Notes From My 45th College Reunion October 30, 2013 THE FILM I saw “12 Years A Slave” yesterday. When it ended, no one moved for a long time. And all I could think as I watched is that millions of Americans at the time (1841-1853) believed slavery should be legal. That’s how wrong-headed and backward even bright, “God fearing” people can be. Inequality has its place, to be sure. The old communist ideal, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” flies in the face of human nature — humans are hard-wired to be self-interested — and leads to tyranny and that oldest of Soviet jokes, “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” But excessive inequality — never more grotesque than in slavery — has no place. As increasingly plutocratic as we have become these last few decades, today’s Republicans argue that the rich are overburdened; that the estate tax on billionheirs should be lowered from 45% to zero; that the minimum wage should not be raised. If the working poor want to live better, they should take on a third job to supplement the first two or — better — start a successful business (or inherit one as the Koch brothers and the Waltons and the Donald all did). Excessive inequality, apart from whatever moral problems it may raise, stunts economic growth. The job creators are not the wealthy but, as Nick Hanauer demonstrates in that brief TED Talk, everyone else. THE REUNION I went. Four thoughts: ☞ With luck, you, too, may one day attend your 45th. Whatever the world’s going to be like then, think how much different it would have been if Al Gore had been allowed to serve. Or John McCain had won. Or Nancy Pelosi still ran the House. THESE THINGS MATTER. ☞ Princeton beat us Saturday 51-48 in triple overtime – they had to flip on the lights, the game went so long. I didn’t know the stadium HAD lights. Gone are the days of easy wins. Especially until we can fix the gerrymandering problem, OUR ELECTIONS ARE LIKELY TO BE HARD FOUGHT. We can hold the Senate next November and – yes — win back the House; but nobody thinks it will be easy. As in 2012, it will all come down to the ground game: how many people can we register; how many voters can we turn out. ☞ Millions of people need to come together to make this happen, including you and me. One of my friends ended his 45th reunion book entry by quoting from Middlemarch (which, needless to say, I have never read): “…But the effect of her being was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.” Your vote, alone, or mine . . . your contribution, alone, or mine . . . your or my persuading others to help – none of that is historic. But collectively? The “growing good of the world” depend on it. ☞ One of my classmates – impassioned by the impending rise of the sea – rolled up his suit pants and, before an audience of 400 including the university president, belted out a song he’d written about how Harvard WILL BE UNDER WATER if we don’t start thinking ahead. Another quoted “an extremely short poem” he said he had heard on the radio: “That was fast! (Life, I mean.)” A third, whose dad was a Boston cop, now owns a prominent Boston office complex housing 8,000 souls on an average day. A fourth, who went to my high school, now drives a limo. There is something about reunions that gets you thinking. Which is not the worst thing to do when we can otherwise rush through life so focused on the immediate that we forget to look up. Listen: Who runs the world really matters . . . it’s all about registration and turnout . . . we can DO this if we have the resources . . . the time to plant the seed corn is NOW . . . we’d be crazy NOT to . . . and it’s accretive: voters we register in 2014 STAY registered for 2016. Tech advances we make for 2014 become the platform for further advances in 2016. BE PART OF THIS. So much hangs in the balance. [Sorry this particular link is geared toward high rollers; but there’s a box at the bottom to enter whatever more human-scale amount feels right. Our average contribution is something like $55, and we would be lost without them.]
