Random Thoughts II

[StN]

Originally Posted by Ab

Prepare plans b and c.

Oh maths has been done - would walk away with 113% salary. And less stress. And as of yesterday (must post in the other thread) even less ties to Christchurch.

[Cyberbob]

I was reminded the other day that the Great NZGames Piss Up of 2004 was 16 years ago.

I'm kinda sad that there's no photographic evidence left, and most likely lost to the sands of time as the paradise and ihug homepages hosts dropped off.

[MadMax]

fuck how did i miss that

[Nich]

It's time for plan B

https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD/s...433856/photo/1

Get ready for lambo memes.

[[fe]]

Lockdown beard scraggle will now be on the drivers licence. Clean(er) shaven - feels good. Almost failed eyesight though :/ on the way out.

[MadMax]

One for data people, what are your thoughts on brush plates in place of the usual cable management units?

[DrTiTus]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYGGfK4bqVs

Everlast

From House of Pain - Jump Around

Had a heart attack [Eminem mocked him]
But stayed true to his roots/heart
Bad ass Irish m0f0 with a grey beard

Pretty cool, went from hip hop to musician

Any other Everlast tracks are great too

[ceer]

Originally Posted by DrTiTus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYGGfK4bqVs

Everlast

From House of Pain - Jump Around

Had a heart attack [Eminem mocked him]
But stayed true to his roots/heart
Bad ass Irish m0f0 with a grey beard

Pretty cool, went from hip hop to musician

Any other Everlast tracks are great too

Yeah used to listen to these albums to and from work many years ago.

Everlast: Whitey Ford Sings the Blues and Eat at Whitey's

Some great tracks, I really liked the "Black Coffee" (Eat at Whitey's) track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETKhRG0-bGU

[Cyberbob]

HB Ab

[Ab]

Cheers bob jesus, 48. That sounds really old.

Bright side: am in much better physical shape than I was at even 40. I'll say this for the COVID jobloss, it's been great for my fitness, sleep, and mental health. Lots more exercise, eating both less and healthier, drinking less because I'm not self-medicating job stress.

[StN]

HB Simon.

[StN]

And about now it's probably time to add a calendar entry for the rest of the day:

"Investigate impact on supply chain of recent cyber attacks and Malware deployments in Trans Tasman entities"

[Brutus]

HB Birthday Ab.

Scary thought. More than half my life lurking here.

Unlike you Covid/lockdown has been bad for my waistline. Lost my 5k walk to work.
Drinking has increased.
More snack food being eaten.
Etc.

Might have to join a gym for first time in my life to deal with this gut I've developed.

[StN]

Many ales and rums after working out 2 above (Yes, no Speights), I am led to beleive the following:

In light of recent events in Australia (Signals division) and India (Border patrol), Monty Python may well retract this. Also, "The Germans" from Fawlty towers may still be on Sky Box sets - for now.


Where's my drink..?

[Lightspeed]

Happy birthday Ab.

[Ab]

Daughter got me Overwatch Monopoly. No complain of product

[Lightspeed]

One of the many games I wish existed:

RPG in the style of The Temple of Elemental Evil. Complex battles that occur in a short period, not turn based, but nearly effectively so due to the ability to auto-pause when an action occurs or can be made. Time being important for determining order of actions and such. A focus on efficiency, incurring maximum damage for minimal injury with minimal use of consumables.

Except instead of a traditional Sword & Sorcery style RPG, adapt the D&D ruleset for contemporary urban warfare. Control a band of mercenaries of various specialisations, from hand-to-hand, small arms, heavy weapons, explosives, etc.

With the ability to watch combat replays once a battle is over.

[Nich]

belated HB Si


Random sustained thought:
- Silver / Gold ratio recently hit a 5,000 year high ~130:1... a 5,000 year high!
- Gold is ~$1,750/oz and <$100 USD from all time high. Price is suppressed by COMEX markets
- Silver currently at $17/oz
- Conservative targets put gold at $5,000 in the event of a dollar collapse / inflation event
- Historic normal for Silver / Gold ratio is 15:1, but that may not apply anymore due to industrial usage, that silver is a byproduct of mining Gold / Tin / Copper, and that very few mining companies dig a hole specifically to mine silver.
- Miners may begin mining for silver specifically if the price were to rise, as it currently stands it is perhaps only profitable to mine Copper / Gold and hope some silver turns up.
- Gold @ $5,000 with a Silver / Gold ratio of 15:1.. Silver is a slingshot to price targets well above $100/oz
- However, Rick Rule believes Silver / Gold ratio is just an measure of people's emotion and sentiment.

