Month: August 2023

Wrong Way Round

Grammar Nazism

In reading an otherwise-interesting article about the looming collapse in commercial real estate, I hit a speed bump at top speed:

Yes, yes, yes I know that it’s the accepted accountancy practice to put the most recent number at the left of a chart, but it simply supports my thesis that non-grammarians (e.g. cops and accountants) should never be allowed to dictate literacy practices.

To wit:  we go from A to B, from top to bottom, from bad to worse and similar fashion in any number of reading customs and idioms… because in the Western alphabet — in which this article was written — we read from left to right (and not to right from left).  We are not Japanese, or Arabs, or Israelis, who are perfectly free to read diagonally across a page if they so wish, using their chicken-scratch pictograms, hieroglyphs or alphabets, but the language of commerce and industry is English.

Except when it comes to accountants.

So when I read the above chart — and I must remind Readers that reading charts was my métier for well over three decades — I couldn’t see what the fuss was about, until I realized that the fucking thing was written backwards.

I never understood nor cared for this accounting practice, which in non-accounting trend data makes the very next chart in the article perfectly comprehensible:

…simply by virtue of the fact that it follows the accepted timeline format whereby the first data point falls to the left, and the latest data point falls to the right of the trend.

Why accountants have to be different simply beats me.

Once I got past that, the article was extremely interesting:

One major hurdle for CRE (Commercial Real Estate — Kim) space is that “more than 50% of the $2.9 trillion in commercial mortgages will need to be renegotiated in the next 24 months when new lending rates are likely to be up by 350 to 450 basis points,” Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, wrote in a note to clients.  Shalett expects a “peak-to-trough CRE price decline of as much as 40%, worse than in the Great Financial Crisis.”

But, says BoA, we don’t have to worry:

Bank of America analysts expect challenges in the CRE space but noted, “They are manageable and do not represent a systemic risk to the US economy.”

…unless, of course, you’re a small bank, whose CRE investment exposure (from memory, anywhere from 10-15% of total assets) is typically much higher than that of GlobalMegaBankCorp (5% or less).

Fun times we live in, what?  And not helped by stupid grammar.

Meanwhile In Texas

Funny Stuff

Here we go:

A Texas woman was left with brutal injuries after she was viciously attacked by both a snake and a hawk while mowing her lawn. 

Peggy Jones told how she’d been on a tractor mower when the snake fell out of the sky and landed on her at her home in Silsbee.

As it began to tighten around her arm, a hawk then swooped down, and began clawing at a defenseless Jones in an effort to grab its prey.

Beat THAT, Australia.

More Woke Bollocks

Two-Minute Hate

Here’s something that gets up my nose (#2,713):

Listen, fuckwits:  “Türkiye” is what they call their country in their language;  “Turkey” is how we spell and pronounce it, just as we change most place names to make them easier for our wooden Anglo vocal cords to pronounce.

I wouldn’t care, except of course that this isn’t done for every country (Deutschland, Russkiya, España etc.), and all they’re doing here is pandering to the Turko-Muzzies.  If you’re going to do this kind of thing, at least try to be consistent.

Calm Invective

Culture, Writing

Here’s a little oeuvre which deserves airing, despite the appalling grammar:  Indiana Jones And The Last Franchise.

Even though I was not familiar with about 60% of his cultural allusions, the writing was enough to engage me.  After all, you don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that combat is awful, bloody and destructive.  I especially liked this little turn:

And, if you ever haul yourself out of bed and find that you have little to smile about… just look up Disney on Google News. It may not bring you joy, but the schadenfreude will most likely bring a smile to your face. At least a little grin.

That happens early in the piece, and it gets better.  Here’s the pre-climax exposition:

My great-grandfather was a mason. A brick-layer, I mean, not the… well, you know the other type. He was a master of his craft. Back in the 20’s, his skill was in such high-demand that he was paid to travel the world and build structures in places like Shanghai and Glasgow that stand to this day. In an age of cheap, third-world labor, it can be a bit difficult to imagine the artistry, skill, and talent of a good mason. There’s more to it than slopping mortar onto a brick and stacking another on top. You just don’t see a lot of work like what he was doing, these days. Men like him labored to build cities not just for themselves, but their descendants. They spent their lives – some of them gave their lives – so that their descendants would live in a world that they themselves could scarcely imagine. They build us sprawling, glittering skylines of glass and steel and lights. Man-made miracles of engineering and architecture that would be, quite literally, incomprehensible to most humans from before a certain time.

