What’s the first specialty quarter of 2020?
Not a joke. pic.twitter.com/IYGSmykh3R
— Timothy P. O'Malley (@timothypomalley) March 30, 2020
The Trickster God will have His little joke…
Of course, everyone this is not the bat that causes the virus. It's not even clear where the virus came from right now. This tweet was but a mild interruption to what has become the world's longest March. It's also not evidence of government conspiracy. Just a bat on a coin.
— Timothy P. O'Malley (@timothypomalley) March 31, 2020
It's the Samoan Flying Fox, which is found in our National Park in American Samoa. The tails side of most recent quarters is of scenes from our National Parks and Historic Sites.
— cinyc (@cinyc9) March 31, 2020
*SRSLY. Click on the embedded link, below:
Looking at the rest of the quarters for 2020, we can expect:
Lyme Disease (Weir Farm, CT)
A hurricane (VI)
Bernie Sanders (VT)
Bubonic Plague (KS, carried by prairie dogs)https://t.co/CIQzXOz0u2— Bridget (@BostonBridget) March 31, 2020
So, you're saying it's the year of the fruit bat? #Discworld #century
— Sprezza (@TureMasing) March 31, 2020
A Ghost to Most
Obviously, someone sent out the bat signal.
zhena gogolia
This is an old clip, but somebody just sent it to me — Trump reacting when Putin says the word “facts” in Russian, which sounds like a certain English four-letter word.
Elizabelle
Too bad we don’t have pangolins.
#Leave the pangolins alooooone
Subaru Dianne is going to want that bat quarter. I do too. Darling creatures.
satby
Betty’s beautiful pictures in the On the Road are fixed, go back and look!
marklar
Eric the fruit bat.
Shalimar
I’m assuming the Fed and the bailout bills did something major to prop up the stock exchanges, because otherwise being up 1.8% after hearing about 6.6 million newly unemployed would be insane.
Gin & Tonic
“Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full with what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car”
Heh. Two threads this morning where I could work in a quote.
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle: I already have it! Have been collecting specialty quarters for years, and had been looking forward to this little guy since I first saw the proposed design. Was beyond thrilled a few weeks ago when it showed up in laundry change.
Elizabelle
Nancy Pelosi to hold her weekly press conference at 10:45. C-Span to have audio only.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to speak at 11:00 am.
Not sure when Cuomo O’Clock is today, yet.
OldDave
@marklar: Nay. Roberto the fruit bat (see: Christopher Moore)
SiubhanDuinne
@marklar: Not to be confused with H’eric the ‘alibut.
Omnes Omnibus
Great. Ed Gein and Jeff Dahmer are going to be fighting over their spot on the WI quarter.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
I was just thinking about you. I wasn’t sure if you had been away or I just missed seeing your nym.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: LOL, I was just going to respond down there with something about “Wait ’til he sees the bats,” but I hadn’t looked up the exact quote yet.
Immanentize
@SiubhanDuinne: Or Eric, the half-a-bee
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud: Thank you! I haven’t posted much, and mostly when I read threads they’re many hours old. But I’m here!
SiubhanDuinne
@Immanentize: Cyril Connelly?
satby
@SiubhanDuinne: as a fellow bat fancier now I need to look for it.
Immanentize
Do you think Cyril and William Safire have a table together in the afterlife?
Fair Economist
@Shalimar: Yes, the stock market is mostly about Fed actions during this crisis. The stock market is not closely tied to the real economy at the best of times but now it’s mostly about the likelihood the Fed will let a given company go under.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
Excellent. Stay safe.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
Typically job losses are a lagging indicator. I know this is a unique circumstance but goddamn…
Some of my friends who never liked Trump seem pretty happy with him because of the stimulus money going out. Gotta keep reminding people that Congress put this together and all meaningful resistance came from the president’s party.
Besides, I’m not willing to extend much credit to a man who needed a literal world-historical level plague to then be dragged kicking and screaming to finally act like a human being and start listening to experts and do something to help the American people. And, even then, only a little tiny bit.
AnotherBruce
@Gin & Tonic: Your radar is unpresidented.
Brother Maynard
Does anyone have experience with usb drawing pads? Several times a year I have to give a half day training session for our new hires and people outside our group. Both during and after these sessions, I tend to get questions from people. It’s not uncommon for me to have to draw something or diagram something to answer these questions. Normally, I would have a whiteboard available or even some scrap paper in my bag for a one on one encounter. However, we are all WFH now and I can’t stand using a mouse to draw. I’m looking for something cheap I can use to draw simple pictures over a remote meeting session.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
@satby: Because they called it a “flying fox,” I had to look up if it was actually a bat. It is, and apparently one of the largest in the world.
Makes sense, the one in the article looked like a bear with wings.
WereBear
@Gin & Tonic: We can’t stop here. This is bat country.
middlelee
@OldDave: I love Christopher Moore’s books. What a lovely twisted hilarious mind.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
I’ve never seen this before, but now every time I post my Update Comments box opens automatically and stays open.
