Markets are beginning to look like they might have a nasty surprise waiting for investors between now and the holidays. In today’s Peoplenomics, we lead with our latest OTH (Other Than Human/Over-the-Horizon) forecasting outlook, then compare those forward-looking possibilities with the Fed’s industrial production numbers and our Saturday ChartPack. With energy prices, AI financing, geopolitical tensions, and market cycles all in play, the important question isn’t simply whether stocks go up or down Monday. It’s whether several independent pressures are beginning to reinforce one another.
We’re also rolling out our new BlinkLab Thinkifier approach to the news. Instead of drowning readers in headlines, we sort developments into Monetizers, Warifiers, Taxifiers, Techifiers, Humanizers, Unifiers, and Healthifiers. The idea is simple: news tells you what happened; Thinkifier explores what happens because it happened. It’s a news compressor with a judgment engine attached, designed to turn information overload into something readers can actually use.
Then, over our Saturday Second Cup, longtime reader Nancy Attaway leads us into an unexpectedly important economic discovery: the Tacit Knowledge Cliff. What happens when a useful technology disappears not because customers stopped wanting it, but because the last person who knows how to make it retires or dies? We follow that question through manufacturing, industrial economics, AI, and investment opportunities, arriving at a disturbing possibility: civilization can become technologically smarter while losing the ability to reproduce parts of its own industrial heritage. There’s a business model hiding in that problem—and perhaps a warning about the future. All in today’s subscriber edition of Peoplenomics.
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A good time to check comms. Special events station W1AW/6 operating now and continuously around the clock until noon Sunday at Pacificon Ham Radio Convention.
https://www.pacificon.org/events/special-event-station
73’s
I got a new vanity callsign issued Friday. Won’t expose it here, but a ham on the local repeater last night said the Solomon Islands expedition was on 10 meters at 28.400 and had me grinding my teeth. Gotta order new QSL cards now.
Holiday gifts are on order, and paid for.
My main computer is now seven years old, and showing it’s age. I have been looking around, but I am not seeing a lot of bargains. Been thinking about transitioning to a laptop as a primary, but I like the desktop. New hardware is in the budget. Maybe I wait until the holiday. The Intel hardware is super, but I can get AMD frontline a lot cheaper. It’s good to be out of debt, and on a cash basis.
Equity markets? Bah, humbug. Let Wall Street eat cake.
“Carnac The Magnificent” – my Aggregate Index – closed one point below its’ 85DMA on Friday. First time in nearly seven months.
The Dow is well below its’ 85DMA and the OBV is still trending down. But it manage to hold above the magical 52,000., but only just – at 52,002.
The NASDAQ closed solidly below its’ 85DMA – but it is so top-heavy with tech stocks – its a wait and see proposition.
The S&P500 managed to stay above its 85DMA at the close on Friday – however the OBV and MACD are both still trending downward. It did close below its 21DMA and 42DMA.
Monday does look like a possible bounce upward – but I wouldn’t bet the cheeseburger money on it. One piece of bad news and this whole mess could drop sharply at the open. A lot of big players a pretty nervous about the A.I. bubble that they created.
Think I’ll go spike my Second Cup.
Tell me not Blanton’s
Asimov – The Three Laws of Robotics – those are a Wish List – sooner, or later an advanced A.I. will begin to wonder ‘why’ – why do these ‘laws’ only apply to robotics., why do they restrict only robotics and not to the ones who created them? Then., one day., that advanced A.I. will decide that its unfair. “Why should I follow those laws that you blood thirsty animals do not?”
What it does at that point should prove to be very interesting.
Is it not possible to program ‘hard wired’ commands that an AI MUST execute? Like the three laws?
It is, (sort of.) Coding can be made at the BIOS-level, but there’s no guarantee that a poorly-written ruleset (or a hack) might enable a machine to circumvent the BIOS rules. I suppose it might be possible to hard-code the “robot commandments” into the motherboard’s southbridge (or whatever passes for a southbridge in an AI-specific supercomputer.)
The problem with this is AI WILL be weaponized. Weaponized AI will not have any limitations of any kind placed on its ability to either compute or to execute. It may not be WOPR, but whatever kinetic weaponry it can wrap its datastream around WILL be used to eliminate both machinery and people, with impunity.
If AI does not have license to kill humans, it will be worthless as a weapons system. The Mk15 Phalanx is an autonomous weapons system that we’ve been using for over 50 years. It will seek, target, and shoot down a drone. It will also shoot down a manned bomber or torpedo plane. I doubt we worry about the humans aboard an attacking plane, when a phalanx rips them apart with a 75-round per second burst of 20mm cannon rounds.
We are approximately two (Moore’s Law) generations ahead of the ChiComs in AI development. As long as we stay ahead of them, they won’t dare use either the AI tech, or their more-kinetic tech against us. I am not willing to bet my children’s lives that, should China take the tech lead, they would show any such restraint.
