Pettis: China Cannot Weaponize Its US Treasury Bonds
China weaponizing its US bonds would tear China apart while doing little to the US. Why is this so hard to understand? Why is it that high IQ academics in the social sciences are the ones who fail to understand this reality?
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Barclays Is Tired Of Taking The Tesla "Blue Pill", Slaps It With $150 Price Target
$150? Sure, that's it that's the ticket! Why not $50, that would make more sense, or $5 which would make even more sense. Tesla is a short term bridge until the next iteration of mobility is sussed out by the markets (that means you and me). Once we figure out what we want and need, we will adopt the next mobility model, and the shift will happen quickly. Tesla is a boutique auto manufacturer making high powered EVs for wealthy dilettantes who want an expensive secret handshake membership to the cult of environmentalism. Fine. But the number of people who fit this bill are few, and mostly already have Prius, Tesla, or cannot afford the secret handshake. This all reminds me of the Pearl District in Portlandia. A couple of decades ago, the Pearl was a dream of downtown lofts and condos for wealthy retirees. The idea was all retirees want to live downtown close to arts, theater, restaurants, and the city. Because the Pearl was small, it worked and attracted a following. But, it had a darker side. Everyone we knew who moved to the Pearl went through a four years transformation from suburban dweller to urban and back. The process was enlightening. The first year, the new emigres were incredibly excited and held several parties. Year two, the party numbers decreased. Year three, they would hold only a single party. In year four, we realized they moved back out to the suburbs. What was happening was the people wanted to belong to the urban clique until they found out what urban living was like. Their friends wanted to come down until they realized how impossible it was to park. Once those realities set in, all bets were off, and the only reason they stayed in the Pearl was to gain sufficient housing price appreciation to make the financial outcome positive. Portland developed another larger urban development similar to the Pearl, but it was a dud, it never could find people to fill the condos. Tesla has filled the pent up demand for super powerful environmental handshake EVs. Soon, demand will begin to slump along with the potential for a profitable Tesla. My price target is Tesla $5. Tesla Sued By Supplier For Not Paying Its $1.77 Million Bill Delta passenger mauled by emotional support dog files lawsuit
Emotional support animals have become a joke, just stop! VIDEO: Hillary blisters Trump during commencement address as grads zone out, yawn - The American Mirror
Hillary is incredibly boring. All she has are shrill cut and paste platitudes. Trump, on the other hand, is an excellent President and entertaining as hell! Most atheists believe in the supernatural, despite trusting science
Ok, if you believe in God, God did it! Today the new fundamental cultists are all on the left, filling the pews of cults like anthropogenic global warming, and environmentalism. They rant and scream about "SCIENCE" but few of their beliefs have any scientific moorings, and the rest are filled with ascientific and non-scientific BS and claptrap. Progressivism is a malign control and death cult. Humans have to believe. The best thing for us is to have well vetted reformed religions which allow us to believe but have been sufficiently defanged to make them a low societal danger. Uber To Ban Low-Rated Passengers
The Pareto curve indicates that the square root of the number of total passengers will be unadulterated A-holes. It will not take long to suss out these A-holes and cut them loose. The entire system will work better when they are gone. Danes make welfare a hot election issue as cracks show in Nordic model As for making the Nordic model, the new American model, see this article: You Can't Have Denmark Without Danes This happened in Sweden years ago. As a result, the Swedes began to reduce their welfare state. Here are some YouTube videos explaining the Swedish issues. Sweden and socialism Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » People Who Express Opinions Outside of their Domain Seldom Have Really Looked into it Much
"My family often jokes about my obsessive behavior vis a vis Tesla and Elon Musk (on the off chance you are unaware of my thoughts, the most recent are here). My daughter texted me last night that "Wealthy millennials seem to love Elon." And that is true. My answer to her is the title of this post, "People who express opinions outside of their domain seldom have really looked into it much." Of course, I am not in any way arguing for some sort of strong credentialism wherein people should not express opinions outside of their domain. God forbid, I would have to shut down this blog. But I am saying that just because someone is really smart and successful at A does not necessarily mean their opinion on B is worth squat. As always, as a consumer of opinions, caveat emptor should always be the watchwords." This blog, as well. So, why read blogs like Coyote