Friday, July 24, 2020

Friday's rambling post.

I haven't really been talking about anything lately because..... what difference does it make?

Houses are flying off the market. The Dow is only down 3,500 points from the top. Yet I can't figure out how anything is effing working. I'm waiting four weeks for parts. Try getting anyone on the phone. That eats up half your day. You are on hold for at least an hour. Businesses are closing down left and right.

On the virus front - California is now losing a Boeing 727 every day. They would have died anyway. Technically. People make choices in life. If you haven't figured out you have to protect yourself at this point - that's on you. But as I've written before - that is not really America's style. Our style is more YOLO. The when shit hits the fan they cry - WHY DIDN'T YOU STOP ME?!
Then they will probably sue you.

So, we are going to be in this for a good long time. You can't put this gene back in the bottle. It has to get bad enough that people self correct. And I don't see that happening for a while.  We are not Sweden! It's definitely America's style to make everything OTHER people's problem. And we have that in spades right now. People don't have to live by their actions. So, until that drills down - we all are hostages.

Also.... ALL of the data people are citing for California is useless. There are reports literally everywhere it takes up to 14 days to get a test result back.

10 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, July 24, 2020 1:51:00 PM

    "ALL of the data people are citing for California is useless. There are reports literally everywhere it takes up to 14 days to get a test result back."

    Assuming the tests actually work, which they don't because they produce enough false positives and negatives to be useless.

    Totally loving my fourteen days in quarantine, BTW.

    That just gives me more time to unpack and to enjoy all of those meals by delivery.

    Someone does my grocery shopping now for me and drops it off.

    I'm not a control freak, I'm a control enthusiast, and so this actually bothers me a pretty good bit.

    "I'm waiting four weeks for parts."

    I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to make local small-scale production work so we have it to fall back on during leaner times. The major problem is that there are things that can't be done with it. Unless you want SIM cards or some highly specialized chipsets that come with highly specialized costs, you pretty much can forget about local or regional chip fab.

    My new role is interesting, I'm an advisor now which also means I can't boss people around, which has some amusing results. People who knew me as the boss are having to get used to the fact that I can't actually give them direction.

    Silver prices aren't great, BTW -- have you checked those lately?

    You'd be surprised how much SAC305 solder costs right now -- no big deal when silver was 9 USD per troy ounce, but now that it's over double that (22.62 USD)?

    No big deal if you don't need silver solder because you sell to EU companies directly, require certificates of WEEE exemption, and the countries you work with don't give a crap about piss-ant sized amounts of lead that will never amount to anything in "waste streams" ...

    But increasingly you can't get around having to use it, especially if you have to use BGA chips.

    High silver prices are reminding me of the crap that the Hunt brothers pulled in Texas back in the 1970s and 1980s.

    Speaking of the People's Republic of Austin, Elon Musk's Gib-Me-Cash factory in Austin's going to happen, but it's almost not in Austin. Apparently he's buying up at least one old concrete plant or rock quarry from Martin Marietta out by Loop 45.

    It's near enough to major roads and the airport that this isn't a totally stupid idea, but it's clear that if he wants to live the cushy in-town life that there's going to be an executive office away from the factory.

    Austin's "Gone Hollyweird" enough that I don't even recognize it in maps anymore. I probably already told you about the experience of finding out that my old house spot is now buried under one of Austin's new roads.

    In a few months, I have an appointment at a US embassy to take care of paperwork, assuming that I can get into that country for the meeting. Right now the borders are closed to anyone with US citizenship because of The Rona Crazy, even if I'm now residing somewhere else.

    Everything's out of Florida now, BTW.

    I have gun dealers in Florida and South Dakota selling off everything but one gun I was allowed to transfer to a dealer here for safe keeping. The Florida and South Dakota gun dealers are apparently happy to have the inventory because I hear there's a gun shortage that even extends to rifles now.

    But yeah, I kept my family's old Winchester Model 70.

