Warm to hot, clear, should be a nice day. Yesterday was another gorgeous day. Didn’t see the high, but sunny and warm, light breeze.
Went to my hobby meeting. Took youngest to sell some more cookies. Weaponized cuteness is fading as her height increases, but it is balancing with an outgoing and razor sharp personality. Interesting to watch, if a bit terrifying.
Today I intend to sleep in a bit, eat a nice breakfast, and do some outdoor work around the house. I also need to rearrange the stuff in the back of my pickup, and pull a freezer out of storage. My fisherman buddy at the BOL found a buyer for one of the freezers. I’ll have a full load this trip up, especially if I pick up another metal storage cabinet.
I’m hoping to get some yard work done, maybe some small engine repair, maybe wash the Expedition, and whatever else seems doable. It’s ambitious. Going away for a week means front loading some of the week’s work though.
Somewhere in there I should buy some more pipe insulation too.
The list is endless. But tasks do get finished, and work does progress. And sometimes movement is progress. Work your own lists.
Stack it up, and hope the bank failure doesn’t spread or cause some over-reaction… the world feels kinda ‘teeter-y’ at the moment.
nick
How clocks control the sun.
We sprung forward and are slowly getting ready to go to church. It is freaking dark out there at 7am. Congress is a bunch of idiots but that has been true for decades. It is 70 F on the West side of the Brazos River.
My cat walked through the fence and is sitting across the driveway in the dark. I am hoping that the coyotes are in bed. My neighbor caught one on his backyard camera a week or so ago, drinking from his pool.
The cat has left his perilous spot in the open and is now screaming that his bowl is empty. Well, excuse me !
Fed him and the dog. The dog is gulping her chicken and rice down. Real chicken and real rice.
IIRC, the banks were incentivized to loosen standards for loans based on companies’ ESG scores so they hired appropriately.
BofA is hip deep in that cr*p, BTW.
As With WaMu, it isn’t as if the warning signs weren’t there. I know people who willingly rode that trainwreck down, keeping en eye on the limits of FDIC protection, because they were getting insane rates on CDs near the end.
That was back before the days of MF Global, however, which changed the rules of “money market” funds.
Regardless, the Fed will do whatever it takes to keep the “too big to fail” banks from actually failing, even if they have to turn the dollar into toilet paper.
I see that one of the four septic tank sprinklers is broken again. The lawn mower ztr keeps on breaking them off. The gift that keeps on giving.
The sign is a big mud patch that the ztr exposed yesterday. There is no mud patch when the 56 foot diameter sprinklers are working properly.
Lynn, can you put something like a tomato “cage” over each sprinkler, maybe with a blaze orange flag on top?
Will FJB plugsy McSpongeBrain bail out SVB? Unless letting it fail is part of the NWO, I think he will bail out the bank. All he has to do is print more fiat money, correct? He can’t let Pelosi’s winery go bankrupt.
78F and 79%RH with medium overcast today.
There is a bit of a breeze.
Coffee in hand, bacon waffles and bacon in my belly, and a leisurely start to the day….
Quick check of the news, auctions, and email, and I’ll be good to go.
n
FWIW, I’ve been unconsciously avoiding all the disasters in Cali. Don’t really know why, disaster prep is a focus for me and the blog, and we have plenty of readers in Cali. Weird, but it almost seems like Cali is Pakistan, or somewhere far away and foreign. I guess in my mind I’ve written it off as someplace that is “not us”, “not here”.
If anyone has anything they’d like to share from the affected areas, don’t let my unconscious bias hold you back.
n
Weird, how you so succinctly expressed the thoughts in my head I didn’t even known were there..
I have a brother-in-law in the mountains above San Diego, in Julian. And my sister’s kids in the San Diego area, but much lower in elevation.
And yet, since they are “foreigners”, I seldom give them a second thought. They’ve made their choices; they must live with them.
There’s an extended lesson there, I think, if I apply that same rule to myself.
I’ve been to Julian. Bakery there has fantastic apple pies.
A normal, if wet, winter near me.
I did order a used eyepiece (Televue 40mm) from a gentleman in Monterey last week, but his local post office has been closed due to storm issues. He offered to refund the money, I told him not to worry, be safe, and just send it when he can,
Lynn, can you put something like a tomato “cage” over each sprinkler, maybe with a blaze orange flag on top?
We did that at the office septic sprinklers. They still break the sprinklers occasionally. Plus I don’t want to see flags in my back yard all the time.
Like EdH, I live in California, but it is a big state. Not big like Alaska, but big enough. The disasters have not affected our area, but we have had more rain than normal.
We have had one power outage of a few minutes since Edison remodeled our largest substation two or three years ago. That is refreshing, because we used to average ten trips (10 seconds to two minutes) a year. Still have to change some of our older clocks twice a year for DST. In the 50 years we have lived here, we have had only two outages for more than two hours, both due to equipment failure.
