Block Island News

We've been going over to the Island for at least a couple of decades, generally in what's called "Shoulder Seasons", which translates to very early Spring and very late Autumn. Not so many silly tourists around. Turns out, the Native Block Islanders have been conducting an annual census for longer than we've been going over. To attempt to get a more or less accurate count, deep off season was chosen. Not too many day hopping mainlanders. Near as I can find, one doesn't have to show some form of Block Island (aka, New Shoreham, RI) ID to be counted. But, to discourage day hoppers from mucking up the count, said count is conducted after that last boat leaves.

Did I mention that the appointed day is Groundhog Day?? Well, yes it is. And, no, Block Island has no indigenous rodents of that description. Small detail. So, as one might expect of the Frequent and Enthusiastic Visitor, there is a yearning To Be Counted. We do "own" a small parcel of Block Island, but not enough to live in all year. So, it'd not be really cheating to Be Counted. OTOH, getting to the Island on 2 Feb. is dependent on the weather. Alas, pretty shitty this year. And all of the ones preceding. Or so I remember it. And one needs to find accommodation, of course. Not all that many open year round.

Not all years is the count published in the Block Island Times in a timely manner. But we mainlanders do get it timely this year: 1,014. The common wisdom is that the Island has a resident population of about 1,000. So it appears. No mention of how many were/are Frequent and Enthusiastic Visitors.

It's Rutting Season - part the second

It all began, IIRC, with that commie pinko professor from my undergraduate days: that Eccles was right. And, more to the point, that the USofA economy would not benefit from a morphing into the Switzerland of the Western Hemisphere. A number of essays here made such an assertion. Here is previous from 2013 (some go back to the beginning of this endeavor).

So, it was with some pride that I got here years before one of my more famous brethren. It must be noted that the author isn't of the tribe of commie pinko professors: he's "the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative economic think tank". But it is more true today than way back when. A few nuggets follow.

Since Mary Poppins's day, the financial sector as a whole — investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, cryptocurrency platforms and all the rest of it — has exploded as a share of the United States' gross domestic product. It now claims the highest share of corporate profits and attracts the highest share of top talent from top schools, in part by offering the highest compensation. But actual business investment has declined, to an average of 2.9 percent of G.D.P. over the past decade from 5.2 percent in the 1960s, when the film was released.

Yes, some of us took note of Blythe Masters folly at the time. Didn't stop the implosion from happening.

So, what do banks actually do these days, you might ask? Not much productive.

Less than 10 percent of Goldman's work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman's own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.

What's that Dire Straits line? "Money for nothing and chicks for free". And, of course, Jeffrey.

So few resources have gone toward new equipment, toward developing better ways to do things and toward hiring and training that productivity in America's manufacturing sector — the output generated per hour of labor — has been falling. More workers are now needed than in 2012 for the same result.

This should not be possible in a functional capitalist economy. In the past 20 years, the United States has gone from leading China in 60 of the 64 "frontier technologies" identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to now trailing in all but seven.

Now, that's progress!! One might say: "oddly, no mention of Trump's pledge to restore American manufacturing??" Cass is, of course, still a card carrying member of the Right Wingnut/MAGA brigade, so I suppose he does have to mince words a bit.

I'll close with this tidbit, which I've long forgotten:

We should ban stock buybacks, which were illegal until the 1980s.

(It was 1982.)

More interesting, while that ends the graph, here's how it begins

We should reform our laws so that when companies go belly up, workers and their communities get to join the line for compensation ahead of the lenders who financed the mess.

Now, I don't know about you, but those are the words of a Traitor To His Tribe.

Almost 3

Well, another missed opportunity to catch up with Kent State. Here. American Stasi on parade. This is exactly what the Trump Base want.

By The Numbers - part the ninety eighth

Frosty the snowman...

The weathercritters are saying that much of Florida will have low temps at or below 32° over the weekend. So... is this the usual? Or has the freqency of freezing temps in Fla. lower than it used to be?

The star attraction is the 1894/95 Great Freeze. Some mentions elsewhere use this event(s) as proof that climate change is bogus!! While there have been ongoing freezes since then, some of which reside in my own long-term memory, this was a (so far) unique event. The wiki piece states that Orlando fell to a record 18°; my Google Weather app says that Orlando will bottom out at 26° on Sunday.

Here's a table for Orlando 32° days from 1892. Just from eyeballing, it's 'true' that the frequency (overall) has markedly decreased from 1892 to now. Who wooda thunk it? Although the volatility (by which I mean the range of 32° days for spans of years is now narrower), also from just eye-balling, appears greater now than way-back-when. That would conform to the results reported below. Here's the top ten years (5⁺ days in a year)

2010
1989
1985
1981
1977
1970
1958
1938
1935
1928
1927
1918
1908

1938 and earlier lead by a nose.

2010, oops, has the most at 12. May be we can find out why.

