@PokerStarsLIVE: RT @PokerStarsBlog: It's the law in Canada: win two Platinum Passes, go on national TV to talk about poker.* The good folks at @morningshowca helped @Amazonjb fulfill her obligation this morning. https://t.co/SLaHxZSmXw * - may not be an actual Canadian law https://t.co/EKmgXo2Fji
Playboy going public: Porn, Gambling, and Cannabis
NEW INFO 5 Results from share redemption are posted. Less than .2% redeemed. Very bullish as investors are showing extreme confidence in the future of PLBY. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/playboy-mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-120000721.html NEW INFO 4 Definitive Agreement to purchase 100% of Lovers brand stores announced 2/1. https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Playboy+%28MCAC%29+Confirms+Deal+to+Acquire+Lovers/17892359.html NEW INFO 3 I bought more on the dip today. 5081 total. Price rose AH to $12.38 (2.15%) NEW INFO 2 Here is the full webinar. https://icrinc.zoom.us/rec/play/9GWKdmOYumjWfZuufW3QXpe_FW_g--qeNbg6PnTjTMbnNTgLmCbWjeRFpQga1iPc-elpGap8dnDv8Zww.yD7DjUwuPmapeEdP?continueMode=true&tk=lEYc4F_FkKlgsmCIs6w0gtGHT2kbgVGbUju3cIRBSjk.DQIAAAAV8NK49xZWdldRM2xNSFNQcTBmcE00UzM3bXh3AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA&uuid=WN_GKWqbHkeSyuWetJmLFkj4g&_x_zm_rtaid=kR45-uuqRE-L65AxLjpbQw.1611967079119.2c054e3d3f8d8e63339273d9175939ed&_x_zm_rhtaid=866 NEW INFO 1 Live merger webinar with PLBY and MCAC on Friday January 29, 2021 at 12:00 NOON EST link below https://mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/press-release-details/2021/Playboy-Enterprises-Inc.-and-Mountain-Crest-Acquisition-Corp-Participate-in-SPACInsider-ICR-Webinar-on-January-29th-at-12pm-ET/default.aspx Playboy going public: Porn, Gambling, and Cannabis !!!WARNING READING AHEAD!!! TL;DR at the end. It will take some time to sort through all the links and read/watch everything, but you should. In the next couple weeks, Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp is taking Playboy public. The existing ticker MCAC will become PLBY. Special purpose acquisition companies have taken private companies public in recent months with great success. I believe this will be no exception. Notably, Playboy is profitable and has skyrocketing revenue going into a transformational growth phase. Porn - First and foremost, let's talk about porn. I know what you guys are thinking. “Porno mags are dead. Why would I want to invest in something like that? I can get porn for free online.” Guess what? You are absolutely right. And that’s exactly why Playboy doesn’t do that anymore. That’s right, they eliminated their print division. And yet they somehow STILL make money from porn that people (see: boomers) pay for on their website through PlayboyTV, Playboy Plus, and iPlayboy. Here’s the thing: Playboy has international, multi-generational name recognition from porn. They have content available in 180 countries. It will be the only publicly traded adult entertainment (porn) company. But that is not where this company is going. It will help support them along the way. You can see every Playboy magazine through iPlayboy if you’re interested. NSFW links below: https://www.playboy.com/ https://www.playboytv.com/ https://www.playboyplus.com/ https://www.iplayboy.com/ Gambling - Some of you might recognize the Playboy brand from gambling trips to places like Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Cancun, London or Macau. They’ve been in the gambling biz for decades through their casinos, clubs, and licensed gaming products. They see the writing on the wall. COVID is accelerating the transition to digital, application based GAMBLING. That’s right. What we are doing on Robinhood with risky options is gambling, and the only reason regulators might give a shit anymore is because we are making too much money. There may be some restrictions put in place, but gambling from your phone on your couch is not going anywhere. More and more states are allowing things like Draftkings, poker, state ‘lottery” apps, hell - even political betting. Michigan and Virginia just ok’d gambling apps. They won’t be the last. This is all from your couch and any 18 year old with a cracked iphone can access it. Wouldn’t it be cool if Playboy was going to do something like that? They’re already working on it. As per CEO Ben Kohn who we will get to later, “...the company’s casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth.” Honestly, I stopped researching Scientific Games' sports betting segment when I saw the word ‘omni-channel’. That told me all I needed to know about it’s success. “Our SG Sports™ platform is an enhanced, omni-channel solution for online, self-service and retail fixed odds sports betting – from soccer to tennis, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, motor sports, racing and more.” https://www.scientificgames.com/ https://www.microgaming.co.uk/ “This latter segment has become increasingly enticing for Playboy, and it said last week that it is considering new tie-ups that could include gaming operators like PointsBet and 888Holdings.” https://calvinayre.com/2020/10/05/business/playboys-gaming-ops-could-get-a-boost-from-spac-purchase/ As per their SEC filing: “Significant consumer engagement and spend with Playboy-branded gaming properties around the world, including with leading partners such as Microgaming, Scientific Games, and Caesar’s Entertainment, steers our investment in digital gaming, sports betting and other digital offerings to further support our commercial strategy to expand consumer spend with minimal marginal cost, and gain consumer data to inform go-to-market plans across categories.” https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tMDAA1 They are expanding into more areas of gaming/gambling, working with international players in the digital gaming/gambling arena, and a Playboy sportsbook is on the horizon. https://www.playboy.com/read/the-pleasure-of-playing-with-yourself-mobile-gaming-in-the-covid-era Cannabis - If you’ve ever read through a Playboy magazine, you know they’ve had a positive relationship with cannabis for many years. As of September 2020, Playboy has made a major shift into the cannabis space. Too good to be true you say? Check their website. Playboy currently sells a range of CBD products. This is a good sign. Federal hemp products, which these most likely are, can be mailed across state lines and most importantly for a company like Playboy, can operate through a traditional banking institution. CBD products are usually the first step towards the cannabis space for large companies. Playboy didn’t make these products themselves meaning they are working with a processor in the cannabis industry. Another good sign for future expansion. What else do they have for sale? Pipes, grinders, ashtrays, rolling trays, joint holders. Hmm. Ok. So it looks like they want to sell some shit. They probably don’t have an active interest in cannabis right? Think again: https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/09/24/playboy-gets-serious-about-cannabis-law-reform-advocacy-with-new-partnership-grants/?sh=62f044a65cea “Taking yet another step into the cannabis space, Playboy will be announcing later on Thursday (September, 2020) that it is launching a cannabis law reform and advocacy campaign in partnership with National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Last Prisoner Project, Marijuana Policy Project, the Veterans Cannabis Project, and the Eaze Momentum Program.” “According to information procured exclusively, the three-pronged campaign will focus on calling for federal legalization. The program also includes the creation of a mentorship plan, through which the Playboy Foundation will support entrepreneurs from groups that are underrepresented in the industry.” Remember that CEO Kohn from earlier? He wrote this recently: https://medium.com/naked-open-letters-from-playboy/congress-must-pass-the-more-act-c867c35239ae Seems like he really wants weed to be legal? Hmm wonder why? The writing's on the wall my friends. Playboy wants into the cannabis industry, they are making steps towards this end, and we have favorable conditions for legislative progress. Don’t think branding your own cannabis line is profitable or worthwhile? Tell me why these 41 celebrity millionaires and billionaires are dummies. I’ll wait. https://www.celebstoner.com/news/celebstoner-news/2019/07/12/top-celebrity-cannabis-brands/ Confirmation: I hear you. “This all seems pretty speculative. It would be wildly profitable if they pull this shift off. But how do we really know?” Watch this whole video: https://finance.yahoo.com/video/playboy-ceo-telling-story-female-154907068.html Man - this interview just gets my juices flowing. And highlights one of my favorite reasons for this play. They have so many different business avenues from which a catalyst could appear. I think paying attention, holding shares, and options on these staggered announcements over the next year is the way I am going to go about it. "There's definitely been a shift to direct-to-consumer," he (Kohn) said. "About 50 percent of our revenue today is direct-to-consumer, and that will continue to grow going forward.” “Kohn touted Playboy's portfolio of both digital and consumer products, with casino-style gaming, in particular, serving a crucial role under the company's new business model. Playboy also has its sights on the emerging cannabis market, from CBD products to marijuana products geared toward sexual health and pleasure.” "If THC does become legal in the United States, we have developed certain strains to enhance your sex life that we will launch," Kohn said. https://cheddar.com/media/playboy-goes-public-health-gaming-lifestyle-focus Oh? The CEO actually said it? Ok then. “We have developed certain strains…” They’re already working with growers on strains and genetics? Ok. There are several legal cannabis markets for those products right now, international and stateside. I expect Playboy licensed hemp and THC pre-rolls by EOY. Something like this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/842996758/10-playboy-pre-roll-tubes-limited?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=pre+roll+playboy&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&organic_search_click=1 Maintaining cannabis operations can be costly and a regulatory headache. Playboy’s licensing strategy allows them to pick successful, established partners and sidestep traditional barriers to entry. You know what I like about these new markets? They’re expanding. Worldwide. And they are going to be a bigger deal than they already are with or without Playboy. Who thinks weed and gambling are going away? Too many people like that stuff. These are easy markets. And Playboy is early enough to carve out their spot in each. Fuck it, read this too: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimosman/2020/10/20/playboy-could-be-the-king-of-spacs-here-are-three-picks/?sh=2e13dcaa3e05 Numbers: You want numbers? I got numbers. As per the company’s most recent SEC filing: “For the year ended December 31, 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s historical consolidated revenue was $78.1 million and $101.3 million, respectively, historical consolidated net income (loss) was $(23.6) million and $(4.8) million, respectively, and Adjusted EBITDA was $13.1 million and $21.8 million, respectively.” “In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Licensing segment contributed $44.2 million in revenue and $31.1 million in net income.” “In the ninth months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Direct-to-Consumer segment contributed $40.2 million in revenue and net income of $0.1 million.” “In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Digital Subscriptions and Content segment contributed $15.4 million in revenue and net income of $7.4 million.” They are profitable across all three of their current business segments. “Playboy’s return to the public markets presents a transformed, streamlined and high-growth business. The Company has over $400 million in cash flows contracted through 2029, sexual wellness products available for sale online and in over 10,000 major retail stores in the US, and a growing variety of clothing and branded lifestyle and digital gaming products.” https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF Growth: Playboy has massive growth in China and massive growth potential in India. “In China, where Playboy has spent more than 25 years building its business, our licensees have an enormous footprint of nearly 2,500 brick and mortar stores and 1,000 ecommerce stores selling high quality, Playboy-branded men’s casual wear, shoes/footwear, sleepwear, swimwear, formal suits, leather & non-leather goods, sweaters, active wear, and accessories. We have achieved significant growth in China licensing revenues over the past several years in partnership with strong licensees and high-quality manufacturers, and we are planning for increased growth through updates to our men’s fashion lines and expansion into adjacent categories in men’s skincare and grooming, sexual wellness, and women’s fashion, a category where recent launches have been well received.” The men’s market in China is about the same size as the entire population of the United States and European Union combined. Playboy is a leading brand in this market. They are expanding into the women’s market too. Did you know CBD toothpaste is huge in China? China loves CBD products and has hemp fields that dwarf those in the US. If Playboy expands their CBD line China it will be huge. Did you know the gambling money in Macau absolutely puts Las Vegas to shame? Technically, it's illegal on the mainland, but in reality, there is a lot of gambling going on in China. https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/10/19/magic-johnson-and-uncle-buds-cbd-brand-enter-china-via-tmall-partnership/?sh=271776ca411e “In India, Playboy today has a presence through select apparel licensees and hospitality establishments. Consumer research suggests significant growth opportunities in the territory with Playboy’s brand and categories of focus.” “Playboy Enterprises has announced the expansion of its global consumer products business into India as part of a partnership with Jay Jay Iconic Brands, a leading fashion and lifestyle Company in India.” “The Indian market today is dominated by consumers under the age of 35, who represent more than 65 percent of the country’s total population and are driving India’s significant online shopping growth. The Playboy brand’s core values of playfulness and exploration resonate strongly with the expressed desires of today’s younger millennial consumers. For us, Playboy was the perfect fit.” “The Playboy international portfolio has been flourishing for more than 25 years in several South Asian markets such as China and Japan. In particular, it has strategically targeted the millennial and gen-Z audiences across categories such as apparel, footwear, home textiles, eyewear and watches.” https://www.licenseglobal.com/industry-news/playboy-expands-global-footprint-india It looks like they gave COVID the heisman in terms of net damage sustained: “Although Playboy has not suffered any material adverse consequences to date from the COVID-19 pandemic, the business has been impacted both negatively and positively. The remote working and stay-at-home orders resulted in the closure of the London Playboy Club and retail stores of Playboy’s licensees, decreasing licensing revenues in the second quarter, as well as causing supply chain disruption and less efficient product development thereby slowing the launch of new products. However, these negative impacts were offset by an increase in Yandy’s direct-to-consumer sales, which have benefited in part from overall increases in online retail sales so far during the pandemic.” Looks like the positives are long term (Yandy acquisition) and the negatives are temporary (stay-at-home orders). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921006093/tm213766-1_defa14a.htm This speaks to their ability to maintain a financially solvent company throughout the transition phase to the aforementioned areas. They’d say some fancy shit like “expanded business model to encompass four key revenue streams: Sexual Wellness, Style & Apparel, Gaming & Lifestyle, and Beauty & Grooming.” I hear “we’re just biding our time with these trinkets until those dollar dollar bill y’all markets are fully up and running.” But the truth is these existing revenue streams are profitable, scalable, and rapidly expanding Playboy’s e-commerce segment around the world. "Even in the face of COVID this year, we've been able to grow EBITDA over 100 percent and revenue over 68 percent, and I expect that to accelerate going into 2021," he said. “Playboy is accelerating its growth in company-owned and branded consumer products in attractive and expanding markets in which it has a proven history of brand affinity and consumer spend.” Also in the SEC filing, the Time Frame: “As we detailed in the definitive proxy statement, the SPAC stockholder meeting to vote on the transaction has been set for February 9th, and, subject to stockholder approval and satisfaction of the other closing conditions, we expect to complete the merger and begin trading on NASDAQ under ticker PLBY shortly thereafter,” concluded Kohn. The Players: Suhail “The Whale” Rizvi (HMFIC), Ben “The Bridge” Kohn (CEO), “lil” Suying Liu & “Big” Dong Liu (Young-gun China gang). I encourage you to look these folks up. The real OG here is Suhail Rizvi. He’s from India originally and Chairman of the Board for the new PLBY company. He was an early investor in Twitter, Square, Facebook and others. His firm, Rizvi Traverse, currently invests in Instacart, Pinterest, Snapchat, Playboy, and SpaceX. Maybe you’ve heard of them. “Rizvi, who owns a sprawling three-home compound in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a 1.65-acre estate in Palm Beach, Florida, near Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, moved to Iowa Falls when he was five. His father was a professor of psychology at Iowa. Along with his older brother Ashraf, a hedge fund manager, Rizvi graduated from Wharton business school.” “Suhail Rizvi: the 47-year-old 'unsocial' social media baron: When Twitter goes public in the coming weeks (2013), one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his photos from the internet. In IPO, Twitter seeks to be 'anti-FB'” “Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia looks like a big Twitter winner. So do the moneyed clients of Jamie Dimon. But as you’ve-got-to-be-joking wealth washed over Twitter on Thursday — a company that didn’t exist eight years ago was worth $31.7 billion after its first day on the stock market — the non-boldface name of the moment is Suhail R. Rizvi. Mr. Rizvi, 47, runs a private investment company that is the largest outside investor in Twitter with a 15.6 percent stake worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday (November, 2013). Using a web of connections in the tech industry and in finance, as well as a hearty dose of good timing, he brought many prominent names in at the ground floor, including the Saudi prince and some of JPMorgan’s wealthiest clients.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/technology/at-twitter-working-behind-the-scenes-toward-a-billion-dollar-payday.html Y’all like that Arab money? How about a dude that can call up Saudi Princes and convince them to spend? Funniest shit about I read about him: “Rizvi was able to buy only $100 million in Facebook shortly before its IPO, thus limiting his returns, according to people with knowledge of the matter.” Poor guy :( He should be fine with the 16 million PLBY shares he's going to have though :) Shuhail also has experience in the entertainment industry. He’s invested in companies like SESAC, ICM, and Summit Entertainment. He’s got Hollywood connections to blast this stuff post-merger. And he’s at least partially responsible for that whole Twilight thing. I’m team Edward btw. I really like what Suhail has done so far. He’s lurked in the shadows while Kohn is consolidating the company, trimming the fat, making Playboy profitable, and aiming the ship at modern growing markets. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-ipo-rizvi-insight/insight-little-known-hollywood-investor-poised-to-score-with-twitter-ipo-idUSBRE9920VW20131003 Ben “The Bridge” Kohn is an interesting guy. He’s the connection between Rizvi Traverse and Playboy. He’s both CEO of Playboy and was previously Managing Partner at Rizvi Traverse. Ben seems to be the voice of the Playboy-Rizvi partnership, which makes sense with Suhail’s privacy concerns. Kohn said this: “Today is a very big day for all of us at Playboy and for all our partners globally. I stepped into the CEO role at Playboy in 2017 because I saw the biggest opportunity of my career. Playboy is a brand and platform that could not be replicated today. It has massive global reach, with more than $3B of global consumer spend and products sold in over 180 countries. Our mission – to create a culture where all people can pursue pleasure – is rooted in our 67-year history and creates a clear focus for our business and role we play in people’s lives, providing them with the products, services and experiences that create a lifestyle of pleasure. We are taking this step into the public markets because the committed capital will enable us to accelerate our product development and go-to-market strategies and to more rapidly build our direct to consumer capabilities,” said Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy. “Playboy today is a highly profitable commerce business with a total addressable market projected in the trillions of dollars,” Mr. Kohn continued, “We are actively selling into the Sexual Wellness consumer category, projected to be approximately $400 billion in size by 2024, where our recently launched intimacy products have rolled out to more than 10,000 stores at major US retailers in the United States. Combined with our owned & operated ecommerce Sexual Wellness initiatives, the category will contribute more than 40% of our revenue this year. In our Apparel and Beauty categories, our collaborations with high-end fashion brands including Missguided and PacSun are projected to achieve over $50M in retail sales across the US and UK this year, our leading men’s apparel lines in China expanded to nearly 2500 brick and mortar stores and almost 1000 digital stores, and our new men’s and women’s fragrance line recently launched in Europe. In Gaming, our casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth. Our product strategy is informed by years of consumer data as we actively expand from a purely licensing model into owning and operating key high-growth product lines focused on driving profitability and consumer lifetime value. We are thrilled about the future of Playboy. Our foundation has been set to drive further growth and margin, and with the committed capital from this transaction and our more than $180M in NOLs, we will take advantage of the opportunity in front of us, building to our goal of $100M of adjusted EBITDA in 2025.” https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company Also, according to their Form 4s, “Big” Dong Liu and “lil” Suying Liu just loaded up with shares last week. These guys are brothers and seem like the Chinese market connection. They are only 32 & 35 years old. I don’t even know what that means, but it's provocative. https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1832415.htm https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-ii-002600994.html Y’all like that China money? “Mr. Liu has been the Chief Financial Officer of Dongguan Zhishang Photoelectric Technology Co., Ltd., a regional designer, manufacturer and distributor of LED lights serving commercial customers throughout Southern China since November 2016, at which time he led a syndicate of investments into the firm. Mr. Liu has since overseen the financials of Dongguan Zhishang as well as provided strategic guidance to its board of directors, advising on operational efficiency and cash flow performance. From March 2010 to October 2016, Mr. Liu was the Head of Finance at Feidiao Electrical Group Co., Ltd., a leading Chinese manufacturer of electrical outlets headquartered in Shanghai and with businesses in the greater China region as well as Europe.” Dr. Suying Liu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp., commented, “Playboy is a unique and compelling investment opportunity, with one of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, its proven consumer affinity and spend, and its enormous future growth potential in its four product segments and new and existing geographic regions. I am thrilled to be partnering with Ben and his exceptional team to bring his vision to fruition.” https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company These guys are good. They have a proven track record of success across multiple industries. Connections and money run deep with all of these guys. I don’t think they’re in the game to lose. I was going to write a couple more paragraphs about why you should have a look at this but really the best thing you can do is read this SEC filing from a couple days ago. It explains the situation in far better detail. Specifically, look to page 137 and read through their strategy. Also, look at their ownership percentages and compensation plans including the stock options and their prices. The financials look great, revenue is up 90% Q3, and it looks like a bright future. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF I’m hesitant to attach this because his position seems short term, but I’m going to with a warning because he does hit on some good points (two are below his link) and he’s got a sizable position in this thing (500k+ on margin, I think). I don’t know this guy but he did look at the same publicly available info and make roughly the same prediction, albeit without the in depth gambling or cannabis mention. You can also search reddit for ‘MCAC’ and very few relevant results come up and none of them even come close to really looking at this thing. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gOvAd6lebs452hFlWWbxVjQ3VMsjGBkbJeXRwDwIJfM/edit?usp=sharing “Also, before you people start making claims that Playboy is a “boomer” company, STOP RIGHT THERE. This is not a good argument. Simply put. The only thing that matters is Playboy’s name recognition, not their archaic business model which doesn’t even exist anymore as they have completely repurposed their business.” “Imagine not buying $MCAC at a 400M valuation lol. Streetwear department is worth 1B alone imo.” Considering the ridiculous Chinese growth as a lifestyle brand, he’s not wrong. Current Cultural Significance and Meme Value: A year ago I wouldn’t have included this section but the events from the last several weeks (even going back to tsla) have proven that a company’s ability to meme and/or gain social network popularity can have an effect. Tik-tok, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. They all have Playboy stuff on them. Kids in middle and highschool know what Playboy is but will likely never see or touch one of the magazines in person. They’ll have a Playboy hoodie though. Crazy huh? A lot like GME, PLBY would hugely benefit from meme-value stock interest to drive engagement towards their new business model while also building strategic coffers. This interest may not directly and/or significantly move the stock price but can generate significant interest from larger players who will. Bull Case: The year is 2025. Playboy is now the world leader pleasure brand. They began by offering Playboy licensed gaming products, including gambling products, direct to consumers through existing names. By 2022, demand has skyrocketed and Playboy has designed and released their own gambling platforms. In 2025, they are also a leading cannabis brand in the United States and Canada with proprietary strains and products geared towards sexual wellness. Cannabis was legalized in the US in 2023 when President Biden got glaucoma but had success with cannabis treatment. He personally pushes for cannabis legalization as he steps out of office after his first term. Playboy has also grown their brand in China and India to multi-billion per year markets. The stock goes up from 11ish to 100ish and everyone makes big gains buying somewhere along the way. Bear Case: The United States does a complete 180 on marijuana and gambling. President Biden overdoses on marijuana in the Lincoln bedroom when his FDs go tits up and he loses a ton of money in his sports book app after the Fighting Blue Hens narrowly lose the National Championship to Bama. Playboy is unable to expand their cannabis and gambling brands but still does well with their worldwide lifestyle brand. They gain and lose some interest in China and India but the markets are too large to ignore them completely. The stock goes up from 11ish to 13ish and everyone makes 15-20% gains. TL;DR: Successful technology/e-commerce investment firm took over Playboy to turn it into a porn, online gambling/gaming, sports book, cannabis company, worldwide lifestyle brand that promotes sexual wellness, vetern access, women-ownership, minority-ownership, and “pleasure for all”. Does a successful online team reinventing an antiquated physical copy giant sound familiar? No options yet, shares only for now. $11.38 per share at time of writing. My guess? $20 by the end of February. $50 by EOY. This is not financial advice. I am not qualified to give financial advice. I’m just sayin’ I would personally use a Playboy sports book app while smoking a Playboy strain specific joint and it would be cool if they did that. Do your own research. You’d probably want to start here: WARNING - POTENTIALLY NSFW - SEXY MODELS AHEAD - no actual nudity though https://s26.q4cdn.com/895475556/files/doc_presentations/Playboy-Craig-Hallum-Conference-Investor-Presentation-11_17_20-compressed.pdf Or here: https://www.mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/default.aspx Jimmy Chill: “Get into any SPAC at $10 or $11 and you are going to make money.” STL;DR: Buy MCAC. MCAC > PLBY couple weeks. Rocketship. Moon. Position: 5000 shares. I will buy short, medium, and long-dated calls once available.