    I can get that licensed here eventually as a hunting firearm.

    In a few weeks, I'll do something that'll surprise you: I'm looking at buying a condo.

    Everything's surprisingly chilled out here and the economy isn't totally in the crapper, so why not?

    I can probably afford to lose it if things get really awful if I don't spend too much on it, which is actually my major consideration for buying a place.

    It'd be like Montpellier perhaps but without the French tax man.

    Geneva seems a lot more like my kind of town than Zurich.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Assuming the tests actually work, which they don't because they produce enough false positives and negatives to be useless."

    Why even test then? I'm not saying there aren't problems, but we are wasting a ton of money on something that is "useless". 

    Totally loving my fourteen days in quarantine, BTW.

    Did you get an ankle bracelet? How do they know you aren't breaking quarantine? It's all the rage you know.

    "I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to make local small-scale production work so we have it to fall back on during leaner times. The major problem is that there are things that can't be done with it. Unless you want SIM cards or some highly specialized chipsets that come with highly specialized costs, you pretty much can forget about local or regional chip fab. "

    Chips are hard. Just ask Intel.
    ---

    "Silver prices aren't great, BTW -- have you checked those lately?"

    I've seen this movie before. Gold gets too rich so people pile into silver. They don't understand how long recessions can last these days. Hoping to make a quick buck on a fast turn round. The turn around takes considerably longer than their expectations and they "all of a sudden" need liquidity. So they sell gold and silver making them tumble. Will look into the Hunt brothers. I don't know what you are talking about.

    "Speaking of the People's Republic of Austin, Elon Musk's Gib-Me-Cash factory in Austin's going to happen, but it's almost not in Austin. Apparently he's buying up at least one old concrete plant or rock quarry from Martin Marietta out by Loop 45."

    Interesting, but not surprising, about the Martin Marietta building. It's gotta be an old dinosaur of a building that is almost impossible to repurpose. Texas can have him. I don't even know why this guy makes cars. States just hand over these assets at rock bottom prices. He could just make money on the real estate alone.

    "In a few weeks, I'll do something that'll surprise you: I'm looking at buying a condo."

    Well.... you know what they say - buy high, sell low. I'm sure it must be hard to find a rental though. I personally wouldn't touch real estate.  I think most of the people in the market right now are inexperienced bottom fishers. This is going to make the housing crisis look like a cake walk. I don't think anywhere gets spared. Cash is always king. It might not be an exaggeration that 50% of restaurants go out of business in the US. Last I remember - the services sector made up 70% of the economy. Every country is broke. They just haven't fully accepted it yet.

    Glad to see you back. ;) You are a wordy guy - but at least they are interesting words.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Houses are flying off the market. The Dow is only down 3,500 points from the top. Yet I can't figure out how anything is effing working."

    Reminds of the movie "The Big Short". About the crash & bail-out of those too big to fail. I just watched it again a couple of weeks ago, that might explain today...

    ReplyDelete
  4. I will put it on my weekend reading list. I mean, I know Trump is just cramming money into the system. But there are bidding wars right now.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, July 24, 2020 9:31:00 PM

    "How do they know you aren't breaking quarantine?"

    Insomnia sucks, BTW, but being able to call someone to deliver breakfast is a bit like living in a hotel, even if I'm not, so there's this to look forward to today.

    The gendarmes have dropped by occasionally in person.

    They have my mobile number, and so even if I haven't installed this damned SwissCovid farce app, they can find out where I am anyway if I take my phone with me.

    These are civilized people here, they generally don't do ankle bracelets.

    "Chips are hard."

    If we could rely on an independent ARM chip fab in the region, we could make do and put up with a forced change in CPUs. That's something new to try that might yet work out.

    We only went with Intel because it made it easy to load Red Hat's commercial Linux distribution on the hardware and to prototype things on laptops. There are already several companies here that build something close to what we need.

    We also could give everyone a somewhat beefier version of a Raspberry Pi for prototyping, and there's fully supported RHEL 7.8 for ARM 64-bit.

