Year: 2015

CHINA / CISG

The Chinese stock market has dropped 30% in a month — but before you go out running for bargains, note that it is still 80% higher than it was last summer.  The bubble may have further to deflate.   Here’s a quick clip from yesterday with the tale.

One Chinese stock that may not have been overvalued, as argued here before, and whose sudden sharp drop may be a case of a perfectly good baby having been thrown out with the bathwater, is CISG.  I bought more yesterday at $5.76.  I’m told it has $8 or $9 of cash per share, so in effect, at $5.76 [update: $6.83], you’re getting its profitable automobile insurance business for free.  Indeed, you’re being paid handsomely to take it.  Just as you were a year and a half ago, if you bought shares at $5.40 when first suggested, before they doubled.  (“This would be an obvious time to sell half and, with house money, see what happens with the rest,” I suggested a few weeks ago, with the stock at $11.  In case you did sell half, it might make sense now to buy them back.)  Note that someone just paid $11.80 a share for $37 million worth, which gives me further comfort there may be value for us here at $6 or $7 a share.

CHINA /FIREWORKS

It’s not just in their infratsructure that China is leap-frogging.  Get a load of this two-minute 2013 New Year’s Eve fireworks display from a town in Hunan province.  (Thanks, Glenn.)  Of course, the Chinese invented fireworks.  [OOPS. Mike Martin:  “I believe the Hunan fireworks video is fake: notice that YouTube describes it as ‘FWSim’ which is software for simulating fireworks displays on your computer.”]

PUERTO RICO

Mentioned here and here, this may be a cliffhanger.  If you were smart enough not to buy the zero coupon bonds at $92 each, when I did, you may now be able to get them for more like $65.  Only with money you can truly afford to lose.

BOREF

Some lucky — or unlucky — bastard bought a few shares Tuesday at $6.70.  That values the whole company at less than half what Demi Moore is asking for her apartment.  One day, we’ll all look back and laugh.  Either at how I actually could have believed any of this (like Isaac Newton buying shares in the South Sea Bubble?) . . . or else “all the way to the bank.”  No Isaac Newton, my strong assumption, nonetheless, is that the stock dropped not — likie an apple from a tree — because anything has come unhinged, but because a shareholder got bored and sold.

That’s what the blimp circling Chicago’s Soldier Field Stadium periodcially scrolled across its giant display, as 70,000 Deadheads — all of whom know the Loose Lucy lyric — did indeed thank the band for 50 years of a real good time.

For three nights running, as you probably saw on the news.

Here was the Empire State Building in New York bopping to the sound in Chicago Saturday — how often does the Empire State Building bop?

And here‘s the video I took of the fireworks Sunday.  That’s the night my friend and I went.  You may have seen us on TV — two specks in a potent haze.

(Here we are.  Move your mouse from the top of Phil Lesh’s upraised left pinky straight toward that giant black rectangular at the far end of the stadium.  Now go back about a quarter inch, which is to say 20 rows from the lower edge of the black rectangle.  That’s us.  The woman next to us is from Alabama.)

The irony is that I, an old guy, am at best an aspiring Deadhead . . . a Deadhead-in-training . . . having jumped on the band’s wagon just last summer — somehow I missed the first 49 years — whereas my friend who snagged us tickets, just 2 years old when Cherry Garcia became a flavor, knows seemingly every lyric of all 200 songs and could reliably tell from virtually the first note, a good 5 seconds before the rest of the crowd, what was up next.

The songs I didn’t know were fine.  But, oh, the difference it makes when you do know them.  I was out getting us more beer and a pretzel when “Unbroken Chain” began to play — not one I knew — and half the people in line bolted to go back to their seats.

(It still took forever, and just as it was my turn to order, they cut off all beer sales to give folks an hour to sober up a little, I guess, before driving back to Iowa.  And the pretzel I got was unsalted.  What, please, is the point of an unsalted pretzel?)

But then there was “Days Between,” which I also didn’t know but could appreciate on first listen . . .

. . . one of the deepest and darkest cuts in the Dead catalog, its lyrics painting a grim landscape where “summer flies and August dies, and the world grows dark and mean.” Still, the song’s soaring finale offer “all we ever wanted was to learn and love and grow … [we] gave the best we had to give, how much we’ll never know,” lines that seemed appropriate here. . . .

. . . followed by “Not Fade Away” to close out the night and “Touch of Grey” (the first encore), both of which I have on my jukebox (actual 45’s in an actual jukebox) — and suddenly I was not just bopping to the music, enjoyably, like a tiny Empire State Building; I was involved.

I was invested.

