Lion ponderings

The lion kingdom last handled a rubix cube in its baby sitter days & possibly only last saw one in elementary school.  There's no memory of owning one.  The baby sitter one was new & very stiff.  It felt like a knockoff.  The knockoff feeling might be reason to believe the lion kingdom owned one, but there is no memory of one at home or the parents ever playing with it. They live forever in a world of fake wood paneling, station wagons, & pipe smoke.  They were impossible to solve, in those days.  Nowadays,  millionaire homeowner millennials just watch a video on how to solve them & laugh at generation X.  The lion kingdom gave it a few tries, but never again.

 Nice apocalypse dream with no zombies or deaths of loved ones.  The mane antagonists were the underground monsters from Tremors, but they somehow remaned unseen most of the time.  The monsters evolved a plan to starve the other animals by cutting off all infrastructure.  Days went by with no effort by the humans to grow their own food or make their own water, so the lion kingdom decided to have a go at solving the problem.  The lion kingdom owned land next to the ocean & could distill water.   Memories of 2009 came back, as the lion kingdom pondered differences between then & now.  Famous blogger Gulker mourned losing half his 401k.  Other internet commenters & especially Robert Kiyosaki called the stonk market & even 401k plans a ponzi scheme.  Finally, there was general distrust of the government, manely by generation X.  Was the government reinflating the stonk market for good or was it luring in suckers to pay off its debt before pulling out?  The feeling then was

The current boom doesn't even show up as a boom in a long term plot of stonk prices.  According to FRED, the fed stopped printing money back in February, but the stonk market hasn't done anything.  The mane unknown is whether interest rates are really going anywhere. The mane concern is the Dave Ramsey plan becoming the norm in the last 3 years: 100% index funds & no cash.  Higher stonk weighting as you get older.  If anything goes wrong, there aren't going to be any dip buyers besides the government.  The lion kingdom sees a short term pop, but selling in May & going away might come true for a change.   The lion kingdom has found betterment to be janky millennial user interface design at its best.  There's a target allocation slider on a front page which selects how much is invested in stonks & a portfolio control on a back page which shows a detailed list of holdings.  The target allocation & the portfolio control are actually the same control.  Change

After the most erotic dream yet about making love to a 20 year old black girl, it was hard to wake up.  It might have been in heroine college. The days of romantic relationships & living in houses are long gone, but lions still wonder what it would be like to stand still at 3000ft as if it was the ground, without any machine, wings, or cables.  Instead of the ground, the tops of clouds would be the only things at eye level.  The closest an animal can get is hanging from a copter.  Hot air balloons & paramotors have to move.  The copter would be noisy & blasting air down.  A copter couldn't hover in the clouds since there's no position reference.   A GPS guided multirotor might do it.  The animal would have to be fully parachuted.  Then there's the issue of getting away from the copter to deploy the parachute.  What happens in a motor failure below parachuting altitude? Perhaps getting a copter ride as an underslung payload is doable.  The mane problem is what ha

The mountain was packed with what lions thought were preppy startup employees but might have been preppy college students with startup dreams.  Really tall, dominant, pale, stuck up women chatted up their planned conquests with their really tall, pale, hipster boyfriends.  They were all having a rare exposure to sunlight.  That's the difference between the prep school students that A startups employ & the lazy lions that C startups employ. The common dream for all the Berkeley & Stanford students is to get into an A startup & become rich immediately after graduating.  Getting into Alphabet, Meta, or Apple is not even on their radar.  They all seemed to be either working for social network startups or planning on working for social network startups.  The days of self driving car startups, fitness startups, or food delivery startups are history. 1st Trump & now Elon have kicked off a new boom in social network startups, this time trying to solve the free speech proble

  This smells like urine. The lion kingdom then knew why 5th grade math class always smelled like urine. The teacher Ms. Mattos must have eaten this every day. We went in right after lunch & all the kids agreed that room smelled like urine. With all the grocery stores out of business, this is now the only instant noodle in walking distance. The stonk market will set a new all time high in the next month, with Ukraine's victory all but certain & no-one taking The Jay seriously.  Then the stonk market will have to digest a lot of empty hawkish threats in May with only a 40% chance of ever materializing. The lion kingdom expects the new money to wind its way back to exclusively asset inflation. The bottom 99% buy crap which is part of the CPI. The top 1% are a separate economy which keeps all its money in assets. All the money made by the bottom 99% eventually goes to the top 1% where it disappears from the CPI in a cloak of real estate. The lion kingdom believes home equi

