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Yes, it's yet another of Trump's money laundering schemes.
For years Trump's sales of residential properties have been almost exclusively to Russian oligarchs and their LLCs.
A typical pro-Trump wheeze by a Fox News journalist about the World Bank - one of the structures the US set up after WW-II to establish global cooperation with the US.
James Freeman makes it sound like the US taxpayer pays for the World Bank in whole and is subsidizing China, but this couldn't be further from the truth.
'Propaganda Coup for the Commies' Trumpist Freeman calls it - https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-propaganda-coup-for-commies-3f75e28f
Votes at the World Bank are proportional to the amount of capital each nation contributes. The US has contributed 1.45% so gets 1.45% of the votes, while China contributes 0.43%. Hardly any of this enterprise is charitable with every nation having their reason for participating within the American global system.
World Bank is a very effective statecraft that costs the US very little, but gives the US a lot of control in global affairs.
China get big projects with German equipment, with capital contributed by Germany - which of course comes back later as profitable order for spare parts and services and German influence, and often China paid orders for additional installations with this first one as a sales tool.
When a World Bank project opens in China, funded in part by China, the World Bank officials are very flattering toward that nation and all of the contributor nations in a manner that's sickening - just like you'd expect. Everyone, including the Chinese participate in competitive backpatting. It's all part of the push pull process of coercing participation.
Growing skepticism toward big business on the right has won Biden's Federal Trade Commission appointees including Lina Khan new allies.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/lina-khan-ftc-antitrust-khanservatives-a6852a8f
Republicans are too liberal, except for their program to end Medicare benefits for retirees, and Trump's program to end freedom and democracy.
Loading up again after a decline would be my preference as well, but that's a gift yet to be given.
I bought Realty Income Corp (NYSE:O) October 31, 2023 at 45.89 and took part as a 26% short-term gain around 58.
Now down to a just a 14% gain at 52.29, I wonder if this isn't a good place to put a lot of our newly freed-up cash in our Roth accounts, with the Fed still likely to bring down short-term rates.
I'm not currently regretting the sale of those tech stocks last week and mostly on Friday.
A 5.9% monthly dividend, plus capital appreciation (all tax free in our Roths) wouldn't be a bad way to cap off what has already been a very good year through March 25 ?
The current SPAXX yield is 4.96%
S&P 500 set for 12th strongest Q1 since 1945. What that means for 2024
A strong first quarter is usually followed by a strong second quarter and a give-back second half. Add in the wild-card that this is an election year?
https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-futures-ease-after-best-week-of-the-year-for-stocks/card/s-p-500-set-for-12th-strongest-q1-since-1945-what-that-means-for-2024--mDHKS0KH4pYm2UnHVJTh
The Blah Blah
It’s the final week of the first quarter and the S&P 500 is on track for a price gain of nearly 10% — and has rallied nearly 30% off its Oct. 27 closing low — leaving investors to ponder just how much good news is already baked into the market.
Indeed, as MarketWatch’s Joy Wiltermuth reported this weekend, the scope of the rally has investors and strategists worrying over warning flags and pondering steps they can take to protect themselves in the event of what many see as a potentially overdue pullback.
The market’s year-to-date performance “would seem to indicate a lot could be priced in. We checked back to 1970, and there have only been 9 1Qs with better performance,” wrote analysts at Jefferies, in a weekend note.
That alone might understandably make investors nervous about chasing the rally, but Jefferies observed that such strong starts often indicate a rally can continue — at least for a while.
Through Friday’s close, the S&P 500 SPX was up 9.7% for the year to date, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA had rallied 4.7% and the Nasdaq Composite COMP had advanced 9.4%.
Citing data going back to 1970, Jefferies found that the S&P 500 posted an average first-quarter gain of 2.5%. When the index does better than that, the second quarter tends to beat its average gain of around 2.6% by 60 basis points, or 0.6 percentage points. Also, the S&P 500 tends to be up around 69% of the time in that scenario, versus an average of around 64%.
And when the S&P 500 returns more than 10% in the first quarter, the boost to the next three months is even bigger, they said, with the second quarter averaging a gain of 3.3% and rising 78% of the time.
There is, of course, a rub.
While the second quarter tends to see further outperformance after a strong start to the year, performance in the second half tends to take a hit (see table above), Jefferies found, with the third quarter seeing a fall of 1% versus a “flattish” average performance otherwise. Fourth-quarter performance, meanwhile, has come in just 8 basis points above its long-term average in years that see a strong first-quarter performance.
“So while we certainly run the risk of pricing too much positivity into stocks with such a massive rally to start the year, we might not have to take our medicine until later in the year,” the Jefferies analysts wrote.
Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA, ran the tape all the way back to 1945. He found the S&P 500 on track for its 12th strongest first-quarter performance since the end of World War II (see table below).
The longer-term data sounds the same theme, strong first quarters tend to be followed by stronger-than-typical second-quarter performances. And they also point to strong full-year gains.
Be aware, however, that the ride may also be bumpier than usual, Stovall said.
He noted that of the 15 top first-quarter advances, 13 saw declines of 5% or more, with the average pullback coming in at 11.1%. And eight of those 13 pullbacks were followed by second declines that averaged 12.6%, he said, with nearly two out of three of the follow-up fallouts proving deeper than the initial selloff.
From a volatility standpoint, the top 15 first-quarter advances saw the average number of days with price swings of 1% or more at 43, roughly the same as for all years since World War II. The top five first-quarter years, however, saw an average of 70 days with price swings of 1% or more, while the top 10 sported an average of 53, Stovall said.
Still, 14 of the 15 top first-quarter years ended up with double-digit full-year price gains, averaging close to 23%, Stovall said. Only 1987 saw a low-single-digit annual advance.
“So, in other words, this strong start implies a frightful yet fulfilling full-year performance for the S&P 500,” Stovall said.
I'd guesstimate their portfolio generates mostly qualified dividends of less than 2.5%, based on major holdings like MSFT.
