On the cusp of Tesla's market shattering quarter, as Model 3 becomes the best selling car in the US, including internal combustion vehicles, I feel a lot of things, but mostly I feel a deep and abiding anger at those who sneered at the vision of Tesla.
Rather than celebrate I find myself searching for snarky tweets and headlines, some written only days ago. Like a hostile drunk, I am wandering through enemy territory on Twitter, throwing elbows at people, mad dogging, looking to cause a fight.
Tesla has been trying to do something completely far out, and now it looks like they've done it. Meanwhile the only thing that the cynics had to offer was their lack of imagination. And what gets me most is how self satisfied they were in their blindness.
It's a common trait of bullies that they turn your greatest strengths against you. If you're artistic you're called a faggot. If you are kind they call you beta. If you care about the planet we live on you're an "SJW." If you have a vision you are called delusional.
Our greatest gifts can all be twisted into something shameful by someone with no vision who calls us out and sneers at us. People have been sneering at Tesla, reveling in the setbacks, tweeting inane hashtags like #Noskidmarks that require way to much explaining to be clever.
In business, you always want to be ahead of the curve. But being too far ahead can be costly and painful. Elon Musk was almost too far ahead. His vision was so far in front of everyone that it quite literally should have failed several times over. But it didn't.
And after this quarter I think the rest of the auto industry and the rest of the world is going to be standing there looking like morons, with legacy infrastructure to unload, decades worth of underfunded pensions,
And an ocean of inventory that is losing resale value by the second.
My father worked in the solar industry. Every decade of my childhood I thought "this will be the decade that the world comes to understand that ALL energy on the planet is solar energy. And that..
.. tapping directly into the sun to power our transportation infrastructure is the biggest no brainier in all of history." My dad never got to see the solar industry fulfill its promise. He never got to see panels on my roof charge my car. He never got to see...
...that the car those panels charged was an elegantly designed, crazy fast, amazingly balanced spaceship on wheels that can literally drive itself. And for the last couple years I knew this day was possibly at hand. I knew that there were tens of thousands of people at Tesla...
... working to make my dad's vision possible. And while that amazing work was happening, there was a chorus of boos that formed kind of a noise floor all around the Tesla story. And despite Tesla's imminent victory, I'm still hearing the echo of those boos and I'm more livid..
... about them now than I think I would be if Tesla had actually failed. I'm not focusing on the positive. I'm not letting it sink in just how great this is for the world. I'm just pissed at everyone, from Wall Street Journal writers, to Seeking Alpha, to my old roommate Jeff.
You guys were all wrong and you gave me a ton of shit along the way. I don't get any of that back. I won't get any apologies or see any retractions published. I won't see my dad driving to work on electrons he got from the roof of the house.
A few days ago during the SEC debacle, I got legitimately scared. The cynics all came out that day with their knives. I thought it was all hanging in the balance. But I did what always do when I believe in something. I bought the dip. BTW, special shout out...
...to E-Trade for enabling after hours trading on my account. Who knew?
Anyway...If you bet against Tesla and lost, just remember that you deserve it because you're a person with limited vision whose been drinking buckets of piss from the fossil fuel industry. I hope you choke.
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Cumulative, rolling 12 month federal interest expense is $756.4 Billion. If total US debt is $31 Trillion that's an implied average interest rate of 2.44%. Am I off base here?
This is odd to me. In Q1 of 22, US interest expense as a percent of total tax receipts is a mere 20%. Last time our interest expenses/income was at this exact level was 1968.
Debt/GDP back then was 39.2%.
And at that time in 1967, just for a reference on rates, the 10-year yield was at a local low of 4.52%.
The government is able to hide the exorbitant cost of it's debt because the maturity of the debt is a lot longer than the political cycle. For example, spending thus far in 2021 for interest expenses alone is $548.3 Billion. So if rates go up this causes a problem right?
1/n
Long term yes. Short term no. Current average interest rate is 1.592% according to fiscaldata.treasury.gov. If Interest rates doubled overnight to 3% then interest cost on total debt would theoretically be over a Trillion dollars, right? Only sort of.
2/n
The government avoids the consequences a rate increase because only $1.792 Trillion debt matures in the next 12 months. So a doubling of rates would only increase total debt service by $25 Billion.
3/n
Every bull market the lie of "faster" altcoins resurfaces. Litecoin is not faster than Bitcoin. Dogecoin is not faster than Bitcoin. Bitcoin actually settles in LESS time than any other cryptocurrency. But to understand why that is, you have to understand what settlement is. 1/n
In a theoretical sense, final settlement doesn't exist at all on any blockchain. What settlement assurance you do get from a blockchain is a function of the energy an attacker would have to expend in order to rewrite your transactions or spend their own coins twice. 2/n
But with enough electricity, any blockchain can be rewritten by hostile miners who want to go back in time, change or delete transactions, then re-mine everything that happened up until the present. 3/n
@edstromandrew has it right. Anyone who makes the MySpace comparison is woefully stupid. I'd like to address why I think this worn out meme is so far off the mark. 1/n
The thesis goes like this: Bitcoin was first, and MySpace was first. MySpace failed therefore Bitcoin will fail. However, MySpace was not first. Friendster was first. If the only thing you base your comparison on is "firstness", then the comparison is already dead. 2/n
But the analogy breaks down for other, more fundamental reasons. People who say this assume that every networking technology will always and forever be replaced by a subsequent, for-profit enterprise who is iterating on the technology. 3/n
I'm so excited about BTC I can't go to sleep, but the line of demarcation for me is $11,391. If we go above that this week then we are back inside a multi-year trend. Next week the line moves up to $11,578.
Zooming in a little more I can see that the reentry point is actually a few dollars lower at $11,378.00 A few minutes ago we touched it and bounced back down. FYI I drew the blue line about a year ago and have never moved it.
Zoomed out view. I don't trade, by the way. This is just for my own personal orientation and to help manage my emotions.