By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Bird Song of the Day
Readers have been so happy with the mockingbirds I’m going to keep doing them. Now entering Week Three!
Long-tailed Mockingbird, Road to Ronquillo at -14.80588, -74.78986, Ica, Peru. “Birds singing on top of tall cacti early in the morning.”
Readers, this Water Cooler is abbreviated because I am finishing up a post on the “Insect Apocalypse.” Herewith some current events as conversation starters:
“Schwab, Fidelity, other online trading brokerages appear to go dark during huge market sell-off” [Associated Press]. “Several online brokerage firms including Charles Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard appeared to be down for thousands of users early Monday during one of the biggest stock markets sell-offs of 2024. User reports appeared to peak around and just before 10 a.m. ET, data from outage tracker Downdectector shows. Some frustrated customers online said that they were unable to log in or access their account balances.” • Not like what Goldman did to Michael Burry in The Big Short, I am sure. Honor roll:
🚨#BREAKING: Multiple brokerages, including Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, TD Ameritrade, E-Trade, UPS, CenturyLink, and Interactive Brokers, are currently down and reporting errors amid market crashes. pic.twitter.com/H2htHnXynT
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) August 5, 2024
Meanwhile, “to the bare walls!”
CVS last night
Flowflex completely gone
Several other brands gone
Binax being snatched up pic.twitter.com/NrlMnz9yI7
— Alexander Riccio (@co2trackers) (@ariccio) August 5, 2024
This is New York. I imagine similar scenes in California.
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jsn writes: “Hollyhock in front of the old store.”
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And speaking of accounting identities, over on links this morning a story about how public dept accrues to the private sector. I always thought it went down a rat hole.
Is there a difference?
Well there is good debt and bad dept but most of congress is well payed not to know the difference.
This scene from Wolf of Wall Street…the core principle of the place being described to a new broker hire as welcome to the world… NSFW or the kids.
I suppose some things have changed over time, and then again perhaps less so. Probably less humming going on today in some erstwhile “high places”…
https://youtu.be/klIbHMw9w2Q?si=us3x5zYDZc_Gkddq
Los Angeles Times: This California COVID surge is stronger, longer-lasting than expected, surprising experts
https://www.gazettextra.com/news/nation_world/this-california-covid-surge-is-stronger-longer-lasting-than-expected-surprising-experts/article_bcd83b85-243b-564c-ac26-50d0dc3f107d.html
“This is not a benign wave,” wrote Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, in a blog post published Saturday. “It’s a major wave now … we haven’t yet reached the plateau.”
I suppose that an upside of a pharmacy selling out of certain products is that these events improve the sales to inventory ratio, so the suits have something to be happy about. /s
throughout wife’s career at the local isd…including the careers of both boys…me and the school nurse established surveillance of the pharmacy, one actual supermarket(maybe an acre of actual store footprint, for perspective), and 2 dollar stores respective medical shelves…to see what was selling.
we did this for 18 years or more…and got Tam and both boys on board, as well as her husbands and their kids.
(as lambert sez, Citizen Science!…but entirely kept in the head, no notes or anything)
but between us, we were able to predict various gutbug outbreaks pretty consistently…as well as just having a general awareness of what was going around in our relatively isolated county.
Will there more added later? Asking for friend;-)
No, sorry!
Funny, I thought this was asking for more covid tests as I read from the top of the comments. “No, sorry!” probably accurate nonetheless!
I am located in the CA central coast and the Covid wave started up here a couple weeks ago. In my small circle of coworkers and others I know of about 10 cases. It seems to have plateaued. School starts here for kids in two weeks. It might get an upswing.
Starmer’s “action man” role, adding to his his broadcasts where he 99% of the time had the Union Flag clearly visible behind him in shot worries people like me. Those who live in the US probably wouldn’t see anything odd. However, most British parliamentarians (and ESPECIALLY those who are not right-wing) never put a flag in shot. It was seen as crass. We never saw a need to “fly the flag” – Terry Pratchett said it best in a novel: “Have you ever flown the flag?”; “NO!”; “Why not?”; “We don’t need to to show we’re the best, we already know!”