So most of the 9.5% dividend yield is a tax-free return of your own capital.
Plus there's the unknown amount of capital / short-term gains the fund spits out at the end of the year.
A curious vehicle indeed.
What is (NYSE:USA)?
How does a closed-end fund holding largely low dividend payers distribute an 8.94% dividend?
Are these short-term gains? Is this fund trading greatly below its asset value?
Big tech companies could drive the S&P 500 to 6,000 this year or crash it to 4,500, says Goldman Sachs.
Or why not maybe something in-between or completely different? LOL
China blocks use of Intel and AMD chips in government computers
https://www.ft.com/content/7bf0f79b-dea7-49fa-8253-f678d5acd64a
China has introduced guidelines to phase out U.S. microprocessors from Intel and AMD from government personal computers and servers. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft's Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options.
Government agencies above the township level have been told to include criteria requiring "safe and reliable" processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said.
China's industry ministry in late December issued a statement with three separate lists of CPUs, operating systems and centralised database deemed "safe and reliable" for three years after the publication date, all from Chinese companies.
On December 26, China's Information Technology Security Evaluation Center had published its first list of “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems. Chinese government officials have begun to follow the new PC, laptop and server guidelines this year.
ETZATLÁN, Mexico — For decades, Mexicans crossed the border to pick Americans’ lettuce, grapes and strawberries. Mexico had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of farmhands — tough, hard-working men who did the jobs most Americans didn’t want.
But Mexico is running short of farmworkers. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/23/mexico-farmworkers-us-economy/
The workforce is graying; nearly three-quarters of Mexican campesinos are over 45. Young people are turning up their noses at farm jobs. And those willing to do migrant work have other options. Nearly 300,000 a year travel to the United States on seasonal agricultural visas, a fourfold increase in a decade.
“They’re taking a significant percentage of the available workers,” fretted Aldo Mares, a farm executive here in Jalisco state. He’s had to scramble this season to find workers to pick his juicy strawberries, blackberries and raspberries.
A worker picks raspberries in a greenhouse belonging to Los Cerritos, which has had to hike salaries to attract enough workers for the harvest
The worker shortage reflects a paradox often overlooked in the supercharged U.S. immigration debate. Even as American politicians outdo each other in proposals to fortify the border with Mexico, economic forces are pulling the two sides closer. The U.S. appetite for made-in-Mexico goods, from avocados to automobiles to airplane parts, is growing so fast that it’s straining the workforce that produces them.
That’s particularly clear in agriculture. The companies that put berries on Americans’ tables, such as Driscoll’s and Naturipe Farms, work with growers on both sides of the border, taking advantage of different harvest seasons. But in Mexico, the farms are competing with manufacturers for workers. In a land once known for cheap, abundant labor, business groups say job vacancies could top 1 million.
In a once-unthinkable move, Mexican farmers are now calling for a major guest-worker program of their own. The government is taking the first step, planning to soon open a database of 14,000 jobs in agriculture and other sectors to non-Mexicans.
While wages here remain well below U.S. levels, employers hope some migrants might be willing to swap the American Dream for a Mexican one.
“We’re talking about Mexico having 1.5 million unfilled job openings,” said Giovanni Lepri, the Mexico representative for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “People in search of a better life could fill at least part of that.”
Now Mexico’s an agricultural superpower, too
A shortage of Mexican farmworkers might seem startling — like Italy running out of pizza chefs, or Colombia lacking coffee producers.
Mexico was long a nation of peasant farmers, who cultivated corn, beans, chiles and other crops. When U.S. employers struggled with labor shortages during World War II, they turned to Mexico. Millions of farmworkers went north on temporary visas between 1942 and 1964 under the bracero program, putting an indelible mark on U.S. agriculture. Even today, two-thirds of employees on American farms are Mexican-born.
But thanks to free-trade treaties, Mexico has become a major agricultural power of its own. Its exports to the United States — its top customer — doubled over the past decade to reach $45 billion in 2023.
Mares, 49, is typical of the new era of ag CEOs. He’s a city boy from Guadalajara who studied business administration. In the 1990s, as the North American Free Trade Agreement kicked in, a professor told his class that 40 percent of them would wind up in agriculture.
“We said, ‘He’s crazy,’” Mares said. “And here I am.”
The countryside of Jalisco, once planted with corn and sugar cane, is now a shimmering white sea of plastic tunnels, filled with genetically supercharged berry bushes — many shipped south by U.S. companies.
Aldo Mares, CEO of Green Gold Farms, in front of one of his blackberry greenhouses. - with sign in countryside slang, "Here there's Jobs" literally "Here there's pull" or if this were in Peru "Here's there's sex appeal"
In the poorer south, which is the traditional source of Mexico’s migrant laborers, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has launched big infrastructure projects, leading to a boom in construction jobs.
In the industrialized north, the brisk cross-border trade has created more factory work. Mexico surged past China last year to become the No. 1 source of imports to the United States.
“The strong U.S. economy drives the Mexican labor market,” said Raymond Robertson, director of the Mosbacher Institute for Trade, Economics and Public Policy at Texas A&M University.
That integration is especially evident in agriculture. The number of H2-A temporary visas issued by the U.S. government to farmworkers has skyrocketed from around 74,000 in 2013 to 311,000 last year. The vast majority go to Mexicans. Another 26,000 Mexicans go to Canada on similar visas. American farmers say they need the Mexican workers, even at a time of record migration, since many of those crossing the U.S. border are city dwellers from places like Venezuela, Cuba and Ecuador.
In Jalisco, farmers say the exodus has compounded a labor shortage caused by the country’s declining birthrate and competition from other industries. They’re 10 to 15 percent below the number of crop pickers they need for the spring harvest.
“Mexico has to think seriously about what to do about workers,” said Juan Cortina, president of the National Agricultural Council, which represents farm producers. “We need temporary work visas for our neighbors to the south.”
