Risky Business

One might wonder why it is that Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts wish so much to kill SS, Medicare, and Medicaid? I mean, they are Christians right? Succour the poor and all that? I mean, other than just pure cruelty, what's in it for the Oligarches? Cruelty is Good, but Moolah is better!!

So, the answer is as obvious as the nose on your face: risk. In particular, shifting as much as possible from Uncle Sugar, who can handle it; if He wants to. There was lots of bleating when the Bond Vigilantes went to work when Mad Dictator Don went total batshit with his 'foreign countries pay the tariffs, so let's make them pay more'. Except, of course, Batshit J. Moron is just that. Seems to have been playing that tune in his head for about 4 decades. Instant Great Trumppression is something not even the ball-less Congresscritters will tolerate. The Right Wingnut talking heads pooh-poohed the plain fact that household investment assets took it in the neck. 401(K) and such. 65 year olds bleating that they can't retire, since they don't have (with the death of unions) defined benefit retirement plans. Gone the way of the dodo. Just some moolah socked away in melting 401(K).

So, what's in it for the oligarches? Well... follow the money. If SS disappears, what's a middle class unit to do? Why, jump into the stock market with both feet!! All that free moolah for brokers and such. Imagine the Chrismas Goose of the SS trust fund nest egg out there to be pillaged by them guys. Guess how much it amounts to today? A little bit, just $2.8 Trillion Bongo Bucks. Imagine the brokerage industry getting its hands on that? Boy howdy!! They'll fleece tens of millions of retail plungers out of that in no time!! Yessirree Bill.

There's a reason civilized countries have pensions financed and run by the Damn Gummint. And it's simple: investing intelligently takes a lot of time, a lot of specific knowledge, and, most of all, a stock pile of Bongo Bucks so that Mr. Jones and family can reliably pack it in for retirement knowing that the expected Bongo Bucks will flow as promised even if there's a Trumppression. Not so much if Mr. Jones, who's just a bare assed plumber, has no real stock pile. If there's a Trumppression, Mr. Jones and his family are shit out of luck. The oligarches have gotten away with Mr. Jones' nest egg. "We're so sorry the market crashed, but we had nothing to do with it, and we decided to keep your moolah. Have a nice day."

No Fucking Way - part the seventh

Well... I'd be willing to bet a vente lemonade that the sub-GED crowd living in them there hollers never expected this. The, mostly, only access to some level of healthcare is going poof. Serves them right for continuing to elect rich white guys at all levels of governance.

Funding for rural hospitals would be hit particularly hard. The draft budget would eliminate Rural Hospital Flexibility Grants, State Offices of Rural Health, At-Risk Rural Hospitals Programs Grants and the Rural Residency Development Program.

It's hard enough, even under Woke Politicians, for the sub-GED shitkickers to get any kind of healthcare. With Medicaid on the ropes, may be the sub-GED rural shitkickers will finally, finally figure out that it really, really is just the Woke Politicians who give a shit about their plight. shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw sure don't. What a surprise. As Heinlein observed: "ignorance is curable, stupidity is forever."

President Donald Trump's firings at the Department of Health and Human Services included the entire office that sets federal poverty guidelines, which determine whether tens of millions of Americans are eligible for health programs such as Medicaid, food assistance, child care, and other services, former staff said.

You ain't the Damn Gummint's definition of Poor, you ain't got no Medicaid. Among others. Hell, if shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw get their way, even a Red Blooded American, who pisses off either of them, will end up in El Salvador.

Foot, Meet Bullet

My time with DB2/LUW has been with community edition (free-ish) 11.5 for some time. Fact is, I acquired this M900 (IBM) pc to outfit it with 16 gig of memory, which is the max supported in 11.5. Since I'm going through the agony of upgrading ubuntu (the image has been moved from 8.04 onward, with the original root partition too small to upgrade further; new machine cloned drive, and so on). So it seemed opportune to have another look at DB2. Imagine my surprise to find the max memory support has been cut to 8 gig in today's shipping edition. They, of course, spin this as a favor to users. Yeah, right.

By most accounts/metrics, DB2 is at the back of the RDBMS pack. They invented the damn thing! So they shoot themselves in the foot. PG is ok, but it's a process model database. MySql is not so ok, what with the corporate nonsense.

Let's Bet

So, they've caught the dude that burned up the Pennsylvania Governor's manor. Let's all bet on whether or not he's a MAGAnaut. Seems more likely than not. Second choice is Real Anti-Semite.

You Might Not Know

It appears, for a long time, that John Q. Public has a false notion of how the Damn Gummint interest rate works. First, and most importantly, the USofA doesn't have a Gummint Bank to rule all others. Most countries (1st world and lower) do, the Bank of England is one such. Our Fed doesn't set any interest rate, at all. Imagine that? The closest lever it has is the so-called Overnight or Interbank Lending rate. But this is just a benchmark which the Fed promulgates to commercial entities. "Pretty please." Of course, if an entity thumbs its nose...

