By The Numbers - part the thirty second

Regular reader has seen here the observation that all those risk taking, entrepreneurial capitalists are just not. They're, to the manjack, scardey cats who dump lots and lots of moolah into 'risk free' gummint instruments. Early reports of what SVB was doing with its moolah led this manjack to conclude that it was among the large pigs slurping at Uncle Sugar's trough. Investing in the USofA's tech future? Not.

Well, reporting now confirms the tale.

SVB, as Silicon Valley Bank is known, had a massive share of its assets — 55% — invested in fixed-income securities, such as U.S. government bonds.

So, how does that compare to banks overall? The Fed report has some numbers (Table 4 - 15 Mar) fur instance

Bank credit - 16,351.2
Gummint bonds - 4,220.0

Numbers in billions, naturally. The divide equals: 26%. Now, the Fortune report doesn't say exactly how that 55% was calculated, so this could be some bit of apples and oranges, but not more than double.

Forward thinking visionaries, my constipated sphincter.

Thought For The Day - 25 March 2023

What with MTG visiting the Insurrectionists and Mad Dictator Don threatening "death and destruction" if NYPD hooks him up, it's once again worth noting who got what in 2020.

67 million more people lived in counties won by Biden (197.9 million) than in those won by Trump (130.3 million).

IOW, they ain't no Red Wave, and this ain't no Right Wing country. At least, when all eligible voters are allowed to vote. And, as has been the case since 1789, the conflict remains the educated urbanites versus the dumb shitkickers in the empty parts. Let's Make America White Again.

NIL and Void

The rich get richer, and the poor have kids.
-- My Pappy (1915-1991)/often

The name, image, and likeness moolah parade has been going on for some time, and I guess it's high time for these missives to address it.

Before it became real, only a glint in the eyes of atheletes who are uneducable, and don't care that they are, and hoop and foobah teams, it was clear to Your Humble Servant that the tenuous notion of student-athlete was finally shredded. One stated positive was that this would allow student-athletes to move school about as easily as coaches. Another was that said student-athletes had been treated as Plantation Negroes by the NCAA and schools for far too long, and NIL amounted to just reparations; never mind that regular Plantation Negroes never were so treated. Finally (so far as this essay is concerned), that non-Power Conference schools would have a better shot at getting elite student-athletes, since they could, indirectly by regulation, pay them for their sporting skills.

Doesn't seem to be working out that way. The Power Conference schools have more moneyed Booster Groups over the years, and still do. The notion that Boosters at Power Conference schools were the only ones making sub rosa payments is nonsense.

The rich will still get richer. College athletics, at least in the important sports of hoops and foobah, will continue to coalesce into an eventual oligopoly of a handful of conferences, which will eat up 99.44% of teeVee moolah.

Bomani Jones, who was outspoken enough to get minimized (and mostly off the teeVee part) at ESPN, has an op-ed piece in today's (dead trees version) NYT slamming the whole NCAA/NIL fiasco. Worth reading, I'd say, but he doesn't ponder the ultimate result. That's what this essay is for.

As an example, here's a report on Nebraska foobah from the horse's mouth. So to speak.

Despite winning 19 games in the past five seasons, Nebraska football posted a profit of more than $60 million last school year.

Student-athletes? My dirty sphincter. Except for USC, the rest of this top 10 are all Red state, aka taxpayer subsidized, schools.

[update 26 March]
Just saw the interview with the Chuckster on "60 Minutes", likely on youTube or wherever soon. He was asked about the state of college hoops, and said it was awful and the problem is that NIL, in a few years, will winnow college hoops to 25 schools that have locked up the NIL money. I think he's correct.

Artificial Energy - part the second

What's it gonna be now?
How willful things are building insight
-- The Byrds/1968

Once again, into the fray.

Let's start with a piece from a couple of years ago. Naturally, the writer and I see eye to eye.

The first episode dealt with AI in healthcare, one of the areas that was to be The Killer App for AI and HPC. Hasn't happened, instead we get ChatGPT, and an uproar. Why is that?

So, what happened? IBM's Big Deal, Watson Healthcare, was supposed to be the primo example of The Killer App. IBM sold it off for the price of a ham sandwich and a bag of crisps.

We've ended up with ChatGPT, which works by sticking its data straw deeply into the innterTubes, and thus sucks up the equivalent of the bottom of a septic tank. It's been, to quote Dr. McElhone, 'intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer', that the RRW are more adept at spreading their poison in the innterTubes than the progressives. A horde of Johnny Rottenseeds.

Since these bots have no real intelligence, they feed on filth and spit it back.

