The World In Which We Live: Fun And Easy To Win Edition

I had hoped that by summer's end there would be no more trade war posts to write but there appears to be no end to the ongoing struggle. Fears of a recession are increasing, so much so that
Bank Of America is offering advice on how to navigate the impending slow down, the price of everything continues to march upwards, retailers are failing in droves, and even a Republican lawmaker is calling for a tax cut due to tariffs. This last point should prove once again that a tariff is a tax passed on to consumers, but try to explain that to the true believers who support the fun and easy to win economic policies of the current administration.

At least things aren't boring. The market reaction to the Fed's announced rate cut (which flies in the face of all logic) followed almost immediately by a tweet announcing more tariffs on Chinese products sent the VIX off the charts and VIX traders into a rapture or rupture, depending on which side of the trade they were on.

And yet, somehow in this crazy world in which we live, Macaroni and Cheese was considered important enough to make it onto the newsfeed of numerous sites.

Comments

Building a FOSS Writing Platform

I've taken a few steps toward resuming writing. I've written off and on over the years and now feels like a good time to get a few pieces started, maybe even finished. I have a long habit of starting more than I finish. As a Free/Open Source Software ( FOSS ) enthusiast, I plan to build my workflow exclusively around such software. The Linux operating system will be the platform; I have a strong preference for Linux Mint . Mint is a stable, conservative sort of operating system, an Ubuntu derivative that surpasses its foundation. This would provide an enterprise-grade platform for my writing and small publishing firm (more on this later). As mentioned, I want my writing and publishing to be done on a FOSS platform. I've used Ubuntu Linux for some time and find it works well, but their parent company, Canonical, appears to be drifting toward centralization, while the Snap application packaging is proprietary software, which is the opposite of FOSS. Canonical isn't a pu...

In Memoriam: Mitch

Author's note. I've reached the age where friends and loved ones pass with greater frequency. This is my attempt to memorialize those who have gone before, the first in a series dedicated to absent friends. These are people I love and respect, whose stories deserve to be told. Mitch I met Mitch my junior year in high school. He'd transferred from a nearby school and was a year younger than I. This was a fortunate move for me, as both of my closest friends had moved out of state over the summer and I was feeling a bit lost. Marijuana and rock music solidified the friendship, and soon we were hanging out alot with the mutual friends. Our group of friends were stoners and lived the stoner lifestyle, getting high, watching too much TV, living on junk food. We’d tell the same jokes repeatedly, laugh like we’d never heard it before, only for one of us to tell it again soon after and repeat the cycle. It was like a scene in Philip K Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” when Bob Arctor ...

Dark Planes Over The Cumberland

Part 1: Treetop Flyer In the immediate pre-Covid era, when my son was 4 and 5 years old, he played soccer (at 4) and T-ball (at 5) in our small rural town in Georgia. Both years, two prop-driven airplanes flew over the fields the team was practicing or playing on. The plain, painted dark and with no clear tail markings, didn’t appear to be commercial aircraft, nor did they fly at high altitude; at times they seemed to be just above the tree tops. Needless to say, all action on the field stopped as the children and parents stopped in wonder to watch them fly by. Around this same time, a controlled substance arrest took place in an equally rural county across the state line in Alabama. Among the usual contraband of substances and paraphernalia was found a small amount of heroin. That last detail caught my eye as the area in which the arrests took place is even more rural than my own. When I lived in Sydney, heroin was a fact of life in the port city and was said to be quite easy to...

www.markholder.org

Search This Blog