Books that promote and can improve critical thinking
A comprehensive list of books that might be of interest to people that want to read something that would improve their thinking or some friends? I have not read many of these, thus I can not personally vouch for all of them or recommend one over the other. I'm not affiliated with Goodreads, but linked to them since I wanted to include the ratings and they have links to several different sources including libraries if you want to borrow or acquire any one of these, and often some quality reviews. I posted this list in /books, but could not crosspost to here, so I post it here. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer 3.93 · Rating details · 6,985 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9754534-the-believing-brain The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths. Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality. Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life by Richard Paul, Linda Elder 3.93 · Rating details · 1,082 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17296839-critical-thinking Critical Thinking is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of your life: in your career, and as a consumer, citizen, friend, parent, and lover. Discover the core skills of effective thinking; then analyze your own thought processes, identify weaknesses, and overcome them. Learn how to translate more effective thinking into better decisions, less frustration, more wealth Ñ and above all, greater confidence to pursue and achieve your most important goals in life. The Thinker's Guide to Analytic Thinking by Linda Elder,Richard Paul 3.89 · Rating details · 163 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19227921-the-thinker-s-guide-to-analytic-thinking This guide focuses on the intellectual skills that enable one to analyze anything one might think about - questions, problems, disciplines, subjects, etc. It provides the common denominator between all forms of analysis. It is based on the assumption that all reasoning can be taken apart and analyzed for quality. This guide introduces the elements of reasoning as implicit in all reasoning. It begins with this idea - that whenever we think, we think for a purpose, within a point of view, based on assumptions, leading to implications and consequences. We use data, facts and experiences (information), to make inferences and judgments,based on concepts and theories to answer a question or solve a problem. Thus the elements of thought are: purpose, questions, information, inferences, assumptions, concepts, implications and point of view. In this guide, authors Linda Elder and Richard Paul explain, exemplify and contextualize these elements or structures of thought, showing the importance of analyzing reasoning in every part of human life. This guide can be used as a supplement to any text or course at the college level; and it may be used for improving thinking in personal and professional life. The Thinker's Guide to Intellectual Standards by Linda Elder, Richard Paul 4.19 · Rating details · 16 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19017637-the-thinker-s-guide-to-intellectual-standards Humans routinely assess thinking – their own thinking, and that of others, and yet they don’t necessarily use standards for thought that are reasonable, rational, sound. To think well, people need to routinely meet intellectual standards, standards of clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, depth, logic, fairness, significance, and so forth. In this guide authors Elder and Paul offer a brief analysis of some of the most important intellectual standards in the English language. They look at the opposites of these standards. They argue for their contextualization within subjects and disciplines. And, they call attention to the forces that undermine their skilled use in thinking well. At present intellectual standards tend to be either taught implicitly, or ignored in instruction. Yet because they are essential to high quality reasoning in every part of human life, they should be explicitly taught and explicitly understood. The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide by Gleb Tsipursky (Goodreads Author) 4.24 · Rating details · 63 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36800752-the-truth-seeker-s-handbook How do you know whether something is true? How do you convince others to believe the facts? Research shows that the human mind is prone to making thinking errors - predictable mistakes that cause us to believe comfortable lies over inconvenient truths. These errors leave us vulnerable to making decisions based on false beliefs, leading to disastrous consequences for our personal lives, relationships, careers, civic and political engagement, and for our society as a whole. Fortunately, cognitive and behavioral scientists have uncovered many useful strategies for overcoming our mental flaws. This book presents a variety of research-based tools for ensuring that our beliefs are aligned with reality. With examples from daily life and an engaging style, the book will provide you with the skills to avoid thinking errors and help others to do so, preventing disasters and facilitating success for yourself, those you care about, and our society. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert A. Burton 3.90 · Rating details · 2,165 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2740964-on-being-certain You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know. Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain, will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris,Daniel Simons 3.91 · Rating details · 13,537 ratings · 704 reviews https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7783191-the-invisible-gorilla Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot. Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement. The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time. Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking by M. Neil Browne, Stuart M. Keeley 3.94 · Rating details · 1,290 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394398.Asking_the_Right_Questions The habits and attitudes associated with critical thinking are transferable to consumer, medical, legal, and general ethical choices. When our surgeon says surgery is needed, it can be life sustaining to seek answers to the critical questions encouraged in Asking the Right Questions This popular book helps bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysing the things we are told and read. It gives strategies for responding to alternative points of view and will help readers develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject. On Truth by Simon Blackburn 3.60 · Rating details · 62 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36722220-on-truth Truth is not just a recent topic of contention. Arguments about it have gone on for centuries. Why is the truth important? Who decides what the truth is? Is there such a thing as objective, eternal truth, or is truth simply a matter of perspective, of linguistic or cultural vantage point? In this concise book Simon Blackburn provides an accessible explanation of what truth is and how we might think about it. The first half of the book details several main approaches to how we should think about, and decide, what is true. These are philosophical theories of truth such as the correspondence theory, the coherence theory, deflationism, and others. He then examines how those approaches relate to truth in several contentious domains: art, ethics, reasoning, religion, and the interpretation of texts. Blackburn's overall message is that truth is often best thought of not as a product or an end point that is 'finally' achieved, but--as the American pragmatist thinkers thought of it--as an ongoing process of inquiry. The result is an accessible and tour through some of the deepest and thorniest questions philosophy has ever tackled Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman 4.16 · Rating details · 317,352 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZNhf1bAIxd&rank=1 In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking. Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do by John A. Bargh (Goodreads Author) 3.97 · Rating details · 788 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35011639-before-you-know-it Dr. John Bargh, the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind, presents a “brilliant and convincing book” (Malcolm Gladwell) cited as an outstanding read of 2017 by Business Insider and The Financial Times—giving us an entirely new understanding of the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior. For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has conducted revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research featured in bestsellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said was “the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past twenty years,” Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways. Dr. Bargh takes us into his labs at New York University and Yale—where he and his colleagues have discovered how the unconscious guides our behavior, goals, and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. With infectious enthusiasm he reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Because the unconscious works in ways we are completely unaware of, Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as useful tricks to help you remember items on your to-do list, to shop smarter, and to sleep better. Before You Know It is “a fascinating compendium of landmark social-psychology research” (Publishers Weekly) and an introduction to a fabulous world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to knowing yourself and unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38315.Fooled_by_Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 4.07 · Rating details · 49,010 ratings Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. Philosophy books Epistemology by Richard Feldman 3.84 · Rating details · 182 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/387295.Epistemology Sophisticated yet accessible and easy to read, this introduction to contemporary philosophical questions about knowledge and rationality goes beyond the usual bland survey of the major current views to show that there is argument involved. Throughout, the author provides a fair and balanced blending of the standard positions on epistemology with his own carefully reasoned positions or stances into the analysis of each concept. KEY TOPICS: Epistemological Questions. The Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Modifying the Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Evidentialist Theories of Justification. Non-evidentialist Theories of Knowledge and Justification. Skepticism. Epistemology and Science. Relativism. Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology by Michael J. Williams 3.79 · Rating details · 86 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477904.Problems_of_Knowledge "What is epistemology or 'the theory of knowledge'? Why does it matter? What makes theorizing about knowledge 'philosophical'? And why do some philosophers argue that epistemology - perhaps even philosophy itself - is dead?" " In this introduction, Michael Williams answers these questions, showing how epistemological theorizing is sensitive to a range of questions about the nature, limits, methods, and value of knowing. He pays special attention to the challenge of philosophical scepticism: does our 'knowledge' rest on brute assumptions? Does the rational outlook undermine itself?" Williams explains and criticizes all the main contemporary philosophical perspectives on human knowledge, such as foundationalism, the coherence theory, and 'naturalistic' theories. As an alternative to all of them, he defends his distinctive contextualist approach. As well as providing an accessible introduction for any reader approaching the subject for the first time, this book incorporates Williams's own ideas which will be of interest to all philosophers concerned with the theory of knowledge. Philosophy: The Basics by Nigel Warburton 3.84 · Rating details · 1,928 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31854.Philosophy Now in its fourth edition, Nigel Warburton's best-selling book gently eases the reader into the world of philosophy. Each chapter considers a key area of philosophy, explaining and exploring the basic ideas and themes. What is philosophy? Can you prove God exists? Is there an afterlife? How do we know right from wrong? Should you ever break the law? Is the world really the way you think it is? How should we define Freedom of Speech? Do you know how science works? Is your mind different from your body? Can you define art? For the fourth edition, Warburton has added new sections to several chapters, revised others and brought the further reading sections up to date. If you've ever asked what is philosophy, or whether the world is really the way you think it is, then this is the book for you. The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14829260-the-oxford-handbook-of-thinking-and-reasoning by Keith J. Holyoak (Editor), Robert G. Morrison (Editor) 4.08 · Rating details · 12 ratings Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have over the past century emerged as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the science of cognition, the study of thinking and reasoning has since taken off, brancing off in a distinct direction from the field from which it originated. The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is a comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning. Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading. Chapters include introductions to foundational issues and methods of study in the field, as well as treatment of specific types of thinking and reasoning and their application in a broad range of fields including business, education, law, medicine, music, and science. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, education, and linguistics. Feminist Epistemologies (Thinking Gender) by Linda Martín Alcoff, Elizabeth Potter 4.14 · Rating details · 43 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477960.Feminist_Epistemologies Noticed this review by an evangelical: "I have found this an immensely suggestive book, collecting as it does essays from both prominent and rising figures in feminist philosophy of knowledge--albeit from about two decades ago. I am struck by how little impact feminist thought, even of this high and generally temperate quality, has had on evangelical theology, to the shame of my guild." -John The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely 3.94 · Rating details · 13,620 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426114-the-honest-truth-about-dishonesty The New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality returns with thought-provoking work to challenge our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves. Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat? How do companies pave the way for dishonesty? Does collaboration make us more honest or less so? Does religion improve our honesty? Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat. From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's the white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, award-winning, bestselling author Dan Ariely turns his unique insight and innovative research to the question of dishonesty. Generally, we assume that cheating, like most other decisions, is based on a rational cost-benefit analysis. But Ariely argues, and then demonstrates, that it's actually the irrational forces that we don't take into account that often determine whether we behave ethically or not. For every Enron or political bribe, there are countless puffed résumés, hidden commissions, and knockoff purses. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely shows why some things are easier to lie about; how getting caught matters less than we think; and how business practices pave the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards. But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our everyday lives. With compelling personal and academic findings, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty will change the way we see ourselves, our actions, and others. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (Goodreads Author) 4.27 · Rating details · 59,893 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_World How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions. Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms. What Is the Name of This Book? by Raymond M. Smullyan 4.24 · Rating details · 757 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493576.What_Is_the_Name_of_This_Book_ If you're intrigued by puzzles and paradoxes, these 200 mind-bending logic puzzles, riddles, and diversions will thrill you with challenges to your powers of reason and common sense. Raymond M. Smullyan — a celebrated mathematician, logician, magician, and author — presents a logical labyrinth of more than 200 increasingly complex problems. The puzzles delve into Gödel’s undecidability theorem and other examples of the deepest paradoxes of logic and set theory. Detailed solutions follow each puzzle The Art of Logic in an Illogical World by Eugenia Cheng 3.55 · Rating details · 740 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38400400-the-art-of-logic-in-an-illogical-world How both logical and emotional reasoning can help us live better in our post-truth world In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she knows how to make an airtight argument. But even for her, logic sometimes falls prey to emotion, which is why she still fears flying and eats more cookies than she should. If a mathematician can't be logical, what are we to do? In this book, Cheng reveals the inner workings and limitations of logic, and explains why alogic--for example, emotion--is vital to how we think and communicate. Cheng shows us how to use logic and alogic together to navigate a world awash in bigotry, mansplaining, and manipulative memes. Insightful, useful, and funny, this essential book is for anyone who wants to think more clearly. How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick Jr. Lewis Vaughn, Martin Gardner (Foreword) 4.00 · Rating details · 530 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41756.How_to_Think_about_Weird_Things This text serves well as a supplemental text in:
critical thinking
logic
introduction to philosophy
philosophy of science
epistemology
metaphysics
introduction to psychology
anomalistic psychology
perception and cognition
as well as any introductory science course. It has been used in all of the courses mentioned above as well as introductory biology, introductory physics, and introductory chemistry courses. It could also serve as a main text for courses in evaluation of the paranormal, philosophical implications of the paranormal, occult beliefs, and pseudoscience. Popular Statistics Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan 3.94 · Rating details · 10,367 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17986418-naked-statistics Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called “sexy.” From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more. For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions. And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't by Nate Silver 3.98 · Rating details · 43,804 ratings · 3,049 reviews https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588394-the-signal-and-the-noise One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012 New York Times Bestseller "Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War…could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade." -New York Times Book Review "Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century." -Rachel Maddow, author of Drift "A serious treatise about the craft of prediction-without academic mathematics-cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism." -New York Review of Books Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger-all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future. In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science. Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise. With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read. Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way: Understanding Statistics and Probability with Star Wars, Lego, and Rubber Ducks by Will Kurt 4.20 · Rating details · 126 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41392893-bayesian-statistics-the-fun-way Fun guide to learning Bayesian statistics and probability through unusual and illustrative examples. Probability and statistics are increasingly important in a huge range of professions. But many people use data in ways they don't even understand, meaning they aren't getting the most from it. Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way will change that. This book will give you a complete understanding of Bayesian statistics through simple explanations and un-boring examples. Find out the probability of UFOs landing in your garden, how likely Han Solo is to survive a flight through an asteroid shower, how to win an argument about conspiracy theories, and whether a burglary really was a burglary, to name a few examples. By using these off-the-beaten-track examples, the author actually makes learning statistics fun. And you'll learn real skills, like how to:
How to measure your own level of uncertainty in a conclusion or belief
Calculate Bayes theorem and understand what it's useful for
Find the posterior, likelihood, and prior to check the accuracy of your conclusions
Calculate distributions to see the range of your data
Compare hypotheses and draw reliable conclusions from them
Next time you find yourself with a sheaf of survey results and no idea what to do with them, turn to Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way to get the most value from your data. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian (Goodreads Author), Tom Griffiths (Goodreads Author) 4.15 · Rating details · 19,580 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25666050-algorithms-to-live-by A fascinating exploration of how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such issues for decades. And the solutions they've found have much to teach us. In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, acclaimed author Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths show how the algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one's inbox to understanding the workings of memory, Algorithms to Live By transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch 4.12 · Rating details · 5,026 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-of-infinity The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World In this book David Deutsch argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations. Though this quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal cosmic level – namely that it conforms to universal laws of nature that are indeed good explanations. This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things. A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method by Daniel J. Levitin 3.76 · Rating details · 3,181 ratings https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28504537-a-field-guide-to-lies From The New York Times bestselling author of THE ORGANIZED MIND and THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever. We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports revealing the ways lying weasels can use them. It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical infomation and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some lying weasels in their tracks! "Levitin is brilliant. Everyone should read A Field Guide to Lies."—Chris Matthews "Eloquent."—The Los Angeles Review of Books “Mr. Levitin is the perfect guide...If everyone could adopt the level of healthy statistical skepticism that Mr. Levitin would like, political debate would be in much better shape.”—The Economist "The timing could not be better … for Daniel J. Levitin’s new book… a survival manual for the post-factual era…in the struggle against error and ignorance, lies and mistakes, he is both engaging and rewarding."—Literary Review of Canada "Who knew that a book about statistics could be so riveting!"—Dallas Public Library "Confirmation bias is a growing problem in the digital information age. As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a giant pattern detector. If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true…The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."—John Cleese
Who is Scott Borgenson? Profile from 2016 in “Institutional Investor”
(Note the connections) CargoMetrics Cracks the Code on Shipping Data Scott Borgerson and his team of quants at hedge fund firm CargoMetrics are using satellite intel on ships to identify mispriced securities. By Fred R. Bleakley February 04, 2016 Link to article One late afternoon last November, as a ping-pong game echoed through the floor at CargoMetrics Technologies’ Boston office, CEO Scott Borgerson was watching over the shoulder of Arturo Ramos, who’s responsible for developing investment strategies with astrophysicist Ronnie Hoogerwerf. At Ramos’s feet sat Helios, his brindle pit-bull-and-greyhound mix. All three men were staring at a computer screen, tracking satellite signals from oil tankers sailing through the Strait of Malacca, the choke point between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea where 40 percent of the world’s cargo trade moves by ship. CargoMetrics, a start-up investment firm, is not your typical money manager or hedge fund. It was originally set up to supply information on cargo shipping to commodities traders, among others. Now it links satellite signals, historical shipping data and proprietary analytics for its own trading in commodities, currencies and equity index futures. There was an air of excitement in the office that day because the signals were continuing to show a slowdown in shipping that had earlier triggered the firm’s automated trading system to short West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil futures. Two days later the U.S. Department of Energy’s official report came out, confirming the firm’s hunch, and the oil futures market reacted accordingly. “We nailed it for our biggest return of the year,” says Borgerson, who had reason to breathe more easily. His backers were watching closely. They include Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM), the world’s largest hedge fund allocator, and seven wealthy tech and business leaders. Among them: former Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi, who also had a long career at IBM Corp. Compelling these investors and Borgerson to pursue the shipping slice of the economy is the simple fact that in this era of globalization 50,000 ships carry 90 percent of the $18.5 trillion in annual world trade. That’s no secret, of course, but Borgerson and CargoMetrics’ backers maintain that the firm is well ahead of any other investment manager in harnessing such information for a potential big advantage. It’s why Borgerson has kept the firm in stealth mode for years. In its earlier iteration, from 2011 to 2014, CargoMetrics was hidden in a back alley, above a restaurant. Now that he’s running an investment firm, Borgerson declines to name his investors unless, like Manzi and BAAM, they are willing to be identified. “My vision is to map historically and in real time what’s really going on in economic supply and demand across the planet,” says the U.S. Coast Guard veteran, who prides himself and the CargoMetrics team on not being prototypical Wall Streeters. “The problem is enormous, but the potential reward is huge.” According to Borgerson, CargoMetrics is building a “learning machine” that will be able to automatically profit from spotting any publicly traded security that is mispriced, using what he refers to as systematic fundamental macro strategies. He calls the firm a new breed of quantitative investment manager. In unguarded moments he sees himself as the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk of portfolio management. Though his ambitions may sound audacious, one thing is certain: Borgerson doesn’t lack in self-confidence. Over the past six years, he has secretly and painstakingly built a firm heavy in Ph.D.s that can manage a database of hundreds of billions of historical shipping records, conduct trillions of calculations on hundreds of computer servers and systematically execute trades in 28 different commodities and currencies. For his part, Borgerson seems an unlikely architect of such a serious, ambitious endeavor. Easygoing and fond of joking with his colleagues, he is a hands-off manager who credits CargoMetrics’ investment prowess to his team. His brand of humor comes through even when he’s detailing the series of challenges he had starting the firm. After using the phrase “It was hard” several times, he pauses and adds, “Did I mention it was hard?” Although Borgerson declines to provide any specifics about CargoMetrics’ portfolio, citing the advice of his lawyers, performance during the three years of live trading apparently has been strong enough to keep his backers confident and his team of physicists, software engineers and mathematicians in place. “Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we can make a more significant investment,” says BAAM CEO J. Tomilson Hill. Former Lotus CEO Manzi is optimistic about the firm’s prospects: “It has an unbelievable edge with its historical data.” CargoMetrics was one of the first maritime data analytics companies to seize the potential of the global Automatic Identification System. Ships transmit AIS signals via very high frequency (VHF) radio to receiver devices on other ships or land. Since 2004, large vessels with gross tonnage of 300 or more are required to flash AIS positioning signals every few seconds to avoid collisions. That allows CargoMetrics to pay satellite companies for access to the signals gleaned from 500 miles above the water. The firm uses historical data to identify cargo and aggregation of cargo flow, and then applies sophisticated analysis of financial market correlations to identify buying and selling opportunities. “We’re big-data junkies who could not have founded CargoMetrics without the radical breakthroughs of this golden age of technology,” Borgerson says. The revolution in cloud computing has been instrumental. CargoMetrics leverages the Amazon Web Services platform to run its analytics and algorithms on hundreds of computer servers at a fraction of the cost of owning and maintaining the hardware itself. At his firm’s headquarters — where the lobby displays a series of colored semaphore signal flags that spell out the mathematical equation for the surface area of the earth —Borgerson leads the way to his server room. It’s the size of a closet; inside, a thick pipe carries all the data traffic and analytic formulas CargoMetrics needs. That computing power alone would have cost $30 million to $40 million, Manzi says. CargoMetrics is pursuing a modern version of an age-old quest. Think of the Rothschild family’s use in the 19th century of carrier pigeons and couriers on horseback to bring news from the Napoleonic Wars to their traders in London, or, in the 1980s, oil trader Marc Rich’s use of satellite phones and binoculars for relaying oil tanker flow. Other quant-focused Wall Street firms are latching onto the satellite ship-tracking data. But, Borgerson says, “I would bet my life on a stack of Bibles that no one in the world has the shipping database and analytics we have.” The reason he’s so convinced is that from late 2008 he was an early client of the satellite companies that had begun collecting data received from space and on land to build a large database of all the world’s vessel movements in one place. That’s what caught Hill’s eye at Blackstone when he learned of CargoMetrics a few years ago. BAAM now has a managed account with the firm. “If anyone else tries to replicate what CargoMetrics has, they will be years behind [Borgerson] on data analytics,” Hill says. “We know that a number of hedge fund data scientists want his data.” But too much reliance on big data can go wrong, say many academicians. “There is a huge amount of hype around big data,” observes Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. “Many people are saying, ‘Let the data speak; we don’t need theory or modeling.’ I argue that even with using new, massively parallel computing systems for modeling and simulation, some forces in nature and the economy are still too big and complex for computers to handle.” Shih’s skepticism doesn’t go as far as to say the data challenge on global trade is too big a puzzle to solve. When informed of the CargoMetrics approach, he called it “very valid and creative. They just have to be careful not to throw away efforts to understand causality.” Another big-data scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of electrical engineering and computer science Samuel Madden, also urges caution. “What worries me is that models become trusted but then fail,” he explains. “You have to validate and revalidate.” Borgerson grew up in Southeast Missouri, in a home on Rural Route 5 between Festus and Hematite. His father was a former Marine infantry officer and police official, and his mother a high school French and Spanish teacher. The family traveled 15 miles to Crystal City to attend Grace Presbyterian Church, which was central to young Borgerson’s upbringing: There he was a youth elder, became an Eagle Scout and received a God and Country Award. The church was across the street from the former home of NBA all-star and U.S. senator Bill Bradley, whose backboard Borgerson used for basketball practice. When it came to choosing what to do after high school, Borgerson was torn between becoming a Presbyterian minister and accepting an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy or West Point. He went with the Coast Guard because, he says, “the humanitarian mission really appealed to me, and I had never been on a boat before.” At the academy, in New London, Connecticut, Borgerson played NCAA tennis and was also a cutup, racking up demerits for such antics as placing a sailboat on the commandant of cadets’ front lawn and leading bar patrons in a rendition of “Semper Paratus,” the school’s theme song. Still, he graduated with honors and spent the next four years piloting a 367-foot cutter — which seized five tons of cocaine in the Caribbean — then captaining a patrol boat that saved 30 lives on search-and-rescue missions. From 2001 to 2003 the Coast Guard sent Borgerson to the Fletcher School at Tufts University to earn his master’s of arts in law and diplomacy. While at Tufts he volunteered at a Boston homeless shelter for military veterans and founded a Pet Pals therapy program for senior citizens. Following graduation, from 2003 to 2006, Borgerson taught U.S. history, foreign policy, political geography and maritime studies at the Coast Guard Academy, and co-founded its Institute for Leadership. While there he would get up at 4:00 each morning to work on his Ph.D. thesis exploring U.S. port cities’ approaches to foreign policy. He would also travel to Boston to complete his course work at Tufts and meet with his adviser, John Curtis Perry. Borgerson’s military allegiance runs deep. One weekend last fall he played football in a service academy alumni game. On another he attended the Army-Navy game. Still militarily fit at age 40, the 6-foot-5 Borgerson works out regularly at an inner-city gym aimed at helping youths find an alternative to gang violence; a few weeks ago he was there boxing with ex-convicts and lifting weights. Leaving the Coast Guard was a hard decision for Borgerson, resulting in part from his frustration with the military bureaucracy’s stymieing of his bid to get back to sea for security missions. With his degrees in hand, he applied for a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the application process he met Edward Morse, now global head of commodities research at Citigroup. Morse was on the CFR selection committee in 2007 and recommended Borgerson as a fellow. Morse introduced Borgerson to commodities, and to trading terms like “contango” and “backwardation.” Morse himself