The final report on our exciting venture in plumbing and cloggery ... We have water going down the drain again. It's been a lively couple of days and cost us about $250 total, counting the various things I bought yesterday.
The plumbing professional is back with what looks like a nuclear powered subway borer. We may have to get takeout for dinner, because it's sitting in front of the oven.
Meanwhile, apropos of the bizarre Haitians-eating-Ohio's-cats canard, John Podhoretz was going on about how Americans are kook-kook-kookydoodles about pets, as if it's perfectly sensible, and it almost made me wish Haitians actually were eating pets.
And, I’m back again. I have kind of backed off recently because, I could be here most of the day, definitely the morning. This morning the farrier is coming to trim horse hooves. My horse has been having some lameness issues, so I’m really, really hoping the farrier will have some ideas. I’ve already had the vet out, and she took X-rays she was supposed to send to the farrier.
I was up early for fasting bloodwork in prep for my yearly Medicare visit, where I have to remember 3 words and draw a clock with the hands in the proper place! They really know how to make you feel upbeat about getting old!! I keep wondering what they’d do if I refused to participate.
Details at the link. I believe Dr. Westman is trustworthy. He’s a practicing physician specializing in obesity medicine, as well as a Duke U prof and obesity researcher. He’s helped patients lose tons of weight. If the support network is helpful, what he offers is not expensive. Plus, he offers free webinars on other help topics, so you can try it out and see if it’s an appealing format.
Thanks so much, Cynthia. Well, my horse is 21, and it seems to be arthritis of some sort. We have a wonderful farrier; he spent a lot of time looking at the X-rays, talking to a couple of equine vets, and giving us suggestions for how to work with this. He recommended a drug that he gives one of his horses, so we’ll try that.
It will be raining here today and maybe for several more days. We need it. The yard crunchy.
I'm back in the office today, processing voter registrations. If you know someone who might not have registered yet, tell the slackers to get moving. In most states, time is short.
I'll have research calls with co-authors today on various projects. I finished initial data collection on the new project. Long story short, what happened when the World Federation of Advertisers decided to discontinue GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media), after Elon Must and X sued them? So the question was simply "even though the lawsuit couldn't spread to them directly, was there any stock market reaction to the publicly held firms who are part of GARM"? Would investors fear a lawsuit or more merely see it as a reputational hit?
Rather than simply looking at stock prices that day, we used an event study method, where we predict what the stock price should be if nothing newsworthy occurred individually for any of those individual stocks; we compare that to the actual change, the difference being an "abnormal return". We then test if those differences are statistically significant from zero.
Drum roll, please....We found a positive abnormal return, about 0.653%. That is, stock prices on average for those 82 firms increased about 0.653% more than we should expect to see on August 9th, had it been an otherwise slow news day.
Now I also compared it for 10 other days (five days prior, five days after), and looked for any newsworthy events that day with the firms (none found). We'll report a two day cumulative abnormal return for our paper.
Next step is to see if there are moderators. I found one. About 15 stocks traded in the US on a delayed basis (their home exchange is overseas). They average close to 1.8%. Something's up with that! Gotta explore it further.
Why did I decide to study this? When I read the article announcing it I began to wonder, so I decided to look into it. Had there been no return, I'd have abandoned it. Actually, I'd have split the data in sub-samples, looking for differences in firms (the foreign exchange thingy mentioned above). But if nothing there, then it would have been a wasted week. Which is okay.
An aside about statistics. Long story short, the smaller the data sample, the larger the market reaction has to be to get statistically significant result. This study is small, about 82 firms/events. My dissertation was 2,014 events from 854 firms (but who's counting)? 🙄
Thanks for explaining why I’m seeing your posts in my Inbox again. It makes it much easier for me. I used to have to navigate to a “liked”comment, click on “view comment” then click on the substack title to navigate to the home page. It was a clumsy process to avoid having to login every time. FYI there is another substack created in response to some censoring going on at “The Front Page” called “Jotting in Purple” by Celia Paddock. She’s a great writer but the folks over there aren’t as cordial as this crew.
Not at all. I backed off because I had too much I was trying to read. I’ve been very interested in the election, but not happy with a lot of the anger. It’s always nice here, and I enjoy your writing.
The doggos are morose. Katie has been up assembling things for her quilt retreat today through Sunday. They sense it. She is getting out a suitcase, she is re-organizing things in the quilting kingdom, she seems, not stressed, but determined. That generally means she's leaving or she's taking them to the vet. Her last quilt retreat was when Zeus planned their Great Escape adventure. So I gotta be extra careful with them this weekend. They know they get fed here, and belly rubs, so they don't wanna run away. Zeus just wants to escape for the thrill of it. Hades tags along because he's ADHD, so why not?
