Wed [DOT 26/4/23]

26/4/23 MegMegMcGee 26

Welcome to Midweek Meh-ness! Hope you are having a good week so far. Hopefully you aren’t, like me, sitting in your bed eating Popeye’s Chicken at 9:20PM and you have some loftier goals and aspirations for your life.

I mean, I have some suggestions if they’d like to hear them.

Where can Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon go now?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/04/25/tucker-carlson-don-lemon-fired-anchor-future/

whaaaaat

Stonks!

First Republic Bank shares fall 50% after reporting dramatic slump in deposits
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/25/first-republic-bank-shares-fall

Deadsplinter compound?

Inside the Italian village being repopulated by Americans
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/irsina-basilicata-italy-americans/index.html

#RIP

Three Harry Belafonte performances you won’t want to miss
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/25/1171895416/harry-belafonte-dies

LOL

Have a great day!

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26 Comments

  1. There is some prime “Househunters International”-ism going on in that CNN story about Irsina. I was particularly enchanted by the story of Tiffany Day, 50, of Nashville, a “former” (so I guess retired at 50, good for you Tiff) financial planner who has bought five houses in the town, and at 50 has five children and eight grandchildren. Her son Hunter is to be wed, so 200 guests will be flying into Irsina to celebrate the occasion. Tiff, how much money do you have? Were you the financial planner for half the biggest C&W all-stars in Nashville? Do you count Taylor Swift (who has a few houses of her own) and Dolly Parton (who has an amusement park) as friends? Will they be going to the wedding? Just like HHI, these details are dangled in front of you but you never get the full story.

    Anyway, Basilicata is very rural and very remote. If you think of Italy as a boot, Basilicata is the foot, and Puglia, next door, also mentioned briefly in the article, is the heel. I wonder how people get there? They fly into Naples and then drive? Even if Irsina is, let’s say, 100 miles from Naples, it could still take many hours to get there, because the roads are so narrow and unimproved. Still, though, it is something to think about, because the little village center has plenty of English speakers and the locals seem welcoming and helpful about cutting through the red tape. Many a retire-abroad fantasy has come to ruin because the retirees picked a place where none of that is true. That’s one of the reasons why Chianti, the famous little wine-growing region of Tuscany, is so popular with Brits, and Barolo, which is similar and up in Piedmont, is not.

      • I’m eligible for Italian citizenship, it would cost $13,000 and take around two years. But if trump manages to win steal a second term I might start the process.

        • Lucky you, because along with Italian citizenship comes EU citizenship, which opens up a world/half a continent’s worth of possibilities.

          I may or may not be eligible for Canadian citizenship. I know I was at one point but I think they’ve tightened things up. My grandparents’ papers ultimately fell into the hands of that brother of mine who died last year. I saw him pre-pandemic and asked if I could have them, or borrow them, so I could get the process started. He was hugely offended because, he claimed, my grandparents were very patriotic Americans and once they got out of Canada they never looked back. I never met my grandfather but I don’t remember my grandmother being particularly patriotic and she used to go back all the time to visit her relatives. I said to this brother, “I too am very patriotic (despite my temporary residency in two foreign countries and my preference for vacationing abroad and in California, which might as well be a foreign country) but why not have a Canadian passport just in case? I mean, you never know. Have you never read nor watched The Handmaid’s Tale?” He had no idea what I was talking about. What really was the problem is that he doesn’t like the Canadian relatives. I, on the other hand, love them, especially the Québécois branch(es), and it would be to Montréal I would go if anywhere.

          I wonder if those papers are now in the hands of one of his children. I hope they didn’t just throw them away. I’ll put this on the to-do list for this weekend.

      • In one of my favorite books, Mercury Pictures Presents, which everyone should read, one of the characters is similarly exiled to Basilicata. Mussolini had towns where people would be sent to. So it wasn’t prison, but you couldn’t leave, and you were responsible for scratching out your own living somehow.

  5. The First Republic thing is capitalism at its absolute stupidest.  Everyone with more than two brain cells to rub together knew that First Republic was a half step short of total collapse and was only saved by a bunch of larger banks throwing money at them.  So, now all of a sudden Wall Street freaks out over the report is total bullshit.  They knew how bad it was.  They’re either just looking for yet another excuse or they were too stupid to get out before the bank went to shit.

    • A lot of modern finance is based on micro-timing stock price changes. Their models have priced in what the herd will do when a formal announcement comes out and they also price in expectations of how long other sophisticated models will encourage holders to keep shares until they can be dumped.

      So you get these weird scenarios where everyone holds stock until the last second assuming that they’ve properly hedged everything against the expected news and then all the capital flows out at once. But sometimes they still guess wrong.

