On December 20 2022 00:25 JimmiC wrote: Yeah daily drivers are brutal because the asset is depreciating because of time and use. Then you have gas, maintence and repairs. With a loan and interest payments there are not a lot of worse things for your money. That being said in north america most cities and towns sre not well set up for other forms of transport (public, bikes, so on), so you are kind of stuck with paying for cars(mostly trucks/suvs around here) or spending a crazy amount of time waiting for busses and then walking pretty far. In a place where I live it would be imppossible. You could bike down a highway in the shoulder, but that would suck especially when its snow and ice. They have been talking about a bike path but its been 2 decades even though someone donated the money. Parking lots though, those go up all the time no problem.
It's funny how Europe and USA take completely different approaches to this. In Amsterdam for example they are removing 10k parking spaces
The Dutch government is also seizing and closing 3000 farms when food inflation is well over 10%, so I wouldn't be holding them up as an example of sanity.
We're one of the largest food exporters in the world, apparently. Closing farms will have a minimal effect on food prices. We have plenty for our own market. What is driving inflation, like everywhere, is energy and gas prices.
We're trying to downsize our agriculture because of a lot of Nitrogen output from farms close to nature causing damage to the environment. And as we are a tiny country there isn't a lot of room to move those farms elsewhere.
The more pertinent thing is that Dutch farming mostly isn’t for the domestic market. The vast, vast majority is exported.
As for the whole Musk discussion, I would say that he’s been showing that he is legitimately a dumb shit that can’t be talked down ever since the Thai cave debacle. Him being terminally online is just showing the wider public this almost 24 hours a day because the man can’t even get a proper night of sleep because of his terminal addiction.
Just right now he’s fighting huge Tesla investors and hedge fund managers on Twitter telling them they’re stupid and to review Finance 101. Because apparently all this is because of ~INTEREST RATES~.
In fact the whole crypto downfall has shown that a lot of rich people really aren’t that smart or rational. They just hit a home run once and basically have so much money that they can’t lose. For Musk, that was getting a huge payday for PayPal despite being a detriment because of his idiocy and obsession with trying to get X off the ground.
On December 21 2022 07:22 TDonkfarts wrote: In fact the whole crypto downfall has shown that a lot of rich people really aren’t that smart or rational. They just hit a home run once and basically have so much money that they can’t lose.
I think that this is a very good take. A lot of rich people seem to think that they got there because they are exceptionally smart and made exceptionally good decisions, when the reality seems to be that they either had amazing start conditions or got really lucky once. And once you got money, the game just snowballs, turning the mediocre decisions that would lose for poor people into more decisions that win, just because you have enough capital.
But it feels a lot better to attribute your success to your own abilities. And so we got these rich people telling everyone their "secrets", but those secrets and strategies don't actually work for other people, because we don't have the funds to shift the probabilities, or they are just the result of survivorship bias. If 1000 people take a dumb decision that works in 1/1000 cases, the person for whom it worked acts as if they were a genius and tell other people to make similar decisions, because they worked. And no one listens to the 999 people who didn't get lucky.
On December 21 2022 00:31 JimmiC wrote: It would not be the first time someone built up value in a persona and then blew that all away with one or many acts. These things are dynamic not static. Musk has changed his message pretty dramaticlly in the last few years, and there is WAY more Musk. It would actually be surprising if people did not have a different opinion of him then they did a few years ago.
The part I find strange is all the southern baptists that now love Musk. His lifestyle does not remotely match with their "values", but we live in strange times.
He lives a rather humble live i read the other day. No mega mansions and mega yaghts, And no doubt he works very hard and puts in lots of hours. The twitter antics i think they forgive him. Its seen as an act to achieve what is neccesary. In a similar way Trump was accepted. As a means to an end.
Tsla keeps dropping i wonder where the bottom is. Would not be surprised to see it well below 100 somewhere in 2023. Musk cleared his bonus and got his shares. I dont know what price he got them for , the 2 recent splits make the situation a bit unclear. He could buy them for ~70 but that was before the 5/1 and 3/1 split i think (not 100% sure on this). Which would mean he got his shares for around 5$ each. (if someone has more accurate info on this i would like to see it).
Making massive amounts of money from China is nearing its end i think. Not only for Tsla but also for many other tech stocks that depend to a more or lesser extend on production and sales in China. Tech will probably remain under pressure in 2023 and i dont think 2023 will be any better then 2022 in general. There is to many major problems still in the pipeline.
He does live a humble life and put in tons of hours. I was more talking about his sorted love life which would be very un-hardcore-christian. But as you say once they have decided that a figure is "their" guy morality is out the window.
He doesn’t live a humble life, the dude literally pays comedians to hang out with him because he’s desperate to be seen as cool and funny. He’s only able to do that by laundering his reputation and wealth lmao.