Inch By Inch October 29, 2013 Inch by inch, my US Air Shuttle followed a conga line of 25 planes at Laguardia Saturday — for an hour — the cabin air scented with jet exhaust, as we waited our turn to take off for the 34-minute flight to Boston. And inch by inch, WheelTug seems to become more real: WheelTug names Scott Perkins as Chief Engineer Gibraltar, 28 Oct 2013 – WheelTug plc has named Scott Perkins to be its Chief Engineer. Mr. Perkins is a strong leader with over 25 years aerospace experience and an excellent history in engineering, analysis and certification of aerospace components. Mr. Perkins’ accomplishments to date include establishing Messier-Dowty (USA) where he led the technical development of the Boeing 787 landing gear. His experience on numerous commercial aircraft projects will be a major benefit in the development of the WheelTug system. Scott Perkins’ existing team at Endeavor Analysis will continue to be involved with the WheelTug project. Endeavor has numerous superb engineers and managers at its disposal and are leaders in structural analysis. Isaiah Cox, CEO of WheelTug, notes “Mr. Perkins brings more than 2 decades of landing gear experience to WheelTug and has an excellent track record of delivering on technical projects. His involvement to date has added tremendous value and we look forward to continuing down our technical development with him at the helm of that effort.” Mr. Perkins adds, “There are very few opportunities to impact the air transport industry as fundamentally as WheelTug is capable of doing. The results of this engineering effort will transform the industry and it is exciting to play a fundamental role is its development.” It’s not clear to me exactly what additional work needs to be done — we’ve seen video of the thing working in the nose wheel of a 737. But the more talent and credibility, the better. Meanwhile, the New York Times had this story last week on an improvement to winglets. One theme: the enormous importance airlines place on small boosts in efficiency. To me, that bodes well for WheelTug, which should boost efficiency. As does the fact that virtually all planes have winglets now — even though the large aircraft manufacturers resisted them for a great long time. And here is an extensive article in Aircraft Technology Engineering & Maintenance — look, WheelTug is on the cover! — that begins (on page 32): Throughout the history of technological development, small companies have often proved more adept at translating it new ideas quickly into workable technologies than have long-established industry giants. Apple and Microsoft, long industry giants themselves, started as two tiny outfits taking on the behemoths of their business (IBM being one) and winning hands down. Facebook and Google are two more recent examples. Now something similar maybe about to happen in the commercial aviation business. Until a few years ago, the airline industry didn’t really believe that a better, cheaper, quieter way could be found to get aircraft to and from runways than by having aircraft taxi for miles under the power of their engines. As long as fuel was cheap, labour costs weren’t high and environmental concerns weren’t prominent in airline thinking, taxiing using engine power remained an acceptable procedure. And as long as airlines didn’t mind taxiing aircraft standing still for minutes while other aircraft backed out ahead and blocked the taxiway as they started their engines, pushing back from the gate with the help of a diesel or electric tug remained standard practice. . . . But the times seem to be changing. BOREF fell back to $16 yesterday and may fall further (yay! it’s on sale!); but for those who bought for the right speculative reason, that doesn’t much matter. The right speculative reason, it seems to me, is that WheelTug may one day pan out and generate enormous profits, at which point it won’t much matter whether you paid $12 or $16 or $22 for your shares. Or it may not work out — something may go wrong — and, well, that’s why it’s a speculation, to be bought only with money you can truly afford to lose. At $16 a share, Borealis has a market cap of about one-third that lovely Cezanne. But I see no potential for that painting to throw off $100 million a year in earnings, let alone more.
Neither Beat W.; What Does THAT Say About America? October 28, 2013 (Well, one did beat him but didn’t get to serve.) Even so, both continue to make tremendous contributions. JOHN KERRY: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM Here’s the video I referred to Friday: John Kerry and Al Gore speaking at the 10th Anniversary of the Center for American Progress. I know you’re busy. But if you want to be proud of your country, and to feel good about its leadership — but also to hear a sober assessment of what we’re doing to ourselves — I commend to you the first 20 minutes: our Secretary of State. AL GORE: “THERE WILL BE JOY IN PREVAILING” Former Vice President Gore follows at the 25-minute mark. If you’re pressed for time, start at the 52-minute mark and watch the 5 minutes to the end. (It’s the piece about the “well-informed citizenry” that contrasts so starkly with the Tea Party enthusiasts linked to Friday.) But you know what? We’re putting 90 million tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every day. We face likely global disaster — that we could mitigate if we stopped tuning out things like the first 27 minutes of this speech. So maybe listen to the whole thing while you’re folding laundry? (Not part of this speech is one of Gore’s long-standing prescriptions: “The single most important thing we could do is to put a price on the CO2 in our economy today: reduce the payroll tax on working people and make it up with a tax on CO2. Tax what we burn, not what we earn.”) # The fix to the web site didn’t work, so it will continue to be down from time to time and email delivery will continue to be ten to twenty hours delayed. I have the world’s worst web hosting provider.