      • On one of my medical forays we passed a shuttered branch of Silicon Valley Bank and a First Republic, and I remember thinking, “As a global banking center, the City of New York should really buy these two spaces and set them up as small museums with rotating exhibits about Ponzi schemes and financial panics and other manias that never panned out. Memorabilia from Kozmo and pets.com. Items donated by former employees of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Copies of Talk Magazine. Betamax tapes. I could personally curate the “Billboard One Hit Wonders” soundtrack that would be played and constantly refreshed. The possibilities are endless.”

        By the way, crypto is back, baby. Not a day goes by when I don’t hear Better Half trying to put together some deal between two of his many, many clients, where one is interested in “entering the crypto space” but for some reason needs a partner that is already “playing in the crypto space.” Neither he, nor his company, would go within a hundred miles of crypto, but they are more than happy to assist those who want to.

    • We were using FRB for some internal accounts. Their client service is awesome, and their UI and website are easy to use. I know some good folks over there and it’s a shame that management can’t get their shit together. But isn’t that always the case.

  6. This is a hilarious Axios article:

    https://www.axios.com/2023/04/25/abortion-republicans-2024-nikki-haley

    Headlined “2024 Republicans eye new abortion battle lines” it has this lede

    Republican presidential candidates are finally tackling abortion politics head-on, recognizing — for the first time in the post-Roe era — that ceding the debate to Democrats could be a recipe for defeat in 2024.

    But it then goes on to describe how the Republican presidential candidates are doing their absolute best to avoid tackling abortion politics head-on, as they waffle and dodge and continue to cede the debate to the Democrats.

    This is still how the GOP got stuck with activists driving them into a corner. Last year the bone brained Jonathan Weisman tried the exact same approach for the NY Times, claiming the GOP was moderating its approach to abortion after the Dobbs ruling, when it was obvious to everyone they were only squirming more in their glue trap.

    • I am surprised this comment was about that article and not the absolutely side-bustingly hilarious NYT headline about how the incumbent president, uh, shocked the world apparently — and defied a private citizen, somehow — by deciding to run for re-election.

      Even graded on the scale of bad NYT political “analysis” headlines, it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen!

      • You’re trying to kill me. I’m just refusing to believe that exists.

        Frank Bruni had an even worse one:

        There is a weird habit among most of their Opinion writers where they openly state something that isn’t just dumb in a stale way, it’s dumb in such a breathtaking way that your first thought is that they’re trolling, until you realize they really think this way.

         

        • I offer more leniency to opinion headlines (and writers) just because they have to take some sort of stand, even if it’s a dumb one. That the framing is so damn stupid given the events of J6 is … well, Frank Bruni was the theater critic, after all. I’m sure he is deeply offended when the actors don’t exit stage left when he thinks they should.

          But that analysis was a fucking masterclass of taking a very straightforward and unsurprising piece of political news and just spinning a yarn worthy of a full space opera. I just don’t recall Mango Unchained’s 2020 announcement being entirely about the delicate feelings of Hillary Rodham Clinton on the matter is all.

          • Just to get nitpicky, Bruni was their restaurant critic, the #2 editor at Opinion, Patrick Healy, was the Broadway guy.

            I definitely get the pressure of the Hawt Taek machine, but one thing that drives me goofy is how their deeply dumb takes are on such predictable things. Bruni’s gotten half of his stuff from the wokeness beat. Pick something new!

            When he was covering restaurants, he knew he couldn’t just cover the old downtown steakhouses that had already been reviewed five times in the past 50 years. Instead of a crazy take on a stale subject, say something crazy about something different! Hydroelectric power is causing our declining life expectancy! Why liberals don’t have gerbils for pets! Put Kevin McCarthy and Chuck Shumer in a kennel and teach them to herd sheep!

      • …if that would be the headline I’m thinking of…a few people have pointed out to me that of the previous presidents who didn’t run for a second term a few none the less served more than 4 years one way or another…& though off the top of my head I’m not sure how many of them served as a VP for two terms first…it sounded like you had to go back as far as the 1800s to find an approximate example of the “trend” he’d supposedly be bucking

        …if they’re going to take a shot at him for being old they really ought to just come out & say that & not try to mask it with euphemisms that don’t make sense?

        • Peter Baker, their chief White House reporter, ran a front page “analysis” that “just asked questions” about Biden’s age not long before Biden went on his surprise trip to Kviv and walked with Zelensky to the sound of air raid sirens.

          Baker’s article was back when they were sure DeSantis would be the nominee, though. I think they know veiled amplification of GOP talking points is the best they can do at this point. They’re probably anticipating a stark contrast being made with Trump hiding from a drizzle to miss a visit to the US cemetery in France, and are worried about getting too far out ahead of their skis, at least for now.

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