And a pretty decent website of how the house was when I last visited is here. It is a great house (cost me 500 yen entrance fee IIRC but this time it is free).
And for a REALLY cool video of how Tanabe-san makes these big installation pieces (and the one here is not the biggest I have seen), there is a time-lapse on the Asia Art Museum webpage (4 days(?) packed into 4mins).
Haven't tweeted Snarky for a while - Snarky Puppy that is (regular snark is on the menu at least a couple times a month).
Just listened to the 'We Like It Here' live-studio album again. I am always struck by the layers, the tightness, and how good the solo+drum interaction is.
Larnell Lewis is just nuts.
And I love the sax/drum interaction in Outlier (5th song).
Watch and listen to the Outlier solo to see the interaction between Larnell Lewis (the drummer) and Bob Reynolds (the sax soloist). LL starts out sparse, and then fills more, and more, and more, then fills hard when BR loses his cans. So good.
A reminder that Kyle Bass' polemic against the HKD from 2+yrs ago got totally smacked down by people who actually knew what they were talking about (because his piece is kind of a dumpster fire, and correcting his lack of understanding of HK money markets caused him to block me).
The fund he raised on a 200:1 levered all-in bet against HKD may now be nearly 2yrs old, and depending on when it launched, it may already be dead/expired. If not, it still has a chance, but I am not expecting great things from it.
Granted, it was an OTM call. And most options expire worthless. It was not a bad bet, per se, just a bet with oddly bad justifications.
Saturday Morning Thoughts - Thread on cheese, doctorates, and other stuff.
The cure for higher doctorate numbers is higher doctorate numbers. It's also a three-card trick. Big Cheese Interests' increased spending on R&D is causing doctorate and fancy cheese inflation.
And I know so many of you, using theoretical frameworks call bullshit on this, but this is hard to explain...
the per capita consumption of mozzarella and doctorates awarded in biological and biomedical sciences? It is the EXACT same thing.
"Don't give me cheap "correlation doesn't equal causation" gibes. It gets old and the burden of proof is on you."
As Big Business has increased higher ed R&D funding on a relative basis, consumption of "fancy doctorate cheese" has gone up vs "normal" cheese.
@INArteCarloDoss As noted, pensions purchase royalty streams on mining operations. They buy Bowie Bonds. They participate in mezzanine lending funds or the equity tranche for real estate deals. Yes, this is unregulated lending but it is not exactly ‘shadow banking’ b/c no bank could hold these.
@INArteCarloDoss And yes, they are outside the central bank QE cookbook ingredient list.
Yes, pensions invest in things which provide unregulated financing. That doesn’t mean it is not appropriately priced and when they do so, they know at the outset they do not have an asset-specific CB put.
@INArteCarloDoss Strangely, modern banking was founded on the practices of merchant bankers, which did indeed fund risk, both as equity and through syndication. In the UK, Barings was one but marchand-banquiers are far older. Eventually, after many lost ships in trading, they enlisted other
these articles which say Something Must Be Done is it is always Something but never This Thing Must Be Done to Accomplish That Goal.
There is literally no recipe here to follow. Just a general complaint filled with odd specificities such as “Blackrock manages $8 trillion” as
if that is somehow symptomatic of how awful things have become. But there are either misunderstandings or misrepresentations. Blackrock is an asset mgr. Banks simply don’t enter the equation here unless you expect all capital activity to be intermediated by banks.
to access lots of the B/S whereas that is tougher for S/S.
3) Senior S/S probably has more experience seeing what cos do with their numbers when guiding/sandbagging/beating/kitchen-sinking. That is helpful at turns (it's also helpful for b/s to study).
4) SS conflicts effectively break the model of being truly useful.
5) But SS has its uses. It's a good way for BS to outsource some of its work.
6) if BS wants to improve the utility of what SS does, all it has to do is engage. The fact that BS engages very little about their