We Didn’t Really Kill Bin Laden October 25, 2013October 25, 2013 SITE WILL BE DOWN FROM MIDNIGHT THRU SOMETIME SUNDAY Web Mistress thinks there may be a way to solve some of the problems we’ve been having with late e-mail delivery and frequent outages. The fix will require about 36 hours to populate through the Internet (or something), beginning at midnight Eastern Daylight Time. I know: how will you make it through the weekend? Reviewing baby names? SHANIQUA HAD A MOMENT IN THE EARLY NINETIES Bill Szczuka: “A quick search on the Social Security Baby Name Database reveals Jennifer was ranked #10, #10, #4, #3, #1 for U.S. females born in the respective years 1966-1970. Given the film “Love Story” was released in December 1970, I’d guess the film did not help ‘Jennifer’ become the most popular baby girl name, as your reader suggested, but it may have increased and extended the name’s later popularity.” Randy Woolf: “Re: baby names, even better is babynamewizard.com. Mohammed is just getting started on this! I see I was named at the peak of ‘Randy’s’ popularity. Also, check out Wendy … until Peter Pan came out, only Welsh shepherds named their kid ‘Wendy’.” Tim Bonham: “Enter a name here and you can see a graph of the historical popularity of that name since 1880. Andrew peaked at #6 in 1987, now in the 20’s-30’s in most states — but still #11 in California. For boys, the big one is John, which was in the top 10 names for 100+ years, from 1881-1987, when it started dropping — it’s now only #27. It was the #1 boys name for much of that time, often with Michael as #2 sometimes passing it. For girls names, Mary was the big one; in the top 10 for 90 years, 1881-1971. Then it too went on a big decline, now down at #123.” WHAT THE RIGHT BELIEVES My pal Jonathan Capehart writes about a right-winger he interviewed who believes — among other things — that the President hates America and that we never actually killed Bin Laden. Watch the segment — and how so many good Americans have come to believe these things. I watched it in the train down to Washington where I caught Vice President Gore’s speech to the Center for American Progress (celebrating its 10th anniversary), wherein he noted the importance of an informed citizenry. I’ll be linking to that speech as soon as the video is available. [UPDATE: HERE IT IS. JOHN KERRY AND THEN AL GORE. If you’re pressed for time, start at the 50-minute mark . . . in about two minutes you get to the “well-informed citizenry” piece . . . seven minutes in all.] The contrast of these two thinkers — the guy Jonathan interviewed and Al Gore — is stark. And sobering. And, I think, deeply worth considering.
The Next Governor of Texas October 24, 2013October 23, 2013 SMBC Andy Frank: “You posted this 23 months ago: Aristides’ Chris Brown: “The SMBC secondary priced at $19 last night, though it was 2x oversubscribed. Tangible book value of the bank drops from $22.47 to $21.26. It’s a great buy in the $21 range. Management stated it should take them 18-24 months to deploy the extra capital. All things being equal, I believe this will be a $27-$31 stock at the end of that period.“ “Chris sure got this right. The stock closed today at $28.50 at the 23 month mark. I’m comfortable holding, as they’re doing well and a 2.4% dividend isn’t bad, but would you know what Chris is thinking now?” ☞ He is thinking: “I still like SMBC very much. They just posted a very good quarter, and had a conference call yesterday afternoon. The management team has executed very well, yet the price/book ratio still hasn’t gone up that much. I think the stock trades at least at 1.3x book 24 months from now, which gives you a $38 stock at that point, plus a 2% dividend while you wait. It is one of our top five holdings. A kicker, which is not needed to make this investment successful (I did not include it in my estimate above), but will help, is that as steady as the company’s growth has been, it seems likely to be a Russell 2000 addition in 2015. That could give shareholders an additional 10% upside, along with some better liquidity.” PRINTING FROM MYM12 William Herbstman: “I, too, use Managing Your Money software. I am currently using MYM DOS version 12 on a 15″ Mac Pro laptop. It runs great in Parallels using Windows 7. I am able to print to a USB printer using a program called DOS2USB without any problems. I track a muni bond portfolio and have not found any other software that does a better job than MYM.” Master MYM-er Mike Starkey: “There are some workarounds for getting your USB printer to work, but one of the easiest, requiring no technical knowledge, is dosprn, a small utility that captures your printer port and sends print jobs from MYM to the USB printer instead. It costs $15, but works great.” Craig D.: “I still use MYM12. Every week since the first MYM for almost 30 years. I have 27 years of stock transactions on it so I am really leery of moving to a new program. I also like the loan setup