Sept 11
The left hates Elon Musk because he spreads misinformation. But the left loves its own misinformation or outright lies. We live in a world where truth is a rare commodity. All shit(lies)stinks.
@RexChapman The owner of Twitter has turned this place into a cesspool of misinformation and disinformation. In order to confuse folks who don’t know better and/or may not have the time to know better. In the end - it’s mean.
I quote from Chart Daily: If you’ve spent the last few months trying to beat the heat — investing in air con units, slathering on sunscreen, drinking more water than you thought humanly possible — then the approach of a less-feverish fall likely can’t come quickly enough.
Now, new data from the EU’s top climate monitor, Copernicus Climate Change Service, has confirmed that, yes: this summer was unseasonably hot. Global surface air temperatures from June through August averaged +0.69°C above the 1991-2020 mean temperature for these 3 months… breaking the previous record, set just last year, of +0.66°C.
This summer's sweltering temperatures all but confirm that 2024 is on track to be the warmest year on the books — in July, scientists reported that the hottest day on record was broken twice in the same week.
While the US has seen an onslaught of national heat warnings owing to chart-busting temperatures, the situation has been especially dire in Europe. Indeed, everywhere from Athens to Zagreb, locals and tourists alike have faced unexpectedly stifling heat, with global surface air temperatures across the continent for Jun-Aug averaging a massive +1.54°C deviation from the 1991-2020 standard.
My words: so it is really hot in Europe but Europe is going green faster than the U.S. or Asia so maybe going green accelerates global warming ?
It will be decades before today’s actions on climate change have any impact on climate change. The costs are large today and the small benefits are far in the future. The Inflation Reduction Act destroys capital and the United States needs more capital.
@NateSilver538 Pew national poll shows a tied race, very similar to NYT's Trump +1. Post-DNC, pre-Labor Day and registered voters not likely voters. But another high-quality poll with a huge sample size.
Watch the Montana Senate race.
Markets and Stocks
This morning’s CPI print should be a benign event. Inflation is falling. The economy is growing. An extended rate cutting cycle begins next week. I like the market. My near term target is 6,000. I believe that the big 7 are cheap and that semiconductors generally are a great investment.
Goldman Sachs is getting whacked because its fixed income trading income is a little weaker than anticipated. I like GS for the opportunity in capital markets. My target is $600.
The U.S. consumes almost 400 million gallons of gasoline a day. The average price of gasoline is down 30 cents a gallon since mid July. That means that at current price levels households and businesses are saving about $12 billion a day.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10
The consumer is not over extended on credit card debt.
The gold trade is very crowded.
Oracle reported strong numbers.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/09/oracle-orcl-q1-earnings-report-2025.html
ORCL is a terrific investment. Larry Ellison who is the big boss at Oracle said on Monday in the conference call that the number of data centers around the world will increase 10x over the next 10 years. Nvidia chips will be at the heart of the data centers. Small nuclear reactors will power many of the data centers. Uranium is going higher. Rolls Royce will built small nuclear reactors.
The latest antitrust case against Alphabet Google is without merit. The DOJ’s definition of the relevant market is too narrow. The relevant market is advertising across all outlets, digital, social media, traditional media and print. Moreover, the market for digital advertising is competitive and undergoing rapid technological change. What is the underlying purpose of the Biden Administration’s war on big technology?
Antitrust cases are measured by several years. The attention span of the public is short, very short.
Google also said the Justice Department’s case was too narrowly focused on web page ads, an older segment of the market that has since expanded to social media, apps and other types of digital media that offer a wide variety of ways to advertise often outside Google’s control.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/technology/google-ads-antitrust-trial.html
Wall Street is a casino in the short run. Now we are going to have zero day options. You buy an option in the morning and the option expires in the afternoon. You simply bet on the price action that day. The one value I immediately see is the ability to hedge risk for a known specific event.
The popular, fast-paced trade—known as #0dte to the savvy and gambling to the skeptics—lets investors bet on whether a stock-market index will rise or fall by the end of the day. Now, zero-day-to-expiry options might be coming to individual stocks. Currently, options tied to single stocks expire weekly on Fridays, so exchanges would need to add new expirations for the other four weekdays. Investors would face new risks, particularly for options that expire on days when a company reports earnings after 4 p.m. ET. With daily expirations, many more options would expire the same day as large, after-hours price moves. See WSJ.
