Now initially you might think you don't need or even want to know about
butyrate (ˈbjuːtɪˌreɪt) noun,
any salt or ester of butyric acid, containing the monovalent group C3H7COO- or ion C3H7COO–, and when you then bumped into this, having first found out it is in butter, you might well panic:
Examples of butyrate in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
Clear plastic screwdriver handles are usually made from cellulose acetate butyrate, a material developed in the 1930s.
— Roy Berendsohn, Popular Mechanics, "Why Do My Old Plastic Screwdriver Handles Stink?," 8 Oct. 2017
But then you would realize that lately it has had a great rise in reputation and helps maintain your biodome and aids in the production of key neurotransmitters that help both our gut and our brains to work. Apparently we make it when bacteria in our bellies ferment high fibre carbohydrates, but it is also, and here is the punchline, found in butter! The highest food source for it. I am relieved, and think I will just butter up everything!
At least these verbose scientist think so:
The neuropharmacology of butyrate: The bread and butter of the microbiota-gut-brain axis?
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Extremely interesting revelation over at Dan’s today. Yesterday, October 31, 2014, with metals in the toilet, Eric Sprott was on KWN with this punchline of a statement:
“Again, I just think that owning paper assets is the worst thing that anyone can do, and they should continue to buy and own physical metals.”
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/10/31_Billionaire_Eric_Sprott_Says_Stock_Market_Will_Crash,_Not_Gold.html
THE SAME DAY, he sold $2M worth of his Gold Trust, for cash.
https://www.canadianinsider.com/node/7?ticker=PHY
That is about the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in the whole sorry metals saga, and I’ve seen a lot.
Move Eric Sprott to the head of the class of criminal hucksters and charlatans.
Yes – sauce for goose not sauce for gander. All the same, and it is so sad. I helped make him rich.
Here’s a song for all those hucksters out there. And what’s with giving Canadians a bad name?
Or this classic from our maligned Beatles:
http://youtu.be/Qxd-kWMzZNk
Daylight dang savings … what a strange thing to do, making it darker in the afternoon in winter.
I thought I had gone crazy because it was 8 when I stepped outside, according to my phone, and 9 when I came back inside according to the nuke. Amazing breath of fresh air, so to speak, was my first thought …
Just catching the tail end of “Slap Shot”. Old Time Hockey, boys! Whack!
Latest polls are pushing the Dems chance of holding the Senate down to about 1 chance out of 4, rather than the 1 out of 3 that had held for months. We really need to run the table on a string of three or four underdog miracles. I’m no pie-in-the-sky dreamer. The barbarians are definitely at the gate. Will the center hold? That won’t really be decided until The Final Battle in 2016.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/senate-update-democrats-chance-of-holding-on-continues-to-fall/
I’ll have commentary here on election night, but it is likely to be more of a “cry in your beer” sort of evening.
I think I’ll go run the dogs. Best way to keep from crying.
I have only just started to watch the pilot of Nixon’s the One, a free on youtube series made by Harry Shearer, the voice of Principal Skinner and Montgomery Burns (Nelson too and a gazillion others I am sure), but am going to post a link to it. I heard about it in a very favourable interview with Shearer, and they have recreated the dialogue from the tapes, obviously sections they chose, but as accurately as possible. The cameras are where the microphones would have been and it is really good. Other than there must be some selection bias, and Shearer is comfortably left, he clearly got into Nixon’s skin. It was filmed in England, oddly, and in the interview Shearer mentioned that working in America people didn’t care about veracity, but the actors and film crew in this production he said leapt at the idea of accuracy and they worked from the actual tapes, listening to the conversations. It was a 360 degree set, accurate to Nixon’s Oval Office, and Shearer also said that because there was no off stage, once you stepped in to the office, it felt strangely real. Interesting project. The film makers got rights in Europe and Ireland but it was distributed free on youtube everywhere else.
Nixon’s the One: “Henry”
I guess ol’ Tricky Dick wouldn’t be a fan of “Project Runway”, eh? I’m not really either, but now maybe I gotta start.
Two minutes until metals open. What’s the bet? 50 bucks down? or just meh?
Yes, I sold all my miners, and all my silver, and a few oz of gold, all at much higher prices, but the rest of the gold is weighing on me like an albatross.