Yet, the cities they built for us, that they left us, are no longer ours. My great-grandfather did most of his work in Pennsylvania and the North-East. He lived in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood his descendants can’t walk through, day or night. His house is still there. I don’t know who lives in it now, if anyone does. I don’t really want to know, either.

All I know is the fruits of his labors, his house, his city — it’s not just that they don’t belong to his descendants, and, arguably, the country he built them for. We can’t even enjoy them. They were wrested out of the hands of the people, and, without consent, broken, smashed, and destroyed by wicked people, who now hand us the smoldering ruins of our predecessors’ lifetime of work, and say with a smile, Here! We made it better! And, if you dare say otherwise, you’re an ungrateful asshole who should be grateful that they’re deigning to give you a damn thing.

Excellent stuff, and well worth the long read.

Sporting Chance

Crime

Looks like the scumbags are upping their game:

The world’s deadliest drug cartels have taken the concept of monster trucks to a terrifying level by retrofitting popular pickups with armour, battering rams, and machine gun turrets.

These heavily armed vehicles are used in pitched gun battles between cartels and the police or rival groups. They are known as “monstruos,” “rinocerontes,” or “narcotanques.” The cartels aim to demonstrate their dominance and intimidate their adversaries.

 And a pic:

Now we all know that is precisely the kind of diet that the venerable .50 BMG cartridge is designed for (seen here next to a .30-06 Springfield, for comparison):

And of course, one wonders if the federales  have a few of these things lying around:

(I know that the Barrett rifles are undoubtedly effective, but man, they look like nothing other than industrial machinery.)

I don’t know how thick that armor plating is;  but I have some of that steel-core Austrian mil-surp Hirtenberg 6.5x55mm lying around, have seen its bullet go clear through both sides of a car — don’t ask — and I’m awfully curious to see how well it would work against one of these narcotanques.

Purely out of intellectual curiosity, of course.

When Panic Costs Money

Eco-Crap, Journalist Scum, Watermelons, Weather

The Greatest Living Englishman has turned his ire towards the BBC, and at climate fearmongers in general:

Amazon Prime star has slammed weather forecasters for spreading what he has described as “green propaganda” in his latest column.

The presenter, 63, went on to explain that due to inaccurate weather reports, he and many other farmers and been forced to “take a massive financial hit” for “absolutely no reason”.

Jeremy recalled how earlier this week, weather presenters had claimed “an apocalyptic storm would arrive in Britain on Tuesday night”.

The Former Top Gear host went on to explain how, due to predictions of weeks of “torrential rain and gales”, he had felt forced to harvest his crops even though they weren’t ready because the moisture content was too high.

“Yes, I’d have to pay £10 a ton to dry the grain after it was harvested but better to take that hit than have the whole lot ruined by the storm,” he wrote in his column for the Sun. 

“We worked tirelessly until 11pm and when I finally crawled into bed, utterly exhausted, I noticed that all of my neighbouring farmers were still out here, doing the same thing.”

Here’s what he was talking about:

But:

The ex-BBC star went on to express his outrage when he had expected to see “Armageddon” the next morning only to be greeted by “blue skies and a gentle breeze”.

“So the farmers had brought in their harvest early and taken a massive financial hit that they can’t afford… for absolutely no reason,” Jeremy fumed.

So he lashed out.

“They feel compelled, when it’s warm, to paint their maps dark red and talk about ‘extreme heat’. And similarly, to keep Greta and the snowflake army happy, they need to say when it’s a bit chilly, that we will all soon be buried under a 20-foot snow drift,” he complained.

“They see their weather forecasts now as political weapons. Baseball bats which can be used to beat the oil companies into submission. And they’ll mangle statistics if that’s what’s necessary.”

He then went on to beg weather forecasters to share “the truth” with farmers and to save their “propaganda forecasts” for people who need to “turn the heating down”.

“They think that the constant wrongness doesn’t matter, because a wonky weather forecast only affects people planning barbecues,” he stated. “But to farmers, it bloody well does matter.”

Frankly, if I were a British farmer, I’d subscribe to an actual meteorogical service and learn to interpret the data for myself.

And refuse to pay the BBC license fee, like millions of other Brits are doing.