Mares agrees a long-term labor solution is needed. But he has to worry about this season, these berries. Ninety percent of the fruit from his Green Gold Farms go to the United States, whose berry harvest won’t peak for months.
His company and others have teams of recruiters scouring the countryside, contacting potential workers via bullhorn, fliers and, increasingly, Facebook.
It can be a tough sell. The jobs they offer — six days a week of plucking berries — are exhausting. Harvesters, paid by the bucket, are in continuous motion. And the industry has a history of abuses, including dilapidated housing and unfair pay practices.
These days, employers have to offer better conditions to attract workers. They’ve hiked harvesters’ salaries in the last few years by up to 100 percent. While wages still pale by U.S. standards, they’ve been enough to slash extreme poverty in many rural areas — “an extremely important development,” said Agustín Escobar, a Mexican agricultural researcher.
Miguel Ángel de Jesús, 19, said he earns twice as much picking berries in Jalisco as he could back home in the hardscrabble mountains of Puebla state. His after-tax salary at Agrovision, a U.S.-based company that sells under the Fruitist brand, is around 400 pesos a day, roughly $24, and his food and dormitory are covered.
“We don’t complain,” he said, as his hands flew over a blueberry bush, the plump spheres cascading into plastic buckets strapped to his waist. “We come from places where they don’t give us all this.”
On billboards and banners around rural Jalisco, berry companies offer potential hires savings plans, social security, signing bonuses and a new incentive: temporary visas to work at partner firms in the United States during their harvest seasons, at much higher salaries.
Mexico has long recruited Guatemalan guest workers to help pick coffee beans in southern Chiapas state. But now authorities are crafting a broader program aimed at the historic flows of migrants headed to the U.S. border. About 2.5 million migrants entered Mexico last year; more than 140,000 sought asylum.
The new program would allow migrants and people living abroad to apply for visas to fill jobs in Mexico. The 14,000 jobs in the first cohort is small, but the program is set up to grow, officials say.
Persuading foreigners to work in Mexican agriculture may not be easy, however. Cerritos, a berry and avocado company, hired around 30 Central Americans through a pilot project. Half soon quit; they’d been factory workers and didn’t take to farming, said Pablo Lázaro, a company official. The rest left after three months. “They said, ‘We found people to help us cross,’” he recalled, and they left for the United States.
In the short term, Mexico’s guest-worker programs might not make much of a dent in the northbound migration flow, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. But given pressure on U.S. politicians to crack down on undocumented immigration, that could change.
“If it becomes harder to cross the border at some point,” Selee said, “Mexico could become an increasingly attractive place to go.”
As a teenager, Robert Dart fancied himself a Renaissance man, and he was indeed exceptional by nearly every measure: co-captain of his high-school football and track teams, co-president of the academic club, science-fair prize winner, literary awards.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/homeless-california-mental-illness-care-court-f63d2027
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/homeless-fake-millionaire-fooled-people-6e13e34d
“He was an easy child,” said his mother, Sherry Dart. “He always found a way.” Dart, who everybody called Rob, married a classmate at the University of Chicago Law School in 2007. He had a son and lived as a successful lawyer and family man in Southern California.
Rob was 35 years old when the voices started. His marriage had unraveled, and he looked to his family for help. He returned home to Vienna, Va., convalescing from psychosis in his childhood room, among his trophies, in the care of doctors and his mother. He visited his young son regularly. After two years of medication and therapy, Rob returned to California as an award-winning lawyer with an apartment in South Pasadena, Calif.
In 2022, working from home in the pandemic, he stopped therapy and quit his medicines. The voices returned. Within a year, he was homeless, drifting in and out of reason. He ranted gibberish one moment and spoke with a lawyer’s clarity the next. On library computers, he posted online messages, by turns indecipherable, ominous and poetic.
“When I used to see homeless people, I thought, ‘Where’s their family? Why won’t their family come and help them?’” said Rob’s sister, Jennifer Dart.
Jennifer Dart and her brother Rob
Last July, she flew from Raleigh, N.C., on Rob’s 44th birthday, hoping to find her kid brother and persuade him into treatment. Jennifer and her fiancé spotted him at a Starbucks.
He was sitting alone with a cup of water, hair matted, staring at nothing. “The only thing I could recognize were his eyes,” she said.
Rob saw her and got angry: You shouldn’t be here. I didn’t ask you to come, he said. She followed him out of the coffee shop and asked if she could hug him. Rob pushed her away. Jennifer collapsed to the ground, sobbing.
Disruptions in mental-health care during the pandemic left many Americans vulnerable. Among people ages 18 to 44, insurance claims related to psychotic episodes rose 30% to 2 million in 2023 from 2019, according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data-analytics company. Around the U.S., [url=https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/children-mental-health-hospitals-treatment-cfb6c797]hospitals are overwhelmed[/url]. Emergency rooms are adding security guards. [url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-psych-wards-full-mentally-ill-accused-of-crimes-languish-in-jail-baee0279]Jails serve as a last resort[/url] for those unable to care for themselves.
“You should understand by now that I had quite a stable and productive life before I underwent any psychiatric treatment or therapy,” Rob Dart said in an email to The Wall Street Journal. “I believe people in your position often use medicine to try to keep people from learning what they otherwise could.”
Rob’s 75-year-old mother, Sherry Dart, finds solace on Monday nights at her church, meeting with others who have loved ones with mental-health troubles. “I don’t believe God gave me this as a punishment,” she said. “God is with me, walking me through this.”
Sherry also put faith in California’s new CARE Court. Under a 2022 law creating the system, judges have broad powers to order those with serious psychotic disorders into treatment. In most states, people are largely powerless to get mental-health care for friends or relatives without their consent. In California, family members can petition the court to step in.
Sherry started the process but has found it difficult to navigate alone. “I don’t know if I have all the papers,” she said. “I need to do it, but I feel like I’m going to be a failure.”