Still considering a small PV solar system with full auto battery backup if the grid goes down. It will be an economic loser, but a prep. We should be able to operate normally for extended grid down periods. My biggest problem is how to get enough water if the grid fails.
“Record Bank Run Drained A Quarter, Or $42BN, Of SVB’s Deposits In Hours, Leaving It With Negative $1BN In Cash”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/record-bank-run-drained-quarter-or-42-billion-svbs-deposits-hours-leaving-it-negative-1bn
“… funded by over $173 billion in deposits (of which $151.5 billion are uninsured), has long been viewed as the bank at the heart of the US startup industry due to its singular focus on venture-capital firms. In many ways it echoes the issues we saw at Silvergate, which banked crypto firms almost exclusively.”
“We got the answer just a few moments after that tweet, when the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation reported that shortly after the Bank announced a loss of approximately $1.8 billion from a sale of investments and was conducting a capital raise (which we now know failed), and despite the bank being in sound financial condition prior to March 9, 2023, “investors and depositors reacted by initiating withdrawals of $42 billion in deposits from the Bank on March 9, 2023, causing a run on the Bank.“”
Wow. I’ll bet that SVB has a very high ESG rating. I’ll bet that the FDIC does not give a flying leap about their ESG though.
So, is every national and local bank getting an anal exam right now ? Both by the FDIC and the stock market.
I am guessing that SVB was maxed out at the Federal Reserve so they could not get more cash. So they had to fire sale assets off.
So much for those banking “stress tests” politicians like to squawk about.
It’s politics. The people running the bank have failed before and are big dem donors.
Sun came out, and I’m off to run some errands.
n
“Dilbert March 12, 2023″
“This is the last Dilbert comic available to the general public. Starting tomorrow (March 13, 2023) the Dilbert comic will only be available here at scottadams.locals.com.”
“And it will be spicier.”
https://scottadams.locals.com/upost/3662737/dilbert-march-12-2023
Regarding sprinkler … I assume the ones you have are free-standing?
Why not convert to pop-up sprinklers that are flush to the ground when not running? Water pressure to the sprinkler head causes it to pop up out of the ground, then retreat when water pressure turns off. They make ‘impulse’ types.
When I had property and horses, we would put a car tire around the free-standing irrigation sprinklers.
Hardcore Dilbert.
This seems to be a classic bank run, exacerbated by electronic (computerized?) withdrawals.
I do not think there are many (any?) banks that could withstand a demand of 25% of their holdings in a day.
I do wonder if it was accidental, or deliberate, or something in between (many large depositors getting bad advice from the same source?).
Like JimB power is my big prepping hole.
I need some solar panels – cheap used panels are 25 cents/watt around here – and a mppt controller (probably a good one, victron or the like).
Soon.
Regarding sprinkler … I assume the ones you have are free-standing?
Why not convert to pop-up sprinklers that are flush to the ground when not running? Water pressure to the sprinkler head causes it to pop up out of the ground, then retreat when water pressure turns off. They make ‘impulse’ types.
When I had property and horses, we would put a car tire around the free-standing irrigation sprinklers.
They are pop-up sprinklers. The ztr is just too heavy and causes the sprinklers to break every few years.
How about using flex pipe connectors between supply line and sprinkler? That would allow for movement of the sprinkler head assembly without breaking the water connection.
I’m not sure about flex pipe. I suppose if you come up and make a 90 flex would work. Dunno about flow restriction. Southern Engineering with garden hose might work better. Or go insane and have birdbaths scattered around your yard. Plumb the sprinklers up and plant monkey grass or vinca around the base. Decorative features. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
How about a few patio stones around the heads? 8×16 or 16×16. Yeah, you might have to hit the grass with a weed eater but the whole point is to make it clear to the driver of the ZTR to “don’t drive here”. “Drive OVER here”, sure.
Or a circle of gravel on top of some landscape fabric.
“Flex Riser” – like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/1-2-in-x-18-in-Flex-Riser-37321/100126627
Or a concrete sprinkler ‘donut’: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Oldcastle-7-in-x-7-in-Gray-Concrete-Sprinkler-Guard-70555609/100346941
Big River lets you edit your reviews. I looked a few of mine today. I’m good. I don’t sound extra stupid.
One review was for a shirt. It’s interesting to read the other reviews. One woman bought this shirt for her stepson. Like, what? “Stepson”. That shouldn’t matter. Anyway. To quote her: “10 year old step-son, for reference he is 5’3”, 175lbs, men’s size large/xl shirt, men’s size medium/large bottoms. “
What the hell are you feeding that kid? Stop it! Do you have him enrolled in Sumo training class?
Best as I recall, I weighed maybe 80# when I was 10. Maybe, it’s been a few years now. I was a skinny kid with long legs and I could out run everyone.
