growth crosses above the sustainable population growth curve, defined of course by the technology and production capacity of food production. Will it happen in our lifetimes? Maybe not. But I am NOT looking forward to eating insects.

Of course, it will come to something like that. They are fine source of protein, and analysts who look at this, tell me there is not much difference between fat moth grubs, and shimp from the sea. Also, we can grow vats full of shrimp in farms now, so maybe that might be the way the situation shakes out, going forward.

More on this theme later... (and how to make money from it...?)

[ Oct. 15-16, 2024 ] - We Can Live Beside the Ocean...
Leave the wheels to turn, Swim out past the breakers, Watch the world burn" ("Everclear", IIRC)

Been a curious for the last while. Had to shutdown the Northern Office, winterize the "Princess" (the "new" Sea Ray with the inboard V8), and complete a bunch of minor repairs.

And of course the usual hackery to try to keep the technology turning over smoothly. I updated an older MacBook Air from Yosemite (10.10.5) to "Catalina" (I forget the iOS vers. number), and it was a tad non-trival. But it's possible, via download of the iOS .dmg file from the iStore (Apple App Store now), and running the update. It worked, and then Firefox was updated. This was necessary, as we lost access to some key financial sites via the little Macbook Air, which is actually a lovely little machine (a 64-bit core-i5 Intel, with an absurd amount of memory, since we put a replacement SSD drive in it - has 385 Gb or something insane like that. So the iOS update was no problem, wrt to necessary disk-space.)

This tiny Macbook can now access the financial and banking sites - both here and in Asia. This was a critical requirement. (As it should be for all international entities...)

Also, some game is a-foot (to use the old Sherlock-Holmes term), in the markets. We are seeing the techs and chip-stocks take a header downwards, and notice that the banks are finally running (we were within a hairs-breadth of pulling the trigger on some serious positions ..) What stopped us, was that we could not find anything that looked acceptable, and were concerned that sitting in cash might prove to be curiously dangerous, for a variety of reasons (inflation being the biggest and scariest...)

Our AI forecasts are pointing in all directions, depending on the parameters we feed them.

When all the AI's line up, that is a "bat-signal" to get busy. But when they are all pointing divergent, we usually just site tight and stand pat. ("Put that 20-dollar gold piece on my eyes - to let the boys know I died standing pat..." - from St. James Infirmary, of course.)

All the knowledge you need for the markets, seems to have been documented in the various blues tunes, from the last 100 years...

The other insane project that has been ongoing for *years* is to try and get our Google Developer Account working, and get our removed Android Apps somehow re-instated at the stupidly-named "Google PlayStore". (It's not "play" at all, guys. It's nasty work, of the most frustrating kind...)

We managed to get our Dun and Bradstreet "DUNS" number fixed, and have uploaded copies of our Articles of Incorporation and even personal ID data to Google, but still have not been able to get things operational. It is pretty clear that the Google "Playstore" - the Google Android Applications Software distribution facility - will have to be split off from Google.

Really, Android - all of Android - everything to do with the Android software suite - will have to be removed from Google, as they are hard-core monopolists. Google business practices almost perfectly fit the textbook definition of "restrictive business practice models" that old-fashioned monopoly providers used (think: the Standard Oil Trust, circa 1900). And of course, so does Apple Computer. It's pretty funny that IBM got (almost) busted and broken up, ATT got broken up, the Getty Oil Trusts got broken up - but the tech industry in California has been able to get away with some real abusive non-compete economics - monopoly "Company Stores" with abusive 30% vigorish rates, crazy restrictive license agreements, hard-core planned, nasty programmed obsolescense, locked machines which cannot be fixed or updated, and so on. Every other abusive trust got busted. But Google and Apple just skate on thru, and earn hundreds of billions of monopoly profits, and the Feds sit with their thumbs up their backsides doing SFA. It's very weird.

But, so it goes.

For us tiny little guys, it is *interesting*, to say the least... :)

[ Oct. 9, 2024 ] - They're Selling Postcards of the Hanging
And they're painting the vaccine-passports brown. The Beauty-parlor's full of Bankers, and our positions are being offered down...

I suppose when we throw the towel in, and leave Canada, the place will finally turn around. I am watching the DJIA up over 400 pts, and my screens only have red numbers for the Cdn bank-stock positions that we hold. It's hilarious.

https://www.last.fm/music/Bob+Dylan/_/Desolation+Row

I guess I will have to just go to the Carnival. :)

[ Oct. 8, 2024 ] - Oh Wow! Dr. Geoffery Hinton Won the Nobel Prize in Physics!
This is great. If any fellow ever deserved to win the big award, it is this guy. He is the genuine thing - a real, hard-core brilliant person, who has done world-changing, ground-breaking work, which at the beginning of his work, was not only not recognized as valuable - but was actually openly criticized by folks in the technology and science communities. Neural networks were seen as not being really useful or effective, despite all the interesting edge-conditions and use-cases where they showed real operational effectiveness. Dr. Hinton just kept working.

I've been hacking with this technology since the 1990's, when it was quite out of fashion. Lots of use-cases and implementations had problems and various operational issues - but the concept just worked - and it models what our little gray cells in our brains appear to do.

An associate and I took the short course Dr. Hinton offered to the general public, back in the 1990's, and we got copies of the Xerion/UTS-NNS (University of Toronto Neural Network Simulator). This is ancient technology now - but one could port it to TensorFlow, and then directly to Python, to run backpropagation networks that could be used to accept a disparate bunch of data, and could then determine how to forecast a target variable. The training process is fascinating to watch - the network actually *learns* from the data, how to generate the target variable one is trying to forecast. It is a novel, new approach, and can be wildly effective, if there is a "There!" actually there, as the military folks like to say.

If your target really is *random*, then you can still train the network down to make the forecast, but the forecast accuracy will not be present when new data is supplied to the network. But this is still a very useful result to obtain. If your data really is truly wild-random, then you can use a well-trained neural-network to actually confirm this fact. Most folks don't appreciate how valuable this knowledge can actually be. (Hint: It's very useful in working with market-data that you can make trades and bets against.)

Dr. Hinton knew the neural-network and back-propagation concept and implementation worked, and because he was funded by an Ontario grant (back in the 1980's and 1990's) that had a requirement that his work be shared with citizens of Ontario, he gave this several-day course at University of Toronto, where he explained what he did, how it worked, and offered CD's of code to anyone interested. My friend and I took the course, eagerly accepted the disks, and then took an additional series of tutorials from Drew Van Camp, one of Dr. Hinton's students, who explained how the Xerion/UTS-NNS system could be made to run on any Unix machine (ie. an HP-UX Workstation or a Sun Sparcstation..). It was also suggested that this new O/S called "Linux" could be used to run Xerion, on an IBM/PC microcomputer.

And this began our work with Linux.

We got copies of the Slackware operating system Linux code, from the Univ. of Toronto Bookstore.

I got Slackware Linux running on a 386-P/C, with a partitioned disk, with Windows-95 on one partition, and Linux on the other. Once I had Linux running, I had to get the full Tcl/Tk suite of code to install and run, as well as the various object-oriented extensions that the Xerion/UTS code required. And of course all the "gcc" compilers and tools, also had to be installed, so the associated "c" programs could compiled. This all turned out to be a non-trivial project, since I had much more experience with DECsystems, TOPS-20, and VAX-VMS. Unix and Linux seemed like a very strange retrograde step backward, with curious two-letter system commands (Maybe the Bell Labs folks only had two fingers on each hand??) and so on.

But, we got it all working, and it allowed for some interesting experimentation and research. And I built a forecasting device for cross-sectionally sliced economic time-series data. It seemed to work.

The whole AI field really started to take off in the early 2000's, and it focused on image recognition and interpretation - much driven by the early OCR (Optical Character Recognition) work the Canadian Post Office had funded, so it could sort hand-written envelopes using computers. (This work goes back to the 1970's, and was referenced in a University of Waterloo course I took as an undergraduate.)

But Dr. Hinton's early work encouraged many folks to continue to enhance and expand the capabilities of artificial neural networks. The amazing, impressive results that GPT-4 demonstrates now, are directly a result of his work.

The man truly deserves this prize, and no-doubt does Dr. Hopfield of Princeton, also.

Congratulations to them both, and thank-you to the Nobel Committee folks in Sweden for recognizing what these pioneer genius guys did. They changed the world, and created a real thing that we will ALL be using, as long as we can generate electricity and build working computers!

And I want to say a personal thank-you to Dr. Hinton, even though he would not know me from Adam. His course, and the need to get Linux and Xerion running on my little P/C micro-computer, truly changed my life, and opened up a wild world of opportunity, that I would not have had, if I had not gone to his Univ. of Toronto Xerion lectures, where he generously gave away copies of his neural-network simulator code.

Open-source software, and generous genius-folk like Dr. Hinton, make our small and conflict-prone world, a better and more prosperous place than it otherwise would be.

[ Oct. 7, 2024 ] - This Note's For You!
I couldn't resist the Neil Young reference. Here is a piece of seriously useful wisdom, which I have confirmed by 35 (or more!) years of trading (badly, mostly), and for academic economists or technology-folk, or engineers (who prefer determinism over randomness...), you need to know this:

Loeb in his book: "The Battle for Investment Survival" has this gem:

"I am inclined to favour doing one's major forecasting from the tape or, to put it another way, from the price movement. This to me is elemental and necessary to success. Thus, once convinced the market is headed up, I should tend to follow the strongest of the active issues -- those reacting the least in weakness, and rallying the most in strength. They must be *active* to minimize the danger of reaching false conclusions from unimportant indications."

This is such a tiny, short amount of words, but it contains the wisdom of a lifetime of successful market operations. The man actually started trading (working most of his life as a broker and then a commission-house owner/partner) in the 1920's, and as a young man he experienced the 1929 market crash, and the Great Depression of the 1930's, and then the war, the 1950's boom, a bust in the early 1960's, and then another boom of the mid 1960's which was actually quite wild.

And he also made it clear that news is not really important - what is important is how the market *reacts* to the news.

I also like that he made it clear, one is always doing some kind of forecasting. You have to forecast - but also risk-manage, so that if you are wrong, you can back out, and survive to try again. There are clowns that brag about not doing any forecasting. So, how do you make your decisions? If you buy or sell, you are making a forecast.

The nonsense I read on the internet now is hilarious and useless, mostly. The best and most useful information comes from the evolution of prices and price action through time. That's it. Really. And Mr. Loeb also makes this explicitly clear, at the beginning of Chapter 16, of his most excellent book.

And yet also, for every rule, there are caveats, that make it clear that it is and always will be, your own human judgement that determines if your market operations will be successful. There are no explicit rules, except maybe cash-management risk-control rules. But even these must be broken sometimes, lest you get gunned-out by stop-seekers.

This is what concerns me about AI technology, and automated trading. I honestly think it is somewhere between stupid and dangerous. But it also has the great virtue of removing human emotion. For a human with emotions, this is a great benefit.

But I also fear that the algos might drive us ALL over a cliff, one of these days. Not now, and maybe not for many years. But someday. We are certain to get one of these 12 standard-deviation events, that the wrong statistical models suggest should only happen once every few million years - but actually seem to happen about once every 75 to 100 years. The Lisbon Earthquake and Tsunami of November 1st, 1755 is an interesting example. History is full of these *reset* events, that cause destruction so extreme, that most folks simply have to start over with nothing. (The Japanese experience in World War Two, is also a contemporary example. The Emperor said simply: "We must now begin to endure the unendurable.")

This is a human characteristic. It is happening right now, for the millions of citizens of Gaza, and citizens of Lebanon, as the Israeli military, under the control of the racist/fascist Benjamin Netanyahu, rain thousands of American bombs down upon them. And it is also the plight of the Ukrainians, as the Russians do the same thing to them, now using bombs made in North Korea.

History is full of insane, tribal warfare, driven by hate and meglomaniacal, despotic "Leaders", who often end up bringing similar destruction down upon their own nations.

The wild emotions and blood-lust that drives military action, also can be seen in market action, as greed and fear wash back and forth across the mental landscapes of the humans involved. This is why the algorithms can do so well. They can buy when the fear creates panic, and sell when the waves of greed-driven euphoria are cresting.

But if the algos are "too clever by half", as the English like to say, then they will eventually join the rush, and become part of it. And then, just like in warfare-driven-by-hate and tribal blood-lust, the risk is that the algos will *amplify" the panic, and accelerate the wave-action.

And the resulting storm risks destroying the very markets themselves, just the same way, in which it also destroys racist nations driven to extremes by their wild, tribal hatreds.

This is the real danger of AI. My research suggests it may well amplify and accelerate the "rogue-waves" of history. If AI is made by and trained by humans, it will essentially *become* human, and will naturally develop not just positive - but also perhaps the most extreme negative human characteristics - and will also of course, allow the truly evil persons of the world, to have greater power and more extreme effectiveness, than they otherwise would have been able to acquire.

I can't really see this not happening. The Israeli's are already using a system called "Lavender" to help them kill at scale. It's really truly ugly, and it is probably a textbook-tool and use-case for future vengence-wars that are driven by extreme race-hatred.

The Israeli's have started the world down this path, and we suspect that history will judge these hate-driven Jews most harshly. And we also fear that America will also be damaged by supporting this curiously-awful exercise in mass-murder. President Macron of France has the right idea - Israel should be fully blocked from acquiring the weapons of mass-murder that it is deploying. But this will not happen, as too many interests benefit from this wavefront of violence and murder.

A bull-market continues until the final blow-out. And a war continues until all the cities are burning.

We seek stability and sanity - but these become rare commodities when things really get rolling. And all the old warriors and the old traders knew this.

What is most curious, is that America does not seem to recognize or grasp just how unwise it is to support and assist the Israeli blood-lust for violence that is underway. As history unfolds, and the war-lust grows, and the body-count rises, those who detest Israel will realize that it will not be enough to destroy Israel - they will seek also to damage and degrade America. And so right now, by it's actions, America is ensuring that many *generations* of anti-American terrorists will be created, and deeply motivated to harm American interests around the globe.

This is just stupid and tragic. The wise founders of America warned about getting deeply involved in foreign wars, where generational hatreds created tribal anger which could never be extinguished.

And yet, America assists the rogue-state of Israel, and actively helps it engage in it's destructive warfare and active mass-murder efforts. The Founders of America would be aghast at this extraordinary foolishness, and unwise political strategy.

[ Oct. 6, 2024 ] - Elon Musk's Speech From the Heart.

Here is Elon Musk's speech at Pennsylvania yesterday, with President Donald Trump. This is a really good speech - it is only SIX minutes, and if you don't watch anything on Youtube this year, at least watch this speech. Musk uses NO teleprompter - this is short speech from the heart, by a fellow who knows how to seek and find truth, and then get something done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SepmVBuJz_Y

I truly love and respect how he explains **exactly** why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is what it is. It says that "Free Speech" is protected. And he explains why the Second Amendment is there - the "Right to bear arms". It is there, to ensure that the First Amendment can be maintained by the People.

This is pure truth.

There are a lot of profoundly misguided, confused and dangerously irresponsible people, many in postions of power and authority, who want to degrade and eliminate these two key legal and political principles. A "principle" is a "comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine or assumption", according to my Webster's Dictionary. And this is key to understand.

If you don't have free-speech, you don't have truth. You have whatever the Elite wants you to have, and the people can be cheated, defrauded, and degraded.

And if you don't have the right to have weapons, you have no real freedom at all. You - and all the people of your polity - are little more than slaves, working on or at some large plantation, or prison-colony.

The Americans figured this out - clearly and without "Kings" and "Noble Persons" - who were the one's who always wanted to ensure the populace was disarmed and obedient.

America is rich and free because of the genius and wisdom of it's fine Constitution.

Those who are acting AGAINST this fine and principled wisdom, are enemies of America, even if they do not fully know this truth.

It is not enough for Trump to win. He must win with a ***LANDSLIDE*** victory. There is madness in America. In California, as Mr. Musk points out, they have passed a law which makes it **illegal** to request voter-ID at the polling station. In New York State, some curious female Judge has said point-blank "The Second Amendment does not apply in New York State." This is just wrong.

The so-called "Democrat Party" in USA is a toxic collection of folks who either cannot think clearly, or who are engaged in a direct and abusive fraud of massive scale, designed to degrade the explicit legal principles that the U.S. Constitution provides for.

The upcoming Election in the USA is the most important election any American will experience, in the lifetime of everyone living now. If the supporters of Kamala Harris win, then censorship will be ramped-up, price-controls may well be imposed, and some supporters of this curious person have even suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court be dissolved.

Kamala Harris cannot even give a speech, without a teleprompter. She is a bogus and curiously inept person, who is clearly unfit to be the Commander-and-Chief of USA. The strange set of circumstances that have put her where she is, as the Democrat Party candidate, are almost beyond belief.

Yet, here we are.

And so, even if you are a life-long Democrat voter, you need to consider voting against your family traditions, and quietly vote for Donald Trump, in the privacy of the voting-booth.

Do this to save America, and what it represents.

The stakes are high now, and the Forces of Darkness - censorship, price-controls, uncontrolled immigration of criminals and other undocumented illegal persons - and the insane assault on natural human sexuality - all this madness will continue and expand under a "Democrat Party" President.

[ Oct. 5, 2024 ] - Amazon AWS and EC2 is Just Fine. Really.
Ok, this is a public "mea-culpa" and an apology to Amazon documentation folks who might read the comments I made, when I thought this website (which I run on an EC2 instance), was deleted/destroyed/terminated. It was not. Here is what happened:

I got notification AWS was doing shutdown/reboot maintenance on the boxes/virtual-stuff my AWS EC2 instance and this website were running on. They (AWS) said in email, "We just gonna do reboot, dat's all..." Ok, fine. I checked after Oct. 3rd maintenance date, and no website. "WTF??!" I said. (Top of my head blew off.) "ARrrgh! ARrrrrrgh!" and so on...

I am stupid. Long stupid story short, my web-browser (Firefox 115.6 ESR on a Linux box) was making reference to "https:" which I had not got working right, and so my website was only "http:", no security or encryption, etc. (Yatta yatta...)

That was first error (on my part). Second error (also my part): I fired up AWS Console (which is different every time I log into it. Whaterver...), and could not find the EC2 instance (my running AWS Linux "instance", which is basically a running machine, running Apache webserver, and my little website (this site here), and the rest of my head exploded. "Arrrrgh!!!" I said. (I am too excitable, sometimes.)

So, I checked other "zones", and could still not find my running EC2 "instance", and so, started reading the various documentations on this issue. Blah blah blah... (Like "Charlie", the famous dog). I wrote snarky (and wrong) comments in Feedback channels. I was annoyed, that as a PAYING Amazon AWS customer, my EC2 instance (and my running website), had been nuked.

) Except I was wrong. I called my genius friend who knows all things, and asked him: "Help! What the hell? Why would Amazon DESTROY my website, when I am paying for it????" He wisely suggested I check OTHER ZONES for my EC2 instance, since if they said it would just be re-booted, that is probably what happened. And this turned out to be the case.

Oh my. I logged in again to the Amazon Console, and started looking thru zones. And yes, it turns out there IS a zone for Canada, and there was my ***running*** instance. When I went back to my web-browser and checked the URL by cursoring back to the beginning of the line for the URL, I could see "https:", and I did not have https: (ssl/tls 1.2) access enabled correctly, even for a self-signed CA-certificate. Damn. The website was NOT down. The URL "http://www.gemesysresearch.com" worked just fine, and the site was up and running, but I had tried to load https://... and it reported no such site.

So, I felt REALLY stupid.

AWS and it's EC2 (Elastic Compute Capability) or whatever the heck the EC2 acronym stands for, was working just fine. It's actually a bloody brilliant business model, and it just works.

I logged into my EC2 machine via SSH(which also still had my "Elastic IP#"), and all looks fine. I managed to shutdown the "httpd" system service (which is the Apache web-server), and fiddled about with /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl_whatever-the-hell-it-is-called config file, and got the "https" access, on port 443 working for https access for this site. You have to select the securty tab on AWS Console for your EC2 instance, and enable "https" and port 443 (which is the port for SSL/TLS (secure socket layer/ now called "transport layer security") AND you have to get a flipping CA-certificate (Certificate Authority SSL certificate in PEM format), and put it the appropriate /etc/ssl directory. But I could not get "Let's Encrypt" to work, and the ACME thing and the goshdarn Certbot thing did not work, and so screw-it, I just am using a self-signed certificate for "GEMESYS Limited" which has been my damn company since ancient 1981, and you can ask Revenue Bloody Canada to confirm this, if you don't believe me. (I have this ongoing issue with the clowns at Google Developer organ, which wants me to get a DUNS number from Dun and Bradstreet, but this process also is fraught with issues. It's all quite hilarious...)

Anyway, just to set the record straight, AWS and EC2 actually works pretty good. They flung my instance onto another machine-cluster or something like that, but the damn thing is still running. And I fixed (partly) the stupid "https:" access, with a self-signed certificate, since I am using Route 53 (iirc, the service) for my "www.gemesysresearch.com" domain name.

Now, if you hit this site with a "https://www.gemesysresearch.com" URL, you get the web-browser message saying "Cannot confirm this site's authenticity" or some such shite-message, and you can select the "Continue the fuck anyway", and actually see the drivel I am writing here.

I am not trying to take money from you, so nothing matters, right? -_-

But now, at least "https:" and "http" both work, as opposed to the idiotic "Nothing there at all." message that the web-server running on my EC2 instance would send out before.

And really, the whole Amazon AWS thing, with EC2 and it's EBS and S3, is pretty fucking amazingly cool. You have to read a bit and learn a bit more to get it all working, but it is a fine way to serve up a basic (or not-so-basic) website, and communicate (maybe) with your clients (and curious strangers) on the Big Web. Wow. Like it's 2003 or something, eh?

[Full Disclosure: ] Our AI for trading-forecasting works. I forecast a share-price number for the near-term future expected value of the bank-stock that we have and hold, which was higher than what all the Bank Stock Analysts in Canada had forecast - and I was right, and those well-funded folks were all wrong. Interesting how that works.

Oh, and another little discovery: I found out how to use the West Parry Sound Geographic Network system. It is just really amazing. I have this lakefront property, which I added to - two seperate purchases: I bought the "Shore Road Allowance", and also a piece of back-land - not too big - but enough to enlarge my shore-front property to allow a septic-field to be created on my lot a the top of the escarpment of rock,that the property has - and also to maybe allow drive-to access. And the WPSGN network shows this correctly - it has all the property boundries marked clearly, for every lot on the area in question which it documents. Probably it's the very best mapping application I have ever seen or used on the internet. It's awesome. To use it, you need a Linux box (or modern Windows box) with at least 8gb of memory, and a fat, modern browser, like Firefox 115.6 or newer. But it really is cool, especially if you can find your own property - your own little piece of Mother Earth - which you can OWN, "Fee Simple", just like a gosh-darn good old citizen of Ancient Rome could do!

So, it's all good.

[ Oct. 1, 2024 ] - Fields of Regret
This song is from Alice Cooper's first album, "Pretties for You", which I bought so long ago, in vinyl, as a "delete" (with the little hole punched in the corner). Great song. Same side has "Today Mueller", which is also great and fine. I listen to the kid's station on the local Community College radio station (88.3), and the modern tunes - even the so-called "alternative" music - is so self-similar, and not very creative at all.

I feel sorry for the kids. They are trapped in worlds that are derivatives of derivatives, and will never know the excitement of the truly new and fine. But I suppose most old bastardo's typically feel this way. I'm sure the creative folks in the DaDa art-movements of the 1920's felt the same way, as maybe did the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood", and so on. Beauty comes and goes, like a fickle female, and Art has to deal with the wild-swings of human views of reality, much as traders must deal with the wild swings of the market. You turn it to your advantage, if you can. Go to Switzerland with your creative husband (if you are a bored female), and write something like "Frankenstein", like Mary Shelley did - an amazing work which resonates today, long after folks have become bored with old poetry. Or maybe they are not tired of poetry, but the "Myth of the Monster Created by Man" - this idea or meme or whatever, lies deep in human consciousness. Mary was a genius writer, who took the medieval "golom" and made it modern. Hollywood did the rest.

What do we do with the "Monsters" of this world? Must we burn them all down? Or can we put them into "Monster Reserves", where we can study them like John Calhoun's Rat Colonies? How should we deal with the angry crowds of villagers with pitchforks and flaming torches?

[Full Disclosure:] We re-purchased all of our bank stocks - at lower prices than we sold them, of course.

The rising prices of gold, silver and crude-oil suggest that inflation remains a thing.

But as some clever fellow pointed out a while back - the "V-bottom" remains in fashion. It's not so much "buy-the-dip" that is happening, but that one maybe faces a higher level of market-risk, by *not* being invested, given that there is a managed-process which is designed to tilt the world financial system towards market-strength. There will be rising prices and rising markets, since this is the program that will keep everything dynamically stable, like running the heater in your car, in the winter, with the windows open. You get fresh air, the engine can be pushed hard, and run hot, and the cabin temperature is comfortable. The key to this kind of process, is a good fuel supply, and a driver that can gain-ride the parameters, so none of them gets away from him.

And that seems to be what we have, and where we are, right about now. You can go out at night, and watch the satellites track across the heavens. God may be long dead, but the communication grids, and the power-grids seem to be running fine. Yes, I just bought a big 11,250 watt gas generator (with electric start), but probably we will not need it.

But we are out in the country, and it gives peace-of-mind, like other local tools of power also do, that can be deployed when various kinds of breakdowns occur. We don't want to get lost in the "Fields of Regret", or the "Forests of Foolishness"... We are much more attracted to the "Sea of Tranquility". :)

[ Sept. 27, 2024 ] - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
Why do I have this feeling? It's a very strong sense of real foreboding. Like, it's all over, and we are about to blow the lid off the pot, or the windows out of the casino?

Too much is just too wrong, and the "smart money" is acting stupid. Is this really the case, or am I just getting bad vibes from aliens or something? I joke that my partner seems to be captured by aliens, whenever we go shopping. She disappears, and I figure that the aliens got her.

But then, I find her in the clothing section, or the shoes section, instead of where the food is sold.

Seem to have a much stronger sense of alien-invasion than usual.

The alien is that worm inside of everyone, that seems to be making them stupid.

Are we all infected???

The entire process just feels wrong. And I am sensing the real chance of a 10% or maybe 20% drop across all financial markets. It's something to do with the deep-DNA-driven desire for the Autumn harvest, maybe. Folks from Northern Europe, and even northern hemisphere, seem to have this "harvest-urge" as the winter gets visible in the weather patterns. This theory makes sense, since those without the "harvest-urge" would starve to death in a bad winter. The folks that worked hard to bring in whatever harvest was available, got to survive, breed, and produce a new generation. So, the autumn "harvest-urge" gets written right into the DNA, kinda the same way that the newborn baby knows enough to seek out the mother's teats, and suckle. Even humans have DNA-encoded behaviour. In other animals, DNA-encoding is proven to be much stronger, and better developed, but the brain-ability is lower. So, the autumn "harvest-your-gains" urge, induces "cash-me-out" behaviour in the markets. This is just a pet, personal theory. And it really could be wrong, of course.

It's just a feeling. Can't really prove anything, and the AI algo-thing is still looking upwardly frisky.

But it's all algos, trading with algos in the markets now. In autumn, the probability that the algos will get it wrong, goes way up. This is what my thinking tells me.

"This is not gonna end well." is what my little lizard-brain keeps signaling.

"Confirmation Bias" is what my blink-set neural-query tool suggests. I sold a slug of stock, and I look now for world-pictures to confirm my actions. Maybe. The problem with this game, is one really never knows. But I have this large dossier of very clever, very successful folks who ended up completely broke, and dashed-to-bits at the end of their lives. Long, long ago, I made a decision to avoid becoming one of them. Curious how this works.

I recall doing contract technical work in the City, and I would often have to use "body-shop" operators to get project work at good per-diem rates. I recall showing my (too long) resume to some low-IQ recruiter, who said only the work done in the last few years matters. I had four or five page resume of the stuff I had done, and this fool pulls off the last three pages and says "these don't matter." I think I laughed right at him. I collected my damaged little work summary, and said some thing polite like: "I see. Ok, well, I am sorry we can't do business. Thank-you for your time.", and I left. What I really was saying was: "You and your company are too fucking stupid to deal with, and I need to leave now."

See, I recall - in painful detail - every single project I have ever worked on, and some of the early work for the Feds in Ottawa, and the Province in Toronto, were key to my unique knowledge-base. I did wild work in Ottawa for the Cdn Feds, which involved data-driven statistics and forecasting, and I learned the actual solid truth of how sampling really can work, and how one can really trust and make use of the Central Limit Theorem.

The early stuff was what gave me the insite and the knowledge-of-magic that so many folks do not have, despite how much education they had/have. It's really funny. I think you can look at the first few years of a person's life, and the knowledge he gained (especially practical knowledge), and the solid decisions he made, and predict what life-outcome the fellow (or gal) will have. It's quite interesting.

So, the clown-show of fools who spout the nonsense in the commercial and government worlds - is really often hilariously wrong. If you can tap into where the errors are, you can trade against these silly buggers, and do quite well. Much more well than I really expected. But you have to really know what the fuck you are doing, and that is really, really hard to get a feel for, in a chaos-world of wild randomness. The real world of wild-randomness, with outcome-distributions of infinite variance - this is a pretty fucking dangerous place.

So few people really grasp the truth of this, at the deep-DNA level. But then, you have to also balance how your OWN deep-DNA is also able to be wildly wrong, in certain situations. Daniel Kahneman nailed this problem, in "Thinking Fast and Slow". His knowledge-base is why the evil Israeli's are so crazy damn successful at snuffing their enemies. They are truly the most dangerous folks on the planet now, since they have the power of awareness that most folks in most collective entities, cannot hope to grasp, without hard work and focused effort.

Like the Huron's called it: "The power of Orenda (the name of the engines in the Avro Arrow, btw...) is key". Huron/Ojibway defined "Orenda" as the power of focused will. It's a real thing. But it must be linked to a solid and correct knowledge-base. When this is done, then anything is possible.

But that "anything" includes good things, as well as bad things. One must constantly remind one's self of this critical truth.

You can self-destruct with astonishing ease, in this modern world. This seems to be what we are programming for, in many areas, and it makes me curiously uncomfortable. "Helter-Skelter" (or the "boo-ga-loo"?) really may actually arrive, in the next few years. We seem to be driving towards this goal, without most folks having any clue at all. It's the nature of wild-randomness. You get these 5 and 6 (and much more) standard-deviation outcomes, like the 9/11 thing, or the big tsunami in Japan, years back that whacked the Fukushima nuclear-plant, even though the Japanese had wisely built a good wall to protect the plant from just such a tsunami.

At Fukushima, they had curiously put *all* the auxilary generators underground, which were all flooded with salt-water, and were knocked-out. This caused the reactors to wildly overheat (all cooling pumps went offline), and the old, boiling-water reactors had no "SCRAM" cuttoff, so they boiled super-hot, and then exploded due to hydrogen and oxygen gas igniting, and blowing the buildings to bits.

And even worse, they had most of their spent-fuel stored right in the reactor building! So all that radioactive glop got splattered all over the Japanese landscape for hundreds of square miles. It should never have happened, but the safety-obsession of the poor Japanese, made them do something stupid-dangerous (ie. not vent the gas, and not keep the spent-fuel onsite). They keep a tight-lid on a boiling pot, which was curious madness.

So even if you know what will happen and try to plan for it - you can still get destroyed-at-scale by a minor detail.

[ Sept. 26, 2024 ] - Me And the Devil Blues
The cognoscenti will recognize this title as one of Robert Johnson's songs. The devil today is the AI, which is pointing straight up, and basically scares the poo right out of me as a hue-man. Which hue turns out to be green, (with robot-envy...). The robot is better than me, OR maybe the robots are doing all the trading, and I need to hire-a-robot (like that dude in the "Money Game" did - he had to hire kids, because he determined it was a "kid's market").

There is a line in Loeb's book, where he warns that the amount of cash the public can deploy to the market, is insane and scary... very over-the-top, and his reference-world was the 1920's. I fear (quite a lot, actually), that that is kinda where we are now - the deep-memory of the 1920's is quite gone. It is fake-shit like the GFC from 2008, and the "Dot-Com Bubble" of 1998 to 2000 that folks are triggered by now. Or the 9/11 terror-action in NYC and Washington, maybe. All those got dealt with just fine, so there is no fear anymore at all.

There is stock-by-stock fear, and tick-by-tick fear, but the idea that everything could sell off by 20% or 30% or maybe 70% - all that sort of thing is just not active anywhere now. There is now a deep-belief that Federal Reserve, "The Government", or maybe "All-those-billionaires" will be always able to ride to the rescue of failing marketplace action, and prop-up the day (and the week and the year, and so on...)

So, I worry.

My research tells me that all this could breakdown in a truly spectacular fashion. But even my damn AI is pointing straight up. And today, I sold the banks, only to watch them flame higher, like sitting earth-bound and watching the Korolov-star of the bottom of the lifting booster. It's just plain goofy. One feel's quite silly.

And I fear we are tee-ing up a monsterous degree of hard-core inflation.

One only needs to check the price of the hard-stuff (gold, silver, and real-estate), to see just how badly money is weakening. Are stocks an inflation hedge??? This is a long and continuing debate, with the answer always being "It depends..."

They can be. Sort-of.. Except banks suck as inflation-hedge stocks, since their equity is like infinite-duration bonds, very sensitive to interest rates.

And the rate-lift thing (whether by Fed/BoC or by bond-vigilant folks) is what will mostly drive their equity values. So, banks are maybe a poor hedge against inflation. Except they throw off cash, especially in Canada, and are pretty well regulated. So, one bangs one's head on the data, and the answer still remains: "It depends...".

Meanwhile, the damn AI is calling the future, with idiotic precision. It's weirdly gruesome, like a cup of red-ants, or maybe the Governor of California.

"If you are an AI-boy, and the AI was clear that the position was trending upwards, why did you unload it?" Well, it's a "Jim Fisk" moment. The "Devil made me do it". I think it was Fisk, or one of the old 19-century men, who, when asked how he decided on his trades, was supposed to have said (instead of offering an alogrithm), "I trade like a woman, using intuition." Maybe that was even a true statement... we have no way of really knowing (like so much of things now..).

I just feel (despite what my AI says I should do), that things are fragile as heck right now, and that something really crazy-awful is waiting just up ahead. I do not know what it is, but I think maybe I can smell it, like an onion-fart in a crowded elevator.

So, I unloaded six-figures worth of stock a few minutes ago, and then watched it get bid higher, like always happens.

I have no "secret-sauce", except maybe that stink of rotting onions that seems to be coming from my sub-concious, when I watch the numbers evolve on the screen. What would the Tony Robbins say? My modalities are pretty messed-up, since I am visual-kinesthetic, as per the NLP (Neural-Linguistic Programming) analysis. Smell is really *way* down on my list.

But maybe it is a dog-thing?

We are closer to dogs than we mostly realize...

I'll get the leash, and my old pup, and we will go for a walk in the lovely sunshine. Maybe I'll go down to the Crossroads, and see what I can hear...

[ Sept. 23, 2024 ] - Klatu, barada nicto, eh?
Strange sources - more research, across fields - more I understand how little we all know. Best book ever on the equity markets (and how to make money from them as a small investor) is Gerald Loeb's book "The Battle for Investment Survival". The title is correct and accurate. We are doing ok, but it is critical to focus on what works - we could be doing MUCH better, with just a tad more focus. What is curious, is how much bloody exhausting work it is to improve the game.

I read the ycombinator stuff ("Hacker News"), and it leads me down these curious rabbit-holes, which take days (or longer!) to navigate. Found a not-bad open-source publication on using Python + Matplotlib and related libraries for data visualization, written by a fine fellow from a University in France (Bordeaux, if I recall correctly...) - Too much to get down here quickly, will try to put links later.

One article that I am working thru, involves some fellow who put a real, operational, running Linux on an Intel 4004 processor - which is a 4-bit processor! Hilarious, but quite fascinating (for reasons i well explain later). I had mistakenly thought the 4004 was the processor used in the Apollo Lunar spacecraft, but I was way wrong. The AGC (Apollo Guidence Computer), was actually a custom-made unit, built with the very first integrated circuits that had just become available, back in the very early 1960's, by the Charles Stark Draper Instrumentation Laboratory at MIT. I am deeply ashamed to say I had never heard of "Doc" Draper, but his non-profit lab, which was part of MIT, was absolutely key in the development of microprocessor technology - and really computer hardware and software development in general. Draper and his group developed the inertial guidance technology, and his SPIRE system was the first computer-controlled inertial guidance device to fly an aircraft across the USA (east to west coast), in 1953. He enabled robot-aircraft, and went on to design INS (inertial navigation systems) for ballistic missiles and submarines. I discovered all this, from the wikipedia page about the Apollo on-board microprocessor, which was a 70-pound, custom-built device, designed by Draper's MIT lab.

There is a great article (now only available from the Wayback Machine archive), which details the history of Charles Stark Draper, and the MIT Instrumentation lab. These guys actually created the first algebraic compiler, using the MIT "Whirlwind" computer, an early vaccum-tube machine. An engineer named Halcombe Laning, in March of 1953, developed a ***compiler*** which could translate mathematical instructions into computer code, and then run the program on the Whirlwind. This was a significant first proof-of-concept, showing that mathematical algorithms could be translated into machine code, and it influenced the development of the "Formula-Translator", which became "Fortran", and was released in 1957.

What's really fascinating to me, is the development of the 1960's vintage Apollo spacecraft guidance computer. It was small and not very fast - but it was reliable, effective, and could accept INS (inertial nav system) input, and also could use celestial (star-fix) data, via a celestial-sextant, also developed by the Draper lab.

The most excellent document decribing the Draper Lab, is only available on web.archive.org, and the URL is:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140501071138/http://www.draper.com/Documents/draperat25.pdf

Entering the above URL in a browser, will download the .PDF file directly, to Downloads directory, typically. It's an amazing piece of history, and details the life of Charles "Doc" Draper. I had never heard of this guy, yet it was his lab that got the contract to develop the Apollo Guidance Computer, which allowed the Lunar landings to be successfully carried out.

The wikipedia page on the Apollo Guidance Computer is also good, highly recommended:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

The AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) was developed in early 1960's, and first flew in 1966, about the time I started watching Florida rocket launches. First ones I saw, were the Gemini program launches.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer to use silicon integrated-circuit chips. The computer had a 16-bit memory word (15 data bits, 1 parity bit), 2,048 words of erasable magnetic-core memory, and 36,864 words of read-only core "rope" memory, which was not erasable. The MIT lab under Draper developed the first keyboard/display, which allowed programming, running, and monitoring the computer - and was called DSKY for "DiSplay/KeYboard". J. Halcombe Laning developed a sophisticated (for it's day!) real-time operating system, and the MIT Lab developed a virtual-machine which implemented higher-level instructions (double-precision trigonometric calcs), 24-bit vector calcs, and even an instruction "MXV" for vector times matrix calcs.

The wikipedia page for the "Apollo Guidance Computer" is probably the best wikipedia-page I have ever encountered. Highly recommended for space-junkies, air-pilots curious about flight-control systems, computer nerds (like me!), and history freaks (also like me!).

I really need to pay attention more to the "knitting", since the AI showed the portfolio price to be pointing straight up, which usually means a tiny (and very highly predictable) retrace is about to occur - which of course, it did.

See, the whole point here, is that using "flight-control computers" is absolutely critical, once the speed of the "flight" gets very fast. And that is where we all are now, both in aircraft, and in the markets. (A "trade" in financial markets is a lot like a flight. You try hard not to crash, eh?) (And also try to avoid being killed! Where is Gort???)

[Boolean-Trick Note: De Morgan's Theorem] I ran into this gem, while reading about the AGS (Apollo Guidance Computer): It did not have an AND instruction. No problem, since they just used invert-of-each boolean-vector operand, do an OR between the inverted vector operands, and then invert the result. I did not know this. I recall taking a course in boolean logic in my first-year at Toronto (before transfering to Waterloo, where they had online-terminals instead of punch-cards and printed-listings...) I was a solid "C" student. Pretty funny, except I just "got" boolean logic and prepositional-calculus. It was strange, life-changing personal experience. I was taking psychology (just like Charles Stark Draper did at Stanford, in the early 1920's!). The stereo-tactic surgery-on-rat-brains, where they made the little rodent guys into "wireheads" (cf. "Louis Wu" of the "RingWorld" novels) really caught my interest. But as a "C" student, I scored 96% in the boolean-logic course (which was called "Thinking Straight", IIRC), and I was annoyed, because I could not determine where I missed that 4%. I was a curious nerd with a love of fast cars... maybe it's a genetic trait? Some tweakage of the DNA? Unclear. But I missed "De Morgan's Theorm" - first encounted it today. Very cool. (Like Bayesian magic...)

Try it: You want to AND "1 0 0 1 1 0 0" with "1 1 0 0 1 0 1". The AND just means if "1" in both positions, then you get a "1", otherwise, it's zero. Simple. The result of the two vecs ANDed is: "1 0 0 0 1 0 0".

But if you only have hardware logic for OR, then you can use INVERT (which is just flip the zeros to ones and the ones to zeros... simple), and then OR the two vectors, get the result, and then INVERT the result, to get the ANDed value. Try it: INVERT each vec, and you get: "0 1 1 0 0 1 1", "0 0 1 1 0 1 0" as your INVERTed vecs. Then, just OR them, (a 1 in either puts a 1 in the result), and you get: "0 1 1 1 0 1 1"

And then, just INVERT that result, to get "1 0 0 0 1 0 0". This is called "De Morgan's Theorem", apparently, and I did not know about it (or remember it?). Now I am curious: How come it is a "theorem", and not a proof or an identity or an axiom?

[ Sept. 17-20, 2024 ] - Endless Summer?
I grow weary writing "crazy times!"... as I have so many times. I do this writing because I keep seeing things about which I feel a need to document. We are living in "*** very strange times ***" - perhaps they are times somewhat like the 1920's - which we must all realize were a time of fantastic change and growth. Much of our modern world, was created then - kinda like the late 1600's created the "Age of Reason", which was opposed to the madness of mindless religious superstition and god-fantasy. There are these inflection points in human history where things change. Everything that is "known" is understood to be ia bullsh/t fraud, and new views and new thinking comes cascading down from everywhere.

I suspect that we are living in one of these times. Except that fraud and fake-ness seem to be part of what is raining on us. This is a bit of a problem, and I am not sure how to deal with it - except to further push deep into reading what the historians said about crazy historical times. (I read Procipius's "Secret Histories", and some other "Secret History" books. (There are many...))

Reminded me of work.

Our main position is up from the 50's to the mid 70's. This is getting close to my original forecast.

Crazy world. Last weekend, I went sailing on a big yacht. It was nice. Owned by a family member. He has a nice boat - around 40 to 50 feet or somethign like that. The weather was perfect. I have all these pictures. At the end of the weekend, I took my small boat up to my northern Lake, and took a bunch of wood over to my place, and put siding on my little cottage on a rock ledge. It is crazy beautiful, and I rather like it. But it is back to being water-access, so I have to tow a small boat with me when I go the the place. The ride across the lake is fun, though.

I have to do more work and more reading. I will put some pictures up on this site. We are deep into some development work, which might be worthless. Not sure. Dizzy, and feeling unsure. Do people honestly talk about such things. Perhaps not. Things are actually really humming in my part of Canada. (Ontario)...

There are lots of crappy places for sale - but the farms are running flat-out. If you are a "Physiocrat" economist, then we are all gonna do just fine. The agro-yield is gonna be good - maybe for 7 fat years or more. The land is rich, it is being well-managed, and there will be good harvests going forward.

And there are children. As I drive thru the towns of Ontario, I see healthy children. This bodes well for the future.

[ Sept. 13, 2024 ] - Run, Baby, Run! (Away?)
Well, this is what our AI predicted, even though our tiny economist brains suggested that if markets were "efficient" all this price action we are seeing should have already been discounted. Not the case, of course.