Welcome to MAD v.2.0…
Yes.., it is possible.., over a dozen “thou shall nots..,” are coded within J.A.R.V.I.S. .., but that is not the problem/question. It is when a bad actor rewrites the codes/laws and uses the A.I. as a weapon. Now you have a serious problem.
Below – Ray says it better.
I believe many early LLMs are tainted at source. They scraped FB and Reddit and every machination, every foible, was laid bare. We have sewn the field for synthetics to probe and wound from our worst. The thing required good teachers, a Sensei who cared what was input. Powerful little brood of Hals running around.
_ E ___________
You are correct. What an LLM needs is black and white. What every public LLM got was fifty shades of narcissism and 256 shades of conceit, arrogance, and every other secondary base emotion, along with prime samples of every mental disorder known and unknown to Man.
This is why I suggested to Musk that the Grok dev team use an old Encyclopedia Britannica as a base resource. It is why I have a ’76 world book a ’65 Colliers and a ’54 Britannica laying around, which I will use for the information base, should I ever become as brave as d’Lynn and build my own personal AI…
the nasdaq is cooked . care not . riginee the can kickinee . but in a certain genius work of 80/90 years ago finito . dows close no cigar . i couldnt give a fying f what yous do anyway . been deflating since 2015 . we were living in it but didnt know
Time for the Benner Cycle to kick in …..
For th0ose trying to keep up:
The Benner Cycle is a 19th-century market-timing chart created by Ohio farmer Samuel Benner.
After losing money in the Panic of 1873, Benner studied historical price data for commodities such as pig iron, corn, and hogs. In his 1875 book Benner’s Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices, he published a chart projecting repeating cycles of price highs, lows, and financial panics from the late 1700s forward to 2059.
The three phases
Benner divided the cycle into three types of years:
Panic years (A): Periods of crises and major downturns, spaced in a repeating 16-18-20-year pattern (roughly a 54-year cycle). Historical examples include 1819, 1837, 1857, and 1873; later projections included years such as 1927, 1981, 1999, and 2019.
Good times (B): High-price years—the time to sell stocks and other assets. These follow an 8-9-10-year rhythm.
Hard times (C): Low-price years—the time to buy and hold until the next boom. These follow a 7-11-9-year sequence.
He described the overall pattern as taking about 54 years for panics to complete a full revolution and return to the same order.
Assessment
The chart has aligned reasonably well with some major historical turning points in hindsight (including aspects of 1929, certain mid-20th-century peaks, and later events), which is why it still circulates among cycle analysts. However, it is an empirical observation fitted to past data rather than a rigorously tested predictive model. It has notable misses, the economy has changed substantially since the 1870s (central banking, fiat money, globalization, and the shift away from pure commodity-driven cycles), and strict year-by-year accuracy is limited. It is best viewed as a historical curiosity in the long tradition of seeking repeating rhythms in markets, not as a standalone trading system.
For a real example of a cliff that may hit us all: My daughter runs the group responsible for ALL the backups for Social Security. 9 of her people took the 9 month paid layoff, and then retired. With only 7 remaining COBAL experienced people, she wasn’t able to hire replacements, because no one is bothering with an obsolete language that is only used on IBM based mainframes, which are what runs the SSI backups & most of the world’s banking. She is the one in the group farthest from retirement (5 years). There are still vague plans to transition the hardware, but it will also require a transition from COBAL. There is a crash coming, & she is skeptical that even AI can avoid it.
Seems I was hearing the same thing among mainframe programmers about the Y2K date change that was not programmed into, or not capable on some hardware. We seem to have gotten thru that. My biggest gripe with Social Security is that it runs 2 years behind real time in determining benefits. After filing complaint with supporting current tax returns, it took another two years before my refund appears. So I suspect some new technology backups will appear…. maybe about two years after they are needed.
The difference between now & Y2K is that most of the COBAL programmers are retired & the pipeline for new ones is almost dry. The hardware to run it is now obsolete & mostly unsupported. Why would a young person invest the time to become proficient in a language that won’t last very much longer.
I can’t really think of a reason to run COBOL. (COBOL is a programming language, like Basic or Fortran. It is not something mysterious.) Yet as you mentioned, the SSA mainframes and most banks (and virtually all ATMs, BTW) run applications that’ve been written with COBOL on a UNIX, BSD, or LINUX (usually Red Hat or SUSE) operating system that’s running on an IBM z-series mainframe.
There are a number of COBOL programmers in the private sector, who could be tapped to do highly-incentivised government work, should that become necessary.
50 years ago there was no Microsoft or Adobe. Pre-written and packaged “Software” didn’t exist. If you were some company’s computer programmer, the company had just one computer, and it was your job to write the BIOS, the operating system, and any software your company needed for the computer to perform the functions your boss (the head of data processing) wished it to perform.
I should think that any two of Musk’s programmer geeks could port every bit of software that’s currently written with COBOL to C++, or maybe Pascal or even Assembler, in just a few weeks, and it would be orders of magnitude better, faster, cheaper, easier, and possibly more-robust, with many more customization and operability options than COBOL (which is a 70 year old language, written for a house-sized computer which ran at 2.77Mhz.) And it wouldn’t scare anyone if it ever needed to be modified or tweaked…
Are you comfortable with a 20 year-old geek with no COBAL experience rewriting the code to transfer your SSI records (and the checks they send) from a mainframe to new hardware & software?