Ok, you might ask, where does an interest rate come from? Well... it depends, but most importantly, it isn't like when you get a credit card (20% ish), or a car loan (6.35% for new and 11.62% for used; people buying used are high risk deadbeats I guess), or a house mortgage (6.62% 30 year). All of those rates are given to you by the lender, period.

Selling Uncle Sugar's Treasuries doesn't work that way. First off, once a note is sold "to the public", it remains an asset for sale forever, well until retired. So the value at which a note sells for this minute is not likely to be exactly the same value shown on the face of the note (you're not likely to ever see one printed like an Abe). So what, you might rejoin!!! It sold for 4.5% at auction last week, so it's a 4.5% note. Nope.

The key word there is "auction". Treasury announces the so-called coupon (what Treasury pays the holder every so often) of, say $5 for a (nominal) $100 note. Normal citizens can't directly buy one or two, but if they could they don't really buy a $100 note because the actual price will be determined by the auction process. So the earned interest rate will depend on the coupon / sale value. If they sell at $100, then the earned rate is 5%, just what Treasury expected. But it doesn't have to be.

More to the point, all those active notes are on sale every minute just like Tesla stock, and the current sale price (and thus the earned interest) is what the trading public wishes to pay. More than $100 and the buyer gets less than 5%; conversely, lower and more.

So, once the implications of Mad Dictator Don's insane tariff regime began to sink in with the hedge funds, and retirement funds, and Japan, and billionaires they all went bananas. According to some reporting Japan (and not China, surprise) was sufficiently pissed at the gag that they sold off reams and reams of Treasuries. Pretty much all at once. Treasury prices sank, implied interest rate soared, and the financial Daddy Warbucks sent Mad Dictator Don a message: "cut the shit, asshole". And he did.

Treasury does auctions, under usual circumstances four times a year. Guess when the next auction (again, normally) is up? May. Guess what happens to that $5/$100 note auction if the trading market keeps dropping the price of Treasuries? Uncle Sugar takes it in the nuts. Expecting $X billion but ending up with $(X - Y) billion instead. Not Good Eats. Even Batshit J. Moron could read those big block crayon letters on the wall. He loves him some debt, and he's gonna need gobs of it to pay hisself and fellow millionaires and billionaires that juicy tax cut he promised. Again. Oops.

Thus endeth the Tariff War. May be. He's so unhinged that he could well try it again soon. Stay tuned.

DIE Motherfucker

Mad Dictator Don has no idea that his Tariff Program is really just another DEI effort.

D is for diverisity, which for the tariffs means each tariffed country gets its own special treatment.

E is for equity, which for the tariffs that every country is treated equally, 10%, until Mad Dictator Don decides that it's really ripping us off and he ups the tariff.

I is for inclusion, which for the tariffs means everybody into the pool, including those uninhabited penquin islands, crafty those funny birds.

But...

Just for shits and grins, I picked the big kahuna of the Banana Republics, Ecuador, to see what's in store.

So, they get the 10% whack, so E, kinda. Turns out, Ecuador has a trade deficit (their USofA imports exceed their exports to the USofA), so why are they worthy of tariff? And so it goes.

We really, really need to protect our domestic banana ranches from this ruinous competition. Don't we>? I mean, bidnezz critters always, but always, claim the mantel of 'competition' when it suits their agenda, almost always to defend obscenely high profits or equally obscenely low wages. Or, in the case of Mad Dictator Don stiffing his hired help. But let some alien force provide an equal, or better, good or service and that must not be allowed to stand. We must defend our banana ranches!!

We Have a Drug Problem

Well... I was busy fighting with a bad tempered M900 and ubuntu, waiting to rant about Mad Dictator Don's drug issue. Imagine my luck when the wholly reliable Derek Lowe picks up the cudgel. You must read. It's longer than your usual innterTubes post, but the essence is in the details. One last offering shows he knows a bit about econ.

That's because the dollar was considered the most important reserve currency in the world, and the yields on US Treasuries set the pace for interest rates around the globe.

Long ago, some finance minister or such complained that the USofA's major unfair advantage (and still is, btw) was the right/ability to borrow in our own currency. That might sound like a small detail. It isn't. There was a conflagration amongst the Right Wingnut econ types when Nixon detached the US buck from gold, and, so it was opined, shitcanned Bretton Woods. What a stupid thing to do, they said. Not a bit of it. "Ditching" Bretton Woods was the best advantage the US Buck ever got. That simple act made the US Buck the globe's reserve currency. And we stole it. China's goal is to take that status for themselves. Idiots like Mad Dictator Don doesn't get it. (He claims that his BA in 'real estate econ' from Wahrton makes him a genius! Yeah.) We are "Great" not because we have more nukes than anyone else, or fiddle many elections in the second and third worlds, but because the US Buck is the basis of global trade. Toss that away, and we're, at best, a second world country.