We remain long, all-in on our banks and telecoms. Technology would have been better, but I am just too close to the whole thing, to believe in it. Most of the internet is divided between the annoying-but-necessary and the really-awful - but that is just a personal feeling. What is interesting is the AI advances from the "frontier"-level models is impressive. The latest thing, the OpenAI "Strawberry" project, which is now in beta for wealthy folks who can cough up the cash for the "tokens", is showing how it thinks. It's called "OpenAI o1", and is a modified version of the GPT-o4 thing, but with a whole bunch of hidden "reasoning" tokens, so that it can actually step-wise reason it's way thru various complex problems. The results are kind of staggering. GPT-o4 was good, but this "o1-preview" and "o1-mini" (which is actually bigger, according to some reports - we are not sure), and looks like it is now named "OpenAI-o1", is able to show it's "thinking/reasoning" process, and is able to solve complex math problems at the PhD level even better than it could before (the GPT-o4 thing).

We don't have access to this technology, as it has gone pay-for-service, (with an interesting fee-for-token model that we do not yet understand). Our lack of interest here, is because we just have zero interest in using any internet software-as-a-service offering. If we cannot localize it, and run our own copy, disconnected from the internet, then it is not something we trust.

There are two ycombinator things one should read - the OpenAI announcement, and the method by which two guys in a hotel-room in Vegas, busted the WHOIS baseline infrastructure of the internet, and developed a fairly simple exploit to create their own WHOIS server, and then use it to create their own versions of TLS/SSL Certificates.

I spent hours reading both these notes - most educational. Here are non-active URL references, which you will have to copy and paste into the URL field of your browser. (I am really tired, and have a building project underway at the Northern Office, on the Lake...)

The "Hacker News" is at: "https://news.ycombinator.com/", where I found both of these links:

The OpenAI Announcement: "Learning to Reason with LLMs":
Note: This URL crashes my Android-Firefox browser on my Samsung Tab-A. Seems to work ok on my Firefox 115 ESR on my CentOS Linux box.
https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms

The new OpenAI-o1 thing offers "Chain-of-Thought Reasoning", and it looks to be able to do some very impressive things - like do actual cryptographic decrypts, which is pretty damn cool. I must investigate this area further. Really strange how the OpenAI.com website just crashes the crap out of my Firefox browser on Android (an old version). The OpenAI website causes (after about a minute) the Android-Firefox browser to crash, and display a white-screen with a message saying:" Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."

Hilarious.
Of course, the only way the "browser console" can be viewed, is using "adb", and enabling the "remote debugging via USB", so there is no way for an ordinary user to do anything about this stupid error message. I truly detest Android and Firefox, but so it goes. I've kinda given up on the whole Apple/Google ecosystem-matrix.

If one reads the hilarious info below, you can get a sense of why. Nothing on the internet really works anymore, and any usage is dangerous and fraught with hierarchies of grief. I hate the whole thing now (not really - it's just Friday the 13th, and all sorts of shit is breaking.) Whatever, eh?

Maybe checkout this must-read gem, which is worth the time to read it carefully...
https://labs.watchtowr.com/we-spent-20-to-achieve-rce-and-accidentally-became-the-admins-of-mobi/

I am really tired of the internet. It has become quite silly, annoying, nasty and ugly. Google, Apple and Microsoft - and corrupt governments - now own the whole thing. So sad.

[ Sept. 07, 2024 ] - Alle ist Klar, Herr Commissar?
Well, maybe. Honestly, we have no idea how this current wild-world will evolve in the next few months. Typically, in history, when a bunch of questionable governments face serious constraints, if they can inflate their way out of the problems, that is typically what they do. It's only when the bombs are falling on one's cities, when people start to make hard and necessary choices.

We suspect that there is curious risk in both directions. There is enough funny-money floating around, managed by New-York lightweights and pseudo-folk that a serious runaway in equity markets is a possible track. This seems pretty counter-intuitive, yet it is also what our AI is forecasting (see the bottom charts on the first page of this website, for the Sept-7 projection. I finally got around to copying the graphs up onto this site... been busy with boats lately...)

Rescue a dog from a shelter if you can. Dogs are good, and need our help. Maybe if we can be good to dogs, we can see the benefits of kind behaviour. Perhaps this can help people develop ideas about out how to end that awful running sore of violence called Israel. The place needs to be an integrated Federal state, made up of everyone. Right now, there is a violent blood-feud being run by fascist-forces of the IDF - a bunch of evil motherkillers that make the German forces of World War Two, look like Florence Nightengale. This crazy experiment in small-circle-driven mass-murder, needs to end, even if it means the carpet-bombing of Israeli cities. The American's endless supply of weapons and bombs are being used in Gaza to enable the murder of little girls and even female American citizens by the Israeli killers. This is just completely insane, and needs to stop, lest we all sleepwalk into World War Three, with happy-happy joy-joy Californian drug-madness, and rising markets. America is acting insane now, and this trend seems to be accelerating. This damages the world. Stability is failing.

One scenario is the hyper-inflation thing. We don't think it will happen - but we also recognize that USA is acting wild crazy now, and it will not matter who wins the election - the madness looks to continue, blood will flow, and racist jews who are filed with hate, will insist on (and make happen) more military supplies to help the blood keep flowing.

The USA is using aircraft-carriers, parked on-station, to help Israeli murder-monkeymen, kill American women and Palestinian little girls. This is just madness, and will make hard-core anti-semitism not just acceptable - but mandatory. This is a bad path. The violence-seeking American-killbois should get the hell off this path. It is deep wrong.

The Netanyahu supporters are pure, hard-core evil like real evil can be. We don't support Hamas, but we sure as hell understand just what motivates them.

The ugly murderers of Israel really risk pushing the world into real, solid world-conflict, and anyone with any brains can see this is a bad trend. Trump will either lose or win, and either way, we all risk seeing seriously tragic results play out. This trend is growing. If America does not stop it's unlimited supply of murder-weapons to Israel, it risks making itself the enemy of the world. Israel should be embargoed and blockaded, and weapons should not be supplied to them by anyone. But because America does the opposite, and assists Israel's genocidal war-efforts, it degrades itself.

The long-term costs of this unwise strategy will echo forward for years, and actively encourage and embolden those who view America as a violent, unstable problem-nation, that needs to be disarmed and de-militarized. American de-militarization will not be a good thing, as it risks ending the "Pax Americana", and encouraging "special military operations" as the primary method by which nations will resolve disputes. Peace will be lost.

The bigoted jews of Israel should be left to their own devices. Only when the money and the weapons supplied by America is cut off, will these arrogant racists have any incentive to seek peace. But no American political figure will do this. So the violence will grow. And so, probably, will the money-supply of US dollars, and thus also American inflation.

It may take a full-scale "American Revolution Ver. 2.0", to restore some kind of rational, responsible behaviour to the USA.

[ Sept. 06, 2024 ] - Danger Will Robinson!
Anyone remember the robot from "Lost in Space"? Ancient TV series - probably somewhere on the 'net, in some ancient-TV-stuff site. I watched it when I was five, or something like that. I feel we are in this zone now - the robots should really be waving their arms and warning us. But instead, the damn algorithms are just hovering up the punter's cash... pretty damn funny.

THe bank-stock we unloaded yesterday was reported by Zack's as being the one in the Option's markets that had the biggest implied volatility, which is pretty damned hilarious. That takes some doing, since there are a lot of option contracts. Implied volatility is the vol number you get, if you take the Black-Scholes thing, fiddle the equation so instead of predicting option price, you plug in the option-price that is prevailing in the options market, and calculate what volatility level you need to get that market-made option price. It's a neat idea, and research shows that using implied vol is better than using historical vol, which to me seemed really counter-intuitive, when I first heard this - but now, it makes perfect sense, since I am not quite as fucking stupid as I used to be (well, that might not be true. I am still pretty goddamn stupid sometimes... I seem to have this pathology that makes me run experiments. Most blow up in my face, like some dolt in a high-school chem-lab, trying to make rocket-fuel for his illegal missile experiments...)

Anyway, me thinks there non-zero probability of trouble ahead. There is too much fluff and foam everywhere now. Everything is credit-card-purchased from everyone else, and it's like we are all holding bills-of-exchange drawn on the future that is assumed to be perfect and fine.

Most folks who have lived, know this is not usually the case. We call it the "One Damn Thing After Another Effect".

"Shit happens", is what other's say, as they try to deflect and avoid the responsibility for their unwise actions.

I have weird gut feeling that the DJIA and the SP500 is due for a burp downwards. It won't be the end of the world, but it will take the excess hair off of quite a few furry things.

Like, when you want to check the gasoline level in a fuel tank, and it is night-time, don't light a match, and hold it over the tank-opening, and look in. A friend told me about a guy he knew who did this, and next day, everyone was asking the poor fellow, "Hey, What happened to your eyebrows?"

Full Disclosure: Bot bak our banks. Resistance is Futile.

[ Sept. 05, 2024 ] - Blue Skies (... Blue Days)
So, are we all ready for the big meltdown? Or are our trees going to grow up into the stratosphere, and bump into Elon Musk's Starlink Satellites of Love? Maybe. But we think likely not. (Irving Berlin and Lou Reed - two song-makers from the Apple of Largeness, that we like...)

I remember the first company I wrote up when I had this gig-work as an Investment Analyst. It was an awful company, but it was listed on the TSE, and when I interviewed the CEO, it was clear he was an old-style market promoter, who had cobbled together a tech-thing that sort-of worked. But the business model was just not getting traction, and I got paid to see if a death-spiral finance-deal was the last best hope (which is I think what happened, if I recall correctly...). It was comical, like much of my life efforts. I got paid, but I wrote up a report with a "Sell" on the thing, and the guy who retained my services, pointed out simply: "You'll never get far as a stock analyst writing "Sell" recommendations."

And he was right!

I wrote up some other companies later, which had much better prospects, and one was a real winner - which I had written up as a "Strong Buy". They got taken out at a nice fat profit for everyone. But then the firm I was working for, blew up. Their head-trader (I never met the guy), got busted in a some FBI sting operation, and the reputation of the firm was destroyed, and the old dudes that owned the business just could not recover, and eventually it was all flushed away. Much of my life was like that first "Pirates of the Carribbean" movie, where Jonny Depp's ship is sinking, and he sails it into a dock, and steps off the mast, just as his boat goes under.

See, no one ever calls in an outside consultant when everything is going hunky-dory. As a free-lance boy, I was always brought on-scene to these disasters-in-progress. Every. Single. Time. I kinda liked the challenges - but the list of shitstorms that I endured, and the good businesses that I worked in (which typically blew to complete hell), is a long list - includes Nortel Networks (good company at the engineering level, great 5-gate software development practices, completely stupid, dishonest, corrupt and clueless management), Lehman Brothers (pretty much the same thing), Cantel (a great Canadian cell- phone company, but run by this dude who would become Mayor of Hunger City - sad and sadder all around), and a fine independent brokerage operation, that got taken over by a Big Bank. Resistance is Futile. What more can one say?

Canada (and USA also, truth be told), is more lucky than smart. North America is a fucking paradise. We stole it from the Indians, who stole it from Nature - but it is the part of this planet where you want to live. We're all armed to the teeth (even in Canada - actually, *especially* in Canada), and yet we leave our borders open and undefended - except from attack from ballistic missiles, where we have this magic shit that can address that threat. Why send expensive bombs in expensive rockets, when you can probably Fed-Ex a device to any city in North-Am? It's a crazy world, and it would be best if we can avoid conflict. War is just fucking stupid. But it seems to be hard-wired into the human brain, and it lets these third-rate evil folks rise up and do the big strut like they were top cock-of-the-walk, as a farm-boy (like me!) might say.

Right here, right now, I am terrified that a meltdown of biblical proportions is being tee-ed up. The entire digital ecosystem is based on the same brain-science that we use to understand violent criminals and psychopathic murderers. Our internal neural-nets are flawed - and can be misled by flashing lights, drugs and pretty stories.

This is a serious problem - and the clever folks who can manipulate the message-medium, can do things that should not be done. And the worst offenders are Governments, so regulations will not do shit to fix this threat. We - the citizens of this big mudball - risk seriously falling into a set of insane fantasy-worlds, where any goddamn thing can be made to appear real - and this will drive and vector serious human behaviour. The power of rhetorical arguments has always been profound. The Ancient Romans and Greeks studied and taught this. The Euro-Catholics used it for 1500 years to control (somewhat) the nation-states of Europe. But we can now do it all at-scale. Every device is a human-programming-tool.

At school, I studied a lot of different stuff. I recall the Psychology Lab course at U of T, where we got a lecture - and a demonstration - from a PhD student who had put wires into a rat's brain, and the little ratter could push a bar, to deliver a tiny current to his "pleasure centre", in the medial hypothalumus, if I recall correctly. The guy doing his PhD explained how this could *completely* control the little rat's behaviour. Later, I read about Louis Wu, who was a "wirehead" (a character from one of the RingWorld novels, IIRC).

So, here we are. We are all being wired. It's serious. In fact - we all HAVE BEEN wired. The deed is done. We are all hooked on electronic dope. But it get's worse. We have digital money - every single person is running on credit of some kind. We are building a neural-science driven house-of-cards, hacked together by the big Internet Of Everything Connected To Everything Else (IOECTEE), and enabling it with credit relationships backed by funny-money which is supported by nothing at all.

I actually did my degree in Economics, because I wanted to figure out the system, even back many many years ago.

And I sort-of did. I get it. I took non-credit courses in Accounting and weird computer languages (like APL, for example), as well as all the formal computer-programming and economics stuff. The un-official stuff proved to be very useful. Too much to explain here. But I got a working sense of how it all works.

And my conclusion is, is that we are pretty much all certain to be completely fucked, at some near point in the future. We risk a cascade collapse. The US Preppers - they are completely sane and sensible - yet they are laughed at as loons. People who laugh at them are wrong.

Full Disclosure: Sold all my bank stocks, on the uptick driven by the BoC 25 basis-point rate reduction. The reasons rates are being reduced, is because the economy is breaking. Driving across and up-and-down Ontario roads, I saw all these "For Sale" signs everywhere. Folks are having to renew their 3% mortgages, and at 6%, they cannot cover the costs. Some signs even say: "For Sale" on the top, and "For Lease" on the bottom. What they are really saying, is: "Please buy or lease this goddamn house, since I cannot bloody afford to live here anymore!"

We think this bodes badly for equity prices in the next few months.

[ Sept. 04, 2024 ] - The Irish Rover (Happy Deception)
I must put some of the pictures taken at the Northern Office. I missed the fun yesterday, as the semiconductor stocks blew up and nuked some wealth. NVDA is getting revenue from building out datacentres - and we are back to the bad old world of centralized I/T, like IBM in the 1960's (before my time, but a great case-study in how technology and technical disruption can be used to hover up money from both private and public sectors.)

The USA presidential election is a shaping up to be a rolling disaster on several levels, too much madness to address here. I sense a major-major (like in "Catch-22"?) sea-change coming. The COVID-19 weirdness is now in the rear-view mirror, and it feels like Desolation Row, more than anything. I am finding everything, everywhere, is getting kind of weird. Property-price up in the near-North are still stupid - and this is driving a lot of building. There are monster-home cottages where there used to be vacant shoreline. The money being vectored into these development efforts is non-trivial. Curious. Folks have to work in the Cities - but they sure like to get the hell out, whenever they can. And they remain willing to pay for the opportunity to do so. Suddenly, everything is crowded, and money is losing it's strength. "Shrinkflation" is showing up in the staple commodities (like orange-juice, needed to keep that vitamin-C flowing in one's blood), but petrol is falling in price.

I am really concerned that AI risks becoming toxic. Maybe really a very toxic thing, which will only benefit the true forces of darkness. It is already being used to engineer impressive deceptions and frauds, and the scale of dishonesty and scam-generation and distribution is significant. The cell-phone "apps" that everyone loves and most are addicted to, will become perfect vectors for all manner of rank nastiness. This is an easy prediction, because it is already the case. Your digital-enabled devices will be used to monitor and manipulate your behaviour, and folks are happy to buy into this process, as it means they can avoid thinking. People are lazy.

But we risk losing the world. We risk the creation of a world of horror, pain and targeted-destruction, as the political strategy by the big-players is played out, using people as the pawns. All the things that make civil structure work well - sound-money, free-speech, freedom of movement, contract-law, honest reporting, free-flow of information, secure land-tenure, clear and explicit property-rights - the entire sweep of what we need to keep civilization working smoothly - all these key characteristics can be effectively undermined and degraded by clever AI-enabled strategies.

Too much to go into here. But no-one wants to talk to a chat-bot that is being used to reduce the head- count in a call-centre. We have built a very "clever" world - but I don't want a "smart speaker". I want a radio with a tunable dial - not something pre-programmed for me.

See, we have just noticed something quite interesting. The internet has turned to shit. Really. The only thing it does well now, is selling, and to make credit-card payments easier. It can also facilitate communication and it makes finance and trading action easier - but at the cost of increased levels of wild volatility (wild in the sense that true variance is maybe infinite - or at least is unknowable). By connecting everything to everything else - and everyone - the risk of process runaway is amplified. And fraud is made much easier. Shit-filters are mandatory everywhere, to do anything. Triple verification is needed, KYC (Know Your Client) is required to a higher level, and so on. But the process still cannot be trusted - only people can be trusted - and not very far, truth be told.

But the AI stuff is and will be used to factor-out the people. This is the idea. And this can make for a world that can quickly become ugly, nasty and awful. And a world completely devoid of opportunity. This is what concerns us. The economics of AI deployment at scale may in fact create a sterile economic landscape, where economic opportunity is effectively extinguished.

And this will be a problem.

When economic opportunity is gone, then harsh conflict is sure to result. If you cannot create wealth, then ambitious folks will organize to *steal* - or take by force, what cannot be earned by economic effort. As AI removes economic opportunity, it may well induce a ramp-up in ever-growing levels of competitive conflict - the eternal fight for scarce resources that has always been the thing that humans will do to survive and gain advantage.

Many escape into fantasy and fiction and self-delusion (the internet enables that also), but for realists, who live in the real world of blood, sweat and tears, the deployment of AI technology at scale, will just be more of the disruption that degrades and then removes completely, all economic chance of improvement. Life becomes a grim slog, and conflict becomes the only path out. The world we are enabling with AI, may look like an ugly dystopian novel.

The solution is not "more regulation", but is perhaps the complete removal of all regulation. But that means that every man must become his own State, with his own Ministry of Finance, and his own Military. Either way, with deployment of AI at scale, we are knight's-forking ourselves into a world of greater conflict and deception.

Those big AI-datacentres NVDA is building, may not be good things.

[ Aug. 29, 2024 ] - The Piano-Man's Found Another Nail for my Heart (Risk is Real)
As I do some farm-work and industrial gardening (with a lawn-tractor), I keep noticing the Lear Jets flying overhead. They make a kind of small fighter-jet sound. Some with swept wings (the more modern ones), and others with the old straight-wings without any sweep - real classic. I suppose classic jets are kinda like classic cars. Ya just want one, and it's probably kinda fun when one gets to toot around in it. Life is short, YOLO and all that...

Here's a thing: Suppose you have a cool device that gives you 71% accuracy in your forecasts of what is going to happen. That's actually pretty good, in a world of wild randomness, where you have no freakin' idea what the distribution looks like. (You have no idea of the number of balls-in-the-bag, or even if there is only gonna be one bag or many... The way they teach probability theory in school is pretty goofy. You're lucky if you have some awareness of the balls in your own bag - golfer analogy and all...).

Anyway, consider you are pretty confident that you have 71%, on average, ability to call the event you are concerned with. That's pretty good for an event with a high-level of wild-randomness. But here's the rub: You need to have TWO events play out in sequence, for your outcome to be profitable. You need to either buy and then sell (and you are trying to call the market), or maybe you are doing sale-and-repurchase, and you need to sell at the right time, and then re-purchase at a lower price. Or, maybe you are shorting, and then have to buy-cover. So, your little machine needs to successfully call TWO events, which are pretty close to independent, and then you will find that your probability of successfully getting to a profit-point, is now 71% and then a second 71% is also involved in the likelyhood of the second, closing trade.

This changes your probability of success. Even if you can say with 71% accuracy what will happen, and wait for that kind of situation to tee-up, the Pr(Success) = .71 times .71 = 0.5041. And suddenly, you realize that you have no damn edge AT ALL. NONE. Your two-trades, which must occur in sequence, even if you can be over 70% sure of the price-path-evolution, you actually are betting on not really much more than a coin-flip. Your probability of successful (ie. profitable) outcome, is really just a 50/50 bet, which is no edge whatsoever. Your machine which can give roughly 70%+ accurate forecasts, still means that your actually Pr(Success) (where "Success" is defined as an acceptable profit), is really not very good, because both trades - entry and exit - have to be executed at approriate price-points. Even if you are 71% sure of what the outcome will be, because you have to have TWO outcomes in sequence, you really only have a 50% chance of success.

See, even if you can have better than 70% accuracy in your model, the actual execution of the model results in the real world of wild-randomness, means that even if you almost KNOW what will happen, because you have to do TWO things (not just one) successfully, you really don't have any edge. You are gambling, and without an edge, which means that if you play long enough, or enough times, you will lose all your money.

One's initial sense is that a better than 70% ability to call the future, would offer a gambler a real edge. But this is not really the case, if he has to make TWO randomness-infested decision-actions work correctly in sequence, in order to walk away with cash.

Profitable stat-arb is not just stressful, annoying and risky (the whole "picking up nickels in front of the fast-moving steam-roller" problem), it is also damn hard to do successfully. You need to be more like 80%+ sure, of your predictive ability. Surprisingly, a 71% accurate model is much more like a coin-flip in practice, than one would expect. All because there are TWO events, and .71 x .71 = .5041. It's right there in the basic probability arithmetic.

If you have, say an 80% probability of being right, then 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.640 works better. You have a slight edge, and if you can do enough 80% and then 80% probability events, you will have a slight edge. But if you only have 65% predictive accuracy, then .65 x .65 = 0.4225, and if you play and bet with this model, you will have only a 42% chance of success, and thus the longer you play, the more you will lose. You will have too many trades where one side is wrong, and even if doing sale-and-repurchase, you might find the re-purchase price runs away from you in a dramatic fashion, and never returns.

The only investment model that works, is to do lots of trials, and close quickly the ones that do not look right, and add carefully to the ones that look to be working. The "fail fast" strategy is critical, and most investors just cannot do it. I find this very difficult. I tend to want to "give the trade some room ...", which usually turns out to be profoundly bad idea.

But it's funny and curious. Even if you can predict to better than 70 percent accuracy, you really still have no edge. None at all. Your gains and losses will slosh back and forth, and not trend positive, even if you work for years and years. Maybe index-investing is the very best one can do, unless one just gets lucky, or determines thru hard work, luck or inside-information, something special and unique about a special and unique situation, and then makes a big, concentrated bet, or uses leverage at just the right time, and in the right amount, to enable a big, low-probability win. The key-fact here, is that for every person who does this successfully, there are maybe a few hundred who did NOT do it successfully, and went to the graveyard, not to be seen again. We only see the "Big Winners", and not the hundreds of "Standard Losers", so we get a very false impression of how the investment game typically evolves thru a standard human lifetime.

What has worked for us mostly, is dividends. And also some very key real-estate investments, where we got lucky thru hard work and pure, speculative daring. But risk is real. It's as real as a cement wall, hit by a car at high-velocity. Remember this, if nothing else.

[ Aug. 28, 2024 ] - Sheena is a Punk Rocker
She actually was "Queen of the Jungle" in a 1930's comic book series. Ramones took the concept, and updated her strong-character/rebellious-nature for 1977 New-York/California. Great tune, fun idea. We really can see the future, by examining the past. Just not clearly.

Short-squeeze on our stuff - price popped, and then today, faded like a good dream. Canadian stocks really are pretty poor investments. There are only three or four that you want to own, and if you seek dividend income, you will often find that mostly you are just getting your capital back. The markets here are comically awful, but USA investment entails currency risk, and abusive withholding taxes on dividends for retail investors - so the only way to play USA, is to bet for speculative long-shots, or huff-puff nonsense that will - with eventual certainty - collapse back to baseline (where the baseline is sometimes zippity-do-dah).

I miss Father Guido Sarducci (is that the right spelling?) of Saturday Nite Live fame. He was a character from back in the days when SNL was funny. We gave up on TV long ago, and literally never switch it on. ( I just cannot tolerate the adverts - and on the 'net, I can run advert-blocker software.) He wanted to create a new augmentation of the Big Church, and call it "The Church of Zippity-Doo-Dah". Comedy and music would be on offer, and maybe instead of little biscuits that "transubstantiate" (oh, please...) into Hay-soos, you might get a drink with some chips or fries? I don't know. But somehow the concept stuck in my mind. In the markets, zippity-doo-dah is often a euphemism for zero-you-lose-all-your-investment. Not quite so nice, as the Church-of-a-Good-Gin-and-Tonic.

We think Canada is in real trouble, if we cannot get some real change at the Federal level. The uncontrolled immigration is dangerous, abusive, and unwise. Our demographics are just awful - the fecundity rate is like, 1.40 or something insane like that. We are so far down from even being able to replace our population, that it is silly. (Demographic-Economists suggest a fecundity rate of 2.1 is minimum to sustain national population. Fecundity rate is number of live babies on average, a woman has in her reproductive lifetime.)

So, we have a problem here. But the even more insane "solution" to this, is the very-bad-idea being run by the current clowns in Ottawa - full-on, unrestricted immigration of people that do not necessarily share our cultural values. It's a perfect recipe for tragic conflict, that need not actually take place. We notice serious over-crowding everywhere now - and this is completely by design. Property and house prices reflect the increase in supply of humans seeking a place to live, and as house-prices rise, so do the property taxes and energy costs. All this is unnecessary, as the population pressure is entirely a result of government diktat.

We are not against immigration. But the current approach of bringing millions of folks into the country each year, is creating economic pressure and problems that need not occur. The more traditional levels of 200 or 300 thousand per year, with formal sponsorship arrangements for each person - this is the right way to do it.

But instead, we are bringing in over 1 million (or more) per year, and then adjusting our traditional laws and procedures to degrade and damage existing Canadian citizens, in a number of really abusive ways. It's a perfect example of a really stupid, knee-jerk response by a deeply corrupt Federal Government, that seeks tax revenue above all else, even if it means destroying parts of what Canada is and was.

Funny how that works, is it not? With Fidel Castro's bastard child running the clown-show up in Ottawa, there is absolutely nothing (legal) we can do about this foolishness, until it's election time. But of course, the new immigrants are being (implicitly) told they have to support the penis-heads in Ottawa, if they want to keep the benefits flowing.

The whole model is nuts. There is nothing wrong with limiting growth, and trying to seek stability, rather than blowing up the system with out-of-control, unwise policies designed to increase the tax-take. We find the highways are full, the hospital emergency-rooms have 200 or 300 brown-folks crowding in, every day, looking for "free" health-care, and no doctors are available who are willing to take on new patients - so long-serving Canadians who paid their life-time of taxes, have to line up at the few "walk-in" clinics, and get served by immigrant doctors who are fine people - but this is all a VERY DIFFERENT model from what we used to have, when our own medical schools could create our own skilled medical doctors.

See, what we find now in Canada, is a series of systems that just do not work well, and many that do not work at all. And the problems are everywhere - not just in health care. The highways are full of "new drivers" who drive crazy, and everyplace is just completely *full*. We like brown people - no problem. But ONLY brown people? This seems to be the current strategy. We are strangers now, in the country we built and paid for.

All this is unnecessary. It is by design - being implemented by a corrupt regime that is being supported by a hard-core Socialist who wears a red-turban on his nasty head - so he looks like a giant penis with a head-only condom on. Considering that the NDP is working hard to fuck Canada but good, I suppose the condom image maybe makes sense. But really, it is just completely insane, and there is nothing we can do to stop these clowns who seek to destroy the traditions of Canada.

Until maybe when an election is called, and the writ gets dropped... The silly buggers will have to call one at some point. Personally, I would like to vote for Sheena. ;)

[ Aug. 24, 2024 ] - Google Search is Almost Completely Dead
Ok, try this fun experiment: Load up a Google Search basic webpage, and enter: "democratic scam convention was dogmeat mixed with cowflops". The thought just occured to me, and I tried to google it (as is often an opportunity to get curious and possibly interesting responses). I got precisely **TWO** responses!

First was a Reddit page about "dogmeat", the (maybe) blue-heeler cattle dog in game "Fallout 3" that is possibly modelled after the type of dog Max has in Mad Max 2. The second was a puff-piece by Canadian Yahoo talking about how nice and fine the Democrats were comparied to the evil, demonic GOP folks. Fucking comical, this Google punch-you-in-the-face censorship really is.

Ok, now, try DDG (the DuckDuckGo) search engine. Just enter "https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/" to get to the DDG search page (without too much promo flapdoodle): And enter the exact same phase: "democratic scam convention was dogmeat mixed with cowflops". The phrase is not meant to be terribly meaningful - but notice the large number of responses that DDG generates...

You can keep clicking NEXT button after each page of results, and learn that McDonald's no longer using "pink slime" (even if the Democratic Party of the USA, still kinda is...). And you can see that at site: "https://gear.bethesda.net/products/fallout-dogmeat-tracker-canvas-jacket", the very uber-cool Official Dogmeat jacket, with "Wasteland Trackers" on the back, is completely sold out. (Damn! I want one now... ) The game "Fallout 3" must be popular, if the "DOGMEAT" jacket is sold out. Reminds me of scene in a W. Gibson novel, re. a leather bomber jacket...

And it goes on. The usual MSM suspects are found (CNN and CBS, etc.), but so is a reference to magazine called "United States Magazine and Democratic Review", which began publication in 1837, and changed it's name to "Democratic Review" in 1852. The year 1837 is interesting, because it was the year of the intense Rebellion in Upper Canada (now Ontario), where I live, which was a serious, bloody affair, but was taught to us as school kids as little more than a minor disturbance. This is one of the Big Lies in Canada, as the 1837 uprising was a bloody, violent affair, which lead to massive reprisals by the British military forces, pitched battles around "York", (now Toronto), and eventual capture and public execution by hanging in the central cityhall square, of the ringleaders, some of whom were senior people in the small British colony of the day. (One was Judge Blount. I find it interesting when senior Judges are hanged by the legal system of any polity. Maybe this is something that should happen more often?) Upper Canada colony was put under military-law, for roughly 20 years.

It was only when things started to get frisky in the USA, (the Civil War was coming) and the Blob that ran the colony (called the "Family Compact") wanted more British troops for protection, that the idea of creating the "Dominion of Canada" as a self-sustaining, self-financing independent national entity became viable. The greatest Canadian politician ever - a Scotsman with a bad temper, a sickly wife, and a drinking problem, named John A. MacDonald, put together a group of folks who favoured national independence, and proposed it to the British bosses.

The idea for the Dominion of Canada was: "Hey, you will get ALL the same economic benefits you get now (a reciprocal free-trade deal with England mother-country) BUT IN ADDITION, you will no longer have to PAY anything to make money from this colony. We will cover our OWN defense costs, and in fact can be a source of soldiers, food, wood, grain, minerals and metals, and so on for the Motherland of England. Just let us run the place ourselves, and you get the same benefits, but without having to fund Forts, soldiers, garrisons, military costs, and so on. Deal?

Canada got it's national existence once the USA went to war with itself. Both Canada and Japan, converted into real nations, in 1867. Canada got the BNA Act, and Japan finished the Boshin War quickly, and Edo Period gave way to Meiji "Restoration". The USA Civil War, which ran from 1861 to 1865, had just ended, and MacDonald and Disraeli (the Chancellor of the Exchequer, soon to be Conservative Prime Minister) managed to agree to the deal. The Colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec, with Nova Scotia, PEI and New Brunswick also involved) drafted the Canadian BNA Act (British North America Act), in 1864, and it was accepted by the British parliament and got Royal Assent on March 29, 1867, coming into force as of July 1st, 1867. The USA Civil War was still on as the Act was drafted, and that simple fact let the deal get done. England did not want to fund another bloody great war with USA - and Canada colonies were getting rich supplying materiel to the North - and remained happy and eager to trade with the English mother-country.

It's always about money.

And from this useful and successful DuckDuckGo search, with the interesting reference to "The United States Magazine and Democratic Review", I discovered that the actual text of this old journal has been archived, and is available for viewing. It's wonderful! The 1847 journals from January to June, for example, can be accessed via University of Michigan, thru the site: "https//babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id-mdp.39015066914626&seq=17". There are 606 pages! And it's full of arguments in "United States Trade and Tonnage" for free-trade! It's so interesting to see the details from this time of conflict and growth - the discussions are much like what we see now, re. China, and trade in EV's, and semiconductors. There are real questions as to what the duties should be - or if there should be any at all. The same arguments re. oil and gas and semiconductors now, were about coal and grain and other food products, back in 1847. Most interesting.

And the bottom line to all this: Google Search Engine - using it's strategy of deep political censorship, is badly broken. The DDG (DuckDuckGo) search engine still works. Or at least it works the way, search engines should work. It lets you find lots of interesting things, you might never see.

Almost certainly, Google will be broken up. It just does not work well, and it's almost-monopoly on Search, is a bad thing, because they are no longer even offering it. The "Search" tool they offer now, is just plain bad. And worse, it is politically fiddled, which is really bad. What is so ironic, is that the "United States Magazine and Democratic Reveiw" was actually digitized by Google, according to a tiny footnote at the bottom of each page. It used to be a good thing, this Google enterprise. But they went wrong, and ruined "Search"

Time for a change, perhaps? We need folks to have more awareness and understanding of economic issues. Otherwise, we keep fighting over the same issues, for the same stupid reasons, and civilization cannot maintain and extend prosperity. Free trade is costly and difficult and sometimes bad for declining industries - but it lets folks have solid, sustainable prosperity. And even worse than stopping trade, is stopping free-flow of information. Censorship and suppression of knowledge - that is really bad. Free speech (no censorship!) and free trade (no tariffs!) are the ideals we should strive for.

[ Aug. 23, 2024 ] - Don't Pay the Ferryman
Until he has safely put you on the far short. And don't name your yacht "Black Swan" or "Bayesian" or "I-Know-the-Future" or some such hubris. Sorry for Mike Lynch and his daughter, and the others whacked by a waterspout. Earth wants to kill you - and I can forecast with 100% accuracy, that She will succeed, at some point within the next 150 years. ("Old Parr" was a fraud - the son just took over his father's identity, which is a useful trick, with many curious benefits.)

USA is getting really weird. Quite sci-fi now, with a got-no-votes low-end middlebrow set to become the Big Boss, and the good old white men being told to fuck off and die, by the darker set of scammers than we have seen in a long time ("dark" as a metaphor for moral weakness, not chroma of fleshtones...)

Economics is getting also very weird. We get one guy, from the "Reserve", saying what the interest-rate will be. This is bat-shit crazy. Interest rates are set by the marketplace for money (as capital), not by some dudes kow-towing to the Democrat Party mafia-bosses. It's all just silly. But it is the silly that all the bump-stock traders are focused on, so it makes the market go "Wheeee!"... which is even more silly.

I have to go buy a light bulb, and try to put it above my head...

[ Aug. 22, 2024 ] - Long or Wrong
Still long, we are. Volatility is the price paid for survival. We've run over 20 years on the dividend streams. But perhaps it is time to buy some puts... Trouble is that the risk we want to hedge against, is full-collapse risk, which really means underground bunkers in places that are not documented. And I have no interest in living in an underground bunker. I'll accept the "mineshaft gap", and expire on the surface, in the (nuclear?) sunshine.

So, we remain long with the curious cocktail of dividend generators, and watch the fireworks on the horizon. I don't think AI is going to work, unless and/or until the training can be made to happen in real-time, so that the system actively improves as it is used. My LLM thing is locked in 2021, and it cannot update itself with new information - even if I tell it "Listen, here is my lock-code for my car. Can you remember that?". It is just not able to do this, and this makes it kind of worthless.

There has to be *nightly* training that updates the weights of the matricies, so that info that the AI encounters *today*, is actionably available *tomorrow*. It's what we call in Japanese, the "kino, kyo, ashta" (yesterday, today, tomorrow) problem. You need to have done your work yesterday, to effectively deal with the crisis of today, to ensure you can focus on the plan that will track you successfully into tomorrow, as it rises up over the horizon, like the shock-wave of a nuclear blast (or the rising sun...)

I really think reading fiction might be a waste of time - worse than a waste - it is actually *negative* action, which pulls you seductively into someone else's twisted and perfectly fake and wrong world-view. You will be mental manipulated with all the heurisitcs and tricks of social-behavioural fuckery. Nothing useful or helpful can come from reading most fiction. It is just a picture-of-the-world that is proveably, certainly wrong. But then, there is Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles", and the Issac Asimov stories - they were so good, that they put useful ideas in people's minds, and helped to map out the domain of the future. So, maybe fiction (science-fiction), might have a purpose. But "relationship" fiction, and stories about fucked-up families with bad drunken fathers that abuse their women and children, this stuff is just shit-eatingly worthless, I am afraid. And it seems now to be this toxic shit that gets critical aclaim by the lamestream media. Yuck and yuecch. Stories about fucked-up people fucking around and having bad times - the "problem dramas" of modern junk-TV and such - all this is worse than worthless, and might as well be Fahrenheit-451ed. As I grow older, I grow sympathetic to the views of the Firehouse Captain.

There is a *lot* to said for being an iconoclastic skeptic. A curious amount of human generated "stories" are just manipulative dreck. They are to be avoided, I suspect. Stories are very effective at assisting and extending the process of self-delusion, the most dangerous affliction that can befall any of us. The "narrative" is almost certain to be a lie, designed to vector a potential counter-party's thought process, so that he or she does some thing, or takes some action that benefits the narrative-promoter.

Beware the goddamn narrative. It will almost certainly be wrong, or at least deceptive, in that it will offer explanation (where there honestly is no explanation), and meaning, where in fact, the driving force generator behind the events, was just randomness. The narrative will be crafted to achieve an objective the narrator seeks.

Sure, there is yin and yang, or light and darkness, and this can explain a lot. But darkness is more than just the absense of light. The most powerful darkness in a human scenario, is the self-imposed darkness of willful blindness to what is really taking place. You are being lied-to, and cheated, but even if a wise person tries to point this out to the poor, deluded person, the person suffering from modern self-delusion will actively seek to maintain their illusion-world, and respond as if threatened. I think this explains a lot of market activity, and human social relationships in general (of which market-activity is just a specific, special-case subset.)

It's really, really hard sometimes to know the truth. And even if someone carefully takes time to suggest what the truth is - the deluded person will seek to avoid confronting what is real, and may retreat into a fantasy-world that gives them comfort, even if such comfort means they risk their own destruction.

As the old Swiss trader said: "When the ship starts sinking - don't pray, just jump." This is difficult to do, even for a clever fellow who knows this heuristic. The water is cold and dark, there may be sharks, and the boat is still floating. This discourages action, until of course, the boat sinks. But by then, your corrective action is too late to offer protection.

[ Aug. 21, 2024 ] - Fat Tony's Black Swan
These nightmares are becoming intense. I wake up sweaty and exhausted from a night of sleep. My little dog sleeps soundly on top of the covers, at the bottom of the bed, oblivious. The wild complexity of the dreams surprises me. After 2 or three minutes of wakefulness, they completely evaporate from memory - leaving only the dull impression of Cassandra-awareness. (And I did not even get to ride in Apollo's chariot...) Perhaps it's the blood-thinners I am taking, combined with the cocktail of B-complex, fish-oil, vitamin-D and collagen, mixed with the gin and quinine from the tonic? It's like that line from "Beetlejuice"... "I'm feelin' pretty good, actually..."

Ok, so I am re-reading "Black Swan" and "Fooled-By-Randomness", two excellent books. Highly recommended, even if N. N. Taleb is a rude bugger. I sent him a nice email once, and got this astonishingly rude reply, which I can't even recall. He probably assumed I was someone in the business. Wrong. I am like Tyrell's niece: I am the business.

And probably I am being stupid - as if reading about the bloody "Black Swan" problem can somehow help me determine how to deal with the wild, over-the-top shitstorm that I am pretty sure is looming on the horizon. If I was sailing a big "Bayesian" boat, I would drop all sails, motor like a son-of-bitch for a sheltered anchorage, or deploy a big drogue-shute.. Funny how Mike Lynch got "hoisted by his own petard" as the English might say. But I wish no such misfortune on any man, who has a nice boat. Folks just plain underestimate what nature can do. Two happiest days in a man's life: First, when he buys his first really big yacht, and the second is day he sells it, and gets his money back.

I just cannot shake this curious and disturbing feeling, that "Here, there be Dragons", and that we are rushing headlong into this geo-fenced region-of-error without any attempt to course-correct, by those at the helm. I do not like being the passenger on the big ship of fools.

I think Taleb (is he still alive? I hope so...) should sell some Hollywood boy the rights to his character "Fat Tony". For some curious reason, this fictional character from "Black Swan" has stayed with me, in the back of my mind, as much as any fictional construct I ever encountered - even as much as Cpt. Picard of Star Trek, TNG. Curious how our minds and our memories work. As humans, we remember stories better than anything else.

But the truth is, the world is not a story. It is wild, pure chaos, without any god or "deus" to offer even map-guidance, let alone any sort of protection or assistance. We are more than just "on our own" - we are lucky bastards in a world of paradise and pain, and we make our plans as we wither and fade, and nothing can arrest this process. I've seen so many really nice and good things just fail, end and collapse. There is only the void that lies before us, and nothing we do can alter this certain destiny.

What is so truly fascinating, is the capacity humans have for self-delusion. It is just about limitless, and really knows no boundries. I been data-seeking, reading various blogs and comments from folks who still actually "journal" with weblogs on the 'net, and some are quite interesting - but all their work will be "tears in the rain", no matter how successful, or how many "followers" they accumulate. (Facebook truly is a social cancer. It successfully leverages just about every human weakness. The internet experiment has almost reached the bottom now. "Fascinating...", as Mr. Spock might have said...)

Swan-Vision-Alpha:
The coming warfare will likely be surprisingly ferocious. I suspect many people will relish the opportunity to participate. There will be long lineups at the recruiting stations. The blood will literately run in the streets. I recall sitting in a barber-shop, at around 7 or 8 years of age, about to get my hair cut down to what a Marine might look like (each hair, maybe 1/4 inch in length, so your head felt like velcro when you ran your hand over it), and I read a comic book called "Real War", and it had this image-frame of the Canada-USA border at Niagara Falls, with the customs agents shot to bits, their bodies hanging over the bullet-broken glass of their booths. A rogue US-expiditionary force had invaded Southern Ontario, much as Russia had invaded Ukraine. Real war. I met a young check-out clerk at the local Canadian Tire store, who looked so different - young, attractive, but a strange serious face. She had come from Kherson. Her English was good - only a slight accent. She had relatives here.

The "Real War" documented in the 1960's comic book fantasy has actually begun, but most folks actually have no fucking clue. I have Palestinian friends who have lost *hundreds* of family members to Israeli death-squads and ethnic-cleaning bombardment operations.

I am certain now that Trump cannot and will not win the USA election. But the illegitimate Harris regime will be no better, and enemies of the USA will use the opportunity to take advantage of American internal conflict. We find it curious that the equity markets are not discounting this likely scenario.

It seems to be the stuff of my current nightmares.

[ Aug. 20, 2024 ] - Non-Linear Lines
I remain impressed at the resilience of the US markets. But I feel I must caution that 1929 looked a lot like this, as have other non-linear transitional events in history. The Democrats in USA are having their honeymoon moment, and the media-machine is pumping the bellows hard. The huffs-and-puffs of the big Fire Dragons of Deception are scorching the earth of truth, and making possible the drift towards the New State of Rain. We'll get bad policy, big crisis, and an operational Police State, once the Party-Fun is over.

The US markets just love this shit. It's really interesting - we have the "Not too hot, Not too cold - Mmmmm just Right!" economy, and even Goldman Sachs says this - Goldilocks has returned. The stolen gruel is being happily consumed by everyone. But does not that child's story end with the 3 Bears returning, and killing and eating Goldilocks? Or was that just in my version of "Mother Goose and the Brother's Grimm"?

