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House Jan. 6 committee subpoenas Twitter, Alphabet, Meta and Reddit
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/13/meta-alphabet-twitter-reddit-subpoenas-house-committee/
By Tom Hamburger
Today at 4:21 p.m. EST
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has issued subpoenas to four social media companies who have so far provided “inadequate response” to requests for information and records relating to the spread of misinformation and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The subpoenas were issued to giants in the industry, including Alphabet, Meta, Twitter and Reddit.
“We cannot allow our work to be delayed any longer,” said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), in a statement. “Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps — if any — social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds to radicalizing people to violence.”
Thompson said that despite months of engagement “we still not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions.”
In a letter sent this week to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Thompson cited reports that Facebook disbanded a Civic Integrity Team that was to focus on election misinformation “and reduced the application of tools used to restrain the spread of violent content. However, despite repeated and specific requests for documents related to these matters, the Select Committee still has not received these materials.”
A letter to Alphabet, formerly known as Google, asked for specific information regarding YouTube, a platform it described as providing “ significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of January 6th attack on the United States Capitol.” The letter noted that Stephen K. Bannon live-streamed his podcast on YouTube in the days before and after January 6, 2021, and that images of the Capitol insurrection were carried live on YouTube.
“The Select Committee believes Alphabet has significant undisclosed information that is critical to its investigation, concerning how Alphabet developed, implemented, and reviewed its content moderation, algorithmic promotion, demonetization, and other policies that may have affected the January 6, 2021 events,” the letter said.
Twitter was similarly reprimanded in a letter accompanying the subpoena. Thompson writes that “Twitter has failed to disclose critical information …For example, Twitter has not produced important documents relating to warnings it received regarding the use of the platform to plan or incite violence on January 6th.”
Similar complaints were lodged in a letter to the CEO of Reddit which hosted “r/The_Donald,” which grew significantly on Reddit before migrating to a separate website in 2020. Thompson’s letter said that site “ultimately hosted significant discussion and planning related to the January 6th attack” and he criticized the company for not responding to previously requested information.
Talking about dogs. Cute video with an Anatolian shepherd dog puppy in training.
Anatolian shepherd dog puppy in training
You might get some smiles with the blog.
A subreddit for cute and cuddly pictures
Biden regulators could rain on Trump's SPAC parade
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/11/investing/trump-spac-stock/index.html
By Matt Egan, CNN Business
Updated 7:57 AM ET, Tue January 11, 2022
What on earth is a SPAC?
New York (CNN Business)Former President Donald Trump is plotting a return to Wall Street with a new media company taking aim at Big Tech.
But Trump Media & Technology Group's path to the stock market faces a formidable obstacle: President Joe Biden's regulators.
Biden's top cop on Wall Street, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, is openly skeptical of SPACs, or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. And Trump's SPAC deal features a host of red flags, including the backing of a Chinese firm with a checkered regulatory history, that have captured the attention of federal authorities.
That's why legal experts tell CNN that securities regulators are likely to heavily scrutinize Trump's SPAC, slowing down or even derailing the deal altogether.
"There is a huge risk the SEC will shut it down," said Thomas Gorman, a partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney and former official at the SEC.
Robert Lamm, chair of the securities and corporate governance practice at law firm Gunster, said that although he's not involved in the Trump deal his experience tells him the SEC could tap the brakes on the Trump SPAC by demanding the entities improve their disclosures.
"They are going to do everything they can to slow this deal, to the point that it can't go," said Lamm, who has represented companies on disclosure matters, often involving dialogue with the SEC.
The SEC declined to comment.
Regulators are investigating the Trump SPAC
In October, Trump announced plans to launch a new media company that will "stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech." Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) simultaneously made public a deal to merge with a SPAC company called Digital World Acquisition Corp.
SPACs raise money from the public and promise to use those funds to acquire private firms. It's an increasingly popular way for private companies to go public, without the hassle and costs of a traditional initial public offering (IPO).
SPAC deals, also known as reverse mergers, were once frowned upon. But in recent years SPACs have become all the rage, with celebrities, former politicians and professional athletes getting involved.