I paraphrase a bit but his “I’m the ultimate Brit” thing rings hollow. Once upon a time you took down nasty big companies and punched up. Why the change?
One final observation. I find it utterly amusing at how many British people who profess their Britishness, fly the flag upside down/back to front. If you can pass a basic test of the criteria I’d expect you to know which way the flag goes. When I took the Aussie Citizenship test in 2014 it took me all of 30 seconds to learn the answers to the only questions I wasn’t already sure about. The “non-Anglo candidates” who didn’t know “the Westminster system” took barely a minute more. Something to think about. You DO NOT need to get the Union Flag correct but if you think you’re “more proper British” when you don’t know your flag then I’m entitled to call BS.
[ Starmer’s “action man” role, adding to his his broadcasts where he 99% of the time had the Union Flag clearly visible behind him in shot worries people like me… ]
Really incisive comment. Starmer played the bully from the beginning, and it worked because of the policy stupidity of the Tories, but from here Tory policy is not the issue. Starmer has to plan now, but I have no sense whether that is readily possible.
Many thanks. I don’t have skin in the game this time round (no national survey I’ve happened to run at the right time to coincide with a surprise General Election!).
However, I totally agree that Starmer has a very wide but shallow pool of support. The “old rules” that “it takes a couple of general elections to whittle away a majority approaching 200” is now nonsense. There is no stability and I consider it feasible (though granted definitely not the most probable) outcome of the next election that we have PM Farage by 2029.
My best guess is a narrow Labour victory with the opposition going through what happened in first half of 20th century: two parties vying to be the official opposition, and from there, the govt – Lib Dems incorporating all the “Tory Wets” vs Farage. THAT will shake up Labour, if nothing else, to make them realise “we really could lose properly and need proportional representation”.
PS Most Brits are stupid regarding their own citizenship. Majority couldn’t tell if Union Flag was upside down.
BTW One of those “things changing to reflect new usage” is that whilst the Union Jack was historically correct only for naval use, Flag/Jack are now considered synonymous so I won’t get on that hobby horse.
Still had to explain to family last week what was the flag being flown by one of two competing houses on the main road who have flags ranging from EU/Union Flag/English/Welsh/Scottish…. through to MY LITTLE PONY flags. They were flying the English Royal Standard 3 Lions…..which was a little odd given who technically is allowed to fly it and when but whatever, I’m possibly out of touch on that too.
As a non-Brit with OCD, I always knew which way is proper. Do I get free citizenship or something? :)
And, as I found out one time, you cannot ‘officially’ get a Naval Ensign unless you are registered as the owner of a boat. (I thought it would be neat to fly the Naval Ensign puttering about Biscayne Bay.)
As for Starmer fronting for King and Country, well, I would direct your attention to the fact that this would qualify him as a Union Fascist. Didn’t Mosley and his lot go in for flags a lot back then?
The only saving grace on either side of the pond is that we are spared the ravages of any truly capable Authoritarians. Thank the Deities for small favours.
yeah…i prefer my authoritarian rulers to be as incompetent as possible.
and i’ll allow only one american flag on my side of the place…a tiny one that the wind dislodged from Don’s big grapevine wreath down at the little pasture graveyard.
its hung upside down and inconspicuous on one of the telephone poles that hold up the Wilderness Bar.
Mom, of course, since Don’s death, has had us replace his american flag twice a year, as it gets tattered…and then for me to burn the tattered one with respect….which i do, but out of respect for Don, not my erstwhile country.
one of these days, i’ll make my own flag…and it’ll have a raised middle finger on it.
i’ll fly that one.
and proudly.
Historically only people on the far right would fly the Union Jack.
I assume you mean ‘the Butcher’s Apron‘?
Speaking of down, though unrelated to the trading platforms mentioned above, I am repeatedly getting errors when trying to perform searches on DuckDuckGo. This is across two platforms (Windows and Android) and two networks (internet and mobile).
Yes. Duck, Duck, go wouldn’t give me naked capitalism and showed an error message, but google worked fine.