I took Hades to the vet Tuesday. He has a growth on his eye, we're gonna have it removed. it's not cancer, but it's not a good thing to ignore. He was a good boy. The last time we took Zeus he got so stressed he peed on the receptionist area floor. And that was after we took him outside to do his business. Hades has an ear infection so they put a syringe in his ear and squirted a yellowish gunky matter into his hear. They say he might be a little hard of hearing for a day or so. I told that to Katie, she grinned.
Good morning. And welcome to new subscribers! Sunny and highs in the 80s here in the Columbus area.
The mothership (that is, The Morning Dispatch) is reporting on the status of the Ukraine War, with Iran and the People’s Republic of China lending more cooperation to Russia.
One note: Puns are the lowest form of humor. I have a habit of showing punsters the 🚪
Re: "our natural psychological tendencies toward tribal identification leads us to follow temporary fashionable thought trends as a society"
Are we posting HERE due to "our natural psychological tendencies toward tribal identification?" Or is that offset by the fact that I'm anything but "fashionable?"
Good morning. On Day 2 of our kitchen sink issue, we're washing up in our camping wash-basins - good warmup for next weekend - and waiting for it to be business hours for people in the plumbing profession. I'm going to phone my mom: at least I have something interesting to tell her.
There's nothing in a 20 year old house that can go real bad. When you started describing issues with reassembling the trap, I knew it would go this way. Snaking out sinks is easy, but it's also disgusting and outside a lot of folks oeuvre. Oh well...you tried. Most folks don't. Plumbing is kind of an acquired taste...you gotta do it a few times and it starts to make sense. I am impressed you got the trap taken apart and put back together.
New betting line...that disposer is putting so much crap down the line, it's clogged.
Disposers are loved by all, but they're messed up in all sorts of ways that folks who would otherwise be good caretakers of our planet like to dismiss as weasel minded anal retentiveness.
POI...It's "disposer", not disposal. "Disposal" is a registered trademark/copyright/something that Insinkerator grabbed. A bunch of us once got official legal notice to stop using "Disposal" in our reports because it is owned by some PE schmoes in a tower somewhere and if we continued to say "Disposal" they would take legal action. It's true.
I’ve actually read that the kitchen sink is dirtier than the toilet!!! I would think you’d have to have an awfully filthy sink, although I keep both (kitchen sink and toilet) very clean. Still, I cannot abide the idea of using the bathroom sink to wash dishes! One time a friend came to visit, walked through some mud, and washed her dirty shoes off in my kitchen sink!!! 😵💫
The nastiest thing in your entire house is the dish sponge. After that, the sink. Your phone is right down there with the dirtiest stuff. Then, your computer keyboard.
I like to think of it as continuing to build immunity. But you’re absolutely right, and I also hate door knobs or anything else you know a lot of people have touched. Oh, and then there are salad bars!! I’ve never read anything, but I don’t have any faith in those sneeze guards, along with the thought of everyone reaching in, using the same spoons and tongs.
Me too. Since I now live in (my own) apartment and it's small, I have one of those cool little Miele dishwashers that's the size of a dishwasher and it sits under the counter in the corner of my kitchen. The washcloths go in every other day.
Nope. The professional plumber thought he'd fixed it, but it turned out to be back again, stronger than ever. Maybe it's the Great Old Ones rising from the sea floor into my kitchen drain.
Could be worse ... could be raining. But seriously, it's just the kitchen sink (and dishwasher, I assume). It could be the whole house.
On the plus side, if it isn’t backing up your whole house, it’s at least a relatively contained problem. A whole house blockage can get into serious money if it involves digging up your line to the public sewer system.
A neighbor had a different surprise when her toilet water supply line corroded away and failed one night: the carpet got soaked over a quarter of her house, requiring all the carpet to be ripped out in order to rip out the plywood underlayment. A flooding issue due to a plumbing line failure is one of the most expensive homeowner insurance claims, as I understand.
This is true. The worst ones are the slow leaks where, by the time you notice it, it's trickled around into everything. Where it really gets exciting is in the condo towers. I had a client that had a small leak at their laundry and it trickled down through 37 floors, damaging flooring, walls, and the ever present mold growth....drywall is mold candy. I think the lawsuit was somewhere up around $50 million.
