Georgia, the All-Star Game, and the Spiral

 Yesterday, the decision was made...the 2021 All-Star Game for major-league baseball....will NOT be held in Atlanta.  This revolves the voting measure that was passed.

I've spent an hour looking over the story, and the economics.

First, there was a $37-to-$190-million pay-off for the city and region.  Cost for local taxpayers to host?  It was figured to be around $2-million (more or less).  

From that pay-off....a fair amount went toward services (both at hotels and the stadium) that employed blacks....so the cancellation hurt a fair number of local folks.

Second, by the half-way point of this season...at least half the clubs will be talking about this 'little' problem where a Friday night game is only getting 12,000 fans when it used to be 30,000 to show up.  

Third, merchandise hurt?  Go ask at the end of the season....how much merchandise sat there on shelf and was never purchased.

Fourth, getting all baseball announcers to avoid the discussion or topic of the All-Star game?  Nearly impossible, and I'll predict that ten of the announcers are terminated by the end of June over this problem.

So what'll happen?  I'll predict the teams hold a meeting the week after the All-Star game and demand some kind of compensation for their losses....which the league management can't produce.

At the conclusion of the season, the losses will figure upwards to one-third to half of what they'd typically make.  

If this goes into 2022 as well?  You just start laughing over the business plan....it won't work.

Observations:

 1.  Some leaked story started up....President Biden promises 'indirect' talks with Iran over nukes. 

Much to the story?  No.  

What it might mean?  A third-baseman from the Dodgers might be sent to Iran to talk over the nuke business.  As leaks go, this is a 2-star deal and not much attached to it.

2.  The baseball 'dumping' of Atlanta for the All-Star game?

By the time that the boycott hits maximum overdrive.....I would figure that the MLB folks lose around one-third to half of their attendance numbers and TV viewers.  Merchandise?  It'll be hit hard.  Some teams....particularly around the south (Marlins for example) might be in deep financial trouble by the end of the season.  

On the positive side....two seasons of this would be enough to wipe out five or six teams, and that might be a gain for both leagues.

3.  Did the NY Times suggest propaganda for the Biden infrastructure project?

Well....yeah.  Some folks were shocked.

My suggestion is that this will 'fumble' around the House for six weeks, and Pelosi will tell the White House to trim this down by 50-percent and resubmit.  

4.  Somewhere in this Biden infrastructure deal....$20 billion....mandated to reconnect neighborhoods suffering by racism.

I thought this was a joke....well, no, it's not.  Two short-range interstates (one in NY and other in New Orleans) are identified as harming the black community and would be taken down.  So access to these short pieces of transport would be terminated.  

I suspect once the communities realize the negative aspect....they will be furious.

The Fake Cow Story

 There is a lot to this story which has not been totally laid out, and maybe it never gets completely told.

So there's this guy....Cody Allen Easterday (almost 50 years old).  He's from central Washington (around Mesa, about 50 miles east of Yakima).

Easterday had this deal with Tyson Foods...involving beef.  

Not much is said over his ranch operation.  Mesa is a fairly rural town....maybe 500 in the town itself.  

Easterday had a deal fixed up where Tyson and another company was paying him money to 'feed' cattle.  He would purchase cattle....then feed them (with special money from Tyson), then send them to the butcher at the right time.  

So in this situation....while you might think it was a measly $100,000 or $300,000....all total....Tyson and this partner had paid this guy $244-million.  There were apparently hundreds of thousands of cows in the middle of this deal.  

The deal said that once the cow was slaughtered and sold (market price)....retaining the money as profit was in Easterday's hand.

So back in 2016....a whole bunch of fake, false and fraudulent invoices occurred.  Tyson at the time....didn't figure this out. 

In the middle of this effort....some cows simply didn't exist.  Yeah....fake cows.  As weeks and months went by....more fake cows were created.  No one from Tyson ever came out to view tens of thousands of cows.  

During this period....cattle futures were beginning to be affected....the stock market was affected to some degree by fake cows.  Yes, even the futures market was affected....by non-existent cows.

I sat and looked over the story.  There's at least a hundred questions I would ask.

Was Easterday even a rancher? Where did Easterday get the idea to invent fake cows?  Why didn't Tyson ever send a guy out to view the 10,000-odd cows?  