As soon as I see a Chinese-sponsored company, with this kind of regulatory history, a red light goes on."
," SAID CHARLES WHITEHEAD, PROFESSOR AT CORNELL LAW SCHOOL
Almost immediately, the Trump SPAC generated enormous enthusiasm among some investors — and raised serious questions among experts.
For starters, TMTG has no known revenue or product. An Apple App Store listing indicates the venture plans to launch its social media app Truth Social on February 21.
As CNN previously reported, TMTG posted an investor presentation in December that appears to contain errors and seems to have been partially copied and pasted from the internet. (One slide defines a user as a "sales representative who travels to visit customers," a definition that is hard to square with the fact this is a media company, not a sales platform.)
TMTG's new CEO is former Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, who has no business experience in technology or social media.
And Digital World has already disclosed that federal regulators are investigating the deal.
Yet, based on Digital World's closing price on Monday, TMTG has achieved a staggering market valuation of $11.4 billion, according to Renaissance Capital, which provides IPO-focused ETFs and pre-IPO research.
Neither TMTG nor Digital World responded to requests for comment.
SPAC backer has a history with the SEC
Authorities are already familiar with Arc Capital, a Shanghai-based firm that is helping take Trump's media company public. Arc, also known as Arc Group, is the sponsor of Digital World.
In exchange for a stake in the company, sponsors typically provide financial support to get SPACs off the ground, giving them the capital needed to hire lawyers, executives and other staff. SPAC sponsors tend to buy equity in the SPAC at "more favorable terms" than investors in the IPO, the SEC notes.
As the Washington Post recently reported, Arc has a history of SEC investigations after the firm "repeatedly helped create or finance companies with little or no revenue, no customers and office locations that point to P.O. boxes."
To protect investors in Arc deals, the SEC has resorted to a rarely used enforcement tool: Stop orders.
Gary Gensler, chairman of the SEC, has made clear he is concerned about "inherent" risks involved in SPAC deals.
In 2017, the SEC stopped three Arc-backed companies from selling shares to the public, finding that they "materially misstated the nature and scope of their businesses." And the agency suspended trading in a fourth Arc-related business.
Although no charges appear to have been brought against Arc in these cases, the fact that the Trump deal involves a company whose transactions have been halted by the SEC is raising eyebrows among legal experts.
"As soon as I see a Chinese-sponsored company, with this kind of regulatory history, a red light goes on," said Charles Whitehead, a professor at Cornell Law School.
Since 1995, the SEC has only issued 42 stop orders, according to the agency.
"You don't want a stop order because it's such a black mark," said Whitehead. "Normally, if there is an irreconcilable difference with the SEC, you withdraw your registration statement. Stop orders are uncommon because no one wants to get to the point of a stop order."
Arc did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Timing is key in the Trump SPAC
Legal experts said the SEC is likely to look most closely at whether Digital World misled investors about the timing of its deal talks with TMTG.
In late October, the New York Times reported that Trump began discussing a merger with Digital World long before the blank-check company went public and before such talks were disclosed to investors.
That would call into question the accuracy of Digital World's disclosures and whether it really is a blank-check company. Some investors who bought Digital World when it went public last year may not have if they knew Trump was the merger target all along. Others would have done so but didn't because they didn't know Trump was involved.
"A blank check company is supposed to be a blank check company, not a hideaway for the Trump media company or anyone else to access the public markets," Whitehead, the Cornell professor, said.
Who's to blame for inflation? It's complicated
Who's to blame for inflation? It's complicated
The Times reported Trump had been discussing a deal with Digital World CEO Patrick Orlando since at least March 2021. However, in a filing last May, Digital World told investors it did not yet have a merger partner.
"We have not selected any specific business target and we have not, nor has anyone on our behalf, initiated any substantive discussions, directly or indirectly, with any business combination target," Digital World said in that filing.
Last month, Digital World said in a filing that federal regulators are investigating the deal and are seeking documents and communications between the firm and TMTG. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, is also looking into trading prior to the deal's announcement, Digital World said.