After spending her savings trying to shield her son, Sherry, a retired first-grade teacher, fears she is running out of people willing to help a troubled man who pushes them away.
“It’s almost like everyone is tired of Rob Dart. The police. His friends. It’s too hard, too complicated,” she said. “People are just giving up.”
This account is based on interviews with Rob’s friends and family, court records, police reports, medical records and people familiar with his situation.
In knots
Rob phoned his sister on most days during the pandemic. They ended their calls saying, “I love you, I miss you, and I’m proud of you,” Jennifer said. She had gotten sober around the time of Rob’s recovery from what was diagnosed as a bipolar condition with schizoaffective disorder.
In early 2022, Rob’s calls tapered off. When they spoke, Jennifer thought he sounded off kilter. When she asked if he was taking care of himself, he changed the subject.
Alison Bloom, Rob’s neighbor, also wondered what was happening to the smiling man next door. Through an open window she saw trash piling up in his apartment. Rob lost weight and walked around the apartment complex wearing only underwear. Through the walls, she could hear him arguing with himself about baseball and movies.
Within months, Rob lost his law-firm job, his car was impounded, and he quit paying rent. In October 2022, he stopped answering his phone. Then his service was cut off.
“I got on a plane,” his mother said. “I thought I was going to find a dead body.”
After Sherry landed, she went to Rob’s apartment complex and waited by the pool. She knew it was Rob’s day to have his son over for a visit. When Rob saw her, he got angry. He allowed her a few minutes to greet her grandson then took him away. Sherry spent the next few days calling Rob, asking him to please let her visit. He refused.
In December 2022, Rob’s neighbors called Sherry to tell her that Rob was delusional and screaming. From Virginia, Sherry reached South Pasadena police and said her son needed help. Police sent a crisis unit that pairs officers with mental-health workers. A social worker persuaded Rob to get help at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena.
Sherry flew to California the next day. The apartment manager unlocked Rob’s apartment for her, and as soon as the door opened, the smell hit. Sherry collapsed into sobs so loud that Alison came out to console her.
Inside Rob’s apartment, Sherry found his notebooks: Rob could hear the voice of Satan. He was the invisible Obama. He was being hypnotized. People were trying to steal his work. “There is a slim chance that this is in fact satan, I can’t take that chance,” he wrote, sometimes signing his entries “John Lennon” or “St. Nicholas Cage.”
Rob Dart’s driver’s license photo
For three days, Sherry cleaned his apartment. She washed 27 loads of laundry, tucked away his loafers and dress shirts and folded clothes into suitcases. She packed his Head & Shoulders shampoo, shaving cream and Nivea skin lotion.
A family friend helped her move some of Rob’s belongings into storage—his law-school degree, favorite books and artwork, photos of his son, some furniture. Sherry kept cards and drawings from her grandson, whose room had been the apartment’s only clean spot.
Sherry called the hospital each day to ask about Rob, but he wouldn’t let her visit. She sent the hospital a letter on Dec. 11: “I understand that Rob has not yet given you permission to speak to me about his condition, but when he begins to get better, I know he will. While I am in knots while not knowing his condition, I know I have to be patient.”
Sherry stayed in town until Dec. 23 and flew home without learning whether he was getting better. She called the hospital on Christmas Eve and asked to speak with Rob. “We have no one there by that name,” a staffer said. He was already gone.
Court orders
On Dec. 28, Rob visited his son on the porch of his ex-wife’s house. He was frenetic and giggling to himself. He showed up unexpectedly the next day and asked to take their boy overnight. His ex-wife said no. He had just been hospitalized, she told him, and he was getting evicted. He said that wasn’t true.
Rob submitted a court brief in March 2023 seeking “an order of enforcement, findings of contempt, and monetary, punitive and otherwise appropriate sanctions” against his ex-wife for failing to follow their child custody arrangement.
Rob served as his own lawyer and told the judge he was “hospitalized under extremely dubious circumstances,” and that it hadn’t disrupted his ability to be a good father. A 2020 addendum to the divorce agreement said Rob would temporarily lose custody rights if he became mentally incapacitated. The judge, persuaded by Rob’s argument, agreed to a hearing.
Rob’s ex-wife filed for a protective order for their son, saying Rob showed up at all hours demanding to see the boy. Rob’s apartment had become unlivable, she said, and didn’t want their son staying there. Her motion was granted.
Last spring, Rob’s neighbors gave Sherry updates: Rob’s hair had grown long and wiry. He looked unwashed. Some residents were scared.
“I didn’t feel afraid of him, but I felt like I probably should,” his neighbor Alison said. She saw him once lying on the sidewalk and stopped to talk. He perked up, she said, as if he knew how to act normal.
“I think he’s just riddled with imbalances that he can’t control,” Alison said. “But he would prefer that you not know what’s going on.”
Sherry had groceries delivered to his apartment, but Rob wouldn’t take them.
During the first week of June last year, Sherry came to see her son, and Rob opened the door of his empty apartment. He hugged her and said he was sorry for all that had happened and for causing her so much worry. Sherry mentioned his eviction, and Rob’s mood turned. He denied he was being evicted and wouldn’t let her stay.
On June 15, sheriff’s deputies took possession of the apartment.
Try again tomorrow
Jennifer flew to California with her fiancé a month later.
She had spent months trying to convince herself that Rob was safe. “I was making stories in my head,” Jennifer said. She wanted to believe that he was staying at someone’s apartment, that he had found someone to help him, that he wasn’t alone.
Jennifer had filed a missing person’s report, but police came up empty-handed. “I had to see him,” she said.
She arrived in Los Angeles exhausted. The flight had been delayed, and she hadn’t gotten any sleep. Jennifer brought a Duke University T-shirt and a bag of snacks for her brother. A neighbor at Rob’s former apartment complex said she had seen him earlier at Starbucks.
Rob was still there when Jennifer arrived. She called out to him and asked if he knew who she was. I know who you are, he said in anger. Jennifer’s fiancé told Rob they had flown across the country for his birthday. Rob said he didn’t want to see them.
