Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for January 24, 2020

Must be time to buy catfood.

Looks like the crazy cat lady from the Simpsons.

She understands the stock market so well that she’s now homeless.

Around here, the street people are quite likely to be what my mother used to call “mental” because we have nowhere near enough mental health and meds available to really pretty much anybody (even good insurance doesn’t pay for enough treatment). It’s not exactly common to see a person much like the one depicted who is in the throes of a full blown episode, but it’s common enough so I’m no longer surprised… just saddened.

Paulie her broker?

And all the money will go to the cats.

That is so true.

She’s at least as good as any stock broker.

Some very wealthy people live that lifestyle.

This reminds me of Hetty Green, “The Witch of Wall Street.” She was at one time the richest woman in the world (late 1800s early 1900s) but was so miserly that she wore one dress only and wore it till it was rags. She refused to eat hot meals most of the time because of the fuel it cost to heat it. When her son injured his leg, she refused to go to the doctor because it cost so much — and when it became gangrenous, she finally gave in and took him to the free clinic. His leg was amputated.

Back in the late 1920’s, there was a saying that said something like “once you started getting stock advice from shoe-shine boys, it was time to get out.”

Why do you think she lives in an alley?

I rather like the street sign…

Would the reaction be the same if she were leading a group of dogs? Or if ‘she’ were a ‘he’? I’ve never understood why it is always ‘crazy cat lady’. And doesn’t anyone remember Ernest Hemingway? His cats are still one of the biggest draws on Key West.

Some times, the guy you see in the old clothes and worn out shoes is wearing just exactly what he wants to wear because he can afford to wear anything he wants to.

I took all kinds of business courses in college and thought I had an understanding of how the market worked. Then one day it was announced that Amazon had lost about $40 million the past quarter and it would be at least five years until they could even have a break even quarter. The price of Amazon stock jumped up about $5 on that news. I knew at that point all that I had learned about business was probably wrong and I should stay out of the stock market.

She’s the principle stockholder of Ramjac Corp.

I knew a man that used to go through the garbage looking for and taking out old food. I used to feel sorry for him until I learned he owned all the stores on the block, he was worth millions.

Didn’t one of the big financiers get out of the market in 1929 because he was getting stock tips from the shoe shiners?

Things are only worth what people think they are worth. It’s all emotion. If I could quantify two human emotions: fear and greed, I’d own Wall Street, Congress and the White House.

The old adage still applies: Never judge a book by its cover!

True story: my mom was a nurse on the Chicago waterfront for a time in the late 1930s. One patient was an unconscious elderly woman. When my mother and the orderlies began to undress her, they found she had sewn tightly rolled ten and twenty dollar bills in the seams of her clothing. When she came to, she told my mother that she “din’t trust them banks since the farydiddle in 1929.” The old gal had a couple of thousand on her, which, in those times, was a fairly big sum.

I believe it was P.T. Barnum who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute” and the stock market is the best example of that.

When Bob does think he understands the market, it’s time to run away.

If you’re into petroleum futures, I’ve got a barely used dartboard that you can have cheap.

What saddens me is that some of the people I served with and had each others back are in that position.

As Mad Magazine once asked: “How can you trust a Stock Broker who is still wearing the same suit from 1968, and brings his lunch to work each day in a brown paper bag?”

Stock Market defined: People with money investing in companies so that they can gain even more money for work they don’t personally do, whose goal is primarily to force the company to increase profits in any manner possible (ethical or not) so they can further fatten their purse. To accomplish this they pay officers ridiculous amounts for success, but fire them if they fail, further encouraging “stab in the back” corporate methods.

When companies began considering stockholder influence as more important than customer welfare and satisfaction… well, “the love of money is the root of all evil”. People earning excessive wealth via other people’s sweat defines the very core of selfishness and self-centeredness in our society.

Okay, dwagon soapbox done. Stab at Corporate Big Brother ended… at least until I read another related comic. ;D

The result of taking financial advice from cats.

Over twenty plus years ago California dropped all assistance to homeless people and now we see the results.

The stock market is pretty easy to understand. It’s a figment of collective imaginations that has little bearing on reality. Barely a step above a craps table.

I was eating my sack lunch on a bench along the Embarcadero in San Francisco one fine day. The meal was spoiled by the loud phone conversation behind me. After 10 minutes of listening to the haranguing and arguing, I turned around to find one guy and no cell phone. (!?)

Gotta feed those cats!

And with the recent wall street highs, NOW is a good time to sell, before it crashes.

Love the “guardian” cats.

One of those Paul Harvey “The Rest of the Story” vignettes told of a woman and her adult son who were homeless and always begging for money.

Turns out the woman was a divorcee’ and was worth about $50 million (in the days before income tax).

Crazy is crazy.