Disclosure scrutiny
Ashley Ebersole, a former SEC attorney who is now a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, said the timing in the deal talks could become the crux of an SEC enforcement action.
If the SEC finds evidence the promoters of the deal knew these discussions had to be disclosed and "intentionally hid it from investors," Ebersole said, this will become the basis for a potential "fraud charge by the SEC."
Ebersole, who represents clients targeted by the SEC and other regulators, said this would also give investors the ability to demand their money back.
Jill Fisch, a business law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said regulators will focus on the accuracy of disclosures — not the merits of the merger.
"The SEC doesn't decide if a merger is good or bad for stockholders," said Fisch. "That's not the SEC's job. The SEC is concerned about whether investors have the opportunity to evaluate the deal."
Investors unfazed by regulatory scrutiny
Gensler, the chairman of the SEC, has raised concerns about SPACs broadly.
In July, the SEC charged a SPAC, a sponsor, a merger target and the CEO with "misleading disclosures" ahead of a proposed deal. Gensler said in a statement at the time that the case illustrates "risks inherent to SPAC transactions" as those who stand to earn profits from a merger may conduct "inadequate due diligence and mislead investors."
And at a conference last month, Gensler worried that investors in SPAC deals "may be making decisions based on incomplete information or just plain old hype."
The Trump SPAC has generated considerable excitement among some investors. Although it remains off its peak, Digital World is trading about 450% above where it was before the Trump deal was announced.
Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, said trading activity suggests little worry about the regulatory risk around the Trump SPAC.
"I don't think there is any concern, but there should be," said Tuttle. "I would be scared to buy this. I would be scared to short this. All I do is watch it in amazement."
Tuttle added that given the enormous attention this deal has attracted, regulators are likely to scrutinize it very closely.
"If there is the slightest hint of wrongdoing, they are going to try to bring the hammer down on this thing," he said.
'Nobody saw that coming'
But this is a sensitive situation for the SEC, an independent agency run by a bipartisan five-member commission.
Blocking the Trump SPAC would open the agency to charges of political bias and a legal fight with a former president who has a legendary history of bringing lawsuits.
Lamm, the Gunster attorney, noted that Congress controls the SEC's budget and the midterm elections this November could give Republicans control of both the US Senate and the House of Representatives.
"Does the SEC want to take a chance that its budget will be cut?" he asked.
Gorman, the former SEC official, said agency officials will be extra careful here, spending more time to review the case. But he said they won't shy away from acting, if it's warranted.
"They know Trump will be litigious. That's okay, they are litigious themselves," Gorman said. "They're not going to let him go out there and sell junk."
During his time running the SEC, Gensler has repeatedly stressed the agency's role in protecting investors, in everything from crypto markets and trading apps to SPACs.
"If the SEC lets this go and it drops to zero, investors will get hurt," Tuttle said of the Trump SPAC. "That would be a massive PR black eye for the SEC."
Tuttle added that the SEC will seek to avoid a repeat of Archegos. That little-known US hedge fund imploded last year, catching regulators and investors off guard, and causing sizable losses to Wall Street firms.
"Archegos you could get away with. Nobody saw that coming," said Tuttle. "But this is not coming out of left field. This is Donald Trump."
Just made another 6+% on day trade LAC. Paid me to put a few more into long account.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3787154-lithium-americas-grabs-two-analyst-upgrades-on-coming-catalysts-valuation
Lithium Americas grabs two analyst upgrades on coming catalysts, valuation
Jan. 11, 2022 10:43 AM ETLithium Americas Corp. (LAC), LITALB, SQMBy: Carl Surran, SA
Lithium Americas (LAC +6.1%) pops in early trading after winning two upgrades: Piper Sandler upgrades shares to Overweight from Neutral with a $41 price target, and Deutsche Bank hikes the stock to Buy from Hold with a $34 PT.
Piper analyst Greg Tuttle says Lithium Americas "holds the keys to a multitude of game changing catalysts" related to the Thacker Pass mine in Nevada, which could receive court permits later in the current quarter.