had, earlier in career, gotten the jump on official oil supply data by hiring planes to take photos of the lid heights of oil tanks in Oklahoma’s Cushing field. Working for the CFR in New York reconnected Borgerson with his Missouri roots. Bill Bradley’s aunt called the former senator to say: “The son of a family who went to our church in Crystal City is in New York. Would you welcome him?” Bradley did — and would later play a part in Borgerson’s career development. While at the CFR, Borgerson became an expert on the melting of the North Pole ice cap, writing numerous published articles on its implications; this led him to co-found, with the president of Iceland, the Arctic Circle, a nonprofit designed to encourage discussion of the future of that region. Borgerson recently spoke to 50 international generals and admirals about the Arctic and is co-drafting a proposal for a treaty between the U.S. and Canada that would help resolve the differences the two countries have in allowing international ship and aircraft travel through the Northwest Passage. His Arctic research led to an aha moment early in 2008, while he was still with the CFR, on a visit to Singapore and the Strait of Malacca with his Fletcher School classmate Rockford Weitz and their former Ph.D. adviser, Perry. Seeing the mass of ships sailing through the strait, Borgerson and Weitz decided to build a data analytics firm using satellite tracking of ships. Like many successful entrepreneurs, the two struggled to find financing before reaching out to a network of friends and their contacts. One was Randy Beardsworth, who had sat with Borgerson at a 2007 Coast Guard Academy dinner, where Beardsworth, then the Coast Guard’s chief of law enforcement in Miami, was the guest speaker. Borgerson “made references to history and literature, and I thought, ‘Here is a sharp guy,’” recalls Beardsworth. “We have been friends ever since.” But Borgerson didn’t turn to his new friend in his initial fund-raising. “He came to me in 2009, after he had been turned down by 17 VCs, was maxed out on his credit card, was married and had a newborn son,” says Beardsworth, who was reviewing the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Obama administration’s transition team. Beardsworth came to the rescue, not only committing to invest a small amount but introducing his friend to Doug Doan. A West Point graduate and Washington-based angel investor, Doan took to Borgerson right away. “To be honest, it wasn’t his idea, it was Scott I invested in,” says Doan, who provided $100,000 in capital and introduced Borgerson to a few friends, who added $75,000. Manzi came on board as an investor in 2009, having been asked by Bradley to check out Borgerson’s plan for a data metrics firm. (Manzi knew Bradley from the late 1990s, when the latter was considering a run for U.S. president.) With Doan, Doan’s friends and Manzi as investors, CargoMetrics was finally able to garner its first venture capital commitment in early 2010, from Boston-based Ascent Venture Partners. That gave the start-up the capital it needed to hire a bevy of data scientists to build an analytics platform that it could sell to commodity-trading houses and other commercial users. In 2011, CargoMetrics added Summerhill Venture Partners, a Toronto-based firm with a Boston office, to its investor roster, raising roughly $18 million from venture capital and angels for its data business. By then Borgerson had already begun to contemplate converting CargoMetrics from an information provider into a money manager; he saw the potential to extract powerful trade signals from its technology rather than share it with other market participants for a fee. Among those he consulted was serial entrepreneur Peter Platzer, a friend of one of CargoMetrics’ original investors. Platzer, a physicist by training, had spent eight years as a quantitative hedge fund manager at Rohatyn Group and Deutsche Bank before co-founding Spire Global, a San Francisco–based company that uses its own fleet of low-orbit satellites to track shipping, in 2012. “We had lengthy conversations on how to set up quant trading systems and how [commodities giant] Cargill had made a similar decision to set up its own in-house hedge fund to trade on the information it was gathering,” recalls Platzer. So Borgerson reset his course. Doan describes the decision as a “transformative moment” for the CargoMetrics co-founder. “The military trains you to be a strategic thinker,” Doan explains. “Scott had been tactical until then, making small pivots, and like a general who sees the theater of war, he moved into strategic mode.” Borgerson’s ambition to succeed was in no small part fueled by the early turndowns by many venture capital firms and a fierce determination to best the Wall Street bunch at their own game. “There’s a lot that motivates me, including — if I’m honest — I have a big chip on my shoulder to beat the prep school, Ivy League, MBA crowd,” he says. “They’re bred to make money, but they’re not smarter than everyone else; they just have more patina and connections.” (Bred differently, he spent last Thanksgiving visiting his parents in rural Missouri. After breakfast he and his father were in the woods, shooting assault guns at posters of terrorists, with Gunny, his father’s Anatolian shepherd dog.) Borgerson’s plan was not met with enthusiasm from the company’s then co-CEO, Weitz. CargoMetrics had been gaining clients and meeting its goals, and was on its way to becoming a successful data service provider. Weitz, who now is president of the Gloucester, Massachusetts–based Institute for Global Maritime Studies and an entrepreneur coach at Tufts’ Fletcher School, did not return e-mails or phone calls asking for comment. For his part, Borgerson says: “A ship cannot have two captains. The company simply matured and evolved into a streamlined management structure with one CEO instead of two.” Eventually, Doan went along with Borgerson’s plan. “We believe in Scott and that shipping holds the no-shit, honest truth of what the economy is doing,” he says. But buying out the venture capital firms several years ahead of the usual exit time would require a hefty premium over what they had invested. Once again Borgerson’s early supporters played a key role. Manzi, a fellow Fletcher School grad who had mentored Borgerson since the company’s early days, put up more money (making CargoMetrics one of his single largest investments) and introduced him to a powerful group of wealthy investors. Separately, the CFR’s Morse suggested that Borgerson meet with Daniel Freifeld, founder of Washington-based Callaway Capital Management and a former senior adviser on Eurasian energy at the U.S. Department of State. Impressed by Borgerson’s “intellectual honesty, vigor and more than four years of historical data,” Freifeld brought the idea to a billionaire third-party investor, who took his advice and became one of CargoMetrics’ largest backers. “I would not have suggested the investment if CargoMetrics had not done the hard part first,” adds Freifeld, declining to name the investor. A chance encounter in the fall of 2012 gave the CargoMetrics team its first taste of real Wall Street trading. Attending an Arctic Imperative conference in Alaska, Borgerson met the CIO of a large investment firm, whom he declines to name. When Borgerson confided his ambition and that CargoMetrics had developed algorithms to trade on its shipping data once it was legally structured to do so, the CIO suggested CargoMetrics provide the analytical models for a separate portfolio the money manager would trade. Live trading using CargoMetrics’ models began in December 2012. Manzi brought in longtime banker Gerald Rosenfeld in 2013 to craft and negotiate the move to make CargoMetrics a limited liability investment firm. Rosenfeld acted in a personal role rather than in his position as vice chairman of Lazard and full-time professor and trustee of the New York University School of Law. The whole process took a year and a half. During that time Blackstone checked in as an investor. Bradley, now an investment banker, has yet to invest in CargoMetrics, explaining that he is unfamiliar with quantitative investing. But he may eventually invest in Borgerson’s firm, he says, because “we are homeboys. I believe in him and that things are going to work out ” — pausing to add with a smile, “based on my vast quant experience, of course.” Borgerson has been in stealth mode since CargoMetrics’ early days, when he moved the firm from an innovation lab near MIT because the shared space was too open. He is much more forthcoming when boasting of the firm’s “world-class talent.” The team includes astrophysicists, mathematicians, former hedge fund quants, electrical engineers, a trade lawyer and software developers. Hoogerwerf, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the Netherlands’ Leiden University, built distributed technical environments for scientists and engineers at Microsoft Corp. Solomon Todesse, who works on quant investment strategies, was head of asset allocation at State Street Global Advisors. Aquil Abdullah, a team leader in the engineering group, was a software engineer in the high-performance-computing group at Microsoft. And senior investment strategist Charles Freifeld (Daniel’s father) has 40 years’ experience in futures and commodities markets, including nine with Boston-based commodity trading adviser firm AlphaMetrics Capital Management. “All were self-made people; none were born with a silver spoon,” Borgerson notes. One of his blue-collar-background hires was James (Jess) Scully, who joined as chief operating officer in 2011, after his employer Interactive Supercomputing was acquired by Microsoft. “The team we built treasures team success, which is Scott’s motto,” Scully says. “We want shared resources, one P&L, not ‘How much money did my unit make?’” Both Scully and Borgerson say CargoMetrics is like the Golden State Warriors, a leading NBA basketball team known for putting aside personal glory and playing as a band of brothers having fun. Borgerson says he fosters a no-ego policy with “lots of play because investment teams are built on trust, and playing together builds trust.” Team building at CargoMetrics includes pub crawls, picnics at Borgerson’s house, poker nights, volunteer work in a soup kitchen for the homeless, Red Sox games and visits to museums. Trips to the Boston docks or Coast Guard base are intended to remind the CargoMetrics team of the real economy. There are also occasional “touch a tanker” days. On one visit to a tanker, everyone was amazed that the ship was the size of a city building, Borgerson says. “They could smell the salt on the deck,” he recalls. “Wall Street can lose sight of the real fundamentals in the world. I don’t want that to happen here.” Unlike the Rothschilds 200 years ago, only a small percentage of the trades that CargoMetrics makes relate to beating official government data. Most simply are aimed at identifying mispricings in the market, using the firm’s real-time shipping data and proprietary algorithms. At a whiteboard in his conference room, Borgerson sketches out CargoMetrics’ general formula. He draws a “maritime matrix” of three dynamic data sets: geography (Malacca, Brazil, Australia, China, Europe and the U.S.), metrics (ship counts, cargo mass and volume, ship speed and port congestion) and tradable factors (Brent crude versus WTI, as well as mining equities, commodity macro and Asian economic activity). Using satellite data with hundreds of millions of ship positions, CargoMetrics makes trillions of calculations to determine individual cargoes onboard the ships and then to aggregate the cargo flows and compare them with historical shipping data. All that leads to the final comparisons with historical financial market data to find mispricings. If CargoMetrics observes an appreciable decline in export shipping activity in South Africa, for example, its trading models will determine whether that is a significant early-warning sign by considering that information alongside other factors, such as interest rates. If CargoMetrics believes a decline in the rand is forthcoming, it might short it against a basket of other currencies. “This is like a heat map showing opportunity,” Borgerson says, noting that CargoMetrics is not trading physical commodities. “We are agnostic on whether to be long or short, and let the computers spot where there is a mispricing and liquidity in the markets.” He sums up his simple, but still less than revealing, process by writing on the whiteboard “Collect, Compute, Trade.” Borgerson says CargoMetrics is building a systematic approach that will work even when cargo cannot be identified — on containerships, for instance. It already knows a large percentage of the daily imports and exports into and out of China and island economies such as Japan and Australia. And although the firm cannot glean from its calculations on satellite AIS data the type of cargo, such as iPhones from China, it can measure total flow, which shows present economic activity. CargoMetrics’ data scientists are working on linking such activity to the firm’s data set of the past seven years to measure the evolving global economy. That will lead, Borgerson maintains, to more trades on currencies and equity index futures and, eventually, trades on individual equities. “Uncorrelated” is a mantra of Borgerson and his team. Well aware that correlated assets sent the performance of most asset managers, including hedge funds, plunging in the financial crisis, CargoMetrics is determined to come up with an antidote. Careful not to say too much, Borgerson lays out the simple principle that the process starts with placing many bets among uncorrelated strategies in different asset classes, like commodities, currencies and equities. The goal is diversification, staying as market neutral as possible and remaining sensitive to tail risk in different scenarios. CargoMetrics’ analytic models help find asset classes that are outliers. Those may include a publicly traded instrument such as oil, another commodity or an equity for which shipping information was a leading indicator during times when other asset classes marched in lockstep. The historical ship data is then blended with this new information to seek opportunities. Identifying mispriced spreads among different trades within an asset class is another way of avoiding the calamity of correlation. Borgerson says the firm’s models will find instances where one type of oil should be a short trade and another a long one. The same goes for whole asset classes — shorting one that will benefit if virtually all asset prices plunge and buying another that will rise when oil prices gain. “We’re counting cards with the goal of being right maybe 3 percent more than we are wrong, as a way of making profits during good times and staying afloat during times of sudden, unpredictable but far-reaching events,” Borgerson says. The key, he adds, “is to know your edge and spread your risk.” CargoMetrics’ uncorrelated approach worked during the dismal first three weeks of this year, says Borgerson. Dialing down risk as volatility in the markets soared, the firm was on track in January to have its best month since it began trading. To improve the firm’s models, eight of its data scientists hold a weekly strategy meeting, nicknamed “the Shackleton Group” after the band of sailors shipwrecked in the Antarctic from 1914 to 1917. Hoogerwerf and Ramos co-lead the group. At one recent meeting they were deciding how much risk, including how much liquidity, there was in a possible strategy; reviewing whether to keep previous strategies; and assigning who would research new ones. The Shackleton Group’s meetings are free-form, with a lot of “I’ve got an idea” interjections that disregard official roles. “We hit the restart button a lot,” says Ramos, a former director of business intelligence and a quantitative economist at law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf who joined CargoMetrics in late 2010. “That’s why our motto is ‘Never lose hope.’” A bet on oil, related to Russia’s production, was stopped at the last minute in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Some currency-trading strategies have been abandoned in theory or after failing. Strategies the Shackleton Group likes are passed on to the firm’s investment committee of Borgerson, Scully and Ramos for a final decision. CargoMetrics has a unique set of big-data challenges. Historical shipping patterns may not be as useful in the new global economy now that shipping freight prices are plunging, a sign that trade growth rates may be changing. And analysts point out how hard identifying oil cargo can be in certain locations and instances, even in more-predictable economic times. “While it may be easy to say that ships leaving the Middle East Gulf are typically carrying crude oil, knowing the type of crude is sometimes quite difficult,” says Paulo Nery, senior director of Europe, Middle East and Asia oil for Genscape, a Louisville, Kentucky–based company that analyzes satellite tracking of ships. Borgerson maintains his team is well aware of the dangers of data mining and getting swamped by noise. “If you run computers hard enough, you can convince yourself of anything,” he says. To make sure CargoMetrics’ algorithms for identifying cargo are valid, the firm spot-checks manifest data filed at ports and imposes statistical confidence checks to guard against spurious correlations. Getting the jump on official government statistics is likely to become tougher too thanks to the recently formed High-Level Group for the Modernization of Official Statistics. Although the U.S. is not a member, Canada is a key player helping to lead the mostly European nation group (including South Korea) in coming up with a global blueprint for measuring and reporting economic activity. Reflecting on his journey to Wall Street — raising money, hiring employees with different skill sets, making changes to CargoMetrics’ culture, overcoming legal and regulatory hurdles — almost gives Borgerson second thoughts about whether he would do it again. “I’ve sailed ships through tropical storms, captured cocaine smugglers and testified before Congress [on his Arctic research],” he says, “but this was the hardest.”