“No our love / will not fade away” had a chorus 70,000 strong . . . who kept repeating it acapella for several minutes after the music stopped.  Literally.   It was tribal.  And the “Touch of Grey” lyric?  “I will get by — I will survive.”  After what a fair number of the folks there at Soldiers Field had been through over the decades?  Maybe even including, in some small way, your humble servant?

You had to be there.

And we were.

Thanks, Brian.

I have not died and gone to heaven, I have lost my mind and flown to Chicago.  For the final Grateful Dead concert.

Long story . . . but take the day off.  Bop.  Bop bop.

Or watch this poignant four-minute story.  (If it’s told by Steven Spielberg, you know it’s likely to be worth your time.)  Thanks, Mel!

According to CNN, former President George W. Bush is now more popular than current President Barack Obama.

That’s right: Bush, who misled us into a disastrous war and wrecked our national balance sheet; Obama, who saved us from global depression and reduced the American body counts from that war to zero.

Paul Abrams:  “Democrats have allowed Bush back by not constantly bashing him for the Iraq War, the most disastrous economic and financial collapse since the Great Depression, and being asleep at the switch for 9/11 and Katrina. Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover through the 1960 campaign.  Why not Bush?”

☞ Democrats, I would argue, are not great at bashing.

I’m sure some of us do bash from time to time.  But as a general rule, Republicans go at it more freely.

Mitch McConnell . . . not just any Republican, but their leader . . . seems a lot more comfortable saying that “By any standard, Barack Obama has been a disaster for our country” — spectacularly, demonstrably, wildly, absurdly untrue* — than Barack Obama seems comfortable characterizing the disaster he inherited.  He tends to call it the Great Recession.  One might argue that we should call it the Terrible Recession — it was not great, it was terrible — and always, always add the word “Bush.”  The Terrible Bush Recession.  Or the word “Republican.”  The Terrible Republican Recession.

The truth is, most of us are not comfortable doing that.  It seems rather bad sportsmanship.  Of course he played a terrible game.  Just not right to rub it in (and could backfire for that very reason).  He’s a nice guy, almost everyone who’s met him agrees.  (I even have a photo with him myself.  In our 20-second exchange he was completely charming and self-deprecating.)  He didn’t mean for things to go disastrously wrong.  He paints remarkably well.  Give the guy a break!

So — largely — we do.

Or at least more largely than their guys give our guys a break.

We had the courtly, shy Warren Christopher quartbacking Bush v. Gore; they had James Baker — and Tom Delay staffers, among others, flying down to Miami, shouting and pounding to “stop the recount!” — the so-called Brooks Brothers riot.

You may believe Democrats are as guilty of bashing as are Republicans.  Or that Bush did a great job and Obama has been a disaster.  But the fact that by at least CNN’s measure George W. Bush was recently more popular than Barack Obama?  It’s at best a matter of some frustration to those of us who disagree.

*If “any standard” includes such basics as job creation, housing prices, corporate profits, the stock market, daily body counts, health care inflation, high school graduation rates, gas prices, energy independence, or deficit reduction.

WHEW!

Same-sex marriage is okay, says this Orthodox rabbi.  Whew!  Now I just have to find the right goy.

OUR SELF-DESTROYING SPECIES

Or the right penguin.

The Supreme Court found Monday — whether rightly or wrongly from a legal perspectve — that the EPA went too far in a recent attempt to protect the environment.  Here’s an entirely different perspective — not a legal one — just by way of context.

From Peter Matthiessen’s End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica:

The blithe wandering of penguins in the ocean wastes is made possible by the salt gland adaptation shared with the gale birds and also by the uncanny powers of navigation found in migratory birds, sea turtles, and other endowed creatures, from dogs to spiny lobsters. Perhaps it was also an attribute of early man, but man does not recognize such gifts as true intelligence, being insufficiently intelligent himself to imagine intelligences of a nature different than his own.

Watching for hours from bow and bridge, I am awed by these creatures and their adaptations and migrations … — by icebergs, whales, the sea and ships, circumpolar currents, geologic time, the origins and evolutionary histories of life-forms, the quirks of birds, birders, and explorers, antifreeze in fish blood, the blue in ice, human folly, the ozone hole, and the earthly balances upset by global warming — in short, the mysteries of the natural world in their endless variations, the myriad petals of creation that open up and fall away in every moment.

Therefore I seek to understand phenomena that might help our self-destroying species to appreciate the shimmering web of bio-diversity in the Earth process, the common miracles, fleeting as ocean birds, which present themselves endlessly to all our senses, to be tasted, experienced, and fiercely defended for our innocent inheritors against the rape and dreadful wasting of this beautiful and fragile biosphere and its resources. In the forgetting that we, too, are animals, a part of nature, as dependent on its health and industrial erosion and poisoning of our earth habitat that promises to leave mankind as desolate and bereft of hope as a turtle stripped alive from its shell.