It has been alleged that many years ago when his wife was pregnant with twins he loved money so much he wanted to name them 𝑷𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒚 and 𝑪𝒂𝒔𝒉. 🙄 It's also been alleged her eyeroll was so loud it induced labor. Journalists are investigating.....
AND!
The final report on our exciting venture in plumbing and cloggery ... We have water going down the drain again. It's been a lively couple of days and cost us about $250 total, counting the various things I bought yesterday.
Yay!
If you’d bought this one, you could have gone into business yourself.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/VEVOR-Drain-Auger-Cleaner-75-ft-x-3-8-in-Sewer-Snake-Machine-AutoFeed-with-4-Cutters-and-Foot-Switch-for-1-in-x-4-in-Pipe-ZDJJKLSGDSTJZXGSSV1-0417/330440750
True, but getting the Parks Brothers to do it for us cost less.
The plumbing professional is back with what looks like a nuclear powered subway borer. We may have to get takeout for dinner, because it's sitting in front of the oven.
Meanwhile, apropos of the bizarre Haitians-eating-Ohio's-cats canard, John Podhoretz was going on about how Americans are kook-kook-kookydoodles about pets, as if it's perfectly sensible, and it almost made me wish Haitians actually were eating pets.
Pod does get wound up sometimes
Thanks again for putting in the effort on this and congrats on #600. That’s a lot of work.
And, I’m back again. I have kind of backed off recently because, I could be here most of the day, definitely the morning. This morning the farrier is coming to trim horse hooves. My horse has been having some lameness issues, so I’m really, really hoping the farrier will have some ideas. I’ve already had the vet out, and she took X-rays she was supposed to send to the farrier.
I was up early for fasting bloodwork in prep for my yearly Medicare visit, where I have to remember 3 words and draw a clock with the hands in the proper place! They really know how to make you feel upbeat about getting old!! I keep wondering what they’d do if I refused to participate.
Well there’s always the farrier.
Anne, following up on your comment regarding Richard yesterday, maybe he’d be interested in trying this:
https://adaptyourlifeacademy.com/
Details at the link. I believe Dr. Westman is trustworthy. He’s a practicing physician specializing in obesity medicine, as well as a Duke U prof and obesity researcher. He’s helped patients lose tons of weight. If the support network is helpful, what he offers is not expensive. Plus, he offers free webinars on other help topics, so you can try it out and see if it’s an appealing format.
I hope the farrier is able to help your horses a lot.
Thanks so much, Cynthia. Well, my horse is 21, and it seems to be arthritis of some sort. We have a wonderful farrier; he spent a lot of time looking at the X-rays, talking to a couple of equine vets, and giving us suggestions for how to work with this. He recommended a drug that he gives one of his horses, so we’ll try that.
They’d diagnose opposition-defiance disorder. 😂
I wish that was it!!
It will be raining here today and maybe for several more days. We need it. The yard crunchy.
I'm back in the office today, processing voter registrations. If you know someone who might not have registered yet, tell the slackers to get moving. In most states, time is short.
We need rain!!! We had so much earlier in the summer, and now it’s very dry. Damn that climate change! 😎
I registered back in February.
I miss that weather.
I do too, if I'm eating oysters in New Orleans. Not a bit farther north, though.
They have big oysters! Not like the ones we would get in Wisconsin. (I’ve stopped eating raw ones.)
I'll have research calls with co-authors today on various projects. I finished initial data collection on the new project. Long story short, what happened when the World Federation of Advertisers decided to discontinue GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media), after Elon Must and X sued them? So the question was simply "even though the lawsuit couldn't spread to them directly, was there any stock market reaction to the publicly held firms who are part of GARM"? Would investors fear a lawsuit or more merely see it as a reputational hit?
Rather than simply looking at stock prices that day, we used an event study method, where we predict what the stock price should be if nothing newsworthy occurred individually for any of those individual stocks; we compare that to the actual change, the difference being an "abnormal return". We then test if those differences are statistically significant from zero.
Drum roll, please....We found a positive abnormal return, about 0.653%. That is, stock prices on average for those 82 firms increased about 0.653% more than we should expect to see on August 9th, had it been an otherwise slow news day.
Now I also compared it for 10 other days (five days prior, five days after), and looked for any newsworthy events that day with the firms (none found). We'll report a two day cumulative abnormal return for our paper.
Next step is to see if there are moderators. I found one. About 15 stocks traded in the US on a delayed basis (their home exchange is overseas). They average close to 1.8%. Something's up with that! Gotta explore it further.
