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Storm the Field

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Everything posted by Storm the Field

  1. Abreu and Pressley as 7th and 8th inning guys with Hader closing would fucking rock. Just don't see us dropping that kind of scratch on a closer though.
  2. Retail sales came in significantly stronger than consensus for December. Combine that with Fed officials trying to tamper down any talk of imminent rate cuts and bond yields are rising again. We're, temporarily I think, back in pattern of "economy still running hotter than Fed wants, ergo bonds go up, equities go down."
  3. Got back above freezing about an hour ago in Houston. Coldpacalypse is over. Supposed to touch 45 this afternoon and hit high 60's tomorrow before the next cold blast front in early Friday morning. Gonna be a chilly weekend with a few hours spent below freezing, but nothing to worry about. 65/45 days with rain and clouds pretty much the rest of the month starting Monday.
  4. Pertty much all ISD's in the Greater Houston area have cancelled tomorrow. No word out of HISD yet, but can't imagine they're gonna go solo as only district staying open.
  5. A lot of folks have this alternate setup. Video i watched last time below:
  6. Not quite as cold, but seeing that after a brief warmup Wednesday and Thursday, most of the state will get down to well below freezing next weekend as well. After that, final full week of the month looking like what I call "pho weather" (temps mostly in the 50's and daily rain chances).
  7. 98% on Rotten Tomatoes currently. 54/55 positive reviews. Kinda bummed it's only a 6-episode season and gonna have to wait a week a between each.
  8. Chesapeake Energy said on Thursday it would buy smaller rival Southwestern Energy Southwestern Energy in an all-stock transaction valued at $7.4 billion, a deal that would enable the second-largest U.S. natural gas producer to take the top spot.
  9. Friday morning pre gym weigh-in at 194. Down 7 lbs since 1/2. I know losing those first 5 lbs or so is the easy part and it becomes more of a grind from here, but feeling good about getting down to 190 by end of January. Scheduled cheat day tomorrow, which I'm both looking forward to (having fun with friends/coworkers and eating really good food) and dreading (being hungover on Sunday). Once Dry January ends, I think I'm gonna try and keep the lifestyle changes half-ass going through the end of February. No booze or unhealthy food absent a valid reason Monday-Friday. Free reign to enjoy but not overdo it from Saturday afternoon through dinnertime on Sunday.
  10. The accountant in the Texas Monthly story I posted was making $50K/year when he started skimming from the company back in 2005 or so. Before long, he was known to have one of the more impressive luxury watch collections in the greater Dallas area. On one shopping trip, he spent more than his entire annual salary in a single transaction, buying 5 different Rolexes. That same year, his wife spent almost half a million, ten times his legit earnings, just on private flights to their 2nd home in Santa Fe and to Aspen and Napa.
  11. The reason why banks and other companies sometimes have mandatory vacation policies for the financial/accounting people. FDIC currently recommends that all banking employees be required to either take vacation or be rotated out of their usual job rresponsibilities for at least 14 consecutive days. If a person in charge of handling money/paying invoices at a business never takes time off and never wants anyone else to handle any facet of their job, that's a flashing embezzlement warning light that at least merits increased scrutiny.
  12. You typically don't get to keep the money you're caught embezzling.
  13. I don't think most people start out intending to steal $100M. A lot of times it's just some middle-class regular joe that hits some financial trouble or wants to buy something they can't afford and they decide to try it once, swearing it'll only be this time, and they get away with it. Later they start thinking about how easy it was, and they do it a second time. And then a third, and so on. Eventually it just becomes part and parcel of their daily routine. Clock in, pay some fake invoices, move some money around bank accounts, and then start shopping for luxury goods. They get addicted to being able to buy whatever they want, and even more importantly, looking rich AF. Texas Monthly did an in-depth story a few years on a guy's years-long embezzlement scheme at the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana that really delves into the why and the how. Definitely worth a read. https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/just-desserts/ Also, back to my earlier point, the dude didn't get caught for so long because he was basically the entire accounting department and had no oversight. He got found out almost immediately after they brought in an assistant.
  14. Seems like the vast majority of fraud/embezzlement schemes that eventually come out are due to the defrauded entity having zero financial controls. It's either a small company where the accounting department is literally a single person with full access to all accounts and unilateral ability to approve invoices, or a big school or govt institution like this where nobody really notices or bothers to check into why some department is paying millions of dollars a year in invoices to some vague entity. There was a case just a year or two ago where the finance director for Yale Medical School was found to have embezzled $40M over the course of 7 years. How did she do it? She had blanket authority to approve any purchase below $10k. She would order hundreds of laptops and tablets every month, always keeping each individual purchase order under $10K, and then hand them straight to a grey-market reseller and pocket the cash. Nobody every looked into why the department needed several thousand new computers and tablets every year.
  15. Apologies for the necro bump, but I've seen this statistic pop up in recent days, and I remember it being referenced in this thread. The number seems shockingly high b/c it's not realistic, given "paycheck to paycheck", in this context, is thrown around very gratuitously. When you see something that says nearly 2/3 of people making over $100K live "paycheck to paycheck" your bullshit meter should go off. Also, your bullshit meter should go off when the solitary source that gets quoted for this statistic is a "report" put out by a personal loan company. "Paycheck to paycheck" means if you miss a paycheck, you're in deep shit. You can't make rent, your car gets repo'd, you have to take out a usurious loan or borrow from family...etc. It doesn't mean "I would have to dig into my savings/carry a credit card balance for a bit" or "I make a lot of money, but I spend like a drunken sailor and don't save or invest."
  16. And here's the chart for 2022, when revisions were positive 9/12 months, including AN UNBELIEVABLE 7 in a row to end the year. Total revisions to the upside of +311K. If anything, it looks like BLS overcorrected in 2023 after consistently undershooting for the majority of 2022. That's the whole purpose of the revisions, to attempt to give a more accurate estimate after additional time and data. I won't even charge a fraction of whatever you pay Schwab for this easily obtainable, free data.
  17. One of the all-time great jokes from 30 Rock. I spit out my drink the first time I saw this bit, and no network TV, no less.
  18. Nat gas since 12/29: Up 28% over the last 6 trading days ($2.51 -> $3.22).
  19. Dude, look at the chart. It has only rarely ever breached 100. You're assuming that it has been in contraction for 39.9 of the last 40 years?
  20. This isn't a shot or anything, because you obviously do get it, but your reference to median vs mean here is timely given that I've been watching in fascination the last day or so as a mainstream liberal econ guy has been attempting to explain the difference between median and mean to far-left Bernie bros on Twitter. A seemingly Sisyphean task if you dig through his feed the last few days. Although, once in a while, he manages to break through.
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