Economics
Bloomberg writes about Apple’s “walled garden,”
Today’s Apple event, however, does highlight the downsides of being a default customer. The iPhone 16’s hottest feature, Apple Intelligence, is arriving almost two years after ChatGPT became a household name. And Apple revealed it will only release some of its artificial intelligence integrations in beta next month. It's likely many more of them won't come until 2025, and even those may feel incremental compared with what’s already on the market.
But still, the rub for regulators and detractors who decry this approach as anticompetitive: This kind of lock-in model just happens to be what Apple users most love about its products. Because iPhones and Macs and the growing list of add-ons work so seamlessly together, and are so easy to upgrade, the average Apple loyalist has no real interest in trying something different—never mind if Apple limits how rivals can integrate with its platform so they can never work quite as slickly.
Epic Games Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney, one of Apple’s most vocal critics, described this as “the brilliance of Apple’s monopolization scheme” on a recent media call. “They [Apple] are so thorough about hiding the disadvantages from consumers that a lot of people can’t even envision a better world that could exist if there were real competition,” Sweeney said. (Apple has said that it does not have a monopoly in the smartphone market and that its success comes from designing innovative products consumers love.)
Consider, for example, if you could replace Siri on your iPhone with Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa. Or change your default camera app to Snapchat and default phone service to WhatsApp. Or sync a Garmin watch or a pair of JBL earbuds as deeply as Apple’s own wearables. Or download and install software from marketplaces beside the App Store. Apple, of course, doesn’t allow any of these things (at least outside the European Union), but consumers don’t seem to care since they’re generally pretty happy with the status quo.
Sure, you could switch to a Google Pixel phone or Windows PC, both of which rolled out their AI faster than Apple did. But, really, are you ever going to give up your iPhone?
My words: over and over I write that the purpose of U.S. antitrust law is economic efficiency and consumer welfare. The purpose is not to promote competition. Consumers are happy with Apple; otherwise, they would not keep buying the products. The people who are unhappy are competitors and government. People should be free to buy what they want, nes’t pas.
India
Why Indian firms don’t scale:
Surveying the literature on the impact of labor regulation, we find that India’s firm-level labor regulations punish businesses in two ways. First, the regulations are too onerous, preventing firms from remaining competitive. While some sectors and large-scale industries might be able to comply with this regulatory overload, most regulations are imposed on firms with as few as 10 employees, disincentivizing firm growth and large-scale employment. Second, labor-related regulations tend to micromanage factory operations through uncertain enforcement by a labor inspection system, further discouraging firms from expanding. India’s labor laws do too much, too soon in a firm’s life cycle.
We argue that to scale manufacturing across industries and foster job creation, India needs to revise its stringent labor regulations. This paper begins by describing the predominance of small-scale firms, indicating the extent of informality in India’s manufacturing sector, which is well established in the literature. It then shows that India’s labor law tries to do too much; instead of merely setting standards, the statutes micromanage workplaces, colors, fonts, uniforms, and more by requiring permissions for a host of workplace activities such as changing the tasks of a worker. It argues that the laws apply too soon in firms’ life cycle—namely, at low employee thresholds (typically as low as 10 workers). Both these aspects increase labor and compliance costs and discourage firms from scaling. Next, the paper offers recommendations for reforms to stop disincentivizing firms from scaling—including streamlining labor laws, raising employee thresholds, optimizing inspections, and avoiding excessive reliance on criminal penalties to ensure compliance.
https://the1991project.com/writing/papers/why-indian-firms-dont-scale-labor-edition
See also Marginal Revolution.
India is a terrific long term investment.
Science
AI will defeat cancers.
@EricTopol Generative #AI keeps showing its remarkable potential for cancer pathology accuracy, workflow, predictive capacity New @NatMachIntell
Sociology
Alcohol deaths have sharply risen across Britain post-Covid - with Scotland remaining the worst-affected country. Alcohol deaths in Scotland have reached a 15-year high, hitting the highest level since 2008, figures show.