where I can keep track of current loan balances on my mortgage and car loans. I keep a couple of old computers around with MYM on them so when my main computer does die I can move my backup to the other computer. I can’t imagine what I would do if my MYM got wiped out.” JENNIFER Tamara Hendrickson: “I have a friend named Jennifer who was born in 1967. Her parents picked the name because it was uncommon. The Washington Post link that you posted doesn’t actually say why all 40-something women are named Jennifer, as your title suggests. It just shows when Jennifer became a popular name. Supposedly, Jennifer came in style because of the 1970 movie “Love Story,” in which Ali MacGraw’s character was named Jennifer. The graphic you posted backs this up because Jennifer becomes popular in 1970 and dominates for the next several years. I keep waiting for ‘Tamara’ to sweep the nation but I don’t think it is going to happen.” WENDY I got to spend an hour with Wendy Davis, who used to work down at the Orange Julius — read her remarkable life story here — and who just may be the next governor of the great state of Texas. She already has 70% name recognition a year and some out from the race (it took our last candidate $26 million to get that far) because of that amazing Texas Senate filibuster you probably saw on the news. And the phrase people most volunteer when asked to free associate, interestingly, is not “abortion” but, rather, “a fighter” — someone who fights for what she believes in. Which she does. And more good news: she’s something of a centrist. Boy, do we ever need more of those in the red states.
A Windmill In Your Basement? October 23, 2013 A WINDMILL IN YOUR BASEMENT? Well . . . that’s not exactly how Ethical Electric works. Click here to see how (and where) it does. WHY ALL 40-SOMETHING WOMEN ARE NAMED JENNIFER Well . . . not all. But click here to see — and then how ASHLEY and then EMMA spread across the land. MYM12 ON THE MAC Bill Kirkham: “I have used your Managing Your Money software almost since it first came out [in 1984]. I am currently using MYM DOS version 12 on a newish 15” Mac Pro laptop. It runs great in Parallels using Windows XP. The Parallels software provides a virtual Windows compatible environment on the Mac. Only drawback, my setup will not print to a USB printer. I am also experienced with Quicken, MS Money, MoneyDance and other more current money management programs but still find the fully adequate simplicity of MYM appealing. Do you know of any other MYM 12 users out there?” ☞ Me, for one. It’s been orphaned for 20 years, so there may be only a few hundred of us left. Helping to parent it was one of the most fun things I ever did.
From $898 A Month Down To Just … $22? October 22, 2013October 21, 2013 BOREF WheelTug signed its 13th airline — Mexico’s second largest, Volaris — which adds 90 aircraft to the reservation list, now 731 planes long. My assumption continues to be that no airline in its right mind would not want the savings from WheelTug — like wanting a TV without a remote control or a refrigerator that builds frost — so that if this all works out (which for reasons unbeknownst to me it may not!), there will eventually be more like ten or twenty thousand planes using it. The company projects annual savings per plane in the $1 million range, of which it proposes to grab half. I continue to think it will never get remotely that large a chunk of the savings, if only because much of the savings — though real — will be so hard to quantify. Still, if WheelTug could bring $50,000 per plane per year to the bottom line, that would be $36 million annual profit on just these 731 planes, or $500 million a year on 10,000 of them. So with stock in WheelTug’s grandparent closing up another $2 yesterday at $19.80 (having touched $21.50 as it bounced around on what — for it — was record volume), you have it valued at a hair under $100 million . . . less than half that beautiful Cezanne and not much at all, really, if its subsidiary ever does earn $37 million or $500 million a year. Big IFs — which is why, as always, you must only buy shares with money you can truly afford to lose. A CORRECTION BUT NOT A TYPO I screwed up last week when I wrote that the $95 fine for those who are uninsured and choose not to buy healthcare coverage “might” have to go up if not enough young healthy people sign up. In fact, definitely goes up. I knew that, but somehow forgot. But, even so, I wrote — and this is the part I got right — so what? We already make tens of millions of young healthy people pay the same as againg diabetics for their group health insurance at work. We make vegetarians pay for meat inspectors. We make Iraq War opponents pay for the Iraq War. It’s called living in a large, complex society. Thanks to Jim S. for remind me that “the penalties are already scheduled to increase:” When someone without health coverage gets urgent—often expensive—medical care but doesn’t pay the