Yep. My Duck Duck Go gone-and-went.
I’m on Linux Mint
I’m no hard-core techie but I do a lot of online research. DDG kept coming up empty so I started comparing –with exactly the same search terms — presearch.com and now all is happy. My warm and fuzzies about DDG are a thing of the past. As to why/ how this is happening –I’ve no idea.
One more trivial observation– I was looking for a particular cat breed — info I knew was out there somewhere. Bupkus. So (gak) I tried (AI) Copilot and there it was. Another reason to crappify search!
DDG working fine for me.
It was working again (from my perspective) within about an hour of when I first reported it. Curious timing with regards to the brokerage issues, but probably just coincidence.
For natural disaster nerds: the Chilcotin River, a major tributary of the Fraser R in central British Columbia, has been blocked by a large landslide since July 30th, and earlier this morning the water backed up above this barrier has started to cut through it.
Various drone and other images are available here, including views from fixed cameras updated every 15 mins or so.
Apart from potential downstream flooding, the major concern is the risk to an incoming migration of spawning salmon, which usually arrives in a few days.
Wow, thank you for posting that link! Amazing to see in real time (more or less), How the Earth’s surface has been and is now being reshaped by these events. Mother Nature…
Slides along this same stretch of river have been a regular occurrence, most recently in 1964 and 2004. The 1964 event is described in a contemporary fisheries report.
Defense Minister of Russia visited Iran today.
(IMO) only way to stop Israel and DC from pushing us all to WW3, is for Russia to give a soft security guarantee to Iran
https://x.com/IranObserver0/status/1820493672443765181
Not without a force demonstration. Your idea was a reasonable proposal 2 or 3 years ago, but Israel is genocidal, set off a bomb in Iran, and murdered a negotiator after a previous tit for tat. No one can reasonably say Israel won’t strike a mall or a school if they feel like it. Tehran has to act. It’s legitimacy 101.
Iran should smoke the nukes.
period.
remove that threat…just take it away from the armageddonists.
then the islamic world can maybe get their shit together, realise that they have more common interests than not, and push those pesky irrational and belligerent people into the sea.
as should have been done a long, long time ago.
might be cool to have another flourishing of Islamic Humanities, at some point, too…ive enjoyed the products of the last one(circa: Bagdhad Caliphate, etc)..but that aint gonna happen until the zionists are defeated utterly.
Last time they got some hits in near Dimona. If they hit Dimona, Palmachim (Jericho missiles), and Haifa, they just have to deal with planes.
Of course, thanks to Kiev hitting some Russian early warning radars facing South towards the Mideast, Iran may have a harder time getting early warning from Russia…
Shoigu has diffent title now (Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation). I guess he came to approve Iranian retaliation plan.
For celebrity Covid anecdata, Jon Stewart will not be on his show this week because he has tested positive for Covid-19. The announcement gave no indication of symptoms or reason for the test, but just that he was out and his one day this week will be subbed and he is expected to be back next Monday.
I had put off a medical procedure for as long as I could because I did not want to be around a bunch of maskless people at the surgery center.
I took the earliest appointment (6:00 AM) in the hopes that it would not be a popular time. Liberally sprayed XLEAR before I left home.
When I showed up, there were more staff than there were patients. I only saw one masked staff member.
I wore an N95 into the facility and kept waiting for them to ask me to remove it. The nurse anesthetist came in, unmasked, to talk to me about the procedure. She left to get the consent forms and when she came back she was wearing what looked like an N95. (I had already taken my glasses off so I couldn’t tell for sure.) I still kept waiting for someone to ask me to remove my mask. The anesthetist informed me that I would need oxygen, but I could wear a mask over the oxygen tubes and leave it on throughout the procedure. I told her that there was a lot of COVID going around in our area, and she replied, “Oh, I KNOW!”. She then proceeded to tell me how much she worries about bringing home something (like COVID) from work to her 90 year old mother. (I didn’t say anything, but I wondered if she was that worried, why didn’t she wear a frikkin’ mask.) Oh, well.