Tony Jay
Venting Time
Since I’m a glutton for punishment I posted this comment on the Guardian Live Site in advance of the result of the Labour Party Leadership contest on Saturday.
Amazingly enough, for a newspaper that touts itself as agenda-free and devoted to truth-telling, the comment and all responses (mostly agreeing with it) were wiped from the site. So I posted this.
Funnily enough “Your Posts are now being pre-moderated”
Colour me shocked. I guess I must have hit a nerve.
These fucking people.
Baud
@Tony Jay:
Why would the Guardian censor your comments complaining about smears against Labour?
scav
With all the automated trading, the noise to (hypothesized) signal ratio is probably getting worse. How many are now building their entire careers surfing the noise? Plus, out here on the WTF frontier of the economy, I don’t think any theory has really been tested, let alone automated. They could all just be chasing hiccups or a cat walking across a home trader’s keyboard.
different-church-lady
THE FOREIGN VIRUS CAME FROM AMERICAN SAMOA!!1!
Krope, the Formerly Dope
Darkly ironic that opposition to war crimes and deliberate disenfranchisement of a minority by a government should be considered anti-Semitism in contemporary discourse.
Immanentize
@scav: You may be right — before this shit hit all fans at once, 70% of all trades were already algorithms and bots. It would be interesting to see if that % has increased. Which would lead to huge instability as the bots bot.
kindness
I like the design of that quarter. And the US paying homage to it’s territories rather than taking them for granted is a good thing,
Raoul
It’s the year of batshit crazy ‘leadership’, certainly. When Trump was elected, I made lots of “this is the end of the American century” comments. I just didn’t expect it to be quite so globally grim.
Obama’s apology tours were able to rebuild some of what GWB cost us in worldwide standing, but no amount of Biden-Warren/-Harris/-Abrams (etc) work can restore us in international relations. And we’ll deserve it.
Though tbf quite a few other countries aren’t managing this super-well, enough are to point out what a shitshow we’ve become. And what Trump is exposing isn’t just his ass, but the many many failings of neocons, neolibs, and captialism (predatory, as practiced here and exported widely).
different-church-lady
So, here’s how the second half of March went for me:
FRIDAY, MARCH 13: Okay, that ticklish little cough I’m getting is really quite disconcerting considering current events. But since all my work has cancelled for the next six weeks, I guess I get to rest up and hope it’s nothing.
TUESDAY, 17TH: Now, perhaps sitting in the unheated basement studio for six hours learning new software was not the smartest decision I could have made considering that little cough is still not going away…
THURSDAY, 19TH: Right. You don’t have a fever. You just have a little cough that’s in your throat and not your lungs, and and a headache and you feel lousy. And there’s a pandemic outside. This is fine.
FRIDAY NIGHT, MY INNARDS: “You know that yummy piece of salmon you had for dinner? That’s leaving your body RIGHT THIS SECOND!!!!”
ALL DAY SUNDAY, MY INNARDS: “You know that tiny fragment of carrot you managed to choke down? That’s leaving your body RIGHT THIS SECOND!!!! AS LIQUID!! THIS WILL BE REPEATED AS NECESSARY!!!!”
MON, TUE, WED: My body is acting like any not-water substance that dares to enter will be treated as an invading force. Yet I am not running a fever and although I’m coughing an ever-increasing amount, it’s all in the throat and not in the lungs. I’m not having trouble breathing, I’m just having trouble not-coughing. And BOY am I having trouble not-coughing…
WED, LATE AFTERNOON: Among many other things much harder to describe, my field of vision is occulted by Peter Max-colored illustrated bears marching in perfect formation about 18 inches from my face. I can no longer go this alone.
WED NIGHT: EMERGENCY ROOM DOC: “You have bi-lateral pneumonia, and we’re so sure that you have COVID-19 that we’re going to claim that a few more times in the hour or so it takes to check you in here. Now hold steady while we insert this three-foot long cotton swab up your nose and into your brain…”
THURSDAY, ON IV FLUIDS, ANTI-BIOTIC DRIP, AND SUPPLEMENTAL OXYGEN: “We ought to have your test results by tonight. By the way, even though your chest X-ray is indicating bacterial causes, we’re still pretty damn certain you have COVID-19…”
FRIDAY MORNING: “You remember that three-foot long cotton swab we inserted up your nose and into your brain? We didn’t actually send that thing to the lab until about six hours ago…”
SATURDAY MORNING: “According to the three-foot long cotton swab we inserted up your nose and into your brain, you do NOT have COVID-19. However, we are going to continue treating you as though you do, because who the fuck would ever possibly believe you’re here in this state without it?”
SUNDAY MORNING: No more oxygen mask. “Since you don’t have the thing we’re still entirely certain we believe you ought to have, we can probably get you home today.”
SUNDAY AFTERNOON: “Put that oxygen mask back on, you’re here another night.”
