The stonk market shrugged off this week's news cycle, manely another Taiwan earthquake.  A 1000 point drop & emergency rate cut was 1 possibility.  Still suspect the cut cycle will begin with a correction.

 

Noted another 20% bump in food prices after the last minimum wage increase, but since it's limited to Calif* it'll be excluded from the average. 

The airline stonk has proven disastrous over the last 4 years.  It just bounced around its pandemic low for 4 years while everything else went up by at least the treasury rate.  It's believed to be smarter to dump it during a dip than dump it during 1 of the brief times it's above its low.  Either way, the money would have to go into something else.  The replacement is going to have more value during a dip.

Claiming a capital loss & buying anything else during a dip is believed to have more upside than claiming a capital gain & buying something else during an up market.  The capital gains tax is an unnecessary penalty for an outcome that isn't cash.

After trading during a dip & collecting a capital loss despite making money in the end, it felt like a trick that should have been illegal, but the government would have charged if the trade involved an intermediate capital gain. 

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Kind of an intriguing still of Ben Heck playing with his cat. He's very wealthy, but it somehow conveys someone living alone in the middle of nowhere, who hard a hard life, had no family besides his cat, living out his last days with his cat. 

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The Ben Heck cast

The Ben Heck show is a rare example where none of the cast was in any credits except for Ben.  Even IMDB has nothing.  It stayed that way even as gootube became a serious money maker.  Not sure many gootubers still hide their identity, now that there's serious money to be made.

Alyson Herreid got a government university staff job & never looked back.

Karen Corbeill went into software management.  Ben complained about her a lot.  Based on lion experiences with management track employees, suspect she acted like Lumbergh.

Felix Gardner famously moved pianos after the show.  Now the internet shows some kind of technician job.  He was in the marines for 4 years, right before things got really bad after 2002.

Max was rarely on camera & the internet doesn't have anything on him.  He was the one pointing the camera after Alyson left.

Based on their job descriptions, the show didn't pay much.  Alyson probably left to make more money in the government.  Ben later said his house was paid for with royalties from pinball machines that he put in the stonk market. 

https://www.spookypinball.com/about-us/ says Ben Heck's pinball game sold out in 2013 & that the company began selling pinball machines in 2011.  That would have been when Ben got into the stonk market.  He bought his house in 2018.

2013 was when lions were reading a lot of doom reporting.  Quantitative easing was going to end badly & it was all going back to 7000.