According to Bloomberg:  The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change Forever.

Interested?  Click the link!  It’s all about the sun.

(Spoiler alert: for all the good news it contains, it still won’t be enough to avert climate disaster.  So — as the Pope recently noted — don’t think we can rely on technology alone.)

#

Of course, this has been a long time coming.

Thomas Edison — who himself knew a thing or two about electricity — famously said, “I would put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

#

You  can stop reading right there.

That quote and the Bloomberg link are more than enough.

But in case you have time for nostalgia . . .

#

It seems like five minutes ago — though it was 1974 — that I was sitting (petrified!) with the Secretary of the Treasury, asking him why we should not begin adding a dime a gallon to the gasoline tax each year — using all those billions to lower the income tax — thus discouraging the thing we wanted to discourage (oil imports) and encouraging the things we wanted to encourage: work, saving, and fuel efficiency.

As I’ve written here before:

. . . Gas would have risen to the same $5 it hit not that long ago, but the cost of driving a mile would have stayed modest as fuel efficiency soared; and all those trillions of dollars over the years would have stayed in American coffers rather than flowing to our friends abroad.

The Secretary — who was considered a bit of a terror (and who certainly scared me) — gave a long glower, as if trying to figure out how to deal with such a moronic question — and said, “Yes, of course we should!  Everybody knows that.  But we could never do it politically.”

Just one enormous example of a simple, obvious policy change that would have made us far more prosperous today, and very likely safer, with a much stronger balance sheet.

Forty years from now, will we be saying the same of our failure to address climate change?  Or our failure to shift modestly from private consumption (bigger homes, bigger yachts) to public consumption (infrastructure revitalization)?

In the winter of that same year — 1974 (as I’ve also written here before) —

I had a cover story in NEW YORK Magazine about the potential for solar energy.  I knew it was important – OPEC and Mideast oil were all anyone could think about (except Detroit’s executives, who would spend the next three decades in denial) – but I was surprised to learn my piece was going to be the cover. It seemed a bit of a stretch to run the piece in NEW YORK at all, let alone as the cover. What was famed editor Clay Felker thinking?

It turned out he was thinking, ‘Let’s sell some magazines!’

He put a gorgeous model in a bikini absorbing rays on a float in the middle of a swimming pool. In February.

I’m not certain how well the issue sold, but finally, nearly 35 years later [now, in 2015, 41 years later], solar energy is becoming sexy on its own.

You could (for example) have done very well buying First Solar (FSLR) at 24 when it went public a year ago (I missed it); less well shorting a few shares as I did this fall at $160 (it closed yesterday at $281, up more than tenfold).  [Around $51 today, down from a peak of $311, that short doesn’t seem to have been such a bad idea.  But with shorting, it’s really important to gtet the timing right.]

Although this stings a bit as an investor, I’m delighted to think we are finally at the point, or nearly so, that solar panel film can produce electricity at competitive prices.

To say I am not expert in this field would be an understatement on the order of ‘the sun is rather hot.’ But according to this, FSLR’s cost of producing a watt of solar power was $1.16 recently . . . and according to this, a privately owned competitor called Nanosolar has begun selling its panels for 99 cents a watt, which (according to this) it manufactures for 30 cents . . . which puts the cost of solar below the cost of coal.  [Hindsight alert:  Nanosolar, Thin-Film Solar Hype Firm, Officially Dead.]

. . .

THE MAIN THING: CAN YOU IMAGINE?

WE’RE GETTING CLOSE TO A BIG STEP TOWARD CLEAN, AFFORDABLE ENERGY.

Don’t Sell Humanity Short Quite Yet.

Has there ever been a more exciting time to be alive?

It seems so simple and so clear.

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered.

Our friends on the other side of this and so many other issues — like the four dissenting Justices — disagree.  Perhaps with time their views may change.

The nature of traditional marriage, which once included polygamy and seven-year olds, changes.

The natural order of things, like the Biblically sanctioned owenrship of slaves, changes.

I am still wide-eyed from those two speeches Friday . . . in the Rose Garden and, hours later, Charleston.

Amazing Grace.

John McCain and Mitt Romney are wonderful people in many ways.  But John McCain wouldn’t have made those speeches — or appointed two progressive Supreme Court Justices.

Nor Mitt Romney.

As Bush v. Gore so painfully reminds us, it truly matters who wins.

A difference of two Justices is the difference between a 5-4 decision that grants marriage equality and a 3-6 decision that denies it . . . between a 6-3 decision that upholds Affordable Health Care for millions and a 4-5 decision that, based on one sloppy line in a giant piece of legislation whose intent is clearly known to everyone, takes it away.