MONDAY MORNING: “Okay, you can really take the oxygen mask off now. Sign these things, wear this mask, and self-quarantine for another week because we don’t care what the stupid three-foot long swab said, you really ought to have COVID-19.”
Baud
@different-church-lady: Yikes.
Steeplejack (phone)
@different-church-lady:
DON’T INFECT US ALL!
different-church-lady
@Steeplejack (phone): I DON’T HAVE THE DAMN THING!
Mandalay
@Tony Jay:
“If“???
You have doubts?
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady: Yikes. And it is so interesting that you never ran a fever.
I wonder a bit about those tests. Glad you are on the mend and you realize you will have to check in daily or jackals will worry.
Know you were having trouble keeping anything down, but did you ever sense a loss of smell or taste? Or it was just something else entirely??
Enhanced Voting Techniques
My god, they really are that stupid;
https://www.yahoo.com/news/didn-t-know-until-last-122146774.html
Sure it could be his excuse, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all that this nitwit was ignoring everything but Conservative sources . This is the result of 30 years of science denial from the Right.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
BR
California folks — time to start wearing masks, if you haven’t already. I think it’ll be a good show of force that people are taking action, in addition to all the things Zeynep Tufecki has rightly written about the value of mask wearing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html
https://twitter.com/zeynep
Another Scott
@Baud: If it’s like this side of the pond, I assume it’s because:
Only <strike>Democrats</strike> Labour has agency.
Am I right? Let’s see!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Jager
@WereBear: That would be a “Bat-Shit” country.
Gin & Tonic
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Goddamn neoliberal shills trying to take the nomination away from St Bernard.
MattF
@Elizabelle: A Language Log post on how to interpret medical tests.
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle: Yeah, no fever. And I completely misunderstood what was going on my with my respiration: I was having no trouble taking air in, but my lungs couldn’t do much with it once it was down there.
Never lost sense of taste of smell. I probably would have headed to the ER sooner, but COVID-19 focused CDC on-line self-test kept indicating “stay at home, call a doctor.”
Another Scott
@different-church-lady: Yikes!
I’m glad you’re still with us. Thanks for the report!
Get well soon!!
Best wishes,
Scott.
TS (the original)
Pelosi announces new select House committee to examine Trump administration’s response to coronavirus amid criticism of its approach
From Washington Post
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@different-church-lady: Wow, I am glad it turned out ok for you.
BR
@different-church-lady:
Apparently some doctors are finding that COVID patients have weird oxygen uptake problems — the virus may be damaging the ability for the lungs to take in and red blood cells to carry oxygen even if there isn’t a corresponding increase in CO2. So they find that people who have low pulse ox readings sometimes visibly seem ok, because initially their bodies don’t react to the damage to oxygen uptake that the virus is doing. Later on those cases can plummet and then no amount of oxygen from a ventilator can help because the body has lost the ability to take in oxygen. There was some speculation that transfusions could help at that point.
MattF
@TS (the original): McConnell, Trump, et. al. continue to assume that Pelosi has neither independent powers nor ability to act. False.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Raoul: It might be easier that what Obama had to do, Remember this was the CCP’s arrogance that let this virus lose on the world. A lot countries are going to take a long hard look at their relationship with China went this is done. Trump’s is an irritating punk but the Virus is costing countries all over the world lives and economic hardship.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
Social distancing on the bus this morning when I made a grocery run at 6 am because of senior & high risk customer shopping hour is 6-7 am.
Unlike last week, this week the shelves had plenty of staple items other than the usual hand sanitizer, TP, etc.
I can live without the peanut butter/chocolate chip cookie dough they were out of. ?
Patricia Kayden
zhena gogolia
@different-church-lady:
Wow! I hope you are feeling better!
different-church-lady
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): God, I miss ice cream…
Tony Jay
@Baud:
Because the Guardian was and is ground-Zero for the anti-Semitism smears, in much the same way as the Even The Liberal NYT sourced, laundered and promoted the e-mail smears against Hillary Clinton. They – hated – the very idea of a left-wing Labour Government so much that they spent three years crafting the bogus anti-Semitism monolith as a weapon for every fake moderate to swing against the former leadership. That’s when I was referring to when I said we could all guess where the new Narrative would start.
Apparently I trod on their big reveal a few days early so they put me on pre-moderation and wiped the comments.
Arseholes.
Raoul
@scav: The market going up today on terrible unemployment news strikes me as a reaction to a quantified result, not the quantity. Before the announcement it was a black void. Now it’s a bad, bad number, but for a few days at least, till probably Monday, market makers can at least ‘know’ something.
Oh, and as a decades long, boring value investor, can I just say how much I fucking hate all the automated trading? The volatility in the market is bonkers as it is. People really don’t have a clue how to value companies. (It’s one of my truisms that stock markets suck at pricing risk. All the devotion to markets as such excellent predictors is just bunk. Stocks are reactive.)