Yup, they put an 18 inch riser on each sprinkler. Lawn mowers are tough on sprinklers and ZTRs are heavy with those 30 hp engines and dual drive transmissions. The guy that mows my house can go over 20 mph until he starts bouncing too bad.
Or a circle of gravel on top of some landscape fabric.
No gravel. I had a double pane window in the office building broken two weeks ago from the gravel drive 50+ feet away at the warehouse.
Driving up from the Rio Grande Valley today, we stopped for gas near George West, and the only one of our cards which worked was my Green Amex. BofA Visa, Costco Visa, and two bank debit cards were no-go.
My wife had a Fentanyl briefing from the DEA at a hotel in the convention center complex in McAllen this weekend. Scary stuff.
Another successful Darwin Award candidate:
See here.
You can find other Darwin Award candidates and winners here: https://darwinawards.com/
[Almost as bad as Etsy freezing transactions. I haven’t checked: Is Etsy shut, or are they taking in money that they can’t disburse?]
[see quote below that begins “Not one of these people…”. Smug little turds. Learn to weld. Does this mean a bunch of H1B’s are on planes home next week?]
[How freaking embarrassing is it that this putz was contributing to Fed policy?]
https://www.foxnews.com/media/home-depot-co-founder-torches-woke-silicon-valley-bank-collapse-warns-recession-here-already
As SVB approached $50 Billion in assets in 2015, which would have triggered higher levels of federal scrutiny, Becker started lobbying for bumping those limits to $250 billion, which was done in 2019. Since then he has kept SVB’s assets below $250 billion. Coincidence?
Yellen is SecTreas. Couldn’t find her backside with both hands and a flashlight, if she’d even try without asking FJB’s handler what to do.
Home Depot co-founder torches ‘woke’ Silicon Valley Bank collapse, warns recession may be here already
Banks are more concerned with ‘global warming’ than shareholder returns, Bernie Marcus argued
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2023/03/12/gird-your-loins-im-not-sure-bloodbath-will-be-descriptive-enough-for-silicon-valley-bank-failure-n536385
What you should do, Lynn, is sharpen some rebar and mostly bury a circle of them at an angle pointing away from each sprinkler. If the mower gets too close, well, the operator will have some time to contemplate his mistakes for a while.
Bernie Marcus. Holy hypocrisy, Batman.
Big investors will still lose as will companies and people owed money by the bank. Those depositors with more than $250K will be out some cash, maybe.
This is a strange failure, and a strange response to a failure. Having been the victim of a failure, as an employee, the response this time is much different. I wonder if some chunk of democratic voters and their votes are on the line. Regardless, I smell political motivation and not sound financial motivation.
Domino #2?
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/new-york-state-regulators-close-signature-bank-3028371
>> Domino #2?
Also being examined are First Republic ($15B) and Pacific Western Bank ($1.46B). Signature had ($4.41B).
This info from CNBC, which is right now running a live special report, “America’s Banking Crisis.
Commentary around people moving funds from regional banks to the national (Big 4?) “TBTF” banks.
In Feb 8 speech, head of the FDIC noted banks overall have $620B in unrealized losses on their books due to interest rate hikes.
Thanks FJB and FJP*.
(* Powell)
I have my meager checking account with one of the top 3 TBTF banks. All have ~$2-3T in assets. Not worried.
Full bailout for SVB. No haircuts.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20230312b.htm
You should be.
I have my money in two Credit Unions.
However I’ve withdrawn over 90% to build my shop as I did/do expect the congress to confiscate most savings accounts.
I living off my retirement income.
I am reading / posting this over my Starlink line at the office. Works ok, just not faster than my two merged DSL lines at the office. I merge all three of them for total backup now using my Peplink 30.
What you should do, Lynn, is sharpen some rebar and mostly bury a circle of them at an angle pointing away from each sprinkler. If the mower gets too close, well, the operator will have some time to contemplate his mistakes for a while.
I take it you have never priced a commercial ZTR. They start at $11,000 and rise rapidly. I am fairly sure that my insurance company would refuse to cover that kind of damage to his equipment.
Plus, I want the guy to come back and mow every week. The dude shows up in August and September in his cowboy hat, jeans, and boots to mow my house and the widder woman next door. Now that is real dedication to mow 10 acres (7 or 8 yards) a day in 105 F heat with a ZTR and then weed eat our houses, driveways, and fence lines.
I have my meager checking account with one of the top 3 TBTF banks. All have ~$2-3T in assets. Not worried.
I am concerned. I have low six figures in one of my commercial bank accounts. But Wednesday’s payroll will knock it to bare minimum six figures. I am not sure if commercial accounts are covered for $100K or $250K.