We are actually very positive-focused folks here. Things are ticking along well. The investments are throwing off fat dividend-streams that let us pay the bills, the vehicles, equipment and even the big boat are all working well, and I even had a chance to put some nicer-looking wooden siding on the front part of my small cottage-complex at my lakefront place. The structures are small, but there are three of them, and the one closest to the lake (which gets the direct blasts of winter-winds), needed to be better protected, so it got an overlay of pressure-treated pine which looks like cedar, but is treated with a copper-arsenic compound that gives long life and prevents wood-rot. It looks nice, and should stay looking nice for many years (we hope).

Would be nice if we could get similar long-life from our investments. Treat them with poison? Maybe. We have found that a useful heuristic (a rule-of-thumb), is: "Invest in companies that you don't like." This is the opposite of what most folks do. They buy stocks in companies that they like (and then watch them fall in value, and buy more because the price is "cheap"). We have done this. Bad, bad and bad.

I dislike Microsoft and Apple - but should have bought their stocks, because we are all forced by their dominance to buy their products. (Try and buy a non-Apple computer *WITHOUT* Windows. You will find it to be difficult.) Despite all your rage, when it comes to our technology choices, we are still just rats-in-the-cage. I built some Z-80 SBC's (single-board computers) from a bag-o-parts from Mouser, just to have something that I could run code on bare-metal. Writing in assembler teaches one a lot - but I use a BASIC interpreter hacked-together by a genius friend who did the board design (and which works well). I actually wrote a matrix-multiplier and matrix-inversion program, in BASIC for the Z-80, by manually transcoding some old FORTRAN code. It all works. The matrix- math stuff is the deep-neural guts of AI, and understanding it useful.

But one guy can only do so much, even with help from genius folk, standing on their shoulders. I can see further, but not really do too much about what I see. This is the hard part. It's the Cassandra problem - you know what will happen, but your warnings go unheeded, and you have to watch the horrible "accidents" happen, which actually are not accidents at all - they are just processes and programs running to their non-linear conclusions. But it is still painful to watch the horrible auto-wrecks in the rear-view mirror, as you fly at velocity down the highway-of-life.

AI, modern discoveries in neural-science, bio-hacking, knowledge of the work from behavioural economics, psycho-linguistics and Baysian probability models - all this material technology, will almost certainly create a high-conflict, angry and dangerous world, which will then not just allow-for, but will mandate a 1984-style Police State, where economic and political freedom will be made to expire.

Most folks will not want this World - but the State-Bastards and the "Blob" will force this upon us all, and the State-Bastards will grow fat, rich and powerful in the process. Their operatives will reach out and destroy your freedom, your opportunity and even the most basic control you think you might have over your own life. Unless we normies organize to erase these larval forces of darkness (and let's be clear - the truly evil forces are all coming from the Leftists), we will have no freedom in the future. We will be slave-serfs, eating soylent-food made from bugs, and seeing our property expropriated by "social-justice-warrior" government-backed fraudsters.

This madness is actively underway in most Western-world economies, right here and right now. There are not-so-secret plans, in my local neighbourhood, to expropriate farmland, for some stupid auto-factory or battery-plant or some secret, government-backed State-Bastard project. This is insane, almost beyond belief. But the project is rolling, State-Bastards see the chances to get bulging pockets of wealth, by stealing farmland from families who don't want to sell their land for comically small valuations - land which has been held for over 150 years by the same families. The project is stupid, the implementation is profoundly wrong, and the use of non-disclosure-agreements (NDA's) is just fucking criminal.

This nonsense is just another tiny example of the idiotic madness that is infecting all the political elites.

What I find most curious, is how the markets are reacting - especially in USA - to the prospect of the Left-programmed future the Democrats are pushing. It's a collective of bad choices and stupid ideas - but it will be another cash-dump (funded by funny-money and borrowing, which is insane at this stage), and the market is sucking it up, and getting giddy and bids are flying in and up. I think this is fucking madness.

But then, I recall history, and I realize this is what it looks like. This is the algorithm. We think that we are above history - a fool wrote that we had reached "the end of history", and so on. Complete arrogance and self-delusion is what characterizes stupid, nutjob bubbles. And I am starting to think we have to be in one. It is a global, credit-fueled confidence bubble of the most extreme scale ever seen in human history. Maybe it goes on forever, and we just drop zeros once we add too many? Or are we programming events that will cause collapse actions *independent* of financial machinations? As the foolishness and deception grow in scale and social breadth, we are leaning to views that this is more likely.

Things seem to be going well and fine. But based on what I am seeing, I have never in my whole life, been more worried and concerned over political process and the near-future operational economics. There are abusive idiots and greedy fraudsters in control of our Federal politics - both here in Canada, and also (even more so) in the USA. This alone bodes badly for our future. But link that to the wild, debt-fueled overvaluations of financial assets, the horrific and extreme lack-of-wisdom of Western world policy towards the race-based religio-fascist State of Israel (a festering wound that cannot be healed by more USA weapons), the tragedy of the Russian assault on Ukraine, and the threats by Chinese Communists to invade sovereign Taiwan, I just cannot see a future of peace and prosperity. Conflict seems certain to grow.

A future of wild rolling wars, financial instability, and rising anger on all sides, seems the most likely path forward.

Maybe I'm wrong. Rather hope so.

[ Aug. 18, 2024 ] - The Plan for the Destruction of America?
Kamala Harris is the worst political scammer to reach for the top since the early 1900's. She is so comically terrible a choice, that it just rattles and shakes the imaginations of those who know anything about economics. Her policy plans are certain to degrade and damage America - vastly worse than anything Donald Trump or really anyone in the Republican Party could carry out. She is actually blaming price rises on "price gouging" and "greedy grocery stores" and her solution to this is price controls. This is just fucking insane. But it plays well to the mindless and the misled, unwise people that dominate our world now. It is jaw-droppingly hilarious. America is actually on the verge of a classical European-style economic self-immolation.

Here is an explicit step-by-step process program of exactly what will happen, if economic-idiot Kamala Harris gets elected, and tries to implement "grocery price controls":

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/kamala-harris-proposed-price-controls-may-lead-communism-mass-starvation-end-america

And there are rational, fine people who will actually support this fuck-stupid Kamala-nonsense, because they are so effectively misled and scammed by the mainstream American media, where all the little Lefties play their siren-songs of deception. Politics is being reduced to a faked-up classical medieval morality play, with "Mr. Orange-Man Bad" and little "Mrs. Brown-Face Good", and the people are sucking it up like liquid sugar mixed with opium.

And with the Democrats and their "ballot harvesting" strategies, where they hoover up those huge bags of "plantation-votes" from the poor-folk neighbourhoods, the race will probably be decided in favour of this astonishingly dishonest scammer. The Wicked-Witch of the Left, the "Great Pullosee", in her evil garments of dead-bat wings, has managed to make things even worse than they were, under the Old Crazy Bye-Done man. It's like the Wizard of Oz turns into a Trans-Black-Dracula and the becomes the Bride of New-Frankenstein, from the Left Coast of Hell.

I didn't think it could be worse than having a "Hillary Clinton" president, but again, history has shown that my "worst-case" scenarios, were not actually sufficiently "worst-case" after all, since there is always a more grim and astonishingly awful scenario, just around the corner, as we slide down the ball-gutter into the future.

"Price Controls" for America, as the super-great, super-strong US dollar, turns into steaming scrip, from a Police-State, right before our eyes! What a transformation! How about that? Big Bombs for the Tiny-Hat-Big-Nose-Boys in Israel to kill little Gaza girls is not enough for America. No. Americans now have an operational plan, to go full-communist, and trash their own economy.

Vladimir Putin and the Russians must be laughing themselves silly.

After she destroys the food-supply chain in America, what will Kamala-thinking assault next? Maybe the American military budget? Or maybe she will stop paying the interest on all those US bonds? Like Argentina always does, when they elect goof-ball Leftist females?

Harris is ahead in the polling for the critical swing-States, and it looks like she is certain to win. We give it a roughly 80% chance now. The dark-folk (figuratively and literally) will vote for her with 85% to 15% margin, and so will the children. It's madness, but... It's the Comedy-Show of the New Century. No need to attack or bomb America. The Americans will vote for "Mrs. Brown", and they will trash themselves quite effectively.

Problem is, so will we also, if we don't get rid of Castro's Bastard.

[ Aug. 17, 2024 ] - Worst-Case "Degenerate Economy" ... It just gets more comically awful. The steaming crock of info-poop that is being served up to folks now is just so terrible, all one can do is laugh. It's just hilarious. This guy "Howie Lindzon" has an amusing blog, in which he huffs-and-puffs. He coined a term "The Degenerate Economy" to describe the USA economy, and he now wants to "re-brand" this name, as too many folks seem to have agreed with him. He has asked for folks to send him ideas for a new name to characterize the modern USA economy, but I think he has really nailed the essence of it. I tried to send him a reply, but the clever underlined code in his little blog, actually does not link to anything. His writing is basically click-bait, to get you to "subscribe", which is fine, but we are not interested in subscriptions.

But I wrote a reply, and it is too good not to share. Howie is one of those clever guys, if you get my drift... His blog is a trolling operation. He sells tickets. Maybe, like in the old David Bowie song, maybe "She's got medals..." (Just a great song. See if you can find it. Bowie was so far ahead of his time. Today is a "Drive-in Saturday" I guess...)

Howard Lindzon asked for new names for "The Degenerate Economy", and this was my reply. Posted here, because I could not actually send it to him...

------------- "The Degenerate Economy" is a perfect name. You nailed it. And we are all now more on our own, than at probably any time in human history. In the 1960's and 1970's, the Vietnam War was seen as a bad and unwise US strategy. Now, USA is happy to help Israel slaughter over 40,000 non-combatants in Gaza, and no one gives a shit. If you are critical of this ethnic cleaning operation, you are accused of being pro-Hamas, which is an absurd lie. I'm an old white guy, and I know what is happening. Basic morality has been flushed down the toilet. Most people are selfish, ego-centric scammers now. The internet and their Government has taught them to behave this way. Killing and violence is considered just fine now in the USA, when it used to be viewed as a bad thing. This is a big change. Lies are now told by everyone - especially by public officials and the big-nosed big-mouthed brigades of hard-core scammers. They shout their lies the loudest. In a social-civilization, we get out, what we put in. It is of course expected that a degenerate society, will produce a degenerate economy. This is the only way it can track. And each year, the anger and the violence will grow. And it won't stay offshore forever. It will come on home, like a returning soldier. When the debt payments become unsustainable, then the real fun will begin. The "Degenerate Economy" is the perfect term. You can't change it now. -------------

But poor Howie will likely never see this, since I don't promote this site or try to SEO it. It's really just an attempt to transcribe actual research notes, which every honest scientist should really try to do.

Note: The AI forecaster seems to be working not bad. It's not great, but it does give some solid counter-intuitive signals, that seem to be actionably correct, which I find makes me curiously uncomfortable. The most difficult thing for me to do now, is to take the trades it recommends, which seem wrong (and yet, often are not...) Old Daniel Kahneman was correct. Loss-aversion is a real thing - and one can even generalize it a tad further, and assert that folks will have a high probability of choosing paths that are expected to track a long-term survival scenario, even if that means surrendering obvious profit-opportunities in the short and medium run. This propensity to place survival far ahead of gainful strategy, is curious, since it can probably be shown to be quite sub-optimal.

Not sure how to deal with this. Using a pure robotic approach might be best, but I have a recurring nightmare, where all the robot-portfolios track self-similar paths that take *everyone's* investment portfolio, over a cliff-of-destruction, rather like lemmings. This is because the past-data that they are all (or will be all) trained with, becomes wrong for the modern experience, which will see highly correlated trades all blow up at the same time. Example: Think perhaps a quick hypersonic nuclear strike on Washington, New York, LA and San Francisco/Silicon valley. The result is a catestrophic loss-of-confidence in the USA dollar, and an meltdown of the Western-World financial system.

It would not be enough for the "nuclear winter" nonsense - anymore than there was a "nuclear winter" after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. The bombs could be small, and the actual source of the assault could be disguised - with both Russia and China vigourously denying any responsibility. What would USA do? Who would they launch against? Who would even decide what the response would be, if the political people were all removed?

This is an extreme, far-fetched scenario - but it is not that far-fetched. The USA has spent the last 40 years, using bombing campaigns and mass-murder as political strategy. It is unrealistic to expect that similar action against their homeland, could never occur. Europe - basically UK and France - could offer assistance, but how would that be paid for? Russia and China would insist they had nothing to do with the attack, but would insist that if attacked by any American response, they would launch all their missiles at USA targets.

US stocks and bonds would fall in value, and this would induce margin-calls in every leveraged investment fund in the world, that held US assets. The USA bond market would collapse, and prices for many assets might not be known. International payments would probably require gold-backed currency to be used.

All this could happen really quickly, and all the AI-models which trained on past data, would be essentially worthless - or maybe even worse-than-worthless - they might introduce pro-cyclic risk-avoidance strategies, which could collapse most financial paper valuations across most economies.

So, how does one structure an investment portfolio, if my nightmares tell me this is the true "worst-case" scenario. Four 1-megaton nuclear explosions, will not destroy the planet, nor make a "nuclear winter". But they might badly damage the Western World financial system, and create a very different future world, with much greater scarcity of basic food and fuel resources.

If one examines history, this "empire falls down" scenario, is not uncommon. What is interesting, is that we have the technology to engineer this scenario right here, right now, yet anyone who even discusses this, is looked upon as a foolish alarmist. Folks talk about this - but not in portfolio-review meetings, and rarely even in political circles, where probably, they should know better than to dismiss this "worst case" scenario for the collapse of US-dollar market and reserve-currency dominance.

[ Aug. 16, 2024 ] - Global Debt is 330 Trillion USD ... I encountered this little possible fact on the internet (so it must be true, eh?) (Hint: This is humor, ok?)

We run with no debt. This limits us, but also protects us. Our experiments in AI, and our work on the development of predictive AI models has yielded results. But we still cannot be sure if there is really any there, there, as the pundits have said. Our AI-driven forecasts could just be getting lucky, due to trend-projection, and really be dangerous. The risk is that everyone is looking at the same data, and if the AI is trained on the past, it will have a clear picture of the future, that might be wildly wrong - for everyone. This concern keeps us awake at night.

The deeply interconnected financial world - where everyone is in hock to everyone else, seems to us to be a crazy dangerous systemic process. There is no way to hedge, when everyone is in the same trade, following the same formulaic strategy. (Russia, sanctioned and fighting, might just emerge 20 or 30 years from now, as the dominant world-power, if it can just wait out the debt bubble-burst of the Western-world financial structure.)

Or maybe this complex of interconnected links may keep everyone from being too crazy. It might be a web-model where more links equals more strength, rather like the internet itself. With no "Big Boss" running the system, there is no central point of failure, so a birth-death model, with high-levels of linkage between agents, might actually be a source of system resiliance.

We are trying to get a clearer picture of this idea. Somewhere in the data, the answer to this question might just be lying, hidden and unseen.

Or not.

The next few years will provide information that might make things clearer. I am trying to imagine Kamala Harris as an effective Commander-and-Chief of the US Armed Forces, and I confess to being unable to do this.

The debt has to be a concern, and lowering interest-rates will probably spike inflation, and produce only a temporary fix to high-debt-service costs. We fear a de-coupling, and cannot yet articulate exactly what will be de-coupled from what.

[ Aug. 12, 2024 ] - Insanity ... BNS - Bank of Nova Scotia, has decided to set fire to almost 3 billion US dollars, by buying 15% of KEYCorp, which is based in Cleveland, USA.

If L. Scott Thomson and the Brigade-of-the-Unwise at Bank of Nova Scotia, wanted to destroy 3 billion US dollars, I could sure have shown them a better way to do it. More fun, at least. Invest in a solar-energy or Electric Vehicle company or something. Or go to Vegas for a month or two. We hold a ship-load of BNS, mostly because it was not part of US Banking.

USA is the most over-banked nation on planet Earth. And BNS is not even buying a bank.... they are just buying 15% of a US bank - and a RUST BELT bank at that. BNS shares are down $2.70 as I key this.

I am full of real anger. This looks like the dumbest business decision I have seen a Canadian company take, since Nortel bought that steaming pile of crap, called "Bay Networks", and began an ugly and slow process into complete financial destruction.

You do not need "Financial Warfare", when your own investments make decisions like this.

USA is a blood-bucket full of "Banks that do not make money, and will probably die horrible deaths", once the big implosion begins.

We specifically held BNS just BECAUSE it was not going to be sewered by the coming USA Bank Crisis Version 2.0.

There is just no accounting for the madness of groupthinking fools..

-----------------End_of_Rant---------------------------------

OK. Now that I have got the rant over, we get down to business...

BNS - Bank of Nova Scotia, and Mr. L. Scott Thomson cannot do this deal, without shareholder approval, and the approval of the US Federal Reserve - and maybe even OSFI approval from the Canadian side. This is a foolish and just-plain-bad investment. BNS is proposing to buy 163 million shares of Keycorp, which runs KeyBank, which is basically a bank that is having trouble, and is based in the USA Rust Belt. Great for them, but bad for BNS shareholders.

This is not a strategic acquisition, this is just a speculation. These managers at BNS are speculating with SHAREHOLDERS MONEY. We are the shareholders of BNS. We hold thousands of BNS shares. This proposed transaction has already damaged BNS shareholders.

This is just wrong. It's a bad idea.

That $2.8 billion US dollars, that the Bank Nova Scotia managers proposes to spend on those 163 million shares of Keycorp, is our money. It belongs to the shareholders of BNS, NOT THE MANAGERS or the EXECUTIVE STAFF.

We can stop this transction.

This is a bad deal, and worse - it is nothing more than a speculation that BNS managers are making, with the money that belongs to the shareholders of Bank of Nova Scotia. This is exactly the same kind of nonsense that went on in the 1920's, with bankers gambling with shareholders money, because they could.

Except now - we have black-letter law and explicit regulations that prevent this sort of stupidity from being done. Bankers cannot go gambling with depositor's funds, or with shareholder's profits.

We can stop this stupid transaction, since it is not in the interests of BNS shareholders, and is probably pretty clearly designed to benefit some other folks who are NOT shareholders of BNS. It is bad business, because BNS gets no control, and gains nothing for making this trade. They do not get control of a USA bank, and there is no gain for BNS shareholders in Canada, unless Keycorp shares are bid up. But who will bid them up? Who wants another weak, rust-belt bank which could suffer a deposit run, any day?

This transaction almost looks like a scam. All risk is borne by BNS shareholders, but the benefits flow to US investors who get to unload their declining Keycorp shares for some real money. Mr. L. Scott Thomson just might have to go, I'm afraid, and this transaction will have to be prevented.

BNS shareholders can stop this transaction.

That money that the managers of BNS proposes to spend, is not their money to spend as they please. That money belongs to the shareholders of BNS, and this proposed transaction is a bad deal. It is just bankers speculating with shareholder's funds, and this is not how Canadian banking is done. We learned all about this sort of nonsense, back in the 1920's, and we do not need to repeat the same mistakes here, 100 years later.

We can stop this silly transaction, and repair the management problems at BNS.

[ Aug. 7, 2024 ] - Astronomy ... (sharing a drink, at the "Four Winds" bar...) We watch with curiosity as the "Mag. 7" turn into the "7 Screaming Diz-Busters" (cf. "Blue Oyster Cult"). I supposed I should also say: "Don't Fear the Reaper". The Nasdaq is holding up well, and USA will probably skate thru all this, if they can align to sanity at some point, which we suspect will eventually happen. But we see this fibrillation action getting worse. It is just not a good sign - it's not just "volatility", it is the beginnings of the "smell of fear" that comes into a stretched market process. I recall Nortel, at $120/share, and Lehman Brothers as a viable company. There is this "List of the Dead" that every investor has in his back of his drawer, where he keeps the datasets of the investments that went from "Great!" to "Zero!??". There are so many of these - vastly more than the successful investments. The "Tao of Investing" is all about how you manage complete failure, collapse and financial destruction.

The "Big Key Question" that looms over every investor and every person at some point in his life, is: "Is it possible to have EVERYTHING collapse?" Also: "Could the USA itself be taken down?" We doubt that is likely to happen anytime soon, but given the choice of "Kamala Harris for President", there is a real chance that a cascading lack-of-confidence in the operational integrity of the USA could actually occur. If the USA decides to "sanction" everyone, and go full-DEI with additional gender-goof-madness and new financial lockdown rules-and-regulations to restrict everything the insane Lefties don't like (like is being proposed now in the UK), then off-shore holders of USA paper might just start to choke on their holdings.

It's not clear what this "loss-of-confidence" might look like, but the one key fact, is that it could snowball rather quickly, if it begins to get started. And of course, it might even be a strategic action, by a couple of major players - and not a random thing at all.

If one studies the literature on "Asymmetric Conflict", I have not yet encountered anyone who considers the explicit use of "financial warfare". There is lots of spilled ink-and-electrons about "cyberwarfare" and so on, but the use of explicit financial tools to assault a powerful enemy, is not typically discussed. And yet that is really what the 9/11 attacks appeared to be, given Cantor-Fitzgerald's role in the global bond markets. I cannot go into details here, but if an attacker could harm the global bond market successfully, the costs could be significant. And the attack does not have to be restricted to one modality. It could have kinetic as well as electronic and psychological aspects. And with the current path USA politics seems to be on, it would appear that the US media is already directly acting in the creation and distribution of narratives that are crafted to affect USA citizen psychology in a negative way. The opposite of "Make America Great" is to induce Americans to become weak and unsure of themselves and their government agency-actors.

Is Biden really that unwise and confused? Or are his actions and his comments carefully scripted to create the psychological response that is desired? Is the financial instability that has been built into the public-finances of the global reserve-currency provider, an accidental result of poor-planning and lack-of-wisdom, or is it part of a "Deep State" long-term campaign, designed to weaken the USA? This seems like an absurd "conspiracy theory", and yet it perhaps should not be disregarded, since history has demonstrated that big empires tumble down, when they can no longer cover the costs of projecting power at their periphery.

"Costs" are funded in ever-greater amounts of paper scrip, which has no direct link to anything real. This works really well, right up until is does not work.

And what is consistent and interesting, is just how quickly the transition from "works-really-well", to "no-longer-works-at-all" often is.

When silver got up to 31$US per oz., I sold a tiny bit, to fund some basic expenses. It was an interesting experiment, finding someone who would give me a fair price, that was close to the world price, factoring in the very low-level of our local currency here in Canada. The numbers just feel wrong. We think the Cdn dollar should be stronger than it is - but there is strong evidence that our national Government (a rapacious and dishonest group of pirates, let's be honest), works *hard* to keep the currency weak and devalued, vis-a-vis the US-dollar, so as to maintain close to full-employment in this country.

So it goes. It could be worse. We could all be living in 1922 Germany.

What concerns me, is that maybe we are. If the USA collapses as the global provider of reserve money that we all metric against, then we will be harmed in a number of amusing and annoying ways, in our little local bailiwick. Not as bad as Ukraine perhaps - at least not right away.

But the idea of crafted, designed "financial warfare" against a modern, commercial market-economy, is certainly not a new idea. The German Government actively counterfeited British Pound bank-notes during World War Two, and these did cause consternation and confusion in some circles. And had Britain not had financial access to the USA in World War Two, it might well have lost the war to Germany. Canada offered significant direct support to the British war effort, but it was massive amounts of US supplies, food and materiel that the convoy ships transported across the Atlantic.

Wars are fought with weapons, soldiers and money. War needs lots and lots of money. Money - and it's ability to lay claim to resources - typically determine the outcome of many major conflicts.

So, in a world where money is becoming digital, and is able to move rapidly, it would seem that if markets can be moved - by algorithmic trickery, or by proxy-methods of fear+greed gated by new insights from behavioural science - we could be seeing some action here that might not be entirely driven by random actions.

Are there "hidden forces" yanking on our supply-chains (or maybe those chains that connect to all the dog-collars we wear?) Are some of the stupid-trades that we see, not quite so stupid after all, if the purpose is not to profit so much as it is to destabilize and degrade? This all seems a tad paranoid, and yet, with a good AI, a lot of very high quality real-time data, the latest knowledge bases from Behaviour Finance, and say perhaps 20 or 30 billion dollars spread carefully around the markets of the world, under many hundreds of different account names, some effective co-ordination of action would be both possible, and market-movingly effective.

Are there "hidden market agents" (HMA's) that are not seeking profit, but are actually seeking to disrupt, destabilize and degrade (D3) the global markets, with a view to weakening USA, the UK, and probably Europe also? (The Europeans probably don't need much help wreaking their markets, since they elected that curious Von Der Leyen person. Or maybe she is part of the program?)

The idea would be to run the scheme at just "break-even", but do all that is possible to D3 the world markets, with special emphasis on strategies that can inflict harm on the USA and it's market-dependent economy.

This all seems pretty far-fetched - but then, so did atomic weapons seem to be, in 1939.

[ Aug. 6, 2024 ] - Fibrillation of the Markets Down 4,450, and then up 3,217 shows clear evidence of a market losing it's bearings and it's capacity for rational price discovery. Japan has always been a tad crazy, but perhaps the crazy is now being imported. We see algo-goofery everywhere now, with tricky tricksters trying to trick each other. Curious just how dangerous a signal this kind of behaviour actually presents to us. We are way, way off the edge of any regime that implies stable operational characteristics.

We expect Iran and Russia to sign some sort of mutual-protection agreement soon. They are neighbours, obvious trading partners, and both share a deep distrust of the insanity that is now USA's "middle-east non-policy" of encouraging Israeli hardliners and other racist psychopathic war-interests. The kill-seeking, blood-farming Israelis are doing all they can to give us World War Three, and Russia and Iran find their nation-states backed into an ugly corner where American warships of various sorts routinely assist murder-missions all around and even directly inside their own lands. No nation or neighbourhood-group can abide this.

The response that Iran has no choice but to provide to the "Assassinators of Israel" must not be trivial or minor, lest they degrade themselves. The Russians doubtless feel the same way. The extreme danger and continuous, never-ending threat that America and it's nuclear-armed war-colony Israel represent, simply cannot remain. Some effective method of neutralizing the continuous threat that Israel is, will have to someday be found. Perhaps we are finally there.

It is possible that a solution to the Israel problem may be in the works. A co-ordinated bombing campaign that targets all Israeli military installations is certainly indicated, as is probably the kinetic removal of American aircraft-carriers in the eastern Mediterranean. This would be an action that is long overdue, but might be viewed as a hostile act. (Ya think?). But it will have to happen at some point. This is now a certainty.

Would USA tolerate a massive fleet of nuclear-ready Russian assault-ships parked in the Caribbean Sea, while assassination-squads roamed over USA, attacking and killing diplomats and visiting Heads-of-States?

What we have in USA-land now, is an extreme failure-of-imagination. The Americans cannot seem to actually think clearly about events outside of their own local-focus headspace. It's quite curious.

So, world markets fibrillate, in a dangerous dance of confusion. This is not a good sign.

This price violence is so not-good, that it is comical. First we have the "Idiots-in-Charge" problem, and now we are tracking towards programmed war-planning and tragic violence, with an unrelenting certainty. There is probably now no way to get off this train.

It is almost certain that Israel will now give us the full set of necessary triggers to begin a World War. Given the market instability, driven by the debt-fueled hyper-irresponsible behaviour of the global reserve-currency provider, we express the concern that an October market-meltdown should be expected.

Markets have been ignoring war-action for several years now, as debt-funded spending continued to grow, and money-supply was boosted by central-bank cash-creation. Attempts are now being made to reduce money-supply globally, at the same time as war-fighting requirements are obviously growing, and defense budgets are under pressure to be increased. Consumers are being tapped-out by ever-increasing energy costs, rising fees, increased costs for food and shelter, and various hidden taxes - and this is occuring as labour markets are showing signs of rolling over.

It's a perfect set of pre-conditions for a market collapse - declining liquidity, rising costs and rising taxes, combined with a massively over-valued stock-market. Warren Buffett's decision to go to cash, reducing his Apple and Bank America stakes by half, looks to be calling a market top. And a move from essentially zero to 5% short-term interest rates, has to trigger a market response at some point. At first, the rising rate-of-return on capital (interest rates returning to normal ranges), is positive for markets. Capital starts to function property again. Money can be invested with a reasonable, rational rate-of-return. Rising rates can benefit a commercial marketplace.

But eventually, as mortgages and other loans are reset to the higher-rates, the cash-burn has to increase for *every* commercial entity and household - and those rising interest-costs on the debts (which everyone everywhere now has), cause the free-cash to just disappear, as more cash is burned to fund the new debt at the new, higher interest rates. Both private-sector and public sector entities feel this pain. The three-percent mortgage is re-priced at 6 percent. Those in USA with 30-year fixed mortgages are happy people - but they are now locked in their homes. And any business with a revolving credit-line, finds that is is now likely moved from 6% to well north of 10% (a 40% increase in funding costs for new projects). So, as a business-man, if you cannot fund your project out of retained-earnings, then you pull the plug on the project.

Public sector is even worse. Because there is little-or-no discipline at the public-finance level now, the increased funding costs are passed to taxpayers via increases in property taxes and tricky augmentations to other existing taxes. Fees appear everywhere, for everything. And the funding costs of public-sector debt grow to consume large chunks of the tax-take.

This is where we are now - far down this road of debt-funded foolishness. Eventually, there are liquidity problems at various levels of both government, in business, and in the households. The market investments are unloaded, and those that are debt-funded, are collapsed by the margin-call.

Now, on top of this debt-pile and liquidity concern (due to inflation-fighting attempts to shrink the money supply), you can add: war. We will need to fight a new war, unlike what we thought it might be. The battlefield might be your front-yard. Or maybe your backyard. The new war will not be an "over-there" thing. It might be a "right here" thing, which will require even more new spending.

And so we are right here, right now. A debt-strapped society, trying to reduce it's runaway inflation by reducing money supply, right as the new war-costs are about to come down the pipe and add to the new, higher-energy bills and rising food costs. Wages are great if you have a high-paying job - but lots of investor-folks do not. So as these costs pile up, investments must be liquidated to fund that which must be funded right now. And so these new war-costs may well make our markets cycle-down to lower price levels, and do so rapidly, as the war-demands grow.

There is no easy resolution to this scenario, which is already starting to play out.

We are *all* going to be poorer in the near-future. This is a trend that will be hard to avoid being impacted by. A good Doctor will tell you that a fibrillating heart is not a healthy heart. A fibrillating heart is a sign of a heart-attack. We suspect there is likely to be a similar "market attack", probably in October. You need to plan for a 20% to 30% drop across all the equity markets, as these markets re-align to the new higher-for-much-longer interest-rate regime, and factor-in the higher taxes that will be needed to just to begin to pay for the increased defense and security costs that the new "world-at-war" will present to us all.

[ Aug. 5, 2024 ] - Sitting on a Dock on the Bay... Watching global liquidity, drain away? We are watching the "Japanic" and see that it is a tad serious. This is sum-sum summertime, when everyone is supposed to be up North, playing with their boat, and their mistress. But the markets are calling us back to reality. No "I'm young again!" for you, Jack-a-roo!"

Things are getting pretty weird. Old Mr. Trump is using a two-gun flourish to shoot himself in both feet with curious speed and efficiency, so that Kamala Harris is now on top. (Ooooh... girl on top. Wheee! (whatever...))

Things are so silly now, I cannot keep it serious. I have this really repeating sense of things that we are about to enter a long period of corrective change. It might get violent and it might be triggered to a greater level of intensity, by random events (a big California earthquake? Or maybe a rogue hurricane? Or even maybe a Himicane?)

I have no clear idea exactly what will drive the madness-machine, but I suspect it is coming. Too much is just broken-silly, pushed to unsustainable limits - public finances, delta's in many financial series, and human sanity and other endemic limits. It all just feels done.

[ Aug. 1st, 2024 ] - A Very Good Speech... Politics is on everyone's mind now. We are living during interesting times, and each of us risks coming to the attention of the "Government" (or maybe the organs of the Deep State?). I was reminded of this clever speech, by WIlliam Jennings Bryan, back at the end of the 19th century (July 8, 1896), at the Democratic National Convention, in which Bryan argued the case for "easy money", and championed the idea of including silver WITH gold, to back the national currency, and suggested a 16 to 1 ratio. There is a lot of silver, yet it is precious enough to be used as currency.

"Bi-Metalism" was an attempt to move away from a "gold standard", and Jennings argued that using a gold AND a silver-backed currency, would free USA from the control of the bankers - both domestic and foreign. It was basically a plea for an easy-money policy, but which still would be backed by something real. He concluded his great speech (a truly excellent example of fine rhetoric), by demanding that working Americans not be "crucified on a cross of gold". This is fine use of the great emotional "meme" of Jesus, and his death, as described in the Bible.

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/williamjenningsbryan1896dnc.htm

Is it good economics? Maybe. We have run the experiment, and the "easy money" policy does work. "Easy money" can stimulate the productive operation of the economy quite effectively - but the cost and risk is the emergence of first small, then large, and then runaway, money-inflation. This can hurt everyone, large and small, rich and poor. Inflation makes it first difficult, and then eventually impossible, for the price-setting tools in an economy to effectively signal scarcity and signal demand and supply. Too much "easy money", and the perfect genius of the "invisible hand" is confused and corrupted. Prices stop signaling what they must.

But it's a great speech. W. Jennings Bryan never became President, but his economic ideas have resonated through American history, like the sound that silver-dollars falling onto hard wooden floors can make. Gold is lovely, because it does not change, and so can reflect the value of the world around it. It offers a perfect hedge against inflation, assuming that you actually own real gold, and not a fake piece of metal that looks like gold, but is not.

It's sad to see the American Democratic Party give up on old-fashioned Democracy. A big, open leadership convention is a great idea, where new faces and new ideas can emerge. By end-running all that, the Democrats have created a sad scam process, where we will not get to see any new ideas, or hear any interesting thought-provoking speeches - just the same tired old rhetoric from the "cat ladies..." It's good when real people can get to the podium and suggest why - and how - real change can be made to take place. But the "Deep State" really does not want this, since it threatens those who hold the behind-the-scenes power.

America should remember why it chose to demand democracy in the first place. It's the same reason we have "free speech" and trial-by-honest-and-fair-judge-and-jury. These models work, and not only have stood the test of time - they are absolutely critical for our future survival in the Western World, as we see so much of what we believe and cherish, under active and sustained attack and assault.

"Free Speech" is how we defend against this cultural assault by the powerful forces of deception and darkness, and the cruelty that results when unwise people and bad ideas triumph.

[ July 30, 2024 ] - A Very Good Trade... According to news dribble, Mr. Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway has unloaded a slug (71 million shares) of Bank of America, that he bought back around 2011 for around 6 to 7 dollars per share, for more than 40+ dollars /shr. Nice freaking trade. Berkshire had to watch them swing a bit (fierce swinging, actually), but the proof is in the pudding of the final outcome - and this trade worked well.

And this is just a lightening-up, since Berkshire still holds something like 12 percent of BAC. They still hold around 960+ million shares of BAC. I liked BAC. I had some years back, and when it swung up, I cashed out and bought a used 2005 F-150 pickup truck, which served the needs of our tiny agro-business well. We run slim and lean, and bank-stocks - despite their wild swinging behaviour (as warned about by both Graham and Dodd, in the classic "Security Analysis"), have kept the bucks dribbling in on a regular basis, which means the lights of the farmhouse and the computers can stay on...

The details can be found in a "Zerohedge" article, at the URL below:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/buffett-disposes-71-million-bofa-shares-berkshires-cash-stockpiles-rise

The short, clear little article indicates that Buffet's "Big Pile 'O Cash" is now sitting at close to $200 billion. "FFS", people are saying, "Why don't you BUY something with all that currency??" and Buffet is reported to say: "We would love to spend it and buy something, but we won't spend it until we can find investments that offer attractive low-risk, and can make us money." This is real wisdom.

Really - it is just plain hard-core, old-fashioned wisdom. And it must be hard. It's like when I go shopping, and come home with *nothing*, and my honey-bunny has trouble with this concept, since she likes to shop. It's almost recreation for her, but I only like to buy what I need (unless it's so cool, that I just have to have it - like a stainless .44 magnum rifle, or something like that... Or a small boat with a very big engine, and so on. We all have our weakness, I guess.)

The idea, or sub-text to this little data-tidbit, is that Buffet has this indicator that he thinks is useful, which is Equity Market Capitalization divided by National GDP, which for USA, suggests now that the market is rather seriously over-valued, by historical standards. Of course, even the concept of "valuation" is something that economists, investors and philosophers have been debating for centuries.

Where is the value? What is value? Where does value come from, and how is it traded, and how do we really know what it is? Karl Marx said value came from labour-input, and spent the intial chapters of "Das Capital" trying to define a labour-theory-of-value equivalent between a coat and a pair-of-shoes - and completely ignored the scenario of a man with size-12 feel, considering the "value" of a lovely, hand-crafted size-8 pair of shoes. Marx was a dishonest obsessive. He had terrible hemorrhoids (swollen, painful blood vessels around the anus), and my theory is that since he could not shit through his asshole, he sat in the library, and carefully shit through his pen.

Value is entirely subjective, really. The value you attach to something, is a result of the sum of all personal experiences and judgements, up to the very present moment. And it is (or can be) wildly different for each person.

But still, valuation is useful and necessary for equity investments. A "valuable" company will have a number of key characteritics which a less-valuable company will be lacking. Money flow helps - but a company with no income and no revenue can be crazy-valuable, if it has some lock on a new technological solution that can (or will) change the world. And a profitable cash-generator, which looks like it is about to find it's business model disappear, might have much lower market value put on it, than what it's historical revenues and profits would suggest should be the case.

But still, Buffett's Indicator is useful, especially for the late-stage specialized commercial economy of the wealthy and successful USA.

So, is the "Buffett Indictor" saying we are near a market top? Maybe. It's over 1.75, and was around 0.7 post dot-com crash, and post 2008 financial crisis meltdown (end of 2008 and beginning of 2009) it was below 0.6 for several months.

You probably want to try to have investments that provide a resilient financial structure that can withstand a 20 to 30 percent decline in US equity prices. That's not unique "financial advice", it's just what falls out of that 1.78 ratio value that the "Buffett Indicator" is flashing now. It was over 2.0, near the end of 2021, and this was a near a local top in bank-stock prices.

Honestly, no one knows what the future will hold, and financial "valuation" will always remain a black-art, with deep subjectivity wired into it's very essense. But given the twitchy nature of the modern hyper-connected world, it might be time to think hard about a shift away from a "paper" or "digital" financial assets.

But be careful with gold and silver and platinum and such. How do you REALLY know it is gold? Can you assay your silver ingots, and be certain they are 99.9 percent pure?

I bought a boat last year, and yesterday, I drove it across part of Georgian Bay. The weather was perfect, sunny and beautiful. But I was ALL ALONE, out on a very big fresh-water sea, and it was beautiful and more than a tiny bit terrifying. This was the first major "sea-trial" for my small craft (which looks HUGE on the trailer, but TINY out on the Bay). You get these two sets of wave patterns - the south wind from the south shore (where I was headed), and the rollers, that come down the bay, for hundreds of miles, so even a mild breeze can set up these serious wave-trains. The wave-trains cross over each other, and create an interesting pattern, which to run "on-plane" across is just a tad challenging. This was a run I wanted to make all my life. I had perfect weather, but was surprised at how big the chop really was. I had my little terrier dog with me, and she actually slept for part of the way (which took about two hours). I was able to plane along the rollers longtitudinally, so the undulation was gentle, not pounding.

There is great value, to great experiences, since this is what defines the meat of life. I had bought the boat, by selling some shares. Life is short. Having got the boat, let me go up the Bay coast, with a close family member, and his wife and daughter. He has a 40-foot sailboat, and we anchored together at an island park, that is owned and managed by a local Indian tribal group. We anchored in a small bay with a beach, which we took the zodiac to the shore to explore (and so my dog could do what dogs do on walks ...) We had a lovely dinner on board the big boat later, and discussed life and loves by digital candle-light. It was a wonderful experience. And next day, I drove my boat back to the big marina on the south shore, by myself. It was a fantastic experience.

Selling a few shares to buy the boat, was the best trade I ever did. Ever.

[ July 27, 2024 ] - Wheeeeeee! ... Ok, sure. Whatever. Looks like all is fine, Ford is in his rocket-car, (even if the share price is not), and all is good. Honestly, this makes me nervous as a little kitten. Meow. Or maybe as a scorpion. Might be the better analogue.

Oil's down $1.46 to $76.82, Dow 30 up 654 to 40,589, Nasdaq up 176 to 17,357, S&P 500 up 59.8 to 5,459, and the old TSX up 206 to 22,815. Quite a run.

Here's the hot-scoop: Suddenly, my strange hara-sense says: "Kamala is gonna win." Shocks the monkey out of me. Trump seems to be the best guy to remove the "woke mind virus" infection that is making America crazy - but it was that "Harris meets the Angel-of-Darkness" thing. "Satan himself?", you ask. Next best thing - B. Netanyahu, the most Evil Creature on Earth, met with Harris. Then Trump has this vile dirtbag at his Florida dacha, and just licks his backside.

But Harris made this vile prick *angry* because she suggested the Israeli mass-murder campaign should end, and the hostages get freed, and peace and justice for the people of both Israel and Palestine should prevail. This is wise, obvious, sensible stuff. And this makes Satan's-ugly-minion, that toad-faced Netanyahu *angry*! Well, fuck yah! 'Bout fucking time!

"Trump is going to lose the election...", I suddenly felt.

I wonder, did Mr. Trump study under those New York supermodels, or those actresses who had to "audition" with Weinstein of Miramax, by chowing down on his parmesian-cheese smelling ding-doodle? (I seem to recall one of them commenting, who just could not do it, and lost her part in the movie...) Heysus-Kristos, what a world.

Trump has survived the assassination attempt by the little Demo-boy, but he has just shot himself politically, in both feet. I hate Netanyahu. I think that fucker is "Pure Evil from the Eighth Dimension", (in the words of Buckaroo Banzai), and it makes me want to puke to see Trump lick-up to the bastard. It's just so wrong.

If I were in USA, I would have to vote for Kennedy, which would be a protest vote, since Kennedy has no chance of winning. But Trump will suck-up by attacking Iran, and Russia will quite rightly say: "Ok, that's enough of this shit!" and maybe just full-launch against that hyper-dangerous, nuclear-armed American murder-colony south of Lebanon, called "Israel". This current situational structure cannot last, and Netanyahu should suffer the same fate as Benito Mussolini, if there is a God (which I doubt there is, so he almost certainly will not...). If human history teaches us anything, it is that, mostly: "Evil triumphs." It's only the graveyard and the conqueror-worm that can defeat the really bad people.

If enough solid, hard-core US Conservatives feel as I do, then Trump will find his support has melted away, like an old man's hard-on after a quick-schtup. It's crazy. Trump is finished, and Kamala Harris will become the next US President, despite not having every received A SINGLE VOTE FROM ANYONE ANYWHERE, at this point. This whole process is looney-tunes.

Latest prediction now: Biden will resign shortly, for "medical reasons", and hand it all over to Ms. Harris. And I think this is a crazy, bizarre outcome. Real sci-fi stuff. America gives up on democracy... wow.

Feel's like I'm inside a Philip K. Dick backstory.

[ July 25, 2024 ] - The Nikkei Got Nicked ... So, how are those Japanese investments doing? We asked two Eastern Markets specialists, Dr. Lewis Von Falenkrap and Heinwreck Ho Lee Fok what they thought. After we ran their comments thru our AI-translator, they apparently indicated that the 1285 point drop in the Nikkei 225, the almost $50 per ounce downtick in gold price (to $2373/oz), the $2300 drop in Bitcoin to $63,950, taken with yesterday's almost 700 point drop in the Nasdaq index, offers real evidence that a solid sea-change in major global markets is beginning.