It is very, very difficult to know how to value a company at 15X earnings, when it is just not at all clear when even the new, recessionary ‘normal’ will kick in. And which of the companies that looked OK-to-good pre-VC19 will just vaporize because the foundations weren’t solid enough, but 10 years of growth hid the cracks?
So people rush around. And by people, I mostly mean program trades, and emotional reactions by fund traders.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@different-church-lady:
OMG. That sounds…unpleasant. So glad you’re home and feeling better. At least I assume you are. Cripes.
Mandalay
On Sunday there were 2,583 deaths in this country attributed to coronavirus.
Yesterday there were 5,102 deaths in this country attributed to coronavirus.
So the number of deaths here has doubled in three days, yet politicians continue to create exemptions for churches wanting to continue having services. That is a lot closer to evil than stupid.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
I heard I don’t know what Senator on Tucker Carlson last night talking about this. It seems like their answer is going to be step back from global trade in general and not, like, make sure our trading partners are behaving ethically.
The almighty free market would be destroyed by even minor considerations for workers or the environment.
Badgetoon
@Brother Maynard:
Wacoms have the most universal support for drawing pads and could handle that easily, I think the Bamboo is the cheapest version. I like my Surface alot for painting on but sounds like that’s more than you need.
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Reward for having saved the Democratic nomination process? Or does it make sense given his skills and areas of expertise?
Elizabelle
I recommend listening to Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings, Op. 22. It was just on public radio, and one of my faves. Good for riding out the COVID quarantine.
Baud
@Tony Jay: Thanks. I did not know that about them. I associate them with being Bernie fluffers so I assumed they would be similar with Corbyn and Labour.
NotMax
Dropped off extremely early (for me), fitful sleep and then woke up too soon. Still feeling the effects of inhaling for maybe all of 10 minutes the fumes of heavy duty cleaning products which permeated Whole Foods* when traveled to town to take landlady to pick up her car at the mechanic’s shop. Great sympathy for the checkers and stockers at WF who must inhale that for hours on end.
Fell asleep to the all Cole Porter sub-channel on the Broadway choices of Accuradio on the Roku. Calming background entertainment.
*Don’t judge, it’s the only place which regularly carries one particular item, which they were out of during the last monthly grocery run. Was so ecstatic to find it back in stock that I splurged and also sprang for a bottle of mustard and one of crushed red pepper, as was running perilously low on both of those.
Raoul
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I have in fact stopped saying that this is China’s century. When Trump got in, that was the second part of my little drive-by ‘analysis’, flimsy though it may be.
But re: our global leadership, I think what Trump’s election has signaled to the world is that the American voter can’t be trusted.
Obama winning twice had begun to restore the sense of reliability that was IMO shattered by Bush’s re-election. Many across the globe had a huge WTF moment when he won a second term. But the one-two punch of Bush, twice and then Trump after just managing to restore some sense to the WH? Too much risk in the people of USA, not just leaders.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
Luckily, there’s a Lic’s Deli & Ice Cream shop about 1/2 block from my apartment, and they’re still open for carryout.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
@Raoul: My buddy is trying to convince me today to pick up some cheap stocks and make a few bucks. I told him I don’t like the stock market because too many people make money shuffling money around and not really producing anything or adding value, while being Congressfolk to protect themselves from rules against abuse of this system, working people, and the environment. I said I’d rather be in the forest eating deer poop than make money that way.
Am I off base?
CaseyL
@different-church-lady: What an utterly terrifying two weeks you had, and thank Dog you’re still here with us.
That being said, I’m interested in hearing more about the dancing bears. If that wasn’t fever-delirium, what was it?
MattF
@WaterGirl: Smart, competent, popular, able to fend off inevitable counter-attacks. Staff will have all necessary expertise.
Geminid
@TS (the original): Harry Truman did some serious ass-kicking when his Senate committee toured the country investigating fraud and profiteering in the defence industry. The reputation he gained had a lot to do with Democratic party leaders “persuading” Roosevelt to choose Truman as Vice President in 1944. They knew how sick Roosevelt was and could not accept Henry Wallace becoming President.
Tony Jay
@Krope, the Formerly Dope:
Oh it took some work, but when the alternative was a potentially popular Socialist administration that could, possibly, raise the taxes of the people who own Britain’s Premier Liberal Broadsheet they got it done.
Heaven forfend that anyone questions them on quite why they decided to jump into bed with Likud’s anti-BDM propagandists, though. They can’t wield the bannhammer fast enough when that happens.
Raoul
@BR: I read about a process where they think the iron in our hemoglobin gets knocked out of place by viral detritus (I am clearly not medically or chemically adept, here).
One of the Trump-touted drugs may help to then knock the viral junk back out of the way (IIRC?). Might make sense that transfusions would help, because at least for a while the new red blood cells would carry O2/remove CO2 until they also get virally gunked up.
