Grab bag, Part II

Today was a "Mom" day.

She likes to watch the CBS local affiliate because they have the most local news and Dr. Phil.

The first part of my visit takes place while The Price is Right is playing. The mind turns in funny directions when it does not have enough to do. Is the TV show The Price is Right a viable concept when inflation gets brutal?

Incidentally, comedian Alan Sandler is Director of TPiR so maybe he can make 100% inflation funny.

Sneks

What does a Texan do when he finds a Communist beneath his truck

There are many good Communists in West Texas.

Pictures from 24hourcampfire.

Irony

Much of the ordinance ordnance now being fired at the Russians is old Soviet material that Central Europeans are brooming out of inventory. That includes Germany who inherited much Soviet material when West Germany and East Germany rejoined.

Military hates to throw out anything that might be useful. Budgets always lag needs and actual delivery of materials lags budget, sometimes by years. Still, given promises that old will be replaced with new...those 1960s and 1970s crates with CCCP stenciled on the sides will get loaded on trucks and shipped east

I would not be surprised if there were still some 45-70 Trap-door, black-powder rifles squirreled away in the US warehouses in some forgotten corner. You never know when WWIV will start and you will need a smoke-pole that can run on chicken shit and charred corncobs.

Unavoidable conclusions

We are now residents in an occupied country. Modify your actions accordingly.

Test your Faraday bag by putting your smartphone into it and then dialing your number from another phone. If your phone rings...your Faraday bag isn't good enough.

Stay away from crowds.

Experts

Research on decision-making and heuristics suggests that the more senior the decision-maker the more deluded they were about their cognitive processes.

Paul Slovic (just one of many) collected anecdotal data about how very senior, very exclusive and high-priced stock brokers selected stocks. They did the same for neophyte stock-brokers.

The reason they chose the stock market for their research on clinical/diagnostic judgement is that quarterly information can be retrieved back into the 1950s. There are no other human venues as well documented as the pursuit of mammon.

The researches retrieved the various metrics of the companies the stock-brokers had recommended at the time they made those recommendations. The researchers performed several numerical studies to reverse-engineer the "experts" actual thought processes.

The majority of the studies found that the neophytes had a relatively accurate narratives describing their thought processes. Most of them looked at the prospects of the industry the company was in. They looked at the position of the specific firm within that industry. They looked at market share trends. They looked at profit margins and Price/Earnings ratios. The regression analysis supported those narratives.

The EXPERTS said they looked at more than twenty different variables and combined them in highly configural ways. The regression models said they were lying. They looked at the same 3-to-5 variables as the neophytes and used them in the same way. Then they used the remaining fifteen variables to either "confirm" their initial determination or to feed some contrived, flim-flam theory that they thought made them sophisticated.

Experts part II

On the world stage, Donald Trump came across like a 4th grade kid with a brown-belt in martial arts strutting around the playground. The EXPERTS were horrified.

Tell me that Trump wasn't the whiz-kid, newly-minted stock-broker who understood Slovic et al and the EXPERTS aren't deluded, senior stock-brokers.

The EXPERTS offer complex theories after-the-fact to mansplain what happened. Their theories are Disneyesque fantasy castles of spun-sugar with lofty arches and fractal fretwork. Like cotton-candy, they don't age well.

Keep it simple

Stay warm and dry.

Stay hydrated and fed.

Share information on need-to-know basis.

Know which neighbors you can trust and which you cannot. That means testing them with small intimacies or gifts and seeing if they are used well. Or not.

No one person can do it all. Find out what special skills your family and neighbors can offer.