Ham radios are like women, sports cars, airplanes, and sailboats.  Your enjoyment of any of these will depend on careful consideration of your “use case”. However, if your use case is “spend all your money” my experiments indicate that even a thoughtless collection of two or three of the above will work fine. Which has … Read More

Going into the long weekend, I’ve been chewing on what may be the most important investment question we ever face, and it has nothing to do with stocks. It’s the question of where we put our remaining attention, energy, and clarity as the calendar insists on moving forward. There’s a “retirement” story most people tell … Read More

There’s a holiday coming Monday, so no markets and expect a short take on life planned then. I did something highly unusual today.  Slept in until a few minutes before 5 A.M. Sure, the beast of a cold was part of it; worn body parts in my 77th year can be brutal if not downright … Read More

How are your “war preps?” This is not something people in the CONUS need to worry about – yet.  Except – and this is our first thinking bit of the morning – there is the Calendar. My consigliere and I have spent uncountable (therefore, non-billable) time calculating the answer to the simple question: “When is the absolute … Read More

America hasn’t become the Duchy of Grand Fenwick overnight. We’re not there yet, and we probably can’t get there for another five or ten years. But the uncomfortable truth is that American hegemony, both financial and cultural, is now openly negotiable. Silver topped $90 overnight. A reserve currency doesn’t lose leadership because another nation makes … Read More

No, actually, the tariffs-as-taxes debate will go on long after my passing, yours, or the pyramids. Sure, it sounded like “free money.”  But usually, where there’s “free money” there’s also fine print. And the tab comes later. Take the inflation figures just out: “The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.3 percent … Read More

Markets are in sell-off mode ahead of today’s opening for a simple reason. You’ll need a scorecard to separate signal from noise. So, let’s line ’em up, shall we? Trump vs. Powell Began developing Friday when the Fed was served subpoenas over – at least ostensibly – the $2.3 billion renovation plans for Fed buildings.  … Read More

No, not a typo… I didn’t quite get around to the deck completion this week because of a bout of chest cold and asthma – not my idea of fun.  And then, as I was creeping out of the crud, it was cold and rainy weather. Since I know the boss around here, I told … Read More

A few thoughts this morning extending the research from Friday on the odds of a Civil War Lite (CWL) riff from the Minnesota outrage this week. As usual, we keep the “systems hat” on. But even for the public, the simple taekout from Friday was “As long as stocks are going up, Walz and company … Read More

Friday of last week, our Aggregate Index opened the New Year at 59,510.42. Going into today’s open (based on Thursday’s close) we notched 60,243.55.  That’s a gain of 1.23 percent in a single week. I don’t know about your life.  But there was nothing impressive noted out here in the woods.  We seized Venezuela, but as … Read More

We return to the post-holiday, time to get back to normal – whatever that was.  But, at least the weather looks good here… Tainter’s Marginal Rate of Return Problem Seen through Tainter’s lens, mass migration, institutional sprawl, and geopolitical chest-thumping are not separate stories — they’re all symptoms of a system burning energy to preserve complexity after … Read More

Subtitle: How a Mouse Wheel glitch on a brand new mouse – plus the insult of having to “get a confirmation code” to take delivery of food we’d already paid for – combine to present a distasteful and inescapable conclusion. We are becoming the digital-spin off the Anasazi.  Which, you (ought to) remember as one … Read More

Dinner out with friends last night didn’t help Elaine or me to clarify our worldview.  Our dinner companions are just as unsure about the latest change in “American Dynamics” as are we when it comes to swiping the head of Venezuela and “perp-walking” him and his wife. As a dynamic systems integrator in my thinking, I’m … Read More