I think this would make a fine 5-star movie....fake ranch, fake cows, fake round-ups, fake cowboys, fake business routine, incompetent company officials, etc.

What'll happen to Easterday?  Well....the question of the money will come up.  Where is the 200-plus million today?  Is it still in the US?  Jail-time?  He might get a decade in prison....but he'll be eventually released.  

The futures market?  How do you go back and rectify this?  

Migrants, Biden, and 2022

 This week, if you followed CNN....they had two numbers that they put up (different days).

The first....they had a guy who says that 25,000 juvenile kids will cross the border and be a US problem.  

I sat and looked at the story.  Actually, if you use current numbers, current trends....then they will hit the 25,000 juvenile number by early August.  So it's more likely to be 40,000 to 45,000 by 1 January.  

This guest on CNN was just half right.  

Second, another guest came on and said the current trend appears to show that 2-million migrants will cross the border and be intercepted.  The number not intercepted or that makes it past the border patrol?  Unknown.  

One might take the general numbers and just take a wild guess....that another 2-to-3 million make it.  

Where this leads onto?  I would suggest three scenarios being played out:

1.  Whether President Biden/VP Harris believe it....this actually snowballs into the number one political 'crap' for them to clean up by early 2022, which no clean-up solution fits their current agenda.

2.  A whole bunch of two-million-plus migrants arriving in the midst of a downward economy?  Go ask the economic professors how this plays out in reality, and it's a dismal script.  

3.  Finally, you come to this issue of the two-million being simply the 'front-end'....what happens in 2022?  Another two to three million?  

All of this leads to a hectic 2022 primary period, with various Democratic House members having to explain things, which don't sell well to 75-percent of districts across the United States.  

I'll take a humble guess that there is this wave coming in November of 2022....where sixty-odd seats held by Democrats will flip, and leave Biden's team in a rough position....where they might decide to hold an impeachment over the Ukraine things, and financial deals with Hunter Biden.  

As for Biden's ticket to survive?  It wouldn't shock me if he suddenly had a 180-degree turn on immigration and suddenly invested 150-billion dollars in the border fence deal.  

E-Car Charging Station Scheme?

 It's just an odd thing when you look at the Joe Biden 'Jobs for America' deal....in the midst of this....he wants a fair amount of money to be geared toward charging stations.  

As of December 2020....1.74-million E-cars in the US now exist.  If you were looking for the public charge-up stations?  Around 17,256 stations exist....with a minimum of two ports (some having a dozen ports).

From two years ago in Alabama....there were a grand total of 115 charging stations.  That's it.

If you hang around Lexington, Kentucky....there are 73 charging stations within the city limits. 

How much use are these getting?  Unknown.  No one talks about the amount of power being 'purchased' or 'consumed' via these public stations.  It's an odd thing.

Two years ago....some German reporters noted a charging station in a rural area of Germany along a autobahn.....next to a McDonalds.  One station.....two ports.  The reporters went over and asked the McDonalds folks....if they'd ever seen anyone parked and charging over the past two years (since they went up).  The crew said no....day or night....no one ever seemed to pull in and charge up.  

My humble guess is that Joe Biden's team has joined up with the charge-up 'mafia' and there's going to be 100k charge-up stations placed around the country....in places where they might only be used five to ten times a year.  

How much do you typically pay at a public charging station....compared against doing the re-charge at your house?  In some cases....at maximum 'pain'....it's 300-percent of what it'd cost at your house.  Right off the bat....no one is going to do public station re-charge at that rate....they will try to stall and make it home....to get the cheaper rate.

How much does the public charging station itself cost?  If you consider the real estate purchase....the concrete for the drive-in....then you've laid down around $25,000 easily.  The electric hook-up, the machine, and the charge-card assembly?  That's probably going to be a minimum of $15k added.  In places like Boston or Chicago....toss in another $30k for fees, lighting, mark-up.  

The odds that Biden 'stations' will all be put in places with marginal use and no pay-back?  It's best not to bring up this scenario.  

If you wake up in some rural area of Alabama, and there's a new charging station (four ports) set up in town?  And within ten miles....there's only three guys with E-cars?  The odds are that it's just one or two 'visitors' to Alabama over the next five years who will visit the Biden-station.  