Tuttle sees management's willingness to deploy capital for road work development on the heels of provisionary permits for Thacker Pass as a positive signal.
Also, Tuttle notes the Cauchari project in Argentina likely will come online in H2 2022, as the joint venture already is priming its facilities to prepare for a slow ramp process.
Deutsche Bank's Corinne Blanchard raises shares primarily on valuation following a 28% drop since late November.
Blanchard taps Lithium Americas, Albemarle (ALB +1.5%) and SQM (SQM +3.2%) as her top picks in the space, seeing the trio as well positioned to benefit from tight supply and rising electric vehicle demand leading to a growing deficit.
ETF : LIT
Millennial Lithium shareholders recently approved Lithium Americas' ~$400M offer to buy the company.
A couple of upgrades this morning for LAC. About 7.5% profit just made for my buys yesterday in less than 24hrs. Not too bad for a hard market. Lets see what the day brings.
January 11, 2022 04:44 AM ET (BZ Newswire) -- News
Deutsche Bank analyst Corinne Blanchard upgrades Lithium Americas (NYSE:LAC) from Hold to Buy and announces $34 price target.
Copyright © 2022 Benzinga (BZ Newswire, www.benzinga.com/licensing). Benzinga does not provide investmentadvice. All rights reserved. Write to editorial@benzinga.com with any questions about this content. Subscribe to Benzinga Pro (http://pro.benzinga.com).
January 11, 2022 06:41 AM ET (BZ Newswire) -- News
Piper Sandler analyst Greg Tuttle upgrades Lithium Americas (NYSE:LAC) from Neutral to Overweight and raises the price target from $32 to $41.
Copyright © 2022 Benzinga (BZ Newswire, http://www.benzinga.com/licensing). Benzinga does not provide investmentadvice. All rights reserved. Write to editorial@benzinga.com with any questions about this content. Subscribe to Benzinga Pro (http://pro.benzinga.com).
"in the near future roughly twelve individuals will have practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies."
Been a pretty good success in short term account even after tax bite in and out of dips and surges (sometimes intraday, sometimes a day or two, sometimes longer), in long term account looks like 20 day on a weekly is acting like support for the moment, it might retrace enough to fill the gap at about 25. All depends on the general market (it's in a downtrend with that near term) and I think the market is going to be a bit volatile near term at least and just have to keep on the toes for any enters or exits trading. Long term lithium and LAC is in pretty good shape fundamentally and can see that continuing barring any annihilations from some virus, wars, or meteor landings. Analysts are still giving a moderate buy rating with $23-24 for low end, but even at that low LAC is still way up percentage wise for my long anyways. Some people don't give any heed to analysts (varies with who the analysts are), but more do so it does affect sentiment overall and in turn effects the sp. Last year they were exuberant, but this year I see them toning it down a bit and being more conservative generally with most securities, but one never really knows.
I read his twitter feeds and not sure if what he emails directs to any link of the whole or if you read the whole "Does Not Compute" post. But I found it quite compelling. Really it's simplistic in nature but one naturally fights the realization of the whole thing. We get life trained in a certain reality of things flowing in a certain track, which we believe that it will be contained to how things always work. And when they don't, our minds are in disarray. I guess that is where we need to learn to "think out of the box" better and realize when it's needed to do that or to know when that no matter how much thinking is done, it won't compute and just "it's how the world works" . Anyway, I thought I would post the whole thing.
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/does-not-compute/
Does Not Compute
Jan 5, 2022 by Morgan Housel
A lot of things don’t make any sense. The numbers don’t add up, the explanations are full of holes. And yet they keep happening – people making crazy decisions, reacting in bizarre ways. Over and over.
Historian Will Durant once said, “logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” And it often is, which can drive you mad if you expect the world to work in rational ways. A common cause of everything from divisive arguments to bad forecasting is that it can be hard to distinguish what’s happening from what you think should be happening.
Two short war stories to show you what I mean.