Trump was over a billion in debt and the Russians bailed him out. ► Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money. In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider possible business prospects. Only seven weeks after his trip, Trump ran full-page ads in the Boston Globe, the NYT and WaPO calling for, in effect, the dismantling of the postwar Western foreign policy alliance. The whole Trump/Russian connection started out as laundering money for the Russian mob through Trump's real estate, but evolved into something far bigger. ► In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob. (NY Times, Apr 30, 1992) ► Felix Sater is a Russian-born former mobster, and former managing director of NY real estate conglomerate Bayrock Group LLC located on the 24th floor of Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Michael Cohen--Trump's former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob. This goes back more than 30 years. ► Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Bayrock (mentioned above). Bayrock was run by two investors: Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who had pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and poured money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. ► In July 2008, the height of the housing bust, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. Again, this was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. ► Semion Mogilevich was the brains behind the Russian Mafia. Mogilevich operatives have been using Trump real estate for decades to launder money. That means Russian Mafia operatives have been part of his fortune for years. Many of them owned condos in Trump Towers and other properties. They were running operations out of Trump's crown jewel. ► From Craig Unger's AMA: "Early on, a source told me that all this was tied to Semion Mogilevich, the powerful Russian mobster. I had never even heard of him, but I immediately went to a database that listed the owners of all properties in NY state and looked up all the Trump properties. Every time I found a Russian sounding name, I would Google, and add Mogilevich. When you do investigative reporting, you anticipate drilling a number of dry holes, but almost everyone I googled turned out to be a Russian mobster. Again and again. If you know New York you don't expect Trump Tower to be a high crime neighborhood, but there were far too many Russian mobsters in Trump properties for it to be a coincidence." ► So many Russians bought Trump apartments at his developments in Florida that the area became known as Little Moscow. The developers of two of his hotels were Russians with significant links to the Russian mob. The late leader of that mob in the United States, Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, was living at Trump Tower ► According to a Bloomberg investigation (3/16/2017) into Trump World Tower, “a third of units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability companies connected to Russia and neighboring states.” ► In 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich. ► The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have been operating out of the home of the president of the United States is deeply disturbing. ► Rudy Giuliani famously prosecuted the Italian mob while he was a federal prosecutor, yet the Russian mob was allowed to thrive. Now he's deeply entwined in the business of Trump and Russian oligarchs. Giuiani appointed Semyon Kislin to the NYC Economic Development Council in 1990, and the FBI described Kislin as having ties to the Russian mob. Of course, it made good political sense for Giuliani to get headlines for smashing the Italian mob. ► A lot of Republicans in Washington are implicated. Boatloads of Russian money went to the GOP--often in legal ways. The NRA got as much as $70M from Russia, then funneled it to the GOP. The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee lead by McConnell got millions from Leonard Blavatnik. In the 90s, the Russians began sending money to top GOP leaders, like Speaker of the House Tom Delay. Craig Unger's book alleges that most of the GOP leadership has been compromised by RU money. ► At the Cityscape USA’s Bridging US and the Emerging Real Estate Markets Conference held in Manhattan, on September 9, 10, and 11, 2008, Donald Trump Jr. was frank about the tide of Russian money supporting the family business, saying "...And in terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." ► Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson in 2014 that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” ► Russian oligarchs co-signed Trump’s Deutsche bank loans. Trump now gleefully takes cues from Putin: ► At the end of 2018, Putin and his allies started making a strong push for a resolution that would justify their country’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and reverse an 1989 vote backed by Mikhail Gorbachev that condemned it. The Putinists’ goal was to pass the resolution by Feb. There is no one on this side of the Atlantic who thinks the USSR was justified in invading Afghanistan. And out of nowhere, on January 2nd, Trump came out strongly supporting Russia's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. ► Trump went against American intelligence on North Korean missiles. He told the FBI he didn't believe their intelligence because Putin told him otherwise. “I don't care, I believe Putin" ► Trump met in secret with Putin at the G20 summit in November 2018, without note takers. 19 days later, he announced a withdrawal from Syria. As a note, Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed. ► Trump refused to enforce sanctions legally codified into law - and in some cases reversed standing sanctions on Russian companies. ► He has denounced his own intelligence agencies in a press conference with Putin on election meddling - and publicly endorsed Putin's version of events. ► Trump pulled out of the INF treaty with no explanation, which allows Putin to create long-range hypersonic missiles that threaten Europe with impunity. The US already has all the weaponry that the INF would ban the development of, so this offers us literally nothing, while allowing Russia to develop powerful new weapons to challenge our allies. ► Demanded Russia get invited back into G7 ► Pushed the CIA to give American intelligence to the Kremlin. ► Withdrew from the Open Skies treaty ► Received intelligence in 2019 that Russia was paying bounties for dead American soldiers, and hasn't done anything about it by the time of this writing. ► Announced troop withdrawal from Germany (America's missile defense from Russia and forward operating base against Russian aggression) ► And of course, Trump continues to threaten to pull out of NATO, a move so catastrophically stupid, so inconceivably cosmically myopic, I truly can't express the profundity of the idiocy. Suffice to say, pulling out of NATO would be like the only guy in a prison yard with a shotgun just throwing it over the fence for absolutely no reason, suddenly giving the people with crude homemade shivs complete power. ► Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, a former advisor convicted several charges, including lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing a congressional committee proceeding, as part of former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. Edit: thanks for the awards, credit should also go to u/victorvictor1 who originally composed this list. Also, please share so that more people can see this
Trump has been in Russia’s pocket for a long time: ► Trump was over a billion in debt and the Russians bailed him out. ► Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to useTrump real estate to launder money. In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider possible business prospects. Only seven weeks after his trip, Trump ran full-page ads in the Boston Globe, the NYT and WaPO calling for, in effect, the dismantling of the postwar Western foreign policy alliance. The whole Trump/Russian connection started out as laundering money for the Russian mob through Trump's real estate, but evolved into something far bigger. ► In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob. (NY Times, Apr 30, 1992) ► [Felix Sater](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Sater } is a Russian-born former mobster, and former managing director of NY real estate conglomerate Bayrock Group LLC located on the 24th floor of Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Michael Cohen--Trump's former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob. This goes back more than 30 years. ► Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Bayrock (mentioned above). Bayrock was run by two investors: Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who had pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and poured money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. ► In July 2008, the height of the housing bust, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. Again, this was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. ► Semion Mogilevich was the brains behind the Russian Mafia. Mogilevich operatives have been using Trump real estate for decades to launder money. That means Russian Mafia operatives have been part of his fortune for years. Many of them owned condos in Trump Towers and other properties. They were running operations out of Trump's crown jewel. ► So many Russians bought Trump apartments at his developments in Florida that the area became known as Little Moscow. The developers of two of his hotels were Russians with significant links to the Russian mob. The late leader of that mob in the United States, Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, was living at Trump Tower ► According to a Bloomberg investigation (3/16/2017) into Trump World Tower, “a third of units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability companies connected to Russia and neighboring states.” ► In 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich. ► The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have been operating out of the home of the president of the United States is deeply disturbing. ► Rudy Giuliani famously prosecuted the Italian mob while he was a federal prosecutor, yet the Russian mob was allowed to thrive. Now he's deeply entwined in the business of Trump and Russian oligarchs. Giuiani appointed Semyon Kislin to the NYC Economic Development Council in 1990, and the FBI described Kislin as having ties to the Russian mob. Of course, it made good political sense for Giuliani to get headlines for smashing the Italian mob. ► A lot of Republicans in Washington are implicated. Boatloads of Russian money went to the GOP--often in legal ways. The NRA got as much as $70M from Russia, then funneled it to the GOP. The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee lead by McConnell got millions from Leonard Blavatnik. In the 90s, the Russians began sending money to top GOP leaders, like Speaker of the House Tom Delay. Craig Unger's book alleges that most of the GOP leadership has been compromised by RU money. ► At the Cityscape USA’s Bridging US and the Emerging Real Estate Markets Conference held in Manhattan, on September 9, 10, and 11, 2008, Donald Trump Jr. was frank about the tide of Russian money supporting the family business, saying "...And in terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." ► Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson in 2014 that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” ► Russian oligarchs co-signed Trump’s Deutsche bank loans. Trump now gleefully takes cues from Putin: ► Trump went against American intelligence on North Korean missiles. He told the FBI he didn't believe their intelligence because Putin told him otherwise. “I don't care, I believe Putin" ► Trump met in secret with Putin at the G20 summit in November 2018, without note takers. 19 days later, he announced a withdrawal from Syria. ► Trump refused to enforce sanctions legally codified into law - and in some cases reversed standing sanctions on Russian companies. ► He has denounced his own intelligence agencies in a press conference with Putin on election meddling - and publicly endorsed Putin's version of events. ► Demanded Russia get invited back into G7 ► Pushed the CIA to give American intelligence to the Kremlin. ► Withdrew from the Open Skies treaty ► Received intelligence in 2019 that Russia was paying bounties for dead American soldiers, and hasn't done anything about it Compiled by u/Torbert420.