The next day, Jennifer’s fiancé followed Rob at a distance and saw him enter the apartment complex. He persuaded the apartment manager to call police and report a man who needed help. The social worker from Rob’s first trip to the hospital arrived with police officers. They took him to Huntington Hospital, and he was admitted.
Hospital staffers told Jennifer that Rob didn’t want to see her. Try again tomorrow, they said. One of Rob’s social workers said she would try to keep him there. Jennifer bought Rob a backpack, clothes and shoes at Target and dropped them off at the hospital.
Then she and her fiancé flew home, expecting to return to California as soon as Rob was feeling like himself. “We thought he was going to get the help he needed,” she said.
Rob was released after 72 hours and wandered back to his old apartment complex. Neighbors sent Jennifer a photo of him wearing the new backpack.
On Sep. 10, 2023, Rob messaged a friend for help. He said he had been shot.
Gone missing
“Hollywood Walk of Fame Shooting,” a local TV station reported. Camera footage showed Rob on a gurney being lifted into an ambulance. Los Angeles police said he had been meditating on a Hollywood sidewalk around 3 a.m. when he was struck by 'an errant bullet'. He refused to be admitted to a hospital.
Rob instead asked a friend for a ride and a place to stay. The bullet had passed through his calf. The friend brought him home and cleaned and dressed the wound with drugstore disinfectant, gauze and bandages. Rob posted photos of his leg on Facebook Around the end of September, Sherry paid for an Airbnb, and Rob’s friend brought him there. At the end of his stay, Rob refused to leave. He camped on the grass. “How can you let the person be on the street like that?” the Airbnb host wrote to Sherry. “If u truly cared about him you would get him some help.”
Rob’s friend tricked him into returning to Huntington Hospital, and a psychiatrist sought a court order to have Rob committed. After a judge ordered him into treatment, Rob appealed with lawyerly precision. He submitted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, a legal request for release. A second judge allowed him to leave the hospital in mid-October.
Friends put Rob up in a hotel, and Sherry paid for him to stay until she could get a flight to California. When she arrived, Rob wouldn’t agree to see her until a friend persuaded him to meet Sherry for brunch. He showed up angry and looking like he hadn’t slept.
Sherry and the friend drove Rob to Huntington Hospital after he agreed to seek treatment. He changed his mind when they arrived, and they took him to another hotel. Sherry stayed a few days hoping to see him. After Rob put her off, she returned home to Virginia.
The next day, Rob tried to admit himself to Huntington Hospital but was turned away. He got into a hospital in Culver City, Calif., about 20 miles away, and stayed a week. He posted a message when he left, thanking friends for “all your expressions about the whole mess.”
Two days later, he posted a photo of himself and said, “I will no longer disclose my locations.”
In early November, one of Rob’s former neighbors sent Jennifer a photo of him sitting in front of his old apartment complex. Before Thanksgiving, Sherry got Rob into a $130-a-night hotel. He had been posting nonsensical messages online at all hours. He occasionally texted Sherry, asking her to get him a burrito via Doordash, the delivery service. The hotel evicted Rob after he got into an argument with the manager.
On Dec. 23, South Pasadena police got a call from a passerby about a man lying in a doorway on a cold night. Officers brought Rob a comforter, according to the police report.
Rob wrote in a Dec. 27 public Facebook post, “Hey guys, I’m looking for a place to crash in Los Angeles. That’s because I’m homeless. If anyone has some space in their apartment or anything, please DM me. Thanks.” Then he went silent for nearly three months.
On March 16, from a public library in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, Rob wrote to his mother, telling her to stop trying to reach him. That day, he also responded to messages from the Journal, saying he needed food and shelter. “It would be great to meet in person,” he said, but added he would have to be paid for his comments. The Journal, which doesn’t pay for interviews, declined the offer.
Jennifer listens to Rob’s old voice mails, she said, wishing she could call him. She hopes he has found a safe spot in the sprawl of Los Angeles County, among the estimated 75,000 homeless people living in shelters, cars, vacant lots and freeway underpasses.
At home in Virginia, Sherry sat on Rob’s bed in his childhood room on a recent day, looking through old photos. She stopped at a picture of Rob at Walt Disney World, wearing Mickey Mouse ears and a big grin. She cried.
“I adored this child,” Sherry said. “I still do.”
That must hopefully follow a lackluster to down March.
I would appreciate that.
Medicare Advantage Is Under Fire. What It Means for Your Health—and Wallet
https://www.barrons.com/articles/medicare-advantage-medigap-choice-healthcare-retirement-3bb736e4
“Medicare Advantage Plans pay providers less and charge their Medicare members more in copays if they need care”
What a surprise. You have to watch Fox News regularly to be taught to believe stupid and false ideas
Republicans Who Do Not Regularly Watch Fox Are Less Likely to Back Trump
Survey data shows that those who get their news from nonconservative mainstream media outlets are more likely to believe that Donald Trump acted criminally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/upshot/fox-republicans-trump.html
The primary investors in DWC have to be based in Russia and a number of influence-seeking Middle East nations.
DWAC being the company paying billions for Trump's worthless "Truth Social" software.
It's a way for non-Americans to legally bribe Trump.
That's who this "investment" makes sense for.
The Porsche in-wheel motors, updated by Saab
It's fairly well know that Donald Trump's father Fred as a KKK member
White supremacist members of the Aryan Knights gang Skylar Meade, 31, and Nicholas Umphenour have been captured in the city of Twin Falls, Idaho.
During their 24 hour escape the two far-right gang members murdered two men in rural Idaho to gain access to escape vehicles. Prison shackles were found at the scene of one of the killings.
Inmate Skylar Meade gave himself injuries serious enough to be taken to a hospital in Boise. After being treated, fellow Aryan Knights gang member Nicholas Umphenour began firing on the prison guards at the hospital and escaped with Meade.
