Author: A.T.

SAVE A FORTUNE ON DRUGS

A friend with some kind of “drug plan” he says he doesn’t understand paid only $1,600 for a 90-day supply of Truvada.  It would have cost nearly $6,000 without insurance.

Or . . .

He could have paid $42 at Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs (and from now on, will).

I’ve long recommended Cost Plus Drugs.  It’s no good for something you need right away; but for pills you take regularly?  It’s saved me so many thousands of dollars it’s ridiculous.

Here is Mark Cuban on health insurance (and/or the longer Wired interview from whence it comes).

Mark Cuban for President?  If we want a business guy famous from TV, I sure wish we had the Shark Tank star, not the Apprentice.

SAVE A FORTUNE ON DEMENTIA

As I’ve long pitched you, there’s ample peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that a few hours a year exercise with BrainHQ (a company in which I’m a small investor) will significantly lower your risk of developing dementia . . . lower the frequency and severity of auto accidents . . . and, if you’re an NFL quarterback, improve your performance long past the age other quarterbacks have retired.

If only Kay Granger were one of your fellow readers and had followed this advice.  Congressional ‘Gerontocracy’ Worries Resurface After Member Found to Be Living in Senior Facility.

Dementia is costly in so many ways.  And seems to be largely preventable.

CORRECTIONS

Friday, I said “Intel” when I meant “Qualcomm.”  Oops.  And a day or two before, I said “million” when I meant “billion.”  Just going to prove that young people have senior moments, too.  (Well, young-ish.)

But first . . .

SELF-DRIVING CARS

Daniel N.: “You’re doing the public a great disservice by pushing back on self-driving technology.  For example, Google’s robo-drivers are now clearly 10X safer than human drivers.  That means that over a hundred people now needlessly die each day that we delay deploying this life-saving technology.  As I understand it, the current requirement is to report robo-driver collisions and not human-driver collisions. The better answer would be to report all collisions in comparable fashion so that the danger posed by human drivers is readily apparent.  But it seems clear that we can’t have that. So, paradoxically, the public is better served by avoiding the sensationalism that currently accompanies the robo-driver-only accident reporting.”

→ I agree we shouldn’t discourage self-driving technology.  Data on human-error collisions have been readily available for decades.  In 2022, for example, there were nearly 6 million police-reported crashes, more than 90% of them due to human error.  There is every reason to think auto-pilot and self-driving systems will keep improving; little reason to think humans will.  So the safety data should grow ever more skewed in favor of these technologies.  Tesla and other car makers with good safety records (relative to humans) surely have the resources to get the word out.

An even more powerful way to get the word out should be the free market.  If self-driving cars have 90% fewer accidents, auto insurers will be offering big discounts to reflect that.  And to the extent such cars do cause crashes, it may be the manufacturers — not the drivers — who are held liable.  Another reason the insurer can afford to charge drivers less if they’ve chosen a vehicle with this capability.

Rather than remove the reporting requirement, as the Trump transition team seems to be aiming to do, it should push for more publicly reported data.  That would be in everyone’s interest — including Tesla’s.

You can be sure the auto insurers themselves will be keeping track, even if the incoming administration chooses not to.

And now . . .

IS THE MARKET GETTING READY TO COLLAPSE?

Quite possibly — though just when is of course impossible to know.  The market has always collapsed from time to time. It’s not the end of the world when it does — and a buying opportunity for people with cash on the sidelines.  People like Warren Buffett, who at last report was sitting on $325 billion (it’s probably more now).

Tesla could just keep doubling every three months, but it currently pays no dividend and sells at 125 times earnings.  As one of my smartest friends astutely observes: “It’s a car company.”  (Ford sells at about 12 times earnings; Toyota, at about 10.)  And, though tariffs could protect Tesla’s U.S. market for a while, Tesla’s Chinese competitors offer the world a similar product at a lower price.

Nor is the market for cars likely to grow at some astonishing rate.  Yes, in what we hope will be a more prosperous world, more people will be able to afford them.  But many of those people live in populous areas where it makes increasingly less sense to pay a fortune for a car that sits idle 90% of the time — and endure the expense and hassle of buying it, registering it, parking it, insuring it, repairing it, and driving it.  Why do all that when you can just summon a chauffeured Lyft or Uber?  And in a few years may be able to summon a driverless Lyft or Uber for even less.

Tesla is probably the most overvalued big market-cap company, but there are lots of others that, while less egregiously overvalued, are overvalued all the same.  (And don’t forget: in a market panic, many good stocks become irrationally under-valued for a while.  Irrationality swings both ways.)