Full bailout for SVB. No haircuts.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20230312b.htm
I figured that the FDIC was gonna blink on that. The bankruptcy judge was going to clawback Peter Thiel’s money (I read a rumor that he moved a Billion $$$ last Wednesday ???).
The stockholders and bondholders of SVB are getting a total haircut though.
For the first time in my life, I’m vulnerable in this.
Because I sold my family farm, deposited the cash, and I’m seeing the financial planner next week. No earlier, because he’s on a scheduled vacation for spring break.
Tomorrow I will be laying off my risk at multiple institutions, for the one or two weeks it will take to get everything invested properly. If I can.
Silicon Valley Bank on Friday paid out annual bonuses to eligible U.S. employees, just hours before the bank was seized by the U.S. government,
Those will be clawed back by the bankruptcy judge. I would not spend that money, especially the officers.
The BOD, Board Of Directors, of the bank are personally liable to the FDIC for its losses on the depositors. They will get an anal exam and some of them might be heading for the Big Spring Texas Federal Prison. No air conditioning but they do have lawn chairs for the ex judges.
If you ever get an offer to be on the board of a bank, look at the books carefully first. Better yet, decline gracefully. The perks are not worth the liability.
When I got a commercial loan from my brother’s bank back in 2011 to buy my office complex, all of the BOD had to sign the loan agreement. I put 40 % down ! One of the ladies came up to me later in church and said that loan made her very nervous as she realized at that point how much her liability was. And my loan was peanuts compared to the 100s of millions of $$$ that they had loaned out.
Here is my Starlink only ping to my main website in Pittsburg from my office outside Richmond, Texas:
C:\dii_16\DII\THRMO>ping winsim.com
Pinging winsim.com [216.92.179.57] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.92.179.57: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.92.179.57: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.92.179.57: bytes=32 time=72ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.92.179.57: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=54
Google is faster of course:
C:\dii_16\DII\THRMO>ping google.com
Pinging google.com [142.250.138.138] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 142.250.138.138: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=57
Reply from 142.250.138.138: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=57
Reply from 142.250.138.138: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=57
Reply from 142.250.138.138: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=57
The Starlink is definitely usable just oversubscribed here in Fort Bend County with a population of 850,000 people.
My commercial grade ZTR was $7,500. It is one of the smaller units, 46″ cut. The smallest is a 42″ cut. That was three years ago. Transmission units need to be serviced every 1,500 hours. In three years I have put 54 engine hours on the mower.
The Starlink is definitely usable just oversubscribed everywhere.
Fixed it for you.
Lynn – from my place in PNW (WA):
Speedtest.net at the same time frame shows download speeds of 100mbs.
My commercial grade ZTR was $7,500. It is one of the smaller units, 46″ cut. The smallest is a 42″ cut. That was three years ago. Transmission units need to be serviced every 1,500 hours. In three years I have put 54 engine hours on the mower.
Huh, all of the commercial ZTRs I have seen around here are 60 inch (three blades). And the landscaper who rents my warehouse is replacing his transmissions usually by 1,000 hours. ZTRs are maintenance queens according to him. He has cracked blocks, etc, due to overheating, etc.
Mine is also a three blade welded steel deck. Mulching attachment installed underneath the deck. The dividing line between commercial and consumer seems to be the deck construction. Welded steel stays in the commercial camp, stamped in the consumer camp.
My engine is 22 HP, V-Twin, air cooled.
Even the 42″ deck had three blades. I could have gotten bigger but the price went up substantially. There was also the issue of fitting the deck in the shed where the mower is stored. The door is only 50″ wide and does not leave a lot of clearance. I back the mower into the shed.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/trump-curse-signature-bank-fails-two-years-after-bank-closed-president-trumps-accounts-over-january-6-riot/
–maybe it’s because doing so shows a willingness to act on personal political beliefs, and not sound money management.
n
Wife is home, pack is back together. Temp has dropped to 66F and humidity is down to 80%RH.
Feels like a storm brewing, but it’s supposed to miss us.
Should be a nice day for the rodeo tomorrow…
n
>> The stockholders and bondholders of SVB are getting a total haircut though.
Bald is beautiful.
Commercial ZTR mowers and Starlink ping times.
Let’s hold the size comparisons there…
@lynn, I just ran ping for winsim, got 29 and 30ms times. google.com got 46 and 48ms. That’s on my att fiber.
n
Really? That’s what you think of your readers? Or is it just that YOU didn’t know so you felt no one else did either…
SMOD inbound…
n
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/trump-curse-signature-bank-fails-two-years-after-bank-closed-president-trumps-accounts-over-january-6-riot/
–maybe it’s because doing so shows a willingness to act on personal political beliefs, and not sound money management.
n
Get woke, go broke.
“Dilbert by Scott Adams has ended its syndicated newspaper run.”
“Dilbert 1989 – 2023”
https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2023/03/12/dilbert-1989-2023/