The Battle of the Bulge was one of the deadliest American military battles in history. Nineteen thousand American soldiers were killed, another 70,000 missing or wounded, in just over a month as Nazi Germany made an ill-fated last push against the Allies.
Part of the reason it was so bloody is that Americans were surprised. And part of the reason they were surprised is that in the rational minds of American generals, it made no sense for Germany to attack.
The Germans didn’t have enough troops to win a counterattack, and the few that were left were often children under age 18 with no combat experience. They didn’t have enough fuel. They were running out of food. The terrain of the Ardenne Forest in Belgium stacked the odds against them. The weather was atrocious.
The Allies knew all of this. They reasoned that any rational German commander would not launch a counterattack. So the American lines were left fairly thin and ill-supplied.
And then, boom. The Germans attacked anyway.
What the American generals overlooked was how unhinged Hitler had become. He wasn’t rational. He was living in his own world, detached from reality and reason. When his generals asked where they should get fuel to complete the attack, Hitler said they could just steal it from the Americans. Reality didn’t matter.
Historian Stephen Ambrose notes that Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley got all the war-planning reasoning and logic right in late 1944, except for one detail – how irrational Hitler had become. But that mattered more than anything.
A generation later, something similar happened during the Vietnam war.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara viewed the world as a big math problem. He wanted everything quantified, and based his career on the idea that any problem could be solved if you obeyed the cold truth of statistics and logic.
One of the key measures of success during Vietnam was body count – how many Viet Cong did American troops kill? Are more Viet Cong dying than Americans? It was easy to track, easy to show on a chart, and became an obsession.
Then there was the logic: If enough Northern Vietnamese were killed, you could break the spirit of the enemy who saw their chances of victory diminished. More enemy bodies was equated with being closer to winning. William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces, explained in 1967:
We’ll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for generations. Then they will have to reassess their position.
The war was turned into a math equation. If enemy dead outnumbered American dead, Americans would win. Ice-cold logic.
But the bodies piled up, and the war went on. And on. And on.
The “equation” would work only if the North Vietnamese leaders were calm, rational actors who would “calculate costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and make choices accordingly,” as one paper put it.
But they weren’t.
Edward Lansdale of the CIA once told McNamara that his statistics were missing something.
McNamara said, “What?”
Landsdale said, “The feelings of the Vietnamese people.”
You couldn’t capture that on a chart. But it meant everything. In 1966 New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury wrote:
I seldom talked to any North Vietnamese without some reference coming into the conversation of the people’s preparedness to fight ten, fifteen, even twenty years in order to achieve victory. At first I thought such expressions might reflect government propaganda … but … I began to realize that this was a national psychology.
Ho Chi Minh put it more bluntly: “You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, but it is you who will tire first.”
That’s exactly how it played out in America, where statistics meant nothing against feelings.
Westmoreland once told Senator Fritz Hollings, “We’re killing these people at a rate of 10 to one.” Hollings replied, “The American people don’t care about the 10. They care about the one.”
That was hard to reconcile in the statistical mind of someone like McNamara. It was like defying the laws of physics, or a typo in a math equation.
But that’s how the world works.
Some things just don’t compute.
Investor Jim Grant once said:
To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.
That’s always been the case. And it will always be the case.
One way to think about this is that there are always two sides to every investment: The number and the story. Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.
The numbers are easy to measure, easy to track, easy to formulate. They’re getting easier as almost everyone has cheap access to information.
But the stories are often bizarre reflections of people’s hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, and tribal affiliations. And they’re getting more bizarre as social media amplifies the most emotionally appealing views.
A few recent examples of how powerful this can be:
Lehman Brothers was in great shape on September 10th, 2008. Its Tier 1 capital ratio – a measure of a bank’s ability to endure loss – was 11.7%. That was higher than the previous quarter. Higher than Goldman Sachs. Higher than Bank of America. It was more capital than Lehman had in 2007, when the banking industry was about as strong as it had ever been.
Seventy-two hours later it was bankrupt.
The only thing that changed during those three days was investors’ faith in the company. One day they believed in the company. The next they didn’t and stopped buying the debt that funded Lehman’s balance sheet.