Why did I decide to study this? When I read the article announcing it I began to wonder, so I decided to look into it. Had there been no return, I'd have abandoned it. Actually, I'd have split the data in sub-samples, looking for differences in firms (the foreign exchange thingy mentioned above). But if nothing there, then it would have been a wasted week. Which is okay.
An aside about statistics. Long story short, the smaller the data sample, the larger the market reaction has to be to get statistically significant result. This study is small, about 82 firms/events. My dissertation was 2,014 events from 854 firms (but who's counting)? 🙄
Thanks for explaining why I’m seeing your posts in my Inbox again. It makes it much easier for me. I used to have to navigate to a “liked”comment, click on “view comment” then click on the substack title to navigate to the home page. It was a clumsy process to avoid having to login every time. FYI there is another substack created in response to some censoring going on at “The Front Page” called “Jotting in Purple” by Celia Paddock. She’s a great writer but the folks over there aren’t as cordial as this crew.
Appreciate the feedback. I had actually grown concerned that the daily newsletters were turning into spammy inbox junk for many.
Not at all. I backed off because I had too much I was trying to read. I’ve been very interested in the election, but not happy with a lot of the anger. It’s always nice here, and I enjoy your writing.
The doggos are morose. Katie has been up assembling things for her quilt retreat today through Sunday. They sense it. She is getting out a suitcase, she is re-organizing things in the quilting kingdom, she seems, not stressed, but determined. That generally means she's leaving or she's taking them to the vet. Her last quilt retreat was when Zeus planned their Great Escape adventure. So I gotta be extra careful with them this weekend. They know they get fed here, and belly rubs, so they don't wanna run away. Zeus just wants to escape for the thrill of it. Hades tags along because he's ADHD, so why not?
I took Hades to the vet Tuesday. He has a growth on his eye, we're gonna have it removed. it's not cancer, but it's not a good thing to ignore. He was a good boy. The last time we took Zeus he got so stressed he peed on the receptionist area floor. And that was after we took him outside to do his business. Hades has an ear infection so they put a syringe in his ear and squirted a yellowish gunky matter into his hear. They say he might be a little hard of hearing for a day or so. I told that to Katie, she grinned.
Jake is feeling fine today, thanks. He's sitting on the dinner table, as if there might be a meal at some point.
I have to take my dog to the vet this afternoon because he was “scooting.” Dog owners should know what I’m talking about! YUCK!
🤮
Yuck.
I know!!!
> she seems, not stressed, but determined. <
*seams
🤩😬🫠
I had a fear I as gonna get needled about that.
Good morning. And welcome to new subscribers! Sunny and highs in the 80s here in the Columbus area.
The mothership (that is, The Morning Dispatch) is reporting on the status of the Ukraine War, with Iran and the People’s Republic of China lending more cooperation to Russia.
One note: Puns are the lowest form of humor. I have a habit of showing punsters the 🚪
Phil is just jealous
I’ll have to disagree. Puns are a sophisticated art form!
Puleese! 🧐
Phil, did you hear the pun about brooms? It's *sweeping* the nation!
HI Jack. Bye Jack. 🚪
Poking the bear, I see!
I wouldn't phrase it like that...
You wouldn’t, that’s true!
Are not!
Or, as one with a rope would say, "Are knot!"
🙄
I'm wracking my brain to remember if TMBG has a plumbing related song for Cynthia.
Weird Al has a Milli Vanilli parody called "The Plumbing Song," which features lines like "don't forget my plumber" and "blame it on the drain."
I love that guy!! I actually got to see him at some big county fair in Milwaukee. Didn’t even have to pay!
We gave our son tickets for Christmas year before last and went as a family with his best friend and his family. It was a lot of fun.
Perfect. Please post for Cynthia.
Re: "our natural psychological tendencies toward tribal identification leads us to follow temporary fashionable thought trends as a society"
Are we posting HERE due to "our natural psychological tendencies toward tribal identification?" Or is that offset by the fact that I'm anything but "fashionable?"
Asking for a friend.
Does this comment make me look fat?
I knew you’d fit right in! 😆
Everything made me look fat since the Carter administration.
Then GLP-1s! I'm the slimmest I have been since basic training. 😁 And my BP is normal, to boot.
That comment looks very good on you!
Like momma always said, "You clean up real good."
Good morning. On Day 2 of our kitchen sink issue, we're washing up in our camping wash-basins - good warmup for next weekend - and waiting for it to be business hours for people in the plumbing profession. I'm going to phone my mom: at least I have something interesting to tell her.
