Blog

  • Wall Street Chaos

    Has anyone been following the short sale chaos happening on Wall Street with GameStop, and AMC theaters? Thanks to Twitter, I have known about all of this craziness since Monday, but it only seems like today that it hit the news. The NYTimes did a little story on it yesterday, but outside of that, no major news media was reporting it.

    If you don’t know what is happening, it sort of breaks down like this; a few hedge funds had decided that GameStop’s stock price was going to fall, and had set up a “short sale” of the stock, which means if the stock price continues to fall, then the hedge funds make huge amounts of money. But, if the GameStop stock price were to go up, then the hedge funds would lose money. Once word got out that this is what these hedge funds were doing, individual investors, normal people who use a Reddit group, started buying GameStop stock, which caused the price to go up, like 200% at one point yesterday, and that caused the hedge funds to lose BILLIONS of dollars. Now, the Reddit people are buying up AMC stock, doing the same thing to the hedge funds today, and looks like the funds will lose billions more today.

    Here is the NYTimes story on it.

    There are lots of interpretations of this story flying around the news and internet right now, from this is a David versus Goliath story, to the free markets at work, to how the stock market doesn’t reflect the real economy, as to why Wall Street needs to be regulated.

    The way I see it; this just proves that economics is not a science, but a man-made machine; a device that can be manipulated to create whatever outcome you want. It’s just the Wizard of Oz. The con is believing that the system is fair, when in reality, you can game it.

    I don’t know how this will end, but it is very interesting to watch.

  • Covid Test Results, And Thinking About Schools

    I got my results yesterday afternoon, and I am negative for Covid. Turns out that I just have a cold. I won’t even get into the fact that I somehow have a cold. How did I get a cold when I am social distanced, wear a mask, and wash my hands all the time? But, whatever.

    With all of this going on, the wife and I started talking about the shit situation we are all in due to Covid. And we are again started talking about sending our kid to school. I agree 100% that remote school is not what is best for the education of children. The kid would be better served in a classroom, with other students and teachers. We are lucky that I can be the dedicated parent to make sure the kid stays on top of her lessons, and also gets an opportunity to explore new subjects. I know that not every family has the luxury that we have.

    Now, I also understand where teachers are coming from. I wouldn’t be comfortable with teaching children without a vaccine, and until I got one, I think I would like to remote teach as well. A teacher’s health is just an important as their students’ wellbeing. There must be some balance.

    I wish the vaccine rollout had been handled better, and I do hope the Biden people do a better job of it. All teachers need to be vaccinated as soon as possible. I also think, and truly hope, that everyone will hold teachers in a higher appreciation, and pay them what they are worth.

    I know we are a long way from being over this disease, but I think we are getting closer to being able to believe that a light in this tunnel may exist.

  • Getting Covid Tested

    A strange thing happened to me late in the morning, yesterday; I felt like I had a cold. I felt fatigued, had a stuffy nose, and there was a scratchy feeling in the back of my throat. I hadn’t felt symptoms like this in over a year, and it really threw me off.

    In the olden days, I would get at least one cold a year, and it usually happened after the kid got sick. The last time I remember feeling sick was around New Year’s 2019/20, and that was from a cold that was going around the office. Since Covid started, and the kid has been out of school, we have adopted a healthy regimen of hand washing, mask wearing, and keeping out distance. What this has produced is an epically long time since anyone has been sick in our home.

    So, as this “cold” feeling kept increasing in me over the course of the day, I was a little dumbfounded how I could be sick, as no one else in our home is. Odds are that it is just a cold, but the reality is that I am the one in the family that runs all of the errands, and as such, if there is a chance that this could be Covid, I should find out as soon as possible, and not endanger anyone else in the neighborhood.

    I had to go get tested.

    Fortunately, there is a City run medical center in our neighborhood, and I headed over for a test. This would be my second time being at this location to get tested. I was pretty surprised that there wasn’t a line; just five of us waiting. Also, having been though before for a test, I was in and out pretty quick. Total time there, maybe fifteen minutes.

    Now, I am in the limbo of waiting for the test result. I actually feel better this morning, but I know if it is Covid, that really doesn’t mean anything. I have to wait, and that does drive me crazy. I can’t run the family errands, and I just have to sit around. I am sure it is nothing, and I am acting out of caution, but I really don’t want to think about if I did get it.

  • Parenting: Organizing Nature/Nurture

    I’m pretty tired from the weekend, and I didn’t sleep well, come to think of it. (To really “come to think of it” I haven’t slept well in three years.) It was too cold to do things outside this weekend, so we were all stuck in the apartment together. We decided to deep clean the apartment, and finish the ongoing project of organizing the kid’s room. We hung more book shelves in her room, since I can’t stop buying her books, and got lots of bins for the kid to put her toys in. This is all in an effort to make her small space more efficient, and to also make it easier for her to clean up her room. As that seems to be a constant battle; cleaning the room!

    On weekends like this, I start thinking about nature/nurture when it comes to the kid. How will this cleaning, and organizing affect her? Will having a room with white bins of different sizes, labeled, cause her to be an organized person? Will she rebel against organization in adolescence? Will this cause her to flourish in analytical endeavors, or crush her creativity?

    My parents were very organized people; Scheduled and regimented. To this day, at 77, my father keeps a schedule for each day, of things to accomplish. I never felt that my folks pushed “order” on me, but I can clearly say that I rebelled against anything that had any order to it in my teens and twenties. I hated patterns, and well, anything scheduled and consistent. Only when I started my professional career in my 30’s, that this inclination to be orderly and organized became an advantage. Now in my 40’s, I can’t stop organizing and scheduling.

    So, as I look at my kid, I wonder how this will play out, or if it ever plays out; does putting things in a box matter?

  • Parking Car Meditation

    Once a week, I sit in our car for about an hour and a half, waiting. Waiting for the street sweeper to go by, and also waiting for the traffic cop to stroll along as well. Most of the time, the sweeper comes through early, and all of us in our cars do a do-si-do, getting out of the way of the sweeper, and thus returning to our spots. Then we sit in our cars for the cop to stroll by and ticket the cars that didn’t move for the sweeper. You would think these two actions would happen in tandem to each other, but actually, they can be an hour between them. Hence, the sitting in the car.

    In this time of waiting, I have adopted the habit of reading the news off my phone, then an article or two from the latest New Yorker. I will end with writing in my journal, all the while listening to music, which to be honest, is now the only time that I have to listen to music.

    I have been doing this for close to a year now. Sometimes the wife takes a turn moving the car, but I would say that I take care of it 75% of the time. And in this time of taking care of the car, I have yet to see the same people each week. You would think since we all live in the same neighborhood, that I would at least see some repeat people.

    In all of this car sitting, I keep coming back to the same question; what do these people do for a living? I mean, we all have to have the ability to take an hour out of our mornings from 8:30am to 10am. For me, I’m unemployed/Stay at home parent, so that’s an easy answer. I am sure some of people are in the same boat as me. But even in normal times, people had jobs. What do they do with their lives?