Members of the German-American Bund marching through Manhattan on the way to their big rally in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939.
Yes, the Republican party has become a fascist menace.
But we've lost the essence of what America is if Americans have to get down in the mud and act like Nazi Republicans in order to defeat Nazi Republicans.
Republicans and Fox News have attracted and weaponized mentally ill and power-hungry people to do their bidding, including Donald Trump for one.
They're noisy and noticeable, but they can't be a majority of voters
The Shingrix vaccine against shingles may be protective against dementia.
People in the US who've received the Shingrix vaccine display a reduced incidence of dementia according to internal GSK follow-up data.
The statistical review was shared by GSK officer Luke Miels at the TD Cowen Healthcare Investment Conference.
Miels said, “We’re starting to look at that. We’ve got another publication coming and we’re starting to think about the appropriate next steps in terms of exploring that prospectively.” A treatment for dementia, he said, “could be transformational.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/our-shingles-vaccine-may-help-protect-against-dementia-says-big-pharma-exec-46e4bf8c
It's likely the neuro-protective effect results from the particularly effective Adjuvant System AS01 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-017-0027-3
AS01 contains two components
1.) 3-O-desacyl-4’-monophosphoryl lipid A (MPL), a non-toxic derivative of the lipopolysaccharide from the bacteria (Salmonella minnesota).
2.) QS-21, a saponin fraction extracted from the Soapbark tree (Quillaja saponaria Molina).
Donald Trump’s new joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee, and fine-print on literature for donors, says money donated will first be used to give the maximum amount allowed under federal law to Trump’s campaign.
Anything donation over the maximum amount for Trump's campaign next goes toward a maximum contribution to the 'Save America PAC' which pays Trump's legal bills.
Only if there's a surplus after paying Trump's legal bills, does any portion of donations to the Republican Party go to the RNC operated by Trump's daughter-in-law.
Donations are shared with state Republican Parties and candidates only if Lara Trump determines the RNC she operates has a surplus, after paying for Trump's legal problems.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-invitation-to-major-donors-prioritizes-the-pac-paying-his-legal-bills-over-rnc-fec0a7e7
Some Republicans are say Trump’s takeover of the RNC has already left the Republican Party short of funds in a way which cannot be remedied with additional donations.
CRWD and NVDA both seem to attract buyers when other tech doesn't.
We'll see.
I think tech was fighting the downside on AAPL today facing a more serious judicial threat to their various monopolies than they're faced in the past, on top of dealing with weak consumer sales in China.
I think we're good, just so long as we don't go seeking safety in Bitcoin.
Raised some cash today in Roths from some overly enthused tech buys.
I could already buy back cheaper.
Donald Trump had just about climbed out of the very deep hole he dug for himself last week when he went on TV and talked loosely about “cutting” programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
Then along came the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday and dragged him right back into it.
House Republicans have just proposed a budget that would slash an astonishing $2.7 trillion from combined spending on Social Security and Medicare over the next decade — more than 8% of the total.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/house-gop-undermines-trump-with-call-for-2-7-trillion-in-social-security-and-medicare-cuts-4ab4d7a2
This is especially disturbing since they're also proposing deep tax cuts — namely, extending the 2017 tax cuts indefinitely which will continue increasing the size of the Federal debt. Something’s gotta give.
This isn’t just touching the third rail of American politics. It’s throwing your arms around it while soaking wet.
The proposals come from the Republican Study Committee. This is not the official Republican leadership group, but it is not a fringe caucus, either. Its membership includes 178 House Republicans including the House Speaker, more than 80% of House Republicans.
The document from the Republican committee will raise yet more concerns, especially among seniors and those in middle age, that the GOP is coming for their retirement benefits.
Politicians mess with this topic at their peril. Evidence strongly suggests that it was their prior promises to cut Medicare that cost the Republicans their “red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections. Apparently not all Republican seniors have drunk the Koolaide.
The latest proposals are sailing into the wind, too. More Americans than at any time in recent history want to shore up Social Security’s finances by raising taxes rather than by curbing the program’s growth. According to a recent poll by Gallup, Americans wanting taxes to rise outnumbered the benefit curbers by a full 30 percentage points, or a ratio of two to one: That’s 61% for raising taxes, 31% for reining in benefits.
That gap is double what it was when Gallup conducted the poll in 2015 and in 2005, and triple what it was in 2009.
Republican talk about “cuts” to Social Security and Medicare makes you wonder how hard Republicans want to win in November.
Still, give the members of Republican Study Committee credit. They’re not shy about their ideas.
During the Crimean War in the 1850s, a French officer was invited by his moronic British counterpart to watch and admire as a British cavalry brigade charged a Russian position. But the British officer sent the brigade into the wrong valley, where they were promptly slaughtered by Russian field guns. The French officer, bemused that he had been invited to watch this needless massacre, replied drily that the performance was magnificent in its way, but hardly the way to win a war.
You could say the same about the Republican Party.
We'll lose everything unless we move all of our assets into Bitcoin as Harry Dent warns us.
I'm sure the only reason Donald Trump has chosen Harry Dent to be his new financial advisor is because his father Harry S Dent created Richard Nixon's racist "Southern Strategy" to win the White House. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dent
That and the fact that his prior advisor, Peter Navarro, is in prison.
Just so long as the Republican Party can successfully eliminate the Medicare program I guess we're good.
Who votes for these criminals?
A new budget by the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 170 House GOP lawmakers, including many allies of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump calls for restructuring Medicare.
The proposals reflect how many Republicans will seek to govern if they win the 2024 elections.
The RSC, which is chaired by Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., counts among its members Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his top three deputies in leadership. Johnson chaired the RSC from 2019 to 2021.
The new budget calls for converting Medicare to a "premium support model," echoing a proposal that Republican former Speaker Paul Ryan had rallied support for.
