April 24, 2025

The worst of both worlds on tariffs

Since the stable genius has signaled the China tariffs will come down, the market has stabilize some.

But am I the only one that things this is actually the worst of both worlds.

The only potential benefit of tariffs is to encourage domestic production. But who in their right mind would invest in production capacity when they are told the market balance will be shifting again.

Meanwhile, this sends a clear signal to consumers to be curb spending since things in the future will be cheaper. Why buy an appliance or any other impacted item while it is subject to short term increases.

Am I missing something or is he just making things worse. I would expect economic indicators to drop off a table in the next three months. Of course that assumes he doesn't change his mind again next week.

April 4, 2025

Even if it works, protectionist tariffs would still be inflationary

The stated goal of these tariffs is to bring American manufacturing back home.

There are some arguments for protectionist tariffs in the right context. But they only work when the timeframe for the tariffs are long term. No sane company is going to invest in a manufacturing strategy based on tariffs that could disappear at any time. They would find themselves with an expensive factory trying to sell items in the same competitive market that they had previously abandoned. So at face value, this stated goal will largely fail.

But even if it worked, the price of goods will still go up. Tariffs don't make it any cheaper to manufacture here. They just create less competition. So the baseline cost of the goods will still go up to match the domestic costs.

Sure there would be accompanying benefits of employment and circulating cash at home. But let's not pretend that the extra money paying for that comes from somewhere else. It will be US consumers paying more.

March 14, 2025

Damn them for not winning a no-win situation!

This is why we lose.

This Country put the Democrats in a terrible position with no control across all branches of government.

And this week is the first of many no-win situations. We are damned if we do and damned if we don't.

This battle was lost in November. This is just the day when this particular casualty succumbed its injuries.

Honestly, I don't have a strong opinion about what the Democrats should have done because all options suck. They are being forced to choose between which option sucks the least and I don't think there is a clear answer to that.

And yet here we are demanding for heads to roll. The Democrats are not the bad guys here.

Keep the focus on where the anger belongs.

I am sure I will get flamed for this. Just know that you will be proving my point when you do.

March 10, 2025

I can't celebrate the decline of TESLA

Frankly, it just makes me sad.

I am not talking about Musk. I will be happiest when he is penniless and powerless.

I am talking about Tesla as a brand.

Once upon a time, they were part of the solution towards a cleaner world. They moved the bar on electrical vehicle adoption. They expanded the charge network. They made electric vehicles cool.

And then Musk dragged it all down with his swasticar and his foray into MAGA.

It would have been so much better if the board had just shuffled him out the door when he bought Twitter..."sorry, this brand deserves the time and attention of a full time CEO, thank you, goodbye." Now it is too late and the brand is tainted.

In a world threatened by climate change, we need every possible positive solution.

So it saddens me to see what has happened to Tesla and I cannot celebrate the decline.

February 2, 2025

Thoughts on this article about using AI for obituaries

This article is fairly opinionated about the concept and I think unfairly so. It broadens the discussion to all kinds of personal writings but the lede is definitely targeting obits.

https://www.vox.com/even-better/397448/chatgpt-obituary-speech-writing-gemini-claude-deepseek

When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didn’t know where to start. The grief wasn’t helping either. “I was just like, there’s no way I can do this,” the 31-year-old from Los Angeles says.

Around the same time, he’d begun using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot, tinkering with the technology to create grocery lists and budgeting tools. What if it could help him with the obituary? King fed ChatGPT some details about his grandmother — she was a retired nurse who loved bowling and had a lot of grandkids — and asked it to write an obituary.

The result provided the scaffolding for one of life’s most personal pieces of writing. King tweaked the language, added more details, and revised the obituary with the help of his mother. Ultimately, King felt ChatGPT helped him commemorate his grandmother with language that adequately expressed his emotions. “I knew it was a beautiful obituary and it described her life,” King, who works in video production for a luxury handbag company, says. “It didn’t matter that it was from ChatGPT.”

I have a confession to make. I recently used the AI at Legacy.com to write my Father's Obituary. I thought it did a lovely job and saved me the angst of trying to get it just right.

I think this article is unfair for a couple of reasons.

First of all, an obituary is very formulaic and has an unusual structure that is neither prose or poetry. Done poorly, it is just a list of facts. Done well, it is still a list of facts woven into a structure that is readable and expresses the familiar bonds represented by those facts.

Second of all, an obituary is not a eulogy. It is the journalistic version of the story, not the editorial one. It is meant to be personalized but not necessary personal. There are other avenues for that expression.

Anyway, it worked for me. My Mother loved it and she was the only person I was really trying to please.

January 27, 2025

Wall Street, welcome to our world

If Wall Street has any sense of irony, they would see today's news as a harbinger that they are subject to the same market forces that everyone else is.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live/stock-market-today-nasdaq-sinks-sp-500-tumbles-as-ai-fears-rock-tech-stocks-143116264.html

Stock market today: Nasdaq sinks, S&P 500 tumbles as AI fears rock tech stocks

If you look at this closely, it is a window into two of the biggest calamities to attack the US workforce in recent history

1. Some overseas outfit can do your job cheaper
2. Some AI company is going to steal the work you counted on doing

Welcome to our world

January 23, 2025

Here is the thing about Nazi salutes

There seems to be a lot of discussion about whether Musk pulled the Nazi salute for Trumps inauguration

It certainly looked like one and I certainly understand why a lot of people think it was the real deal.

But here is the thing...people who actually give a damn would sooner break their arm than make any motion that could even be remotely mistaken for a Nazi salute. My brain stem would simply take over before my arm got anywhere near that shape.