For you, CynthiaW: The Plumbing Song by Weird Al https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sew7y_RfmY
Thanks, that was inspirational.
There's nothing in a 20 year old house that can go real bad. When you started describing issues with reassembling the trap, I knew it would go this way. Snaking out sinks is easy, but it's also disgusting and outside a lot of folks oeuvre. Oh well...you tried. Most folks don't. Plumbing is kind of an acquired taste...you gotta do it a few times and it starts to make sense. I am impressed you got the trap taken apart and put back together.
New betting line...that disposer is putting so much crap down the line, it's clogged.
Disposers are loved by all, but they're messed up in all sorts of ways that folks who would otherwise be good caretakers of our planet like to dismiss as weasel minded anal retentiveness.
POI...It's "disposer", not disposal. "Disposal" is a registered trademark/copyright/something that Insinkerator grabbed. A bunch of us once got official legal notice to stop using "Disposal" in our reports because it is owned by some PE schmoes in a tower somewhere and if we continued to say "Disposal" they would take legal action. It's true.
Are your bathroom sinks not working?
They are, but you don't wash dishes in the bathroom. That's just entropic!
I’ve actually read that the kitchen sink is dirtier than the toilet!!! I would think you’d have to have an awfully filthy sink, although I keep both (kitchen sink and toilet) very clean. Still, I cannot abide the idea of using the bathroom sink to wash dishes! One time a friend came to visit, walked through some mud, and washed her dirty shoes off in my kitchen sink!!! 😵💫
But do they both host the same species of germs? I'm inclined to think there is some difference, and different associated risks.
Is she still a friend?
I have no idea where she is these days. It happened so fast, I didn’t have time to stop her!! (We weren’t all that close to begin with.)
The nastiest thing in your entire house is the dish sponge. After that, the sink. Your phone is right down there with the dirtiest stuff. Then, your computer keyboard.
I like to think of it as continuing to build immunity. But you’re absolutely right, and I also hate door knobs or anything else you know a lot of people have touched. Oh, and then there are salad bars!! I’ve never read anything, but I don’t have any faith in those sneeze guards, along with the thought of everyone reaching in, using the same spoons and tongs.
We don't use a sponge. I throw the washcloths in the laundry regularly.
I meant to write “Miele washing machine”, not dishwasher.
Me too. Since I now live in (my own) apartment and it's small, I have one of those cool little Miele dishwashers that's the size of a dishwasher and it sits under the counter in the corner of my kitchen. The washcloths go in every other day.
The nastiest thing in my house is a political consultant. I'm gonna try to some new ways to keep them out...
I’m getting tired of the desperate text messages! How many numbers do they have, because “STOP” isn’t helping!
Good one.
The bathroom sink is too small.
Dogs drink out of the toilet... just sayin'....
Not ours!
So do cats.
I'm sorry that went south on you. Did you figure out where the problem is exactly?
Nope. The professional plumber thought he'd fixed it, but it turned out to be back again, stronger than ever. Maybe it's the Great Old Ones rising from the sea floor into my kitchen drain.
Could be worse ... could be raining. But seriously, it's just the kitchen sink (and dishwasher, I assume). It could be the whole house.
On the plus side, if it isn’t backing up your whole house, it’s at least a relatively contained problem. A whole house blockage can get into serious money if it involves digging up your line to the public sewer system.
A neighbor had a different surprise when her toilet water supply line corroded away and failed one night: the carpet got soaked over a quarter of her house, requiring all the carpet to be ripped out in order to rip out the plywood underlayment. A flooding issue due to a plumbing line failure is one of the most expensive homeowner insurance claims, as I understand.
This is true. The worst ones are the slow leaks where, by the time you notice it, it's trickled around into everything. Where it really gets exciting is in the condo towers. I had a client that had a small leak at their laundry and it trickled down through 37 floors, damaging flooring, walls, and the ever present mold growth....drywall is mold candy. I think the lawsuit was somewhere up around $50 million.
I'm going to try not to think about those things. Not that I'd care about the carpet: it's 20 years old.
Still annoying. I hope the plumbing guy doesn't add to your pain.
It's only money.
I *LOVE* money.
Oh, wait ... Does that make me evil?
Not in my book!
Fact Check: true.
It has been alleged that many years ago when his wife was pregnant with twins he loved money so much he wanted to name them 𝑷𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒚 and 𝑪𝒂𝒔𝒉. 🙄 It's also been alleged her eyeroll was so loud it induced labor. Journalists are investigating.....
It's more nuanced than that.