Farrowing Friday – Disaffected Musings

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.

My wonderful wife and I probably watch too many episodes of The Incredible Dr. Pol on Nat Geo Wild. How else would I know that farrowing describes the birth of pigs?

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The first time I saw the sketch in this video, sadly the link is from a minion of the Evil Empire, I think I laughed harder than I have at any other time. It is still unbelievably funny to me, even after having watched it 5 or 6 times the past two days.

The bit was performed on the British version of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” The American version? Well, for whatever reason I am no fan of Drew Carey and despite the fact that Aisha Tyler is very easy on the eyes she proved to be another clueless entertainer who doesn’t just want to bite the hand that feeds her, she wants to amputate it.

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This CNBC article is about people still using ridiculously easy passwords on the Internet. My understanding is most hacks of company computers are not the result of clever, but criminal, people going to great lengths to crack protection. Instead, every company has people who use passwords that are too simple and are easily guessed.

This CNBC piece is titled, “Inflation? Recession? Starting Black Friday, holiday shoppers are planning to spend.” Here is the first paragraph of the article:

“Americans are not planning major cuts in holiday spending this year, starting with Black Friday, despite inflation fears and the risk of recession being top concerns among the majority of consumers, according to an annual survey conducted by CNBC and SurveyMonkey ahead of the first big shopping weekend of peak season.”

Since 70% of US GDP comes from consumer spending I guess that is good news. It is also an indication of how much economic activity can be the result of self-fulfilling prophecy. If people really think a slowdown will occur soon, then many of them will spend less, further adding fuel to the slowdown fire, which may or may not exist in the first place.

Whether one looks at the 2-year/10-year or 3-month/10-year Treasury yield spreads, both are inverted, meaning the yield on the shorter maturity debt is higher than that of the longer maturity. (At this moment, the 1-year yield is actually the highest for all Treasury-issued debt.) Such inversions are considered to be a strong indicator of a looming recession. Of course, the lag time could be as high as 20 months or as few as 10. I won’t call Economics the “dismal science,” but it is certainly not precise and never will be, in my opinion, no matter how much decision makers rely on machine learning or deep learning. For the nth plus n time, history is replete with examples of the folly of human beings trying to predict the future.

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Here is a more or less random collection of photos. Hope you enjoy.