An example of a preposterously overvalued, insignificantly small company — it has just $5 million in annual sales — is DJT.  It, too, could just keep going up and up, at least for a while.  But what if its huge annual losses never become profits and it has to sell more and more stock to stay afloat?  Or what if its chief asset, Donald Trump, doesn’t live forever?  Steve Jobs didn’t and Apple has done just great; but can the sober-minded investor expect the same of Trump Media?

The nice thing about “our” stocks is that — though some may collapse or disappear — they are neither overvalued (in my view) nor particularly tied to the stock market as a whole.

The most obvious example is PRKR.  It could lose all its lawsuits and go to zero.  But if it recovered $1 billion or $2 billion from Qualcomm, et al, that would be a rounding error to them, but potentially $10+ a share to PRKR.  So even in a bear market, the stock would likely jump well about its current 85 cent price.

Similarly, if ANIX were to succeed in curing ovarian cancer, or its breast cancer vaccine proved effective — giant ifs, to be sure — then whatever the state of the stock market, its shares would likely be worth many times what they sell for today (not least because they have been beaten down, I’m guessing, by year-end tax selling pressure that ends Tuesday).

At another is extreme BKUTK — not a crazy swing-for-the-fences like most of the things I suggest, a sleepy community bank selling at less than 7 times earnings.  Whatever the market does, it seems not worth selling.

Not least because, if the past is any guide, bear markets eventually end.

Somewhere in between those extremes of aggressive speculation and hoped-for deep value, lies CNF.  On the one hand it is selling at under 4X earnings.  On the other hand, it’s Chinese (even though it trades on the New York Stock Exchange), so who the hell knows?  In short: a “speculative value stock,” to be bought only with money you can truly afford to lose.  It’s fallen so far for so long, I have to assume there’s been significant year-end tax selling; so I’ve been buying.

[Speaking of losers . . . there is RECAF.  I haven’t sold because the pain I’d feel seeing it go to zero pales beside the anguish I’d feel, having sold, if it somehow soared.  But if you bought a meaningful number of shares between February 28, 2019 and September 7, 2021, click here to possibly join a settlement that entitles us, as a group, to some share of what appears to be about $5 million after legal fees and currency conversion.  It’s likely not worth the time and effort if you bought only a few hundred shares; I can’t imagine it will cover a very large percentage of our losses.  But if your loss, whether on paper or realized, has been large enough that getting even a modest slice back would be meaningful, follow the instructions very carefully and email your documentation no later than January 9.]

Back to the question at hand.  Is the Market Getting Ready To Collapse?  If you didn’t click that link before, you might want to click it now.  James Scurlock makes a strong case for being concerned. 

You certainly don’t want to be in the market “on margin” (i.e., with borrowed money) or with cash you might actually need in the next year or three; and you may want to have some meaningful amount of cash on the sidelines, like Warren Buffett.

That said, Buffett (and Scurlock) would be the first to agree that in taxable accounts, there’s a huge cost in trying to “time the market,” because each time you take your gains, if they’re large, you pay a big chunk in taxes.  That really crimps the power of compounding.

So if you won’t need to sell any time soon . . . and are not the type to panic and sell at the bottom . . . then, in taxable accounts, it can certainly make sense to hold for the long term and pay no attention at all.

Which last happened in 2005, and so I offer two gifts:

> A rotten little kid’s brutal letter to Santa (2 minutes, adults only).  Who raised this kid?!  Satan?

> An Easy Way to Calculate — And Double-Offset! — Your Carbon Footprint.

I took the 5-minute test and rejected most of the suggestions.  I already do a lot of this stuff and am too selfish to do much of the rest.  But a couple of the ideas were thought-provoking, and at the end I found a painless way to possibly double-offset my footprint for just 60 cents a day . . . far less than the $2.32 a day you can save just by adopting my selfless iced tea routine . . . and a very big deal indeed.

Whatever your religion or lack of same, the spirit of Christmas is the best in us, and the last word always goes to Tiny Tim.

Happy Chrismukkah!

Yesterday’s post about forming a shadow cabinet — Professor Timothy Snyder’s excellent idea — had a heavy dose of Musk.  (And one senior moment — I said Musk paid $44 “million” for Twitter when of course it was billion.)

Today: guess why Musk blew up the deal to keep the government open?

Heather Cox Richardson explains:

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. . . Musk blew up the agreement by issuing what was an apparent threat to fund primary challengers to any Republican who voted for it. He apparently scuttled the measure on his own hook, since Trump took about thirteen hours to respond to his torpedoing it.

Musk expressed willingness to leave the government unfunded for a month, apparently unconcerned that a shutdown would send hundreds of thousands of government workers deemed nonessential into temporary leave without pay. This would include about 800,000 civilian employees of the Pentagon, about 17,000 people from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and those who staff the nation’s national parks, national monuments, and other federal sites.