Why would people buy Gold / Silver?
- Dollar purchasing power is under direct attack
- Almost every financial advisor and hedge fund puts at least 10% gold in their portfolios, which is very different from 5 years ago when it was typically 0%.
- Stock market goes up and down based on news headlines alone. Fundamentals are gone. How long can the good news keep people's spirits up?
- 14 year olds have stopped playing Fortnight and are trading stonks through Robinhood. Their hypeman / ringleader is a guy called Davey Day Trader, who picks stocks by pulling random letters out of a scrabble bag. "Stocks only go up!"
- US FED practically doubled the available USD liquidity in the last 2 months. Some days it created $1 trillion in a single day, but settled at $100 billion per day.
- They don't even try to call it QE or hide it behind fancy names. Stock markets going down means elite rich people feel sad, FED wants to make rich people feel happy and has stated their unending, infinite ability to cheer them up (money printer go BRRRRR).
- 60 minutes interview has US FED admitting that they generate new money simply by entering a new number in a computer.
- Rich people happier while poor people get sadder and angrier is the largest wealth gap we'll probably see in our lifetimes.
- The longer this goes on, the less confidence there is in government issued money, the more people realise this is an everything bubble.

Silver Bullion: The Best 5 Year Investment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RNDc8_uMDQ

Crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Gold & The Dollar, Forthcoming Moves
Silver / Gold ratio analysis
https://youtu.be/qSrzlVGRHCE?t=1922

Rick Rule on Gold / Silver setting the table commodities
https://youtu.be/55z7J1V4BTU?t=1288

[Nich]

Doug Casey Reveals Next 10 Bagger Speculation. (1000x UPSIDE!!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB1ZQz4QRRk

Of course, any discussion on Silver / Gold wouldn't be complete without Doug Casey

full interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugTjJtFMkHA

[Lightspeed]

Too many people with too many opinions. Give me a good book where the last 20% of pages are dedicated to all the references the author made in the book.

Right now it's a bunch of Anglo-Westerners grappling with feelings normal the world over under our reign. And of course people looking to make a buck off appeasing those feelings.

Awful shit, right?

[Nich]

Doug Casey - International Man
David Graeber - Debt: the first 5,000 years

Other authors:
Jim Rickards
Mike Maloney

Governments punish savings and encourage bad debt. They steal our wealth by promising not to raise taxes (which would be overt theft), but lowering interest rates, inflating the money supply carte blanche (subversive theft).

TLR real estate and precious metals stop the bleeding caused by inflation. Time to get an insurance policy.

In the future, it's best to have preserved some purchasing power while everyone gets nudged towards dependence on a central bank debit card posted to them each month. That debit card will no doubt have strict conditions on with whom you are allowed to transact.

[Ab]

Originally Posted by Nich

- 14 year olds have stopped playing Fortnight and are trading stonks through Robinhood. Their hypeman / ringleader is a guy called Davey Day Trader, who picks stocks by pulling random letters out of a scrabble bag. "Stocks only go up!"

(FORTUNE Magazine, 15 April 1996) – JOE KENNEDY, a famous rich guy in his day, exited the stock market in timely fashion after a shoeshine boy gave him some stock tips. He figured that when the shoeshine boys have tips, the market is too popular for its own good, a theory also advanced by Bernard Baruch, another vested interest who described the scene before the big Crash:

"Taxi drivers told you what to buy. The shoeshine boy could give you a summary of the day's financial news as he worked with rag and polish. An old beggar who regularly patrolled the street in front of my office now gave me tips and, I suppose, spent the money I and others gave him in the market. My cook had a brokerage account and followed the ticker closely. Her paper profits were quickly blown away in the gale of 1929."