There's an old saying among the weather geeks: if you know where the jet stream is going, you know what the weather will be.

In general, may be. Here's a report from MIT (bastion of liberal bias), which describes how the northern jets are affected by climate change (global warming). In a nutshell: it's the historical overall temperature difference between polar air and mid-latitude air. The greater that difference, the jets move (more or less) in a circle around the North Pole at latitude well above the good old USofA. The jets don't fall south, allowing polar airmass to visit the lower 48. It's established that the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet. As the temperature difference narrows, the jets get hinky. The lower 48 gets uncomfortable. You can thank climate change.

NOAA's latest report. Why Ayatollah 49% Don^© forgot to scrub this, I don't know. Get it before it goes.

The last 10 years are the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.

By The Numbers - part the ninety seventh

As many readers will know, I've grown accustomed to some of Dr. McElhone's adages, high among them: "it is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer." And, no, I don't attribute that to the Good Doctor. It's been around for ages; I just first heard it from him.

Which brings us to some obvious. Here is a report on MAHA and the attack on vaccination.

But a different way to think about it is this: as another attack on the country's threadbare social safety net by health libertarians whose strategy for making America healthy again appears straightforwardly to mean letting more of the country's weak and vulnerable suffer and die.

I've long since forgotten where it came from, but the gist of Trumpism is just this: cruelty is the point. And also The Rich damn sure ain't rich enough. Which bring us to the other bit of obvious

In some Southern states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, life expectancy is more than half a decade shorter than in Northeastern states, including Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York.

Look by county and the disparities are even starker, with life expectancy over a decade shorter in large swaths of Appalachia than in the upper Midwest. That's about the same as the life expectancy gap between Liechtenstein and Bangladesh.

So, the Rich plutocrats have convinced the victims of their evil that the problem is really the God hating Blue States. Stupid people just never learn. And that's also the point. Boeing has found out the hard way that assembling airplanes in North Carolina with marginally educated knuckledraggers is a lose-lose situation. And, of course, that's just the latest in a continuing saga of FUBAR, all in the name of union busting.

As has been written here a few times: who'll make the neat stuff if Trumpism drags the Blue States down to Shitholeville?

O Canada

Once again President Caligula and his horse faced wife are at it again. Yet again with Greenland, obviously part of the USofA. I mean, it's just 22 miles from Ellesmere Island, across the Nares Strait. It's almost in Canada, anyway. And President Caligula and his horse faced wife have proclaimed Canada as our 51^st state. Bank shot. Both are President Caligula and his horse faced wife's property. An all-weather, members only, golf club would be another feather in their caps.

Obituary - part the second

Well, once again: That Didn't Take Long.

Ayatollah 49% Don^© has managed to stir up Our Allies to the point that they're actively seeking to visit the USofA with (almost) financial ruin. Dumping a bunch of Treasuries, in and of itself wouldn't kill the USofA in a nano-second, but takes the Rest of The World one step closer to stripping the US Buck of Reserve Currency status. And that, as explained in Episode 1, puts USofA Debt into Zimbabwe Land. That's not good eats. Bretton Woods gave the USofA the luxury of paying its foreign debts by printing its own currency. No other country could/can do that. Think about that for an hour or two.

So far, European officials have signaled Greenland's sovereignty is a red line that's not up for compromise, while the Trump administration isn't budging either on its stance.

But the U.S. has a key vulnerability the EU can exploit, according to George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank.

"Europe owns Greenland, it also owns a lot of Treasuries," he wrote in a note on Sunday.

Holding those bonds helps balance America's massive external deficits, and Europe is the world's biggest lender to the U.S.

And, I'll bet, you thought that was China? Guess not.

The European hoard is said to be 12.6 Trillion Dollars worth. At least until it isn't.

According to the US Treasury, Japan is the largest single country holder, at $1,202,600,000,000 nominal last November. China is third with $682,600,000,000.

How difficult would it be to dump the US Buck as reserve currency and choose the Euro or Renminbi? General view is: will take more than Ayatollah Don^©'s infantile behavior. Me? I'm not so sure. He's clearly on a crusade to make America 19^th century again. Back when we were a third world country: a few Marie Antoinettes and the rest cake eaters. Only shitkickers would vote for such an idiot. And Batshit J. Moron means to intimidate all those Blue City Voters to stay home on Election Day. We'll see.

Don't believe Mammy Yokum? Go look at a county level vote map from 2020. See all those Blue Dots? That's what's had Batshit J. Moron going batshit since forever. Only stupid shitkickers want him. Discrete state/precinct maps, like this (haven't found a USofA one yet, but at least one dataset exists for the adventurous) show what Batshit J. Moron is up to in yet more detail.

He could just about end American Dominance just because he's so stupid. It ain't how many nukes ya got, it's whether you control international finance. But he's a failed (6 times that we know about) real estate knucklehead, and nothing more. It's a sure bet that he thinks Bretton Woods is a fine merlot. Only tyros drink merlot.