MattF
@CaseyL: Any short-term buying or selling is heavily ‘taxed’ by automated trading. Vanguard funds are generally a good choice for the longer term. IMO, individuals should not trade in stocks, not ever.
zhena gogolia
@Krope, the Formerly Dope:
No.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@WaterGirl: I’ll guess yes? I don’t know much about Clyburn, but his influence in his home state and his place in the leadership indicate somebody he’s somebody who knows who to operate, and he has the confidence of Nancy Pelsosi
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Crikey. Recuperate with alacrity; don’t overdo – that diverts energy from being applied to healing.
Tony Jay
@Baud:
Fluffing Bernie gets them free and unearned credibility as a ‘Progressive Paper’. If there was even the slightest possibility that their support could lead to Wilmer raising taxes on the Hedge Funders that own it they’d drop him like a hot mic.
Miss Bianca
@different-church-lady: Holy crap, dcl! So glad you’re still here to tell us about it, tho’!
TS (the original)
Listening to Cuomo – He should not be having to do this by himself. Unbelievable what each state is having to do with next to zero help from Trump & Co – I have no idea why trump is rating above 27%
Also mentioned enrolment is open for the ACA
Miss Bianca
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Oh, that’s the first thing that’s made me smile all day. Well, that and pictures of ducks from TaMara’s post last night.
Go, Team Blue!
different-church-lady
@CaseyL:
Hell, who wouldn’t be?
A lot of it was really hard to describe. Part of what was super-weird about it was that none of it was random — it was all intensely bold-lined and patterned, like some graphic designer in my head was really cranking things out. A lot of it would make great wallpaper for a head shop. And then certain parts of it would start to zoom in and out while others held dead-steady, and the parts were always separated on a sort of very clean diagonal. Like, think the utter opposite of Ralph Stedman’s chaotic take on Hunter S. Thompson.
Bats.
CaseyL
@MattF: Good to know, though I think you’re replying to someone other than me :)
Regarding the stock market – I never have and never will have enough interest or acumen to trade stocks. I have a couple 401ks that I leave alone, other than adjusting the ratio of investments now and then as I hurtle towards retirement age.
TS (the original)
@Krope, the Formerly Dope:
Would think this is a terrible time to start trading stocks if you have never done it before. Easy for some to say they can make a few bucks – they can also loose more than a few bucks.
There are always those who will make money out of someone else’s misery. If someone wins, someone else loses. Smart move to stay out of it.
Raoul
@MattF: The many, many howler monkeys will scream that the Clyburn investigation is partisan. OMG, partisan!
Carry on, honorable Pelosi and Clyburn. Sane people will read and absorb your work!
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: And yet, the Grauniad has persistently, and in this former fan’s mind, inexplicably and unmeritoriously, fluffed Bernie Sanders over the course of the years and trashed more MOR Democrats, so here I was figuring that was because they were all in on Corbyn and left-wing Labourism. Huh.
@Baud: Or, y’know, what you said.
Mandalay
@Raoul:
Yep. The stock markets are about as close as you can get to a free market here in theory. Everyone is free to participate, and buy and sell (short) as they see fit. Friedman’s wet dream.
Of course the snag is that “everyone” is actually mostly computer applications, and the moment things go haywire, trading is suspended. All of a sudden the free market is not king, but nobody even acknowledges it. Suspending trading is only mentioned in passing as an indication of volatility, rather than being viewed as a symptom of a broken and rotten system.
MomSense
@different-church-lady:
I’m so glad you are ok.
My dog is now lying on the floor under the table where I’m working. She doesn’t like lying on the wood floors, but I think she is so exhausted from all the extra walks and runs with her boys that she is hiding from them.
The boys said she was on high alert yesterday when they ran through the blueberry barrens. Today they ran into someone from the trail committee who told them they discovered a yuge coyote den in the barrens. There are probably pups in the den. Poor thing was probably really stressed out.
SiubhanDuinne
@different-church-lady: OMG, and also Yikes! What an ordeal. I’m glad you’re back home. Take good care of yourself.
Tony Jay
@Mandalay:
I’ll broken glass for whoever it is, but there are a LOT of mainstream Labour Party members who found his ball-washing for the anti-Semitism smearers hard to swallow.
Whoever it is, the second they stray off the reservation and start talking about bulldozing the smouldering wreckage of 40+ years of Thatcherism off the road, rather than celebrating it as an unavoidable but strangely lovely by-product of our British Heritage, they’ll be History’s Greatest Monster in 10 seconds flat.
jayjaybear
Re: the Discworld tweet…I’d kill to have Vetinari in charge instead of Trump. At least the Patrician was COMPETENT.
CaseyL
@different-church-lady: Wow, that’s a nice detailed description!
Have you ever had migraines? Those produce a characteristic lightshow, too. Coruscating geometric shapes that strobe and dance before your very eyes.
But yours sounds much trippier.
MattF
@Mandalay: And, as a technical point, ‘halting trading’ is about as non-linear as you can get. Makes everything even more unpredictable, as if the stock market wasn’t already unpredictable enough.
Tony Jay
@different-church-lady:
Bloody Hell! You don’t do it by halves, do you?