Green-brown bile in J-P drain, 12hrs post mesenteric/small intestine abscess drainage
Patient is 37M, non-smoker, no known health concerns other than obesity and sleep apnea, no abdominal injuries. We (I'm his fiance/common-law spouse) reside in eastern Canada. Patient experienced abdominal pain, fever, loss of appetite, low energy, general discomfort from Dec 25-27th, which resulted in a visit to our local ER on Dec 27th. Patient was admitted eve of Dec 27th, put on bowel rest, and started on antibiotics and pain meds (metronidazole and ceftriaxone along with lactated ringers solution and Dilaudid/Tylenol). CT scan discovered abdominal abscess on Dec 28th, in belly button area. Follow-up scan with contrast on Dec 31 showed that abscess grew despite constant IV antibiotics. Decision was made to operate. Patient had open surgery on Jan 2nd. No apparent IBD/diverticulitis discovered. "Golf-ball sized" (surgeons description) abscess found in mesenteric area amongst the small intestine loops and was drained/washed. No known cause of abscess prior to or immediately after surgery. A Jackson-Pratt drain was placed during surgery. Fluid was red and yellow throughout first 8-10 hours post-surgery. The next morning during initial post-surgery follow-up it was discovered that a dark green fluid was present - bile, it appears. Surgeon somewhat concerned, mentioned there may be a hole in the small intestine that was missed during the first procedure. We're hopeful that the antibiotic treatment + drained/washed abscess will allow the apparent hole to close on its own. Plan is to watch for 2 days and then potentially go back in to remove a portion of small intestine if the issue does not resolve. My/our question is surrounding the hole, and the likelihood that such a thing could heal on its own with antibiotics and the removal of puss/infection in the abscess. Surgeon seemed to have mild-to-moderate concern, but we're aware that Poker-face exists. ;) Patient believes he'll end up needing it removed ("my luck") and we're both feeling pretty nervous at this point. His anxiety is rising substantially. Still, two RNs have told us today that "it's somewhat common" to see this green-black/green-brown fluid. I'm terrified of him developing sepsis - which is probably irrational, I understand. The thought that there is a hole spewing intestinal contents into his body is not my favourite. It's impossible to predict the future, obviously, and you don't have the chart/notes, I understand, but I thought perhaps some discussion may help me comprehend what is in front of us a little better. I like to read journals/watch presentations/etc when things like this arise (a basic education of the issue at hand helps me manage my anxiety) and I'm having trouble finding information that does not include IBD or livepancreatic/biliary references. A generalized opinion on his body healing (with IV antibiotics) vs. further surgical intervention would be great, if such an opinion is possible with the above information. We'll speak to the surgeon further when we get a chance to see him, but we don't know when that next opportunity will arise. The patient and his mother unfortunately did not ask the questions I would have, and I was not with them at the time of the surgeons brief visit this morning. I appreciate your time and any direction/terminology/information you might be able to provide! :)
OBLIGATORY FILLER MATERIAL – ESCAPE FROM STALAG SULTANATE, Part 4
Continuing… SKREEEEEK! SKRONNNNNK! “SQUEEEeeeeeeeeEEEEE...!* “Nah, ya’ borgus frap! To the left!” I shout. “We’re facing the same fucking direction, so same fucking left.” I reiterate. “OK, the other left then. Back about 2 meters…” I growl, exasperatedly. SKKKKKKKKKKREEEEK!EEEGAH! “OK, now just drop the sonuvabitch.” I command in a loud, steady un-Presbyterian voice. KABLONG! fagroon…kubble…kubble… “Perfect!” As I give the ‘OK, you meathead’ salute, one finger at a time. “There. Marvelous. You can leave now. Yes, you may take your forklift with you.” I insist. SHEESH. So, now we have a rusty, old Maersk 20 foot shipping container blocking our villa’s carport. Open ‘er up, have a look. No contraband. Frankly, I’m vaguely disappointed. Some foreign bugs, properly dead. A quick sweep with the propane-powered pressure washer and tomorrow, the guys arrive to start schlepping our stuff. One step closer to exiting the Stalag. Still waiting on a report from Rack and Ruin. But we have our container for our ‘personal effects’. Esme walks out to our courtyard and looks over the situation. “Let me guess... Going straight, right, or left was beyond their ken?” she asks and hands me a cold beer that she had found hiding in the back of my fridge. “Chinese beer? Oh! Velly nice.” I chuckle as I drain the liter by half. “That’s wascist!” Esme chuckles and helps herself to one of the Ukrainian beers she also found in my fridge. See, we have several fridges around the villa. The big one, for food and the like, is in the ground floor kitchen. Then we have slightly smaller ones in each of the other three kitchens we have on the other various floors. Then, due to a contractor’s inadvertent and irresolvable mistake, I have my massive, stainless steel drinks fridge downstairs, just off the alcove to our open-concept majlis. Most would call that a living room. My fridge doubles as a cigar humidor (instead of a vegetable crisper), glass chiller, wine rack (reds only), drinks station, and beer icer-downer. My fridge has been suffering from a depauperate population of both cigars and liquoriferous delights of late, thanks in part to all the COVID-connected craziness. Thanks to Mishka and his black market confederates, we’ve solved, at least temporarily, the cigars quandary. Esme has been going through our villa, into rooms seldom visited and into storage areas even more unfrequented and lonely. She has discovered a long-forgotten treasure trove of potent potables we had stashed for long-past parties, infrequent celebrations, the occasional in-house staycation booze-up, super-typhoon, or recovery from a particularly vexatious and nasty contract in a, particularly vexatious and nasty locale. Long story short…(ha), my fridge had regained its usual turgor and boasted beer from over a dozen countries, dangerous, seething polychromatic liquors from six or twenty-two others, and other unidentifiable drinkables from just outside the Outer Rim; where Imperial Forces wouldn’t even bother to venture much less examine. “Marvelous!” I exclaim to Esme as I hold her in a crushing one-armed bear hug. I puffed on a vintage Arturo Fuente Opus X BBMF cigar and was partaking of a cold Yorshch, comprised of Polish Pre-Wall-Fall Buffalo Grass Vodka and New Zealand Steinlager. Yes, the one-liter bottle size. What else? Anyways, I had the guys delivering the 20’ container leave the front dogs down and the rear dogs extended. That gave the container a tail-to-front gradient of approximately 20. Just enough for me to get the propane-powered pressure washer into the container and let the effluvia drain out the front, down the street and unto who knows where in a place that has absolutely no idea Climate Engineering exists as it’s applied to urban conurbations. I fire up a fine Zuban cigar, push-prime the pilot on the propane-powered pressure washer, attach the hose, and fire up the recalcitrant little beast. After fixing all the leaks in the system that hasn’t been used in over 5 years, I get it purring like a well-oiled kitten (now there’s an image) and venture into the back of the container. After grappling with the 250 psi(g) pressure washer and only getting smacked in the head twice by the custom-built Power Wand!, I begin hosing off the debris accumulated from hundreds if not thousands of trips on the high seas. It was a weird odor, that of propane exhaust, my cigar, and all the schmoo and such now being peeled off the metal walls and being sent to the land of evanescent wind and spirits. Of course, when there’s water of any depth present in this desert nibbana; the local critters try, with unflinching determination, to make certain they get their fill. Now, I don’t mind the vinegaroons, camel spiders, or whiptail scorpions; but I draw the line at Saw Scaled Vipers. I mean, that last batch is just plain ornery. Plus, their bite can prove fatal to non-ethanol fueled organisms; such as Esme. Therefore, I have to ask, in a most straightforward, ill-mannered, and direct manner, that they must take their leave of the area. Immediately. If a good shot of the propane-powered power washer isn’t enough to dissuade them, then a couple of loads of birdshot from my .44 Magnum usually suffices. Plus, as a bonus, it gives the Egyptian Buzzards something for lunch. Such handsome little neodinosaurs. Flappy-flap. Anyways, I’m hosing out the 20-footer and getting slightly giddy from the fumes as it appears this container spent some time over in northern South America. The propane-powered pressure water effluent is now a milky white. I do believe we have some remnants of a batch of Peruvian Marching Powder that resided for a longish time right here in this very strongbox. Or it’s anthrax. Either way, I’m feeling a bit on the more-than-usually-loopy-side. After kicking the final saw-scaled viper to the curb, I make certain the doors to the big metal box are propped open so they can dry during the 500 C night. I toss in a couple of smoke grenades which I’ve wired to cans of Pif Paf Bug-be-Gone. The snakes and mice hate the smell of the mercaptans in the Pif Paf as well and I hope, by morning, the smell will have dissipated. Really doesn’t matter, as everything is going to be packed in bubble wrap, cardboard, or metal boxes and sealed in the house with tough, shipping-grade vinyl wrap before they hit the container. I return to the villa, strip, toss the smelly work clothes in the wash and wander upstairs for a shower. Since our water chiller croaked right around the time the first wave of COVID hit, we have no water chiller for the shower. Taking a shower any time other than right at first light or well after sunset is a clear invitation to second-degree burns, steam injuries, and bubbling flesh. Happily, Es had some other ideas, so that I was well insulated from the possibility of a skin-bubblingly hot water shower. An hour or two later, it was almost positively tolerable. The next day, over bagels and coffee, we’re waiting for one Chettur Goyal, the moving crew chief, and English speaker. He and his crew of Eastern Expatriates start to show up to begin packing up and trundling out all the kit we’ve determined that without which, we certainly cannot live. We decided that a couple of his team, depending on English skills, will work with Esme on the ground floor level of our villa. Our house has been described as being decorated in a style called “Early Museum”. Well, when you’ve lived on over five continents for the last 35 or so years, you tend to generate some eclectic collections. We’ve developed an easy tag-out method for our perhaps less than 100% literate friends doing the schlepping for us. Green tag means pack the cabinet and everything contained within. Red tag, everything stays, as Esme and I have already cleared the internals and sorted them by desirability. A yellow tag means as Chettur, Rock, or Esme after all the green tagged furniture and bits and pieces have been packed; will make decisions on what goes and what stays, if anything. In all truth, we probably have a couple of 40-foot containers-worth of material; definitely, if we decided to take Es’s Land Rover and/or my Isuzu Trooper. Alas, they’re being donated to the American School. Neither Esme nor I have the time, inclination, nor patience to put them up on the local “Used Car” board only to deal with shifty locals or whiny expats lusting after our wheels. The former one will waste your time and finally strike a deal, only to show up on the fateful day 2,000 or 3,000 rials short. “It’s all I have, sahib.” They’ll say. They know full well you’re on your way out and don’t have time to waste telling them to ‘get fucked’. Besides, doing that might bring a visit from the Royal Ostrich Pluckers. So, usually, the expat gives in just to get rid of the fucking vehicle. With the other expats, particularly the Eastern variety, pulling a sobbing, snuffling, wailing scene as you’re trying to get everything packed and into the container; is also most unwelcome. They’ll try and wheedle and cheese a deal. Ridiculous for you, splendid for them, in the hopes you’d rather just get the fuck out of Dodge and the hell with the car, where are the fucking plane tickets? Either one is a monumental pain in the ass. So, donated to the American School they are. We receive thanks, a receipt, and a healthy deduction on our next-years taxes. But I still miss that Trooper. Fuel-injected V-8 with little pollution control crapola. M8274-S 10K WARN-winch upfront on the huge bespoke Bull Bars. Massive Hankook all-terrain tires. Custom 11-speed transmission. Skid plates where skid plates should be, transmission intercooler, and holy fuck, wait… I run after the tow truck driver just before he drops his vehicle into “Tow: low”. I retrieve a Colt 1911 .45 caliber pistol I won in a poker game from one of the several secret compartments I had personally TIG-welded into, onto, and under my erstwhile vehicle. I have the tow truck driver sit tight and smoke one of my cigars as I go through the vehicle, trying to remember where I had placed all the ’secret stash’ hidey-holes. I found several knives I had thought were lost or stolen, a couple of small caliber handguns, some very dusty ammunition, a Ziploc measure of Mexican agricultural pharmaceuticals for the treatment of my chronic back pain, a box of blasting caps, and a small electronic detonator I’d completely forgotten about; batteries totally corroded and weepy of alkalinic shmoo. I also found those half-dozen large ampules of Ketamine and hypo I kept in case I found a horse or ox or Utahraptor in obvious distress during my travels. Anyways. Wouldn’t that be fun on American School Driver’s Education day when one of these compartments popped open and a .25 caliber snub-nose dropped into the lap of the novice driver? Well, in my defense…I’ve been busy lately. Ahem. Anyways. Back to packing. Es was going to take care of watching over and answering questions down on the ground floor. I decided it would be best for me to go up to my office/lab and direct the packing of some of the more esoteric items I had living with me up on the third floor. “OK, Mr. Chettur, I don’t know how well your charges speak English, but I want you to translate for me verbatim.” I asked. “Yes sir. I can do that for you.” Chettur replied. “OK, guys. Gather around. Comfy? Good. Now, this is my office and laboratory. I’ve taken to dismantling and packing of some of the more delicate instruments as far as I can. Yes, you may smoke up here; hell, I do and am. But if I find one cigarette or whatever the hell those nasty things are butts on the floor or packed in with some cargo, well, I’m sure you can all get along just fine with one working kneecap.” I waited until that was translated and for the horrifying looks to subside. “OK, now we’re on the same page. If you drop, smash, or destroy anything, well, kneecaps aren’t everything my friends.” I said. Again the looks of horror. “Now, guys. This is just my way of impressing upon you that some of this stuff here is very, very delicate. Some of it’s very old and parts are probably not available. Some of these things are very, very heavy and that could take out a kneecap or scrotum easily by themselves as well; if ONE IS NOT CAREFUL!. We green?” “Green?” Chettur asked. “Yeah. Green. हरा (hara). Green as in ‘go’ because we’re on the same page and we understand each other explicitly. Green as in the color of the grass that’ll cover you if you fuck up with my stuff. Green as in You diggin’ me, Beaumont?” “AH. Ha. Hara. Green. Yes. We understand.” Chettur smiled finally getting the crux of my gist, noting the motion toward which I’ve drifted. “No, you might Chettur, but the rest of