He’s got the same problem as his ex-partner Grimes, which explains why they hooked up. Both lived a life where their parents were able to give them everything material and never really gave them any discipline.
So they just drift between interest to interest, without developing any skill whatsoever in said interest, while thinking they’re well read while doing so.
One day Musk and Grimes can cosplay the struggle life by renting out a roach infested flat. Then after they get bored Musk can pretend to be a hot shot music producer for a week before abandoning his top of the art equipment. The next week he can get bored of learning chess and justify ending his interest by claiming it’s not useful in real life because it has “a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces”. Then he can pretend he’s a huge history buff the next week by injecting the Latin language (poorly) everywhere because he got interested in the Roman Empire while reading Wikipedia.
Just because he isn’t interested in expensive cars or watches doesn’t mean he’s living a humble life. The only reason he doesn’t have traditionally lavish interests like flying planes or collecting watches because he can’t hold onto any interests for more than a few weeks and has to be seen as an expert in everything he does.
The more Musk is terminally online, the more clear the guy is just another billionaire asshole that’s forcing the entire world to deal with his mental illnesses. Only this time is incredibly easy to dunk on him because he paid $44 billion to be Lowtax of Something Awful fame.
When you have stories coming out of Tesla that they basically assigned a VP to distract Musk as much as possible and his perpetual online antics plus the number of companies he is involved with makes you wonder how much he actually works with his "long hours".
Musk built up a pretty good amount of hype for his companies centered around them being in new spaces (EV and private space) and him being the visionary leader. It worked for a while and he made a lot of hype and promises over the years that really pumped Tesla stock price. Now he has moved away from his perpetual hype to being a troll and doing dumb shit like the twitter sale debacle. Now you see less the image he presented and more of the actual Musk and now tesla has tanked a fuck ton this year. Promises and hype keep getting pushed back, sales/production have slowed, and the stock price has had a sledge hammer taken to it.
His main problem is that he is an investor who now believes he is Steve Jobs.
On December 21 2022 12:27 Slaughter wrote:His main problem is that he is an investor who now believes he is Steve Jobs.
That’s the folly of a lot of high profile investors. His pal Jason Calacanis is no different, he got lucky with Uber (despite only putting in like $25,000 - basically nothing for an angel investor) and now thinks his word is worth more than people like Tim Cook who have actually generated value for the companies they run lol.
All ego, no brains. Dead obvious when they’re on podcasts and group discussions with actual c-suite members of successful businesses.
Then from the same Space we have a former Twitter engineer ask Elon to explain what's so damn crazy and awful about Twitter from an engineering perspective and his solution, only for Musk to spend the entire time stammering and eventually resort to a "who are you?!" ad hominem attack:
And he's given us this piece of absolute garbage of an opinion:
There's no 5D chess or anything with regards to why more and more people hate this guy and why Tesla's stock is tanking. A lot of other CEOs and venture capitalists have brain dead opinions and make brain dead decisions, just look at Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary both eating dirt for falling for and promoting obvious Ponzi schemes. They're human like the rest of us! But they're typically not giving their brain dead opinions to random Twitter users at like 4am in the morning.
I won't post anymore about him but literally every hour has him showing his ass in such a way that its confirming a lot of the claims about how awful SpaceX and Tesla are to work for, his actual understanding of fundmental economics and finance, his actual leadership and management capabilities, and his actual personal beliefs. None of these things you really want to know about your CEOs - we certainly know close to nothing about Tim Cook unless you really try to look for it.
So, CEOs and co-founders of Alameda/FTX are now cooperating with the government against SBF to reduce their own sentences (no idea how much of a 110 years you can get reduced for cooperation LOL). It's actually good to see cocky sub-30 years old people who tried to scam their way into money get sentenced to life in prison. Might dissuade such practices in the future.
Some of the charges so far:
Conspiracy to commit wire fraud
Wire fraud
Conspiracy to commit commodities fraud
Conspiracy to commit securities fraud
Conspiracy to commit money laundering
Conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission and commit campaign finance violations
SBF is being charged and prosecuted by 3 branches of the US government: DOJ, SEC and CFTC.
I must say that every time i hear something about that case, it is kind of impressive how many different and obviously fraudulent things were going on.
These people clearly didn't give a fuck, and either thought laws don't apply to them, or didn't know the laws. They somehow ended up in positions where they could handle massive amounts of money, without any clue on how to legally do that, and were so sure of themselves that they didn't seek out anyone who would know.
On December 21 2022 07:22 TDonkfarts wrote: In fact the whole crypto downfall has shown that a lot of rich people really aren’t that smart or rational. They just hit a home run once and basically have so much money that they can’t lose.