    ATMEL isn't beefy enough, so going with whoever the Italians behind Arduino are using isn't an option. I do like the AVR design for stuff that doesn't need very much power behind it, but it just doesn't work for what we're doing.

    "I'm sure it must be hard to find a rental though."

    It varies, and it helps to have local people helping you.

    It also helps that tourism's been in the crapper (for obvious reasons). If you can put up with throwing money at the problem, things aren't too difficult, especially since there are former Airbnb types who now realize they just want to get paid more reliably.

    But the bigger (or smaller?) problem is that this place is smaller than the old one, so I'm not completely unpacking yet. If I can buy a new place that's bigger, then this will be easier, and I'm going to leave a lot of stuff packed for now.

    As for where, that's something I'm working out, but I have an idea that might work out ...

    Swiss Federal Railways is actually a pretty decent rail system, although I can't get near it right now without getting arrested. That means if I want to commute into Zurich or Geneva during less paranoid times and stay out of the city centers (unlike what I did in Miami), that's an option.

    There are little things I would enjoy right now but can't, such as getting on a train and walking into Vaduz, Liechtenstein just to have an afternoon of wandering, good coffee, pleasant mountain scenery, and people with very good manners.

    But on the whole, this isn't bad at all.

    My French needs some work, mostly because of the accent: it's neither Swiss French nor that of France metropolitain.

    "Are you Canadian?"

    No, I am Not A Maple Leaf State Refugee!

    I don't know where they get this because I don't honk and quack like a duck.

    Ah, breakfast has arrived. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. manufacturing is fucked.

    I'm having to explain this damn near daily to customers these days. Usually without the profanity, well, I try without the profanity anyway.

    We just shut down everything for at least a couple months. Which includes not only the guys making the final product, but the guys making the parts, and processing the raw materials. And many are now having to run at reduced capacity due to spacing requirements. Its going to take months to clear the backlog, because people haven't stopped buying! Plus importation problems. And NOTHING is made 100% in the USA any more, there's always some little part that's imported.

    And daily I have multiple people asking me why no one has X product in stock any more. So many people have gotten this horrified look on their faces when I explain the basics of how such things work.

    Clothing! Very very very very little fabric is made in the USA these days. Most of the fabrics we wear these days are made in asia. Fabric stores are empty, people shrug, who cares if the crafters can't sew? But no one seems to back track that to realize what that means for fabric sourcing over all. I really hope I don't need to buy any clothing for the next few month to a year. I should be good, I hope.

    Testing reports here in Upstate NY is better than yours, results are taking a few days, not weeks. But we're seeing more and more reports on how the tests might not be accurate, by a significant percentage. Reports that the CDC and several states are combining the results from the "you have covid NOW" test and the "you had covid at some point in the past" test, which jacks the numbers being quoted all around. Still no tested positive cases in my store, and only 1 tested positive case in the any of the stores in the region (and that was a guy who'd traveled out of state).

    ReplyDelete
  7. " I really hope I don't need to buy any clothing for the next few month to a year. I should be good, I hope."

    Oh Baby.... you should hit that soon. People are still spending because we don't know when we will be able to get something. It's like a whirling dervish of hoarding right now. I have a whole monument of TP! I'm actually really tired of being pushed into shopping because you don't know if you will find that thing again.

    Clothing is in the whirling dervish bullseye. Of course this is California not New York. Your mileage may vary - but I was in buying clothes last weekend because it's been six months - I need stuff at this point. The cashier was like - "Everybody is buying clothes right now, I'm surprised we aren't sold out".

    I'm like - some stores ~are~ sold out. That's why I'm here.

    I've already noticed on Amazon they are saying they don't know when they will stock certain clothes. Like sports bra's. I usually only buy things I don't have to try on through them, but when simple items like that become scarce......

    We ~were~ all really spoiled.

