Sometimes God rewrites the schedule

Today is Michigan's opening day of the 2026 Firearms Deer season.

Except for me.

I am nursing what appears to be a fast-moving virus.

I expect to get reports (texts) from the guys out on their stands.

I was wrong, sort of...

A couple of commenters took issue with my claim "Interest rates will go up. The private economy will stop investing."

I will state up-front that accounting is not my strong-point.

I was not looking at the economy from the standpoint of individual people but from the standpoint of businesses or enterprises. While a hardware store, for instance, might stock-up on commodities that will hold their value (nails, screws, copper fittings, wire), factories are unlikely to squander cash (even though it is depreciating) on illiquid capital equipment that cannot be quickly turned into cash. Really, how many pennies-on-the-dollar will the dies used to make fenders for Tesla Cyber Trucks get on the secondary market?

They MIGHT purchase some equipment from competitors that had to liquidate...or they might not. From a net-gain to the economy, it is a wash transaction. New production equipment is not purchased. The productive capacity of the economy did not increase. Rather, existing equipment changed ownership. The firm saw it as an investment but the larger economy did not.

You pay for the steak and you PAY for the sizzle

Decades of easy-money and low interest rates resulted in lots of "money" looking for investments. The investment market accommodated the clients by "finding" "assets" that were long on narratives and short on history.

Funds were sunk into these assets on the promise of future profits. It is easy to make extravagant bets when you are playing with "house money". It is much harder when you are betting the rent that you traded forty hours of your life and a gallon of sweat for.

When credit is tight, most customers weigh the steak to the gram and put on hearing protection as armor against the siren's-song of the sizzle. 

Credit markets

The government takes out "loans" by printing contracts that promise a certain amount of money on a give redemption-date and then selling them at auctions.

At any given time, there is a finite amount of money looking for a fixed-but-guaranteed return on an investment. (This ignores the slight-of-hand where an off-ledger quasi-government entity buys government issued bonds with fake money and then stuffs them into bank portfolios).

When a government's need for money increases, it auctions off more of those contracts and it absorbs more of the finite amount of funds which leaves less for the private side of the economy. When necessary, the government accepts less cash-up-front for the contracts and prints more contracts to sell. That "less cash-up-front" means that the calculated interest rate just went up.

Private industry lacks the ability to print money and historically has a greater likelihood of going out of business sooner than the government. They have to pay a higher risk-premium (in terms of interest rates) to find buyers for their debt.

In times of rising interest rates, these firms are also likely to be experiencing cash-flow difficulties as their clients are purchasing fewer goods and substituting lower profit-margin goods for premium products. At the wholesale and manufacturer's level, customers are also taking longer to pay off their accounts. Revolving credit is used to fill growing gaps in income-vs-outgo.

Crashing demand craters the Net Present Value calculations of capital investments because trading fixed costs for variable costs is incredibly volume sensitive. A $4000 pizza oven that allows you to run at peak demand with one less employee has negative value when you aren't selling any pizzas.

What I missed

Individual households make investment decisions daily hourly.

Those decisions can be as mundane as buying a new potato peeler or knife sharpener, seeds for a garden or an electric blanket, a deck of cards or a package of yeast.

Those investments can also be changes in how leisure time is spent. Individuals might decide to learn to knit or sew or they might start reading books.

Not investing is an investment decision. Once the time is gone...it is gone. 

Entropy (also known as "disorder")

Many of the smarter people I know are experiencing a vague and ill-defined sense of dread or lack-of-ease regarding the future.

Perhaps the reason they cannot define it or get a grip on it is because what they are sensing is the accelerating disorder in society. Disorder by its nature defies neat-and-tidy definitions. It is like turbulence or the rainfall or Lorenz's Butterfly Effect...it is never twice the same.

The remaking of society (by idiots)

The ghastly thing is that the idiots in the room, the ones who are PROUD of the fact that their minds are unhindered by history or the bloody results of prior attempts, are in control and they are loudly telling us that they are going to redesign society.

"Ok, Boomer. You had your chance and you screwed it up. Now it is our turn."

It is as if electricians threw out the 997 page National Electric Code book and were going to start rewiring buildings based on "this feels right". They dismiss the fact that every "bullet" in the NEC was the result of somebody getting electrocuted or a building  burned down.

It isn't just one or two examples. This mindset seems to be everywhere. But since I owe you some concrete examples, here are a couple:

NYC passed an ordinance that gives non-profits an exclusive, five month window t bid on condemned properties. It also gives those non-profits the authority to match private-party bids after the window and still win the auction.

NYC has a shortage of affordable housing. NYC is highly regulated and landlords are forced to skimp on maintenance.  Tenants file complaints. Property gets condemned.

That property, in theory, could be rehabilitated and returned to the housing stock. In practice, they will let the five months spin off the clock while the homeless will cook meth, crap-and-pee everywhere and burn open fires in the building. If the building hasn't burned down in those five months, it will be hopelessly impaired and must be demoed. In the unlikely event a private party invests the due-diligence and decides to bid on it after the five month period, the non-profits will match their bid and the private party will be "out" all of the time they spent inspecting and planning the property.

The compassionate, welfare-state

High inflation was already baked into the future (even if the Republicans had kept both houses).

The "lesson" of the last election was that politicians who don't address symptoms will not get reelected.

That sets the stage for Universal Basic Income in some form; likely direct deposits to checking accounts or debit cards.

That reduces incentive to work which will throttle the supply side. It will goose the demand side. Those two, when combined, are the recipe for accelerating inflation.

Interest rates will go up. The private economy will stop investing. The public sector will respond with public work projects and it will become impossible to find a foot of steel rebar or a sack of cement. People whose incomes don't track the real rates of inflation will quickly find themselves in abject poverty.

