@LongTplexTrader EASY Brother🙏----BELIEVE me when I say I feel the pain...We all know the likeliness of what 'can' come...and THAT would be waaaaaaaay worse. Live Ready🙏
I needed to move a sofa.
I mentioned this to an American. He said, "You know anybody with a truck?"
I did not know anybody with a truck.
He looked at me with real concern. Not pity. Concern. The way you look at a man who has told you he does not have a name.
"You gotta know somebody with a truck."
I asked how one acquires such a person.
He said, "You just do."
This is the third time I have received that answer in this country. It is the answer to everything here. You just do. There is no process. There is only the eventual fact of having.
He said, "Ask Kevin."
I do not know a Kevin. He said Kevin like I should. He said it the way you say a shared uncle.
I met Kevin four days later. Kevin owns a truck. Kevin does not own a truck for himself. Nobody owns a truck for themselves. Kevin owns a truck for a fifteen mile radius.
Inside I said: THIS MAN HAS TAKEN A VOW. HE DID NOT ANNOUNCE IT. HE SIMPLY PURCHASED A BED AND ACCEPTED THE CONSEQUENCES.
Kevin arrived on Saturday. He brought the truck. He also brought a second man.
I had not asked for a second man.
The second man's name is Tony. Tony came because Kevin came. Tony did not know me. Tony did not ask what we were moving. Tony brought gloves.
They moved the sofa in eleven minutes.
I offered them money. Both of them laughed at the same time, which felt rehearsed and was not.
I asked what I owed them.
Kevin said, "Buy the pizza."
That is the price. That is the entire economy. The truck costs one pizza and the pizza is not negotiable and the pizza is also not expensive and everyone knows what size.
Inside I said: THE FEE IS FIXED ACROSS THE ENTIRE NATION AND WAS SET BY NO ONE.
We ate on the floor because the sofa was against the wall and none of us wanted to be the first to sit on it.
Tony told me his daughter plays soccer. I asked if she is good. He said, "She's aggressive."
I still think about that.
Three weeks later, Kevin texted me.
"You free Sunday? Helping Tony move a fridge."
He did not ask if I wanted to. He informed me of a fridge.
Inside I said: I HAVE BEEN CALLED UP. I DID NOT ENLIST. THE PAPERS WERE FILED ON MY BEHALF.
I went. I moved the fridge. I have no truck. I contributed only arms.
Afterward, a man I had never met asked me if I knew anybody with a truck.
I said, "Yeah, I got a guy."
I have a guy.
I am somebody's guy now, too. Tony has told two people about me.
He describes me as "the guy who's strong for his size."
I have never been prouder of a sentence in my life.
A woman in a hot-air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below.
She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.
"She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be a Republican."
"I am," replied the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."
The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Democrat."
"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"
"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going.. You've risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."
I agree there is zero risk for the UST to not be able to refinance. The question is at what cost? Options are a) price discovery or b) repression through monetisation. For a highly financialized system that relies on credit growth to survive, adding ~$1.5T-$2T (4-5%) annually to government debt ($39T) has very serious implications. IOW crowding out effect is very real and consequential.
In no particular order:
- no political will to reduce deficits
- private credit cracking
- oil at $100
- ongoing war with a defence budget of $1.5T (increased from ~$900B
- interest expense surpassing defence budget for the first time
- 5Y yield approaching 4% (WAM ~6 years)
- foreign holdings of USTs declining as a % of total
- JGB yields approaching decades high
- auctions tailing
- refinancing of covid era debt issued at ZIRP now due (assuming WAM ~6 years)
- tariffs revenue plan shot down by the Supreme Court
- tariff refund?
- Fed chair designate a proponent for a smaller Fed b/s
- reserves at $3T (LcLOR imho)
- positive SOFR-IORB spread
- PD sheet capacity limited
- a frozen housing market and mortgage rates ~6.4%
- trough unemployment
- persistent inflationary pressures
- $1.2T securities margin debt (FINRA)
The Fed will have no choice but to step back in and do LSAPs and $DXY will be the release valve.
All federal heavy charges have been officially dropped against the American doctor
Dr. Kirk Moore, who gave hundreds of people a "saline solution" instead of the Corona vaccine and issued them vaccination cards!
Dr. Kirk Moore said amid his tears: "I only did what was right! You cannot ask for 'informed consent' from people when they do not know what is being injected into their bodies!"
This is true medicine, conscientious humanity, and unwavering absolute justice!
Given how the Corona coercions distorted human lives around the world, this historic acquittal is a judicial slap directed at the global network.
Salute to the real doctors, to the conscientious doctors!
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
If anybody wants to know why Gen X is always mad, it's because they had to replace their record collections with a tape collection that they had to replace with a CD collection that they had to replace with an MP3 collection, and now they need a subscription to listen to music