Gvg
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: it depends. What about picking companies that actually produce something? My father decided on buying some zoom stock based on overhearing elderly church committee members say how easy this was then checking on all the online services reviews and noting zoom wasn’t crashing due to surging demand. Those seem like valid reasons to invest to me. There are other companies actually providing goods and services. Why lump them in with the financial manipulation companies?
Of course it’s hard to determine and you don’t have to, but the real value companies are still there.
hueyplong
@Raoul: I think Pelosi & Co. know that the head of any modern version of the Truman Committee concentrating on CORVID-19 will get the FoxNews/Trump/RW social media guns turned on him/her with an HRC-like intensity.
Jim Clyburn is here for it. I think he is primed to be the face of a fighting Democratic Party looking to take out the Nazis.
Barbara
Noted without comment, lest I ruin my laptop with upchuck:
Baud
Dem convention moved to August.
Another Scott
@TS (the original): Yup.
I checked yesterday – the S&P 500 is/was still higher than it was 5 years ago.
Unless you need the money now (/very soon), leave it alone.
This crisis in the economy is temporary.
(I am not a financial expert. YMMV. This advice is worth what you paid for it. Etc.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: Sad, because when I was indexing the Guardian back in the 80s (and the complete facsimile English-language version of Pravda, those were strange days indeed!), I grew to love its skewering of Thatcherite and Reaganesque policy and *really* loved its political coverage. There was a time when I could have rattled off the names of Neil Kinnock’s Shadow Cabinet members way faster than their corresponding members of Reagan’s cabinet. How the mighty have fallen.
Mandalay
@Baud:
There isn’t going to be an August. The Democrat Party fuck up yet again.
Sister Golden Bear
I realized that one reason I’m such a mess right now is that quarantine is triggering flashbacks to waiting at my mother’s home when she was dying of cancer a few years ago.
Spending almost all my time at home. Check. The days blurring into each other check. The feelings of dread and helplessness. Check. Knowing that it will end eventually, but not knowing when it will end. Check.
If others have been through similar experiences in the past, be extra kind to yourself now.
WereBear
@different-church-lady: Wow! Glad you made it through!
And you made me laugh. A lot.
Raoul
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: I’ve pretty much never been a short-term trader. I have bottom-fished, which is how I’m still up 22% on Delta Airlines stock despite it being battered the past month. I’ve held it since 2013, when the industry also looked shaky, but I ‘felt’ an upswing coming (it helps to invest in sectors you know. I’m an aviation geek. I’m also dumb enough to have had Northwest stock go bust on me!).
So, your friend may be right, but it depends on your risk tolerance, which sounds more conservative. No one knows where the bottom will be for this market. Least of all me, who has been ‘predicting’ a bear marked for two+ years (I haven’t trusted the growth wasn’t just a new bubble).
But between now and, maybe late summer, the chance to bottom fish for stocks to hold for the medium term may be decent. Buying ‘cheap’ stocks for short term trading, nope, that’s for the sharks, IMO. Sharks who can afford to bet wrong.
And most generally, for folks just thinking of tiptoeing in: ETFs are less risky than individual stocks.
Baud
@Mandalay: Huh?
MattF
@Baud: World ends in July.
different-church-lady
@Tony Jay: Look, I had what they probably view as mild pneumonia. My lungs never got much below 90% capacity. The idea of having a kind even slightly worse is just terrifying.
Enjoy every sandwich, people.
Miss Bianca
@Barbara: Wow, when abject stupidity has to become your go-to excuse for your incompetence…
…Then maybe you have the all the right qualifications to be a modern GOP leader!
different-church-lady
@WereBear:
And ain’t that the point of it all? ;-)
Krope, the Formerly Dope
@Raoul: It’s more that I’m opposed to the entire financial services industry.
Elizabelle
@Sister Golden Bear: Hugs.
beef
I see several of you making the same mistake about computerized trading, thinking that the volume of automated trading has anything to do with the gyrations of stock market indices.
Most trades in the stock markets are carried out on behalf of automated betting systems, about 75%. There are two major contributions. First, market making is done almost entirely by automated betting systems these days. If some one trades, they almost always trade against a market maker. That gets you 50%. Market makers don’t go long or short the market and they avoid holding positions overnight. They don’t have an opinion about market direction, and their betting doesn’t have any influence on market direction. The remaining 25% comes mostly from automated statistical arbitrage systems. These systems are basically doing a fancy form of pairs trading, e.g., betting that the relationship between Coke & Pepsi is stable, so that if Coke goes up, Pepsi should go up. Same story as before: These betting systems are not taking positions on which way the market is going, so they don’t influence which way it goes.
Automated betting on the direction of the market itself does exist, but it’s comparatively rare. I don’t think there’s enough of it to have a big influence on the market’s day to day behavior. What we’re seeing is coming primarily from human decision making, from speculators, day traders, panicking 401(k) investors, and big players like corporations and pension funds changing their bets.
trollhattan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Jesus, how stupid can this guy be? [asked rhetorically] The Chinese fuckup #2 was presuming the virus was not transmissible before symptoms presented. We learned this back in December!