    Trump is just going to beat Biden to death with this China shit. I think I'm pretty moderate, but we can't even take care of ourselves right now. How is that effing possible? The last gloves I bought had a slip of paper inside with Chinese manufacturing info. WTF?

    My city is still fairly stable. Which is amazing because everyone works in Silicon Valley but lives in the burbs. But inland to me is super hot. They have had to call in the feds for help. It feels like all around me is sort of hot, but we have been very mask compliant.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, July 28, 2020 1:42:00 PM

    "Manufacturing is fucked."

    Here's something near and dear to Snarkie: LCD screens.

    But most people don't think about what goes into them, and that's where the commodities markets get interesting.

    Demand for indium is not only relatively flat, but also the price of it is at its lowest point over the past five years, if not an all-time low.

    Commodity and special metals investing isn't like gold, silver, palladium, platinum, and so forth, because metals investors aren't interested in these except as smaller players who have some industrial connections.

    You wouldn't buy indium or cerium oxide unless you really know what you're doing, because it's so easy to lose your shirt that way. It'd be crazier than betting on the Bakken during the Rona Crazy.

    But I was talking about indium ... oh, except that cerium's also used in fuel cells, and so if demand for cerium is also not very high, that means nobody's expecting growth in fuel cell production right now either.

    There's been a slow slide downward ever since a huge peak in cerium oxide prices several years ago. This was not helped by China pulling some shit with the Fanya trading platform and the sudden stop in rare earths trading.

    What does this mean for Snarkie's LCDs and hipster phones and all of that?

    Don't expect a rebound of growth in electronics manufacturing.

    The commodities markets have been signaling for over five years not to expect new demand to rise any time soon, and so the commodities producers have been slowly cranking production only to find that the individual unit pricing keeps sliding gradually.

    Some of that may be predatory production designed to keep China in the supplier's role and everyone else priced out of the market, and that's why we also don't see any demand for restarting what's left of Sons of Gwalia.

    The Rona Crazy might shift priorities for local rare earths production, but the last rare earths production facility in the US was shut down because of enviro-whacko bullshit, meaning don't expect a rebound from US production.

    Copper's interesting right now because it might actually be signaling a restoration of certain types of manufacturing, BTW.

    "The last gloves I bought had a slip of paper inside with Chinese manufacturing info."

    Some of those slips written in Chinese aren't manufacturing info.

    ReplyDelete
  9. So you're telling me a threw away a hostage note and the last chance of someone getting rescued? Awesome. Good talk.

    The rest of the post was interesting. But not surprising I guess. China has areas been trying to hoard the rare earths, so there is def some consolidation ahead. And I do love me some LCD screens. ;) I like shineeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey lights.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, July 28, 2020 10:36:00 PM

    "... a threw away a hostage note and the last chance of someone getting rescued ..."

    Maybe, but often enough, yes.

    I have seen a sign like the one in this article, BTW, but I was guided away from that place by the people I was with. I could only guess why at the time, but then I realized that the last character is similar to one in Japanese (止) that means "stop". Later I thought we'd wandered near a hidden military facility.

    China's not trying to "hoard" rare earths. They've been pushing out the other producers and have succeeded at doing that in the past. China wants the power and economic comfort that comes with being the sole remaining major producer.

    Restarting what's left of Sons of Gwalia alone would put China's rare earths industries in serious pain, and if the US would get past its enviro-wackness, that'd increase the pain. Global politics in the Post-Rona Crazy Times might actually get this restarted.

    Cerium and indium despite being called "rare earths" are not hugely rare, at least not like antimony which gets used up with all of those PET bottles everyone loves.

    Sometimes I wonder if Crazy AOC's talk about everything going wrong in "twelve years" has to do with the countdown to severe shortages of antimony instead of some new millennial-style fear of the future.

    The danger with her is that despite frequently sounding like a fool, she actually has a bit of knowledge: she's one of two politicians in Washington who knows a lot about MMT, for instance.

    The other happens to be Donald Trump.

    ReplyDelete