bill, everyone else ends up paying the price. That’s why the health care law requires all people who can afford it to take responsibility for their own health insurance by getting coverage or paying a penalty. The fee in 2014 is 1% of your yearly income or $95 per person for the year, whichever is higher. The fee increases every year [until] 2016 [when] it is 2.5% of income or $695 per person, whichever is higher. For more on this, click here. Jim S. continued: “My own health insurance costs next year will go down from $898 per month for a high-deductible plan with Kaiser to $22 per month for a similar plan with Kaiser under the Affordable Care Act which I purchased through the California health exchange last week.” Come again? I assumed $22 was a typo, but when I asked, Jim replied: “It was not a typo. I actually feel a little bit guilty because this is such a great deal. I am 63 and my wife is 62. Our income consists of social security and a small pension. I have been gradually converting our IRAs to Roth IRAs over the years so I supplement our income with distributions from our Roth IRAs. These Roth distributions are not included in our modified adjusted gross income which is the key number in the ACA subsidy calculation. Since our modified adjusted gross income is low (about $47,000 in 2014), we qualified for a subsidy of $1046 per month. Based on that, our share of the $1068 premium for our policy is $22. The policy is called the Kaiser Permanente Bronze 60 HSA. It has a high deductible but allows you to contribute to a Health Savings Account. My $898 plan was a similar HSA-compatible plan.” Despite the lamentable roll-out problems of healthcare.gov — no one’s finest hour — the overall long-term impact on the health of the citizenry — and the economy — should be highly positive. Ideally, the national resolve will be to improve the system as we encounter problems, not try to tear it down. In some quarters, that may be too much to hope for. But with time, comparisons of Obamacare to slavery . . . and the well-meaning but ill-informed demands that government “keep its hands off Medicare” . . . may just sort of fade away, as did Ronald Reagan’s now famous jeremiad against Social Security and Medicare.
WWTFHD? The Founders and Borealis October 21, 2013 WWTFHD? You know WWJD — what would Jesus do? Well, how about WWTFHD — what would the Founders have done? Here is a screed lambasting most sitting Republicans as unfit, because so many of them — 24 out of 28 in the Senate, 108 of 122 in the House — voted for President Bush’s Medicare Part D*: There are many ways to determine whether a Republican is worth the least bit of support from advocates of limited government. One is to see what the person’s position was on Medicare D — Bush’s prescription drug program. In particular, anyone who voted for it can simply never, ever be trusted to guard free enterprise or the Constitution against the ravages of Washington’s welfare state.* Like most of us on the left and the right, I revere the Constitution. But the world has changed a lot since 1789. It’s hard to know what the Founders, reborn today, would have thought about letting people die for lack of access to health care. Or about slavery. Or about letting women vote. Or about instituting a minimum wage. At their core, they were men whose common goal was to craft a new form of government that would work better for “the people.” It should at all costs avoid tyranny (both monarchical but also — magnificently — the potential tyranny of the majority over a minority). It should be fair. It should be practical. It should require compromise of competing factions. It should leave people free to elect representatives who would act wisely on their behalf (and kick them out of office if they were perceived not to have done so), applying that wisdom in whatever ways, over the centuries, they perceived to make sense. All of which suggests — at least collectively, if not from each Founder individually — a bias toward centrism. Compromise. Finding a workable balance. Lots of arguing, but, of necessity, a quest for common ground. You cannot tell me that President Obama — who adopted the Republican-think-tank-conceived health care plan that his 2012 Republican opponent had successfully championed in Massachusetts — took an extreme, intransigent, left-wing ideological approach to health care reform (some form of which all agreed was essential). And you cannot tell me that the Tea Party approach — that shut down the government rather than allow the law, passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the President, affirmed by the Supreme Court, and reaffirmed in a presidential election in which it was a central issue — was anything but extreme and intransigent. What made sense in 1789 in terms of regulating the Internet or handguns or the morning-after pill — or health insurance — might not make sense in 2013, since of all those things, only handguns existed in 