That faith is the only thing that mattered. But it was the one thing that was hard to quantify, hard to model, hard to predict, and didn’t compute in a traditional valuation model.
GameStop was the opposite. The statistics showed it was on the edge of bankruptcy in 2020. Then it became a cultural obsession on reddit, the stock surged, the company raised a ton of money, and now it’s worth $11 billion.
Same thing here: The most important variable was the stories people told and the emotions they suddenly stumbled upon. And that was the only thing you couldn’t measure and couldn’t predict with foresight. That’s why the results don’t compute.
Whenever something like this happens you see people shocked and angry about how the market has become detached from fundamentals.
But Grant was right: It’s always been like this.
The 1920s were giddy. The ‘30s were pure panic. The world was coming to an end in the ‘40s. The fifties, ‘60s, ‘70s, were boom to bust, over and over. The ‘80s and ‘90s were insane. The 2000s have been like a reality TV show.
If you’ve relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy you’ve been confused for 100 years straight.
Japan is offering companies a 40% tax rebate to raise wages. But most companies aren’t, in part because raises just aren’t part of the Japanese business culture.
Meanwhile, JPEGs of apes have risen in value several thousand percent in the last few months, in part because that is part of the crypto culture.
Economist Per Bylund tweeted this recently:
The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any), and its value is higher the more it’s wanted and the less there is of it.
Not utility, not discounted cash flow – just whether people want it or not, for any reason. So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of.
To me it’s obvious that the one thing you can’t measure, can’t predict, and can’t model in a spreadsheet is the most powerful force in all of business and investing – just like it’s the most powerful force in the military. Same in politics. Same in careers. Same in relationships.
A lot of things don’t compute.
The danger, and you see it often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like – so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise. No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time. Always asking, “Why is this happening?” and expecting there to be a rational answer. Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.
The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a neverending chain of absurdity, confusions, messy relationships, and imperfect people.
Making sense of that world requires admitting a few things.
John Nash is one of the smartest mathematicians to ever live, winning the Nobel Prize. He was also schizophrenic, and spent most of his life convinced that aliens were sending him coded messages.
In her book A Beautiful Mind, Silvia Nasar recounts a conversation between Nash and Harvard professor George Mackey:
“How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof, how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?” Mackey asked.
“Because,” Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”
The first step to accepting that some things don’t compute is realizing that the reason we have innovation and advancement is because we are fortunate to have people in this world whose minds work differently from yours. Beyond Nash are people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, whose personalities are equal parts brilliant and absurd, and the absurd can’t be separated from the brilliant – you have to accept the full package. We’d never get anywhere if everyone viewed the world as a clean set of rational rules to follow.
The next is accepting that what’s rational to one person can be crazy to another. Everything would compute if everyone had the same time horizon, goals, ambitions, and risk tolerances. But they don’t. Panic selling stocks after they’ve declined 5% is a terrible idea if you’re a long-term investor and a career imperative if you’re a professional trader. There is no world in which every business or investing decision you see should align with your own view of the world.
Third is understanding the power of incentives. Bubbles are technically irrational, but the people who work in bubbles – mortgage brokers in 2004 or stockbrokers in 1999 – make so much money from them that there’s a powerful incentive to keep the music playing. They delude not only their customers, but themselves. Nothing gets people to look the other way like easy money.
Last is the power of stories over statistics. “Housing prices in relation to median incomes are now above their historic average and typically mean revert,” is a statistic. “Jim just made $500,000 flipping homes and can now retire early and his wife thinks he’s amazing” is a story. And it’s way more persuasive in the moment. If you look, I think you’ll find that wherever information is exchanged – wherever there are products, companies, careers, politics, knowledge, education, and culture – you will find that the best story wins. Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere while old or wrong ideas told compellingly can ignite a revolution.
Novelist Richard Powers put it: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
It’s hard to compute, but it’s how the world works.