If you’re with Justice Scalia, Jeb Bush, Fox News, et al, on matters like these, you have every right to be — obviously — and I am particularly grateful for your visiting a site like mine and considering my views.

But if you helped elect and re-elect Barack Obama, you helped lift the nation’s sights Friday afternoon, and light her White House Friday night, and I am yet more grateful still.

Please stick with it.  Four of our nine Justices will be in their eighties in the first term of the next presidency.  Which party’s nominee gets to replace any who might retire is a matter of enormous consequence.

NIGHTLY

Did you see Larry Wilmore’s segment on the rebel flag Monday?  So funny.  So sharp.  And informative!

Did you already know about the “Cornerstone Speech” of 1861?

. . . [The Confederacy’s] cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. . . .

It was new to me — and puts the Confederate flag and its rebel counterpart into even starker relief.

There is so much truly wonderful about the South and Southerners . . . obviously . . . just as there is so much wonderful about Germany and Germans, Japan and Japanese.  But certain aspects of their histories — while they should never be forgotten — should probably not be flown proudly overhead.

You’d think that would have gone without saying.  But at least now, in the wake of tragedy, Alabama, Wal-Mart, Lindsay Graham, et al, have come together, finally, to say it.

GAYLY

Did you see this examination of gay voices?  Six minutes.  The surprise at the end is so obvious it’s not much of a surprise — but still powerful.

REALLY?

And with the Supreme Court “marriage” ruling likely to come down this morning or Monday morning, can it really have taken until now for this kick-ass review of “traditional marriage” to have appeared?  Really?  How I’d love Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito to watch it — the three Justices I assume will vote against civil marriage equality — and then hear their thoughts on the virtues of traditional marriage.

Three clips totalling 22 minutes.

LATE BREAKING NEWS

And now this one, with the Supreme Court marriage ruling just having come down, wherein the President of the United States brings a boy who never thought he could have a life — never thought he could share his secret — never thought he could express his love — yet somehow knew, even then, as a boy, that what he felt wasn’t bad, just different . . . wherein that great President brings that young boy, now grown, to tears.

Simply put, the last two days’ Supreme Court rulings have been good for health and for love.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

NIGHTLY

Did you see Larry Wilmore’s segment on the rebel flag Monday?  So funny.  So sharp.  And informative!

Did you already know about the “Cornerstone Speech” of 1861?

. . . [The Confederacy’s] cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. . . .

It was new to me — and puts the Confederate flag and its rebel counterpart into even starker relief.

There is so much truly wonderful about the South and Southerners . . . obviously . . . just as there is so much wonderful about Germany and Germans, Japan and Japanese.  But certain aspects of their histories — while they should never be forgotten — should probably not be flown proudly overhead.

You’d think that would have gone without saying.  But at least now, in the wake of tragedy, Alabama, Wal-Mart, Lindsay Graham, et al, have come together, finally, to say it.

GAYLY

Did you see this examination of gay voices?  Six minutes.  The surprise at the end is so obvious it’s not much of a surprise — but still powerful.

REALLY?

And with the Supreme Court “marriage” ruling likely to come down this morning or Monday morning, can it really have taken until now for this kick-ass review of “traditional marriage” to have appeared?  Really?  How I’d love Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito to watch it — the three Justices I assume will vote against civil marriage equality — and then hear their thoughts on the virtues of traditional marriage.

Three clips totalling 22 minutes.

LATE BREAKING NEWS

And now this one, with the Supreme Court marriage ruling just having come down, wherein the President of the United States brings a boy who never thought he could have a life — never thought he could share his secret — never thought he could express his love — yet somehow knew, even then, as a boy, that what he felt wasn’t bad, just different . . . wherein that great President brings that young boy, now grown, to tears.

Simply put, the last two days’ Supreme Court rulings have been good for health and for love.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

After nearly a decade, we’re almost there.  July 14 will be the fly-by.  Read more?

Tom Stolze:  “A lot folks don’t know Pluto’s elliptical orbit around the sun takes 248 earth years! So NASA had to do this while Pluto is nearest to the Earth.  In another 248 years there might not even be an Earth — or an Earth with humans.  And, by the way, the New Horizons spacecraft has been the fastest of all, at 36,373 mph; it set the record for the highest launch speed of a human-made object from Earth. Even at that speed it will have taken 3462 days to go the 4.5 billion miles . . . and needs just 228 watts of power to operate all the cameras and other scientific equipment on board.”

☞ I’m not saying 36,373 miles per hour isn’t really fast.  But because the earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, you could say we’ve been going one mile per year.

As my friend Bobby would say: “Think about it.”