Were I building an AI machine (and I'm surely not), it would surely not rely only on a correlation engine. In front of that would be a deterministic engine, aka RM, aka SQL database. It would store the fixed and known connections between entities in the real world, and would override the shit from the bottom of the septic tank. But, alas, AI is the product of coders, not data mavens, so they're exclusively concerned with writing 'cool code'.

AI has been shown to be helpful in narrowly focused realms, like health diagnosis, but feeding on the dregs of the RRW on matters of anything else? Well, boy howdy, walking right into their honey trap. Just try to shut them up.

And, btw, even in healthcare, there be dragons.

On the 17th day, her Medicare Advantage insurer, Security Health Plan, followed the algorithm and cut off payment for her care, concluding she was ready to return to the apartment where she lived alone. Meanwhile, medical notes in June 2019 showed Walter's pain was maxing out the scales and that she could not dress herself, go to the bathroom, or even push a walker without help.
...
Walter died shortly before Christmas last year.

Fucking Commies

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
-- Karl Marx/1875

The N.F.L. evenly divides all of its national revenue — from broadcast contracts, merchandise sales, sponsorships and so on — among its 32 teams, regardless of their performance. That money makes up about 75 percent of each team's revenue, creating financial parity.
-- Ken Belson Kevin Draper/2023 [my emphasis]

It's been widely known that most professional sports teams make money for their owners, if only by providing generous write-offs to the owner's overall tax liability. But here is a detailed exposition of the extent of it in football; both versions. This welfare for the mostly, if not entirely, MAGA crowd, who bitch incessantly about lay-about Black folks.

Thought For The Day - 14 March 2023

Some of the crypto-creeps have taken the failure of SVB to bray that the American banking system is the cause, and unregulated crypto is the cure. But, as some of the Left wing have pointed out, SVB (and Silvergate and Signature) was the 'beneficiary' of Batshit J. Moron's 2018 rollback of Dodd-Frank for just those sized banks. The notion that an un-regulated banking system is a Good Thing is easy to disprove. Just go read up the wiki list of recessions/depressions/panics from 1789 through the 1800's. The count, more or less, is 28 for the 19th century. If you count up the years, a bit more than half (more or less, depending on how you count the part-years) of the 19th century was spent in recession or worse. The Good Olde Days.

Once again, the cryto-creeps, as adolescents and sex, think they've invented the Best New Thing. They're intent on repeating history. And skim boatloads of moolah for themselves in the process.

Despite the braying of Ramaswamy, SVB went under because its tech and biotech startups needed more cash. Tech and biotech are the furthest thing from ESG. The proximate cause of the run was the CEO's idiotic public announcements that it was selling off Treasuries (at a loss to face value) and seeking (but not yet having a committment) to sell $2.5 billion in new shares. By the way, that CEO Becker, was among those who'd lobbied long and hard to get his size bank out from under the rules of Dodd-Frank. I'd call that a Pyrrhic victory.

(This just in, and I mean just: it looks like it could be an inside job. Who wooda thunk it? Yeah, it's just evil ESG.)

The belly up of Silvergate and Signature are just more in the continuing saga of crypto-crash. What a total waste of wee little electrons.

Exactly how much power does it take to create a bitcoin? According to Digiconomist, as of Sept. 15, 2022, a single bitcoin transaction required 1,390.49 kWh, the equivalent of power consumption of an average U.S. household over nearly 48 days.

or, to put it in global terms

Annual energy consumption of bitcoin is projected to be 129.47 TWh in the year, or about as much power as is used annually in Sweden.

These are the folks who're convinced they've the Bestest Idea Ever.i

[update]
Here are all the gory details that you might want to read. And, no, he doesn't blame ESG.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the third

OK, you'll have heard it here first when you tell your grand kiddies about how you survived the Collapse of 2023^©.

Despite what is said and written, even (and especially?) from the Left, this is a deja vu moment.

The 2008 Great Recession implosion happened because a bubble burst. That bubble was over-priced houses on mortgages with ratched interest rates. As the ARMs clicked up year after year, the 'owners' (who had been conned into the mortgages) met the enemy: a monthly mortgage nut which couldn't be paid. In the many decades before, fixed-rate mortgages were the overwhelming norm, so national defaults weren't in the history books. Not in the history books, so "it can't happen" was the mantra. All those fancy MBAs (I'm talking to you Blythe Masters), neglected their basic sums. It paid to ignore those basic sums.