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Jan 5, 2022 by Morgan Housel · @morganhousel
That's one nice chart. The 200 day is pretty close to straight linear. Wonder how long it will continue. Looking like a chance of another little trend break upwards within a couple of weeks (depending on what the market does generally). It's funny how today after it reaches $62 JPM raises price target from $52 to $62 (maintains overweight). I know it's just about the algorithms and process the analyst uses, but it still feels like "oh now you tell us" kind of thing. LOL Most bullish whale trades 1/21 Calls at $70. On my watch and study.
Tech-Spec getting wrecked and think we might have a bit more wreckage to come short term, with some of the more higher spec being totaled for quite a while. Been hearing "buy the dip, any dip" is on it's last legs right now in that sector. Maybe in the second half of this year, some of her plays may pan out, and there will be specific few tech and spec jumping out to be leaders and successes, but I think it will be more on plain luck, not her philosophy so much. She's no Buffet that's for sure.
If your talking some of the big names like GOOG or MSFT, there might be some bargain hunting there with those type, but all these really high valuation stocks of 21, there will only be a few comparatively that rise above. So I can't have the faith in being heavily invested in those sectors or her abilities to pick them. To be honest though, I'm not at any time any more than 15-20% of the whole buying speculative stocks even when they were doing gangbusters (not counting day trading or short term), that's just my philosophy and my own rules.
There is a big time rotation of money out of spec-tech right now with retail and institutional and I think we have a little more rotation to go. The whole sentiment for that is in a downward trend right now. Once it settles down a bit, maybe take a look again at that time.
Have to wonder what benchmarks she's using. Liquid nitrogen temperature? Not using any, just not looking or caring? Maybe alternative realities, just don't understand.
One still has to go through pick and choose, but those two sectors are the best and quite a few up trending for now anyways. It could change without notice, got keep watch constantly in this market. Cathy Wood is down over 20% last I checked for 21 which is a total failure in my view especially given the 2021 market was a very easy yr to succeed. I just don't see or understand that for last year nor can give her any faith for this year. But maybe because I'm not part of her HOOD (Urban dict). LOL
Pretty flat today (at the moment), but Energy and Financial Sectors of S&P have been consistently on top recently.
list of Energy stocks.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/indices/SREN/components/
List of Financial stocks.
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/SP-SPF/components/
It is taking a lot more work(time) to find and sort right now, but there are some good areas of focus and some really good value to be found. Tech especially not so good (losses taken there), the energy and financial sectors are where a lot of money is going, energy especially yesterday when markets were taking a big dip, the S&P energy sector was going gang busters north.
The volatility for traders can be great and was yesterday. It was like throwing darts almost, there was so many great trading opportunities, just couldn't even begin to get them all. Got RIVN early for example at $77 sold $85+ in just a few hrs, there were quite a few more yesterday. Bought FANG (energy) Monday morning for about $110, sold yesterday for about $123 (might go back in, have to see if trend continues or it might pull back a bit). E, BP, CVX, and more all trending up.
Yesterday and this week, been getting %10+ with short term trading with most all trades. Some stopped out and went out manually for small loss, but overwhelmingly very positive. All pretty solid stocks, not the big gains of the pumps or stinky SPACS, but I'm happy with 8-10% gains in hrs to weeks.
The long term plays are taking some time, (along with all the scanning and playing short term) not really having time to read other news (besides market news) or keep up on the boards of interest, so I guess it isn't "easy money", but I think it will be worth it more in the end and I've had too much money dead for too long, so I've got to get serious and this year I see as maybe the opportunity to do that. We know that no matter what happens short term (I think we have some crap hitting the fan the next month or two), long term the market is up.
SPY down early morning, so batter up and pick your poison. LOL
This article was from last month and the author really does presume a lot, but not entirely out of the realm for LAC, but a couple of yrs in the future IMO. I didn't think too much about it when I read and saved it, but recently there was other statements from a news sources on my EV watch list which includes F(own), GM and TM which is stating how TM had their stock of chips already procured before the chip shortage allowing them to overtake sales above GM for first time. The other auto makers are now forming their own supply lines away from foreign supply including their own lithium battery supply. These continued efforts are giving support for a LAC battery production that this article talks about.