What’dya think? Too late to dump now? I’m not so sure. I’m pretty much out of love with the whole narrative. And it’s been 30 years, so it’s not some recent crush. I’ve panned for gold in ice cold creeks, for chrissakes.
Even as an inflation hedge, stocks have done better long term than gold. The numbers don’t lie. Stocks pay a dividend. Stocks are companies with underlying earning power. What does gold have? If I ever thought gold had something, I don’t even remember now what it was.
Still, when you hold some in your hand, the weight of it, it’s magical…
I do still find comfort in having some physical … was discussing it the other day with our investment guy … a few coins is still months of rent. But I have always been a many eggs in many baskets person.
And it is a meh, but a downward meh.
Nixon’s the One: “Secrets” [it just gets worse!]:
I used to find that comfort. I miss the feeling. Now all I feel is opportunity cost. It feels like dead money.
Some bullshit political commercial was on just now. I couldn’t even tell you the candidate. The thought that popped into my head was “how come nobody ever says they want to cut business waste?”
That’s it! Let’s cut the dead wood out of corporate America. And out of all the mom and pop businesses too. And don’t deny it, there’s a lot of idiot kids and nephews employed there, making big salaries for reading the paper, who could never hold a job anywhere else.
OK, “reading the paper” is an anachronism. More likely getting paid to surf porn sites.
I guess I feel fortunate to be able to be diverse. No home runs, plodding along. One goes up and the other goes down. But a ratchet effect. But I certainly know what you mean. It is like me wrapping my head around investing with borrowed money … it seems insane but if interest rates are low and dividends are high … and I took forever to try to accept that all money was equal, and I still thank heavens to murgatroid that we had education savings funds for the kids. But yes, compartmentalizing investments is wrong, while diversifying is good, and sticking with a proven loser is an odd strategy, I confess. But it is now a much more insignificant component of the overall shamozzle.
Intellectually, I know it. Diversification. One goes up, one goes down.
But…in my heart, whatever the laggard is, has to be dealt with. Each dollar is my employee, and only exists to increase my hoard. Whoever falls behind, gets the lash.
I know it’s not right, but it is what it is. I ride this stuff 24/7. Always have. And the one thing I can say is, I’m no genius, but I’m a survivor. From the Crash of 87, the Mexican debt crisis, to the crash in, what was it, 91 or 92?, to the the Russian debt crisis, to the Thai baht crisis, to the LTCM crisis, the whole tech bubble, and tech wreck of 2000, the peak oil bubble slash real estate bubble slash stock bubble, in 2008, the gold bubble in 2011, and now whatever the hell this is we got now, the one constant is…I’m still here, and not doing too damn badly either, if I do say so myself.
A lot of those events I listed off seem like they must be nothing now. They’ve disappeared from the history books. They seem like nothing compared to NOW. Well, isn’t that always the way? At the time, they were HUGE, earth shattering events, end-of-the-world potential events. CNBC on at 3 in the morning events. And some pimple faced kid today is going to tell you that today’s BOJ crap is the most important thing that’s ever happened? Gimme a fucking break! I’ve been around the block and these kids have no idea!
Sorry for the rant, this shit pisses me off.
Gonna go take a sauna.
Every time I see “they have no idea” in print, I have to play Cramer’s rant. I have more of a rant all cued up, but I’ll just internalize it and go and sweat for a while instead. Enjoy.
It is true that Bernanke has no idea how bad it is out there. I doubt he even carries a wallet. Cramer is a huckster, but even hucksters are sometimes right.
I never get tired of that clip. It is just so…out there! And poor Erin, trying to break in.
“Cramer”
“Cramer”
Just too funny.
Well, it seems no markets have melted down (or up) overnight, so off we go on maybe an uneventful day. We could use one. October was crazy. Why is it always October when the wild stuff happens?
A pre-election flurry followed by a calm before the storm? But I have noticed it really happens in industry too, at least in the telecom and engineering world that we inhabit, October was always a nightmare as though people felt winter coming and had to get everything done at once. Deadlines galore and then it would all fade away until some spring kerfuffle.
I think for a variety of reasons I am trying very hard to keep everything on a level field right now, and that also influences my investments. But the current strategy we are using with stocks pretty much has us picking up the under-performers and not getting caught up on runs by re-balancing on an ongoing basis, but all within a tight crowd, trading apples for apples so to speak, while hoping to pocket dividends that out-pace the now structured debt. I am certainly feeling that it is sound, and so far so good.