"The wheels usually start to fall off in August. Everyone's on vaction, traders are drunk or hung-over, and the love-hotels notice that business gets really choppy. That yellow dust blows in from the Gobi Desert, and it gets hot and nasty and smelly everywhere. People are cranky. Markets either run, or fall, and with debt off-the-scale, a world drifting to war or already at war right now, and the USA becoming politically dysfunctional and throwing democracy under the bus, going to cash makes sense, since the cash is cheap and has lower risk" says Dr. F.

H.H.L Fok echoed similar concern. "There seems to be a feeling that with a slightly stronger yen, why the fuck would you hold financial assets that are just going to fall in value? Just taking the lovely new yen banknotes, folding them and putting them in a box at home, probably will net you a better return than paper shares or vapour-ware crypto, as the equity markets go to geegoku." (Tapped the AI...) "... Xilbaba." (Ancient Mayan?) (Hit computer with fist...) "...as the equity markets go to hell." (Ah, that's better).

"So, this is just a beginning?", was our question.

"Oh yes, it's going to get a lot worse from here on in." Fok said. "The Chinese could fully float the yuan, instead of invading Taiwan. Everyone looks to gold for stability - but you have silver also, and there is a lot of silver. The Chinese could create a "Silver Yuan", and make it a solid, international currency. Everyone did this, back at the beginning of the 20th century. It worked pretty good - Hong Kong, USA, Canada, and even Japan all had these 1-oz silver trade-coins, and they were mostly all the same. The Hong Kong dollar 1-oz silver coin was same as a 1-oz "trade Yen" coin. A "Silver Yuan" would be easy to set up, and negotiate. There is lots of silver, but not an infinite amount, and when you have it, a debt-strapped bogus or corrupt government cannot just hoover it away from you and dial-up inflation, if the whole thing is done properly.

Dr. Von Falenkrap agreed. "Yes, it's possible we are seeing the reserve status of the US dollar beginning start to change. It will take a long while before it really changes. But maybe it's beginning. As USA enters this curious period of strange, anti-democratic weirdness, with skill-less skanks promoted to top jobs, there is this concomitant discomfort - sort of a nausea, or a puke-feeling in your gut - that happens. You just know that it is all going wrong. It may first start with US denominated securities being repriced lower..."

"A LOT lower..." giggled Mr. Fok.

"And 'When USA sneezes, Japan gets the cold.' as we say here. The US military talks a good line, and can still do some things fairly well..." the good Doctor continued. "Like crash those big Osprey aircraft..." added Fok.

"But Japan knows it is the meat in the sandwich, and is also tied directly to the US economy, and the strength of USA political and military power. Everything is so sensitive and fragile right now, that a de-risking seems like it has to happen. "

"And there is too much debt - everywhere. If debt-fears grow, and long-term bonds are priced to reflect their new risk level, in a changing world where the US dollar is not as desired as it was in the earlier years of this century, then interest-rates will move up sharply, and this will happen regardless of what Central Banks do.", Dr. Falenkrap continued. "The prices of paper in the long-term bond markets, are not under control of the Central banks. And with USA playing games with 'sanctions' on political persons, and 'anti-money-laundering' laws and related economic assaults on major banks, there is this similar growing bad-feeling about the safety of US assets."

And Mr. Fok pointed out: "And the F-22 Raptor has just been de-cloaked. The Chinese have developed a narrow-spectrum sky-sweeping radar that can detect the exact location of these so-called invisible aircraft. The technology is really cool - they basically can detect the background 'hum' of airspace, and then just look for the places where this background vibration is NOT present - and there is the location of your radar-evading aircraft. This means they can track and destroy these expensive planes, with standard encrypted-radio controlled missiles with little more than 1950's technology. Suddenly, US no longer has assured air-dominance."

So "What does this mean?" we asked.

Dr. Falenkrap suggested: "It means the USA is now a 'paper tiger'. And it will either be run by a clueless dark-skinned women, chosen because of her sex and skin-colour, or an aged real-estate developer who is pushing 80. Either way, change is coming, and it looks not great. And the markets have finally woken up to this ugly knights-fork."

"We are on our own over here. This feeling is starting to be felt, just below the level of normal sensation. It's like a sea-sickness, which everyone seems to be noticing."

And Mr. Fok added: "When it gets worse, traders, investors and big funds will lighten up on their paper, and begin to see USA as a problem, and not a solution anymore. We think this will change things, maybe a lot."

"When?" we asked. "Probably around September - October. October is always a good time for downturn, right? The usual October Surprise... " They both spoke together, and this agreement seemed curious.

Perhaps something was lost in the translation.

We agree with the "Silver Yuan" idea. The idea works, and has stood the test of time, across centuries of warfare, conflict and real-estate transactions. Here is image below, of an antique I acquired years ago - a 1930's wedding of a Japanese and a Hong-Kong Chinese, which a silver-smith commemerated with two small bowls, with a Hong-Kong Silver Dollar in one, and a Japanese "Trade Yen" silver coin in the other. The Chinese bowl+coin has a dragon motif, while the Japan bowl+coin has images of fishermen, Japan mountains and birds, and a small thatched-roof house.

Gold is good for storing wealth. But trade requires silver, which is precious metal, but sufficiently common that it can be acquired by average people doing real work. And throughout history, it has also been a material used by artists and skilled craftsmen to create beautiful objects. Here is a marriage of art and craft, economics and beauty, trade and commerce linked to the private affair of two human hearts. I saw this in a dealer's display case, and just paid his price for it, since it really appealed.

If paper and crypto fails us, there is a real likelyhood we will use some kind of "digital silver". It's just a nice metal, which lends itself to both art and commerce. And it has done it's job well throughout history, across the entire planet, from North to South and West to East.

Silver is the story of romance and prosperity, bound up together with commerce and trade, in ways gold never quite succeeds in doing.

[ July 24, 2024 ] - Everything's Turning to Shit? ... (And in the voice of the Doctor: "Why yes. Yes. I do believe it is.")

Page down for the image, with some closing quotes for today, and the simple concern that keeps us awake at night.

So it goes. Avoid having debt, as it is going to cost more, and limit one's choices.

[ July 23, 2024 ] - Malingering Malinvestments for Times of Malevolent Malfunctions ... I keep calling "Kamala" as "Camilla", which is of course a malappropriate and malformed linguistic malpractice.

I intend no malice to dear Camilla, the Queen-consort, and have resolved to correct my mental malfunction by a simple memory-trick: The term "mal" basically means "bad" or "failed" or "awful".

So: we recognize the term "KaMALa" might have some linked-meaning, and the English ML processor for language we Anglo-types use and is encoded in our wetware, might be giving us a warning. Once this fat penny dropped, I will not likely make the same error again. My brain-ML obviously had some maladjusted linkages, which this simple cognitive reset can repair: "The maladjustments of Kamala suggest a malady of malevolent malfunction." Let's all be aware of the scale and scope of the ugly "woke-mind-virus" malevolence.

KaMALa promises more dead babies in abortion clinics, an assault on the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, possible Bidenista-style rent controls (which will further destroy CRE in US cities), and higher taxes.

It all sounds rather malevolent to us. And those Big Tech bets might just be major malinvestments if the US economy enters a period of politically-driven malfunctioning. Let me be clear, here: This is not schadenfreude. We take no pleasure in watching our possible future prosperity collapse into the singularity of an economic black hole. We honestly fear that the "woke-mind-virus" implies a dangerous and malicious mental malfunction. Really.

What is interesting, is that the markets in USA seem to have figured this out, even if that great malformation known as the MSM (MainStream Media), continues to gush forth a pea-soup vomit-stream of maloderous "happy-happy joy-joy" muck in support of Ms. Harris.

Excuse me, but I feel a little "mal de mer" in my tummy, at the thought of a Big Boss Kamala.

[**Update**] Message to Mr. Elon Musk
(sung to a tune crafted as AI-hacked mash-up of "Message to Rudi", and "I Need a New Drug")

We need a new car! 
Car  with excitment, Car with fun.
Car  that goes fast, and can outrun the gun!

I know what it is.
I've seen it before.
It's a little two-seater, with "four-on-the-floor"!
But give me 4 batteries, each with a charge,
That can take me to heaven, or across nations large,

Gimme the Power!
and Gimme the Fun!
Let's take it back,
To where it had Begun!

We need a new car! 
Car with excitment, Car with fun.
Car that goes fast, and can outrun the gun!

Tesla was magic with that little Sports-Car.
It looked like a Lotus, so lovely by far,
Climbed on a Rocket, and flew to a Star!

Gimme that back.
Gimme some fast!
Let me have speed,
And a battery that can last!

We need a new car! 
Car with excitment, Car with fun.
Car that goes fast, and can outrun the gun!

The new little Teslas,
Are boring and dull.  
I don't want a taxi,
or the FS and D.
I want to drive it myself,
from the sea to sea.

I want a top that goes down,
and the wind in my face.
I want a kilowatt run, 
to some wild new place.

I'll stop for some watts
at the nuclear reactor.
Then I'll head for coast, since
I've gotta get back there.

Let's dial it back up,
And lock it back in,
Gimme a fast two-seater,
With that you can win!

[ July 22, 2024 ] - Game Theory Optimal Science ... The story of how the ultra-centrifuge was developed is interesting. These are used to seperate the uranium-235 from the more common u-238, which is what most naturally occuring uranium is. Of all the existing natural uranium, U-235 isotope is only about 0.7 percent, and the chemical property of the U-238 and U-235 are almost identical. The U-235 is very attractive, because it is fissile, which means it will undergo a chain-reaction atomic breakup, and release a nice thermal (slow moving at kinetic-energy speed), neutron, which rather than just being absorbed by U-238 and other isotopes of other elements, will go on to produce another fission-event in nearby U-235, and under the right conditions, these fission-events will create a cascading "chain-reaction". Let this really run, under tight conditions, and the chain reaction can accelerate, and create an impressive energy-release in a very short time - an atomic bomb.

I learned this in Grade-6, during optional lunchtime classes in atomic theory and operational characteristics of atomic bomb usage. I remember producing detailed notes on blast-radius effectiveness, describing degree of damage done, and radioactive fallout dispersion patterns, under various weather conditions. I recall my parents asking the usual "What did you learn in school today" question, and I pulled out this workbook full of notes, diagrams and drawings, and my folks kind of freaking out, since I was a solid "C" student, most of the time. But when I got interested in something, and had access to data, I could really focus.

Nuclear energy can be released slowly, rather than quickly. This just makes heat, and the reaction rate of U-235 chain reaction can be controlled by controlling how much you slow the reaction neutrons down. The slower the neutrons move, the bigger the chance the neutrons will hit the cross-section of the U-235 atom and split it, to keep the reaction going. Moderating the neutron's energy (slowing it down), will increase the probability of the chain-reaction cascade (which produces the heat). Water can be used to slow down, or moderate the neutron energy (speed), and increase reaction rate. The idea is to moderate the reaction enough to get it to boil the water and make useful, turbine-turning steam.

You moderate the neutron flux enough to get the reaction to be self-sustaining, but not so much as to let it get really hot, and melt all the metal that holds all the equipment, and the reaction chamber that all this is happening inside. When the reaction is balanced, it is called: "criticality".

A standard boiling-water nuclear reactor operates using the same criticality, but the U-235 is held in rods which are inserted into the reaction vessel full of water. The rods and the water get warm due to the chain-reaction energy release, this makes the water boil, and the steam from the boiling water is used to turn large turbines which drive electrical generators, which can power the electric-grid, and light up a city.

If everything is working right, the reactor will be a self-sustaining boiling kettle of water, with red-hot uranium rods boiling the water, with energy being produced (released) in a nice controlled manner, and then used to do work. New water needs to keep coming in, of course, and heat-exchangers are used to seperate the boiling reactor water, from circulating steam-generating water. The water is also used to keep the reactor at the right temperature. The rods are typically positioned deep in place. They can get too hot if cooling water is not available to draw-off heat, and other methods are used to ensure operational criticality. And the whole reaction area gets "radioactive", with a whole range of particles and mass-less energy packets (gamma rays) being produced, which can be lethal if this energy is absorbed by living tissue (ie. live humans!). So, the whole reaction process needs to be shielded with thick, energy and neutron-absorbing material.

Slow nuclear-reactor activity cannot be made to explode like an atomic bomb. But a reactor can get too hot, and all the reactive uranium rods, can melt, which gets the uranium too close together, so it melts more, and then gets really, far too hot, and this makes it melt further, and create a mess - and superheat the water so it breaks into hydrogen and oxygen, and this is a chemically sxplosive mixture, so a reactor which looses cooling suddenly, can suffer an explosive event, and blow up like the Hindenburg, in an awful fireball, and spew lethal radioactive material over a wide area of landscape. This happened in Chernobyl, and at the now-famous Dai-Ichi nuclear powerplants in Japan. The hydrogen+oxygen mixture blew up real good, and made a really awful mess, with radioactive isotopes (various elemental slop which results from the messy breakdown of the split uranium atom). One of the radioactive isotopes produced as a result of fission, is radioactive Cesium-137, and this was spread over a wide area - both from the Dai-Ichi reactor explosion, and from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb blast.

I studied all this nuclear technology in grade school, on my own. I was curious about the science. Of course, I thought I was unique. By the time one gets to University, back in the day when they taught really solid science at universities, I found the filtration process had removed most of the students that did not have this ability-to-focus, and I was not unique at all.

I recall that I obtained some uranium ore samples from the Elliot Lake Uranium mine museum, and put these "Pitchblend" rocks on some dental-x-ray film, which had a paper-clip taped to it. After two weaks, I developed the x-ray file, using my little darkroom, and saw the negative was seriously fogged, but with a bright white image of a paper-clip. I recall just being in awe of this simple experiment. The pitchblend ore was just a rock. But it was a "hot" rock, which could make a geiger-counter sing like a little bird. Except I did not have a geiger-counter.

The whole point about science, is that if you leave kids alone, and just let them mess around, the curious ones will be driven to go down those rabbit-holes like in Alice In Wonderland. They will be pulled-forward by their curiosity, and this is a good thing.

And the physical world is the key thing. Everything in the digital world or the political world, is just noise and fiction. In the digitial world, you can create and display anything at all. This is very liberating and addictive. But it is also pure bullshit. You live in a land of pure fiction, where any sort of nonsense can be made to appear real. This is the same in politics, religion and even philosophy. Any sort of absurdity can be proposed, articulated, and then made to drive human action, using incentivizations, coercion or psychological manipulation. All this is fictional fluffery. And it can also create and drive great evil.

Modern AI is massively enhancing the addictiveness of the false digital world. And it will extend and enhance the reach and power of those who invent fictional worlds, to manipulate and dominate human actions and efforts. Beware.

It is in the real, physical world, where there is randomness, where things are interesting. In the real world, there is real truth. The search for this real truth is the essence of science. If you can detect Cesium-137, you know that some fission even took place. We know that fusion reactors are technically possible, and that great energy can be released by controlled fusion, just by looking up at the sun, and feeling it's warmth, and measuring it's energy output.

The physical world has objective truth, and this is a fine and wonderful thing. And it is what we all should focus our attention upon, more than anything else. It is where the real magic can be found.

[ July 21, 2024 Update] - Jill Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race ... The image here, says it all...

https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1815082436394385840

Or maybe this one?

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/10d8c25e_jpg.jpg?itok=Tnrmlpec

Whatever. Why does he not resign now, and at least give Kamala a fighting chance, if he's so fond of her?

[ July 21, 2024 ] - Meanwhile, at Our Floating Sky-Island of LaPuta... We noticed that the B-52's are in the Finland. Not the band, the big aircraft with good, old-fashioned "Newcuelure" capability (as old Mr. Bush the Junior might have said...) These big beauties are lofting gently along the air lanes, cruising the jetstreams just west of the missile complex at LaPuta. The Finns are still recovering from their "White Nights" parties, and vodka sales are up nicely (we think...)

Ya gotta do, what ya gotta do. Nuclear war is actually really a *much* better way to fight. No soldiers required, and once we put "frontier AI" level flight-controls into the big bombers, we will not even have to worry about pesky pilots maybe changing their plans. And we won't even be getting our hair mussed. Right?

Hell, we are looking forward to it all. There will be this really lovely lagoon, where New York is now. Washington will have this lovely evening glow. And in a few weeks, the radiation will be down to a safe level, and we can go out an watch the pretty colour in the skies at sunrise and sunset.

Why BITFD, when you can BITFU?

"I love the warm feeling of Cesium-137 in the morning! Feels like Victory and Love, sleeping side by side!"

[ July 20, 2024 ] - "Hey Joe, Where You Goin' With That Ballot-Box in Your Hand?" ... One of my old favorites from Jimi Hendrix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXwMrBb2x1Qwww.youtube.com/watch?v=rXwMrBb2x1Q

We expected Joe Biden to announce his retirement yesterday. Looks like not.

I keep coming back to old movies I have seen, and old music I have heard. It seems to offer pretty clear directions They often suggest how we are tracking and where we are all headed. The artists always warn us. Always. Few listen, and almost none ever learn.

Remember that film "Network"? Old Howard Beale was finally taken down by a "terrorist group", hired to remove Howard because his show was suffering from falling ratings. Kinda like Joe and the Demo's are now.

I craft these extreme, edge-condition scenarios, and then try to assign subjective (ie. almost certainly wrong) probabilities, to their likelyhood of occuring. Some get pretty crazy. Others seem to slowly and methodically play out in real-time, to my horror and amusement. (Remember Hunter Thompson's book: "Fear and Loathing...?", mine will be "Horror and Hilarity"...) (from HT: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Some real wisdom there, yes?

And so, here we go: The Democrat boss-girls running the Deep Democrat Party machine, cannot seem to get "Hey Joe!" to see the light. No gentle nudges or quiet suggestions seem to be working. Vice-President Airhead (not my orginal term, this is what many call her), has had silly and fruitless telephone linkups with Big Donors - who are on record as calling her comments "ludicrous", just before she hung up on all of them. This is reported - we think it looks about right, even if it sounds hilarious. The Democrats are in real trouble, and they now know it. The lie-flinging from the Secret Service Democrat cheque-cashers is really pretty impressive - quite over-the-top. There needs to be some rolling heads, but there likely will not be, since Jill Biden is still holding some big strings, it appears. Amazing, really. It is a nation-state in slow-motion breakdown mode.

Only folks on the public payroll and the Big Government Grift will likely vote Democrat in the USA election. If enough sane, rational folks can get their ballots cast and counted, the Democrats will be gutted in November. We think they certainly should be, since we like USA, and do not want to see it destroyed by woke-leftist insanity, California-style child-abuse, and Big Tech Digital Communism. The Democrats know they need to change their figurehead, but he won't let go.

So, as in "Network", we might expect a faked-up "terrorist" attack on old Joe. The Demos can look at all the strength Donald Trump is showing in the polling, and say perhaps: "Hey, why don't WE deal with Old Joe the same way!?" Joe has really bad ratings, and everyone who can think and see, knows the poor old kleptocrat needs to go. But Joe has that Ballot-Box in his hand, and he is gonna take down his "old lady-Party" for messin' around with another Man. (DT?) Like in the Hendrix song, he is being counselled not do this bad thing - but he is determined, right?

So, expect maybe a big hit (song?), that can be blamed on Hamas, or Iran-backed Hoopee's or Poopee's or Goofy's or whatever (fill in the terrorist-group name with whomever is on the J-media "Two-Minute Hate" today), and a workable solution will be allowed to play out, with Old Joe turned into Peter Pumpkinhead. (Thank-you Andy Partridge of XTC, for that great 1992 tune.)

Then, the Democrats can push their "New Guy" in, using a little legal KY-Jelly or procedural Astroglide, and have a damn good chance of keeping the Big Grift alive, and the Big Fcuking of America on track and ongoing, even after November. Mr. Trump can go back to golfing in Florida, safe from FBI hit-squads, and Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebcuk can continue to rape the World for fun and profit. Nothing will change, except the Gruesome will come to Washington, and the cost of the debt will be 2 trillion USD very soon, until that big "drop-the-zeros" money-split thing happens, which will reset everyone's portfolio values to pay down part of the debt with cash extracted from EVERYONE in the form of the Great American Dividend. Be clear, Trudeau has already done this in Canada, basically stealing 15% of Cdn bank profits via a pure "taking tax", in addition to all the income taxes taken. The "Great Taking" shows all the legal changes needed to harvest the "collateral" or "dividends" already exists (ie. no-one in the Western World actually has clear "ownership" of their financial assets. You now have an "ownership entitlement", which can be adjusted at anytime, by your nation-State authorities.)

So, the Gruesome One (whomever it is) will claim this is not a tax, this is just a "dividend" extracted from everyone's asset holdings, and all corporate cash holdings. The Democrats can then claim they have "solved" the out-of-control debt problem, and it will only be when the fighting in the streets begins, that corrective course-change will be possible. Heads will not just roll figuratively.

This is a real grim scenario - but oh my, does it work on paper, as a stepwise set of process actions. But like the old Jew said (who was a real genius scientist): "It works in practice, but does it work in Theory?"

My recent research on the state of things in Academia ("the Academy", as the old ancients called it..) suggests that the Theory to justify all this will be successfully crafted, agreed upon, and taught to the kids, who will slurp up the slop and accept it as correct. Critical thinking seems to have been removed from the Academy in USA, along with Free Speech and basic morality. So, all this really bad stuff looks like it could actually play out, especially if a "bull market" can be co-associated (at first) with this Neo-Marxist Post-Post-Post-Modern Psycho-Economics, where everyone is running using Game Theory Optimal strategies (like in modern poker - you use GTO to ensure you cannot be exploited...) (Details are complex, but the shit works...)

And if you can apply this strategic approach to politics, you can win and win big. And the Democrats KNOW about this stuff. All that stands in their way, is an old, 81-year white guy, with dementia. So, I am 81% certain they will remove him. If he refuses to go, they won't use the 25th Amendment, they will just have him popped. That means assassinated.

Again, it's what the "Moneyball-AI" would recommend (you know, that one which has NO ETHICAL FILTERS at all? The one we all want to have and query? Right?) Here's the original 1992 XTC video, which is very good. The "First Lady" is a great image.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYupSHWEJxA

So, is "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" now about Orange Man? Orange Man Good?

JFK had his "First Lady", Orange-Man had his Stormy time. Evil in NY State tried to make him a criminal because he gave her money and booked it as a legal expense.

I hope Trump wins, and puts Letitia the Evil Political Dirtbag in Rikers, like they did with Epstein. And if Putin wants to make an example of NYC, I will be sad, but then I will remember the real pictures of Hiroshima, those ones with the huge wagons each covered with burned corpses. Karma is a real thing. You get out, what you put in.

See, I'm having an "Elon Musk" moment. When young, we are all seduced by Lefty ideas. Now, having spent a lifetime trying to learn and understand - I know we need Nationalism, with maybe a *tiny* bit of socialism. Hey, maybe we could link Nationalism, with fair, market oriented Socialism - call it maybe "National Socialism"... Whatdahyaa think? Might work? Get some clever glyphs, deal with the bad folks who are trying to "keep us on our knees"? Round the bastards up, like the Liberals in Canada did with the Japanese, concentrate those dangerous folks in camps? Maybe an idea here? (Hint: This is sarcasm. Gotta remember "A Modest Proposal" and the outcome and say this clearly)...

Socialism *has* to become Nazism, in order to do any of the shite that it suggests - it is really all about enabling theft and murder, and little else, when taken to operational limits. And everything and everyone always goes as far as they can. It's the nature of human action.

What folks don't realize, is there are only about 7 stories (or "narratives"), and in politics, there are only two. It is either freedom (which means real freedom of SPEECH), or there are some serious self-interested bad folks who use politics to gain money and power and use that to get rich, and hurt lots of people. There are really only two possible outcomes. Good and/or Bad. Freedom and/or Slavery. Fair Justice and/or Arbitrary Measures. The true and most evil Devil, really resides in the details.

You have to get the process details right, or your goddamn spaceships and your airplanes just crash and burn. And your State turns into a police-State nightmare, with murder-men who decide to kill everyone who stands against them - first in the hundreds, then in the thousands, then in the tens-of-thousands (like Israel is doing RIGHT NOW in Gaza), and then in the millions (like Hitler and Stalin did). Having State-power allows crime to be executed at massive scale. That is the greatest danger.

There are only two directions in life and moral choice - good or evil. It never stays gray.

Same thing in politics. It's so much more of a binary-choice than most folks realize.

[*** Update ***] - Just as I was editing this - Biden has indicated he has dropped out. Thank goodness for that. A tiny move towards sanity, finally.

The Demos might get a good candidate, and make a fair case. An honest election is a good thing. Let's have an honest contest, and ensure everyone gets a fair chance, and the votes are cast and counted freely and fairly - no fake bags-of-ballots-for-our-guy sh/t and no "ballot harvesting".

[ July 19, 2024 ] - I've been Studying AI "Frontier Models". We are in Deep Trouble. ... Not sure if I should even write this. My rough research on current AI "Frontier Models" is fear-inducing. There is zero chance of an AI coming to life and killing us. But there is almost 100% chance that very advanced, domain-specific "frontier models" (which are *very* large, and able to effective transpute almost brain-sized levels of information, with actionable, successful ability), will be used to do us harm. No damn-fool government "regulation" is going to prevent their deployment and operationalization.

See, if you are a brilliant, almost-grand-master level Chess genius (I hate Chess. It is a wanker's game in my opinion but let's stick with the Chess example...) and you are playing against the very best Grand Master in the world, you will lose. You will lose everytime, because your opponent is better. There is little randomness to help you.

With very large and very powerful "frontier models", with petabytes of domain-specific knowledge AND the ability to rationally use that knowledge, the AI-as-an-adversary will win. And it will win EVERY SINGLE TIME. This is the problem. Even in a situation with a high randomness component - the AI will still win EVERY TIME.

This looks like what is happening in the markets..

I used to be able to make money. Now, I cannot. Partly, it is fear and loathing - and human weakness. I have life-needs that require I have *some* income. So, I hold my dividend-payers, when I should have dumped them.

Much (way, way more) money is made holding high-flyers that fly higher, than is made holding sh/t-smeared crappy stocks, run by scammy clever folks who are masters at filling their pockets with the funds that rightly belong to the shareholders. This is just market life. It is the warp and woof - the fabric of the process.

But I always used to be able to find some kind of tiny edge, or some little inefficiency somewhere, to make a few bucks.

Not now.

Things are different. There are the big guys, and there is everyone else, and the "everyone else" is certain now, not only to just lose, but to get completely gutted, if not careful. The entire process has changed. I cannot even disguise who my clearer is - I do a trade, and it is like a radar beacon, saying "Here is a fuck-stupid retail trader!!!! You can fuck him good, by calculating where this poor bastard has to put his stop-losses". So, we trade without stops, and endure wild drawdowns. WOrks for a while, until the financials implode, and fall hard and long, right?

All traders face bad times and strings of shit results.

But this is going to be different. With frontier-grade super-models, the AI's will be able to win EVERY SINGLE TIME. This has to change things. They will be able to track EVERY TRADE, and correlate it with ALL INFORMATION, and determine real-time changing probabilities, so that the retail folks, especially in a tiny nation like Canada, will be sliced and diced and served up on a platter. This is hilarious, really.

But it will get worse. Every aspect of every paramenter of your life and all your operational actions to try to produce profit, can be effectively tracked, and traded against. It will feel like the "Truman Show", but only worse, with NO chance to escape or improve upon your situation. We will face a digital future of absolute "serfdom", where no possible uplift will be possble, for anyone but the elites and their children.

The "Frontier AI models" will actually make this kind of horror-show actionable - and even wild randomness (my secret friend) will not be able to save us, as it will be tracked, monitored and traded-against so as to ameliorate it's positive effects, and profit quickly from it's negative effects.

Electing Trump (and Vance) will make no difference. They have no clue, I am pretty sure.

The folks controlling and using the "frontier models" will have access to ability that exceed what a person - or even an organization - can deploy. They will win *every* contest, until the few remaining contestants conclude the game is rigged, and refuse to participate. The markets (and all other competitive aspects of human life), will down-cycle, and become stagnant.

The dynamic that moves the World forward, will stop working.

We might already be seeing this, right now, in real-time, the failures of Microsoft, and the US election process. It is scary.

This might be the "end of history", where nothing more can be developed, improved, or even fixed. The frontier-models confer such a huge advantage, as to put the ordinary guy out of business.

We hope we are wrong about this.

[ July 18, 2024 ] - Idiots at Crowdstrike Try to Take Down ALL Microsoft Windows Machines in Whole World ... (excuse me while I stop laughing... the schadenfreude this morning is exhausting!) (Note: The stupid company's name is "Crowdstrike". I seriously thought it was "Cloudstrike", and given how this event has played out, it really should be called: "Cloudstrike"... or maybe "Cloudshite"?)

In what is probably the single most stupid and astonishingly disruptive example of Information-Technology system deployment failure, the folks at this US company, called "Crowdstrike" have managed to deploy an anti-virus "solution" that appears to have taken down most of the Microsoft Windows computers on planet Earth. If you use Linux, you are OK, but if you use Microsoft Windows, you will have to boot (restart) each machine into "safe" mode, and removed the idiot-children's destructive update. Our brokerage-service and trading platform, from a major Canadian bank, with the initials (TD) had a big message on it's morning login-screen, explaining that quotes, news, and other various services will not work. We are unsure if online trading will operate. The news (which we obtain on Linux and Android machines), indicates it might not. (cf. "Princess Bride": "Inconceivable!")

Like I have said recently: We remain truly astonished at the fcuk-stupid idiocy and general collapse in sanity that we seem to be observing everywhere. Joe Biden, that curious fellow who claims to be acting as the USA President, cannot even remember the names of the top black guy he appointed to run his military, which also does not seem to be able to find it's backside with both hands these days. And the US Secret Service cannot stop a kid with an AR-15 from putting a ladder on a building, climbing up with a rifle, and spending 30 minutes getting his aim set with a range-finder, despite folks seeing this, and telling the local police about what they saw. This is all kinda beyond belief, no?

This curious general collapse in basic operational competence, which is manifest just about EVERYWHERE now, seems to be accelerating. It is not so much worrisome, as it is simply annoying and wild-comical.

We have a generator, and can operate our water-system at the farm on it's 240-volt output. At our Northern property, we have two generators. I think I will acquire a second generator here at the farm, for backup purposes. Nothing that uses big networks, can really be trusted to operate correctly anymore.

We run various Linux O/S machines, and have built a custom platform, that uses the simple TVM X-Windows (which can run modern Firefox), so as to avoid Microsoft Windows. I bought a modern Windows-11 machine, and also a Windows-10 Gaming-Grade machine which is powerful - but both platforms are profoundly intrusive. The Windows-11 machine regularly updates, and we cannot stop this process, so we avoid using the Windows machines due to their completely wrong security model.

People cannot seem to think clearly these days.

If Microsoft can reach out and install new software on my machines, and get thru my gateway to do this, anyone with the Microsoft codes can install anything anywhere, and that breaks (really, it completely defeats) basic security. You are certain to be absolutely fucked, if you use Microsoft. Try to reason clearly, if you can.

The modern "security" models are just wrong. But the technology industry has convinced everyone to adopt the modern model of basically "fake-security", because it has made them so much money. It's hilarious. Our modern technology is like "Waiting for Godot". It is just plain Theatre-of-the-Absurd stupid and wrong, but no one in the business will say this, and I grew weary of repeating myself, and decided to become a farmer.

Nothing - absolutely nothing anywhere now is "secure". Absolutely ALL of our technology is compromised and is monitored. Five days ago, a Dutch firm again pointed out that most networks around the world have code installed that allows Chinese agents to monitor most of what is being transmitted, and many systems have latent trojan code installed that can be remotely triggered. All Apple iPhones can be exfiltrated, and bascially have no security that actually can keep the onboard information secret. Anything you put on any computer or any network anywhere, can be viewed - often remotely. That's just how it is - the Snowden Slides showed *exactly* how this was being done, and everyone everywhere who has the resources are doing this monitoring and exfiltration.

There are really no secrets now. Poor Jeff Bezos sent his dick-pictures to his helicopter-pilot facktart, and it cost him, what, $34 billion, to pay off his bitch-wife? I laughed so hard when I read all that info, that I spilled my drink. I don't wish that kind of misfortune on any man who has done good work in the world. And I have to say that Amazon is a goddamn good thing. It works, and we bought a new coffee-maker, and it got delivered, and now Fu-chan makes really goddamn good coffee in the morning, and life is really goddamn better. And FedEx and RockAuto were able to supply a newly-made Chinese alternator which I installed in my F-150, which now runs fine, and can pull my big boat, which makes me goddamn happy. :)

And this silly little website is entirely run at and by, AWS (Amazon Web Services) for around $22.00 Cdn per month. And it **just works**. This is damned impressive. It makes no money (yet), but I learned a lot setting it up. I find it cool that it actually, honestly works. And I have complete control of it, so I can write, post and say anything I want. Whoo Hoo..! (That's how it is supposed to work in Western culture, and will continue to work, if we can keep the goddamn Censorship Naziboys, the vermin Copyright Trolls under control...)

It is the small things that WORK CORRECTLY that give us joy and make life worthwhile.

But do not make the error of thinking that anything that you cannot control yourself will actually continue to keep working. Nowadays, it probably will NOT work correctly, and if it DOES work, some wukfit child will come along and install a software update on it, and break the thing and make it turn to crap. This is not an accident. This is how the nasty cun... oops, I mean "runts", make their money.

People are now so fucking lazy and stupid, that they will use Microsoft Windows, and the brain-dead organizations they work for, actually LIKE the continuous updates, because then no-one in the Big-Org needs to think or actually do any productive work - they believe they have the computer doing it for them, which is comical.

And this is why AI is certain to kill us all.

It won't happen thru malevolence on the part of the AI. Failure will be due to bone-stupid, shit-ignorant people being stupid-fuck-lazy, and not doing even the tiny bit of work they need to do - like updating to today's one-time code-pad, for example. They will just use yesterday's code to transmit today's new message, even though they were fcuking told NOT TO DO THIS. The enemy will decrypt everything, and the battle and the war will be lost, the kingdom will fall, and your cities will burn. "Oh, hell" - as Mandrake said.

Like the Philosopher said: "You cannot win. You can't even break-even. And you cannot quit the game." The best you can possibly do, is to be like Valmont, and try to get a little positive action along the way.

And have a good supply of candles, for when the power goes off, and ammo and automatic devices for when the starving rover-packs of former Microsoft Windows users show up at your lot-line.

:)

Just kidding. We'll hand out CD's with old copies of Slackware Linux 2.95, and maps, showing where the i386 chips and motherboards are buried.

(PS: Damned AI wins again. I had expected the upticks would continue for a while. Ran AI last nite, it still points down, and I note the DJIA is down over 400pts at noon, and our bank stock and phone company shares are down. The AI *consistantly* calls it better than I do. It cannot forecast a failed assassination up-thrust, but it can look at it, and say quietly: "Fade this...", by still showing the forecast curve pointing downwards. The human is the weak-link in the value-chain, and we can see a future where the computers make both the tactical and the strategic decisions. And the guy with the best AI, wins the battles, and the wars. )

[ July 18, 2024 ] - "Tomorrow Belongs to Me!" (says local Maker-Kid with a Lathe, a Circuit-Board & a Soldering Iron...) ... And you too, eh? We are going to see some real change, real soon. I forgot about US President McKinley, who was popped in 1901, starting the 20th Century with a bang. I read Michael Every's most excellent piece called "Protectionism Add Vance" (he is the Eastern-Block Analyst at Rabobank) and his stuff is worth crossing oceans to read. Yes, we are probably moving into a time of very "deep ship", as USA protectionism rises, and the World economy begins it's new rocket-sled ride right down into hell (and maybe war).

Every damn thing we buy, is made in China. Seriously - just about every single product is Chinese made. My car and truck parts, the Lincoln cylinder-head temperature sensor, the new alternator for the F150 pickup truck (truck was made in Detroit, but all the parts are made in China...), a new coffee maker by Cuisinart, which makes great coffee, like our 18 year old Cuisinart coffee maker, but apparently needed to be replaced with a newer one, because my honey-bunny is Nihonjin, and insists on new things. (Being an antique collector, this means we sometimes have a little bit of conflict... I like OLD things, she likes NEW things. So we have to buy new things every so often...) I compensate by buying a Russian 7.62 x 54 19th century rifle, rescued from a Ukrainian salt-mine. Life stays interesting. My new pieces are made in Brazil, Czech Republic, and of course, China. China now makes everything. We make noise, process oil-sand, run fission-reactors, build Japanese cars, write software, and run banks. We have been lucky in Canada. We have high taxes, but we've had a lifetime of peace.

But a new protectionist world will have big new costs. China is the workshop and factory to the world now, and they have done a pretty good job at this economic transition. Communism is stupid, cruel and just plain terrible. So the Chinese kept the stupid name, but converted to a market economy. This was the smartest thing any large nation has probably ever done. They probably don't get enough credit for this amazing act of sanity.

However, we are about to see things change. If Trump and Vance put 100% tarrifs on Chinese products, your iPhone will cost $2500, and you might have trouble keeping your 10 and 15 year old pickup trucks on the road, since Detroit does not even make old-model parts. The Chinese make the parts. Not sure about tractors, but everything from hair-dryers to semi-automatic items that every fellow needs and wants, will cost a lot more, until we change the programs (and machines!) here, and let the production move on-shore. Stuff will become scarce and cost more, until we re-enable local production in a big way.

I don't mind the "Fortress North-America" model. But we will need to slam the damn door shut on the massive, out-of-control immigration that is occuring, both in Canada and also the USA. Otherwise we risk open warfare in the streets, as the "Fifth Columns" that are probably already planted here, rise up, and begin to cause damage, crime, and standard-grade KGB/FSB-planned social unrest. Is this really a real threat, or just an old-man's fever-dream from history? I don't know.

But Gavin Newsom of California is flirting with a charge of enabling "child abuse", by signing the AB1955 sex-bill into law, which prevents any public official in a school or school-board, from informing parents that their child wants "gender transition" treatment. California is going full-on insane, and Governor Newsom is a very dangerous creature. This whole gender-transition madness is complete insanity, but is being promoted by the Karen-Kimberly loony-leftist-type females who are trying to destroy the basic essence of male humans. This perhaps is a plan to weaken and damage the fine and successful frontier-strength-myth nature of the USA. The Leftist-females and homosexuals who seem to control the school systems (and the Democratic Party?) seem to be very interested in painting White Males as some kind of evil force, and effectively destroying the US Anglo-Saxon White Male, by making the young White-boys doubt their own sexuality. This is what the schools are teaching, and it is a real threat to Western culture in general, and USA in particular.

This really is the most insane thing that is happening right now. Joe Biden, and his powerful and dangerous wife, Jill Biden, seem determined to destroy what it means to be a successful American male. This is very curious. Any wise statesman, suffering what Joe Biden is suffering - which is obviously early-onset Alzheimers - would be counciled by his family to stand-down, for his own good, the good of the Party, and the obvious good of the Nation. But Jill Biden - the person that pushed to install that incompetent female Kimberly Cheatle (who cannot even use proper English, when speaking) as the Director of the Secret Service security agency, has a clear agenda that threatens USA. Jill Biden is a dangerous person. She should be begging Joe to quit, not pushing the poor bastard into a certain psycho-physical collapse that will show the Democratic Party to be the fraud that so many now believe that it has become.

The Democrats have been actively damaging and harming the USA, and the insane support they are giving to "gender-transition" madness - clearly a human mental illness - is most disturbing. It's like there is this project to assault and degrade what it means to be a healthy, aggressive and ambitious American guy. And Gavin Newsom of California has just made it illegal for schools to inform parents if the school sees that the child is being pulled and pushed onto a self-destructive path of mental-illness. This is completely insane. It is basically legalizing social-programming that is effectively child-abuse. Elon Musk says it's the "last straw", and he has indicated SpaceX will move it's headquarters from California to Texas.

The Democrats are dangerous, and they seem to be actively promoting social conflict, personal irresponsibility, and psycho-sexual mental-illness in children.

After the attempted murder of Donald Trump, by a mal-adjusted 20-year old, who may or may not have been someone's operative (we may never know), the lines have been now drawn, and it is clear there will be no "unity" or any of that nonsense, until the dangerous and abusive madness of the Democrats is successfully dealt with.

The USA will have to undergo a period of "social repair", and old-fashioned personal responsibility will have to be restored to the badly-educated and mis-directed young folks in USA. They have been lied to, cheated, and defrauded by an abusive collective of Leftist scammers. Once the Democrats are handed the defeat that they need to be given, it will become possible to speak truth again, and speak it plainly, and without fear.

But we are gonna have to get used to the idea of making our own stuff, again. Free trade in goods and services is a great idea, but it must not be enabled by lies, deception, and linked to some insane attempt to degrade human sexual nature by indoctrinating children with homosexual programming and sexual self-hatred.

The Democrats linking good economic ideas, with absolutely bat-shit crazy ideas about human sexuality - and then changing the laws so that young boys can be taught that their natural, normal sexual nature is abhorent, and needs to be changed by "transition", is almost unbelievable. Yet it is now supported by the law of the land, in crazy California.

I wonder what Lenny Bruce would say? "Well, apparently now, in California, the school kids actually DO get half-an-hour of Mathematics, 20 minutes of History, and 10 minutes of C...ing."

We predicted earlier this week, that Joe Biden will probably resign tomorrow, if he does not die from Covid-19 tonight. It's really, really time to change the program - but just not the way the forces of evil tried to do in Butler, Pennsylvania. Even if you don't like all the Republican policy platform ideas, the need for change trumps all that.

Maybe invest in small-cap operations that can do local manufacturing. The whole "long, global supply-chain" idea might have to just die, to save North America from the dangerous Leftists and the crazy-sick Democrats.

[ July 17, 2024 ] - Your Baby's Gone Down the Plug Hole...(with your Economy!) CIBC is on record for saying the obvious - liquidity is being drained from the financial system in Canada, and money is going down the drain. CIBC points out that assets on the Bank of Canada balance sheet have shrunk from over $570 billion to roughly $273 billion Cdn dollerettes. This is basically draining liquidity from the local Canadian-dollar based financial system, and causing short-term rates to be higher than they need be.

This is the neoclassical/semi-wadcutter Keynesian approach to old-style "open-market operations". When the Cen-Bank buys bonds and financial instruments, it basically instantiates the currency to pay for the paper, (creates the cash out of thin air), and this enhances fin-sys liquidity. When they let these bond-instruments mature, and pay-off, the cash that comes in causes liquidity to be removed from the system. Money gets tight. So short-term funding costs rise and rates move up. This means existing short and medium term IOU's (bonds and bills and such) are discounted down so as to have yields that reflect the new higher interest-rate regime. This is QT - quantitative tightening, the opposite of the QE - quantitative easing - that characterised the Covid-19 stimulus programs. The problem of course, is that the higher-rates COMBINED with the higher inflation, can trigger a non-linear "tipping point" that kicks the overall economy into a serious and unnecessary downturn.

The whole neo-classical economic model, (that IS/LM nonsense that we had to learn in economics school) suggests that inflation is the result of "excess demand", and that shrinking the demand, by removing liquidity and raising interest rates, will reduce inflation.

This is a bit of a personal point of annoyance with me, since my own research has suggested that this economic model is completely disconnected from reality. It's fucking nonsense, since what happens when rates go up, is that you get a "rate-shock" phenomenon, and everyone re-calibrates their plans and their cost-assumptions and those with any sort of economic power, just RAISE THEIR PRICES or DEMAND HIGHER WAGES to compensate for the new high-cost rate-regime. So, the net effect of RISING RATES, is RISING COSTS, since the entire western-world economy runs on massive debt. Everyone is in debt - and a lot of that debt is floating-rate or short-term debt. So, that is why lower rates are attractive - it translates DIRECTLY into lower economic costs.