Baud
@MattF: I don’t have that on my outlook calendar.
sdhays
I don’t know. Your doctors sounded pretty sure…
Glad you’re feeling better!
Barbara
@beef: “Panicking 401(k) investors . . .” Yes, and yes. Not me but my SO. Still, I figure he needs to sleep at night when it comes to his own account.
The biggest difference for me over 2008 is that I am much closer to retirement, or dreams of retirement, anyway.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Music 4 you.
;)
NotMax
@MattF
*grumble grumble* And I was so close to perfecting this perpetual motion machine.
:)
Tony Jay
@Miss Bianca:
Nah. The Guardian is the ‘Liberal’ newspaper in the British sense, meaning their favoured Party is the Liberal-Democrats. They spent the last Election trashing Labour and lionising the Lib-Dem leader.,. who led her Party to humiliating defeat and lost her own seat. Now she’s dead to them.
IOW, they preferred a Tory Government they could attack from the left to a Labour Government they’d have to attack from the right, and did everything possible to deliver one.
Mandalay
@beef:
Link?
different-church-lady
@sdhays: OK, I really seriously need to give the hospital a little feedback, the general gist of which is, “The Emergency Room is no place for smug.”
I went in thinking I had a really bad sinus infection or something upper-respiratory. And the tone that came back was, “Well we think you’ve got COVID-19, and we’ve just got to wait for the test to confirm it.” And that tone came from more than one doc. It was not a tone of caution, it was a tone of self-satisfied insistence.
I was real pissed off my sample did not go out for 24 hours, because I had clients on the outside world who needed to know if they had to quarantine.
Fair Economist
@different-church-lady: I am so glad you are recovering! Your docs are right: this has a very high false negative rate, partially because the dangerous manifestation happen from chest infections.
Tony Jay
@different-church-lady: Mmmmmmm…. sandwich.
Be well, lady.
trollhattan
@Barbara:
In 2008 I stopped looking at my quarterly statements. This time I have to because we probably need to resubmit the kid’s FAFSA and college-specific apps because our net worth will be…who the hell can guess what the fraction is compared to when we submitted the originals. My guess is at least third has evaporated.
Will it make a difference? Impossible to know but the #1 school choice isn’t kicking in enough to be financially viable ATM.
Baud
@NotMax: Maybe that’s what causes the world to end.
Matt McIrvin
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: There are two main kinds of bats, megabats and microbats. The megabats are mostly bigger but that is not an iron rule. The main way to distinguish them is that the megabats have cute faces with long snouts and the microbats have weird squished-up faces.
The horseshoe bat that probably harbored the coronavirus is a microbat, as are most (all?) North and South American bats. Flying foxes and other fruit bats are megabats.
VeniceRiley
@Tony Jay: I’ve noticed a couple of articles appear yesterday on the topic and I did not click, but did wonder: Oh, so the leadership election must be on then?
RedDirtGirl
@different-church-lady: That sounds like quite the ordeal!
beef
@Mandalay:
Common knowledge in the industry. You are welcome to treat it as original research. I don’t have the patience to search through reams of ‘financial journalism’ to find you a link.
Robert Sneddon
@VeniceRiley: The Labour Party leadership elections are done and dusted, they were just delaying announcing the results until after Parliament went into Easter recess. Things have happened since then, I believe the official coronation of Tony Blair Mk II will be consummated on April 4th. No-one will give a fuck, having other things to worry about.
frosty
@different-church-lady: I’m glad you’re coming out the other side. Great description and Holy F*CK!!!!!
Barbara
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I like to think that China will rethink the permissibility of live animal markets that include non-domesticated animals. Whether China is being completely straightforward with death totals or whatnot, this has to have damaged its own economy greatly, and probably damaged the credibility of government authorities. I suspect that India’s response is going to make the world even more nervous about relying on India as a primary source of pharmaceuticals.
Mallard Filmore
@TS (the original):
Since this is not about a government (e.g. Trump) to government (e.g. Ukraine) investigation, there is a lot of contact and records that involve private and business parties.
It will be much harder for Trump to effectively stonewall.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: Did you give that Buns lecture at xkcd?
NotMax
@Baud
We’ll never know until the on switch is thrown, will we? (rubs palms together ominously)
Tony Jay
@VeniceRiley:
Yeah. With a Tory Government flapping around helplessly like a bishop’s tallywacker at a Choir Boy Trampolining event, it’s absolutely imperative for the good of the status quo that Labour be forced into a civil war/ideological purge, otherwise the Funny Fat Man might come under some sustained pressure and the British Media simply can’t have that.
Have I mentioned I do not contain fondness for these people?
joel hanes
@BR: Been wearing a mask for almost two weeks.
Since I’ve only been out of the house once in two weeks, this is not a big imposition.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Milwaukee is nice in August. Well, down by the lake, it is.