[Nich]

The Looming Bank Collapse
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...llapse/612247/

Get ready for subprime V2.0. Hopefully this time they fail like they are supposed to.

[crocos]

Originally Posted by Nich

The Looming Bank Collapse

[...]

Get ready for subprime V2.0. Hopefully this time they fail like they are supposed to.

This does not surprise me even slightly given some of the shit I've seen at a previous financial services employer. Some of the shit we were instructed to do skeeved me out and I once used the internal whistle-blower process for something that flew in the face of the official ethics policy... though with no results that I saw.

[blynk]

The whistleblower process is pretty much non existant in NZ.
There is the law that relates to public entities/public money, but other than that companies can do what they want, so they dont have to abide by anything if they don't want to.

[Lightspeed]

The question is, are our politics the results of our day-to-day skeeviness we're all guilty of, or is our skeeviness a result of following our political leaders? Or is it something else?

Cause I see a relationship.

[Lightspeed]

While you guys are all raising kids and having careers, I have just cleaned out my place and thrown out all telephone and coax cables, and anything related.

Very satisfying. All my network cables are now in one box too. There were fewer USB cables than I thought.

[Nich]

Kids or no, a man is never without his box of random cables that forever need to be organised.

As far as career goes... yeah well 2020 has poured cold water on that.

Have you sorted your USB cables into "charging only", and "data transmitting" ?

[StN]

In my ceiling cavity I have 5 or 6 small washing baskets with different cable types. I hardly go into the roof much, but recently I offered to sort out the AV setup at the pub, and a pile of old RCA leads was handy in resurrecting a 30 year old Technics amp. In cleaning out Dad's garage I found a Freeview decoder that will hook up to my multi-monitor display in my garage - just need to extend the co-ax - luckily, I have a basket for that

Then there are the vintage SCSI cables from all three employers - recycled as tech and connectors advanced. Very handy in replumbing 1990's Unix boxes.

[Ab]

Originally Posted by Nich

Kids or no, a man is never without his box of random cables that forever need to be organised.

As far as career goes... yeah well 2020 has poured cold water on that.

Have you sorted your USB cables into "charging only", and "data transmitting" ?

This

Also, seem to have retained a box of firewire cables just because firewire was so amazing and should still be a thing

[[fe]]

Originally Posted by StN

Then there are the vintage SCSI cables .

This gave me a SyQuest Flashback... 200MB Storage on those babies.

[Lightspeed]

Does everyone also have a shoebox full of failed mechanical HDDs?

[Ab]

I did until last Saturday, wiped 'em all and dropped them off for recycling.

[StN]

Originally Posted by Lightspeed

Does everyone also have a shoebox full of failed mechanical HDDs?

More like a shelf full of uselessly small functioning ones.

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by Lightspeed

Does everyone also have a shoebox full of failed mechanical HDDs?

Mine is a mixture of failed, and small but operational. A while ago had great fun hitting a few of the really failed ones with a sledgehammer as they potentially had client data on them and they weren't running well enough to properly wipe.

Also raises hand re cables box.

[Lightspeed]

Yeah, mine are mostly failed, so can't wipe them. I've always wanted to destroy them with thermite like I've seen on the YouTube, maybe I'll do that one day.

[Ab]

The thing I enjoyed about my wipefest last weekend was the fact that I needed a puter with lots of easy-to-reach drivebays to do it, so I used my old G4 PowerMac. Just opening it up was satisfying. What a beautifully engineered bit of kit.

[Cyberbob]

Originally Posted by Lightspeed

Does everyone also have a shoebox full of failed mechanical HDDs?

I've got two failed HDD's that have data on there that I missed out of some crucial backup routines.
I'm keeping them for when I'm next optimistic enough to retry them in a PC before being disappointed that they don't boot.

[Pepsi]

You’re all very organised, and have reminded me of the fact that one of my daughters can’t use her wardrobe as it’s full of my old cables and misc IT gear. I really wish I had sorted that out during lockdown..

[Ab]

Originally Posted by Ab

TSLA just closed at 547.20

1,120

By market cap now the biggest car manufacturer in the world, also bigger than Disney.