Monday in the Trenches – Fed Week Looms

CLEAR YOUR BROWSER CACHE.  This will speed up the recovery of UrbanSurvival on your computer.

I’ll save the discussion of the website issues (oddly: 10 hours after my space-time bending effort, and as Hank noted, also its Retrograde time, anyway.  And I tend to run three weeks ahead of retrograde, but more on the back end.  Markets are still opening, so with too much coffee and being up most of the night, let’s roll into it.

Markets Flatten

This is Slow Joe’s first overseas trip.  Then the Fed FOMC gavels in tomorrow.  “What are we to make of it?” wonder the markets.

Apparently not much.  With 2-1/2 hours to the open, the Dow is up only 10 points…which seems constructive.  Until you put that in context of a 200 day annual trading ball park.  That would be a 2,000 point rally in a year.  Not squat for a return on printing $120-billion (plus) per month.

The two 900-pound gorillas in the background?  China (China denounces G7 statement, urges group to stop slandering country | Reuters).  And then there’s the changeover in Israel: (Israel’s new government gets to work after Netanyahu ouster (apnews.com).

If you want to hunt for something smaller than gorillas?  Well, bigger than a possum (for sure) is what’s going on with Bitcoin: $39,396 earlier.

Our pals in the lumber industry are seeing a continuing slide down to $1,059 early.  Which doesn’t sound like much, until you consider the all-time high a short while back was up in the $1,700 plus range.  I figure the $1-thousand handle shortly.

That kick-ass drop in the lumber prices will be in the market eventually.  But the horror stories from neighbors who’s been to the Big Box stores will singe your hair.  Amazing.

Bloomberg had a good post over the weekend “Lumber Prices Post Biggest–Ever Weekly Drop With Buyers Balking.”  The point LOOB made in the comments last week (about how much per hour a couple had to make just to buy the over-priced roof) was exactly on point.  While housing may go up at an astronomical rate due to money-printing madness, there comes a point where people simply walk away.

Oh – when they do?  Society Collapses.  Joseph Tainter’s classic “Collapse of Complex Societies” will teach oodles to would be liberal economists who think Modern Monetary Theory is unlimited.  The Anasazi and other cultures demonstrate mass walk-outs are real.  Who saw those coming?

All leads up to the hyperinflation “Transitory Scam” written up over on ZeroHedge today.

Short Takes

If you’ve got to have a server collapse, might as well be in the summertime.

You know our assessment of the Doldrums Arriving is spot-on when the International Biz Times rolls out 15 Best Shows To Binge-Watch On Netflix.

It’s so quiet out here in the woods, you could hear a price drop.

BS Walks.  Or, more properly jets home.  G7 summit: Leaders pledge climate action but disappoint activists.  Probably because some are figuring that climate is a hard sell (sort of like vaccine hype is diminishing).  And because people are not (*yet) dumb enough to agree to a Global Tax.

Wind Up Joe:  stick a quarter in him or leave a mic open and oh, gee… “President Biden Says U.S. Credibility Restored on World Stage After G-7.”  Think he’s gonna call out his buddies?  Hah!  Good one!

Who’s for lunch, dahling?  Queen to meet Joe Biden at Windsor Castle.  Bet me who gets stuck for the tab.

Crooked Nancy, speaking of BS, is defending the Marxists in her House.  Pelosi calls Omar ‘valued member’ of Democratic caucus, looks to move past controversial remarks.  Amazing how people fall for stuff.

Clinton Murder chain, continuing?  Bound to cross the minds of people who understand clear-thinking and can do basic probability math.  This as the reporter who broke the Bill Clinton- Loretta Lynch planes meeting in Phoenix story is dead.  Think I’m skeptical of the reported “suicide?”  (*Who, me?)

Things are Bigger in Texas:  In the weekend race to pop the most rounds as One suspect arrested and another remains at large after Texas mass shooting that injured 14 people.   Ohio’s gunplay didn’t even come close “Cincinnati shooting injures 4 people — including 2 children.”

Broken Web

Everything was fine and dandy on Sunday morning.  Good ShopTalk Sunday column and an hour of heavy yard work before the yellow blaster in the sky warmed up.

Then came the emails: UrbanSurvival was down.

I will save the details for later, but if you got to Peoplenomics – good for you!

We’d put in site forwarding (designed to point all calls to the (still) broken site to a new one.  Problem is we are not propagating very fast.

When it dawned on me (about 9 PM last night) that we’d be having to propagate web pointers around the world twice, the decision was made (Zeus the Cat consulting) to go ahead and get up at 2 AM and start the process of moving to a new hosting provider.

Sadly, my long-time friend, who ran the hosting operation where Urban lived before – 15-years of great service and friendly advice – died in mid May.  I made the classic assumption that they would have a solid follow-up plan but, no actually, not.  At least by the look of it from here.

Looks like a large part of the summer will be enjoyed right here in my office chair.  Except for food and beverage runs and Elaine’s PT.

A Sample of Broken Web

You may not have read my 2012 book “Broken Web” but the research for that lit my hair on fire.  It’s why I have not one, but two websites.  The thinking was that one would be a fail-over to the other.

The problem with failovers (simply pointing UrbanSurvival at the Peoplenomics site) all takes time.  24-48 hours.  Rather than be “down” for two more days (for sure and for certain) I took the gamble at 2 AM and fired up a new hosting provider.

That has been stable enough (though it comes and goes) to let me at least get started on the recovery.  My thanks to my buddy Gaye Levy over at https://strategiclivingblog.com for sorting through hosting providers and such.

The rollover to the new site could take a week – and maybe longer.  Rest assured, though, that I’m doing my dead-level best to keep everything rolling (not to mention the daily prose and Peoplenomics report to come Wednesday, too).

It’s been a shock, but somehow not.  The web is becoming a notorious digital rework of the wild days of the American West.  Except instead of some 16-year old immigrant Irish kid with a six-shooter in Dodge City, the modern replay has a 16-year old code-slinger somewhere in Eastern Europe.

Interesting times we live in.

I will get the comments features turned back up as soon as possible because that “assembly of like-minded people” has been incredibly valuable.

Actual cause?  Unknown.  Do know the hard drive is full on the old server and I can’t recover some things I’d like.  Because  the drive keeps filling up again.

It’s on a “virtual private server” and I figure the network admin getting hacked (and taking down a lot of sites) may be going on.  But we’ll see.  Maybe an SSD failure?  But the timing.  Right after the space-time experiments Saturday.

Maybe I said something that pissed off someone really, really big?

The latest technical chit-chat with Marcell (kind of IT support guys) is:

“I’ve checked the DNS history using SecurityTrails’s DNS history tool and I’ve found the previous IP 45.33.29.40 where your domain was pointing to.

After setting my host’s file on my computer to point the domain to the old previous host 45.33.29.40, I could indeed replicate the same issue.

This simply confirms that the error on your end is still coming from the old provider. This is just DNS propagation as you have said earlier.

Please give it some hours while the DNS propagation is completed over the web and you should not experience any further issues.”

All takes time…sorry to say.  But better to go through it once than twice.

Write when you get rich and I’ll answer as time permits.

George@Ure.net