1789. And they fired just one shot before requiring an elaborate process to reload. (It would not be until 1835 that Samuel Colt invented his revolver.) So we don’t know what the Founders would have thought of Obamacare. But it’s not at all clear Rush Limbaugh, Ted Cruz, and Michele Bachmann do, either. *Ironically, liberal Democrats like Barney Frank voted against the bill creating Medicare Part D, because it was “unfunded,” and so would balloon the debt. Democrats collect taxes to pay for needed spending; Republicans, since Reagan, prefer to borrow from future generations. Which is more responsible? BOREALIS Peter R: “I started this Borealis ride with you back in ’99! I did over the years sell off some when it spiked for no reason at all, then bought back when it settled down again, so currently left with 10,000 shares (cost basis about $2.90), so a nice paper profit of almost $150,000 — and the dipping in and out over the years paid for what I have now, so playing with the ‘house’ money. We’ve been waiting so long, can just as well ride it out to its ultimate conclusion!” Peter Baum: “I can tell you with certainty that I will not lose money on BOREF. I sold 1/4 of my modest position, so now it’s house money. (You asked recently who would actually *sell* this stock: perhaps it’s people like me.) I remember exactly one thing from my engineering statistics class–type I and type II error. It’s based on the idea that whatever decision you make *could* be wrong, and to weigh each of those eventualities appropriately. Let’s say you’re building a bridge and have to decide whether to spend money on extra structural reinforcements. You might include them and have them turn out to be unnecessary, costing taxpayers money. Or you might exclude them and have the bridge collapse, killing hundreds. That’s why bridges, nuclear facilities, etc. have lots of redundant systems. Now back to BOREF. You could either hold your entire position and have it crash to zero, or you could sell 1/4 (or whatever) and be guaranteed to at least break-even. Psychologically, that’s an easy call for me, and I would recommend that you start viewing it that way for yourself. I will note that this doesn’t necessarily lead to selling. Before the 1991 baseball season, I bet $20 at 250:1 on the Atlanta Braves to win the World Series. By the time they’d miraculously made it there, I could have cashed in for $2500. But I wanted the full $5000 — not out of greed, but because I wanted to be historically, amazingly, brilliantly RIGHT. And while I will hate Lonnie Smith for the rest of my natural life, I’m quite content with having held out.” ☞ I’m guessing Lonnie Smith was either a really bad umpire, a Brave who screwed up, or NOT a Brave who did something great. Whoever he was, my take-away from this story is that, like Peter and the Braves, I will hold all my BOREF not out of greed, but because . . . well, yes, actually, out of greed.
BOREF, Etc. October 18, 2013 My web hosting service has got to be the same private enterprise contracted with to build healthcare.gov. (Ugh.) I posted Thursday’s column at 1:22AM . . . and it was promptly delivered to those of us who get it automatically by email 19 hours later. For those of you who live nearby, it would have been faster for me to print it out and slip it under your door. The hosting service is trying to figure it out why. And why my site was down for nearly a full day last month. And why WordPress operates so slowly on its server. Etc. These are very 21st Century problems to have. It’s a gorgeous day outside, I have hot water, I have magic in my pocket, and someone seems to be bidding up shares in Borealis. As I type — mid-day — the stock is $16.52 bid, $16.55 asked. I don’t know which I find more amazing: the fact that it’s jumped here from $12 in the last week (it was $3 for years and years and years when I first mocked it), or that the “spread” at this moment is just 3 cents — less than a fifth of one percent — where it was routinely 100 times as wide (e.g., $3 bid, $3.50 asked, which is a 16% spread) for so many years. If I can mix fowl, I would advise that none of us crow before our chickens hatch. The stock could drop back to $12 — or $3 — the spread could widen — all that. But this is probably a good time once again to review the big picture. There are 12 airlines now that want WheelTug systems on their planes — seven of them, “flag carriers” like KLM, Alitalia, and El Al — and because the system is estimated to save an airline many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year per plane, there is the possibility that all airlines will eventually want WheelTug, just as all TV purchasers now demand remote control. Especially because the company’s model is to require essentially nothing of the airline upfront: only (or should I say “only”) half the savings. None of which will amount to anything if WheelTug can’t get FAA certification, or if some even better solution emerges