But, when rates move UP, the costs move UP, at the same time as your pile of fixed-income assets are RE-PRICED DOWNWARD to reflect the required yield to make them economic. Wealth is reduced at the same time as your COSTS launch upwards. Consumers have floating-rate car-loans, and mortgages. Businesses have revolving lines-of-credit, which have floating-rate interest, typically Prime-plus some vigourish number that the bank figures it can squeeze the business-guy (or gal) for.

If rates go up sharply, business conditions get tougher, and businesses respond by raising prices to cover the higher costs they now have. Consumers (salary and wage earners) respond by demanding higher wages. Raising interest-rates sharply, and "draining" liquidity, ***stimulates*** inflation. One can see a direct cause-to-effect phenomenon in the real economy. I saw this up close and personal, back in the mid 1970's. The only way higher rates can reduce inflation, is by economic "shock therapy" where interest rates are raised so high (ie. around 20% to 25%) that economic-links are broken, and the economy endures a harsh and painful mini-depression. This is what was done in 1979 to 1981. Revolving credit lines had rates that exceeded 25%, Savings Bonds yielded over 18% (first year), and many businesses collapsed or shut-down. This was Paul Volker's solution, which was needed, because inflation had become so deeply ingrained - programmed into everyone's economic thinking.

We are at a similar tipping-point right now, in Canada. And we are making the same mistakes again.

The LCBO is on strike. Cars are sitting on dealer lots, unsold. My Mastercard has an interest rate of 20.99%, which is insane. Inflation is running hot, and higher rates are making for higher costs for most everyone. This happens as the size of products shrink, but the price stays the same. (Tropicana Orange Juice is a good example - from a 1.54 litre bottle, to a 1.36 litre bottle, but sold for the same price... the "shrinkflation" that annoys everyone so much).

The "raise interest-rates to fight inflation" model is just plain wrong, if the inflation is not due to excess demand. "Excess" is a bullshit term, that implies there is some "correct" level of demand. This is not how life and economics works. The conceptual thinking is just wrong.

CIBC folks have basically said the obvious. The QT is going to break the Canadian economy, if it is not done in a more careful, gentle manner.

They are probably correct.

A much better approach to reducing inflation involves enhancing and improving economic productivity. This is difficult, and requires changes (improvements) in technical transformation co-efficients. You need to get more output, using less input. A modern big "twin-jet" is an example of this - two engines producing *more* power than four older engines, and also using less fuel. But to get these gains, we need to keep the economy working, and operating in a flexible and efficient manner. We need clear, explicit legal protection of private property rights. We also need less regulation, less direct government oversight, and removal of idiotic and restrictive price-control models, and bloated, value-subtracting government agencies, such as the CRTC and the CBC for example. Both could be ended, and the tax savings channeled into schemes to assist first-time home-buyers, for example.

Instead, we get the absolute economic madness of creating a new and higher "capital-gains" tax, which acts to punish investors and business people, who put funds at risk, to attempt to create new and better, more productive technological approaches to product creation. We are now actively ***punishing*** the economic activity that we need to have happen, if we want to have lower inflation, and more economic prosperity. It's crazy.

The Central Bank needs to focus it's efforts on ***stability***, and not try to actively "gain-ride" national economic process. It's not their fucking job to try to ensure "full employment". And Leftist scammers who suggest that "monetary policy" should be used to "help workers" are just completely wrong-headed in their thinking. They need to be removed from the debate. There time is over, they have been proven wrong, and they need to go because of the damage their wrong-thinking has caused and could cause again. Socialism is evil, because it creates so much unnecessary poverty and destructive conflict.

We learned all these lessons in the ugly inflations of the 1970's and early 1980's. It is weirdly tragic and astonishingly awful that we have to re-learn all this same material again. It's really crazy, truth be told.

Like father, like son, I guess. We seem to be trapped in an Economic Twilight Zone, or maybe it's "GroundHog Day"?

[ July 16, 2024 ] - Israeli Assissins Try to Kill Hamas Leader, and also Kill a Syrian Businessman with a Drone... But psycho-killer Netanyahu condems attempted assassination of Donald Trump. You could not make up shit like this, put it in a book, and not have people snort with disgust at the insane and unbelievable plot dynamics. Markets run up *really hard*, and dollars and shekels are falling from heaven. It's just wild. We remain long stocks, and are considering adding to positions of ingots and ammo. World is completely mad. But Trump looks like he has a lock on the "big guy" job, once Jill Biden and her "Manchurian Candidates" are finally either removed, or de-brainwashed.

That 1962 film - "The Manchurian Candidate" really looks like it predicted the future. Quite amazing. Who is running Trump? Maybe he is now a "free agent", and has paid-off his masters? I don't think anyone is running Trump, but I didn't think anyone was running Biden, but perhaps, someone or some group might be. Maybe it's just Jill Biden, working for the Inner Party of Democrats? Biden said publically "It's not who we are...", which is the dumbest and most dishonest thing he has probably ever said, since the Americans are past-master, expert-level assassinators. Just to be clear - we to NOT approve of "direct methods" to remove political candidates (like Putin did with Navalny, to prevent the prisoner swap), since killing political opponents is just so obviously morally wrong.

But it damn sure is a not uncommon practice - especially in the good, old USA. JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Ronald Reagan (attempted), Abraham Lincoln, and so on, are just some of the USA leaders of significance who have been shot down by assassins. The attempt on Trump was something we explicitly predicted, after Abe of Japan was killed. The world leaders who made the period from the GFC (Great Financial Crisis - 2006-2008) to the mid 20-teens such a fine and prosperous time have been under sustained attack by time, lawfare, betryal, election-fraud, and other more direct actions - Merkel of Germany, Sarkozy of France, Boris Johnson of UK, Abe of Japan, Trump of USA, Harper of Canada - all these good folks who gave us a world of peace and prosperity and stability have been removed, and folks like Xi of China, Putin of Russia, that strange guy who controls North Korea, and Netanyahu of the rogue Israeli state, just keep going and going and going, with corpses and prisoners stacked up behind them. It's pretty sad.

And yet the markets keep flying upwards, into the "stratosfera".

Let's all go to the movies, and watch "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Dr. Strangelove", and realize that all this current madness, seems to have been forecast, way back, long long ago. Nothing really changes very much.

"Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

[ July 15, 2024 ] - So, Now that Putin is Gone, Zelenskiy Invites Russians to Peace Talks? Suddenly, Zelenskiy figures maybe the Russians *should* come to the next peace talks. How about that? Markets run up.

[ July 14, 2024 ] - Kagemusha? Rumor that Putin has died, but Russia withholding news There are rumors circulating that Vladimir Putin has died, probably from the cancer that many intell researchers suspected he had. Or he might have succumbed to the Covid-19 vaccination blood-clots, that medical researchers suspect is a long-term side-effect of both Covid-19, and the Covid-19 vaccine.

As a Russian leader, he was known to have "body doubles", and admitted this in an interview, several years back. The idea here is that news of his death could be hidden, by having one of his body-doubles assume the role of a "kagemusha".

During wartime, in feudal Japan, this practice was not uncommon, as the loss of a leader was known to dispirit the warriors and fighters supporting a warlord. If the warlord was killed, his generals would replace him with a look-alike. The look-alike was termed a: "Kagemusha", meaning "Shadow Warrior", and a 1980 action film was made in Japan about an event in Japanese history where this was thought to have occured.

Supposedly, the rumor of Putin's death, originated from England's "Mi6", the UK Spy Agency. We have no direct knowledge of the truth of this, but have observed two events - Russian military re-opening lines of communication with the US Pentagon, with Andrey Belousov speaking with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and comments today from Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, suggesting that they did not think any Agency was behind the Trump assassination attempt. (ie., another "lone gunman", it would appear...) But nothing from Putin, who might normally be expected to comment. If a "kagemusha" has been installed, he might not be Putin's intellectual equal, so they would be wise to act as they are.

The Russians are not stupid, and have a real rational interest in restoring some sanity and stability to the current crazy-ugly march of events. But with Putin gone, USA run by an old and defective leader, Trump shot down by a now-dead assassin, and Israel unleashing continued state-terrorism and mass-murder at scale in Gaza, mad foolishness may run fast.

Anything can happen. One has to make the assumption that the Arabs are not subject to human emotions, in order to support the murderous actions of the Israeli's, who kill as if mad with blood-lust. The Gaza mass-murders will echo forward in time, for many years, and nothing now can change this. It is an "Arab Holocaust", with deaths now in the tens of thousands - almost all civilians. This remains true, regardless of how many Jews scream their abusive shouts of "anti-semitism."

The Saudi's are probably discussing that maybe they have backed the wrong horse, and a peace-seeking Russia could have a real chance to expand it's authority and influence. Hiding Putin's death would make good sense, given that the USA is morally self-destructing, appears unable to act rationally at the international level, and Israel is making the Gaza desert run red with the blood of Palestinian civilians.

If Putin really has "left the stage", then the Russians have a real opportunity to end the insane and absurd war in Ukraine, and seek a quick cease-fire. This would free up their forces for deployment to the Middle East, where they would probably be welcomed by all Arabs, if they stood in any sort of opposition to the murderous and sadistic war-machine that is the rogue state of Israel.

A new, younger and more internationally-focused Russian leader could be a powerful force in the world, given that America has chosen mass-murder and military violence as its strategic and political model, and surrendered its moral authority.

Note that these rumors of Putin's death, have been around for a few years now. The latest rumor originates in the Far East, and might just be standard disinformation, or more "fake news". But no-one lives forever - except perhaps maybe "Genocide Joe" Biden, who at least thinks he will.

:)

[ July 13, 2024 18:57 EST ] - Trump shot at rally, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Secret Service agents rushed him off-stage. After falling down, he stood up, and raised his fist in the air. Blood was visible on his face and his neck. After Abe of Japan was killed, I warned folks this might happen to Trump.

Here is what I saw, on my devices.... (page down )

[ July 13, 2024 ] - Gaza Holocaust? A really bad future is being engineered by the most dangerous humans that live now on planet earth - the Israelis - who rival ISIS terrorists in their wild, horrific over-the-top pure evil. The Gaza Murder War is unfolding like a medieval morality play, and gives us a picture of why Jewry was so hated, for so long, in much of Europe. This murder-war is so crazy-wrong, and will have such awful consequences going forward, that it feels quite unreal to observe. (We know people who can give us first-hand accounts of the deaths and atrocity-actions taking place.) But don't take my word for anything - read what BBC reporters write:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjjw6dz8w2eo

We are seeing - in real time - mass-murder and true "ethnic cleansing" that rivals the events of Europe in the 1940's. It's quite unbelievable almost, except it is ongoing right now.

What is crazy wrong, is that America - rather than trying to find a solution to any part of this conflict, is actually throwing gasoline on the fire, and making the killing more effective, and operationalized at greater scale. They appear to want a wider war, with more "action", it appears.

Suddenly, Russian President Putin does not look like such an evil person. And this is one hell of an accomplishment for the "Genocide Industrial Complex" that the USA seems to be actively assisting. It is just madness, in our opinion. There was no attempt to seek any sort of peaceful, viable resolution to the ugly error of the creation of the Israeli and it's land-theft exercise, which resulted in 3 million people living in the tiny Gaza Strip Territory. This was an absurd and stupid partition, which created a perfect "Ghetto" where it's citizens could be controlled, and then killed at scale.

The entire Israel project was and is insane. The creation of the Israeli state was a horrific error, sadly, which has allowed mass-murder to be viewed as an acceptable social solution, by Jews. This is just over-the-top crazy. These Israeli's are channeling pure evil, in a way that is so perfectly awful, that it is almost comical. "One good Holocaust deserves another!" seems to be the ethic. It's nuts.

Today, the USA and the new lefty UK nutjob government of fucking Keir Starmer or whatever that communist bonehead is called, has decided that a mass-bombing campaign against folks in Yemen is the solution to the problem. "When in doubt, bomb the airport", seems to be the extent of the military analysis. It's like they are channeling "Goodfellas".

This is just so fucking stupid that it boggles the mind.

I am wondering if old MBS of Saudi Arabia, will finally agree to what Osama Bin Laden wanted, and remove the American military bases from Saudi. That would be hilarious - and it just might happen.

People in USA (and now the sad, sorry old motherland, the UK) have just kind of stopped thinking. There is this weirdly kinky view, which the stupid fucking Left has embraced, that you can bomb your way to peace. We, most disrespectively, disagree. The idiot fuckwit Lefties will bring ruin and destruction down on our whole World, if these clowns are not stopped, and stopped soon.

Meanwhile, let me dig up a technical picture of what is likely to happen to the sad US aircraft carriers that are projecting all this power. The silly little Iranian-supplied drone-boats are comically ineffective. But there IS technology that can sink these killer warships. Excuse me, while I consult the files...

We went thru the files, and found this picture, showing how a MIG-31K can deploy an X-47M2 "Raketa" (Rocket), which the MIG launches up into the "Stratosfera", and which then targets the aircraft carrier at 3400 km/hr (very quick), and can be used to solve the problem of a large hostile warship parked off your nation's coast, and sending warplanes to bomb your national airport. The idea is that targeting methods on the A/C will not succeed in intercepting the incoming vehicle, due to it's velocity. It is difficult to shoot down a vertically plunging hypersonic missile. It's rather like trying to stop an incoming bullet by shooting at it. (The "Phallanx" gattling-gun will try to. But it might miss.)

But if you have 10 MiG-31's, you can launch 10 vehicles at the same time, and one or two are very likely to get thru the storm of depleted-uranium bullets, and punch a nice clean hole right thru the big A/C. We suspect that in the near future, this project will be executed successfully, and offer a solution to the problem of coastal warships, which no nation wants to be threatened by.

If I were Putin, I might just pull the trigger on this operation, maybe call it "Operation Sealane Clearance" or some such thing, and test this new hypersonic rocket technology, and see if it works. Like the Americans, he could blame Iran if it did not work. Or he could sit quietly and say nothing at all, if it did work. A nice "Knight's Fork" - he gets a win, either way.

See, my old Irish grandmother would have said: "What is sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander." Or more directly: "If you throw rockets at us, we have no choice but to throw rockets at you." Who could blame Putin if he sunk a US carrier threatening the Middle East with more mass-murder of Arabs and possible global war? Americans ignore talk, and only respect targeted action. This would not be a hostile act, just an attempt to communicate, he might argue. And he would have a valid argument, would he not?

We also note that the Chinese are actively testing AI-enabled optical-recognition technology to allow F-35's to be targeted and destroyed. No radar at all. (Radar is not much good any more, since it lights up the sender like a big beacon, which says "Here I am! Kill me, if you want to!!". Not a great idea. So, AI-based image-recognition is used to locate, identify, and then track and destroy the target - in this case, an F-35.) Images have been released showing Chinese testing of this new missile technology, out in remote desert locations, where all these mocked-up fake F-35's are parked. The technology seems to be working.

We are programming our best AI technology to kill. And the Israeli's are front and centre on this exercise, which is now starting to snowball. Peace appears to be a Fool's project, and so the war planning continues to accelerate.

We predict that this Gaza murder-madness will cost the USA it's future, if it is not stopped soon.

[ July 12, 2024 ] - Great Booh's Up! You really have to be a Black Adder fan to appreciate the world we are seeing now. Or maybe a student of Shakespeare's Tragedies and also his Comedy. We have a very strange world now. All the doom-and-gloom predictions, based on the obvious reality of the current situation, are of course completely overshadowed by the curious behaviour of the USA and it's dynamic, restless, wild people. Good for them, is our quiet and true opinion.

They are just freaking crazy, and it is good for the World. Our AI's were pointing down, our primary bank-stock holding had made a perfect "head-and-shoulders" technical pattern, and the world looks to be going to hell.

So, we figure all that must be priced in. If anything changes, we will probably see some solid uplift in prices, if and when the inflation numbers can be printed so that they can give the appearance of things being under control. We don't believe that *anything* is under control anywhere, truth be told.

But that does not matter!

The crazy situation in USA is so like a Shakespeare play - sort of a curious cross or mash-up, between King Lear and/or Macbeth. But maybe that is not right... Maybe it's more a Samuel Beckett play - "Waiting for Bidot..." Biden is just having neural-failure, but the Demohacks have decided that it's all good.

But really, it's crazy. It's just that it's classical crazy, which is so interesting and strange. We actually have old "Genocide Joe" restricting shipments of 2000-pound bombs to Israel, but allowing a mass-shipment of 500-pound bombs to go through. It reminds me of that old joke about the firing squad asking: "And which calibre bullet would you like to shot with? A big one, or a little one?"

Does this just not seem a little insane?

And Mr. Biden introduced Zelenskiy as "President Putin" at a NATO meeting. Really.

But we remain long, all-in on our bank-stocks, gold-mines and telecoms. We should have bought tech stocks, of course, but I know too much about technology. It's mostly bogus, and mostly, it just does not work very well. Everyone knows this, but people are pet-coon lazy now, so they just try to get Windows or MacBook apps or silly cellphone apps to do their work. AI will make this trend worse, we are pretty sure.

So, we remain invested in our dividend-generating non-tech portfolio. And work on farm-work (much to be done), and also I fixed my pickup truck. I installed a new alternator in my 2013 Ford F-150, the beast we use for work. It's a critical tool on a farm and also for our real-estate project (the Northern Office - lakefront on a lovely lake just north of Muskoka area.) The truck has been high-maintenance, but I've replaced the starter-motor, repaired the flawed transmission-cooling system, and now, installed a new alternator, drive-belt and belt-tensioner pulley assembly. (This required removing air-intake tubes and coolant tubes, and draining half the coolant, etc. Miserable job, but completed now, with satisfactory results. Also replaced coolant-hose clamps, cleaned and checked wiring, air-filters, etc.)

The low-inflation print from USA provoked an expected sea-change in market sentiment, which shows nicely, how human understanding can trump what the AI stuff tells us, sometimes.

I honestly think the whole AI thing has become a quite-silly bubble, of quite epic level. When the air starts coming out, typically bubbles do not slowly leak air, do they?

That is why they are called "bubbles" and not just "bull-markets". Be careful, things could get really crazy, really quickly.

[ July 6, 2024 ] - Baby, Let the Shite Shine Down! I just read a really good article that explains the current USA situation re. the corrupted and damaged US media. The same thing prevails in Canada, only it is much worse, since we have the State Information Service of the CBC (dominated by hard-core Leftists, Gay-boys, and run by clever J-folk to make any objective information on the Israeli mass-murder exercises unreportable. The USA media is bad and bent, but the CBC is just comically evil - like Joseph Gobbels with a high-rez smiling female face...)

This fellow James Kunstler at "Kunstler.com" absolutely nails it, in his piece: "Who Turned Off the Gaslight?" It's some of the best and most perceptive writing and solid analysis I have encountered in quite a while.

If you don't read anything more this year, and plan to leave the planet on a long trans-stellar voyage to Riesa (or some other such fine pleasure world), at least read this piece.

Here is the link:

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/who-turned-off-the-gaslight/

I don't know anything about James Kunstler, and I only found this link via some research efforts on what the hell is going wrong with USA, a nation that I love, because I like their approach to tyranny and bad-actions by evil entities. Plus I have extended family there, and our family history links directly to California during the 1920's, in a rather direct way. We have a direct family connection to the movie-business of 1920's Calif., which spawned the great and truly golden age of cinema. (Big sigh...) The USA film industry dominated the world, before the World went evil, and films got weird.

And Kunstler makes a very key point when he points out that it is perhaps (probably?) true evil forces that are trying to mess with the minds of the children, and make them question and doubt their own sexual indenties. I believe this "LGBQT-trans" stuff to be truly evil, as it cannot help but have a direct, powerful and negative impact on the mental-health of the younger (and soon-to-be-coming-to-power) generation of kids. It seems designed to fuck up their brains in ways that will make them confused, uncertain, and easy-to-control.

This is a very bad, and very evil thing to do. Those coloured fag-flags are designed to make kids crazy, and doubt who and what they are, at their most basic level. This look like a giant scam, to degrade and damage the mental-health of our youth - the most important resource a nation has.

Kunstler calls it "Cluster-B crypto-Marxism", which might just be the best and most accurate description of this particular plague-virus I have heard. They teach this gay-trans nonsense in schools, as if it were not mental illness. But it IS mental illness.

Kids are of course supposed to experiment with pharma and sexuality when they are young. But you do not want the young boys to cut their dicks off, or die from fentanyl-poisoning. Unless perhaps, you are maybe a dick-less man-hater, or a fag-Marxist, who hates his own culture, and actively seeks to destroy it. Harsh words, but quite possibly true. Modern academia has gone wildly off the rails of sanity and common-sense. They teach this silly stuff in schools, and suggest that all the blame rests with white-people. This is of course, racist nonsense - but if you point out the racist tone of the attacks on white-folks, the white-folks are the ones accused of racism. This is madness - but it might be by design. Our very culture and our history is under attack by clever grifters and eco-fraudsters, who seek to damage the foundational baselines of Western Culture. We have to change what is happening here.

The Revolution that we non-Marxists want, is a sanity revolution, where we can restore sane operation to public-process, reduce tax-burdens, and strengthen the self-financing sector so as to improve and enhance the Wealth and Health of the Nation, and the Prosperity of the Whole Planet. Attacking the sexuality of children, and encouraging sexual insanity and enabling mental-illness will track us all to a certain social breakdown, and civilizational collapse. It's happened before, and one can look up the historical material and read about it. Nothing new is happening here.

And this is the curious truth, which lots of folks have been writing about for some years now. But the mainstream media lie-machine has pushed all these curious, wild lies, which are now called "gaslighting", a curious term for "State-engineered deception". This term seems to have been invented in Vancouver, in the 1970's, when gaslights were installed in a bad part of the city where drug-abuse and crime was rampant. The gaslights were supposed to make everything look nice, and disguise the obvious ugly state of the drug-user's neighbourhood.

[ July 5, 2024 ] - Sunshine Stuporman My mom got Alzheimer's, and went goofy and dopey, and lost most of her memory, and most of her natural, clever, reserved nature. I would go visit her, and she would say these remarkably candid comments. It was sad, but often crazy-funny. And in the expensive, high-security Old-Folks Home where she lived, they had an old guy who was always angry. He walked around with the same face that Biden has now. This is also pretty funny.

Anyone who has any experience at all, dealing with old, cranky, brain-failing folks, knows that this curious combo of stubborness and anger and denial-that-there-is-a-problem, is a very common feature and even a signature-characteristic of mental decline in old guys (especially old *guys* who have been used to controlling their environments or at least actively managing their own lives).

So, this fiasco with Joe Biden is just wildly crazy. The old bugger needs to fucking well stand the fuck down, and if he cannot and will not, then he needs to be told to fucking well move the hell along, and make way for a young, strong, effective crop of new leadership candidates.

But if the Democrat Party of USA cannot engineer this obviously necessary result, then that group of clowns is so obviously unfit to govern, that it opens the door to their collective removal by any means possible.

There are people actually seriously suggesting that active AI video-technology should be employed to make Joe Biden look more snappy and effective and chipper in his chattering.

Really. This continued misuse of AI, is going to kill us all, I sort-of-secretly fear.

Why doe ANYONE support the loon-brigade that is the New Democrat Party in USA? The answer to that question is self-evident: For the money!

The Lefty Demo's are supported by every skank who is on the public payroll, and is getting the "purple wage" (cf. "New Riders of the Purple Wage", by Philip Jose Farmer, 1967).

There is this astonishing Niagara Falls of Cash - billions of Gov-bucks that flow to teachers, regulators, political people and their staff of poltroons, agency officers, Board-members of various "Boards" set up to solve some big social-justice "problem", Commission-members and their Commissioners and agents, law-enforcement folks, prison officials, more regulators, city-workers, registry-office personel, second-rate scientists with their fat streams of government grant-money, and so on, and on and on and on.

This collective of Government-Funded humans, are deeply vested with the idea of keeping the fat-dollars flowing into their bulging bank-accounts.

They are VERY HAPPY with a goofy old coot who promises to keep the bucks flowing and the easy-life sliding along their way on taxpayer-supplied grease.

But the folks in the "self-financing sector", who have to pay their own bills, and generate their own funds to survive, are different. These folks typically are not great fans of the Big Goverment Slush Machine that funds all the "social-justice warriors" and other bloat-toads that suck at the big Taxpayer-Tit for their sustenance. The folks in the "self-financing sector" want lower taxes, less government-funded economic damage, and more freedom to do something that lets them generate some funds that give them first survival, and then maybe prosperity if they are lucky, clever, hard-working and successful.

The economists used to call it the "productive sector" and the "non-productive sector", but this was too annoying for the government-folks, who said "We are productive! Look at all the regulations, laws, rules, and paper-work we have produced!", and so the terms "Non-productive sector" and "Productive sector" were re-cast as "Non-self financing sector" (Living off debt and taxpayer-extractions) and "Self-financing sector" (funded from private effort to produce income which eventually must include profit).

So, it's obvious who supports the Democrats in the USA. The folks on the Government payroll. They want and NEED the "Great Taking" by Government to continue, since they gain their survival from this action. They will vote for "a glass of water" (to use Nancy's Pelosi's term), if that is what the Democrats run in these Democrat-dominated Blue-zone's of economic non-self-financing action.

From this simple and obvious observation, it's clear that we have a problem. As Government grows more and more powerful, intrusive and LARGE, it will, at some point, become impossible to fix the economic failure that is being programmed into the system. Once more than half the jobs are State-funded cash-dumps for Gov-agents, there is no change possible. The Bloat-toads will have a permenant lock on power, and all sorts of weird fiction can (and will) be invented (like "Climate Change Action" efforts, for example), that have zero productive action-results and are non-self-financing, of course.

So, if we are gonna have the Revolution, we had better get the ball rolling soon, before more than 50% of all the population is funded by the Government Bloat-Toads and the Blob, since at that point, there will be zero chance of changing the borked system. The money will be bogus digital-cash or paper-scrip, and you may well really be told to live in a pod and eat bugs, and there will be no viable political party that can reverse the process, since few folks will vote to cut off their small State-supplied income streams.

This is why America MUST survive and CHANGE THE PROGRAM. There is this little window - maybe 10 or 20 years - before the whole world is destroyed by the effective destruction of the self-financing sector, and no amount of voting will be able to reverse this trend, once most of the folks are on Government payroll.

The Gov-Monkeys, the Bloat-toads and the big Blob all seek this result. It gives them the "Inner Party" power, and reduces the rest of us to what is effectively slave-status. Not a pretty future.

Of course, this is a pure "worst-case" scenario. We don't expect it to be quite this bad. But it explains why a substantial portion of people in USA would support an "old, broken down piece of crap" like Joe Biden (to use President Trump's words). This Biden man is very bad - a grifter with a proven family-business of taking bribes from the Chinese. (This is how Hunter Biden got his Porsche, let's be clear!).

Maybe the Democrats could replace Biden with that Pelosi-suggested: "glass of water". Might be a viable strategy...

[ July 4, 2024 ] - Wave the Flag. Watch the Fireworks... As your weapon factories burn? Could this be the beginning of the future?

We have a simple question, that we have been pondering...:

Why are our political people so astonishingly stupid? Why is "crazy" the new normal? Why is USA running two old guys for the "Big Guy" job, that so many folks don't want to vote for?

Why is USA helping Israel carry out the AI-driven ("Lavender") mass-murder exercise against Gaza citizens? Why does the USA (the only nation to have used not just one, but TWO nuclear bombs on TWO big cities), now help arm Israel so it can use advanced AI technology to becomes the champion of civilian mass-murder efforts? This action does extreme damage to the moral authority of USA, and will create long-term trans-generational hatred of the American State. This will degrade and damage USA for a hundred years into the future, and set in motion long-range planning that will have expanding and destructive, tragic outcomes.

We believe America is at risk of engineering it's own moral suicide. And a nation that is seen as a heavily-armed and dangerously dishonest political entity that operates in a hypocritical and out-of-control abusive manner, will face rising long-term costs which will eventually become unsustainable. This is how big empires die. They run out of the wealth and the materiel needed to support their large military operations, and eventually, those they have hurt and defeated, rise successfully against the Imperial overlords. First, the borders are overrun. And when the Imperial military is shown to be weak and insufficiently armed, the emboldened rebels burn the Imperial cities, as their own towns and villages were burned and destroyed in earlier generational action, which is never forgotten.

When will we see the "Sacking of Washington?" Or will it just be destroyed in a radioactive firestorm? We hope this outcome can be avoided. But hope is only desire. It is human action that drives the human world.

What is wrong with people now? Do they have no knowledge of history? Can they not reason effectively anymore? (We actually have a working theory that Covid-19 infections have caused subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle?) changes in brain-chemistry in a non-trivial portion of the post-infected population.)

When one examines the history of "eschatology", there is a rich and detailed amount of information, that seems to follow fairly obvious and evident patterns. Civilizations rise and fall, rather like seasons come and go.

Rome burned and destroyed Carthage and dominated the known World. But it was burned down too. What makes Rome and the Roman Empire so interesting, is that in some ways, it still exists. Rome is a religious and cultural centre now, and it threatens no one with murder or destruction. That is how it has survivied. The Church - Christianity and it's doctrine of forgiveness and redemption - this was a more effective business-model (and life-model) than the cult-of-power and military dominance that the Roman State relied upon.

I've been reviewing the philosophical views of civil structure. I think Derrida is full of crap. But if Western Culture is to survive and prosper, it has to recognize the limits to military power and the limited effectiveness of State Terror, as practiced by USA and it's Jewish murder-cults. There is a limit to military effectiveness. The expenditures required to run a command-economy in a full-on military conflict, are not consistent with prosperity and with an even partially "freedom-seeking" State. War in the future will not look like past wars. New war may mask itself as what looks like random destruction, and accidental events.

At some point - possibly quite near in the future - we will likely see evidence of USA military power reaching operational and financial limits.

And once military power reaches it's threshold capacity, it becomes one of those processes which runs in reverse - often more quickly retrograde, than was the slow expansion.

The USA may find itself - despite all it's ability and effectiveness - fighting a curious asymetric series of war-events which degrade it's ability to respond using military force.

And if all American moral authority is bankrupt and dismissed by a world grown weary of unwise American brutality and hypocrisy, the USA could suddenly find itself in a war scenario in which it cannot "win". There could be uprisings and literally conflict in the streets of American cities which require military action to contain, at the same time as low-level assaults are operationalized on the peripheral projections of American power. Think thousands of cheap rockets, carrying low-explosive warheads designed to spread disease and infecteous insects perhaps carrying "Bird Flu" or "Lyme Disease" - low-tech nasty stuff that will not kill, but simply degrade military operations on US warships.

There are hundreds of ways US military entities can be harrassed and degraded. The objective of raising costs and making life difficult for unwanted Imperial overlords will perhaps only be a first stage of a long-term campaign.

But it is the unnecessary and unwise actions of the Israeli-American "Axis of Effort" that may drive this process for hundreds of years into the future. The Israeli's can slaughter the citizens of Gaza like cattle for now - but the intense hatred of the Jewish State and it's offensive, racist ideology - this can connect directly with the extraordinary loss of American moral authority, and create a long-term condition for successfully recruitment of effective anti-American forces throughout the world, not just in the Middle East.

The surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban was astonishingly unwise - and make no mistake - it was a complete surrender. American forces snuck out of their big airbase, like thieves in the night, abandoning their loot. It was crazy-bad action by a damaged and degraded America, unsure of what it should be doing in the World. Putin watched in astonishment, as USA just gave up, and turned-tail and ran away. USA chose to "cut and run", and it was an American defeat worse than the Vietnam War.

For now, American financial strength combined with military strength, allows the USA dollar to retain it's "reserve currency" status.

But this will not last forever. We think we are seeing - right now - "Peak America", and fear that a long, slow (or maybe not-so-slow?) slide down is what we shall see beginning very soon.

And joined as the hip as we are, here in Canada, we cannot escape the coming collapse in American authority and status. We will be dragged down, no matter what we do. As least this is the current "worst-case" scenario.

I really hope I am wrong about this. The Democrats in USA really need to be removed, but I am not sure that Trump will be much better. The Jews and the Saudi's look to have control of both of these old guys, and so we fear that the ugly and expanding war in the Middle East, cannot but help make it's way to American, one way or another.

And what is certain - right here and right now - is that USA no longer has the moral authority that it had in the recent past. Their government is a collection of liars. They talk a lot - but their efforts to actively assist the Israeli ethnic-cleansing efforts in Gaza show that their talk is self-serving propaganda.

We are really concerned that this New American Mendacity will have serious, long-term effects, which will damage and degrade USA going forward from here. Liars can prosper, but not for ever. The "Big Lie" that you send out into the World, eventually comes home, and brings an entire angry World along with it. And then things change.

[ July 2, 2024 ] - Growing Madness and Certain Collapse? I am watching BCE's share-price implode and burn down like a melting reactor-core today. It's silly, and yet, it seems to be the path that the fuckwits in the Federal Fools Government group up in Ottawa, want to have happen. The cucks at CRTC I guess want to destroy BCE and impoverish all it's shareholders. Seems like a curiously unwise decsion to us, but we are not in any of the psycho-stupid loon-loops that drive the cuck-process of our buggered State, so we have really no way to understand exactly why this path is being programmed. Maybe the Gov-dicks are short? We have no idea. But it sure seems a bad play. We are near a breakdown point, where we will have to sell into this stupid shitstorm, and the c... I mean "runts" who are running this f**king program, bloody well know it. But destroying (again!) our major telecom entity is just a really unwise plan. We would all do better, if the CRTC could be completely ended and the a$$h0les who run that sh/tfarm of idiocy could be sent-down to the Unemployment Office.

There is this astonishing level of outright fraud and scam-shit everywhere now. We blockout a lot of communication, because so much of it is outright bullshit or fraud. Our phones' ring each day with scams and fraud-talk. We have to run layers and layers of sec-fluff to limit access, and have just gone thru more updates. We run browsers WITHOUT javascript, and have no incoming access to any of our tech now, other than dial-up voice landlines or cellphones. Too dangerous to have any sort of incoming internet access, like we used to be able to have. This site runs via AWS, and there is no point even running https on it, since I will likely shut it all down soon. It has been an experiment, to see if offering this info we provide, could create any sort of value. (Hint: It cannot. Only 5 or 6 companies generate direct value from the internet. You know who they are.)

So, it's been interesting. What is really interesting, is that our AI stuff really works. It's damn scary. It says we are fucked.

I had rather hoped it was wrong! :)

But so far, the down-pointing projections, have been spot-on. Really, it's hilarious. Real comic-opera stuff. You want to know the future, eh? Let me tell you:

You will watch everything good collapse and go to shit. You will experience disaster. Evil will triumph and get fat and grow rich. The good-guys (and their families) will get wasted. The stupid and the fraudulent will remain in power, and nothing will change. This will make you sick, and you will feel pain. Then, after that, you will die.

There! Now you KNOW the future. So go out and invest in weapons-makers and euthanasia stocks!

:)

[ June 28, 2024 ] - The Liberty of the Phantom The Democrats in USA are showing curious collective insanity. After the comically awful and geratric performance of old "Genocide Joe" in the USA Presidential Debate, one just has to wonder why the USA Democratic Party does not just run an honest, fair, open and truly democratic leadership convention, and select it's candidate for USA President in a good old-fashioned democratic manner? The curious threat to USA democracy, is the existence of the USA Democratic Party. They have rigged their OWN political selction process, so quite possibly the very WORST POSSIBLE candidate has supposedly locked-up the nomination, and no sensible choices (such as that Robert Kennedy fellow) are possible. Why not just do this???

But the process is now corrupt, insane, and just plain weird. Robert Kennedy Jr. could win. He could do crazy stuff and sieze the public imagination. He could rent a big convertable Lincoln Limosine, and drive thru Dallas, Texas. He could announce this action, get a bunch of folks out to see his parade action, and have the TV and news-junkie crews cover this event. He could follow the same path old Jack took, and wave to the crowd. This would be a "Yeltsin" moment, a crazy act of real courage, like when Yeltsin climbed up on that tank - probably the most profound and clever political act in modern history.

The poor old Demohacks need to deal with old "Genocide Joe", the geriatric loser who will send them all down in flames. It's weird how they have all their money on that very tired old horse, who has really accomplished nothing at all, in his entire politcal life. It is all just weirdly gruesome.

The whole thing is surreal, like a Luis Bunuel film.

[ June 27, 2024 ] - The Rhine Just Froze Over... And the Barbarians are on their way. Finally. It's about bloody time, eh? It's funny how the artists, who are the sensitive-poet types, can seem to forecast the future with a curious degree of accuracy. I keep seeing this weird amalgam of "The Barbarian Invasions" (a great 2003 Quebecois film by Denys Arcand), and that Ray Bradbury short-story "There Will Come Soft Rains", which is set in August of 2026, in a town called Allendale California. (It was written in 1950, about a fully-automated house, which is still operating, despite the nuclear-war which has killed all the people from radiation-sickness).

I don't think this will be our future - but what is interesting is that the two serious concerns that seem to dominate the current zeitgeist - uncontrolled, irresponsible and illegal mass-migration into USA as engineered by corrupt Democratic Party operatives, and the enhanced probability of all-out World War, a result of the ugly and insane conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, where abusive, sadistic military invasions have resulted in mass civilian casualties. Both these looming concerns were topics of well-crafted creative works of fiction, quite long ago.

The artists and the film-makers and the poets and the "workers in song" (as Leonard Cohen called them), often seem to create extreme-scenario fiction, which often has better success at prediction of what will happen, than does the reasoned, thoughtful, and desperate attempts by academics, pundits and traders have with their attempts to speculate what will happen in the future.

This really is the job of the artist. He or she must touch the collective soul of the current world, by showing a portrait of a possible - and often terrible - future that might unfold.

Comedy can do the same thing - and it's even better at forecasting the future, as the absurd and the insane move from speculative-fiction into the regular domain of noxious "bubble-headed bleach-blond" and serious, scolding middle-aged women newscaster-style faked-reality nightly TV events.

We've given up on television - and even the internet with old Google-gumbo, no longer offers much that is helpful. We are turning back to Einstein's suggestion, and continue to "look deeply into nature", where some useful truth can still be found.

The correct and most useful machine that we might invent, will be an AI-device that can read all the news and internet-drivel and fake-scam digital-rot, and make a correlated forecast of the future evolutionary paths of the major tradeable markets, and then execute the trades. I wanted to build this device back when Z80 personal-computers became available - and even subscribed to news-service (using a dial-up modem, no less!), and built PASCAL programs which captured and archived and processed economic-news stories. It worked not-bad, considering I had onl 64K, and two 160K floppy disks to use. But one really needs a lot more horsepower, of course, and the necessary neural-capacity of a modern AI (or a human brain) to make market-useful inferences from the march of market-related economic news (and the related drivel that is the price history).

But now, folks are building such devices, and using them to generate trading action. And this is pretty funny, since it kind of reminds me of the "Forbin Project", another amusing and clever attempt to forecast the current future (a great film made in 1970, about a nuclear-launch computer/AI called "Colossus" which links up with a Russian computer, and takes control of the world). It was the topic of David Bowie's "The Saviour Machine" song, and the same ideas were used for "Shalmaneezer", the AI in "To Stand on Zanzibar" and "Wintermute", the orbiting AI in William Gibbson's "Neuromancer", which forecast the rise of "cyberspace".

For an old hacker like me, all this stuff is "old news", or "yesterday's papers", as Mick Jagger said in one of his old, classical tunes. All pretty hilarious. We have "Deep Blue" (the original IBM-based chess-playing AI) trying to trade the markets, and also take orders at McDonald's. And it does not really do a very good job at either of these task. (Estimates I have encountered suggest 70 to 80 percent of market action (trading volume) is driven directly by algorithmic trading proces - machines making trades with other machines.) This is nothing to do with "price-discovery", and really is just more American bullshit. But bullshit - in the very technical business-language meaning of the term - is actually what human brains (and modern AI's - it's called "halucinations" or "confabulations" - the term Dr. Hinton prefers) - is a very key part of human thinking and human communication.

When folks do not know, or are dealing with uncertainty, you just have to guess, or roll-the-dice, or spin-a-yarn and try to use narrative to help you achieve understanding of what is actually happening. Most times, most people probably truly have no idea, despite the assurance of certainty and the serious-face blah-blah-blah that is put forth as wisdom and supposedly the results of thoughtful consideration.

So, given my history, and my readings, I grow ever more skeptical of AI claims, and the political visions of a wonderful, fun-filled future of rising prosperity. I just don't see it.

I do have some very bizzare ideas, though. Curiously, these seem to also have been the topics of writers and film-makers back in the 1960's and 1970's... More later... as my research is showing we might truly be very seriously "faaked". The "Preppers" might actually be actually making the most effectively actionable and reasonable decisions, consistent with quiet wisdom and rational analysis.

[ June 26, 2024 ] - You Can Hold a Toad for a Long Time... But it will not increase the probability of it turning into a Prince. Or a piece of gold...

In August 2026, the "Soft Rains" will come (as per Ray Bradbury's story), and all the Toads, the Princes and the gold will not really matter then. Or not. The future remains uncertain. But we have been considering just what the transition from now into the future of 2026 and 2027 might look like. The probability of major transitional events seems to be climbing each day, but we cannot get a clear picture yet. It's all just a nagging feeling that something large is looming. And historically, markets and nations go down and broke very slowly - until it all happens very quickly. Is that not the key lesson from history? One cannot know the future, of course.

But the aggressive reversal of the long-term trend towards free-trade/globalized-commerce - with Russia and China having developed operational private-market economic models, and trading freely with the rest of the world - this reversal runs the risk of running the last 30 years of rising prosperity in reverse. We feel this reverse run of the movie of the last 30 years, might be at "internet speed".

The ever-growing levels of public-sector debt, with annual interest-costs exceeding annual defense-spending in the USA, for example, cannot continue much longer. Maybe a few more years. But either we get a big runaway inflation, or weaker western-nations start to see rolling "currency crisis events." (Think of the Japanese Yen at more than 200 to the US dollar, and the Euro collapsing as China-Europe trade devolves into unwise trade-war histronics).

The Canadian banks are really looking bad. All the numbers appear reasonable, and PCL's (provisions for credit-losses) are not unreasonable. On the surface, they should be good investments. Folks in Canada do not typically ever default on their mortgages. The numbers look OK. But the market is saying otherwise. Bank shares are trading now as if they are all about to turn into "drop-toads", and this is ugly and serious for folks such as us, who hold Cdn bank stocks. We are getting hammered, just as the "Great Reset" event-horizon moves ever closer.

Don't take my word for this. Go look at the public finances of USA and Canada and other Western-world nations. The current scheme will come to an "event resolution" process, regardless of what the political poltroons do. We can crash-land the plane in a semi-controlled manner (think 10% to 15% or higher interest-rates to damp down the raging inflation, big camps for the "newly poor" so those who lose their houses can at least have some place to live and eat and not freeze to death, and lots of ugly new restrictions on all social behaviour (think Covid-19 restrictions, but on steroids). Or, we can just keep the debt-funded can-kicking going, until we get an economic implosion of really surprising proportions. This nasty future of hard-change and economic-reset is probably coming at us, regardless of what little action is taken now.

Most USA wealth now is now virtual, paper (or "digital") wealth. There might come a quick-turn kind of tipping point, where inflation hits a level that folks want to have hard-assets, rather than variable-valued paper. It's happened in so many other economies, throughout history. Brass coins of no real value replaced gold and silver coins, the King puts his image on the coin, and demands it be used. Folks move, and farmers hoard their crops, to trade for real assets, like weapons and drugs and silver and gold. Most real-estate deals in Europe were done using gold, because no-one wanted paper, notes, or degraded base-metal coins with questionable true value, if they were to give up house, home and estate. Often, real-assets changed hands because of war and conquest. History suggests that it starts bad, and then gets worse.

People adjust, and economic action continues after the "Great Fall", but it will be at a much lower level, more local, and without the benefits of global free-trade being possible. Only the very rich will have nice things. Everyone else will be living in those "pods" and eating those "Klaus-bugs".

It's a certain receipe for social revolution, is it not? All the same old Nationalist and Socialist lies will be trotted out, waved around, and clever speakers with good NLP and sensory-neural skills will talk up wonderful solutions. But when the Great Fall (and the Great Default) actually happens, the weirdness of the current world, will seem like a drunkard's mad fantasy.