The Collapse of 2023^© has a similar, though not perfectly identical, cause: Uncle Sugar and Jerry Powell. Some of us saw it coming. Those, in particular, who found the Volkerization Plan he was following could only end badly. Moneterists are like the carpenter whose only tool is a hammer: everything tends to look like a nail. In the case of The Fed, it has always looked at inflation as solely caused by too much moolah, ignoring the fact that inflation can be caused by wages (on the whole not rising dramatically) and by slack supply (boy howdy, Big Time). The True Monetarist solves the inflation problem by driving down demand to meet the level of supply which the bidnezzmen choose to provide. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Since SVB (and most banks) are too chicken to invest in the private sector most of the time, they hold Treasuries. Now, when Jerry went on his Volker Rampage by driving up interest rates, he had the required effect on the market value of said Treasuries: the market value fell. So long as a bank just kept them in the vault, no one cared. But SVB, which catered to tech and biotech, needed to backstop an increasing number of these 'cutting edge' clients who were in some amount of financial distress (sounds like ARMs coming due?) and had to sell off Treasuries at a loss (market value less than book/acquistion value).

SVB demonstrated the bubble bursting. And it will happen again. I'll leave the mess of the two (and counting?) crypto-trapped banks aside. Despite the rhetoric, most financial institutions are scardy cats and hold boatloads of Treasuries, rather than invest in the rest of the private sector. Basically, they lie. Jerry will kill at least a bridage's worth before he's put down.

Blind

The essence of drug development is the clinical trial betwixt your Fabulous New Thing and something else. That something else is, mostly, a placebo, aka inert somethingorother, less often the predominant current drug. And the essence of a 'good' clinical trial is that it is double-blind, placebo controlled, and randomized. The former characteristic attempts to ensure that no one involved (drug company, administering doctors, patients, data collectors, and such) knows who is getting what. The latter's purpose is to ensure, more or less, that both known and unknown patient characteristics are equally distributed between the groups; it's pretty much impossible to know (even after years of approved use) what all of the patient characteristics are that affect efficacy. If such were typically known, good drugs would work 100% in 100% of administered patients 100% of the time. Not so much.

So, we find out that a drug for a rare disease, Rett Syndrome, just got approved. There is currently no direct therapy for Rett. It's a pediatric disease that's 100% fatal for boys within mnnths of birth and nearly so for girls who live a shortened time, who are almost all patients. The price tag? Lowest 'estimate' is $575,000 per year; for life, it appears. Some remarkable results: the company stock dropped after the announcement and it turns out that during the clinical trial 82% of the patients getting the drug had diarrhea. Oh, and the measures used to assess the drug were all subjective observations of the patient. So: shits like a chicken - on the drug or shits like a kid - not on the drug. FDA approved this cash cow on no hard data (I'll assume that no physical measure has been found, and not that the company chose to duck it). Certainly, with no existing therapy, and significantly reduced life time and quality of life during that time, we have to do something!, is clearly the marching orders. What if, and I'm betting if, the girls don't live any better or longer? The two companies will have hauled in a boatload of cash for snake oil.

That link includes the following

The mechanism by which trofinetide exerts therapeutic effects in patients with Rett syndrome is unknown. In animal studies, trofinetide has been shown to increase branching of dendrites and synaptic plasticity signals.

FDA is a mess.

Oscar

Not that I've seen many flicks for a while, and I didn't watch the award show. And I just ran the on-line page of winners. Imagine my surprise to see a White Girl get best supporting actress for an Asian film over an 'Asian' (CA born) actress in same movie. I guess White Privilege is a thing of the past.

One Divided by Two

Learn your fractions, as your third grade (I guess; been too long since I was in that level of school) teacher once said. The SVB debacle, and nearly all in USofA history, rises from the structure for fractional reserve banking. And it's largely impossible to run a modern-ish economy otherwise. Have a nice day.

Externalities

It's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer (that's a McElhone-ism) that every economic process/policy/execution generates externalities. What, pray tell, are such? Simply put, economic consequences not directly considered by the actor or others. Some are positive, others negative. When generated by the private sector, mostly negative. When generated by the public sector (in healthy democracies, to be concrete), mostly positive. The Covid vaccines is a recent example.

The archetypal example of the former is the tannery dumping tailings in the local holler's crick. The cost to the tannery is about 0; just the piping needed to get the shit away from the property. The externality is the cost, immediate and long term, borne by those poor folks who use the water in that crick. Much of the cost is non-monetized, since the poor folks haven't the moolah to substitute processed water for the filth in the crick. They get cancers and such, never get medical services, and die young. The tannery avoids all those costs.

The Norfolk Southern derailments are a glaring example, no surprise there. What is surprising is the swift turnaround of those Red county residents who demand that a private sector actor make them whole for the externality of lost property value.

