A corrupt president with criminal immunity to everything but impeachment, as granted by the Supreme Court. ICE thugs in Minneapolis and an unwarranted attack on Jerome Powell that threatens the integrity of the Federal Reserve Bank. Not to mention Venezuela, Greenland, Ukraine and Gaza. With whatever is in the Epstein files yet to be revealed. Under the circumstances, this is the movie for me.
Author: DOuG pRATt
Stalled Sunny Songs
This superbly produced single was released on April 12, 1969. Opening like a Four Seasons song, it should have been a top ten hit on Billboard, but it peaked at #32. Sisters Bonnie and Pat Lamdin provide the glorious vocals.
Here’s one, from 1966, that didn’t even chart on Billboard. Sincerely, this was how it felt being young in Christian Fellowship.
Don’t Be a Masshole
Last I recall, Massachusetts has some 320 350 communities. Matt says the name of my town. Jimmy is from Joe Sinnott’s town, Saugerties, NY.
A Guy Who Can Draw, on the Politics of a Guy Who Couldn’t Draw
Artist Bill Sienkiewicz, who began his career drawing comic books, talks about his interaction with Scott Adams.
Never Before
I have LaserDiscs that suffer from laser rot and burned CDs with more errors than music. But I’ve never before had trouble with a manufactured CD. Until Never Before, a gift from a couple of not-so-secret Santas at work back in ’89.
I popped that Byrds disc into the Panasonic DVD player I use for CDs. Spin and click, spin and click, without reading the table of contents. Uh, oh. The deck is over 20 years old, so is it starting to fail?
In the Sony Blu-ray player, that’s only a few years old, the CD did the same thing. Spin and click with no playback. One more test in the DVD/CD drive of the old Dell tower PC confirmed the problem must be with the disc.
The album is on Lyrion Music Server in lossless WMA format. I was thinking of ripping it again into lossless FLAC. Would I have to resort to using FFMPEG to convert the files? What about trying the Samsung USB DVD/CD drive I bought twelve years ago for $30?
Success! Never Before played and ripped. What was the trouble it gave the other players? I put it back in the Panasonic DVD deck and… it played fine.
I left the CD in the player, turned it off and, 24 hours later, turned it back on. The player spun the disc and clicked.
Back into the Samsung it went. It played, I skipped around the disc a bit, took it out, then put it back in the Panasonic. No problem with playback.
So, what the heck is going on? Is the heat of the laser in the player that’s able to get past the starting point doing something to the reflective aluminum surface to flip bits, so they stay correct long enough for transplant to the other player?
Private Money, Reckless Capitalism
I wrote this a while ago, before Warren Buffett retired, and lost track of it. Now it’s late, but I think still timely.
I asked Google AI this question:
“why don’t investment banks follow Warren Buffett’s advice?”
This is the summary of what it said:
“Investment banks do not follow Warren Buffett’s advice primarily because their business models and objectives, such as a focus on short-term performance and high-volume transactions, are fundamentally different from Buffett’s long-term, value-investing strategy at Berkshire Hathaway.”
So, I guess short-term investing is reckless and long-term investment is conservative? Trump wants interest rates to return to zero. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls for less banking regulation.
Treasury Secretary Bessent calls for looser regulations for the U.S. financial system
Will we be able to get through another financial crisis without “capitalizing the gains, and socializing the losses?”
I disagree with a lot of what fund manager and author Rucshir Sharma says in that installment of Wall St. Week. He makes the argument that everything would be great if we stuck to Adam Smith’s original vision. Ideologues of every persuasion, including Supreme Court justices, are mistaken in their adherence to whatever it is they consider “originalism” to be.
In that same video, Bloomberg’s John Authers says that, “Capitalism and Democracy have a symbiotic relationship.” Not always, as seen in China. It’s possible, if not likely, that China is already practicing Capitalism 4.0.
Authers also says the capital markets indicated the big shifts in modern Capitalism. I’d say that Wall Street isn’t a barometer of trouble, it causes the trouble.
My retirement money is in IRA CDs. I have no investments, as such, other than a modest holding in private shares at my former place of employment. That investment would be worth vastly more today if not for the HITECH Act, which was part of ARRA in 2009.
HITECH was a prime example of Industrial Policy. That’s when a government decides to intervene in a particular industry.
Trump’s brand of industrial policy is, of course, transactional, as seen in his recent deal with Nvidia. Recently on Marketplace, Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, had this comment about what is becoming, under Trump, state capitalism.