Aleta
@different-church-lady: Whew. Very glad you’re OK. (Relatively.) Hope you’re feeling much better.
joel hanes
@Raoul:
can I just say how much I fucking hate all the automated trading?
IMHO, a 1 cent per trade federal tax on securities transactions would be A Good Thing. Revenue for the government, tamps down volatility.
But I am neither an economist nor any other kind of expert. Countervailing opinions by the more knowledgeable positively desired.
joel hanes
@Mandalay:
“The connection between stupidity and evil is a deep one”
— Alan McGowan, on Usenet sci.environment, sometime around 1988
Omnes Omnibus
@different-church-lady: So you say.
Raoul
@beef: My understanding, which may be antiquated, is that automated trading amplifies the size of the moves, though.
Maybe not on the arbitrage side, but that program trades can cause cascading. A bunch of portfolio builders trading for managed accounts have, for example, Boeing sell orders at $150, $149, etc.
When a downside starts, because bad news comes out about BA, the first orders trigger, softening the price, which then ticks someone else’s $149.50 and we’re off to the races as the first guy’s $149 sells, and so on.
Circuit breaker pauses are in part, as I gather it, to give investors and traders time to decide if they want all those program moves to stay in the queue or not.
Mandalay
@beef:
No surprise there. I did search. You are full of shit.
beef
@joel hanes:
That tax would have perverse effects. It would utterly ruin the automated market makers (who make less than a $.01/trade). The result for the rest of us would be higher transaction costs when we wanted to trade. It would also significantly impact the statistical arbitrageurs, making them less likely to step in to stabilize relationships that had gotten out of balance. The end result of that would be more volatility, not less.
I think it’s worth keeping in mind the Chesterton’s Fence Principle. The existing stock market is a complicated evolved system that plays a critical role in our society. It is definitely not perfect, but its imperfections are not really what the general public thinks they are. We should be very wary of people proposing fixes that fit on a bumper sticker.
beef
@Mandalay:
Link please.
Raoul
@beef: @Mandalay:
CNN link so YMMV, but “On a typical trading day, computers account for 50% to 60% of market trades, according to Art Hogan, chief market strategist for B. Riley FBR. When the markets are extremely volatile, they can make up 90% of trades.”
I think what the above glosses over is the ratio of algorithmic vs. stop-loss trading.
Raoul
@joel hanes: I’d be completely fine with that. I’d pay less than a dollar a year from that tax. Some years it might be 10 cents.
@beef: IRRC from my biz school daze, Market Makers are typically just a couple specialists per issue, so there could be a policy provision to exempt them, I’d think.
beef
@Raoul:
I think the use of leverage plays a larger role than stop loss orders in cascades. Traders are forced to dump positions when margin calls threaten
Zelma
@different-church-lady:
Wow. I’m glad you made it through. I hope you can take it easy now,.
M31
@Matt McIrvin:
MegaBat is my favorite superhero
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@different-church-lady: please be careful and I hope you have people to take care of you and check on you. Whether it is Covid-19 or not pneumonia is rough and takes a long time to recover from. Fever isn’t always present and isn’t always high of it is present
sdhays
I have missed your ability to turn a phrase.
Geminid
A couple days ago I asked my friend in Atlanta how Georgia governor Brian Kemp was doing. He replied that he hadn’t heard much from Kemp. I think the governor would have done well to keep his mouth shut. Stacey Abrams will do her best to get Raphael Warnock elected U.S. Senator this year ( and maybe put a Democrat in the other senate seat contested this fall), and then turn her attention to Bryan Kemp, and run his sorry ass out of the Governor’s Mansion in 2022.
Tony Jay
@sdhays:
What can I say? Catholic schoolboys see a lot of things they shouldn’t. 8-)
Dadadadadadada
@TS (the original): iirc, the major focus of that committee was going after war profiteers. (Truman certainly became famous for relentlessly and ruthlessly fucking up suspected war profiteers.) Let’s hope the modern version does the same.
TomV
@Gin & Tonic: What are bats doing in the desert near Barstow?
JaneE
@Shalimar: Back in the early 70’s, one of my co-workers noticed that every time the unemployment rate went up so did the stock market. For quite a while, he was right. We couldn’t figure it out then either.
Another Scott
@beef: So we live in the best of all possible worlds then?
Hmm…
Cheers,
Scott.
beef
@Another Scott:
I very clearly said that markets have imperfections. So please don’t put words in my mouth. It’s a bullshit rhetorical strategy.
different-church-lady
@JaneE: Money hates people.
joel hanes
@JaneE:
That one’s easy.
The stocks of companies that agressively lay off their employees to preserve short-term profitability do better than those of companies that sacrifice short-term profitability to retain and protect employees, and companies know that.
Another Scott
@beef: There are always details that have to be considered. That doesn’t mean bumper-sticker proposals are necessarily bad.
e.g. https://www.cepr.net/ftt-before-vat/
YMMV.
Cheers,
Scott.