Latest figures (in the UK) show that violent and sex crimes are rising faster than anything else, we are not quite at the point where headlines tell us that “local boy drowns in river, after being sexually molested by trout…” but, we are getting there.
Of course it is all about money and funding, nobody is going to cut funding into stabbings or rapes, so stabbing and rapes take more and more hours per incident to investigate, and of course waiting until 2017 to report an alleged incident in 2002 is no roadblock to this.
You got burgled, your vehicle got stolen, you got mugged, tough shit.
It’s an old saying amongst city traders that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, it’s a saying that is never really analysed though, which is a shame, because what it is really saying is that shit can stay crazy long after you ran out of the ability to continue to bet that crazy shit would be reined in….
I suppose I sort of did have the money back in the *very* early 90’s to “get on to the housing ladder” but I looked at houses that were going for 40,000 and thought they were wildly overpriced, 25,000 would have been nearer the mark, so between than and the lack of a burning desire to get a mortgage I never bothered, now those same houses are 275k, 285k, 295k.
So that’s 27 years of proof that shit can stay crazy right there, and there are plenty of other examples, “family law” started getting “reformed” in the seventies, so there is 45+ years of shit staying crazy right there, US MIC and the Norks, we are up to 60+ years of shit staying crazy, Federal Reserve, 104 years of shit staying crazy.
So the upside of all this is if it lasts much longer than a year, you aren’t really going to have a way to bet against it and come out ahead.
Of course this doesn’t mean that there is a way of going with the flow and coming out ahead either….
Lets look at the latest shit from Catalunya, go to the banks (that just relocated their HQ’s out of catalunya) and draw all your money out, why not, it is your money…
well, it’s not.
not in law.
When I pay money into a bank account in my name I *deposit* funds, and I become a *creditor* of the bank, my money is gone at that instant, and it becomes the bank’s money, that’s the LAW… see that shit about crazy being able to outlast you..
Of course we all know what the word crazy means, or do we, because inherent in the definition is the assumption that being or acting crazy has immediate negative personal consequences, but, as we can see from real life, shit can stay crazy long long long after your ability to bet against it and win expires.
So maybe we need to redefine crazy, because if shit can stay crazy long after your ability to bet against it and win expires, you aren’t the one taking a minority opinion or a marginal opinion, you are the one taking the way out there fringe opinion… think on that…
The house that I did not buy in 1992 for £38,950 because it was wildly overpriced would be “worth” £275,000 today, of course if I had stayed there I could have paid off the mortgage by now and would own it outright, but it would still be “one urban semi detached house” and if I sold it, that is all I could buy with the money, I would not suddenly have traded up to “one urban detached house with 3 acres”
Arguably I have lost money in the interim paying rent, arguably I didn’t, because I didn’t have 25 years of property maintenance and taxes to pay either.
So we are no nearer to a definition of shit be crazy whether it would have been better to buy that house back in 1992 or not, or, are we?
Arguably history isn’t linear, you cannot go back and change just one thing, so maybe if I had bought that house in 1992, I would not have met my own personal ex psycho skank ho, but does that mean I would not have met *any* psycho skank ho’s… after all, the penniless tramp rarely gets mugged for his rolex, so I look at contemporaries and yes, a significant portion of them never got to stay in the houses they were buying and owned, the only bits they got to keep were the mortgage and upkeep and living costs of the resident.
So we are back to shit staying crazy longer than you can bet against it and win.
But we are also saying that shit staying crazy and betting *with* the flow isn’t necessarily winning either, it is just deferring the losses.
Weinstein was just deferring his losses, until 2017 it made perfect sense to be a fat perv in a position of power over da wimminz, and as late as summer 2017 it still made sense, and had done for well over 20 years straight.
You see the parallels here.
Because old harv wasn’t the only one, every fucker was doing it, and as ollie stone said, every fucker *knew* every fucker was doing it.
If the Clintons had *not* done corrupt deals with russian nuclear energy firms, that would have made the Clintons the only people on the beltway who were *not* as corrupt as fuck, and that would have made the Clintons as well known as Melvin Q Peabody, the famous hollywood mogul who never once abused his position of power, of course, he never got *into* a position of power either…
I do not do drugs any more, and have not for 30+ years, but “smoke weed every day” is something I can still relate to, because while smoking this shit may be crazy, at least it is a crazy I can get a handle on, this other crazy shit, blows my fucking mind man…
And there we come to the truth of the definition of shit be crazy and shit can stay crazy long after you can bet against it and win.
Betting against it, whether you win or not, is the act of making a rational appraisal of something, and finding no rational reason why it should continue.
Going with the flow is the act of accepting that something is irrational, not making any attempt to understand it, and not making any attempt to appraise it, especially when you see the odd loon who does do such things lose their fucking shirts.
So, getting back to the whole “markets can stay irrational” thing, we come to the final part, which is you staying solvent, which really means your ability to stay in the game as a player.
Well let’s define “player”
I know someone who is 18/19 years into a 25 year interest only mortgage, their youngest child is just in double digits but still in junior school, so just about the time that kid leaves school, the interest only mortgage will end… where is that adult going to be?
It’s a fucking HUGE unanswered question, we have not quite yet got to the point where the first takers of interest only mortgages gets to the end of their term, so we don’t actually know what will happen.
Will the bank act as landlord to the tenant and allow them to continue to reside there, and if so, what will the “rent” be, because they are struggling on the interest only repayments which are a lot less than the market rents, a *lot* less…
Will the bank do a perpetual car lease thing and hold them liable for all the work needing doing to the house to bring it up to pristine saleable condition?
Will the bank issue them another mortgage?
Will the bank extend the terms of the current mortgage?
You see the problem, we are trying to appraise something rationally, whereas the answer probably lies within the realms of not attempting to explain or understand anything, or make any rational choices, because….
That’s certainly the attitude of this person, the same attitude weinstein had, and the same attitude we have to pretty much everything in the west from sociopolitical to economic to engineering and infrastructure and technology to everything else.
the smoke weed every day guys are self medicating their stupor, every other fucker is on a permanent natural high and they ain’t never coming down man, not if they can help it.
Put cheech and chong in charge of fucking *everything* and it will probably be more rational than everything we have known in the west for the past 70 years, and finally we come to a *true* understanding of the sentiment that the markets (and everything else) can stay irrational long after you ran out of the ability to stay with skin in the game and on your back.