Over the last couple of months, at least prior to the latest spasm, the notable action was that the Big Bucks crowd was moving vast amounts of money to Treasuries.

Thought For The Day - 8 April 2025

In classical econ, wages are assumed to be equal to the marginal revenue product. In the real world, wages are determined by political power. Get rid of unions, OSHA, class action litigation, and other worker protections, and wages go down. Allow unions to wield some counter-vailing power against capital, and wages go up. It's no coincidence that mamufacturing employment has fallen with the kneecapping of unionization. It can be argued that union wage gains are just the extortion by unions of higher wages out of the extortion of high prices by big bidnezz. How much of manufacturing labor can be categorized as highly skilled, and thus worthy of middle class earnings?

Here's one report that belies the Right Wingnut myth.

Despite the prominence of the skills-gap debate, a new paper co-written by a University of Illinois expert in labor economics and workforce policy finds that the demand for higher-level skills in U.S. manufacturing jobs is generally modest.
[my emphasis]

As it happens, my rather motley career path has included drone assembly line work. All of those tasks were learnable in a day or two, sometimes an hour or two. That's the main reason manufacturing capitalists always flee to the most welcoming 3^rd world countries on offer. That and no labor laws.

The poor, misbegotten sub-GED crowd, envious of educated middle-class status are willing to buy Mad Dictator Don's baloney. Sure, American capital would willingly pull their factories over here, over here. Just one thing, though: pay workers what they pay in Vietnam (or wherever), get rid of worker protection laws, and subsidize any losses. What could be better? Kind of like what he did for shitkickers last time he tariffed China, who retaliated by squelching ag imports from the USofA. $28 billion. Who said welfare isn't in the DNA of the GOP?

Let Elon Run Your Money

The Musk Ox is so transparently dumb (he has that vacant visage so often seen in HS dropouts) that I've not felt the need to confirm this obvious truth. But times change, I was impelled to let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles. And what did I find? He's as dumb as a sack of hair. It's been known for a long time that the only thing he made from scratch was PayPal; or so the PR says. As Tesla, he didn't create that either. (In this quote, X.com isn't twitter, but the pre-cursor to PayPal.)

In January 2000, it was discovered that a security flaw allowed users of X.com who had the account number and bank routing number of any other bank account, even at other banks, could move money from that other account to their own and withdraw it. The problem existed for a month before it was discovered and corrected.

Such a fucking genius.

The Office of Data Integrity in Action

Regular reader knows my thought on the risk NSA pays to the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts in general and Mad Dictator Don specifically. Now Lunatic Laura Loomer appears to have instigated a data purge at NSA. Of course she would.

Believe it or don't: the NSA remit is to hoover up all electronic comms to and from, but recorded from, anyone not in the USofA. That, of course, includes all the chatter betwixt Mad Dictator Don, his minions, Vlad and his minions going back forever. Where's Edward Snowden when it matters? We American People need to know whether Mad Dictator Don has and is selling out our country. Full stop.

Thought For The Day - 3 April 2025

Long time readers will recall one of the memes of these missives: anarchy favors the rich. The Left Wing Lunatic Fringe has been frothing at the mouth over Mad Dictator Don's tariff regime. They can't or won't figure out the rationale of what, from a macro point of view, is full blown stupidity.

I can't bring myself to type the needed words to describe what he, or as likely, his staff of simpletons concocted

To determine how much higher those nations' rates should be, the White House says it calculated the size of each country's trade imbalance on goods with the United States and divided that by how much America imports from that nation.

It then took half that percentage and made it the new tariff rate.

That is just idiocy.

Now, Mad Dictator Don claims to have a high-quality econ degree from The Wharton School. Well, he's about a third right. 1) he didn't go to Wharton, he got a hall pass through the back door after two years at Fordham, where he did go. 2) that degree he got wasn't a rigorous econ curriculum (I went through that at about the same time); it was not the MBA that Wharton has been famous for, for years, but just something called real estate economics as a BA. 3) at the time, that program accepted nearly anyone who could fog a mirror out of high school; they didn't want him.

Once again, with feeling: only a fucking moron thinks that the foreign entities, governments and businesses, send the US Treasury a check once a month or quarter to pay the tariff bill. It appears that Mad Dictator Don made up that shit decades ago, and he's sticking to it. Tariffs are a, very regressive, sales tax. Full stop. And will harm the sub-GED crowd, Mad Dictator Don's base, the most. Ya know, those folks who think 'experts' are out to get them, and who think that book larnin is a waste of time at best and evil most of the time. Measles? Just load up on vitamin A. Covid? Ivermectin.