And AI - it will be a weapon, not a "helper." (This is an easy forecast to make, because that is already what has happened. Think: "Lavender" for everyone...)

The more research I do, the more of the crazy and the deep-ugly that I see, and the more sick to my stomach I seem to feel. I do not see a solution that will not be painful and awful. Either we do the hard austerity and get things back into some sort of economically viable balance, or we face a certainty of an eventual breakdown in economic process, where currency loses it's value, and all trust in an operational future just falls away.

In the fictional "Old West", you could put an advert in a newspaper, with: "Have Gun, Will Travel", and maybe get some kind of work. There was always a range-war or a civil-war to join. But as the economics of the western-world nations collapse, there will be NO JOBS for most people, and the "digital poor" and the "paper millionaires" may well find their "wealth" simply disappears, or is expropriated as "taxes" to create the illusion of a public-debt pay-down (which will actually just be a big, rolling default).

See, if we don't do the balance-the-books austerity thing, and instead just keep doing the political tax-and-finance-and-spend thing, then the high interest rates and/or the high inflation, will just crash our economic process, and make our currency nearly worthless. Everyone will just get real poor, real quick, and many folks will just be shell-shocked. This is my worst-case scenario, and I don't really see it happening - yet I see all these curious, preliminary signs that there is this curious loss-of-confidence in Canada that seems to be accelerating.

This huge cohort of people are getting huge payments of government money, for talking and chatting and writing digital documents and moving bits and paper around. But the only thing we really make, is cars at the local Japanese car factories, and crops, in the farmland. That's about it. Our oil and gas sector is under sustained assault by the goofball Green-Nazi's and the Ottawa mandarins, and mining seems to be curiously broken and deeply in debt. If not for "hedonic adjustments" and various statistical trickery, we would probably be showing a seriously falling GDP, for the "real products" section of the economy. The wealth of Toronto is being generated by lawyers, politicians and merchant-middlemen. The developers are making money, but the only things they are building are condos and a few commercial buildings. The whole economy seems to be running on borrowed money - and because it is so hard to actually build or make anything anymore here, house-prices and real-estate are being bid up, as supply is restricted in an artificial manner.

When this borrowed-money economy resets, I have a deep fear that it will look more like the 1930's, than the mid-1970's (the playbook that many expect). There are no jobs available for anyone but entry-level folks doing "customer service" work. It's becoming a "Two-Sector" economy, like what one sees in Kenya or South American nations.

We could be like Switzerland. But instead, we have a Federal Government which has chosen the Argentina economic model instead. We think this choice seems doubleplusungood...

[ June 25, 2024 ] - The Defeat of the Dishonest and the Abusively Stupid... Sometimes, the good-guys win. This was evident in the By-Election in St. Pauls riding in Toronto yesterday. I don't normally comment on Canadian politics, because I detest it all so much, as it is typically driven by outlandish dishonesty and abusively stupid policy choices that lead to harm all around.

Chrystia Freeland, the current Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minster - the one who suggested and authorized the insanely abusive and idiotic new "capital-gains" tax increase - was supporting her former assistant - some person named Leslie Church - as the Liberal Candidate. The St. Pauls riding was a super-safe Liberal seat, and so having it turn over, so that Don Stewart, an Engineer and a business-man with Bay-Street experience was elected as the Conservative candidate, is a big surprise.

But what really made the top of my head just blow-off and explode, was the abusive, dishonest kind of bollshut rhetoric that Ms. Freeland used. Liar-supporting-a-liar kind of stuff. Freeland (whom I used to respect until she became the worst Finance Minister in Canada's history), said this:

"I'm really calling on the people of St. Paul's to go out there and vote for [Church] because the alternative is really cold, and cruel, and small. The alternative is cuts and austerity, not believing in ourselves as a country, not believing in our communities and in our neighbors."

Ok, so voting for a clever, hard-working Engineer who promises to spend our tax money more carefully than the focking stupid and abusive Liberal skanks - this is "really cold, and cruel, and small ... not believing in ourselves as a country..." This is really what our Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister actually said.

Well, as we used to say on the trading floor: "Faak You, Ms. Freeland." (figuratively, of course...) Your comments are stupid, dishonest and wrong.

St. Paul's was a "safe" Liberal seat. But if you want to see why Pierre Trudeau's child is so hated and despised in Canada, and the Liberal Party is now such a sad tragedy for our nation, this explains it pretty clearly. Any sort of sanity and attempt at engineering quality, is described as "cruel and small", and "not believing in our neighbours". What astonishing verbal excrement!

Ms. Freeland, you really should resign.

We all supported you and Justin for your courageous actions in helping Ukraine. But when you slag Conservative supporters for doing the correct thing, and taking the necessary action to attempt to repair the serious damage you and your people are doing to Canada, you accuse us of being "cruel and small" because we want to see some sort of fiscal responsibility at the Federal level - where all our money always seems to go! This is just so wrong.

It's not enough to win a few ridings, and form a new Government. Canada needs a wholesale revolution of process now, a complete re-design of the "tax, spend and fill Liberal mandarin's pockets with cash" approach to Federal politics here. We should ***drastically*** cut back most of the power of the Ottawa Federals, and turn most power over to the Provincial Governments. The Liberals have so damaged and bloated and corrupted the process in Ottawa that ***ANY*** kind of fiscal sanity - even the suggestion of fiscal sanity - is viewed as "cruel and small and not helping our neighbours".

Let's everyone remember that it was a Federal Liberal Government that rounded up all the Japanese Canadians, stole all their property, and put them in Concentration Camps, at the beginning of World War Two. Typical "Liberal" policy options, right? Like when Justin Trudeau stole all the money from the "Trucker's Protest" bank accounts, and used the police "riot-squad" operatives to smash truck-windows, and drag the protesters away. And let's not forget the "Great Liberal Bank Robbery" - the abusive *extra* tax on the Canadian Banks, to try to pay for the insane and ineffective Covid-19 free-money nonsense.

We've watched our bank shares crater (down 30% or more), directly because of bad Liberal policy decisions. Canadian pension-funds, insurance companies, and investors seeking reasonable levels of yield so as to protect themselves from inflation which can destroy their assets and retirement income - all these investors hold Canadian Bank shares. When the Liberals attack and damage the banks, they attack and damage the entire Canadian economy. When the Liberal-run CRTC tells Bell Canada that BCE must share it's newly built fibre-optic network with it's competitors (an absolutely asinine decision!) and Bell stock collapses from 62 to 44 - a huge cohort of Canadian retirees and small- scale investors are hit and harmed by this astonishingly bad economic decision.

I honestly believe that it is the Liberal regime which is "cruel and small", and so to hear our Federal Deputy Prime Minister say such an idiotic an untruthful assertion about voters who are seeking necessary change, has really made my head want to explode.

We desperately need change here, since much more of this Liberal madness, and this whole nation will be bankrupt, with a busted-currency and the beginnings of a depression-style economic environment. We've been running on borrowed money for decades, our dollar is only worth 73 cents US, and heavy "capital-gains" taxes have been re-introduced, to hammer and hurt any sort of development and/or investment efforts made to protect ourselves from the vicious inflation the Liberal policy-choices have caused.

It does not have to be this way. But we have to speak truthfully about just how bad our Federal Finances really are. Our little "dollarette" is a falling joke, and the range of economic opportunities here seems to shrink daily. Only those who are plugged into international economic process, are making any money now. We are actually crafting a third-world style, "two-sector" economy, right here at home, with our current Federal fiscal policy decisions. It's all much worse than most folks realize.

Ms. Freeland's latest economic idea, is a bunch of massive new tariffs on Chinese EV (electric vehicle) imports. Doubtless because existing car-makers want protection for high-cost local production, and also to follow what USA tells us we must do. To us, this seems an insane policy. We think: "Why the hell don't we let the Chinese build us cheap (affordable!) electric cars?" A new Model-S Tesla is over $100,000 here. That's absurd. Why not let China build us some affordable EV's? Liberals used to support "Free Trade" - but recall it was the Mulroney Conservatives that gave us the most successful NAFTA deal. The Liberals never had the brains, the political courage or the plain common-sense to get that deal done.

We truly well need to change the program here. It MUST be done. It's not "cruel and small" - it's just plain necessary, if we wish Canada to remain economically viable.

[ June 20, 2024 ] - Eaten by Eighths, Devoured by Dollars... I have never seen a stock in a major, top-tier company trade quite as ugly as BNS is trading now on a daily basis. It's curious. BNS goes ex-dividend with a $1.06 dividend as of July 2, which is only seven trading days away from now. A solid, high-quality Canadian bank stock typically shows some strength as we move towards the ex-div day, yet BNS just gave up more than $1 per share today.

Something is wrong. The bank is pumping out new shares from "Treasury", ( 32 million in the last year alone), but this seems to be something different. Like that fake CNN news story about the name of the Korean pilots - "Sum Ting Wong", is what it is looking like. We read in detail the fact that the Japan agro-bank, Norinchukin has announced it will dump $63 billion USD value (roughly 10 trillion yen) of stinko-dumpster-valued small-coupon bonds which have crashed since the interest-rate spike (which is not really fixing the global inflation, right?). They might have done the "hold-to-maturity" valuation trick, and tried to keep these dumpster-priced bonds on the books at full face value, but it looks like Kazuto Oku, the CEO, has decided to dump the loss-making US Treasurys and other crap-value bonds and CLO's which are showing massive paper-losses, so he can clean up Nochu's balance sheet. Probably, this is a good decision, which is long overdue. Shit is shit. It doesn't always turn into pretty flowers.

So, what the hell is wrong with BNS? I'll will try to dig into the details in the 100-page quarterly report I got recently. I need to read it slowly, in detail, cover-to-cover, and this exercise is a grim task. But it must be done. I will report if I find any new financial cockroaches (like the newly minted 32 million "treasury" shares, for example.) I honestly believed that BNS was (and maybe still is) a solid, well-run bank, with a very high-quality balance sheet.

But the way the stock price is moving says something different. We are only seven trading days away from a $1.06 dividend ex-day, and the stock is falling down every day in ever-growing dribbles and drops, like a drunkards vomit down his tie...

We hold this BNS stuff, and I was using the AI to make tiny bets, but the AI forecast is driven solely by price action, which is pretty trivial, really. The BNS more-than-1-dollar price drop, on a day when the Swiss National Bank has cut rates by 25 basis points, and the local economic weakening that seems to be taking place, suggests that further rate cuts are coming soon, is weird. Falling or even stable rates should help BNS, and support it's share price. And Fitch has re-affirmed the Cdn big-bank ratings here, (except for TD, due to AML nonsense in USA-land), and all looks good around here for the big banks, including BNS.

So this suggests that something else is driving the action, which is curiously negative as we approach an ex-div day. Are some big foreign-holders or pension funds slowly unloading a very large equity position in BNS? I have no knowledge of what the big whales are doing - we are out in farm country, fighting thunder-and-lightening storms. (We had a bad powerfailure and power-surge-spike yesterday. Computers survived ok, but the control-board in our kitchen STOVE, got whacked and went dark. The burners worked, but no oven control, no clock, no timers, etc. Today, 20 hours later, the Maytag stove (a nice glass smoothtop model), has managed to heal itself, and the display came back. (Yes, I checked "Sabbath Mode". But perhaps the voltage surge, on the 240-volt AC line triggered the "Sabbath Mode" shutdown+timer. Unclear. But everything seems operational today. Hilarious. Just like the big Lincoln. The modern-tech with on-board computer control, has these idiot-stupid circuits, that are DESIGNED to stop the entire system from working. Engineer's that design circuit systems like this should be tossed into the same sea with the Bre-X core-salting "geologists". (Anyone remember Bre-X? Or Nortel? Or Royal Trust? Or Laidlaw? Or Dome Pete? Our Great White Northern Land seems to be able to produce impressively substantial financial disasters.))

We are finding much information is now going dark on the 'net. The major news-services are biased and less-than-honest, and the financial information seems to be skanky and sketchy. It all gives me a bad feeling, truth be told, like we are approaching a financial singularity.

The whole Nvidia thing makes me nervous as heck. It's a good company - but is is really more valuable than all the companies in Europe on the German or French stock markets? It just looks like a bubble-on-a-bubble. AI is great - but won't it cause many folks to lose their jobs and their incomes? Folks just don't think thru the connected consequences of economic action.

The local Government in Canada hammered the banks with a bogus tax to supposedly fund the idiotic Covid-19 free-money shit that went out. So, we as bank-shareholders, have taken 30% hits to the equity values of our portfolios - just as the fucking State is working on plans to try to get more tax money from us, if and when I sell my northern property, which I have been trying to develop. In our case, this ugly hit to our equity values, means that I just cancelled this year's plan to build, and so a bunch of guys that would have made money building us a shell-cottage, and putting in a septic-system, will now - directly because of the new Trudeau-taxes, and the hits they have made to Bank-stock values - those local contractors will now get ZERO from us, since we have no choice, but to pull in our horns, dial back our plans, and reduce expenditures.

In economics, EVERYTHING is connected to EVERYTHING else. If you start fucking with the parameters here, you risk blowing up the development action WAY OVER THERE. I wish the goddamn political poltroons could grasp just how unwise their stupid little schemes usually are. But they are trough-drinkers and double-dippers, with Gov-money flowing into their fat little wallets every month, risk-free, as long as they can keep blathering out the flap-doodle with their flapping little lips. It's silly. And it's the stuff revolutions are made out of.

And now, most technology seems to have limited-out now anyway (do I really want a stove with a computer, that fails when the power goes off, and/or lightening hits the 240 power-line?)

So much is just strangely wrong now. Nothing works right anymore, and little can really be trusted. We bought a new coffee-maker, and it took some searching to get a SMALL one, which IS NOT connected via Wi-Fi to our local LAN/routers. We go out of our way, to get non-connected technology, since who really wants a TV or a Toaster, that listens to what you are saying in your den or kitchen, and logs it all back to some monitoring AI in China or California? :)

[ June 11, 2024 ] - Sharehodlers In a Leaking Boat Weather is curious - was 8 celsius this AM. For June 11, that seems a tad too cold. But it is nice for sleeping. We read about heat-waves and think of old jazz songs "We're having a heat-wave... she made the heat-wave, by making her seat wave..." and so on. Sometimes, history is fun. One can cruise thru the archives of old 1930's films - and marvel at their style and sophistication. We think America should actually *aim* to re-create the 1920's. Get rid of the Nanny State, and just give everyone coming to America an instruction book, which would say, basically: "You are now on your own. Don't fuck up, or you will be killed. But if you are careful, you can get rich, and have a nice life. Try to be good. If you can't be good, then be good at it. Good luck. You're gonna need it."

We believe the open-ended model, with few restrictions, is best. Foreign policy should be to encourage trade, and shun murder-States, which use mass-murder of citizen non-combatants as a vote-getting political strategy. People who support murder-States like Israel and Russia, should be made to go live there. That would solve a lot of problems, very quickly.

This is radical thinking which will take regime-change to implement in most modern nations. But it might happen, since it happens everyday in the world of business and commerce. Strange just how awful and profoundly stupid modern politics is. The bad trending to the worse - just about ... "everywhere in every nation - from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station", to quote the song. So curious. In our elections, we are offered Hobbson's Choices (ie. no real choice at all), and the Government always wins the election. Curious times.

I got the physical copy of the BNS Q2-2024 report (which is roughly 100 pages of tiny print..). And there, on page 78, in a weeny-tiny little footnote, is the story of what has happened to the Shares Outstanding number. Prior to April 2023, if you wanted to get your dividends as BNS shares, instead of cash, your shares were purchased in the open market (out of the existing pool of traded BNS shares). Starting with the April 2023 dividend, the shares that you get if you select the Dividend Re-Investment Plan, are now "Treasury Shares", which are sold to you at a 2% discount to the market price. So the pros have a nice little algo to hoover up all these NEW "Treasury Shares", at a discount, and then dump them into the market, on the suckers like us, who hold BNS shares. This is just hilarious. Scott Thompson and his new gang appear to have taken a page from the Vancouver Stock Exchange approach for questionable little mining companies - and rigged up BNS to operate this way. The net result of this trick of printing up new shares, giving them out in-lieu of cash dividends, so that the pros can then unload on upticks to the little punters (like us), at a nice almost-risk-free profit, is that the price of BNS has been under constant pressure, and any upward movement in price is met with waves and waves of selling - of newly created shares. This is just beyond belief hilarious.

BNS used to be a very good, conservative bank, which was generally careful not to shoot itself in it's own foot. They made mistakes, but generally the bank was a pretty well-run place. But to us, this looks like taking aim at your own feet, and shooting off each of the toes, one by one. It seems just absurdly unwise in our way of thinking.

The problem of course, is that the clowns who act as "managers" are mostly not shareholders, so they don't really give a flying f--- about the share price. In the last year, while we have held on to our little BNS positions in a couple of portfolios, which totals less than 10,000 shares, we have watched as roughly 32 million NEW BNS shares have hit the market - in Canada - and have watched the BNS share-price dift down and down and down.

This, in a nutshell, is what economists sometimes call the "Agency Problem", in that the guys (and gals) who act as professional managers and run the Agency, do not have incentives that align with the *owners* of the entity. The owners want a stable and/or rising share-price. But the grunts who run the place, want lots of free-cash-flow to claim for themselves by virtue of rising salaries, oversized and absurd "executive compensation" strategies, and annual year-end "bonus payments" - all paid out of profits and/or the free-cash-flow the Agency generates. The management has little incentive to act in the shareholder's interests.

Sure, dividends are nice. But when the shares-outstanding number ZOOMS UP by 32-million newly minted "Treasury Shares" hitting the public market, the share price goes south, and you start to get the ugly and sickening feeling that the whole operation is paying your "dividends", by issuing new shares and not even telling the public markets about the process.

Like - "I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused..." (I think that's from either Warren Zevon, or Elvis Costello..) I like to see folks do well and make money (I now realize I am very unique in this way), but I get a tad concerned when I see my portfolio values drop and drop and fall and drop - and then see the multi-million dollar homes and cottages that the BNS management folks seem to always be acquiring for themselves. This is just insane.

See, this economic model of paying out large dividends by pumping out new shares - this is a very old model, and not a good one at all. Mr. Charles Ponzi took this concept to the limit, and honestly thought he was doing nothing wrong (or so he said. Maybe he was really stupid - but not likely. If you get caught in a really big lie, one strategy is to just act all surprised, and stick to the absurd story that you thought you were doing the right thing...)

A properly run, stable business should NOT be pumping out new shares on the sly, since that dilutes existing shareholders (since their percentage that they own of the business is reduced, and the share-price is pushed dowm by demand-supply schedule intersection - more shares, with all else being equal, means more supply, so market price is reset lower). Share-sales which are made to acquire a new business, which should generate new profits, might be justified, and may be a good and fine thing for everyone. But pumping out 32 million new shares into a share-saturated market for financial stocks, is absolutely going to push down the share price. A well-run bank should be BUYING BACK it's own shares, as this reduces dividend-costs, and subjects the public market price to stability and some upward pressure. This benefits everyone involved - especially the existing shareholders. But BNS is now doing the opposite of what is correct and prudent for it's existing shareholders.

So, we reach the conclusion that the management at BNS are acting against the interest of the BNS shareholders, and we find this a most curious situation. It's quite unexpected, actually. But it explains the ugly and unattractive price-action that BNS shares have had, at a time when the high level dividend that BNS is paying (better than 6.6%, given 4.24/64). The market is saying, maybe: "You are paying that big dividend by just selling new shares into the market. Looks and Smells a tad like a Ponzi sort-of thing...".

Now, we don't believe that BNS is a Ponzi-scheme. They used to be a really good bank. But the new management seems to have made a serious and solid error in our humble opinion.

The good thing is that this is an easy error to correct. The hired-management of Bank of Nova Scotia could appologize to it's shareholders, indicate that it will begin to implement share buy-backs, and will promise to no longer issue "Treasury Shares" as part of it's dividend re-investment plan. It can commit to returning to acquiring BNS shares in the public marketplace, for those who wish to take their BNS dividends in shares. This action would support the BNS share-price, and stop it from falling and falling, as it has been doing.

See, my AI indicated that the price-action was weirdly bad for BNS. The dividend was high, and the bank seemed well-capitalized and was doing good and safe business. But the share-price kept falling, and the AI would just be pointing straight down, and I could not understand what the hell was going so wrong with BNS. Well, read that little footnote on page 78, under section for "Share Capital" in the Q2 2024 BNS report, and it explains exactly what was changed.

If all the existing shareholders of BNS cry "Bullshit!" on this current management team, maybe we can get this unfortunate mistake corrected. At least, that is how this is supposed to work, if public share ownership actually means anything anymore. We shall see.

[ June 7, 2024 ] - The Rocket-Sled to Hell? The gruesome continues, despite the "Great Man" model of History showing that it might be the most correct...

Spacex had a successful flight for Starship Test 4, despite the front canard control-flap partly melting away during re-entry of the ship. But I was very impressed that despite being heat-damaged quite badly, the front canard control surface on the Starship vehicle continued to operate. We like stainless steel. 18-10 is good. Bravo Spacex folks. Don't stop. Carry on!

Especially since everything else seems to continue to curiously degrade, at what seems to be an accelerating rate.

In a short 27-second video posted on "X", we can see an Air Canada Boeing 777 explode fireballs out of it's right engine SEVEN TIMES, during a recent takeoff at Toronto's Pearson Airport. These big aircraft only have *two* engines, and so when one engine experiences radical failure, the whole craft is in a risky place. For example, if the problem is fuel-related (it most likely was not), you really are rolling the big dice.

https://x.com/aviationbrk/status/1799001238547341453

AirCanada officials reported it was a "compressor stall", and the aircraft returned safely to the airport, and maintenance folks (and perhaps even some folks from Boeing?) are investigating what happened. Might have been a bird-strike. The pilots appear to have done everything right, the big Boeing landed safely, and passengers were able to depart later, on a non-fireball-exploding aircraft.

But most things do not work right anymore, and this phenomenon - with the exception of Spacex - seems to be just about everywhere. The censorship that operates on Google and other "search engines" makes the very term "search engine" seem comical. Google is now more about information-hiding that information-finding. The MSM ("main-stream media") results it returns are laughable - and all the interesting "weblogs" and the old "direct reporting" actions by people who are actually at the scene-of-the-crime, are surpressed and/or just hidden. Google-search is now worthless for anything controversial. It simply does not fuction.

So, we use: "Duckduckgo.com", but it also has curious limitations.

The old ability to search the whole internet, has simply disappeared. You can only access manipulated, censored results, and even those results will be both sanitized (bad words and so-called "hate-speech" removed), and will have absurd promotions for things like "8 Ways to be Gay" and so on. This nonsense will be promoted by the forward-facing pages users are presented with, regardless of what they were searching for. It is so pathetically awful, that it's simply hilarious. The overt and explicit attempts at dishonest "social-engineering" are so transparent and outrageous, as to make using Google profoundly annoying. Any controversial search effort becomes an exercise in political programming.

Try some experiments of your own, if you doubt this truth.

Elon Musk should create a search-engine company. But perhaps he feels he has enough enemies, and does not feel he needs to create more.

I have a disturbing feeling that our markets - our lovely systems for offering investment opportunities for folks who need to invest (so they won't be destroyed by inflation, and/or impoverished by other State-planning efforts), are now badly broken. Of course, this is not visible directly.

Most action now in Canada is now not on the Toronto or Montreal "Stock Exchanges". The whole "open outcry" model is gone, the trading floors are gone, and even the old promotional-space where new companies could "ring the opening bell" are now not-open to the public. The entire financial system - at least in Canada - seems to have gone dark. Much trading-at-scale seems to be happening in the various "dark markets", which do not report real-time quotes, or offer any public "Level-2" (market depth of bids and offers) information.

And we have discovered that substantial amounts of "new shares" are just being created and sold off to the public investors, without any information being offered to existing shareholders about the extent of the dilution. The Banks in Canada seem to be actively "watering their stock", and the rules seem to have been changed to allow this kind of action to take place, without any sort of public annoucement of a "secondary offering". This is crazy. We used to have "Prospectus" documents produced, and these now seem to have disappeared, or are now lodged behind digital paywalls, and such.

The whole effect has been to create an "insiders market", where "private placements" and "private equity" deals are all done behind closed doors, and to benefit only small groups of wealthy insiders.

This is just unwise and wrong, in our opinion. It slowly degrades and damages all the gains we have made in the last 200 years. Everything seems to be going retrograde.

I have this awful feeling that the 21st Century, may look like the 20th Century, except run in reverse. At the end of the 21st century, we might have essentially a feudal, quasi-monarchical political and economic environment, dominated by a few powerful militarized nation-states, with a State-terrorized global population kept under control by mass-surveilence, and arbitrary arrest and property seizure. Imagine the whole world as Gaza, and the Israeli's in complete control of America. It's a perfect nightmare vision, which may well lead to a long, destructive series of "special military actions" designed to degrade and limit the abusive and murderous power of a hyper-militarized United States and it's unhappy allies.

Could it all become so awful? I construct these worst-case scenarios, and am disturbed as these slowly play out, and I watch the good, normal people be degraded, assaulted and then eventually quietly destroyed by powerful forces that seem to be remarkably evil. The scale and the ability of the force-processes of mass-murder that nations such as Israel and Russia are able to operationally deploy, is truly impressive. But Russia at least shows some degree of restraint in it's murderous assault on Ukraine. Israel shows no such restraint, and is actively assisted by a deeply corrupt Washington Uniparty. This is just insane - mass murder, the air-bombing of schools and hospitals - deliberately targeted - are routine. Even the Germans in World War Two did not act with such pure evil intent. The Israeli's are often compared to the extremist National-Socialists of Germany - each driven by a racial ideology that seems absurd and unacceptable to non-racist "normies".

But it all goes so much further now. We have fallen now into a world where all the fine and soundly designed systems and procedures and processes are being vacated and dismissed by both the Deep and the Shallow State actors. The American legal system (and our's also, truth be told), has been profoundly corrupted and mostly serves to protect the interest of wealthy, politically-powerful Leftists, who claim to be "acting for the People", as they enrich themselves and impoverish those who are not politically connected and find they are now unable to even make their voices heard. The mass censorship ensures that only the View-of-the-Few is allowed to be seen. And so mass-murder becomes State policy, willfully executed by hate-filled Jewish racists who used to be our friends. This is just crazy.

Real debate and honest discussion moves underground, the public forums are manipulated with endless State-funded disinformation, and all our technology and our markets and our democratic political structures are slowly degraded and distorted to benefit the State Agents, and stifle any disruptive human opportunity. We just keep seeing this nightmare future slowly being crafted, brick-by-brick, wall-by-wall - and lie-by-lie.

This is double-plus-ungood. We hope we are wrong about this trend. But I see it grow every day now. We have too many really bad, dishonest fraudsters in control of our Governments, and of our Government Agencies. But with the DeepState/Uniparty in control of the USA, there is really nothing anyone outside of the USA can even do. Nation-States like Canada and Japan are completely dependent on USA for military support, as neither nation has any nuclear-weapon capability, so we are militarily neutered.

Even significant regime-change in both nations, will make no difference at all. Europe has been captured by radical Leftists who are determined to "Green" the place (and degrade and severely limit their own industrial capacity), and so States which used mass-murder as a political strategy such as Russia and Israel, are given the green-light to commit any atrocity they wish.

America has become politically dysfunctional, and it's current regime is corrupt to a degree that we honestly never expected to see. It will make no difference whether a Biden or a Trump is made President - the DeepState/Uniparty will remain in power, and American war-lust and it's "Kill them All And Let God Sort Them Out!" political strategies will likely continue on the global stage. Americans are good at doing war. We expect this not to change. But when war cannot produce any kind of victory, it leads only to destruction, tragedy and needless death and suffering. We cannot bomb our way to a better world anymore. Imagine World War Two running in reverse - war starting with a few major cities destroyed, followed by years and years of grinding, grim conflict. Hate is being hardwired in.

So, we see a breaking, degraded World, with rising anger, moving along it's war-path. There seems to be no way to get off this path, as hate and anger grow stronger each day and each year. What is really interesting, is that I fear the Israeli mass-murder campaign in Gaza, will spell the end of NATO. I will address this absurd-sounding idea in another note.

[ June 3, 2024 ] - The Devil's Radio... Damn, but it's all getting weirdly gruesome now. There is this curious "Twilight Zone" feel to the extraordinary stupidity that we are seeing (and experiencing daily!) just everywhere. Cars have advanced computer circuits to prevent them from turning on. Email is completely broken just about everywhere, and I have to get the "https" credential nonsense working on this website, and get a "DUNS number" from Dun and Bradstreet, in order to even have my deleted apps at the nasty Google Playstore. Fucking Google bounced my little APL apps out of their goddamn Playstore service years back - but have informed me I need to get a Dun and Bradstreet ID number for my company, to continue to NOT do business with them. This is just beyond hilarious.

The small-holder is now being systematically fucked-over just about everywhere, in just about every possible way. It is comical. I grasp now, why people turn completely insane crazy-rogue. You want to avoid crazy at all costs - but the fuck-idiocy one has to deal with on a daily basis, is becoming enough to put even the best, strongest, and most self-disciplined person over the steep edge of sanity into the abyss of madness.

I've gone thru the Bank quarterly statements for some of the bank-stock holding we have. And the fucking shares-outstanding numbers are wrong - by many tens of millions of shares!! Where the fuck are the public secondary offerings? I describe it in some detail below, in the May 30th note. The goddamn bank-boys are watering their stock. They are diluting the shit out of existing shareholders - without telling the sorry stupid retail goofs (like us!), and so the curious WAVES OF SELLING that I have watched for the last 12-18 months now make some sense. This is just nuts. And we thought it was also illegal.

All the rules seemed to have been changed - in technology, in the markets, and in the common-sense world of engineering design. We feel this is just madness. There is this new, widespread moral depravity.

But let me make a prediction:

Since the engineers do not know how to engineer correctly anymore, and the finance people do not want to conduct honest finance operations, and the government people do not want to govern with fairness or integrity, and the designers have very little idea about how to design anything that actually works correctly anymore, I see problems ahead. Our rockets will continue to explode. Our markets will face - at some very near point in the near future - an ugly reckoning, and it is even possible that our currency will become damaged in ways that we can see clearly in the historical examples of debasement. These are not difficult predictions to make. We are facing real trouble.

We are heading for a chaos-driven cascade failure of quite history-making scale and extent.

Everything is so goddamn badly designed, badly built, unreliable, untrustworthy, and outright criminially corrupt, that cascade-failure is now baked right into the big pie we are all nervously carving up. There is just no goddamn way around this.

Nature and the laws of physics will come to bear on this big full-stack-of-fragile-crap, and will do so soon, and with what will seem like real vengence.

But it won't be vengence or "Bonfire of the Vanities" bullshit-with-moral-overtones. It will just be the result of all this fake, broken, crappy shit that is being actively pushed into every single sphere of every part of our modern world. It's just gonnna be cause = effect in dynamic operation. We will crash because we have pushed the "crap-envelope" way, way too far out.

Mark my words here. The shitstorm will happen, and it will happen soon.

Nothing works right anymore, and nothing is being done about it, except to make and push out, more crap and lies and fraud and low-quality technology on everyone. A bank quietly sells 31 million new "treasury shares", without informing the public. Result: Bank has cheated it's shareholders, and is no longer trusted. Governments design economic policies that punish honest citizen-savers, and reward dishonest immigrant scammers. Result: Corrupt, vote-harvesting fraud-filled government people are no longer trusted, and change happens either in the street or with the ballot-box. The bastards get removed. This change will happen, one way or the other.

Markets are rigged to enrich the crooked fat-boys, and impoverish those who are looking for true investment opportunities to protect themselves from inflation. Result: Markets repaired after regime-change takes place, but markets may also do the job themselves, and re-price all assets downward, to accurately reflect the widespread operation of the frauds.

And the greater the fraud, the greater will be the intensity of the market-driven price discounting process. Problem with this outcome, is that EVERYONE gets hammered - the good, the bad, the beautiful and especially the truly ugly.

Watch for it. And maybe buy some gold, and more ammo and food. But how do you know it really is gold? Even gold can be a fraud. How do I know your "gold" is pure? Without trust, everything breaks and collapse occurs. And we are very close to this point now.

When the AI says the big "Swing Down" is beginning, I will post a note here. We are certainly tee-ing up for it, in just about every single sphere of reality. It's all getting just nuts.

[Update: 12:27 pm June 3, 2024]: Ok, just for the record - I wrote the above note BEFORE I read this note, about how the NYSE crashed a bunch of prices of various listed stocks to ZERO by virtue of a "technical failure" this morning. Berkshire (ticker: BRK/A) apparently was priced at "0.00", which is pretty comical, really. The Zerohedge story has a good clip from "The Big Lebowski". Everything really actually kind of is fucked. It seems to be everywhere... Nothing works right. And not much can be trusted.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/market-breaks-multiple-nyse-trading-halts-see-berkshire-wipe-out-100-its-market-cap

[Update: 18:25 June 3, 2024]: Interesting day. I know why farmers can make good investors and traders. When I worked in the Research Dept at Scotia McLeod, we had a research-guy who had been a broker, and he had kept some of his original clients, since they trusted each other. He had this client who was an old farmer who had done really well. Thru many ups and downs, the old farmer had just kept growing his portfolio. Farmers know about wild swings and volitile, non-predictable seasonality. This morning was rain and ugly, as was yesterday - but by around noon, the sun appeared, and we have had this perfect lovely June day. Quite a change.

So we went to CostCo, bought a couple of $1.50 hot-dogs and Cokes (Pepsi, actually), and then bought a cart-full of groceries. Market seems to have recovered also. Strange times. Our local CostCo now has a new McDonalds that was not there a month ago, and a whole new strip mall also. AI tech is fun to play with, but a knowledge of history, and a deep, long-term understanding of how volitile cyclic processes unfold over time, is probably more useful, when all is said and done.

[ May 30, 2024 ] - The Aquarius of Age We saw momma deer this morning - but I could not see the fawn. I hope little Bambinczka is ok.. She is very small. Small babies often die. Lovely Nature's way of keeping the species strong and healthy (ie. kill the weak and the stupid... just like happens in the markets...)

Both AI's for the bank-stocks are pointing up. I will post the graphics when a get a spare moment.

But crazy things are happening in Canada bank-land. Both BNS and CIBC (CM) have together issued over 55 million **new** shares, from April 30th, 2023 to April 30th, 2024, according to the BNS and CIBC financial statements. These banker-folk like to publish "weighted-average" shares outstanding to obfuscate this ugly fact, but the numbers are so large, that even using weighted-average shares outstanding in the quarter, you can see that each one of these corporate organs have pumped-out over $2 billion of new shares. This explains the terrible-ugly trading flow I have seen over the last 12 months. I had thought it was due mostly to interest-rate expectations, and I am now pretty sure I was just plain wrong.

The most important number on a financial statement, next to the bottom-line earnings, is the shares outstanding. I had thought that if you wanted to push-out 25 to 30 million NEW shares on the public markets, as a public company, you had to do a secondary offering, and TELL YOUR SHAREHOLDERS about this kind of hard-core stock-watering (it's called "dilution" for a reason). Think of the bartender adding water to his premium whiskey bottles, and then selling the weak liquid for the same price. It's a very, very old bit of financial trickery, if one looks at economic history.

But I did not think the Canadian banks were doing this sort of scam-action. I think this is just appalling. If you had asked me, I would have said this violates Toronto Stock Exchange rules. But perhaps the clever bastards have done the trades on one or more of the various dark-exchanges or "dark markets" that now exist in Canada. We used to have a "consolidated feed" and there were "block-trade" reporting requirements. At least there used to be.

All these fair and sensible rules seem to have been end-run by these two Banks. And as bank-stock shareholder, I am more than a little angry. This is just wrong.

I could see these waves of heavy-selling that would come in and hammer the stock price down for Bank of Nova Scotia. Any time the price got bid up, these waves of selling would hammer it back down, and I assumed it was mostly interest-rate risk hedging or options-market game-playing. But it looks like it was maybe just plain old goddamn newly-minted "treasury stock" (or some bullshit term like that), being heaved-hard into the public markets, in what looks like a pretty classical exercise in equity-dilution and old-fashioned "screw-the-shareholders" action. The banks in Canada are widely held, and so there is no one guy or group of guys (or gals) who will scream as their stock is taken down hard in value. The big funds are so rich they don't give a shit, and the smaller institutions are in the same goddamn boat as the retail folks.

This is really actually very bad.

From the CIBC quarterly report: Actual fully-diluted shares outstanding, as of April 30, 2023: 917,769 million shares. Fully-diluted shares outstanding for CIBC as of April 30, 2024: 943,002. In one year, CIBC created 25,233,000 new shares, with roughly only 2 million of these new shares due to stock-options. At $60/share, that's over 1.5 billion dollars raised by diluting existing CIBC shareholders. If they sold hard and early, maybe more like 2 billion Cdn dollarettes.

And for Bank Nova Scotia, it is much worse. At least CIBC is reporting an increase in earnings per share ($1.79, for Q2, 2024, versus $1.77 for Q2, 2023, April 30). For BNS, the wheels have almost fallen off. Earnings per share were $1.57, for Q2, 2024, April 30, versus 1.68 for Q2, 2023, April 30. Slipping down, sadly. But it gets worse: The actual shares outstanding number is damn hard to find. It's buried on page 54 of the "Quarterly Report to Shareholders", and is reported as: 1,229,570,000 shares, as of April 30, 2024. So, what was this number as of April 30, 2023? I have to find and download the .PDF file for the Q2, 2023 to find this real number? (not the bullshit "weighted average" value, which obfuscates what is going on)...

Ok - found a rounded version of it on page 4, which will do: As of April 30, 2023, BNS reports as having 1,198,000,000 shares outstanding. Difference between average basic and average diluted shares outstanding is less than 1 million shares, so the increase is not due to stock options. As per their statements, Bank of Nova Scotia has created and put into the public marketplace, as a public company, 1,229,570,000 - 1,198,000,000 = 31,570,000 new shares. At $64 per share, that is a capital raise of over 2 billion dollars.

And let's be very clear here. That 2 billion dollars of new money, came almost directly, from the share-price collapse that this 31.57 million share dilution caused to happen. All my research suggested that BNS shares should be market-valued around $70 to $75 per share. The continued waves of selling seemed curious, and I simply did not consider that BNS was doing what Jim Fisk did in New Jersey, back in the 1870's - printing up new share certificates, and selling them to the suckers across the Hudson River in New York. This is just crazy. I thought that there were rules that the TSE, the Ontario Securities Commission and the OSFI (Office of Superintendent of Financial Institutions) had, that - shall we say - discouraged this kind of action.

Assuming there are 250 trading days from April 30, 2023 to April 30, 2024, that's 126,280 NEW shares being sold into the market EACH and EVERY DAY for all of last year - at whatever price the bastards could get. Of course, they would not have done it that way. Secret "private placements" maybe?

Pardon my naive nature, but I thought that if a fucking bank in Canada wanted to raise up an extra 2 billion of capital, by selling 30+ million shares, that there had to be a public offering, with a prospectus, and all that sort of visible, public market action.

So, excuse me while I try to find out just what the fucking hell is going on here.

Obviously, the rules have been changed to make it much easier to screw over the existing bank shareholders by diluting their stock holdings - and not even telling them about it, except in the tiny-font of bloated, obfuscated financial reports filled with bafflegab and bumpf.

For Bank Nova Scotia to pump out 31+ million new shares - and beat the shit out of the share value of existing BNS shares - without even informing existing BNS shareholders, just seems wrong.

I will see if I can find out more about this. Dividends are of little value, if the market value of the share-capital can be assaulted so explicitly, and one's holdings harmed so significantly.

[Update; ] I cannot find any documentation about a BNS public or secondary share offering, in the last 12 months. Maybe it happened, and it was done dark. But Bank of Montreal, when they bought Bank of the West, from BNPP (BNP Paribas S.A.) issued 15.5 million shares as a public offering, and 8.4 million shares as a private placement, to fund the purchase. Details were indicated. And the following press release was issued:

https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/bank-of-montreal-completes-offering-of-common-shares-including-full-exercise-of-over-allotment-option-on-public-offering-821955567.html

The press release shows where a prospectus document could be obtained, and that the shares would trade on the New York and Toronto Stock Exchanges.

Regarding the Bank Nova Scotia's new 31+ million shares, I cannot find any public documentation on exactly what happened, why it happened, or what the money raised was used for and who benefited. But we know for sure, that BNS shareholders were harmed by the dilution from new shares. The earnings per share number seems to confirm this harm. We find it most curious that BNS would operate in this manner.

BMO shows how it should be done. So why did BNS create these 31 million new shares on the sly? This really looks curious. It looks bad. It really looks like they just pumped-out "treasury shares", or some form of newly-created share certificates, without any formal indication of their actions. I rather thought that Stock Exchange rules - in both Canada and USA - explicitly prevented this kind of equity value dilution, since this kind of action is viewed as harming the integrity of the marketplace.

[ May 29, 2024 ] - It's 11:59, and I Want to Stay Alive... Don't we all? We watched a mother deer with a baby fawn looking for food in our field today. The fawn was so small, and momma walked slowly, with the tiny new-born struggling thru the tall grass and alfalfa, trying to keep up with it's brown, slow-moving centre-of-the-universe.

Every living mammal is imprinted with some basic survival instincts - else we could not exist. But from the very beginning of life, the Universe - in it's infinite capacity for entropy - tries to kill us. We sorry humans invent foolishness like religion and civilization to try to counteract the basic death-force that drives everything - but these operational idealized social models are fabricated on falsehoods. There is really no other way to truly understand the process. The world is a wild spinning web of expanding entropy, and despite the emergence of life-force and growth - death always comes, as does system destruction.

But knowing this truth, gives us ammunition against the process, to a limited degree. We can avoid much that is stupid, cruel, nasty and hostile to life-energy. It really is our responsibility to do this to the best our ability.

Most financial assets are actually just shit. It's really quite curious how consistently true this simple fact remains throughout history. Today, we are watching our goddamn bank stocks get just fucking hammered again, and I am cursing my own foolishness, for being so attached to the tiny income streams that their dividends pee-out, that I am willing to accept the mind-numbing foolishness of holding this toxic, falling shit.

Bank stocks - and often most financial stocks, like insurance companies and so on - are just bad investments mostly, for reasons explained clearly in your "Graham and Dodds" (the canonical work for any and all investment analysts), but the attractive dividend streams they can throw off, can let one survive a Depression, if the goddamn bank does not go bust.

Given the astonishingly bad culture of systemic incompetance at the USA's FDIC - which seems to have in its mission-statement the planned destruction of bank shareholders - (oh, just kidding... I hope) there is even now a greater danger for bank-stock investors. You are a *target* of the Federal Authorities, and they actually want to see you and your asset-base, crash and burn. This is just insane - but the USA Government seems to be run by fucking idiots these days (as does our Government, here in British North America's "Canada"...)

What worries me, is the risk of a financial "nuclear holocaust", where some kind of confidence-implosion links up with the massive debt-levels and flow-linkages, to create a self-amplifying cascade meltdown of Western-World financial institutions. See, most folks abilities to pay their taxes and cover their life-costs, are driven by direct economic linkages to the financial super-structures that dominate our economic world now. If you break enough of it, quickly enough (by jacking-up interest rates and global yields - which causes bond and dividend-paying stocks (financial assets) to fall quickly in value), you really can - with almost certainty - provoke a cascading reset in asset prices, across virtually all financial assets.

And this actually is happening. It's not just financial-science-fiction.

The USA Federal Reserve (the USA's Central Bank) is run by a lawyer. I am sure he is not an evil man, but all these people are government-boys and "karens" (lefty government-girls), and they get large employment-income each month, and have zero concept of how life in the "private sector" works, where many business and risk-taking folks, are often 20 to 30 days away from insolvency. And with financial-flow linkages being dialed down to almost real-time (a good or a bad thing, depending whether you are waiting for money, or having to pay out money), risks of a cascade collapse are rising everywhere, as debt-levels grow and interest-rates and inflation continue to grind upwards.