from left field. But it’s not unreasonable to think it eventually will get certified — surely (in my view) there is a 50% chance of that. And if there is some even better solution lurking out there somewhere, it had better not infringe on any of WheelTug’s patents, or I’m gonna call those personal injury guys who advertise on late night TV. If things did go according to WheelTug’s plan, and WheelTug were eventually powering 10,000 aircraft, the profits would be in the many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And that’s before any profit someday from other applications of the technology. Could it be useful in cars? And before any profit from any of the parent company’s other fancifully ground-breaking technologies, none of which may amount to anything . . . but that’s what most people assumed about WheelTug for a long time, too. It’s easy to get carried away, but what I have long argued is that, given so much potential, this lottery ticket should command a much higher price. If I’m right that there’s a 50% chance none of this will fly . . . so don’t bet the farm! . . . but a 50% chance it really might . . . then how can the parent company not be worth $200 million (less than one times hoped for earnings)? Or, for that matter, $500 million? Which is to say — with the parent company divided into 5 million shares — $40 or $100 each. At those prices, I can see why someone might hesitate. And at those prices, I might begin to lighten up a little. (Though, at least as I see things now, just a little.) But at $16.50? Which is to say a market cap of less than $100 million — less than half what that beautiful Cezanne went for? Why? So those of you who own some should perhaps not rush to sell — even though the stock could well drop back down, and there’s maybe a 50% chance we’ll never win this lottery. For those of you just tuning in now, here’s the video of WheelTug’s CEO presenting recently in Toulouse. If you do decide to hop on, please do so only with money you can truly afford to lose. Toulouse . . . to lose . . . what are we to make of the fact that they are homonyms? Cue the ominous music. Oh, look at that: now it’s $17.20 bid, $17.60 asked. So the spread is wide-ish again. But it’s now up $2.10 so far today on 7,700 shares. If nothing else, I’m having fun. Have a great weekend.
What To Buy Now? October 17, 2013 They’re reopening the government (over the objections of 18 Republican Senators and 144 Republican Representatives who voted to keep it shut down). Borealis is up to $14.50. And I just watched a Mexican drug dealer’s head ride a large turtle across the desert. “Breaking Bad” aficionados will not soon forget that scene from Season Two. In short, I am in a good mood. But I have questions. Among them: When did it become patriotic to cripple the United States government? What does the supposed fiscally responsible party say about wasting $24 billion? What does the supposed “party of small business” say to the woman in this short video, whose small business they just destroyed? When did it become acceptable for the wealthy — who are not the job creators — to moan about paying taxes to help the poor or rebuild the nation? (Not crazy-high tax rates like the ones that prevailed for 35 years after World War II, but rates like those that served us well during Clinton Gore.) ELIZABETH WARREN’S TAKE Yes, we prevented an economic catastrophe that would have put a huge hole in our fragile economic recovery. But the reason we were in this mess in the first place is that a reckless faction in Congress took the government and the economy hostage for no good purpose and to no productive end. According to the S&P index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt. $24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded? The Republicans keep saying, “Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets.” They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt. So I’m relieved, but I’m also pretty angry. We have serious problems that need to be fixed, and we have hard choices to make about taxes and spending. I hope we never see our country flush money away like this again. Not ever. WHAT TO BUY NOW Land in the currently frigid north. It could be hot property sooner than you think. Click here. WHERE TO BUY IT Certainly not in one of those awful places like New York or California, where the taxes you pay get exported to help folks in other states. The New York Times has prepared a little map. And notes: . . . Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the [state’s dependence on the feds], the greater the support for Republican candidates . . . Those red Southern states are, in short, “the takers.” READ IT IN ROMANIAN An e-book edition of The Best Little boy In The World has just been released — for free — in Romanian. Here’s the announcement. Click the link in the first paragraph to get it (“poate fi citită făcând click aici“). Don’t say I never gave you anything.