Federal workers considered essential would have to continue to work without pay. These essential workers include air traffic controllers and federal law enforcement officers. Military personnel would also have to continue to work without pay.

Taking away paychecks is always wrenching, but to do it right before the winter holidays would devastate families. It would hurt the economy, too, since for many retailers the holiday season is when their sales are highest. Musk—who doesn’t answer to any constituents—seemed untroubled at the idea of hurting ordinary Americans. ″‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” he tweeted.

In the end, Congress passed a bill much like the one Musk scuttled, but one of the provisions that Congress stripped out of the old bill was extraordinarily important to Musk. As David Dayen explained in The Prospect, the original agreement had an “outbound investment” provision that restricted the ability of Americans to invest in technology factories in China. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) had collaborated on the measure, hoping to keep cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as well as the jobs they would create, in America rather than let companies move them to China.

As Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) explained, Musk is building big factories in China and wants to build an AI data center there, even though it could endanger U.S. security. McGovern charged that Musk’s complaints about the spending in the bill were cover for his determination to tank the provision that would limit his ability to move technology and business to China. And, he noted, it worked. The outbound investment provision was stripped out of the bill before it passed.

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And, HCR goes on to explain, a provision to lower health care costs was also stripped out of the bill.

As always, she is worth reading in full.

So much more to say, but with Christmas and Chanukah just hours away, let me just wish you all the happiest, healthiest, merriest, and most meaningful.

Every day is a gift!

Human error is responsible for thousands of U.S. auto accidents each year.

Tesla’s auto-pilot isn’t perfect either.

We know this because car companies are required to report auto-pilot accidents.

Tesla doesn’t like that requirement, so the Trump transition team is moving to scrap it.

That’s the bureaucratic nub of it.

This 11-minute video brings it to life — and death — in living color.  

The next segment in the same show reviews a list of Trump hires . . . segues into an interview with Tim Snyder that describes our slide into oligarchy . . . and asks what the hell do we do now?

The whole thing is only 9 minutes, but if you’re pressed for time, at least watch that last piece, because Professor Snyder proposes forming a shadow Cabinet to whom the press could turn for comment . . . not only on the bad stuff the Trump team is doing, but also on the good stuff we’d like to do.

Musk invested $277 million in electing Trump.

Since Trump’s election, his net worth has increased by about 700 times as much (about $200 billion).

Autocrats and oligarchs are thrilled with Trump’s win — Putin foremost among them — but so are most MAGA supporters.

At least for now.

They know Trump’s going to:

. . . give them great healthcare at a fraction of the cost (after 9 years’ hard work, he has a concept of a plan) . . .

. . . drive down the cost of groceries by: (1) adding tariffs to the price of the food we import; (2) deporting low-wage workers who bring to market the food we produce here . . .

. . . reduce the deficit by lowering taxes on the uber-wealthy and further strangling the IRS.

It behooves us, I think, to stay engaged.

So says Senator Chris Murphy:

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. . . I don’t think there are signs that the media is folding. They are folding. They are. We’re watching them fold. I don’t exactly know why Elon Musk decided to fold his entire operation into the White House, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that he got rich off of government policy, whether it be tax credits on electric vehicles or subsidies for his space business. He’s just much better off being integrated into power. I don’t know why Comcast decided to sell MSNBC, but maybe it has to do with the fact that they decided they don’t want to get crosswise with Donald Trump because they have lots of business interests that intersect with the government. I don’t know why Jeff Bezos, for the first time ever, told The Washington Post not to endorse, but maybe it’s because his bread is often buttered by government policy. I don’t know why ABC decided to settle a bogus lawsuit, but maybe …

Listen . . . when the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer.

And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime.

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Worth reading or listening in full.

So what do we do?

I called 1-800-CHATGPT.  (No joke.)

“How do we keep from losing our democracy?” I asked.

“That’s a big question,” she replied, and proceeded to give me a sensible response, albeit no silver bullet.  She concluded by asking me “what sparked your interest in this?”

I said, “The possible prosecution of Liz Cheney.”  And off she went with another interesting response about the rule of law.

I have no idea how 1-800-CHATGPT and “LLMs” can possibly work, but it is clear we are hurtling toward a brave new world.

I would like to see it be a world of democracy and decency.

“Stay engaged,” 1-800-CHATGPT advised.

Tuesday, two misconceptions and this from “The Daily” — How China could shut off our hot water — and everything else.

Today, Tom Friedman: How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations.