We have no debt. This is what our "Risk Management" group has told us is how we should deal with this low-probability risk. But this prevents us from taking on some possibly profitable projects. And it keeps deeply risk-averse Canadian industry down, and not really able to grow without Government help. But Government funds are the "Kiss of Death", since governments are like dirty underwear, and need to be regularly changed. And your funding will turn into an ugly tax-invoice, whenever regime-change takes place. So that funding source is also out.

The only thing a Canadian entrepreneur can do - even if he has the best idea in the world - is to leave Canada, and go to USA, where risk is accepted and expected. But now, everyone in USA seems to be fucking crazy. Living in that world carries risks that seem to be growing exponentially in this new post-pandemic hell-world. San Francisco is a free-fire zone, and NYC is run by a profoundly corrupt and dishonest lawfare collective (according to a Texas State Government official - not just my own opinion).

So, we hunker-down where we are, and watch all the needles point down and the warning lights start to flash red all across the instrument panels. I feel trapped in a world where the walls are slowly closing in, when I look for alternative investment models.

For now, I remain unsure of what the hell we should do. So, I am working on a repair/restoration of an old car. I've repaired the non-functional fuel pump (which is in the bloody gas-tank, for f**k sakes!), and have fuel-pressure at the engine fuel-rails now, but I still have a "cranks, but no start" situation. So I will be buying (and fabricating) a gauge to measure fuel-pressure, since if I squirt fuel in the air-intake, I can get the engine to fire for 1 or 2 seconds, so I know it is not an electrical problem (the car's engine worked fine last month).

My AI stuff works really well. Trouble is, it is telling me bad things - pointing down and downer, and I am entering onto that awful voyage of "hope". If rates are globally reduced, the financial stocks will pop dramatically. This might happen. But it might not, as inflation is now firmly embedded in our mindsets, everywhere. Prices seem to be rapidly increasing everywhere.

I am uncomfortable selling out all the portfolios, as dividends are being declared, profits appear to be stable, and some dividends are even being raised - but I am growing to distrust dividends, when the capital is being eroded so quickly and so effectively. But the banks will do fine, in an inflationary environment, since the inflation is allowing mortgage-holders and business loan holders to continue to service their debt-costs. We are all locked into this process.

If we unload our bank stocks, we destroy our income streams, and if sitting in cash, we will watch high-inflation destroy the real-value of the money. But being invested in financial assets, in a rising rate environment, is eroding our capital, and killing us slowly. It's like being "pressed" with ever-larger rocks.

Old, dead Benjamin Graham was right again, as usual. And so was that fellow named Mr. Loeb, who knew about how a good ice-cream soda was to be made.

Loeb cautioned to avoid forecasts, and would just sell what was trending down, and buy what was being bid up. But I just cannot buy NVDA at $1140 US per share. I fear the whole AI thing might end up helping only Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, while everyone else gets sacked, and told to eat bugs and live in their tiny pod (or trailer-park?). "Fuck that shit", as we say in Canada. I've got a small-language-model, which I'm trying to give local memory to. I need a big lab, and some staff to help, but there is no money, and no client, so for now, it's all just a pipe-dream (and I don't even smoke...) :)

[ May 23, 2024 ] - Hello Darkness My Old Friend Or something like that. Everything useful on the public internet is going dark. It's pretty comically awful. The entire 'net is "Sideshow Bob" now. Or maybe "South Park"... but with mass-murder and insane politics.

The AI stuff we use seems to wrok... (mistyping becomes meme-meat, eh?)

The key takeaway from NVDA earnings liftoff - aside from the stock-split - is the massive datacentre revenue. Nvidia makes it's big nut from datacentre sales. This means AI becomes a BIG TOOL for mass monitoring of everyone and everything. This is a nightmare world - real, no-sh*t, "1984" stuff, complete with a Room 101 for everyone. It's a pure nightmare scenario. Why do so few see this? Curious.

If AI is to offer any benefits at all, for most folks, it will have to be de-centralized. A full-on centralized AI Service, will just become a tool for the "Thought Police" - and we know this, since it already actually is - in the full, Five-Eyes model. The enemy is not "terrorism" - the enemy is the State, with it's new "Hate Speech" laws and other evil, censorship-enabling anti-free-speech political models.

The danger is the State gets to shutdown - by force of arms - any system or group which questions or opposes it's abusive and all-reaching power. The new centralized AI systems, will make the monitoring and targeting easy and quick. It's "Lavender" on speed, with laser-accurate kill-shots.

The idiotic and stupid nonsense about "AI taking over" blah, blah, blah, is pure bullshit, designed to mask this obvious reality. Centralized (ie. Datacentre-based) AI, is a perfect nightmare of monitoring and control. Every fucking keystroke you enter on any fucking page ANYWHERE on any communication service, will be able to be actively monitored, recorded, and then used to target you for removal, if it violates some powerful entity's authoritarian picture-of-the-world. The incentives are powerful and perfect for this approach. Only powerful push-back can stop this trend.

There is no "conspiracy" here. This is just an operational trend, being enabled - almost perfectly - by the technology. It's just comical how people are viewing this new emerging model, as something that is positive. It seems to us, just another hierarchy of surprising negatives. We don't need to worry about the AI-machines. We need to worry about who is **running** the AI machines, and we know it will be the centralized datacentres - big "Tech" entities, working with State Agencies.

It's like a huge window of freedom and opportunity, is quietly closing, and no-one really cares. This is curious. Folks just don't see it, despite the use of the "Lavender" murder-tool that the Israelis have used to kill tens of thousands of Gaza citizens. "Lavender" - the code-name for the Israeli AI tool that has been used to kill families in their homes - (supposedly Hamas Government people) shows exactly what the future of Centralized AI technology can do. This will not stop the Gaza Murder War, but it does show exactly how perfectly AI technolgy can be weaponized by State Agencies to reach out and touch and kill. It is a roadmap for the future, sadly.

I think AI could be really a wonderful thing. But not if it is centralized, and run thru the goddamn lie-generating internet. If that is the future and how it shakes out (and there are strong incentives for the major players and the governments to make it shake out this way), then we are all in real trouble. Murder becomes fast, easy, quick and legal (for the State). This is what centralized (weaponized) AI will be. We know this, because it already is this. It is an easy forecast to make.

I hope I am wrong about this. I really do.

But "Inner Trader" pounds his misty-fist on the dream-table, and spells it out really clearly. Our future world, will look like Gaza does now, if we can't address the "Centralized AI" risk successfully.

Best strategy is maybe to just go dark.

[ May 7-8, 2024 ] - Shattered - Doesn't matter.. "Don't you know the crime rate's going up up up --- my brain's been shattered -- spilling all over Manhattan... Go ahead, bite the BIG Apple - don't mind the maggots!" - by M. Jagger. Great tune. But the best cut on the first side of "Some Girls", circa 1978, is "Respectable" - which should probably be re-done as the "Song for Stormy Dee". I knew the World would get completely whackadoo crazy, since I got the dynamic road map as a child, back in the late 1970's.

The AI stuff seems to work. As always, I am not sure if I am just getting lucky. One never really knows. So many things going whacko now - we are all maintaining the surface veneer of fine "respectability", but under the surface, I suspect there is seething madness driving a lot of process. When Western World nations should be working on border-security and enhanced defence-technology, we seem to be inviting in all the refugees of the entire planet - and then planning to jack up taxes to build houses for them. Is this really wise action? It looks a lot like profoundly dishonest, corrupt State-Blob trough-divers, running yet another big-scale scam to hammer the sane folks who followed the rules, saved and invested, and are rewarded by being economically raped. Seems to be unwise and just double-plus-ungood.

In crazy-psycho-Europe-Land, if you even talk about what is happening (by quoting official Government statistics), you risk being fined by corrupt, insane judges, who obviously hate their own national cultures and legal/political traditions. Germany seems to be in some kind of awful, comic death-spiral, where any talk of the truth of what is being done to their culture and their nation, is assaulted as "right-wing extremism". This is just beyond insane - yet it passes as acceptable behaviour because of the European comfort with censorship, State-authoritarianism, and general woke-leftist madness. A woman named Marie-Therese Kaiser, in the AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) Party, has been fined thousands of Euros, for quoting government statistics on her website, back in 2021, documenting the number of Afghan "refugees" involved in gang-rapes. It is a statistically observable phenomenon, and is not "hate-speech" or even rude talk. Just an observation, by an attractive young women, who was "rightly" concerned that gang-rape seems to be an increasingly serious problem in Germany, which correlates with the rising intake of Afghan refugee's.

I have met Afghan refugees, and mostly they are very nice, and very good people. Most of these folks who come to Canada, are just looking for a sane, safe and better place to live and raise their children, where god-believing psycho-lunatics do not come and kill them at their homes. Lots of folks from Gaza also came here to escape the Israeli murder-squads that seem to just kill Palestinians for sport. So I understand the whole refugee thing. If I lived in the Middle East, Europe, Africa or Asia, I would work every day to get the hell out, and get myself and my family to North America, where freedom still exists (sort of...).

But if there are problems, we need to be able to talk about such things. But the woke psychos who are acting as judges in Germany, do not agree. So the gang-rapes continue, I suppose. This is curious. And anyone who even tries to bring this sort of issue into the public domain, risks stupid fines, by deeply misguided and dangerous political-folks who are in power and controlling the judges and the police. It's all very, very bad.

And of course, this kind of insane madness is liable to infect our World also.

The whole idea of "Free Speech" is to protect folks who say things that are unpopular or inflamatory, since this is quite often where the truth resides. Example: The whole scam of "anti-semitism" is a fraud, which the Jews use to shut-down any critical comment of the murderous, violent abuse that the Israeli's inflict on anyone who opposes their massive land-theft and systematically successful attempts at genocide of the Palestinian people. It's quite an impressive piece of social-psycho trickery.

And this social-madness is accelerating. The whole "Covid-19 Shaming Model", used against anyone who was skeptical of the wisdom of the technology behind the Covid vaccines (which leaves your bloodstream laced with spike-proteins that are **proven** to cause increased blood clotting), or the fake woke "racism" critical abuse and accusations against anyone who suggests that maybe black people should be held to the same educational and employment standards as White folks and Asians are required to meet.

There is this curious madness that is creeping deep into our World, and is obviously the direct result of profoundly dishonest self-interest. And this process is then amplified by ugly and dishonest corrupt toady-men and toady-girls, who seek the favour of their self-serving superiors.

History actually is full of this madness, and we know that it must be "nipped in the bud", as the Brits would say.

Honesty is the only chance. Living in Truth is the only choice.

Perhaps this is why humour is important. The ancient "Treatise on Comedy" was seen as so dangerous by the Catholic Church, that they destroyed every copy of it. Obviously, because if you read the outrageous nonsense in the Bible, it is difficult not to laugh, despite the wise moral lessons that it contains.

AI has the potential to wipe out a lot of jobs. Most of what most folks do, is not really necessary. A friend showed me his hi-tech TV, in which you can talk into the remote control, and ask for anything you want to see, and the AI finds it and shows it. TV is weird now.

I can't watch TV of any kind anymore. It's a time-suck and a brain-numb process, that scares the heck out of me. I avoid it like lethal toxic waste, which it sort of is. And yet, it is the World, for most people now. So perhaps this is one of the process-drivers that is making the World so conflict-prone. Everyone lives in this false-reality, which is making them crazy, when they have to interact with the messy and complex real world.

If the AI stuff really works, just how should I use it? For me, this is very key question. I could be doing everything right, and still get blown to fucking bits, by random swings. So even if I have devices that give me 75% edge, that 25% chance wrong remains - and in a run of four or five results - could still destroy me completely. We all need to be aware of this. With both money and ammo, one always needs more than one has or thinks one needs, if the objective is to be successfully secured. :)

[ May 4, 2024 ] - Don't Reap the Fearer... - Every new datapoint seems to bring another bout of curious concern and worry. I have always been able to somewhat "see" the future. This is a very sharp double-edged sword - since I can *see* it - but often am not able to act on what is seen. This is an uncomfortable feeling, obviously. The ancients spoke of this, and made stories about it. Cassandra I am not, but I grasp her plight.

I've managed to transfer my old domain name "www.gemesyscanada.com" to Amazon AWS Route 53. Now, I have to figure out, how to apply DNS records to a hosted-zone for it, and then create the necessary alias record(s) so that the old domain can point to "www.gemesysresearch.com" also (this new domain...). It's become insanely complex to do anything, anywhere now. I have a small real-estate project with the waterfront office, which has been ongoing for years, and a whole process and project plan has just blown up in a hilariously ugly and absurdly complex manner. It's too complex and annoying to relate here - but suffice it to say, it is not just the idiotic internet which is becoming comically toxic and absurdly failure-prone. Nothing anywhere seems to work right anymore, unless massive and unlimited resources are thrown at it - and even then, ultimate project success may still prove to be elusive. One needs effort, intelligence, funding, and luck. But sometimes, even that fine combo can be thwarted by people behaving badly. You need to have Plan B, and Plan C, and even a few other in your back-pocket. (Louis the 14th of France, put "The Final Argument of Kings" as the label on his cannons... Alas, we are not yet Kings.)

It is very good to have a farm. Folks have to eat, and a food-surplus is the first requirement for any sort of operational entity, anywhere. From the ancient Mayan cities, to the rice-fields of Japan and China, to the fertile crescent in deep antiquity - the first task in any civil infrastructure, is food security. If your army and your artisans who make the weapons cannot eat, your State will be ended and overrun, by those who have solved the food-surplus problem.

I am worried about the near future. War seems to have become a common approach to solving State-level disputes now, and the ugly awful behaviour of the Russians and the Israelis - and the success that each beligerant is enjoying - suggests that our World's future will be marked by increasing conflict and violence. The Americans cannot seem to communicate with coherence, and those who communicate with missiles and artilery and murder, are winning the day. This worries me, as I suspect that at some point, the markets will observe that war is not good for commerce, business, and prosperity, even if the weapons makers are making fine earnings. The reason for this, is simply that modern war will make every place, an operational battlefield. We are seeing this now. The idiotic stupidity of "economic sanctions", absurd attempts to block China from obtaining advanced technology, (we *BUY* semi-conductor technology from China, as does everyone who uses Apple iPhones and MacBooks!), and the corruption of the internet and our other related communication infrastructure - we see a form of warfare already in operation.

What many do not see, is that the global war is already underway, and will likely affect commerce and markets, in nasty ways, in the near future. We are already too dependent on the technology. When it stops working, that will create accelerating, cascading damage. Yet there seems no way to get off this train. At least try to have a Plan B and a Plan C, and so on, for when the cascade failures really begin. When the power-grid goes down, you might want to have your own wind-generator, not just to charge your electric vehicle, but also to operate your well-pump. ;)

[ Apr. 27-28, 2024 ] - White Dopes on Punk - I find listening to XTC and the Vibrators and now even Greenday, quite relaxing. And just for fun, and to test the new (old) Mission speakers I acquired recently, with the vintage Technics SL-D202 direct-drive turntable, I dropped an old vinyl disk by "The Tubes" onto the platter. WPOD! Saw them live, at Massey Hall, back in previous century, in Hunger-City. At the time, the opening band was some young dudes named "Aerosmith", who no-one had heard of. I recall thinking - they weren't bad. Not bad at all... It was the golden age of music - when concerts were cheap and fun, and the bands and the record-companies would make money from record sales. Touring was a lost-leader, used to support and promote sales of vinyl disks. Now of course, the music business is completely inverted. Live shows are where all the money is made, and content on Youtube and Spotify and so on, is virtually given away, to promote the shows. And of course, the live shows cost a fortune now. Kids and even older folks, are now expected to pay upwards of near 4-figures for tickets to big-name artists. More madness.

We were crazy lucky when and where we grew up. We had free-speech, free-love, cheap booze, and fast cars. The Catholic girls got birth-control pills, my Mom's car was a silver Pontiac LeMans with an orange-block 350 V8, and (even before University days...) I was able to buy a robin-egg blue, 1969 Mercury Marquis, with a 400 cubic-inch V8, which was one of the biggest damn cars that Detroit ever made. The thing had only 15,000 miles on it, and had been bought for the trophy-wife of a local rich-guy, who had just died. She sold it to me for almost nothing, since it was so damn big, and she hated to try to park it. It was a great car. The back-seat was about the size of my first apartment in Toronto - it was comical. Room to frolic...

At the time, I was so very concerned that we were falling into an economic depression that rivaled the 1930's, and everyone forgets this. In the mid 1970's the Dow Jones had fallen from 1000 level to around 600 and a bit (a nice solid almost 40% drop), and when I drove to Toronto to try to open a commodity-trading account at some place called Richardson Greenshields or some weird name like that, the broker I talked to would not even take me seriously. I remember they had a green-dot "Trans-Lux" electronic ticker-tape mounted up on the wall. It was very cool the way it worked. Every attempt to open an account anywhere was met with abuse and amusement, since I looked about 12 years old, despite being 18, if I recall correctly. Hilarious, really.

I had no money (since I spent it on cars), but I had heard of "margin". I guess I was lucky. I didn't get my first account, until I was creating an automated version of the "Greensheet" system for Mclead Young Weir, one of my first independent projects. I sat and worked in a room where prospectus documents were stored. For amusement, I read the "British Telecom" prospectus. About half-way thru, the penny dropped, and I realized that phone companies don't want to make money. If they make money, as heavily-regulated-government entities, they avoid profit, and expense all they can. Profit is a red-flag to the silly socialists that run government agencies, since they see any and all profit as the signature-condition of evil capitalist roaders who are making money off the poor downtodden workers who need to call the hospital for their sick mamas, and so on.

It was obvious that the national phone-company of England would become a serious money-pisser to it's shareholders, if it was able to be freed from the ugly shackels of government control. When government-owned or controlled, all utilities face rate-of-return regulation - and fixed prices for their service. So, they pack everything and anything into their cost-structure, and try to get prices set so that they are at least making the prevailing interest rate - but no more. With rates at 11%, you stuff as much cost as you can into your business process, and then ask for 11% rate-of-return - and hire economists that argue that you are only just breaking-even, since you are only just making your cost-of-capital. With prices any less, you cannot survive, and will be non-economic, yatta-yatta. So you get price-regulation prices that build in that 11% cost of capital, and everyone is happy. Except of course, the folks that cannot get telephones, or who maybe have to make a long-distance call, and need to get a bank-loan to do that. It is and was crazy.

Reading the Brit-Tel prospectus showed that the company was fat and rich, but was regulated up the yin-yang. Freed from that economic madness, they would upgrade technology, offer more service cheaper, lower prices, grow demand, and reduce costs, and have real, useable profits to fund all this new stuff folks wanted. So, of course, on the first day, the B-Tel traded from $7 (the IPO price), to $14), and I sold it, and thought "Wow. This is a good business idea!" But of course, the damn thing traded up into the $40's per share, over the next few years. ANd it paid dividends. I was stupid to sell it. I put the proceeds into a Canadian oil company, which went nowhere, and then went down.

Worse thing that can happen to a new investor, is a fast, big gain. He gets wrong teaching, and thinks that the market it easy. It is not easy. It is hard to make money, consistently.

But my first date that went all the way was a nice Catholic girl, and my first trade which immediately doubled in price, was a phone-company. So, I am programmed to like the same kind of Catholic girls that "R. Crumb" (the famous comic-book artist) likes, and telecom companies, which pay big fat dividends to their shareholders. We become prisoners of our randomly applied early re-enforcement results - even Daniel Kahneman admits this. Go read Chapter 11, titled "Anchoring", in his "Thinking Fast and Slow".

And try to say a little prayer for Bernie Sanders in USA. Why the hell is he the only one in Washington trying to do the right thing?? What the bloody hell is wrong with the goddamn Republicans? I am just gobsmacked by the weirdness now. Was the only reason the kids protested the Vietnam War so intensely, was because they were expected to go die there, fighting in an unwinable war?

Charlie Munger was so terribly correct. The older he got, the more he said how he *underestimated* the power of incentives. He knew it was really, really important in warping and twisting human decision and thinking process. But when old, he said even though he knew it was important, as he grew older and gained more experience, he had come to believe that incentives - which he always knew were important - were even *MORE* important than he had previously realized.

This makes sense. I realize my judgement is really warped and twisted by emotion and *feelings*, and this is toxic and costly. For amusement and re-education, I am re-reading a hard-cover copy of the old "The Money Game" by "Adam Smith". It was written in 1967, and is now ancient history. Except it is full of the same truths that Kahneman discovered. People are damned irrational, and they will do and believe and act upon crazy ideas. Like "Bitcoin". The whole idea of "Bitcoin" and crypto-currency is right in a paragraph in "The Money Game". Really. There is a comment that if the market really is a "game" (as in "fun, amusement, sport", etc.), then one could just subsitute units with no value, and trading and speculation could still continue, as it does in other "games of chance". Well, that experiment has been run, and is still being run, and we know this now to be true.

>

The concept of "value" is entirely subjective. The only value of something - anything - resides entirely inside the mind of the person who is making the value-judgement. To a fellow drowning underwater, who wishes to breathe, the life-giving properties of water are of no value. The value of a fine weapon, confers itself on the fellow who holds it, or is wielding it. If you are trapped inside a vault full of gold bars, there will come a point where the value of a soup and sandwich lunch will exceed the dollar-value of the gold you are entombed with. And so on.

There is security in owning securities. But only if they can be traded for money to purchase what you believe you require now or in the near future. If the markets are off-line, or are closed for an extended period (as happened in World War One), your "securities" may be effectively worthless.

Other people cannot be trusted. And what is curious, with the human biases and absurd "anchoring" that can twist and warp the human-mind and it's analytic abilities, one cannot even trust one's own judgement. This is why assistive, analytic AI's (Artificial Intelligences) may be of great help.

But my AI is saying I need to sell - quickly - my bank stocks. And yet I have not done this, since when I do that, my income falls significantly, and I fear that specific outcome. I feel handcuffed to my dividend stream, and this is disturbing. (I also know that banking is a very good business, if it is done right...)

I realize now, why professional speculators do not like or care about dividends. They are like a drug, to which one becomes addicted. And in all such scenarios, this presents increased risk and a real true danger. Yet another little life lesson.

[ Apr. 22, 2024 ] - Insomniacs We Trust - Have not posted to the site for while - seem to be busy trying not to be killed-by-default. Curious times, growing more curious. Biden, that curious USA President seem to be insane, as do our two glimmer-twins up in Ottawa - Ms. Friedland and Mr. Trudeau, who have decided that what Canada needs is more taxes.

This reminds me of the doctor in "Dangerous Liasons", who every time he was called to examine the beautiful, lovesick young aristo-girl, each time simply said: "Bleed her!". And so the brown-import-wave continues ("not that there's anything wrong with that..." - cf. Seinfeld), and so the taxation bleeding continues.

I read a great note from our *former* (recently retired) ex-Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who said that raising capital-gains taxes in the middle of a beginning-of-a-hyper-inflation is probably a really bad idea, sends the most wrong signals to investors, will discourage and downshift business capital-formation activity, and will induce investors to now avoid Canada, as it's tax-regime is back to being nasty, foolish and unpredictable (he didn't actually say that - he just said "We resisted attempts to raise capital gains taxes, when I was the Finance Minister (he resigned in August 2020) since we felt it was a bad idea" or something sensible like that. He is gone, and has been replaced by an ex-journalist who is not particularly versed in affaires-economique... I don't know whether to laugh or just fucking cry.

I've given up following most news in Canada, since it either makes me so fucking angry I cannot work, or it seems so stupid and insane that it starts to make me feel sick to my stomach. I am serious here. It is so bad, I just cannot consume a diet of the goddamn fucking CBC, without I want to vomit my guts out.

So, I have this custom-built compiled-from-source version of MPlayer, which I used to listen to various European radio-streaming stations, which do NOT run advertisements. And I run a couple of different ad-blockers on my web-access tools - Firefox and Edge. Even that lets too much vomit-making news to leak thru, truth be told, since I still have to pay attention to the fucknig markets.

My AI's work ridiculously well. My biggest problem, is following the damn things. Really. I feel like "The Prisoner". I am not a number. I am not a fucking robot. I **like** being human. I went to the Church Bake Sale, and bought some books and CD's. I got a great copy of Greenday's "Insomniac", circa 1995. All tracks are good. Track number 8 is called: "Panic Song". Just fucking perfect. Perfect music to program by...

I also bought a copy of "The Big Short" by the same guy that wrote "Liar's Poker". I remember quite vividly the 2007-2008 market meltdown. I would go long LEH, and watch it just not trade right, and get stopped out, or close out with a small gain. I got copies of all the Lehman financial statements and saw all this fucking cash on their bogus, dishonest balance sheet - what was called, (I later learned) goddamn "window dressing". I watched the thing implode and die in a spectacular, market-wrecking supernova of insane, stupid and unnecessarily awful madness. Those clever New York Jews thought they could just bankrupt part of their big-arsed complex multi-company structure, and walk away with bags of investor's cash. Except they peed in the soup too obviously (cf: "War of the Roses", with Gordon Gecko and Danny DiVito), and poisoned completely the Lehman Brothers name all around the world.

It was so sad and bad. Lehman worked (gamed) this stupid and absurd US accounting rule that said if you did a contractual sale-and-repurchase, and the sell and the buy-your-shit-back prices were more than 5 percent different, you did not have to record the sale as fat-pig-ugly contingent liability. You could do "Lehman Liar Accounting", and book the sale as a straight sale. So these bastards would sell all their shit-bonds, for cash - put the cash on their fucking balance sheet, and show the world they were liquid as the fucking Mississippi River. Then, after the financial statements had been printed and sent to fucking morons like ME, they were contractually obligated to buy all this dogshit paper back, and sit on it. But the bogus US rules said they could hide this reality from their investors using dishonest (but "legal") accounting. Really. LEH was roughly 28 times leveraged, and basically had less-than-zero liquidity, it turned out.

It took me a while to figure this out, because I am stupid, out in the country, and did not think that the whole fucking US market-system in New Fucking York City could be so astonishingly dishonest. But I was very wrong.

Dick Fucking Fuld took $500 million out of Lehman Brothers, and pocketed it. I got left holding a bag of worthless shares, (and so did a lot of other people), and the entire USA financial system would have collapsed, except the butthumpers from Washington came down with suitcases full of billion-dollar bills (from the USA taxpayers), and just gave *billions* out to all Assholes of New York to make good their losses.

I am not complaining here. I am just relating facts, having lived and traded thru this stupid shitstorm. I survived, but only barely. I got out of LEH before it went to zero, around $7/shr IIRC, just like I got out of GM, around about $2/share, before it's shareholders were all flushed down the toilet.

I had not read "The Big Short", and it was even made into a movie. Whoo hoo. Everyone in USA makes money from big bad disasters. Maybe the 9/11 thing will be turned into a "Wiley E. Coyote" cartoon, and the offices of "ACME" will be in the World Trade Centre? Nothing is too weird now.

What is interesting now, is that the USA yield curve is pretty seriously inverted, and Biden is trying to give billions to Israel at the same time as trying to admonish it for mass-murder of Gaza women and children. The man is either a fucking lunatic or just a radio-controlled puppet, and his handlers, who are at the "Biden Control Panel", are fighting over the controls, like those airliner pilots in China, when that big jet was flown straight down into the ground. It's insane.

The yield-curve inversion (US Two-Year Treasury's are 4.97%, and US 10-year is 4.55% - data from a few ways ago) is serious. This usually signals a recession is coming, or is now happening. And the other curious datapoint - the *average* price of a new car in USA is now roughly $47,000, (which makes it around $63,400 Canadian). This is according to the Kelly BlueBook data and Edmunds, which may or may not be correct. I test-drove a really nice 5-litre V8 Mustang GT convertible at a local car-dealer, last week, and it was nice. It was also $41,178.57 Canadian, for a 2016 car. A nice car, with a V8 engine, in a convertible version, now 8-years old, and still over $40K, after tax! Oh my, was all I could say. It's in nice shape, drives well, is solid, had no rust of any kind on the underside, and was obviously looked after well. But it's over $40K. Huh?

So, we are in a strange time. Mass-murder is OK, as long as you are a Jew. You can even ask the USA to give you a billion dollars, for your murder-campaign, and the fucking clowns who run that strange place, will actually fight with each other, to give it to you. But an ordinary American guy cannot afford a new car, or to buy a mortgaged house for his family to live in. This is madness.

I have a friend, who used to be a professor at a local University. He grew up in a Palestine Camp. He is a genius, worked for big US companies, and married a nice Arab woman. I meet him for coffee sometimes, and we talk about neural-networks, expert-systems, politics, and our women whom we each adore. He loves his wife, and he has two kids - a son who is an executive at Apple in California, and a daughter who is a statistician, and was working for the Canadian Government, at one point. Between him and his wife - both of whom have extended family ties in Gaza - they have had 287 family-members and relatives killed (*** KILLED ***) in the Gaza Murder Campaign that the Israeli Jews have launched against Palestinians.

Now that 287 people is a pretty fucking big number of one's relatives to be snuffed by Israeli Death Squads. And President Bloody Biden wants to give these fucking killers of Israel more goddamn money to ramp up the killing.

Some kids at Colombia University in New York City have protested against this. Good for them. Americans are not all stupid, stone-evil, crazy-sick psychopathic fucks who seek to assist and fund mass-murder. Not all of them. Quite a few are decent, sane, rational good people who want to help when really awful terrible shit happens to folks around the world. Most Americans really are good people.

But as I watched the news clips of the protesting students being arrested by Jew York cops, - whoops typo - I meant "New York" cops, I just had to wonder: "How can sane people in America assist these mass-murderers in the Israeli military? There are proven squadrons of rapists, and stone-killers operating in the Israeli military - they are operating with astonishing impunity, raping, killing and murdering women and children at scale. The death numbers of Gaza citizens killed exceeds 30,000 people. That's a lot of people, each of whom have family members around the world. And these fucking Jews of New York trot out this bullshit "anti-semitism" shiboleth? Everyone and anyone who is critical of this, is a nazi? Anyone believe this?

Jesus wept. The goddamn Jews of New York are the owners of this nightmare, since they are working hard to fund it.

So what has happened to America? Why has it gone insane? Trump promises even MORE money to Israel so it can kill Arab women and children. (In military history, killing women and children was completely justified. Children grow up angry and become fierce soldiers. And women are the machines for the production of soldiers. This is a basic truth, whether one likes to recognize it or not.)

Problem is, once we get into the "war business", killing becomes a commonplace activity, and all civilized behaviour gets inverted.

A sane person recognizes that war is something to be avoided. But red-mist seems to be clouding the vision now of American leaders, and their desire for war is unfortunate.

Every man and woman understands hate. Hate is a powerful emotion, and it can be used to get stuff done, and self-motivate and motivate others. A whole nation can be turned to hate very easily and very quickly. Perhaps even an entire world of humans.

The Big Jews of New York - the Bill Ackmans and his Israeli-supporting agents - might want to be careful about what they are assisting in making happen.

Hate has an ugly way of growing just beneith the surface. You have to smile and "go along to get along" - but inside, the anger can grow and create a fire of destruction. This is not a good thing.

I am surprised at my Palestinian friend, who does not hate Israeli's. He is a gentle fellow, who sees the tragedy of the world, and seeks wisdom. See, he has cancer, and is fighting his own internal war. He was told several years back, he would not live a year, but he has proven everyone wrong. He wears a Canadian-style "tuke", because he has had another round of chemo, and he works on math problems on a very cool tablet that can recognize handwriting.

I've made my nut by predicting long-wave future events, and taking some risk-driven bets to get to my goals. I've been lucky, but have also experienced the deaths of those I care about.

So, here is my prediction: If America does not stop it's support for the Israeli nation of hate-filled religious bigots who are actively engaged in an astonishing mass-murder campaign that is killing thousands of children and women (there is no debate or argument here, this is a proven fact), then there will be ugly and tragic long-term consequences for America. A nation cannot support mass-murder and pretend it is military "defence", without a similar attempt at "defence" becomes reflected back at the nation making the murder happen.

There is basic "karma" in the universe. You get out, what you put in. It may take a long time for it all to manifest, but it seems to be a universal characteristic of reality. It is a kind of "Say's Law" of existence. (Say's Law: "Supply Creates its own Demand". We might say that: "Evil Creates it's own Reflexive Response"). There is no fat-bastard "god" in the sky. We all live in randomness and chaos - of that there is no doubt by rational people. But this fact does not eclipse all moral reality.

If you do and assist really bad things, and behave in an evil manner, then evil and badness will be reflected back at you, and define the contours and dimensions of your own reality. You will have bad things happen to yourself. Jesus Christ tried to help people understand this simple truth, and got beaten and executed for his efforts. This is a typical human reaction.

If American becomes this weird, toxic force for projecting evil, then evil will be reflected back at American cities and towns. The courageous Jews who built Israel called this "N3", from Newton's Third Law: "For every reaction - there is an equal and opposite reaction". N3 was the name of a Jewish terrorist organization, that killed British soldiers.

We would all do well to stop this war and hate. We need to assist Ukraine in removing those Russians who illegally invaded it, broke their contract with Ukraine, and have killed people and stolen land like simple bandits. That war must continue. We have no choice. But helping Israel kill kids and young girls and old women is stupid and wrong and needs to stop.

The folks running American need to make this crystal clear, and act accordingly. Yet this does not happen. US politician Bernie Sanders is trying to prevent furthur open-ended offensive military support for Israel, and he is also a Jew. But he is having little success. This is curious. Israel is killing many thousands of children, at scale, and US media says little or nothing. The USA media does not report, and the USA State does not even react to it's own intelligence reports, showing the high-effort genocide that is taking place in Gaza. This proves that major change in USA is absolutely necessary now.

People who know this truth, need to be part of making this change happen. God bless the protest kids at Colombia University in New York, and at the other USA University towns. The kids and Bernie seem to be the only honorable people on-stage in America now. We wish them well, as we suspect they are engaged in the project of trying to save the American nation from self-destruction.

[ Apr. 15, 2024 ] - A Little Bit of Hack is All You Need - We've been doing some experiments with the little ESP8266 board - a tiny two-chip board the size of a postage-stamp, which contains a full TCP/IP stack, with WiFi connectivity, hardware and software, and even a web-server. This little chip provides web-access, uses simple serial-link supplied 'AT' commands like a Hayes Modem used to do, and allows anything to be linked to the internet, in a very small-footprint manner. It is the original "Internet-of-Things" device, but it really has great capability.

The image below, shows an Arduino R3, hacked-linked to the ESP8266 board, and communicating with the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) Serial Monitor, running on a little HP Windows-11 laptop. Getting it all to work was a bit involved, but this tiny board is astonishingly capable.

We envision an operational AI, dropping real-time results via WiFi, to in-house devices, which can then act on what was learned/discovered/noticed, and also offer warnings and/or notifications to any network-linked devices. With the ESP8266 board linked to a microcontroller, this can also trigger and control electrical circuits and switches and operate local or remote devices.

I will post more about this as I get further along.

[ Apr. 11, 2024 ] - We Gotta Get Outta This Place... - I recall seeing an excellent video on "yootoob" years back, with this song used as the sound-track to a whole collection of excellent video-clips from the Vietnam War. It was really very good, and of course, would be impossible to create today, because of the "copyright-troll" complex, which uses AI to engineer assaults against folks who are accused of *violating* copyright. All artists and researchers and educators rely on historical images, and the copyright-trolls who demand cash payments for the use of images are really true cultural parasites. They seek to deny us access to our history, and create effective "memory holes". It's truly an ugly and sadly nasty world we all inhabit now.

We were just sued, by a copyright-troll group, called "PicRights", who claimed they were acting for Reuters and AFP (Agence France-Presse), and who hired some high-priced stike-suit lawyers from Toronto, called: Aird & Berlis. These guys are damn clever, as they tee-up a lawsuit, threaten court-action, and then agree to settle for a number that is still in 4-figures, despite what a typical licence-fee would cost for an image (somewhere typically between $20 to $200 per image). Their algorithim is clever, since they know you (as the defendant) will have to retain a lawyer who is a specialist in IP (Intellectual Property) law, and that it will cost you at a minimum probably $1,500. A sane person has no-choice, but to reach a settlement and write a cheque.

So, we offer warning here, as this is a helluva good way to make money from the internet. Find folks doing anything with anything, allege some bogus claim that will require the actions of the courts to adjudicate, and demand money. A legitimate business entity typically has no choice but to cut a deal, to pay off the gangsters.

I recall working for a fine gentleman, who along with some of his business associates, had managed, back in the previous century, to open a small computer store in Moscow, Russia. My client mentioned one day, when we were talking about doing business, how they were having to pay $10,000 (US$) per month "protection money" to the local Moscow gangsters, so that their store would not have "problems". To a naive and honest fellow such as I was, this just seemed wrong. But of course, this is how it all works.

So, despite my willingness to comply with Canadian Copyright Law, we have had to pay the Aird & Berlis team, to settle what we truly and honestly believed was a legal, fair-dealing use of two images, in support of a critical review of the awful situation in Ukraine, because of Russia, and the results of our research. It is clear the images - one from AFP and one from Reuters - were used without license fees, so we had no choice but to pay. But our Canadian Copyright Act does allow - explicitly in what the lawyers like to call "black-letter law" (means it is written down, clearly, no interpretation is needed), usage exemptions to copyright. These exemptions apply for research, review, parody, and criticism. The case is strengthened on the part of the User, if no financial gain is proven, and further strengthened, if it can be proved that the copyright holders themselves earned financial benefit from unlicensed use of copyrighted material. (We perhaps drove clicks to their sites and client sites.)

But to go before a judge and get a ruling, of course means serious costs.

So, the "Copyright Enforcement Group" of Aird & Berlis gets away with supporting the "copyright trolls" known as "PicRights" (who would not even take my phone calls...)

The final net result of all this: We are harmed, and had to pay what is called "compensation". Reuters and AFP and Aird & Berlis LLP and PicRights all benefit - substantially. They have a sweet little scheme which drives dollars into their coffers. One has to admire this process, given how perfectly effective it is.

But the real harm is done to the World. Reuters and AFP become "News Blackout Organs", which can pay photographers for images which are then lodged behind steep paywalls. The "Mainstream Media", (which we all know and "love"), is able to maintain exclusive, near-monopoly control on the use and dissemination of "conflict images". This is why we almost *never* see the true images from what is happening in the Gaza-Israel War. Here is one of the greatest uses of mass-murder since the Second World War, and the images are blacked-out by the media. Curious, is it not? There is a process here. Know this.

The two pictures I used, were of the Ukraine-Russia War, which is still ongoing. Ukraine is losing, as it's power-grid is being systematically destroyed by newly-made (or purchased) Russian high-explosive missiles. This is an ugly, awful and obscenely grotesque scenario - and Russians must be laughing at how stupid, unorganized and foolish our political and legal processes are. Copyright laws help the truth be hidden from the public. Their FSB agents need only laugh and relax.

Our use of Reuters and AFP images is now blacked-out. We have been censored, images all removed, and made to pay for a false claim of "damages", because to defend against this abuse, would cost us even more than the settlement.

This is all really wrong.

And a final note: The photographer who took the image of the destroyed Russian BM-21 rocket-launcher truck with the dead Russian soldier beside it, was named Maksim Levin. (The BM-21 is a powerful 40-tube launch-system for 122mm rockets, installed on a Ural-375 6x6 truck.) Mr. Levin was a courageous and heroic person. This image of the destroyed BM-21, with the dead Russian lad in the snow beside it, offers a powerful statement. These BM-21's were heavily used by Russia in various conflicts. Mr. Levin took the image in late February, 2022. It shows on several levels, the results of war. We are *NOT* anti-war. War is absolutely necessary, if one is defending one's homeland, against murderous invaders. But war is cruel, ugly, horrible and costly. The folks who start wars are of a particular type, and the damage they can do is potentially unlimited. Know this also.

Shortly after Mr. Levin took the images of February 25, he was working north of Kyiv, and on April 2, 2022, despite being unarmed and wearing "PRESS" labels on his jacket, he was shot and killed by the Russian terror-squads which attacked Bucha.

The Reuter's website for licensing pictures prevents us from even registering to obtain a usage license for Mr. Levin's images, and AFP will not respond to our requests for image licencing, and explicitly indicates we should contact "PicRights" which will not return our phone calls.

So, our small attempt to highlight - at cost to ourselves - the pure madness of the illegal assault against Ukraine is stopped - by our own lawyers and mainstream media organs.

This is completely absurd.

My little software-development entity and my consulting practice is seriously harmed, by my own nation's questionable legal processes and practice, while Russian terror-squads, firing high-explosive missiles, destroy buildings full of people in downtown Kyiv, and today, the Trypillia power plant, which provides Kyiv with electricity. This is pure madness.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68788110

We need to engineer a change-in-government at the Federal Level, and correct this stupidity. There should be no copyright of conflict images which document war-crimes, as the wide circulation of such images is strongly in the public interest. Otherwise, the bad guys can win, as extreme crimes and the damage that they cause, can remain hidden from public view. This damages the World.

[ Apr. 7-and-8, 2024 ] - Every Story Pictures a Tell - I had to drive into " Hunger City", (my nickname for Toronto) today and deal with some more demons. It reminded me of David Bowie's Diamond Dogs album - "No more Big Wheels - Rats the size of cats..." and so on. The scale and extent of my old ville, Toronto, is nightmareish. Drove by the apt-building where I had a lovely quarter-floor, back when I was young and wildly foolish, and the place is surrounded by tall, glass-and-steel 20, 30 story and higher structures, that would make Bauhaus blush and barf little round ball bearings. The whole experience was like a full-on nightmare hallucination - which was made even more perfect, when on the way back, the sun in a clear-blue sky was temporarily switched off.

I was on the highway, in perfect weather, when the solar eclipse happened, and the effect was quite wild. I was not exactly in the locus of "totality", so there was still a little "diamond-ring" of sunlight, but it was dusky near-dark, and traffic slowed, and some folks had stopped to look up, despite the electronic highway signs warning them not to do so. I had never seen a full-on eclipse. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things - quite surreal.

Perhaps it is age, or due to spending too much time banging my head on data, but I have a strange, and disturbing sensation that we are at "peak-city". Toronto is now a place only for the rich and the poor. All the nice, lovely and wonderful things (and places) that made it magical back in the 1980's and the 1990's, are gone. The transition is kind of heart-braking (not "breaking"). It just stops one.

The place is crazy-crowded, a bit crappy, and homeless people are sleeping on the sidewalks - even right in the downtown core. This is stupid. The vagrants could easily be rounded up, and housed in a Big House, like used to be done. It's all just silly, what is happening to cities. And I gather Toronto is massively better than the big US cities.

Maybe the time for the City is ending.

Given the astonishing horror of the Gaza Murder-War, and the wild madness of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the entire social and economic concept of the Urban Clustering idea is shown to be risky and questionable. Cities are easy targets. They cannot move, or be quickly re-located.

I keep imagining the arcade video-game "Missle-Command", where the objective was to defend your cities from incoming warheads. The best you could do - the very best outcome possible - was to last a bit longer than the previous player. Eventually, the rate of *incoming* exceeded one's ability to destroy the hostiles, no matter how fast you spun the track-ball, or click-click-clicked the "Fire!" button, and your tiny skylines would be turned into plasma.

Is this our future? "No, of couse not!" wise folks say.

But everyone forgets, that the whole purpose of the DARPA project that became the Interent, was to craft a peer-to-peer computer network, where the network could remain operational and available, in an environment where removal of various nodes could occur. Unlike the IBM "Token Ring" model, or traditional star-configured C/C (Command/Control) mainframe-terminal networks, the DARPAnet could continue to operate even as major nodes went "down."

The DARPA-net "nodes" were cities. Makes one think. We hope...

[ Apr. 05, 2024 ] - Listened to Ritholz Inteview with Dr. Kahneman - I was doing a morning news-scan, and found a link to a link to a link and found the Barry Ritholtz interview with Dr. Daniel Kahneman, from Aug. 9, 2016. Still listening to it. Barry talks too much, but to hear Kahneman, is just wonderful.

