WNash

I don’t have much confidence that the flow will back enough to sustain anything significant to the Buffalo metro outside of the typical southtowns hit, but I’m more confident that ice won’t be an issue for this event. The latent heat release from the phase change gets overlooked as a factor keeping the lake open. We’re not that far away from a freeze up, but it’s going to take a little longer than a week to do it.

Just bonkers.

I drove from Boston to Nashville not long after the March 1993 storm. It was insane. I think I took I-90 to I-84 to I-81 to I-40, and the snow piles from the plows were huge and continuous until about 30 miles east of Nashville. The impact of a powerful Miller A is just astounding.

LOCK IT IN

I don’t think I disagree with you either. Occupy was almost entirely a failure. I admire their commitment to radical democracy, but the consensus decision making process let bad faith trolls prevent them from doing anything significant to build capacity for further action. But their failure still pulled just enough Dems a little bit to the left and scuttled Obama’s “grand bargain” BS that would have capped social security. As for the wsb community — I don’t microtune my small amount of equity investment because the system is so stacked against individuals who don’t have seven or eight or more figures invested. So it was absolutely awesome to see the GME play. Two things I especially love about it — even more than wrecking the lives of a few hedge fund bastards — was that it showed the power of aggregate, collective effort, and that it flushed out the true positions of political elites whose real priority is defending the interests of the money elites. If all the people who hate this system fought the elites and not each other, we might actually have a chance of not being relegated to lives as drones and morlocks.

They exploited a weakness in utterly corrupt financial markets, which was personally remunerative for many people, and which caused some inconvenience for a few scumbags who wholly deserve pain. But these markets are set up for the benefit of the scumbags, and they’ll never let this kind of things happen again. The elites who need to go down are all of the wealthy people who have used their money as leverage to shift the foundations of our economic and political system to benefit themselves at our expense. Naming the enemy is something Occupy got right, and they forced income and wealth inequality back into the arena as issues driving political action. Democrats pay lip service to inequality while protecting the elites who support them, while Republican politicians point the finger at cultural elites as a distraction to protect the real elites. Cultural issues are garbage. It’s superstructure, meaningless and powerless to affect the basic structure of economic relations. Anybody who tries to distract us from recognizing who really holds power — the money elite — is either a dupe or is working on their behalf.

Yeah I drove the length of Buffalo along Bailey Avenue (near the eastern border of the city), and only the most southern quarter of the city has snowcover.

As bad a winter forecast as you can have in the eastern lakes. One marginal chance of a minor snowfall in the span of a week in which the temp never rises above the freezing mark. Not even any snowpack for the cold to preserve.

Just got a lightning alert on my Tempest. Distance of 21 to 24 miles. To the south, that distance is an arc from Angola to Boston to Holland. Definitely one of the coolest things about the Tempest, and both the lightning detector and the anemometer are working great since I ran a 12 foot mast up the back of my house (putting the station at around 28 feet above the ground level).

Really wish they would divide the county into thirds. Most of “northern” Erie County will be lucky to see advisory criteria snows. And I’m not understanding the SWS that includes NF and Buffalo. I just drove down NFB from Robinson to Main Street, right through the SWS area, and outside of a small burst of moderate snow well north of the 290, I barely saw a flake.

From now on I will only use the Mattchera algorithm for snowfall totals

Countercyclical spending is the right approach now. I’m seeing the value in the MMT approach to monetary policy. Float money to the broader economy with direct payments and necessary projects to take up the slack in economic productivity, and reel in the money through taxation changes when the private economy is capable of being more generative. This should keep a bear market away for now, but I’m still thinking bonds are a good play. Maybe an inflation hedge like a precious metals fund if the price is right. I’m sure people are using BTC/crypto as a hedge as well, but I don’t have confidence in the stability of that market (which is probably my loss, but miss me with that opportunity).

Yeah the Titans made two huge mistakes: dropping the spy on Lamar on that 48 yard run, and abandoning the long passing game that tore up Baltimore’s secondary in the first half. They thought they could win by running Henry into an eight man box. The Bills won’t make the first mistake. Tennessee stomped Baltimore in last year’s playoffs because they schemed to contain Lamar on every play. The Bills will do the same, except Buffalo has a far better defense than the Titans. And on offense, Josh needs to keep hitting Baltimore on the long shots as long as they’re giving them away. But it will be important to have the running game going if Baltimore drops multiple LBs into pass coverage. Josh can tuck and run, but the Ravens will cheap shot a QB at any opportunity. I can see Cleveland winning in KC in a shocker. If the Bills take care of business against Baltimore, two weeks from today they could be playing in Orchard Park for the Super Bowl.

I am really sorry to hear this. Can you think of any triggers? Environmental, behavioral, physiological? I was just reading an article by the NHL player Colin Wilson, who retired after 10 or so years. He suffered though some really severe anxiety and insomnia problems, and it turned out he had untreated OCD that in retrospect is obvious to him, but at the time he was just totally unaware. Not to be weird or anything, but what worked for him was therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs, which allowed him to identify the parts of his personality and behavior that were causing him problems. I’m teetotal and I think it’s good for people to keep their use of mind altering substances to a minimum, but I recognize that taking medication for psychological conditions is absolutely necessary for many people. If you’re struggling to figure out what could possibly be causing these health issues, finding a therapist who uses psychedelics may be a good idea.

