Process

The Order of Things

Content Warning: This is not a post about the manufactured housing industry.  This is a post about option pricing.  Readers looking for the usual crap can click here,   here or here. In the fifth and sixth seasons of The Crown, now-King Charles is played by Dominic West.  This causes cognitive dissonance.  Dominic West is …

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BOHICA All Over Again

There are two reasons I regret not having served in the military.  The first is that military service gives people license to bend the English language.  Why say ‘A’, ‘F’ or ‘R’, if you can say alpha, foxtrot or Romeo?  The -FU acronyms, like SNAFU, FUBAR and TARFU, are like rhyming slang with free beer …

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Everything You Wanted to Know About VIX But Were Afraid to Ask

Content Warning: The following post contains a disquisition about option pricing.  Readers who are sensitive to this type of content, or who seek salacious details about park residents, decaying infrastructure, baseball bats and large men chasing other men wearing diapers should turn to other posts on this blog. In the climactic scene of the movie …

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Tufte Guys

An Ordinary Day for a Manager of a Manufactured Housing Community Everyone should at least flip through Edward Tufte’s books once.  The first book that Tufte published is called The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  The second is called Envisioning Information and the third is Visual Explanations.  They never get boring, but they all come …

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Ceci N’est Pas un Post

TABLE I According to Websters, a blog post is an entry or article that is written on a blog. It can include content in the form of text, photos, infographics, videos, or deep-fakes. Chez Dirt Lease, a post is an insightful one-to-two thousand word essay that views consciousness, history, sex and the rest of the …

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Vampire Squid

Chat GPT – write a paragraph about Goldman Sachs as a squid: Goldman Sachs is a well-known investment bank and financial services company, often referred to as “The Squid” due to its logo resembling a squid. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs has grown to become one of the most influential and profitable financial institutions in …

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Baksheesh

When my eighth-grade biology teacher asked our class if any of us remembered the word for white blood cells, a guy named Jonathan Harvey raised his hand and shouted, ‘Homocyte!’  The word he was half-remembering was phagocyte, which is a type of white blood cell.  If you trace the Greek root of that term, it …

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Forty Thieves

The Hainan Island Incident of 2001 is overshadowed by events that happened later that year, but when it transpired, it set the then-still-nascent Internet abuzz.  An American spy plane, which had been flying over a disputed section of the South China Sea, collided with a Chinese fighter jet and was forced to make an emergency …

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