As with any real estate purchase, an appraisal and tests for safety would need to be done for homes in East Palestine. But like Stewart, Warren said it is not yet clear who will pay for the additional tests on water and ground contamination for that peace of mind.

"For all we know, the county might cover it, or the EPA or Ohio state government. That remains to be seen," he said.
[so, may be the Damn Gummint will rescue them from NS? my emphasis, of course]

May be oughtaBePresident Nicolae Ceausecu will take up the slack? After all, he declaims wildly that he is a Populist For The People!! What would be more Populist than aiding your Rabid Base with moolah?

I wonder, too, whether MTG's New Confederacy Gummint would demand NS make whole the citizens of such a Red county?? Enquiring minds need to know.

One For The Ages

Nikki is the latest RRW demanding that SSN eligibility be pushed yet higher.

"What you would do is, for those in their 20s coming into the system, we would change the retirement age so that it matches life expectancy."

So, by her account, on average, no one would ever receive SS or Medicare payments. Just do the arithmetic, dude.

This cabal of RRW either are ignorant or evil: SS isn't a personal saving plan, which funds your retirement payments, it's a current account system and has been from the beginning. The reason for that is obvious: if the law had been structured as a personal saving plan (401(K) before that was created), then it would have been 30 or 40 years before anyone qualified. Not much help, that. So, of necessity, those of 65 were immediately eligible, and thus were paid out of the current account. It's been a standard braying point for years from the RRW that the number of workers supporting the number of retirees has been shrinking for decades. And there's a very good reason for that: the Baby Boom Generation was the pig in the python for 40 years supporting their Grands and Parents. Now we're squeezing out the ass end of the python.

Once the BB die off (and we aren't really living decades longer as the RRW want you to believe), a more equitable steady state will ensue. It's just a lie that life expectancy has jumped decades since SS was enacted (1935). Here's the relevant numbers (simple averages of male and female, for the most part) -

life expectancy at 65 (1940) - 79
life expectancy at 65 (2020) - 84

life expectancy at birth (1940) - 64
life expectancy at birth (2020) - 77

As they say, figures don't lie, but liars figure. Most of the data can be found here.

It's also worth noting that the most RRW associate increase in life expectancy from 1900, aka, the start of the modern USofA.

life expectancy at birth (1900) - 47
life expectancy at birth (2020) - 77

Where did that nearly 20 year increase from before SS even existed come from? Mostly antibiotics, vaccinations, and sulfa. Oh, and more widespread clean water; makes a hell of a difference.

Yes, the USofA spends a horrific amount of money keeping geezers alive for a short period of time what with cancer and all; and now looking for Alzheimer's treatments. But that's as much to blame on the RRW as the Dems.

See Saw Marjorie Dumb

She do see saw, mostly to the far right and consequent loss of balance. Not that she cares. Anyway, the subject of this missive is the Blue States' Burden, aka Red States. Studies over the decades have found that the movement of moolah from states to DC and back to states has the Red States in significant surplus. That's a burden on the productive Blue States.

But, for now, let's just look at FEMA. Natural catastrophes tend to occur in Red States, and thus they get lots of Uncle Sugar's moolah. Let's see, if the data is easily available, how far the see saw weighs down toward the Red States.

While not as complete as one might like, this report has parsed some of FEMA's data. As you can see from the bargraph, it's mostly Red States in the top 10. Who wooda thunk it?

California is there largely on the basis of power company wildfires and the rain/drought cycle from the Pacific.

Just three months before the latest wild weather hit, researchers at the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research released a study warning that climate warming has already doubled the risk of a weeks-long extreme storm sequence capable of producing a California mega-flood.

One would be hard-pressed to blame that rain disaster on lame brain Woke Californians.

Say good bye to all that help, MTG.

Call For Gov. DeMented© - part the second

Well, this didn't take long. Gov. DeMented^© as another life-lesson on display. And, irony of ironies, it's thanks to the Jews. What's religious RRW to do?

A government move to overhaul the judiciary has prompted one of the largest waves of protests in Israeli history, the beginnings of capital flight, threats by army reservists to refuse military service, and warnings from leading politicians of political violence and even civil war.

"Florida man leaves Florida with only stupid 'you want fries with that' rednecks."

But MTG called and offered Florida man a cabinet post, education commissioner, in the revived CSA. He is said to be mulling the opportunity.

And what of Walt's plaything? They'll be gone in a few years; set up shop in a more hospitable locale. They could easily afford to buy up all of Nantucket, toss out all those beautiful White people, and just call it Nantucketland. I'd go.

Nantucket - 105 square miles
Disney World - ~40 square miles