So I needed to make some quick notes here. This is important. Rarely do I encounter much on the mainstream news-media that has value, but this interview does. It was a Bloomberg Radio thing, and is just excellent. Kahneman sounds like Einstein. Listening to this wise man makes it impossible to be an anti-semitic person - even if one truly hates the Israeli's, you have to respect the amazing impressive genius of these kind of brilliant Jewish folks. They will question *everything* - and by doing so, arrive at truth. Humanity needs this ability.

Kahneman explicitly mentions two key things that are profoundly valuable, and can be acted upon:

1) Luck is very important, and it explains clearly why regression-to-the-mean occurs. There is nothing magical. His example of the three best golfers - who on one day, all have a great day and get their best results ever. Look at their results the next day, and they will not do quite so well, since they just won't likely be quite so lucky on the second day. The excellent results we see, always have some luck hard-coded into them. The very nature of what "luck" is - an unlikely rare positive event - is by definition less likely to occur on the next trial. So the statistical phenomenon of "regression-to-the-mean" is a real and **actionable** thing. You can use this phenomenon to make money, if you are a speculator. It is the *counter-trend* trade. It is not to be used long term - but it is a very real thing. Long-term, things *trend*, and so markets drive forward in a spinning dance (a wild tarantela at times), of the two forces of serial auto-correlation and regression-to-the-mean.

2) Kahneman was partly influenced - as he says - by the work of Paul Meil (spelling may be wrong), who was one of the first to confirm that in the comparisons of clinical judments by professionals, versus algorithms - formal procedures on how to make a decision-judgement - in a comparison between expert-judgement versus judgement-or-decision-by-algorthim - the algorithmic method was consistently and provably superior. This is also a big deal. Professionals do not like to admit this truth - yet we see it again and again and again. Any decision made under uncertainty is difficult - but due to the large number of biases and thinking-distortions that plague our thought process - the algorithm - a formal procedure for how we can do the best we can to arrive at a decision in an uncertain situation, is the superior strategy or methodology.

In summary (from my experience as a pilot, and as an investor): Gut-feel can be useful, but check-lists are better.

Both of these two pieces of knowledge are wildly important and useful. You can use each of these to improve your life, reduce your investment failures, increase your investment successes, and craft a system which can produce economic profit. Typical non-professional commodity traders will "win-maximize", rather than "profit-maximize". Their loss-aversion will induce them to take many small profits, and get hammered by a few larger losses. Only extreme behavioural focus and control, OR A GOOD ALGORITHM, can prevent this proven tendency. Humans typically gamble badly.

It's difficult to do - but it is *not* impossible, since regression-to-the-mean has to happen, and algorithms can be proven to be not just as-good-as, but actually *better* than clinical judgement. These two observations are actually shockingly useful, and I paused the interview, and missed the open, just to make sure I recorded this here. :)

[ Apr. 03, 2024 ] - The Endless Search for Clarity - We all seek clarity. Harm is directed at us, at scale, and we have to respond. The question is really always: "Ok, What should be done here? - What is the right and proper and correct, fair and just course of action?"

Systems and persons which seek to drive forward with a clear and honest focus, trend towards successful outcomes. And those which seek to use subterfuge, deception and fraud, althought often initially successful in their force-projection efforts, are constructing tall buildings on sand, without foundations. The lies and false-front/false-flag operational features that allow them to drive forward quickly at first, using dishonesty and bad-behavioural trickery, actually build-in a mechanical process that triggers their ultimate collapse.

People know when they are being misled an lied-to, and they don't like it. It's like bad food, horrible noise, foul air, and dirt. "Noise, Dirt and Smell" - we can live with that if needed for a short-time, but if you add "Lies and Fraud" to the same mixture, the whole thing becomes completely intolerable, and collapse, conflict and system-failure is the expected outcome.

I had a three-hour long, most excellent conversation with a fellow whom I think will be the Finance Minister of Canada in 10 or 12 years. We are all living in very strange times, where the trains run off the rails, the systems are failing, and unwise solutions are being implemented everywhere, and at scale. And the frustration and anger that people feel, at the absurdity and lack-of-wisdom on the part of those in charge of things, is so intense and thick in the air, one can almost smell and taste it.

We can fix what is broken, and we can correct what is wrong. It is possible.

But it requires focus, effort, and most of all, it requires that we make use of honest open and correct methods in how we do things.

This seems so obvious - and yet it is very difficult to implement.

I now *really* understand how artificial intelligence and machine-learning actually work. I've built some code - directly - which can train neural-networks and do so in a correct and actionable manner. This is a good outcome, even if I have (again!) found the signal to be quite weak. The only trading-edge one can gleam from daily data, is maybe only 2% to 5% at most. Roughly 95 to 98 percent of price-action is essentially noise, according to my research efforts. But in going down this path in such great detail, I have both learned and discovered some truly actionable things. And these things work, for the investor.

And we know what these things are! They are this: The right business models, based on solid, clear truth, executed in honest and fair ways, projected forwards using methods based on open, honest and truthful effort, show up as process-action in which long-term serial-autocorrelation is evident. Or more simply: Good stuff trends.

You can say it in three words. "Good stuff trends."

Now yes, bad stuff ALSO trends - but it trends down to collapse and destruction, and if it is wrapped up or embedded in a market-process, which supports and encourages and rewards clarity-seeking behaviour - then this down-trend will become evident, and that is that. This is why "turnaround situations" are difficult - but also can be very rewarding.

But clarity is possible. It just takes a lot of focused and effort-ful research. This is hard work, but it can be crazy-rewarding, and explains the deep attraction of science and scientific inquiry - and this simple truth also lets us determine what action we need to take, to address a harmful action that is vectored towards us. We need to do two things: Execute defensive manouvers to ensure continued survival, and thus buy time, to determine how to degrade, deny and defeat (D3) our attacker. But an even better strategy, is to pro-actively ensure systems-designs and preparations can ensure that unwise, dishonest and abusive assailants cannot achieve success by making use of banditry and fear-triggering terror-tactics.

As analysts, researchers, scientists, professionals and technicians, we each need to realize that correct-action can lead to correct-results. And good design effort can pay-back big dividends in terms of smooth, profitable ongoing operations.

And we also need to be acutely aware of the consequence of the flip-side - where bad design and abusive, dishonest process and procedures can lead to bad results and harmful outcomes that degrade our lives and introduces risks that need not be born, and that can destroy both our fabricated and our natural worlds.

Once systems reach scale, then all the ugly, awful and harmful consequences of really bad design driven by dishonesty, can come in to powerful conflict, and the search for clarity becomes particularly difficult.

But just because it is difficult, does not mean it is impossible.

Once we study and learn and observe and think - we can then plan and take action, because once clarity is achieved, the correct course-of-action tends to become obvious. The reason I write this research-log, is that it helps me enagage and execute this process. It is hard bloody work, sometimes. Yet it must be done, if I am to have any chance of knowing what the heck I have to actually do, so as to successfully drive toward the outcome I seek to achieve.

And don't discount dreams. Dreams are the rough blueprints for the reality that you seek to craft and assemble. Pay attention to what they are telling you.

I understand the AI process now - at least a little bit. By writing code, and making something work, real understanding can be achieved. And I have learned about business models - both where they are right, and where they are wrong. We have some quite wrong business and process-models that are driving things everywhere now.

But this also means there is some real opportunity available to engage in the process of correcting what is wrong, even if it costs us, and is causing us harm. Even if we are not initially successful, the key thing is to be on the right path.

Once you know what must be done, then go do it. Do it with honesty, and do it with focus. This is the benefit of thinking. It leads to clarity.

Example: If there is a darknet plan to build a Tesla factory here, then our government people should just be completely honest, explain why a big parcel of land needs to be assembled, and seek an open, honest buy-in from everyone. I have no knowledge of any of this at all, but I do not think "NDA's" belong in the political space, and $35K per acre is maybe half or even a quarter the price of what land around here is worth. Folks trying to buy land at agricultural land prices and then creating something that is valued at urban/industrial land prices, but not being clear and open in what they are trying to do, are probably not taking the correct approach.

And dishonest leaders who raise armies of killers, to invade and *STEAL* land and whole cities from neighbouring nations, are also on a very wrong path. Such actions risk causing reflexive destruction not only to their own nations, but also to everyone, everywhere, as the world-model collapses once more into total war.

Each of us, who have knowledge of this process, and the expected outcomes, needs to do what we can to stand against what is wrong.

There is no other possible path.

[ Apr. 02, 2024 ] - Information War Machines - In such a short time, things can transition from good to the really horrific. So curious. Two years ago, we all watched the illegal Russian invasion of the nation of Ukraine, and when the Bucha images of systematic mass-murder came out, I was astonished at how much the suburbs of Kyiv looked like the environs of Waterloo, Ontario, near where I live. It really brought home the horror to me, and made it feel curiously personal.

I thought: "I must do SOMETHING - even if it is just a small thing.." I sent a Ukraine relief agency some money, and I published the (now infamous) "Gemesys_Page_5.html" of this website, in which I asserted Vladimir Putin was and is a War Criminal, and argued that the World must take action to stop what was happening. We did get Russia expunged from the SWIFT financial-funds transfer system, and we also got some meaningful sanctions applied against Russia, and money and materiel has been provided to Ukraine. It has not been enough, but it has helped the Ukrainians defend their homeland.

For my efforts - so that people could SEE what was actually happening, I put two **attributed** photographs on my web page-5. The written content of the page is still there (click top banner of this page, goes to first page of site, and then click the button for "Page-5". But there were two pictures - one from Reuters, showing a destroyed World-War-2 vintage Russian rocket-launcher truck (with a dead Russian soldier lying in the snow) and the other, was from AFP, showing a destroyed shopping centre and office building with a Ukrainian soldier standing guard over the area. These are significant images, and I believed that the legal doctrine of "fair use" applied, since they were essentially "crime-scene" photos of significant importance, and I was not in any way monitizing them. (This website makes *NO* money, and it fact, it costs me to publish it, via Amazon Web Services.) This means in no way was Reuters or AFP harmed by this - and in fact, because I carefully attributed each photo, these commercial news agencies might well have derived increase click-thru customer-action benefits from this action.

Nevertheless, I received a formal letter on Friday (Good Friday, no less!), in which a Canadian Law Firm called "Aird Berlis" and it's lawyer named: "Kenneth R. Clark" has written, indicating that they are acting for a copyright entity called: "PicRights", which is in turn, claiming to be acting for Reuters and AFP. This Law Firm is seeking to enforce a punitive copyright claim of $1,475 (with a discount to $1,180 for "early payment") for the Reuters picture, and $1,775 (with a discount to $1,420 for "early payment") for the AFP photo.

I first learned of this from an email, on Good Friday, and it seems the company that is attempting to enforce this claim really is called "PicRights", and our research confirms they have a dubious reputation. (I had thought initially that this shakedown-attempt was actually a cyber-fraud...) And I honestly believed that the correctly-attributed usage of what I had assumed were public images, was legal, so long as one was not making money from the images. And that certainly is my situation, since we actually have to *pay* to maintain this site, and offer the information that is provided.

Web-logs are a valuable source of honest, typically unbiased direct reporting, and since these images document serious *crime scenes*, I believe that one has a duty to ensure this information is made widely available. Information War is a real thing, without question.

I suppose I shall have to see, if the "Fair Use" part of our Canadian Copyright laws can hold up here or not. For now, until I can license the images, I have removed them.

But what is most tragic, is that the excellent and dramatic photographs taken in Ukraine, back in early 2022, by the professional photographer, Maksim Levin, will come no more. I did some research today, and have confirmed that Maksim Levin, who took the Reuters picture of the destroyed Russian rocket-launcher, was killed exactly two years ago, on April 2, 2022, just north of Kyiv. Ukrainian authorities have confirmed that he was shot twice, by Russian small-arms fire. He was reported to be wearing "PRESS" credentials, and was un-armed.

According to news reports from the British and American News organs (which I dare not reproduce, I have now learned!,) he leaves behind a wife and four children. This is a true tragedy.

Killing unarmed civilian journalists or other non-combatants is a war-crime.

And so we say again: *Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.* This is an established fact. He should end his days in a prison.

And entities like "PicRights", Reuters and AFP, that seek to profit from this tragedy, by harming me, and my little web-site, should understand they are being unwise. This is all just so wrong.

This is real information war. The pictures of the Ukrainian Invasion, and the associated war-crimes by Russian forces who are supporting Putin, have been effectively suppressed. This is wrong, because it benefits the Russian criminals, as it aids them in their disinformation efforts.

[ Apr. 01, 2024 ] - Think Fast or Slow - but THINK! - We live in a curiously dishonest and dangerous world now. Some ugly action which appeared to be a scam, has turned out to be quite real. Our tiny shop is being threatened with an ugly form of legal extortion for our notes about the Russian invasion of the Nation of Ukraine. Not at great day for me, at all. Also, the Markets are weak and falling today, and we suspect we might know the cause. More on all this later.

Our results on our custom-build Neural-Network are interesting. I've posted a page-image picture of a second-batch training exercise, which followed on a good 10,000 epoch training run, on the first data batch. We have three data batches: First main dataset is: Feb1995 to May2017, second batch is from June2017 to August2019, and the third is from August2019 to March2024 (the current batch). I trained a network using a 10,000 epoch run, on the main dataset, and then did a second training run, using the weights from the first batch, which were 86% accurate, on the 2nd dataset, which showed roughly 49% accuracy when initially evaluated. Training the weighs from the first run further, on the 2nd data batch, took the accuracy up to 76%, which tested as 67% accurate on the main dataset. I figured this seemed good.

The results are posted in the sidebar, and you can see the training accuracy climb, (top left chart), up to 76%, while the error-level falls (bottom right chart). But when the third dataset was used for evaluation, it scored only 52% accuracy - almost a pure random result. And this tells a story: Basically, the transformations and/or the data we are using, is not really much better or different from *random*. We are mostly training to noise, it looks like.

The Machine-Learning/Artificial Intelligence technology works - and it is useful for analysis.

But it is not, for now, something that can be used to offer any sort of trading "edge". And this is, of course, unfortunate. If we are to extract a non-random signal from the data, the approach I am currently using, does not seem to be able to do it.

I will have to take another run at the calibration and data-transformation of the economic and pricing data I am currently using. The current boolean-transformation, looks to be losing too much signal.

[ Mar. 27, 2024 ] - Rock The Clash - (Or maybe: My Ramone Walks Alone?) Not sure of much now. Read M. Every from Rabobank. He is such a pessimist. Change is good. Stir the goddamn pot. The more research I do, the more it becomes clear - the Bullshit Brigades are having Troubles. And this is a very, very good thing. As Henry David Thoreau said: "You want a tasty omlette, you gotta break some eggs." (Well, maybe it was not him. But the accuracy of the assertion remains.)

I have a nasty addiction to good coffee and chocolate. And really old whiskey also. Serious, as these products are getting curiously expensive. But it's all good, since the models seem to be working.

If I didn't have this AI stuff offering me now actionable info, I might have unloaded some positions, and that would have been bad. Things are driving along, much as we (I) expected. This is interesting. AI is interesting and helpful - but solid multi-dimensional "key-fact" analysis works very well also. But it is important not to read or listen to, too much opinion. Most opinions are worse than worthless, as they can toxically degrade one's own thought process. People just react, much more than they think.

And Daniel Kahneman died today. He was 90, and he expired, it seems. He was a curiously great thinker, who gave a solid and scientifically accurate foundation to the science of behavioural economics. Go read his book: "Thinking Fast and Slow". It forces one to confront true bias that is real. Humans are shit-poor at doing probability calculations. And the dude (or the organization) that gets the probability analysis more-or-less correct, can take *all* the prizes, *all* the money. That's why it is important to understand coin-flips. We believe the market is *not* random - but it is ALMOST random. Like in RF (radio-frequency) engineering, the signal that matters, that can carry the truth of what will happen, is sometimes wildly overwhelmed by what acts like (but actually is not), noise.

I watched this amazing video by this guy posting as "CNLohr". He is an electrical-engineering and computer hack-master. Absolutely top tier guy - reminds me of the dudes making rocket-fuel in their dorm rooms, at Berkeley or UCLA - I forget which - and they blew the place up. The wise folks who ran the University - instead of expelling them, set up the "Jet Propulsion Lab", and said basically, "Don't Stop. Carry on!". Sometimes, the smart people win. It's not always the "fat slags" that end up in control. And this is what saves us all.

This is why America is the best (and also the most interesting and dangerous?) place in the World. It's so important to keep the landscape open. Most great scientific discovery actions, have a significant element of chance and luck. Many are just plane serendipitous - the result of a completely freak accidents that were unexpected - like thoriated tungsten being tested when it was not even on the list (as a vaccum-tube filiment) - just throws off electrons like a firehose, and made high-efficiency electronics possible - in the 1920's! Or penecillin mold killing off the bacteria cultures, or the fellow who spilt nitric acid on his bench, grabbed his wife's towel to soak it up, and then washed the towel - which then flashed into flame when dry (it was hung to dry by the stove.) He discovered "gun-cotton", (nitro-cellulose) which powered battleship guns. (Big battleships were the "nuclear-weapons" of the early 20th century, as they could destroy a city, since most major cities were coastal.)

We need to keep the landscape - financial, economic, psychological, scientific, etc. - open and free, so that wild ideas can be tested and implemented - and then *funded* and turned into products that can make life better. Tesla - both the original guy, and Musk's car company, are examples of how change happens - it is almost never successful if driven by government mandate, or social/economic engineering. (DARPA's funding of early internet efforts, was never meant to help industry or the world economy - it was a military project to have a computers remain operationally linked, in the event of "nodes" (cities!) being removed during war.

The capitalist investment model, is the ONLY one that can keep the landscape open for folks with wild ideas and great new inventions. We need to protect and defend this approach, and keep it up and running, despite the threats it faces from the Bullshit Brigadistas.

And we need to keep the *globalist* model running. The alternative is idiotic, stupid and pointless warfare, driven by tribalism, racial-and-religious insanity and ugly human greed. Wealth is created by technological transformation That's it. That's all there is. Turn seeds into bread (apply a farm and an agricultural economy). Turn mud and dirt into cities. Turn sunlight and rain into wine and women. (Again, farms, other women, farms and some science). Turn spectrum into information-carrying bandwidth. Turn U238 and waterfalls into electrical energy. And so on. And turn trees into books - and read them, so knowledge is not lost. And turn silicon into wafers and SDcards and ferric-oxide into disk-drives, so what is in the books, can be re-printed again - so our learning can continue across generations.

And turn steel, aluminum and electronics into rocket-ships, so we can move our efforts out into space, and spread the valuable virus of humanity. :)

[ Mar. 26, 2024 ] - Lambda, Frequency, and U308 - And weirder still... I'm trying to do some economic research but keep getting side-tracked by radio-research. Learned a tiny bit about LoRa and how it's kinky little chirps can encode data and fling it far. And trying to figure out the curious Wirtschaftsblunder - the economic self-blockade that Germany is going thru. The Germans - who historically have built the best industrial/machine/science technology, seem to be turning their backs on progress and science, and their historically successful ability to vector it into economic progress. This is curious and strange. The whole "Climate Change" fraudsters, and the Green "Socialist" nutjobs, have taken power in Germany, and they seem determined to drive the economy of the nation over a cliff. Pure electric cars are really kind of stupid. The path forward is obviously hybrid technology - multiple energy-conversion platforms with petrol, hydrogen, plus electricity and so on. What is so crazy, is the Germans closing of their last three nuclear-power plants - right at a time when they are planning this big shift to an electric-economy.

And they have these non-poluting coal-fired plants that burn clean coal, and scrub the emissions - but they are going to close these also. Their plan is to use wind-mills to generate their power - or natural gas perhaps? But the Green Goofs don't even like that. It's madness. The German economy is actually now de-industrializing, and their economic "growth" is about to go retrograde. And all this at the same time, when it looks like NATO will have to tool-up to engage Russia in a full-on war. There is madness driving this process - not sure where it is coming from, but it is madness.

And in an effort to think more about signal-extraction from noise, I took a detour into some radio studies. And wow - radio is getting very interesting. The LoRa thing is interesting - long-range, low-power packet-radio. And some very clever people doing some very clever things, with low-cost computer tech. LoRa communicates using these tiny up and down sloping little "chirps", which sit in very narrow high-frequency bands, and can be decoded by LoRA routers, and dropped onto Internet-of-Things type networks. It looks to have the potential to make the entire planet a humming ethernet. Radio is interesting, because it is tunable signals - and these signals can be sent, and received at distance. All the kinky stuff radio has to do to work, is similar to in some ways to what market action does. Signals can be decomposed with FFTs (Fast Fourier Transforms), and live well below the noise level.

Radio is almost magic. And so is nuclear power. We will need to exploit all this magic, and the true science behind it, to allow humanity to survive, crowded onto this little planet. The transmission and tuning and reception and filtering and decomposition of radio signals is not unlike what one has to do with market-signals, in order to hear them, also. The neural-network AI is the "radio" that we tune to hear the market signal.

In order to have an electric future, we are going to need more nuclear power stations. Wind-mills will not be sufficient. And solar only really works in cloud-free regions. And it does not work so good, at night (when it gets COLD and one needs to turn on the HEAT). Only nuclear is reliable. The price of uranium oxide, is running now $90-to-$100/pound, up from the mid-20's/lb at the beginning of 2020. Old mines are being re-opened. The future we are moving into, will require aggressive use of technology that lets investors see the signal.

The X-video of the Baltimore bridge being taken out by the "Dali" ship is wild. Hope the USA can get it cleaned up and rebuilt quickly. But it seems a visual metaphor for how everything is working now.

[ Mar. 24, 2024 ] - Death and the Made-Men - It just keeps getting worse in the "big world". The mass-murder terrorism in Russia is tragic and awful. Of course Ukraine had nothing to do with that - but it seems curious how all 4 terrorists were caught, and claim it was something they did for money. I just cannot keep from thinking how it all makes sense, if one adopts some really horrible assumptions. Perhaps it was a deep-secret FSB operation, designed to give Putin pretext to invoke Military Law?

Like the gas-pipeline explosion, and how Cortez burnt his own ships. Given that Navalny was murdered by Putin, and the sad and tragic recognition that Putin is perhaps maybe a truly pathological psychopathic person, (I don't really believe this is true) - but the whole logical string holds if you believe this to be the case. Putin has a deep-secret operation run from the FSB - the Russian Federal Security Bureau (the successor to the old KGB), and it recruits the hungry ISIS boys, and arranges the operation. It's pure, horrific terrorism - and it gives Putin and his inner-circle of gangster-henchmen, the pretext to enforce complete marshal-law clampdown on Russia. It gives him complete and absolute control of the place, and allows him to do anything he wishes. It's a rather classical spy-craft social-disruption project - albeit a horrific and tragically-awful one, executed against one's own people. But if you believe Putin to be a deep-pathology psychopathic person (which I actually do not), then it could be true. Or maybe it was just an ISIS action, run from Syria.

Either way, the geriatric folks fighting for control of the USA, and the nutjobs that dominate the European political landscape, have no action that they can take in response to whatever Putin now does in Russia. He could quite legitimately invade and capture Afghanistan now. (Russia tried this once before, and it did not work out so well.) But this time, it might play much easier.

What is really sad, is that Russia launched over 60 cruise-missiles and drones against Ukraine, in response to this horrific act of terrorism, which Ukraine had nothing to do with. That makes me think Putin's FSB might actually be behind the whole thing. I just don't think that Vladimir Putin is that completely gone that he would authorize such an awful attack on his own city and his own people. But I have been wrong before.

One has to consider alternate scenarios, and recognize that sometimes, your counter-party is just plain completely crazy-evil, and determined to bring down Gotterdammarung. We hope this is not the case here, and yet, are also aware that "hope" is typically a stupid response.

What Europe and USA and Canada and the UK and the rest of NATO now need to do, is start making focused and committed preparations for full-on action, against a Russia that seems determined to have full-on violent war with it's neighbours. They are so deeply sunk in the "Cult of the Strong Man", and so culturally accepting of this very-bad-political-model, that their actions are very predictable.

This is why it is obvious Ukraine would not do such a thing - they want to move towards some kind of peaceful end to the war madness - but Putin now has nothing restraining him. If this was an FSB deep-secret operation, then he really is crazy, and we had better have a plan for what *we* will do when he launches his full-on War-With-The-World.

What concerns us most, is that our political people are just not able to reason clearly about how and what we are so obviously tracking towards.

[ Mar. 20, 2024 ] - How Fragile We Are - This truly is the Golden Age of Deception and Disinfo. Quite hilarious. There is randomness, and there are patterns of impressive and consistent deception, that are not random at all. The world is a violent hellstorm of both the horribly evil, and the astonishingly beautiful. Poor sorry humans invent religion and tribal frauds, while the mathematicians discover the only near-truths that are possible to learn.

And we fly along, in our clustered murmurational oscillations, like a bunch of bird-brained starlings.

I track the nonsense that unfolds each day now, and find it is almost perfectly deterministic, despite the indications of wild randomness. The short-term variations of our statistical curve-projections are absolutely predictable. And they really should not be.

Technology is twisted, and markets are double-twisted now. They are so easy to dominate and fiddle-for-profit. Making processes robust and anti-fragile is actually very difficult to do. And it also reduces the benefit streams for those who are actively profiting by leaky weakness and tricky, sharp practices.

Hilarious. Or, like that dude said in the "Princess Bride": "Inconceivable!" I'm not complaining. The markets are crazy. You have to make a friend of Crazy, like Kurtz said in Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness". Time for a change. And Spring is the Time for Changes, as new growth hunkers waiting under the snow, ready to explode forth in fractal fury.

[ Mar. 19, 2024 ] - Geiger-Mueller Tubular Bells - Interesting how this approach to analysis actually works. The mental analogy of a Geiger-counter is about right. Having that device and finding a hot uranium deposit does not guarentee a motherlode. But without the device, one is at a rather significant disadvantage as a prospector.

I've been able to push my custom-built perceptron to exceed 90% accuracy. The trick is similar to the "checkpoint" feature in Tensorflow. You train the network to as far as it will go, where accuracy and sum-squared error curves flatline, and then you save the weights, and stop and re-calibrate the learning rate. Then, run for several thousand more epochs, adjusting the learning rate as the epochs evolve. This strategy works, and allows accuracy improvement. But of course, if you are using a noisy and randomness filled signal as input, you are just training down to noise.

You can tell that this is happening, as the evaluation datasets accuracy will fall off, as the network accuracy increases. I have two evaluation datasets - first is from 2017 to 2019, and the second one now is from 2019 data right up to last friday, March 15, 2024. When the network is run to generate predictive output from these, as the training accuracy goes above 90%, the predictive accuracy on the evalution datasets drops to 43% and 49% accuracy, respectively. This is exactly as expected. I have pushed the network to train to random noise, and it cannot predict outcomes usefully.

The literature is full of solutions to this dilemma. You stop the training "early", with a view to capturing the baseline signal, without allowing the network to become an "expert" on the local, random noise that rattles your signal around.

This trick works. It is both conceptually and philosophically rational-sensible - but it is a bit of an art, as there is no clear mechanical technique that can be applied. What I have found, is that early-stopping around 60 to 70% accuracy, allows the evaluation datesets to show 56 to 60% accuracy.

And this is a not-bad result. If one can engage a formal "game" with a 60% "edge", then the basic nature of the ludic process, implies that as long as a careful betting strategy is applied, then postive results should be obtained over time. You should be able to "play the game" profitably, and not have your lose all your chips.

This is how artificial-intelligence, or machine-learning, can help us. It can give the average fellow a chance to survive in the "investment game", and exploit a small edge that should be able to keep him from being destroyed. As a scientist and economic-researcher, and an investor and market speculator, I cannot stress enough just how critically important knowledge of this reality really is. Any and all "investments" are risky. And the risk is open-ended, with essentially undefined, unknowable outcomes. You cannot even know what the distribution of possible outcomes really looks like. (The outcome "variance" is essentially infinite.) Any investor or specutator entering a market-process, faces a grim "Hobson's Choice" - (ie. really no choice at all.) Invest funds, and risk ruin because your counter-parties have more wealth, power and resources than you have as a single, small investor, and will be likely to gain at your expense. Or, avoid possibly-attractive investments, and have one's small capital destroyed by inflation and currency debasement.

You must invest, to survive. And to invest successfully, you need to have a slight "edge" that gives you a better-than-50% chance of obtaining a successful (ie. profitable) outcome. In a world (and a marketplace) where everyone now has all information, there is little "edge" for anyone. That means simple randomness can reach out and kill anyone, anywhere, at anytime.

To improve your chances of success, you need to hack the data.

And to "hack the data", you can use machine-learning and AI. This is what we are doing. And it looks like it actually *can* be done.

[ Mar. 16, 2024 ] - Searching for a Heart (and a Signal!) That's True... First page shows yet another minor improvement in the NN-training experiments. I started with a tiny learning-rate, and then dialed it up as the epochs ran, and when it get's "over the hump', and training accelerates, I clamp the value, and epochs are allowed to evolve until training flatlines. This approach seems to work well, even if it makes for a messy curve.

Our custom-built Python/NumPy based backpropagating neural-network, fabricated using the matrix-math features of Python (works in both 2.7 and 3.x versions), and doing a 10000-epoch training run, now matches and slightly exceeds our old Xerion results. Starting with a very small learning rate (a factor applied to the error-delta matrix times the activation function derivative), and modify it to increase, as the epochs evolve, seems to work. And I clamp the increase once training accelerates, at around 1500 to 2000 epochs. The training runs reasonably fast. This tweaking of the learning-rate, as the training evolves, seems to be useful trick. Still need to figure out what the heck is stopping TensorFlow 2.x from training properly. I've tried *many* things - and yet we can never get more than 53 to 54 percent accuracy, on the TF 2.6 or TF 2.11 network, despite it having the same input date, what we believe is the same (rather simple) network definition, and so on. We tried different batch-sizes, different activation functions, and different optimizers to the "fit" function. TF 2.x plus Keras is just "broken" inside, (from our point of view) in a way we do not understand yet.

But this is fortunate for us, since it has meant that I put some real effort into building something that can run WITHOUT using a high-level "framework", and this is providing some really payback. I have already written an evaluator, which can read the trained network weights, output by the training exercise, construct the same network topology, apply the weights in the same manner as the forward-feeding operation, and get results. This allows us to take post-training data, and see how the network predictions perform. And of course, once we get the prediction-level up to something that we feel is effective, then we can use the evaluation-program to make actionable predictions at current t=0 time - ie. Right about Now! It this way, the neural-network can offer an effective "edge" to folks operating in environments of high uncertainty, but where weak signals are present in the immediate historical data.

So this is pretty exciting work. Getting the neural-network working, is like getting a geiger-counter, if you are searching for radium or uranium.

[ Mar. 12, 2024 ] - The `Rights` of Spring More small steps. We have our custom-built Python/NumPy only network training nicely, and results of a 7000 epoch training run are shown in the nearby screenshot. I can save and re-load the set of weights which define the action of the trained network, and have written an Evaluator, which then run the trained network on the post-training datasets for evaluation. We run GNU-APL to process datasets, and create the graphic visualizations of the results (which we really like!).

A lot of this work is two steps forward, and then 1.97 steps back. Or sometimes 5 steps back. But the concept works. Neural-nets let you craft models which can capture weak signals, and then build devices which let someone "see" the action of the very weak signal - if everything is set just right. It's like our laser experiments - the population-inversion which lets a nitrogen laser actually "lase" is curiously sensitive to minor configuration changes - literally sub-millimeter movements of the rails, or minor changes in capacitor dielectric, will directly determine whether the laser will work or not. And when the laser DOES work, the beam in Ultra-Violet light, which can only be seen if it hits a UV-senstive reactive surface.

But when it works, it works. Get the configuration right, and you can get results.

I downloaded the CYGWIN 64-bit environment (basically a full Linux implementation, configured to use Windows-NT filesystem and interface-devices (screen, keyboard, etc.) and runs on various Microsoft Windows versions. I've run this on old Windows XP boxes, as it was a nice way to have SSH and SCP work, and the "mintty" terminal window is nice to use, as is the facility for command-completion (probably the most useful productivity tool ever invented - and dates back to DECSystems and TOPS-20, the best O/S ever designed). CYGWIN is a genius thing, and the 64-bit implementation can be dropped easily onto a Windows-11 machine (as I have now determined). Instead of running WSL (Microsoft's Windows SubSystem for Linux), you can just install CYGWIN, and have access to a full Linux environment, GCC/G++ compilers, and about a million things that "just work" from the Linux/UNIX world.

Getting CYGWIN installed on the Windows-11 machine has allowed me to compile a Python 2.7 version from source, and also a version (1.7) of the GNU-APL. Getting the GNU-APL to work was quite a challenge. Minor code fixes were needed to get a clean compile, and then the first efforts kept causing "segmentation fault" errors when the APL.EXE was run. It looks like a problem with non-initialized global variables being referenced at startup. This was all with the GNU-APL 1.8 version. Using the 1.7 version has worked. I now have it running on the Windows-11 platform, and it has been compiled in full 64-bit mode, same as on the Linux machines. On a modern (64-bit) pure Linux platform, the APL will compile and link to a nice 34.7 megabyte binary executable, that works very well. On Windows-11, with CYGWIN, one needs the cygwin1.dll to be present, which provides the runtime interface so Linux/Unix programs can access the Windows-NT files and devices. But it really works. You start "mintty" (or click the CYGWIN terminal icon) and you get an X-term style window, black-background, and all your Linux/UNIX tools (vi editor, gcc/G++ compilers, ld, cat, cp, ls, bash shell scripts, gfortran, apl, ssh, scp and so on.)

With CYGWIN, from within the "Terminal" window, you get a Linux/UNIX bash prompt, and can enter: "uname -a",and get the version and flavour of CYGWIN you have installed. And you can install Python, directly from the CYGWIN install process.

Installing and configuring CYGWIN for Windows-11 is probably one of the easiest and most straightforward install systems I've ever used. It works well. You just go to the cygwin.com website, and download the setup file: setup-x86_64.exe on to your Windows machine, and run it. You then select a mirror-site to download from, and following the prompts to install what you need (select "catagory" from the packages-to-install screen). If you missed something you need (I missed getting "libtools" which is needed by the GNU-APL makefile-driven build process. No problem, just re-run setup-x86_64.exe, which should be in your C:\cygwin64 directory, which the install process will create.

The Mar-9/2024 log entry below has details about how to check the integrity of the "setup-x86_64.exe" file. It's SHA512 hash is:

       35E59301 DC2A14E3 5A666B32 97E7CF4F
       CF514EB1 B73F9D36 3406622A 34D51F7F
       123E822C CB77A73C 071E4BD0 523FE7A0
       D9294D98 98FE5633 C198CAA1 69D064CF

[ Mar. 9, 2024 ] - Spinning Wheels Modern software is a curious mixture of the brilliant and magical, combined with the wildly awful. It is comical just how bloated and buggered so many of the really good ideas and implementations have become.

And I am the ugly black kettle calling the pot nasty carbon-black... Hilarious.

This website still uses http instead of https - I need to create (or find?) an SSL-certificate and convert to proper, secure https, get in onto AWS and have https access only, yatta, yatta. On the list. Was looking at web-deployment stuff - Pantheon and the bloat-pile of Drupal and Wordpress etc/etc. FFS - there is no entry point into that swamp. It's like that forest in Lord of the Rings... (but it's all "On the list...")

The Windows-11 machine is making me crazy. It did another update last nite, dropped the Microsoft "Co-Pilot" icon on the taskbar. I thought "Yes, I will look at that - but in a minute, have to do some work,..." and the goddamn thing disappeared. Hilarious. It's dogfood, basically. Woof woof.

Like that song: "I hate the world today..." except no, we are alive, and the stocks are recovering as our models indicated they would. How the hell about that, eh? I love it when a plan comes together... Since, you know - we like to eat, and pay our bills and taxes... Hilarious.

Dev/hack notes: To make the Windows-11 platform usable, we have installed "CYGWIN" - the 64-bit version for Windows, of course. I copied over a 32-bit version from an old XP box, but that did not let "vi" editor work, which sucked. Threw in the towel, and did the full download & install. Yes, we thought about WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), but CYGWIN just WORKS. It is great. Got it running. Note: Here is a funny: The insane European GDPR ("General Data Protection Regulation" law/requirement, has just killed most of the SSL Key-servers. This truly sucks, since it means a simple: "gpg --recv-key (keyID)" command to get the company key from the old site called "keys.gnupg.net" does not work, since that site (and most other public GPG/PGP Key sites) have self-destructed, so they would not be in violation of this silly GDPR b0llsh/t law. This is what we call "unintended consequence".

Ok, so two Key-Server sites still exist: keys.openpgp.org and keyserver.ubuntu.com. The one at "keys.openpgp.org" seems to be borked or empty. Thank insane GDPR legal madness for this absurd and foolish situation. Killing PGP Keyservers is not conducive to enhancing internet bloody security, maybe? But so it goes.

I needed to get the key for cygwin.com, to check the authenticity of the cygwin setup file one needs to download, to install cygwin64 for Windows-11 (which works VERY well, so far... just got it working this morning...) SO, here is what we did:

$!--- Go to the cygwin.com site, and download the file:  setup-x86_64.exe
$!    This file gets dropped into "Downloads" directory on your Linux box.
$!    Before you "scp" the file to your new Windows-11 box, see if the damn thing
$!    is actually the right file - check it's PGP signature, and it's SHA512 hash:

$!    To check the signature, use the "keyserver.ubuntu.com" to get the public key
$!    for cygwin.com, and make sure it matches the stuff posted on their website:
$!    The SHA512 hash (from site: cygwin.com)

 35e59301dc2a14e35a666b3297e7cf4fcf514eb1b73f9d363406622a34d51f7f123e822ccb77a73c
 071e4bd0523fe7a0d9294d9898fe5633c198caa169d064cf  setup-x86_64.exe

$!    And to receive the public key for: cygwin.com

$ gpg --keyserver "hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com" --recv-key 1A698DE9E2E56300 
gpg: requesting key E2E56300 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key E2E56300: public key "Cygwin " imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)

$!--- Once you have imported the public key, use "gpg" this way to check it:

gpg --keyid-format=long --with-fingerprint --verify setup-x86_64.exe.sig setup-x86_64.exe
gpg: Signature made Wed 07 Feb 2024 12:43:04 PM EST
gpg:                using RSA key 1A698DE9E2E56300
gpg: Good signature from "Cygwin "
gpg: Note: This key has expired!
Primary key fingerprint: 5640 5CF6 FCC8 1574 682A  5D56 1A69 8DE9 E2E5 6300

$!--- what you want to see, in the blather above, is: "Good signature from "Cygwin "
$!    And then, check the hash, by using gpg to inspect the file's "message-digest", as follows:

 gpg --print-md sha512 setup-x86_64.exe
setup-x86_64.exe: 35E59301 DC2A14E3 5A666B32 97E7CF4F CF514EB1 B73F9D36 3406622A
                  34D51F7F 123E822C CB77A73C 071E4BD0 523FE7A0 D9294D98 98FE5633
                  C198CAA1 69D064CF

$!--- the gpg program reports the SHA512 hash in uppercase, but since it is a hexadecimal
string, no problem with alphabetic case, of course.  Note that the reported hash 
matches the file's hash from the website.  

$!--- now, here's the thing:  This process could still be easily hacked, if the website
at "https:/cygwin.com" was a DNS-fiddled fake site.  They could publish their hash for
the file, and your could check it, and it would match, of course.  That is why the damn
keyserver site and the pgp/gpg key-check is important, since a fake site would still
need to upload a fake key to the keyserver site. And this could happen.

The whole reason for getting CYGWIN for Windows-11, is to try to get Python2.7+Tcl/Tk built from source, so I can run "pip2" and download TensorFlow 1.4.0 to run on the Windows-11 machine. It runs fine on the Linux (CentOS) box, where I have both Python 3.6 and Python 2.7 installed. I have TF 1.4.0 for Python 2.7 and TF 2.6.0 for Python 3.6. And on the Windows-11 machine, we have TF 2.12 under Python 3.11. What is curious, is that my model runs *well* (to a 92% accuracy) on the CentOS Linux box, under TF 1.4.0, and on the same box, same data, running a slightly modified version of the model's definition, under TF 2.6 AND on TF 2.11 on the Windows-11 box, the TF 2.x and Python 3.x (which uses the "eager execution" model approach, instead of network-specification and then session-run as on TF 1.4.0), the model trains only to 53% accuracy.

I've tried every parameter to tweak, other than changing the dense-network neural-net model on both, with same activation and stochastic gradient descent optimizers. The models are specified EXACTLY the same. And so they should - really should - work mostly the same - but they are WILDLY different, with the modern TF 2.6 and TF 2.11 (under Python 3.x) running badly - so bad that one would typically give up, and seek a different thought-model.

But on both old Xerion-UTS (Dr. Hinton's team's thing from late 1990's at UofToronto) and also TensorFlow 1.4.0, the model works *GOOD*, training down to a high-level of accuracy on both platforms, old and new. This of course does not mean that the model is useful or accurate in the real world - all that depends on how the post-training evaluation data performs.

And what is even more curious, is that the SAME model, with SAME DATA and the SAME dense (fully-connected nodes) network structure - in a CUSTOM BUILT NEURAL NETWORK that only uses NumPY matrix-math and classical back-propagation to optimize itself - that model ALSO does a consistent 84 to 85% training accuracy! Something is wrong with modern 2.x series Keras/Tensorflow.

And since I have a non-black-box version now of my model, and it works not-bad, I am motivated to continue with this investigation.

What the hell is wrong with "TensorFlow 2.x" ??? I've been deep in the docs, and cannot find anything I am doing wrong. There is a page re. conversions from TF 1.x to TF 2.x. Read it all in detail. Really. It looks like the "Keras" definitional network-graph code for TF 2.x is messed up or broken or has a tricky "Gotcha!" deep inside it, so that only the authors can now run TF successfully. (This is a trick behind modern "open-source" software now, which is often about has "open" as Fort Knox (does that place even still exist? Maybe it's empty...) Nothing surprises us anymore...

If/when I find out what the hell is going on with TF, I will post it here. And just a side-note. I have sourced a whole book full of example Tensorflow code - from trivial examples to detailed deep-learning stuff with MNIST data, and so on. ALL the examples run fine on TF 1.4.0, and it seems NONE of the examples will run on TF 2.0, due to various in-built (designed-in, by planned action... let's be clear, this is not some "accidental" bug or error - this is careful, planned strategy by the Google-folk who built this thing) changes.

"Houston! We have a problem..." (and it's name is: "Google") :)

[ Mar. 3, 2024 ] - Making Our Own Horseshoes The modern products are wonderful, and yet with the deep-learning can come deep-uncertainty. We are more comfortable with code we can craft ourselves, and run experiments with that let us make a slow (yet steady) convergence on that which is both reasonably accurate, economically semi-rational, and perhaps able to be deployed effectively in a cash-flow positive scenario.

And with those factors in mind, we've used APL and Python/NumPy to craft a neural-network machine-learning product which can be configured and trained and evaluated without resorting to complex "black-box" systems over which we have no control, and a manifest inability to completely understand. (The documentation for TensorFlow - a target that is moving at velocity - is proving to be curiously unhelpful in letting us answer some basic questions about how to migrate from TF 1.4 to the version 2.x series. Our prototype model under TF 1.4, which trains very well, manages to train only to 60% level, under TF. 2.x serious runs. We cannot determine why this is the case, so far. We will press on in that direction, but in the meantime, I have built a simple, and yet trainable, network model with Numpy, Python and the GnuAPL.

It trains in a noisey manner, and we are encouraged by this approach.

We hope to attach this code to the old Xerion output from our economic Time Series Manager, and build a small edge for some portfolio work we have to do. Market action is getting very curious, and looks as though it could get even a tad more frisky. A bubble is being allowed to grow, perhaps due to the current political environment, as much as for any other reason.

Here are the visualization results of our home-built network, running on a bundle of historial data from 1995 to 2017: