Have You Bought The BRRR?

These days, individuals who, like John Locke, “love truth for truth’s sake,” are far and away in the minority.  Out of the bowels of America’s higher learning institutions comes a young populace with sullied brains and fanatical hearts.

At a hefty price tag now being piled on taxpayers, they learned not how to think; but, what to think.  And in doing so, they’ve retarded their mental abilities.

Those who skipped college to learn a trade are more readily able to discern an objective truth using basic common sense.  They weren’t subjected to an abundance of rubbish like their college educated counterparts.  This affords them the freedom to independently separate fact from fiction.

Debasement of thought goes hand in glove with the decline of the west.  In fact, with open eyes and a listening ear, one can observe that as society degrades, reality is distorted in unnatural and fallacious ways.

Over the last decade, for example, pronouns have been corrupted to authenticate non-binary gender designations.  ‘They’ is used in the singular to convey the unspecified.  The supposed social enlightenment of it all takes priority over violations of both biological fact and English grammar. Continue reading

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Ghosts of the Alexandria Hotel

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower.  Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?  For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’”

– Luke 14:28-30

Seize the Towers

The highlight of the 2024 Grammys last month was the duet by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs of Chapman’s 1988 hit “Fast Car.”  The performers teamed up to deliver several minutes of musical magic.

The otherwise hollow affair was held at the posh Crypto.com Arena – formerly known as the Staples Center – in downtown Los Angeles.  This is one of the few places in LA that will pull the rich and famous away from their protected westside enclaves in Malibu Colony and Beverly Hills.

The exterior view from the arena’s Star Plaza entrance delivers a fabulous, Los Angeles-style aesthetic.  One that simultaneously pleases and lacerates the eye.

Beyond the foreground statues of famous LA athletes sits the Oceanwide Plaza development.  This trio of incomplete luxury towers was abandoned in 2019.  That was when the developer, Oceanwide Holdings ran out of money. Continue reading

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Day of Reckoning

“Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth.  Money is time.”

– George Gissing

Divine Disorder

Time, like money, offers a unique marker.  Something to count and compare.  Something to use for measuring progress – and failure.

What is your annual income?  How many hotdogs did Joey Chestnut eat in 10 minutes on July 4, 2021?  What is the year-to-date return of bitcoin?  What is the max MPH of a 1969 Ford Mustang at sea level?

In fact, the tick tock of time all seems so systematic, arranged, and orderly.  Almost a direct proof of deism.  Sixty seconds make a minute, 60 minutes make an hour, 24 hours make a day, and one day equals one complete rotation of the planet earth.

Roughly every 30 days the moon orbits the earth – which is one month.  Then every 12 months the earth orbits the sun – which is one year.

So far so good, right? Continue reading

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Wall Street Clustery

In the buildup to this week’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) report we came across an article on MarketWatch.  The author, Jeffry Bartash, closed his remarks with a brief contrast of the CPI with the Federal Reserve’s preferred price gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index.

According to Bartash, the PCE index gives less weight to housing than the CPI.  Housing costs are the most significant monthly expense for many people.  For whatever reason, the PCE index developers at the Commerce Department don’t think this is an important factor for understanding price changes.

Maybe this is why the Fed prefers the PCE index over CPI.  Another likely reason is that the PCE index also considers shifts in consumer behavior as a result of higher prices.  As elaborated by Bartash:

“A grocery shopper, for example, might buy ground beef instead of ribeye to save money.  Or a shopper in a hardware store might buy a cheaper imported tool instead of a more costly American-made one.”

These supposed shifts in consumer behavior may help fabricate the PCE index more to the Fed’s liking.  In reality, they make for poor assumptions as to what consumers actually do. Continue reading

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