So whether he meant to or not, it represents a strangely cavalier 'fuck-you' attitude that he obviously does not have that filter. He does not take the idea of Nazis serious enough to even care that he might be mistaken for one.

Of course he followed up with a lot of trolling jokes about it so he clearly thinks the whole thing is acceptable grounds for trolling.

I will say what I always said about him. He lacks the emotional maturity to be anywhere near the center of power.

November 24, 2024

What does Musk get out of all of this? I think I figured it out.

In a nut shell, it is all one giant crypto price manipulation scheme. And its working.

In order to understand this all, it is important to understand the meaning of the term DOGE. At first it was an incredibly popular meme. Then someone created a cryptocurrency called DOGECoin as a joke. But the internet has a fascination with both stupid memes and crypto so that "joke" caught on and became a run away success in the crypto marketplace. And since Musk sits at the center of the dude-bro internet world, he thinks DOGECoin is great and has been pumping it up for years.

And thus begins a whole series of Musk actions that elevated the Crypto currency. He is so tied into this currency that every single spike in its value can be traced to him. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/DOGE-USD?window=5Y

-Musk tweets about Dogecoin causing it to spike https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/if-you-invested-$100-in-dogecoin-when-elon-musk-first-tweeted-about-the-crypto-heres-how

-Twitter changes it's logo to the DOGE logo https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/03/dogecoin-jumps-over-30percent-after-twitter-changes-logo-to-doges-symbol.html

-Rumors on Twitter trading crypto https://www.the-independent.com/tech/dogecoin-price-x-elon-musk-crypto-b2518052.html

Musk was sued about it https://www.reuters.com/legal/lawsuit-claiming-elon-musk-rigged-dogecoin-ends-2024-11-15/ but was unsuccessful because... reasons. It finally got dropped from appeal just this week because I guess the writing was on the wall.

All of which leads to his current assignment. Naming the committee DOGE was a huge boost to the attention of DOGEcoin. Not to mention the fact that he has been undermining the US currency by warning of US bankruptcy that can only be rescued by DOGE. As you can imagine, DOGECoin spiked about 400% in the last month.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/06/100000-by-2025-donald-trump-and-elon-musk-fuel-huge-bitcoin-price-predictions-as-dogecoin-soars/

Musk has acknowledged that he owns some DOGECoin but no one knows how much. There is speculation that he owns Billions.

So just imagine if the real value behind Twitter was the ability to manipulate markets. Stock market manipulation for percentage points is for suckers. Why bother when you can toy with crypto for exponential gains by directly manipulating the people most dedicated to you.

November 10, 2024

One phrase I have barely seen mentioned this week is COVID 19

Personally, I think we were fucked from the day COVID stepped into our lives.

Even at the simplest level, it was directly responsible for the inflation that ended up being the biggest head wind that we could not overcome.

But even beyond that, I think we massively underestimated the impacts that this period has caused. Like all large traumas, there are lingering after affects that will infect our psyche for years.

In my opinion, the MAGA movement was waning until COVID happened and it found new life in the resistance to COVID policies. The whole "bootstraps" crowd was perfectly happy to endanger entire communities as long as their personal "freedoms" were not hampered. They got new energy, new talking points and an economic environment to use a bludgeon for recruiting.

Perhaps the worst part of it all is how it all aligned with the rise of the RW media machine and radicalizing algorithms in social media. Entire segments of the internet became untethered from reality just when people were cooped up in their homes with little more than the internet to keep them occupied. To say they took advantage of it is an understatement.

So here is the controversial part that you aren't going to like. In my darkest hours over the last few days I have had two thoughts that keep coming back to me.

1.) Sometimes the right policy isn't a winning policy. In my heart, I know we did our best to protect our society from a deadly disease. But our efforts demanded a level of public cooperation and mutual concern that does not exist in this Country. We tried anyway. I think most people held on through the first year. But going into the second summer and fall, I think we lost people. The Country had covid fatigue and we were the ones talking about vaccine mandates and closing another year of school. Right or not, it was not popular and fed many of the narratives that MAGA have been driving ever since. Meanwhile, deSantis opened back up early during his campaign and got re-elected Governor easily. I am afraid that we ended up taking all of the lingering resentment and fueled the populist revolt in the process.

2.) I wonder if it would not have been better to lose in 2020. I always worried that it would be a difficult time to govern. It was pretty easy to see that things were going to be challenging. In the stock world, they call it "catching a falling knife". We inherited a Presidency that had at least 2 years of pain built into it. Even at the time, I figured that it might very well be so painful that re-election would be near impossible. It was a thankless job. If Trump had won, he would have been damaged and dealing with the economy that we got stuck with. It would have sucked for us. But in the end, it would have sucked less than the Trump 2.0 version that we are about to see now with no guardrails.

Just my two cents.

August 19, 2024

Latest scam at the gas pump

Stopping to get gas at the gas station closest to work this morning, I noted the price at $3.49. this was already about $.15 higher than a similar cluster of stations less than a mile down the road but convenience has its price.

But I pull up to the pump and there seems to be an error. The pump is showing $4.39 for regular. Assuming a mistake, I go insideto report what seems to be an error.

Nope. 90c price difference for credit. Of course they didn't have the decency to post that on the road side sign. Just hoping to fool some people who don't notice.

I called the clerk out on it but he was just mortified. Said he agreed. It wasn't him. It was the company.

I bailed and went to the cheaper station down the street and paid $3.25

I rarely use cash for anything but gas is probably the most obvious choice for credit to me. Primarily so I don't have to go inside. I like to fill up my tank to limit stops so it prevents two trips inside. I don't mind paying a small premium to cover the fees but this is just a scam.

I hope this station enjoys its little windfall. I have spent hundreds of dollars a year at that station which I will never use again. Screw 'em