this crowd? Please interrogate and explain.” I asked. After some bad noise and a promise they could help themselves to anything in the kitchen fridge, an agreement was sorted. Extra care and damn the time clock. We’ve got a huge job in front of us and if it takes 4 days instead of two, so be it. I’ve got a lot of kit I’ve accumulated over the years, and most of it’s irreplaceable. “OK, now we’re all nice and green, let me take this time to quickly go over what you’ll be packing and transporting for me. I already have a list of the material for which I want special transport insurance. But, beforehand; let’s have a smoke, go get a coffee, tea, or whatever, and get back here all nice, refreshed, and attentive in 10 minutes. Shall we? We green, gentlemen?” I ask. “HARA!” was heard, as well as “Akhdir, as I had a few had Arabic language skills. All I know was ‘Jebel Ackdar’ means ‘Green Mountain’, so I guess that will suffice. I lit a new Cohiba #9 Oscuro cigar and made note of the strategically placed ashtrays around my lab and office. I dropped an extinguished Lucifer into one of these ashtrays and pointed to the receptacle. Chettur knew I meant for his charges to follow suit. It’s a bit bothersome moving furniture with only one functioning kneecap. I toured quickly with Chettur and gave him the highlights. He was amply impressed. I asked him to convey that same sense of wonder to his charges. A few ticks later and the crew had returned, obviously mistaking my fridge for the kitchen fridge. Instead of juices and water bottles, there were bottles, cans, and bags of beer. “OK by me,” I said, reminding everyone of the less than two functional kneecap penalties if anything’s ruined. “OK,” I say before we begin, “Most of this will not mean anything to most of you guys, but as I explained to your boss, these are delicate scientific instruments. Treat them as if they are made of very heavy and easily fucked-up glass.” They all nodded and got the idea. “OK, gents, follow me” I motioned to pile number one in my lab. “This”, I said, pointing to the bits and pieces before them, “Belongs to my eldest daughter. It is a Russian telescope; oddly enough from Magnitogorsk, Russia. It is a Stargate-500p syn-scan 508mm (20”) f/4 parabolic truss tube computerized go-to Dobsonian telescope and I don’t understand what the fuck all that was any more than you do. I do know it, in total, with clock drive and tripod weighs in at around 125 kilos. So, let’s be very careful here.” They all looked, goggled a bit at the intricacies of the instrument, and chattered among themselves. “Next on the parade is one of my reasons to live. It is my JEOL JSM-7000F Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope, and I’m one of the very, very few private citizens to own a working one. I’ve had this for years, and it’s taken me all that time to accumulate all the cryogenic and vacuum equipment as well as the gold evaporator and carbon sputter coaters. Just for grins, an elemental aluminum stub to which I affix a specimen costs $950 each.” They all jabber and recoil in shock at the costs. “Of course, I didn’t spend that kind of money on them, but it gives you an indication as to the expense of this particular piece of scientific equipment. It’s insured for over US$1 cool million. At least, that’s what I place on replacement cost. Handle accordingly.” I smile. They all smile agreeably. OK”, I continue, “Next up is my trinocular polarizing petrographic microscope. It’s an Olympus Microscopes BX51 Pol-Polarizing with BF/DF and Trinocular Head, refitted with custom-made Zeiss optics. As you might imagine, it’s old, and one of a kind. It’s also got a lot of glass, mechanicals, and other parts that are easily broken. I would be most unhappy if something happened to it or any of the peripheral equipment you see here. Green?” “HARA!” was the answer. They were actually getting good at this. Then I pointed out my 9 Halliburton aluminum camera cases. These were chock full of Canon, Nikon, Zenit, Rubinar, Kyiv, and Smena 35-millimeter camera equipment. Lenses, power winders, a FS 122 PhotoSniper, flash equipment, both digital and film. They were already armor-plated, but I wanted these characters to take it easy on this stuff as well. Next, we went into my petrology/lap (lapidary) lab. Aside from all the rock saws, tumblers, wax stations, and assorted petrological equipment, I had everything necessary to create thin sections. That is slices of rock affixed to glass slides anywhere from 30 µm (= 0.03 mm) to 10 µm (= 0.01 mm). Included in that were my lap table and vibratory lap polisher. My lap table was a hunk of cold-rolled and hardened tool steel, some 3 centimeters in thickness, 1 meter wide and 3 meters long. Luckily, it broke down into 1-meter sections, each about 215 kilos in mass. It had to be that heavy as the surface was hand-polished to an unevenness of perhaps a thousand of a millimeter across not only the connections but from one end of the table to the other. I spent days and days going over this table getting it as close to ultimate horizontalness as possible. The weight also helped to dampen vibrations. The flatness tolerance defines a zone between two parallel planes within which a surface must lie. Since flatness is applied to an individual surface, this tolerance does not need to be related to a datum. Flatness is usually used on a surface associated with a size dimension, acting as a refinement to the size requirement to ensure proper function of a part or to promote even wear. I was aiming to get flatness to less than one one-thousandth of a millimeter over a piece of steel three meters by one meter by three centimeters in thickness. Most said that was impossible. However, the more I worked at it, the more Rick Sanchez and his moody grandkid dropped by for a look and a few cold ones. When his grandkid almost refused to leave because he was reveling in the flatness of my table, I knew I was nearly there. Still, there was much consternation a the weight of the individual sections and the fact we’re about 10 meters above ground level. No matter, I sealed the deal by showing them my hydraulic-pneumatic suspended 6.5 cm (2.55”) thick, heat-treated, Rockwall 66 hardness, 1.2 meters (3.93’) diameter Vibra-lap. It is another piece of heavy steel kit that polishes rocks flatter than flat by gyratory, Earth independent, shimmying; similar to this, but larger and heavier. It was driven by a smallish 220 VAC electric motor and was covered with various degrees of diamond dust and mineral oil. An already flat hunk of rock was set down on the Vibra-lap, it switched on and the huge mass of the lap table began to vibrate, but at very low hertz, or cycles per second. It was all accumulative, as the longer you left the Vibra-lap run, the finer and finer these vibrations got and the flatter and flatter the rock face you were polishing became; down to thousands of a millimeter difference over the face of a sample. That’s a bit of the problem. The hunk of steel that makes up the working surface of the machine weighs in at about 340 kilos Or around 912 pounds for the American crowd. There was a bit of an inconvenience when I decided to assist in its initial removal and moving. True, it’s a heavy piece of kit; one who’s relocation should be attempted only by three strong men and a boy. Well… Viswarupa thought Chakravarti had it. Chakravarti thought Madhavacharta had it. Madhavacharta thought that I had it. And therein lies the problem. The lap plate was let go of by three of the four characters moving it. I was the last to let go. The plate hit the marble floor. Luckily, it was insulated from the total impact by the fingers of my left hand. Luckily. My middle finger and ring finger of my left hand are already artificial, titanium-tungsten-osmiridium alloy, and were just fine. My index finger, also artificial, was out of the line of contact. The well, little pinkie finger of my left hand was not so lucky. It got sort of, well, mashed. “Oh, fuck.” I noted. I’m no stranger to manual injuries. Yep, that pinkie finger is hosed. Busted in at least 3 or four places. But, no matter. No time for a hospital or doctor, especially during these strange times. I have Esme retrieve one of the many finger splints we keep around for just such an occasion. With a liberal application of gauze, surgical, and duct tape, we’re back in action. In case you were wondering, yes, it stung a bit. However, my left hand is so fuckered from burns, scarring, and the like, it wasn’t debilitating. In fact, I was off growling at the movers within a half hour. Continuing: There was a bit of an almost instant insurrection when I noted this piece was, in fact, one-piece and needed to be schlepped to the container as is; just let me mop off the blood. “OK, cool out,” I said and opened a door to the outside balcony. I had installed a gin pole and electrically-operated crane for just such an emergency. It could handle about 2 metric tons, so the lap table and the Vibra-lap posed no problem. OK, a little problem. They still had to manhandle the thing out the door and onto the bloody balcony. Then, once on the ground, into the container. But hey, that’s why they were making the big money. Right? But of course. Several days, and a significant dent in my fridge’s state of turgor later, the 20-foot container was nearly full. Now since shipping via container relies on volume rather than weight, we made certain all of our heaviest kit was packed throughout the container, instead of being stuffed in one end or the other, or one corner or the other. Still, it required a second crane, a larger one, to lift our container onto the flatbed semi that was going to overland this for us to Dubai,. Then onto a container ship and finally to New Jersey, if we were unlucky, or Chicago, if our luck held out. Then, once through US customs, it would be trucked to my eldest daughter’s place in central West Kansanebraskistan. Then we’d all have a grand reunion as my youngest and her latest paramour trundle down from Baja Canada to become repatriated with the gear we’ve been holding for them for the past 8 or 12 years. Like Christmas in December; we hoped out container appeared sometime in November. The jury's still out. Kind words and goods thoughts appreciated. But first, we had to make the agonizing decisions of what went and what stayed. Remember, there’s no coming back for us; this was the final exit out of the Sultanate, and as things stood, we’re leaving a shitload of machinery, electronics, and furniture behind. Virtually all my electronics, such as televisions, stereo, and such were 220 VAC. The US is 110 VAC. In my experience with voltage inverters, they simply prolong the departure phase. They are not clean enough, nor fast enough to prevent fuzzing, frosting, and frying of delicate electronics. I have to replace all the motors on my petrology equipment and SEM with equivalent 110 VAC devices when we return home. The same goes for most all my small hand tools. All 220 VAC. Easier just to replace them when we get home than drag them halfway around the world. But I’ll still miss my Dremel sets, electric beaver (German wood carver…a gift from my Mother-in-law), and some of the big electrical motors I got for a song that ran my larger rock saws. As for home electronics, we left the 75” television. Simply no room and truth be told, we weren’t’ watching that much TV anymore. We left the WiFi gizmo, modems, and other Internet goofiness as we’d get that for free at University. But the furniture. The furniture. Pure volume. Keep the dining room table and six chairs or take two china cabinets and everything within them? Keep the gabbro TV stand, which takes up a fair amount of room and weighs some 220 kilos, or take the bedroom suite? Esme and I wrangled with decisions like this for weeks. Finally, after a lot of give and take and some tearful decisions, we got everything absolutely necessary into the 20-foot container. Luckily, I dropped a few of my things with some military buddies out in Thumrait who were about to rotate back. We found enough room for Esme’s two hand-built Rosewood cabinets and her living room coffee table made from an old Omani window. Still, we were leaving a shitload of expensive furniture and gobs of household bits and pieces. Wouldn’t be the first time, though. And it’s taken time, but we realize we either ship it and essentially pay for it again, or leave it, buy new and enjoy the new furniture and old memories. But it’s still a pain in the ass to do, no matter what the logic. So, we finally got everything packed into the container that we’re going to ship. The few bits-n-bobs like clothes, my computer, and some other unleavables were coming with us in our luggage once Rack and Ruin figure a way for us out of this place. So, the first crane couldn’t lift the container because of the mass. So, we had to wait on a second crane. Of course, the lorry sent to transport our kit to Dubai was then, of course, too small; so we had to wait on another more robust prime mover. The old fridge took a serious dent during all the waiting. To be continued…
Laws are changing fast, and this guide promises to remain up to date on all possible movements concerning online poker legislation. A brief overview of each state’s stance on online poker is below, but click through for a full update on the state’s online poker laws, and gambling laws in the state in general. Alabama Legal Status of Online Gambling. Let’s clarify the legal status of online gambling in Canada to put any potential punters at ease. In short, it is illegal to operate an online casino in Canada without a license, however, it is perfectly safe and legal for Canadians to play at any offshore casino. In fact, in 2019, the gross gambling turnover at offshore casinos was c$392m with 2020 projected ... Poker – There are over 50 domestic casino locations offering poker tables across Canada. Canadians are permitted to play online poker since there are no laws that specifically outlaw it. Texas Hold’em is one of Canada’s most played poker games. Lottery – Lotteries are set up by the provinces or territories and fund local community programs. Canadian Poker Sites. The laws of Canada as they apply to online gambling and playing online poker aren’t particularly well understood for those living outside of Canada. This has led to quite a few people to consider Canada to be in a “grey area” so to speak when it comes to the legality of playing online poker there. Canada’s online gambling laws are both straightforward and confusing. On the one hand, online gambling, whether sports betting or casino gaming, is legal as long as the provider is licensed within the country.But on the other hand, Canadians use plenty of offshore online sportsbooks and casinos. Canada is known for its beauty and peace and has maintained itself extremely well. To continue peace and harmony, along with gambling entertainment, the government has made efficient gambling laws in Canada to continue gaming effectively. A fair approach toward the formation of laws has maintained unanimity between lawmakers and Canadian gamblers. Canada Poker Laws. All Canadian criminal law is enacted and enforced at the federal level (1), in contrast to the United States where each state comes up with their own criminal statutes and has their own criminal code. So in Canada, it doesn’t matter which province you live in, as the criminal laws are identical. Find all about ⚖️ the gambling laws in Canada. 🍁 We will discuss the legal status of online casinos, poker, sports betting, lottery and more. Legal Poker Canada 2021 - Find out if it's legal for CA residents to play poker online. Get up to date info on legal sites & legislation affecting them. Gambling Laws in Canada. The nation of Canada is a unique blend of natural beauty and urban modernity. From the frozen tundra of Nunavut to the steel and glass skyscrapers of Toronto, the world’s second-largest country in terms of total area has a lot to brag about. This sense of national pride also applies to their robust gaming
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