Yeah, it's a waste of money, but don't tell anyone about this. 

Being At An Intersection

 There's a piece I read over this morning....discussing this serious 'junction' which the news media has come to, and unable to grasp the direction ahead.

Are we in an era of 'hope' or an era of 'turmoil'?

Under the Trump-agenda news....it could only be an era of 'turmoil'.

But to enter the era of 'hope'...you need evidence or persuasion-factor....to carry the load.  Apparently, the news folks are having a problem....they don't see enough change to jump on the 'hope' era, so logically....this should mean they still market their brand of turmoil.  But if you sell turmoil....it hurts the Biden-message.

So they are standing there....in the middle of a road, and unable to really move ahead.

For four years, CNN sold a remarkable amount of 'doom'.  In the past month or two?  You get the impression that they'd like to move on, but they look over and realize that around one-third of their viewers have quit.  So it begs the question...were they (the one-third crowd) there to watch 'doom' episodes mostly?  

I sat and pondering over this.  I just wasn't (for the past four years) that much of a CNN viewer.  You couldn't convince me to sit for forty-five minutes to get anti-Trump news....day after day.  I might have watched ten minutes a day of CNN...mostly hoping that they'd accidentally do a ten-minute segment on world events.

Flipping things around to be purely an era of hope?  To be honest, I don't want fake hope analysis, or fake-hope achievements, or fake-hope chat forums.  

I also don't need four guests with a moderator to spend an hour talking about fake-hope coming in micro 'bursts'.

Instead of arriving at the 'Y' in the road, with hope on one side and turmoil on the other side....I think it's more a double-Y, with fake news and biased news as also part of this trip.  

Maybe it's best to just halt at the intersection, and sip a bit of brandy at this point....waiting for things to resolve themselves.  

The Fake Story Over Black American Farmers

 Around three years ago, some news folks started the black farmer story of woes, and talked about the numbers of black farmers in the 1920s.  One million black farmers existed.  

Today?  45,000 are all that exist.  A story of woe?  No.

The farm population in 1920 consisted of 32-million total.....black, white, Asian, Latino, etc (around one-third of the nation was within this group).  In the 1920s....industry arrived and offered better paying jobs, and automation started to show up.  You didn't need four guys to operate a 100-acre farm as you got into the 1950s/1960s. 

So a second event started to occur.  People reached a point where 50 acres of farmland did not provide the type of income to 'survive'.  

If you walk around today....if you say black-ownership....49-percent of people qualified as black farmers....run a 50-acre or smaller operation.  The rule-of-thumb is that a 50-acre farm (at best) is enough to have around 25 to 30 head of cattle.  You'd have support this with feed, and draw upon your expenses....to make this work....so the simple idea of a guy trying to get ahead with 50 acres....is fairly stupid....yet 49-percent of black farm ownership falls into this category.

Getting to the 180-acre or larger farm (up to 1,000 acres)?  Thirteen-percent of black-owned farms fall into this category.  This is likely one of the two scenarios where black-owned farms are fairly successful (the other second is the 1,000 acre or more farms).

Trying to suggest racial discrimination?  Once automation came, and manpower became the 'thread' of financial success....where you needed to have a farm of significance (180 acres or more)....the business model of the small-time farm dissolved away.  It went that way for blacks and whites.  The only way to make real profit off 50 acres or less....is to run some bio-home garden operation, and selling garden products to local grocery or stand operations.  If you don't modify your farm plan....you don't survive.

So I look at these journalists and politicians....who mostly have never been to a farm in their life, and wonder if they grasp the history to this.  

The other odd part of this story trend?  State by state, the black farm ownership differs.  

Back in 2012....out of California, there were a total of 126k farmers in the state.  Of that....ONLY 526 were black.  

A 2007 study by USDA showed that the majority of black-owned farms were actually cattle ranches (near 45-percent).  Black farms producing fruits and nuts?  If you took all farms (blacks and whites in the mix) in the nation....barely five-percent of them produce fruits and nuts, of that....black owned farms marginally had around two-percent of the deal.

If you were looking for states with higher numbers of black farm ownership....it's in the south....now on the west coast, eastern seaboard or northern frontier of the US.