Tuesday: walk, phone call, waiting in line

I walked with M.

I had a long phone call with J., and then another half hour later. There were some interruptions on my side, due to waiting in line, and on his side, due to a cat having the runs. Yikes.

The waiting in line was for the DVC “member cruise” for Galactic StarCruiser. It is August 19, and they were doing it for 30% off, which seemed interesting enough to at least attempt to do. I had worked out a (short) list of interested parties (I wasn’t flying in any west coasters for an August Florida trip, I mean, come on). I got into the queue days in advance and I was sitting there when it refreshed and said I was 315 in line. The inventory was all gone before it got to my number, but in theory, there were still waitlist slots available. As a practical matter, I got a persistently blank screen when I entered my member number. Oh well! I tried. It was pretty fast — all over in under 2 hours. I have a suspicion that Disney is trying to collect some information about velocity and oversubscription in this case, to figure out how to get the regular price correct to fill in better more generally. There was a flurry of news and blog posts saying they’ve been running somewhat empty. But I don’t really know anything. I still want to go, but not at the holidays, and they aren’t booking out past the holidays, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

Matt Levine’s column today about Credit Suisse is a Gem

There’s so much good stuff. I really liked the bit about the Saudis. After noting that they were all mad that they got zero’d out (fantastic quote from I believe FT coverage quoting someone: “You make fun of dictatorships and then you can change the law over the weekend. What’s the difference between Saudi Arabia and Switzerland now? It’s really bad”), Levine remarks:

“One difference is that the Swiss regulators did not bring the chairmen of Credit Suisse and UBS to a hotel and torture them until they agreed to the deal. (This is in part because the chairmen of Credit Suisse and UBS are experienced bankers who know how this is supposed to go, though also for other reasons.) Still I mean you can see their point.”

A. wanted to know what I was laughing about and I just went, too hard to explain!

But really, I live for moments like this, both in history AND in Matt Levine columns:

“And now it is apparently falling apart for reasons that have nothing to do with its own audacity. Oh, I mean. It is possible that there is some characteristic of Credit Suisse that made it unusually likely to (1) do this First Boston deal, (2) have the Archegos, Greensill, tuna-bond, garden-party-spying, etc. scandals and (3) ultimately fail and be sold to UBS. Possibly the problem is that the overall level of audacity at Credit Suisse was too high, and eventually that caught up to it.”

Truly, at the crossroads of Fuck Around and Find Out and Oh You Just Now Noticed.