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’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.

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.

My brother is in the Moderna trial. First dosage he felt a little achy and tired the next day, but felt fine by the morning after that. He’s pretty sure he got the actual vaccine, partly because of side effects but mostly because he had two extended periods of exposure to COVID positive coworkers in a relatively confined space about six weeks apart. The more recent exposure involved a arrogant fool of a coworker who had removed his mask for about 30 minutes with his back turned to my brother and two colleagues. The two colleagues both developed symptoms within days, and one of them was hospitalized for over a month. My brother was in quarantine but went to be tested three times over two weeks, and was negative all three times. He also had antibody testing, but the trial protocol won’t reveal those results to him. I’m sold. Sign me up.

This pandemic has really brought the eugenicists out of the closet.

I’ve seen this same misleading statistic cited on Facebook and Twitter. The context is always removed. Out of curiously I tried to track it back to a source. It should surprise no one that like-minded denialists create and retweet/share this stuff and amplify it so much that it’s difficult to determine who was the first person to misrepresent and share it. A few times members of this site have shared similarly misleading data points — sometimes about COVID, sometimes about election fraud — and have been laughed at. So it’s possible that he shared the UN data without knowing that he had zero credibility. But why don’t people ask simple questions — is the information current, is the information relevant, is the source authoritative, is the information presented in context, and most importantly, what is the purpose of the information and the point of view of the source ? It’s a basic test of the legitimacy and reliability of information, and this stuff fails that test much of the time, because it isn’t produced to inform but to mislead. Asking “whose interests does this serve” is critically important.

I don’t like Cuomo, but Artvoice has turned out a lot of BS and disinformation since its few reputable journalists started a different weekly.

With UB students gone until the end of January, a chunk of regular tests and higher than average positivity rate and new cases will be taken out of Erie County’s numbers. I expect a small but significant drop in those metrics. It will probably have limited affect on hospitalizations, as college age COVID cases are a far greater risk to others than to themselves, and their interactions with non-students are generally limited to food service and retail workers and to a lesser extent the police who have to break up their superspreading parties.

This argument just lost an election, but go off

Are you in Patrol Services? I think you mentioned you were assigned to a precinct. I’m curious to know if patrol officers are being given specific orders on enforcement of pandemic regulations, or if it’s just another case of politicians leaving cops guessing about what their role is assumed to be.

At least his dad, for his flaws, cared about regular people. Andrew Cuomo represents one group of elites who are hated by another group of elites. Both groups of elites have support from regular people who think you only get two choices, but never fool yourself into thinking that any of them give a damn about us. Cuomo’s nursing home regulations were directly responsible for many deaths of vulnerable people, and for numerous employees of homes. It’s unforgivable and minimally the consequences should be that he leaves office in disgrace.