I’m starting to come around to the realization that federal budget deficits and the national debt don’t actually matter. Whether a Democrat or a Republican wins the presidency, deficits don’t matter, and the debt goes up. Even the tax vs spend argument doesn’t mean much. I was born when Nixon was President, and every President in my lifetime except Carter actually increased spending AND lowered taxes. The only taxation difference between Rs and Ds is that Democrats’ tax cuts are usually offset by a tax hike on wealthier people and Republicans tend to shift the overall taxation burden downward by disproportionately cutting taxes for the wealthy. And there aren’t meaningful spending differences between the two parties. Republicans talk about cutting discretionary non-defense spending but never actually do, while some Democrats talk about cutting military spending and then do not. The only really meaningful deficit reduction since Carter left office was in the last Clinton term, when total federal discretionary spending was kept around the inflation rate while upper income and capital gains tax rates, increased when Clinton first took office, brought in a lot of revenue from the first tech boom. Despite the fact that neither party is actually willing to do anything about budget deficits, predictions of runaway inflation or other economic consequences never materialize. In practice, deficits really only seem to matter as a pretext for ideological policy preferences. So the same politicians who brought us a 50% increase in the national debt are going to pretend that deficit spending is a danger to the republic. Total nonsense, but most politicians know that admitting their real motivation would get them run out of office. Either deficits do matter or they don’t, and if they matter, politicians should have to govern like they matter. We’re not politicians, so we don’t have to BS each other.

Equities prices are being backstopped by the Fed, which has created moral hazard for investors. In fact, investors are dramatically increasing exposure to risk because on the evidence, share prices can only rise. In a sense it’s a massive government intervention that overwhelmingly favors very wealthy people, and it’s not sustainable, creating absurd EPS ratios. At the moment when investors realize that the Fed will no longer subsidize equity markets, there will be a collapse in stock prices, but unlike the pandemic bear market, nobody will be riding to the rescue of stock traders.

Obviously we get thundersnow on rare occasions in the northern third of the metro, but the lake influence promotes stability and minimizes convection from late winter until late summer, diminishing the temperature gradients that allow charge to build up (I hope I am explaining lightning correctly). The radar image of a convective complex collapsing as it reaches Buffalo is familiar to all of us. We get occasionally spring and summer thunderstorms, but a fraction of the number of storms outside of the lake plain. I’m looking forward to seeing the lightning data from the Tempest — I’m thinking the number of thunderstorms will jump dramatically in August and September, dropping back to near zero by mid February. In any case, I felt pretty comfortable procrastinating the work needed to ground the mast until the first part of the summer, but after last night, maybe not. I’m going to get the ground wire connected this week and sink the rod when the soil lets me.

Garbage weather for New Years Day, but this alert from my new weather station was cool. When I put up the mast off the back of our house, I told my wife that we wouldn’t have to worry about lightning striking the mast (2 m above the roofline) for 7-8 months, and by then I would have have grounded the mast. Of course when she heard the thunder she gave me a *look*.

Henry’s a great running back, and potentially a HOF player. You have to hit him in the backfield to stop him. Green Bay’s linebackers showed every NFL team how to do that, and the Bills have some great MLBs. As I know from my wife, Bills have seen too much to ever get cocky, but speaking objectively, they look like a top tier team with only KC joining them at that level.

I’m a Titans fan, and the Tennessee pass rush is so poor that the Bills would easily win with just an average performance.

Is that the Buffalo Blizzards book? I’ve been looking for my copy and can’t find it. The storm this Boxing Day storm might be a little higher than 18.4, right? I don’t have time to dig through the hourly totals from KBUF to see if the 24 hour total might move the storm up that ranking more than the daily total. Crazy that the November 2014 storm only appears on the KBUF daily records as one mediocre 7.4” daily record snowfall. We were in Parkside at the time and of course we only got a couple of inches.

Easily top 20, likely top 10 for daily snowfall. But there’s a big cluster of events within 1-2 inches of today’s snowfall. It reminds me a lot of the 1/25/2019 storm that jackpotted the airport, but which in retrospect was overshadowed in impact and storm total by the two day blizzard the next week. https://www.weather.gov/buf/BUFRecords What really stands out is that daily records don’t fully capture the most impactful winter storms we get, the epic long duration events. The 1985 storm is barely a blip (two modest records, both well under today’s airport total). That said, the 2001 long duration event is utterly impressive in both daily records and storm totals.

My new Tempest weather station gave me a lightning detection alert late last night, which was cool. We seem to have about 16” of pack — the compacted 5” from the Christmas Eve synoptic + the lake effect from today. So we definitely had a foot or so of lake stuff today. Pretty good storm, especially when we got rocked by the most intense edge of the lake band this afternoon. Fingers crossed we can still get the elusive epic Buffalo metro multi-day event this year!

Yeah it’s ripping. I couldn’t see my neighbor snowblowing less than 40 yards from my window.

Where in TN were you? My mother lives in Nashville (where I’m originally from). That bomb there today has messed up air traffic control and mobile service. As disruptive as it has been, I’m relieved that more people weren’t seriously hurt (or worse).