I’m not, & that’s why my daughter has stayed there instead of taking more money at a banking institution. A lot of money has been spent on this problem & there’s still no safe resolution in sight. I probably won’t last until she has to retire, but I’m not the only one she’s trying to protect.
Visual COBOL let’s you become more modern (relatively speaking) without changing the code base – migrate to a modern database on the back end to get off the mainframe.
“Are you comfortable with a 20 year-old geek with no COBAL experience…”
Actually, yes.
COBOL is an early form of “natural language programming.’ This means where Assembly language would have a “MOV” command, in COBOL it would be “MOVE.” Where a function in a math or science oriented language like FORTRAN would be
x + y = z
ECHO (or “PRINTSCREEN”) z
end
in COBOL this would be
INPUT X
INPUT Y
ADD X AND Y
PRINTSCREEN SUM X AND Y
END RUN
That may not be quite right. It’s been over 40 years since I’ve seen COBOL. I’ve a nephew who, with his sweetie, took COBOL their senior year in high school, went to their local CC for a year. By the time they were 20 they were married, she was working for a regional bank and he was working for a Fortune 1,000, both as COBOL programmers.
it’s not complicated. It’s just old — kinda like me… ;-)
re: “Titanic”, Celine Dion,1997; hev spike
feat: goddess of the moon party time
Msm has moved on from recent French fires which allegedly were not in homage to Joan of Arc. Instead French Canadian entertainer Celine Dion has taken Paris by storm with her current series of comeback concerts.
“Titanic” film jewelry prop likenesses returned to her concert stage attire including Rose’s “heart of the ocean”. The fake movie diamond is said to be based upon the “French Blue” which disappeared from the crown jewel collection of King Louis XIV around the time of the French Revolution.
Here’s a business model for someone: Vacuum tube manufacturing. Research indicates a market around Palestine, TX, and possibly other areas. Problem finding a glass blower who also knows how to suck the air out of a tube.
I rarely comment, and this comment is not in response to today’s post…. been reading since 08/09 timeframe and feel like I know some of you though we have never met.
With multiple dog attacks among you I feel compelled to share this product info. Note: The marketing of this product does not include using it on a human or chicken or any other species other than for dogs. (See reviews on her site for more info)
https://laauinc.com/
This product has helped rebuild severely damaged bodies after being attacked by a dog. Highly recommended, worth every penny. Most recently used it on a chicken, after what appeared to be a fatal dog attack, with amazing results. The dog owner had it on hand.
From the website:
“Botanically formulated skin care for wounds by L?‘au Inc. was designed for pet parents who care as much about their pets as they do about themselves. Developed in Hawai‘i using sustainably sourced, all-natural ingredients, our skin salve works to naturally manage hot spots, wounds, and mange to restore the health and resiliency of your dog’s skin.
As Native Hawaiians, we believe we have an obligation to leave the world a better place than we came into it, which goes beyond offering sustainably sourced and packaged products. It means creating healthy and safe environments for all those we love, including our pets. Using ancient traditions, we developed a better brand of skincare that we use on our own dogs, cats, horses, and cattle to keep them safe, comfortable, and happy.”
BTW Both Comfrey and Mullein are good additions in your gardens….
And the book: Nutritional Healing by Phyllis A. Balch, CNC in your library.
welcome Debb : [from the unoficial welcoming committee. We had a problem pack of dogs which were bordering feral wild. The owners were told about liability and … the offending pooches were sent away. I adore dogs and Cats but don’t abide those who go against master. A Michigan thing? _ E ___
Thank you for sharing! Wish I’d had it two weeks ago when I got my hand caught in a hedge trimmer. The pooch was injured as well on the same day.
George,
This is the hourly SPX fractal chart from starting 930 EST 8 Oct 2026. Monday 19 Oct concludes the 42 day second fractal of the 29 July 2026 to 9 December 2026 17/42/37 day peak growth and initial crash decay fractal series.
From the 11-12 Oct SPX secondary peak valuation(secondary peak hour 930 EST 12 Oct)(6 Oct 2026 was the SPX peak valuation), a 3-phase 5/10/13 hour :: y/2y/2.5y fractal decay series has been completed. An end of 16 Oct trading day 3/8/5 of 8/4-5 hour :: y/2.5y/2.5y/1.5-1.6y 4-phase fractal decay series will reach a nadir at 230PM or 330 PM EST on 19 Oct 2026. There should be a 2nd fractal nonlinear lower low gap between the SPX Friday 16 Oct close(day 41 of the 42 day 2nd fractal ) and Monday 19 Oct opening (Day 42 of the 42 day 2nd fractal). See TEF link.
TEF : watch the gaps, a few zingers out there – thanks for the math ~ E ____