The idiot's response

"There are many kinds of intelligence. There are lots of brilliant people who cannot read or do math." Then they will point out that Einstein was considered an idiot when he was in grade school and that Michael Jordon was cut from his high school varsity basketball team.

"You can't prove that our clean-sheet-of-paper remake won't be better than what we have now."

ERJ's rebuttal

I will concede that random processes can produce improvements. That is the entire basis of the Theory of Evolution.

Random processes can produce output that appears ordered. If you flip a "fair" coin a million times there is about a 75% chance that you will produce at least one string of twenty-straight head or twenty-straight tails. If you have five dice in a cup and shake them out onto a table there is about a 1-in-1300 chance that your first throw will be all ones, or all twos, or all three...or all sixes.

"Maxwell's Demon" predicts that entropy can appear to work in reverse. In theory, I can dump 10 pounds of sugar and 16 pounds of rusty nuts-and-bolts into a tub, shake it, and then pull out three, Purdey Over-and-Under shotguns. All I need is for the little demon to rearrange the iron, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms.

The idiot scoffs. "Shotguns are very complex and there is no way sugar and rusty bolts could randomly order themselves into engraved steel and fine walnut!" 

Which address the point. The global economy is about 40 orders of magnitude more complex than a shotgun. I am vastly more likely to be able to pull those shotguns out of that plastic tub on the first try than a bunch of idiots completely rebuilding the economy based on "feelz" actually improving outcomes for most people.

Random mutations more often result in cancer than in a new race of supermen. 

Sorting brass

 

89 grains. 

There are at least four companies that used the PS headstamp. This piece was probably made by Poongsan Metal Manufacturing Company Ltd., Seoul, Republic of Korea (probably at the Angang Ammunition Plant).

More than 101 grains

CBC = Companhia Brasileira de Cartuchos, Avenida Industrial No 3330, Santo Andre, Estado de Sâo Paulo, Brazil. This photo has a good image of the crimp-marks (3 of them) on the CBC headstamped piece.

MON; no information. Maybe it was made on MONday. 

3% of the lot of ammo that I am working with is over 101 grains. 

Three jokes

The first joke

There was a boy who was boasting to his friends that his youngest brother was the stupidest kid on the block.

"How stupid is he?" they asked.

"Watch this" the boy said.

"Hey Jimmi, come here" the boy commanded.

Jimmi dutifully trotted over. The older boy held out both hands. In one hand he had a dime. In the other, a nickel. "Which one do you want?" the boy asked.

Jimmi pointed at the nickel and said "That one is bigger".

The boy handed Jimmi the nickel and all of the friends snickered.

A bit later, one of the other boys had some guilt pangs. "Jimmi, you should have taken the dime. It is worth twice as much as the nickel" the tardy saint informed the little boy.

The little boy winked. "The first time I take the dime is the day my brother stops giving me nickels." 

The second joke

Q: Do you know how many chiropractors it takes to change a light bulb?

A: Only one, but he has to review your health insurance policy before he can tell you how many visits it will require.

Back to NYC vs Chicago

Is it possible that the criminal justice racket in Chicago has been "captured" to a greater degree than the CJR in NYC? There are a lot of "professionals" who see high crime rates as a guaranteed income stream and an easy way to have prestige in the community: Social workers, lawyers, parole officers, clerks, etc. And then there are the unions that represent corrections officers and public safety officers and consequently the politicians who benefit from the donations from those unions.

They all have perverse incentives that create a conflict-of-interest. Seen from that perspective, it should not be a surprise that the criminal justice racket is paralyzed in many jurisdictions.

Homicide rates in NYC vs Chicago .AND. Trains, Planes and Automobiles

It is a curious thing that the homicide rate in Illinois urban areas where the victims are Black is 510% that of the homicide rate in New York urban areas.

The internet gives the credit to New York's "community based interventions", "focused law enforcement strategies" and "investments in public safety".

I have to call Bull-shit on that. I refuse to believe that Illinois/Chicago hasn't thrown money at all of those fashionable buzz-words.

By all practical measures, both states have draconian gun laws, so that cannot be the reason.

I doubt that the people in NYC are inherently "better". NYC has a greater percentage of Blacks from the Caribbean than Chicago but the murder rates in Jamaica and Trinidad/Tobago are the worst in the Western Hemisphere so it is difficult to make the case that the origin of the population is the difference.

The best I can come up with is that a person contemplating murdering somebody has an easier time fleeing the scene of the crime in Chicago vs NYC. What is a thug in NYC going to do? Call a cab? Ride the subway?

I suspect that congestion and traffic gridlock are what make NYC safer in terms of homicide risk than most other major cities, not the policies.

Why does it matter? Reality always wins. Sometimes it takes a while, but delusions are very expensive to maintain while conforming to objective reality is the path to success. The implications are that thugs have more impulse control when they know that there will be consequences for their actions. 

The Black community is the community that is most victimized by crime. The Black community is also the community that has received the most "social justice" and "criminal justice reform". Perhaps, given enough time, the murder-rates in NYC will match Chicago's as wannabe-thugs realize that getting caught will only result in their getting a free dinner in the Graybar Hotel that night and a cab-ride to the destination of their choice in the morning.

Any thoughts on other causes for the Chicago/NYC differences will be much appreciated. 

John Candy

Spoiler alert: From the final sequence of the movie

Trains, Planes and Automobiles is my favorite Thanksgiving movie. It is a masterpiece and John Candy was a genius. Lots of people have favorite Christmas movies. Not as many people talk about "Thanksgiving" movies.

In a polebarn a 1/2 mile north of the Thornapple River

 

Shrink-wrapped and heading to the taxidermist

Nontypical. Looked like an oak-stumped that had been bulldozed out of a fence row

Man's boot in background is size 12.