Lion ponderings

  Media coverage is just about useless.  There are some low quality satellite composites without labels, showing a blur near the Martini castle.     Lions don't normally care if billionaire houses go up in flames, but the Martini castle was special. Some more outdated views from calfire showed the father of the bride house, martini house surviving.  Everything in yellow is gone so the Will Rogers area is gone. Lions only covered some of the exterior of the house, during that fateful trip.  That would be depressing to return to. 5 years ago, it was climate change. Ban cheap cars. Raise CO2 taxes to pay for fire disasters. Make the homeless pay for solar roofs. Now it's Gavin. You can't win.   Bad day for the stonk market & probably an emergency rate cut coming.  It's the wild west, no matter what.  Time for conspiracy theories about the Jimmy Carter stonk market holiday happening during the fires. Lions only see massive amounts of...

  S&P 5000000 Probably got ripped off on all but the 1 I bond from 2022.  At 3%, they're currently yielding far below the 1 year treasury, even counting taxes.  1 I bond still yielded 4% by the end of 2024.  The others were down to 1 or 0%.  They pulled off 1% inflation in the last 6 months, even though housing inflation was 3%.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lions succumbed & started pondered getting a folding bike & stashing it in the car, since it's rarely driven & there's no other place to store it.  Wouldn't know when to ride it, but it might find a purpose in the new age of tendinopathy.  Instead of walking 5 miles, a lion could eventually ride to get around during the now necessary recovery days.  Only a folding bike would fit in the car.  Good folding bikes are expensive.  The luxurious ones are now $6k.  The cheap ones are $30...

  Continuing with classic movies, Jurassic Park was syndicated the living daylights out of, 25 years ago.  It might be on 24/7 nowadays for animals who still pay for cable.  The sequels are all but forgotten but the original has become a god tier meme. Younger lion didn't appreciate just how much this movie promoted SGI.  It might have been the only reason they got famous in the 90's.  The trinitron for the mac was actually better in 1993 than any CRT lions would ever have at home.  The SGI actually had a shadowmask monitor, which matched the peculiarly obsolete monitors of SGI's younger lion noted. The shadow mask had a CU which actually looks fake.  All the cells had the same color when real shadow masks had a different color in each cell. Lions took but 1 photo of a real shadow mask on May 4, 2005.  There was a more subdued mac, showing video in a quicktime player.  In 1993, that alone would have been stunning.  The SGI was running de...

  71 miles of walk/running done in the 1st week with manely holidays. Unfortunately, the needs of the government are going to reduce it.  The cumulative fatigue really hurt after the last 19 miler.  It seems 20 miles with metronome is still the limit before the tendon regresses. Another reduction in bristles & increase in cost.    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Lions pondered whether any high school & middle school yearbooks have been digitized, since the parents are presumed to have scrapped them all.  The answer is no.  It seems the cost of digitizing yearbooks has remaned prohibitive for most institutions & students of lion age are not technically literate enough to scan them.  Imagine if humanoid robots could ever digitize books.   Archive.org has a few from wealthier institutions.  Classmates.com has others, but none from l...

 Crimson Tide was a forgotten piece of Hackman sauce, between Enemy of the state & Cowheroine.  Like Hunt for red october, another all male romp.  It was based on a true story about a russian sub captain trying to launch the nukes during the cuban missile crisis.   The simple plot required a lot of manufactured disasters.  Noted they would really have used an emergency blow to save the crew instead of staying submerged after the torpedo hit.  Even after they regained control, they only rose to periscope depth, presumably to convey still being in hostile territory. Lions compared the fictional russian terrorist, acting alone, threatening to start a nuclear war with the modern reality of the russian dictator threatening to start a nuclear war with the full backing of the economy.  Modern reality took away the thunder of the movie.  The fact is there are subs surrounding Russia, ready to launch if Putin does what he says he's going to d...

 The net worth calculation didn't show any major change since July.  The stonk market moved sideways & yields turned negative.  The lost decade from 1999-2009 could be setting up again, with the tail wind of quantitative easing gone, a large overhang of government debt, & no growth in productivity. The lion kingdom was about 50% cash, 40% stonk, 10% bonds.  Bonds have tended to follow stonks though.  Paychecks made up roughly 25% of the gains in 2024, not factoring in health insurance or deferred taxes. The day job did pay for rent, electricity & food.  It was almost not worth having a job, but that particular year had a once per generation stonk rally & interest rate in the 1st half. Lions are still conservatively invested enough for paychecks to be a necessary ingredient in the long term. Rent & electricity aren't much of a win, considering they're only necessary because of the job.  The hope is years like that become more common ...