We used to watch Cramer … throwing chairs and peddling stocks while astonishingly not having a heart attack on-air. But it would be good for ratings!
Now it causes too much angst.
The more I dig into the math behind rebalancing strategies, and run some actual backtests, the more I’m impressed. Say for example with a basic portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds, simply rebalancing once a year really adds up to an impressive advantage over the long term. Always selling a little of what got expensive, and buying a little of what got cheap.
Add that to the reality of compounding, and it’s huge. If you just generate a point or two better per year, it’s a gargantuan amount of money over a 20-30-40 year span.
Yeah, right now 75% equities and heading to 25% fixed income (still have cash), and every quarter he wants to rebalance within grouped sectors. So say we had allocated some portion of those equities to banks and insurance companies, and some had lost a little and some had gained, we resell so we have the same initial amount of cash, or more hopefully, invested in each company, equally, or almost equally being on the dividend hunt. And adding and subtracting companies as appropriate. We did a good catch save.
Also, this friend has generated a fabulous spreadsheet that really encapsulates the whole thing – so you can see everything you own, not broken up by account type, at once. Makes decision making a breeze, and anyhow I do everything he says.
Bottom line is still that I feel very fortunate to be able to be making these kinds of choices.
Good Morning.
For reasons that totally escape me, this song has been playing in my head for days. So I thought I would share my haunting and try to pass it on to someone else:
good morning. an ever so slight bake to start the workday.
It can smooth the rough edges, and I am your pal this morning …
Good Morning, Pete!
Election Day is here, and it looks bad. There’s no way to sugar coat it. Statisticians are giving the Dems about a 1 in 4 chance of holding the Senate. Could be worse, I suppose. Those are better odds than Romney had in 2012.
Here’s the short version of how it shakes out. Dems are stuck at 45 seats and they need to get to 50. We have slim 1 or 2 point leads in North Carolina and New Hampshire. That gets us to 47, but then it gets harder. We’ll need a string of poll defying miracles after that.
The situation in Kansas, where an Independent is in a dead heat, and then might caucus with the Dems, is a possibility, but we still need to find a way to 49 on our own.
The chances are in Iowa (down 2 points going in), Colorado (down 2), Georgia (down 2), and Alaska ( down 2). We need upsets in 2 out of 4 of those, just for Kansas to possibly save us.
In the Wisconsin governor’s race, in our attempt to unseat our very own Tea Party Fascist gov, same story. Down (you guessed it) 2 points.
Partisan Dems will spend the day passing around anecdotes about early voting in Iowa, Hispanic voting in Colorado, and big turnout in far flung Alaskan fishing villages. I’m under no illusions. This will take a miracle.
Still, there’s nothing to do but continue to fight the good fight. It’s too important to just give up and stay home.
It is a built in feature of the American system, that now you have had 6 years of a Democrat for president the Senate will swing Republican. More of a vote the bastards out than a voting of the bastards in.
But yes, the polls are looking more like Elephants than Donkeys, or is it the other way round?
And it lets Obama off the hook for the rest of his presidency because he can blame an intractable Senate.
Yes, I think voting is important still. When the politicians know they have apathetic voters it is much worse.
Son and girlfriend were going to be slackers. “Oh, I don’t know where to vote. Oh, I don’t know how to prove my residency, blah, blah, blah.”
Papa got them all straightened out. Turns out it’s simple, and their polling place is practically right in their back yard. But, hey give the kids a break. 5 months just wasn’t enough time to figure this stuff out. JFC!
Daughter voted an hour ago. First timer, 18 years old.
Let this be the hour, when we draw swords together, kiddos.
Paul Farrell is prone to hyperbole, but that’s part of his charm. I don’t always agree with him. In fact not that often at all anymore. He’s usually just over the top for the sake of being over the top. But I think he nailed this one.
Opinion: Ayn Rand vs. Adam Smith: the only midterm election that counts
That was a well written piece. Imagine someone else going to bat for Adam Smith and actually reading Moral Sentiments too. The invisible spectator keeping one moral. And also Adam Smith didn’t include any painfully embarrassing sex scenes.
yup Xty. we tried to talk about this last week if i recall.
http://www.xtybacq.com/here-she-goes-again-going-to-bat-for-adam-smith/
about to go vote. i won’t be voting for Paul Ryan.
here is a song being played somewhere. thank you Xty for all.