Blog or Maddog's Lair? Because we are skeptics, who bring cautionary analysis to the fore. I don't look at Tesla and try to figure out whether Elon can fix the thermal electric engine problems or whether he can devise lower resistance electrical wiring harnesses. I hope so, but I have no ideas in those areas. But I can look at the financing, and the core business model and determine whether it fits with where I think the world, investors, and automobility is heading, spoiler alert, Tesla is not. Coyote and I are also on board with the Global Warming nonsense. At first, I was on board, although skeptical. I thought the Sturm und Drang was Gore getting his incompetence in a knot. Then I started looking into the "science." What I found in the "science" appalled me. The Alarmists scientists were hiding data, hiding findings, lying, publishing research without any of the supporting documentation and were unwilling to publish the supporting data or even allow it to be seen. Later, the EmailGate scandal proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Alarmists were intentionally acting to prevent the publication of research which might undermine their published positions (they were not findings they are undocumented, unsupported position papers). Then I started to realize that the Alarmists were manipulating the data pools for unclear reasons, but the manipulation always made the past cooler and the present warmer. I could go through my entire epiphany, but the gist of it was that as a skeptic, none of the information I was finding was reducing my skepticism to the contrary it was inflaming it. In the end, I began to look at the best long term data on my own to determine whether anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming was even one of the probable scenarios and I found the answer was a damning, NO! A low possibility, sure, but it never amounted to a probability or even a significant possibility. I also realized that if I had acted as the Alarmist scientists in any of my physics or climate courses, I would have received a failing grade and likely been expelled from school. Just as a good litigator does not need to be an expert in the field he is litigating he only needs to have a good BS detector and access to honest, objective, experts who can help him understand the field. My BS detector has never sounded as loudly as just before my epiphany about the global warming lie. Back to Elon Tesla-Solar-Hyperloop! "Elon Musk is Ferdinand DeLesseps. He is PT Barnum. He is Elizabeth Holmes. He is the pied piper. He is fabulous at spinning visions and making them sound science-y. But he is not Tony Stark. There is a phenomenon with Elon Musk that everyone thinks he is brilliant until they hear him speak about something about which they have domain knowledge, and then they realize he is full of sh*t. For example, no one who knows anything about transportation or physics or basic engineering has thought his Boring Company and Hyperloop make any sense at all. His ideas would have been great cover stories for Popular Mechanics in the 1970's, wowing 13-year-old boys like me with pictures of mile-long cargo blimps and flying RV's. He is like a Marvel movie that spouts science that is just believable-enough sounding that it moves the plot along but does not stand up to any scrutiny. All of this would be harmless if he was not running a public company. I don't really care about the rich folks who were duped by Elizabeth Holmes, but hundreds of thousands of small millenial investors who have totally bought into the Elon hype are literally putting their last dollar into Tesla, and sometimes borrowing more. Tesla shorts often laugh at these folks on Twitter, calling them "bagholders," but it is a tragedy. Unless Tesla finds a sugar daddy sucker, and the odds of that are getting longer, I think it is going to end badly for many of these investors As a disclosure, I have been short Tesla via puts for a while now. It you really want to understand Elon, the best book I can recommend is The Path Between The Seas about the building of the Panama Canal. First, it is a great book you should read no matter what. And second, Ferdinand DeLesseps is the best analog I can find for Musk." Elon is one of the most financially dangerous people you can encounter. He is a true believer in what he is doing and in himself. He is highly intelligent which means clever and capable of constructing elaborate but believable stories and answers to complex questions which seem to answer the problems or issues raised (so, he is like Paul Krugman in economics). He is charming and convincing because he believes his BS completely. Elon is wrong about many things. Regardless, people drop their life savings into Tesla, Hyperloop, or whatever new mind fart Elon has concocted today. To understand whether the venture makes sense, look at the foundations. If they are well engineered, perhaps the venture can work, if they are little more than a drizzle of liquid plaster over sand formed to look like concrete, RUN. Increasingly Tesla looks like the latter, and Elon's actions appear to be those of a man who is beginning to realize that fact. |
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