Moreover, if the intent is some (as yet undescribed) plan to re-shore business in the Red Blooded USofA, by what law of modern economics will the average oligarch pay middle class wages for average assembly line drones????? The plain fact is that American oligarchs could have paid such wages decades ago, the Damn Gummint didn't prohibit them from doing so. The Damn Gummint (mostly the Right Wingnut version), throttled unions about that time, which lowered manufacturing wages, yet the oligarchs still shipped the jobs off-shore. Again: what's going to compel them to pay good wages now if they do re-shore? Case in point (read it up): Boeing's attempt to cut cost in South Carolina; pure disaster.

As many pundits, not just this author, have pointed out: the main beneficiaries of the fucked up tariffs will be those few oligarchs with on-shore production, who'll simply raise their prices to match the higher tariff-induced import prices. They're not so dumb as a sack of hair to leave all that moolah on the table. Will their worker drones see any of it? In a pig's eye.

What Mad Dictator Don just about guarantees is Trumpcession. Whether it's just a really bad Great Recession or full blown Depression isn't yet known. Once again, I remind gentle reader of Smoot-Hawley

The ultraprotectionist Smoot-Hawley Act is widely blamed for deepening and prolonging the worst chapter in U.S. economic history. In a 1993 debate with independent presidential candidate Ross Perot on Larry King Live, then VP and free-trade advocate Al Gore brought an antique picture of the two senators, mocking them for a disastrous policy prescription that "sounded reasonable at the time." Indeed, for the general public and a wide swath of trade experts, going the Smoot-Hawley route is the economic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

The oligarchs, mostly, kept partying in speakeays all the way through.

Feets Don't Fail Me Now

It was, IIRC, Dr. McElhone who introduced me to the saying, "the good people vote with their feet." 'Good' is, of course, fungible. Some take a broad view, while others keep it to the very straight and narrow. As in minded, by the way.

Speaking of straight, here's a report on the bent among us.

"With everything going on in my previous country, I didn't have much choice," Kasatkina said about choosing to switch nationality, per Reuters. "For me, being openly gay, if I want to be myself, I have to make this step, and I did it."

Doesn't say why she chose Aussie rather than some European enclave. May haps she knows more about Vlad the Impaler's plans than the rest of us? I expect we'll see more Americans leaving the Red states for the relative 'freedom' of the Blues. And so far as killing all that funding from Blue to Red through DC, well we in the Blue will welcome the lifting of the burden. Will Red state administrations work to replace the lost moolah? HA.

I Told You So - 1 April 2025

And not, alas, an April Fool's Joke. The real skinny.

In the week ending on March 8, the number of homes for sale in the Washington, D.C. area market grew by 56.2 percent compared to a year earlier, Realtor.com found.

It was the third consecutive week of rising inventory, after the number of homes for sale in the metropolitan area grew by 46.5 percent year-over-year in the week ending on February 22, and by an even higher 48.3 percent year-over-year in the week ending on March 1.

Next, we'll find out that those private equity monsters that have been buying up distressed houses all across this great land, will have lunch on worthless, out of work, bureaucrats.

No Fucking Way - part the sixth

Yet another shoe has dropped. How many shoes does a centipede have? And, just as last time, shitler is bailing out the Rednecks. Farmers first, of course.

A sponsor of the measure, Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican who owns an 850-acre farm in Washington State, said his colleagues had felt unable to act while the border remained chaotic. "That excuse no longer exists," Mr. Newhouse said. "I truly think this is the Congress that we can make it happen."

Who said they can't find folks? Oh, they can't find American folks who'll work for starvation wages like those Mexicans?

And, then, there's the direct bailout, just like 2018.

The early discussions offer a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Trump's expansive tariffs could unleash financial devastation throughout the U.S. agricultural industry, a crucial voting base that the president similarly tried to safeguard during his 2018 trade war with China.

So, ya tink egg prices are bad now? Just you wait.

Such a rescue package ultimately proved expensive, with the government shelling out about $23 billion after China imposed high retaliatory duties on soybean, corn, wheat and other American imports beginning in 2018.
...
But the price tag this time could prove even higher, since Mr. Trump has threatened to target many countries, including American allies like Europe, Canada, Mexico and Japan. The potential scope of their collective retribution could inflict deeper, more lasting harm on American businesses.

Or, as shitler has said

"When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win," Trump tweeted Friday morning. "When we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore — we win big. It's easy!"

Once again, with feeling: "Hey shitler, show us just one wire transfer that pays the tariff from just one foreign gummint or company!" Whataya say man?

What only a few of the pundits have told the American People: when tariffs increase the price of a foreign good/service, domestic producers follow along. And, why not? Why leave money on the table? Anyway, who'll tell differnce between French Champagne and that Gallo ersatz version at about the same high price?