Doctor greets me in the procedure room, maskless.
When I woke up in the recovery room, oxygen tubes were gone, but my N95 was snugly fit on my face. Whoever adjusted it really did a great job.
My ride came in with a HEPA filter and ran it until I left. (I forgot to bring my trusty ARANET, so I don’t know what the CO2 readings in the recovery area were.)
When I got out to the car, I used Betadine mouth wash.
That’s about as safe as I could do it.
Many thanks to NC (especially Lambert) for all of the tips on keeping COVID safe.
Will send some $$ to the tip jar.
Thanks for sharing this experience. And a little report from the rust belt: after seeing the helpful tweet above reporting empty Covid test shelves in California and New York drug stores, I just stopped by my local pharmacy and picked up the last two boxes of BINAX (total: 4 tests for $48 — thanks, Joe Biden!). The pharmacy clerk said they might get more in on Wed. or Friday. Or not. Who knows?
Hope all went well! If for some reason it didn’t, well, it sure wasn’t your fault… Wishing you a speedy recovery.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whom we all love and adore, gets shredded in this Israeli piece:
The free world is in an acute crisis, as shown by its reaction to terrorists’ deaths
Opinion: The reactions of many countries and organizations to the death of Ismail Haniyeh meant to uphold the values of freedom show that the free world is in deep decay and that the world crisis has become acute
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s100rw69tr
“Whatever Benjamin Netanyahu’s flaws as Prime Minister of Israel, and these flaws are many and deep, he is entirely right to publicly reject the views of those who “urge me to end the war, claiming it is unwinnable.””
Mr. Market’s gonna need something stronger than mere alcohol in the coming days…
aweright, dammit..i’m assigning homework!
our well traveled/widely domociled commentariat can surely put it to bed who is more “Free”…and/or Happy…china, russia, eurozone, USA
so chime in, for our erudition…us less traveled folks.
will one get swept up by the thought police in china if one criticizes the gov?
that has happened in usa…but its usually a thrid party(facebook, socmed mob) that does the cancelling.
what about Russia?
can one publically criticize Putin…or is it all just a reinvigorated soviet state, as our betters would have us believe?
similarly…when Don’s cousin and her hubs were up, a month ago…right after the trump assassination attempt…and my Mom lit into me in front of them(weird, in itself)…his cousin chimed in that Russians and Chinese wer all starving…implied that they needed us to rescue them…
some definitive experience on the ground…and here, at NC…would be helpful.
(hell, i’ve “known” a bunch of y’all for years,lol)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2024/08/04/athlete-sick-swimming-dirty-seine/74666387007/
Belgian triathlete gets sick after competing in Seine river
https://7news.com.au/sport/olympics/over-40-athletes-test-positive-for-covid-as-virus-rips-through-australian-olympic-team-c-15599666
Over 40 athletes test positive for COVID as virus rips through Australian Olympic team
More than 40 athletes have tested positive as doctors work hard to minimise the spread.
“Schwab, Fidelity, other online trading brokerages appear to go dark during huge market sell-off” *********** It’s an EMERGENCY! The FED needs to cut interest to 0% NOW! So those earning 5% interest will see that go instead to the casino traders in the insanely overpriced stock market.
a natural end-game of what happens when commissions = $0.00.
Right. I’m a saver and I dint want the interest rate cut. I’m finally making a little bit of money in my money.
This consumerist economy, terrible!!
I enjoyed the song of the Long-tailed Mockingbird. I especially liked its lyrical quality.
saw bosslady of the local post office takin out trash as i pulled up…known her for 30 years.
(and her drawl is all kindsa sexy,lol)
she sez that yes, post office in hinterlands is short staffed…that they, right here, are OK, because locals want jobs that have bennies…but that the big mail nexii, like abilene, where all our mail is channeled through, are hurting for people to do the work.
hence, my lil ol pension check was 5 days late…having taken 7 days to get from just north of downtown austin to me.
thats right at 100 miles.
but it had to go, as forever, to abilene, first.
just a lil anecdata to plug into y’all’s narrative frameworks.