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“China had its Sputnik moment — his name was Donald Trump,” Jim McGregor, a business consultant who lived in China for 30 years, told me. “He woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort to take their indigenous scientific, innovative and advanced manufacturing skills to a new level.”

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Wait ’til you read.

COMMON MISPERCEPTIONS

These quick takes are worth a couple of minutes:

Undocumented immigrants and taxes.

Trump and energy independence.

As NBC used to say, “The more you know.”

CHINA

“The Daily” on how China could shut off our hot water — and everything else.  Of course, we could presumably do the same to them — so let’s not?

DRIVERLESS CARS

Fun.

But first:

MOVIES

I had forgotten why I was on this list — like you, I’m on a lot of lists — and, truthfully, the trailer for Regarding Us left me worried it could be well-meaning but preachy. 

I decided to go anyway because the invite promised a post-film discussion with Martine Rothblatt, who founded United Therapeutics (market cap $16 billion) and SiriusXM radio and designed — and pilots — her own electric helicopter, and, well, I don’t think you will ever read a more astonishing Wikipedia bio than hers.

Plus, it was only 17 bucks.

I hopped on the subway, took an aisle seat by the door in case it was excruciating, and settled in with a bag of popcorn.

Just as the film was about to start, Martine and her stylish wife Bina plopped into seats behind me.  (Martine was “Martin” when they married and had kids.  She transitioned 30 years ago.)

Up came the credits, Martine’s name as Executive Producer, and — yikes! — my name a few frames in.  So that’s why I was on the list.  It had been so long in the making, I’d forgotten that I chipped in.

So now I was even more worried — what if it really was excruciating?

But it was great.  And will be streaming soon on Apple+ and I need you to do me a favor.  Spend $12.99 to “pre-order” it now.  Healthy pre-order demand will earn the film a bigger promotional push, and thus your $12.99 will be a small contribution to a kinder, gentler world.

(A movie in theaters now with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating — related to Regarding Us by the Catholic church — is Conclave.  Even my wonderful brother-in-law the priest loved it.)

And now:

GEOPOLITICS

It’s tragic what Hamas did to the Gazan people by slaughtering and kidnapping so many Israelis — just as it was tragic what Japan’s leaders did to their people by bombing Pearl Harbor.  But for all the tragedy in Gaza, which is unspeakably awful, there may now be glimmers of hope.

How Israel Turned the Mideast Around.

Your comments welcome, as always.

JUSTICE

Trump and his post-Gaetz pick for Attorney General go back a long way.  He seems to have successfully bribed her.  Check out the time-line!

It’s no secret that he gets away with a lot of stuff.

Consider the contrast:

TV personality Martha Stewart lied to the feds about something relatively trivial — and went to prison.

TV personality Donald Trump lied about his theft and concealment of top-secret documents — and fired the FBI director.

Or would have in a few weeks if that director had not — tragically, in the view of many — “obeyed in advance.”

FAIRNESS

Oklahoma Jeff:  “With regard to yesterday’s post, fair pay is good for everyone, but I disagree with the Pay the People! premise that the American economy is rigged against anyone.  My dad’s small business billed less than $100 the winter I started high school, but I had need-based scholarships to send me to college, where I earned a degree that landed me in two low-paying careers (journalism, teaching).  College also gave me some knowledge of the stock market, enough (with the only investment book I would ever need) to let me retire early anyway.  I would say the American financial system is stacked in my favor.  Furthermore, this constantly telling Americans they are victims may have contributed to their voting for a senile, sociopathic sexual predator for president, just hoping he was right about someone else being to blame for their miseries.”

→ An important perspective, but if there should be any minimum wage, what should it be?  And if there should be any income or estate taxes on the uber-wealthy, what should the rates be?  (Not the nominal rates, but the true rates after loopholes.)  One could argue that the federal minimum wage, last raised 15 years ago, is just right at today’s $7.25 an hour — that this is about where most Americans think it should be set, so that’s where their elected representatives have set it.

And one could argue that the marginal federal tax bracket for someone earning $10 million a year from investments is just right at 20%, while the marginal federal tax bracket for a self-employed, single plumber earning $50,000 a year net of deductions and exemptions is just right at 37.3% (income tax 22% plus 15.3% FICA) — that this is about where most Americans think it should be set, so that’s where their elected representatives have set it.

I think most Americans — clearly not all — think otherwise.  And that the uber-wealthy and their lawyers and lobbyists have had more than their share of influence on those elected representatives.  Mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too.

NEXT STEPS

Obama head speechwriter Jon Favreau on The Conversation Democrats Need to Have.

Candidate for DNC chair Ben Wikler with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

Please get ready to spend $12.99 to pre-order a movie I’m going to tell you about in a day or two.