Under the new RSC plan, traditional Medicare would be replaced with any private plans they qualify for and beneficiaries would be given subsidies to shop for the policies. The size of the subsidies could be pegged to the "average premium" or "second lowest price" in a particular market, the budget says.
The plan became a flashpoint in the 2012 election, when Ryan was GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's running mate, and President Barack Obama charged that it would "end Medicare as we know it." Ryan defended it as a way to put Medicare on better financial footing, and most of his party stood by him.
Biden has blasted Republican proposals for the retirement programs, promising that he will not cut benefits and instead proposing in his recent White House budget to cover the future shortfall by raising taxes on upper earners.
The RSC budget presents a conundrum for Trump, who has offered shifting rhetoric on Medicare without proposing a clear vision for the future of the program.
AI chip start-ups have taken solace in Nvidia’s inability to meet chip demand, hoping to become a second source based on shortages alone.
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/nvidia-ai-gtc-conference-startups-7ead148c
But with Blackwell Nvidia has worked with suppliers to have more production ready. “The benefit we have is we’re not surprised this time,” Huang said during a financial analyst Q&A session at GTC on Tuesday. “We are geared up for an exciting ramp.”
And there’s the product breadth. At GTC, Nvidia revealed several Blackwell products—including the B100, B200, GB200 Superchip, HGX B200 server board, and GB200 NVL72 liquid-cooled rack system with 72 GPUs. Got all that? The gist is that Nvidia has an offering for a wide range of AI needs and customers, from small corporate workloads to supercomputing.
The lineup fulfills the company’s promise late last year to accelerate its AI launch cycles from two years to one. “The bigger AI gets, the more solutions that will be needed, and the faster we will meet those goals and expectations,” Nvidia’s chief financial officer Colette Kress told Barron’s at the time.
The strategy isn’t new for Nvidia. It harkens back to the company’s first decade when Huang figured out a plan to win against dozens of competitors in the market for graphics chips.
In the late 1990s, Huang observed that graphics chip companies were only maintaining a leadership position for up to two years. It became a game of leapfrog. PC makers would choose new parts twice a year during the fall and spring. Since a typical graphics chip took 18 months to develop, the market leader would always fall to a better-performing chip from a competitor.
Huang cracked the code. Instead of one engineering team, Nvidia split the design team into three groups. The first would design an overall new architecture, while the second two would develop faster derivatives. It enabled Nvidia to ship a new chip every six months. The plan was called “Three teams, two seasons,” and, once deployed, the competition couldn’t keep up. The list of competitors fell from 50 to 10 virtually overnight.
Beyond product speed, Curtis Priem, who co-founded Nvidia with Huang and Chris Malachowsky in 1993, emphasized the importance of the ecosystem surrounding the company’s hardware. Nvidia provides industry specific libraries and tools to make applications rapidly. “There are a lot of me toos out there saying you can do a chip as fast, but they don’t have the software stack,” Priem recently told me.
Then there’s the issue of hiring the talent to get this all done. “What’s the strategy with other start-ups?” You have to hire half the people at Nvidia, but they are still locked down with stock,” Priem says. For future employees, a megacap stock that continues making new highs could be the biggest advantage of all.
I looked at the Caller IDs of the recent calls on our "cable landline phone".
It's just for outgoing calls. - We have no outgoing message and the answering machine is off.
Apparently purported cities call us a lot. You'd think Los Angeles, CA would have better things to do than to call us. And what's a Dana Coffey?
LOS ANGELES, CA
Unavailable
Unavailable
LOS ANGELES, CA
GREEN HOUSE
SPAM RISK
GREEN HOUSE
LOS ANGELES, CA
DOWNEY, CA
DANA COFFEY
SPAM RISK
SPAM RISK
If it's a "spam risk", why bother connecting the call?
It must not be legal yet for cable companies to block calls from the brigade of miracleJack spammers as cell phone providers do.
At least we're now dealing with just a limited number of "Billy Smiths" who operate "independent telecom companies", rather than millions of anonymous spammer/scammers /often also drug addicts /or located outside the US.
T-Mobil is a lot more aggressive about blocking calls coming from "independent telecom companies" than Charter Communications is.
With T-Mobil, I never even receive the calls. I can still specifically "White List" a number operated by a "Billy Smith" telecom if I had some cheap friend or relative who used magicJack or some other "Billy Smith" telecom.
Spectrum Cable/Charter just changes the incoming CallerID to "SPAM Likely", so we turned-off the ringer on our Spectrum "Land Line" - we just use it for outgoing calls.
As I mentioned, residents of Florida receive a lot more of these spam/scam calls because your telecom provider is under pressure from Florida to put these calls through to you. Why? Because these dodgy "phone companies" based in Florida are a lot of revenue for the state and local politicians.
A lot easier if T-Mobile simply blocks calls coming from the magicJack "telephone network"
Riley Financial has a market cap of $570 million.
There's a lot of privately-owned "telecom companies" owned by campaign contributors like "Billy Smith" who are willing to let their telecom customers get away with far more in return for the right price. He even donates free phone banks and callers to Ron DeSantis's campaigns.
For some reason most of the "Billy Smiths" in the telecom industry are headquartered in Florida. As are most boiler-room call shops. Florida residents also receive the most number of SPAM and fraud calls.
It can't be the corrupt State government. It must be the weather.
We can attempt to prosecute Billy Smith and the "telecom companies" he owns, hoping to put him on bread and water. Will Florida do that, or let that happen? Billy says he's always made his "best efforts" to screen his telecom customers.
Or we can let large telephone companies block all calls coming from any telecom provider connected with Billy Smith, putting him out of business.
The weakness with requiring telecoms to first validate a poor "Reputational Score", before cutting off the calls, is after Billy Smith's telecom company gets a bad score, Billy simply starts a new "telecom company" with a new name and a fresh and clean Reputational Score.
Riley Financial (NASDAQ:RILY) owns magicJack, which is one of the larger telecom providers who aren't an actual phone company.
https://www.magicjack.com/account/mjLandingpages.do
They charge you $43 a year for a VoIP telephone line linked directly to one of the cell phones in your "Click Farm", and they are your STIR/SHAKEN verifier to the global phone network.