 The lion kingdom eventually settled into chewing on the right side & moving the softer mass to the left side for tasting it.  There's no taste when chewing on 1 side. Kharkiv in 2009 & today. Only the administration building was destroyed. The pre famine buildings seem to be intact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALfXM_ZIq0c The lion kingdom noted this rich millennial house resembles the steel pole barn once envisioned. It's a straight gable with the ends all glassed over. The exterior was never shown, but it appears to be a stick frame. Take away 1 floor, most of the rooms, most of the finishings, all the millennial, & it's a lion den. The sides are solid glass between support columns, with few exceptions. The lion kingdom originally envisioned windows, but making sections all glass or solid might be simpler. Helas, remote work is starting to revert to an option for only the highly qualified again. Most of the neighbors are commuting again. The lion

 After a week of rhetoric from the Jay, the lion kingdom still expects the government to manufacture a reason for expanding the money supply & not doing anything to slow down inflation.  They've got war, pandemic, race relations, Kim Kardashian to work with.  It's a rare year that the lion kingdom makes any money, but this might be a year of capturing some of the inflationary gains. Another thing which lions don't buy is Trump being a dictator.  Look, outside of republican disneyland US is a 2/3 dictatorship, 1/3 democracy.  2/3 of the people work for the government & follow all the rules that entails.  1/3 is the private sector.  2/3 live under mandates, serve the 1 ruler & stay in lock step with the 1 ruler.  The government doesn't do a damn thing for the 1/3 that's outside the autocracy. A politician who thinks the government shouldn't be 2/3 of the population is called a threat to democracy.  Basically, a threat to the autocracy is a threat to de

  It came to pass that Nob Hill joined Albertsons in valhalla.  People just can't afford Biden's inflation.  For 22 years, it was the easily walkable solution to the mane's demands.  The plan is to build more condos in its place.  Now, the nearest real food is 1 mile away. After 4 years, the lion kingdom is arguably not as happy with its mechanical cherry keyed keyboard as it was with the cheaper keyboards.  The light resistance, progressive failure of the spacebar & other keys were a heavy price to pay for a clicky noise.  Compared to the bugs in modern text entry boxes, the keyboard is the least problem.  Maybe a unicomp model M clone was the only mechanical keyboard that was worth it, but they're no longer made. There is a new desire for a smaller keyboard with enough room to tack on air vents.   Made 1 last photo of the natural tooth, revealing the fatal crack.  All the teeth have various cracks, but the others are not fatal.  Then it was reduced to a stub &

 The lion kingdom ended up owing money despite being on the withholding compliance program, so it's another year of paper forms.  Next year will be the big capital gains tax.  This process involves filling out page 36 of the 1040 instructions.  They don't break up the AGI box into different amounts to be computed from different tables.  It's hard to believe that's all lions have to live on, in an age of $3 million houses. It's all unnecessarily complicated, but it also means most animals don't pay capital gains tax.  Their taxable accounts are all cash or invested in houses.  Only their retirement accounts earn capital gains.  Lions are in the unfortunate position of having manely taxable accounts.   The IRS reported a certain amount of interest paid, which implies the interest was deposited somewhere.  Helas, irs.gov requires creating a new account every year & this year requires a video call to get in.   It is believed the tooth being shaped like an animal

  JPL in 1964 & 2017 The lion kingdom didn't cry at all from late 2010 to late 2021, no matter what was happening.  Then crying returned after nightmares about mom dying & finally the loss of the natural tooth crown.  Not sure why the long vacation happened.  Maybe the period from 2010-2021 was an easier time.  There was always occasional crying before 2010.  There might have been another easy time from 1996-2007. It might have been better to live with the pain & eventually get an implant than embark early on a life without sticky foods.  The pain was static for 4 years & it might have outlasted a crown with a lot less care.  It hurt bad at least once every day, though & chewing manely on 1 side was wearing out the other side.  There was always at least 1 errant bite or test to see if the tooth was still damaged. The tooth was marginal & could have degraded at any time, necessitating an extraction.  The choice was based only on that risk or the chance of at