I think that this is a very good take. A lot of rich people seem to think that they got there because they are exceptionally smart and made exceptionally good decisions, when the reality seems to be that they either had amazing start conditions or got really lucky once. And once you got money, the game just snowballs, turning the mediocre decisions that would lose for poor people into more decisions that win, just because you have enough capital.
But it feels a lot better to attribute your success to your own abilities. And so we got these rich people telling everyone their "secrets", but those secrets and strategies don't actually work for other people, because we don't have the funds to shift the probabilities, or they are just the result of survivorship bias. If 1000 people take a dumb decision that works in 1/1000 cases, the person for whom it worked acts as if they were a genius and tell other people to make similar decisions, because they worked. And no one listens to the 999 people who didn't get lucky.
I think it's a very poor take. Musk and Trump are the exception in that they're rich people that want to be famous. Most rich people want the opposite and hide their wealth. One of the most important aspects of wealth management is anonymizing it. 95% of the rich aren't telling you their 'secret' because they don't want you to know they're rich. They're not going to tell you it's all their ability because they're not even going to tell you they have money.
On December 21 2022 07:22 TDonkfarts wrote: In fact the whole crypto downfall has shown that a lot of rich people really aren’t that smart or rational. They just hit a home run once and basically have so much money that they can’t lose.
I think that this is a very good take. A lot of rich people seem to think that they got there because they are exceptionally smart and made exceptionally good decisions, when the reality seems to be that they either had amazing start conditions or got really lucky once. And once you got money, the game just snowballs, turning the mediocre decisions that would lose for poor people into more decisions that win, just because you have enough capital.
But it feels a lot better to attribute your success to your own abilities. And so we got these rich people telling everyone their "secrets", but those secrets and strategies don't actually work for other people, because we don't have the funds to shift the probabilities, or they are just the result of survivorship bias. If 1000 people take a dumb decision that works in 1/1000 cases, the person for whom it worked acts as if they were a genius and tell other people to make similar decisions, because they worked. And no one listens to the 999 people who didn't get lucky.
I think it's a very poor take. Musk and Trump are the exception in that they're rich people that want to be famous. Most rich people want the opposite and hide their wealth. One of the most important aspects of wealth management is anonymizing it. 95% of the rich aren't telling you their 'secret' because they don't want you to know they're rich. They're not going to tell you it's all their ability because they're not even going to tell you they have money.
Being rich, staying relatively quiet and falling for the survivorship bias are not mutally exclusive. You only have to hang out with successful entrepreneurs for an evening to figure that out.
I mean, there's a reason why a lot of business owners subscribe to the "bootstraps" theory.
Something I learned today that shocked me was that the madoff ponzi scheme eventually got people back 88.5% of their money. Thats probably not going to happen for FTX. What assets are listed and being described as money is just a ponzi scheme nesting doll that isn't worth much in reality as selling it would cause its value to collapse. Madoffs ponzi scheme isn't even that noteable compared to a lot of legitimate ventures. Quibi got back most of its investors money as well and that gets a lot of bad press.
Haven't been in said recession since August(?) of last year. That and wasn't this already happening for the past 6 months anyways? What is the goal of Powell here? To make sure everything is decreasing.... no matter what? And to continue on no matter what till employment, and inventory starts to lower.
The ghost of volcker demands that inflation be brought under control by any means and by any cost. They will increase interest rates until inflation is broken. A recession is acceptable collateral damage for them. A depression to them is preferable to not fighting inflation.
On January 05 2023 00:17 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: Haven't been in said recession since August(?) of last year. That and wasn't this already happening for the past 6 months anyways? What is the goal of Powell here? To make sure everything is decreasing.... no matter what? And to continue on no matter what till employment, and inventory starts to lower.
On January 05 2023 04:39 Sermokala wrote: The ghost of volcker demands that inflation be brought under control by any means and by any cost. They will increase interest rates until inflation is broken. A recession is acceptable collateral damage for them. A depression to them is preferable to not fighting inflation.
The problem is that if you don't stop inflation, you get the depression anyway, but with inflation on top.
Ask anyone who had to deal with a 10%+ increase in prices each month how much fun it is.
On August 21 2022 16:32 iPlaY.NettleS wrote: Posted a few days back in the Ukraine thread that sanctions against Ukraine were clearly hurting Europe especially Germany far more than Russia.I will post the latest data here due to it being economy related.
Latest news from Bloomberg is stating German natural gas prices are 11x higher than normal.Prices have doubled past two months.Year ahead electricity price $540 megawatt hour up from $40 Mw/h two years ago.
Obviously this is and will have a serious impact on German industry as implied by the title ‘Germany Risks a Factory Exodus as Energy Prices Bite Hard’.Expect a very severe recession in Germany unless there is some miracle.
EPT