You sign-up with them for your "home security business "Visa Security" and your new number is now verified by Riley Financial. What are your going to do with your "Click Farm" making calls as Visa Security.
As small as they are, Riley Financial is a fairly large business. What leeway might an even smaller telecom STIR/SHAKEN provider be willing to give you in return for $7,000 a month instead of $43 a year? Let you report your outgoing number as the number you're calling? For $7k, why not? This is the weakness with STIR/SHAKEN which the telecoms have now almost completely implemented after Congress authorized it.
This is why major telecom companies are pushing for the right to cut-off calls coming from a telecom business with a poor reputational score aka verifying a lot of Spam calls from their users as legitimate. Some say this is big tech firms trying to put small competitors out of business. Currently some telecom companies, like out cable company, change their Caller ID to "SPAM Likely", T-Mobil on cell phones blocks them completely.
A retiree Spammer/Scammer working his 21 magicJack "Phone Farm" calling as "Visa Security" - magicJack says his call is 'Verified'
T-Mobile would like to block magicJack outgoing calls due to a poor reputation
This kindly magicJack lady in the photo might be a ruthless SPAM Scammer in the Philippines or Vietnam.
Or maybe she secretly lives across the street from you and claims her name is Court?
What is an American criminal penalty to a internet and telephone fraud crook resident in Nigeria or Vietnam?
Inside a Vietnamese "Click Farm" - https://www.cnn.com/style/vietnam-farms-jack-latham-beggars-honey/index.html
At its GTC conference, Nvidia today announced Nvidia NIM, a new software platform designed to streamline the deployment of custom and pre-trained AI models into production environments.
NIM takes the software work Nvidia has done around inferencing and optimizing models and makes it easily accessible by combining a given model with an optimized inferencing engine and then packing this into a container, making that accessible as a microservice.
Typically, it would take developers weeks -- if not months -- to ship similar containers, Nvidia argues -- and that is if the company even has any in-house AI talent. With NIM, Nvidia clearly aims to create an ecosystem of AI-ready containers that use its hardware as the foundational layer with these curated microservices as the core software layer for companies that want to speed up their AI roadmap.
NIM currently includes support for models from NVIDIA, A121, Adept, Cohere, Getty Images, and Shutterstock as well as open models from Google, Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Stability AI. Nvidia is already working with Amazon, Google and Microsoft to make these NIM microservices available on SageMaker, Kubernetes Engine and Azure AI, respectively. They'll also be integrated into frameworks like Deepset, LangChain and LlamaIndex.
"We believe that the Nvidia GPU is the best place to run inference of these models on, and we believe that NVIDIA NIM is the best software package, the best runtime, for developers to build on top of so that they can focus on the enterprise applications -- and just let Nvidia do the work to produce these models for them in the most efficient, enterprise-grade manner, so that they can just do the rest of their work," said Manuvir Das, the head of enterprise computing at Nvidia, during a press conference ahead of today's announcements."
As for the inference engine, Nvidia will use the Triton Inference Server, TensorRT and TensorRT-LLM. Some of the Nvidia microservices available through NIM will include Riva for customizing speech and translation models, cuOpt for routing optimizations and the Earth-2 model for weather and climate simulations.
The company plans to add additional capabilities over time, including, for example, making the Nvidia RAG LLM operator available as a NIM, which promises to make building generative AI chatbots that can pull in custom data a lot easier.
This wouldn't be a developer conference without a few customer and partner announcements. Among NIM's current users are the likes of Box, Cloudera, Cohesity, Datastax, Dropbox and NetApp.
“Established enterprise platforms are sitting on a goldmine of data that can be transformed into generative AI copilots,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Created with our partner ecosystem, these containerized AI microservices are the building blocks for enterprises in every industry to become AI companies.”
Villagers grow corn and raise cattle in the Greenland Guobinfu luxury villa project, built in northern China's Shenyang, Liaoning province in 2015 - now abandoned.
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2024-03-14/gallery-abandoned-villas-102175424.html
AMD fans are always optimistic.
Every time good things happen for Nvidia, or in the past for Intel, AMD fans have always been convinced some crumbs are going to fall off the table into AMD's lap.
One change they noted with joy is the new Nvidia Blackwell chip has one fewer floating-point processors rather than more of them.
The reason is AI uses Scalar chips and rarely uses Floating Point. The market for high-precision GPUs is less than 4% of the GPU market. When you're dealing in immense numbers, very few also believe they need precision on their trillions answer 16 digits past the decimal point.
So AMD kids are all sugar plums with the idea that AMD might grow their share of the high-precision multi Floating-Point share of the GPU market from nearly nothing to as much as 1/3 of that 4% part of the market with their new MI300X. Crumbs
More predictably NVDA will introduce another product later with more FPPs.
ANET routers, incidentally, are used for all networking uses, but the biggest demand driver currently are companies fitting out new AI data centers. It's just that firms like CSCO aren't seeing any much new business because no one needs the extra burden and expense of doing networking infrastructure the Cisco way.
GOOGL certainly caught a break being chosen as the AI partner for Apple, but shares are still locked in the doldrums. We own way too much GOOGL, so I'm not too much at a loss selling some in our Roth accounts before the Apple news. We have a lot of AMZN as well, but no doldrums there.
The Nvidia conference where they released their new Blackwell GPU, led to a post-euphoria sell-off this morning in AMD and NVDA as well as ANET and other AI related vendors.
Predictably the dip was immeadiately bought in NVDA, now back to the prior close.
AMD not so much, remaining sold off. Which is not a surprise to me as the new NVDA product was not good news for direct competitor AMD.
ANET networking equipment will pick up virtually all of the orders from new data centers.
Trader's enthusiasm was a little too much in the sector, but other traders took advantage of this morning's sell-off to pick up shares.