Lithium Americas: Electric Battery Ambitions
Dec. 20, 2021 5:47 PM ET
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4476115-lithium-americas-electric-battery-ambitions
Summary
We summarize why the market has dropped & if this presents an opportunity for the long-term lithium investor.
The Biden Administration's EV support is covered along with a battery push.
Lithium Americas battery plant ambitions are revisited.
Batteries and electric vehicles on a blackboard
Yagi Studio/DigitalVision via Getty Images
Before we get into this article let's look at why the market is a mess. Then we can speculate on Lithium Americas and why I think they will build a battery plant in Nevada.
Messy Market = Opportunity
Emotions often dictate short-term investing and how we respond. If I were to say that Stock X is up 100% from where you bought it, you would respond with joy. If I were to say it is down 25%, you would not be thrilled. If the company is progressing forward and the sector is progressing forward then we need to look past short-term jitters of emotional investors. We need to focus on the long-term situational logic.
I've got a friend who texts me often when the market shows any jitters. It reminds me of the character "Tweak" from "South Park". The truth is the market is going to shake; it will pop up and down; it will get messy. Messy creates opportunities (usually). Take, for example, the decimation of Standard Lithium (SLI) last month over a fake short seller report. This created opportunity. The recent lithium sector downtrend creates additional opportunity.
Looking at Lithium Americas (LAC), Standard Lithium, and Cypress Development (OTCQB:CYDVF), I can't help but nibble and add to my position at what looks like discount pricing. Could things continue to go south? In the short term, absolutely. Long term though, lithium demand continues to grow on the commercial side and on the government side.
In this article we will explore what has pushed lithium down in the short term. Then we will explore the long-term demand by auto makers and the government. Lithium Americas battery plant ambitions will also be revisited.
Short-Term Market Jitters
We are having a Blue Light Special on lithium on aisle #2. The market has been selling off a few names: Cypress Development, Standard Lithium, Lithium Americas and other lithium stocks are in the red and have been on a down trend. The reasons for this are:
1. Momentum traders selling off to move elsewhere. After a massive run north in price, the trend has stopped and the momentum traders exit to lock in profits.
2. End of year window dressing to lock in profits and bonuses.
3. Locking in tax losses to offset profits for some people. This is most likely the largest contributor to the drop. Frankly, people are looking at what they own and selling off things at a loss to lock in tax credits. I know because I have sold off another stock to do just this and so are my friends.
4. A fake short seller report against SLI bled into Cypress, as both use related DLE technology to extract lithium. At the same time, Lithium Americas announced new financing. This put a damper on lithium.
5. Warrants were executed against Cypress Development and then some were most likely sold into the market. This puts downward pressure on the stock in the short term.
6. The Omicron nothing burger surfaced and went nowhere.
7. Federal Reserve Corporation Powell spread fear via inflation talk and tapering.
With all of the above, I have gazed into my blue crystal ball and it hints that January will be better after the tax loss selling is over. The story for lithium has not changed for the worse. In fact, it has improved via government cogs that are spinning and private industry plans via Volkswagen (OTCPK:VWAGY).
The Government Wants Lithium
Looking past the trendy word crafting, we can see the Biden administration is behind lithium much like the Trump administration was. Looking at the December 13th, 2021 statement we see the following highlights:
1. "The Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Transportation (DOT) will establish a Joint Office of Energy and Transportation focused on deploying EV infrastructure."
2. $5 billion in funding for a national charging network.
3. $2.5 billion in additional charger funding.
4. Target of 50% EV penetration by 2030.
5. DOT will publish standards for EV chargers.
6. "Increase domestic manufacturing of EV batteries and components and advance environmentally responsible domestic sourcing and recycling of critical minerals."
7. "$17 billion in loan authority in the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program (ATVM) to support the domestic battery supply chain. LPO will leverage full statutory authority to finance key strategic areas of development and fill deficits in the domestic supply chain capacity. This will include the ATVM program making loans to manufacturers of advanced technology vehicle battery cells and packs for re-equipping, expanding or establishing such manufacturing facilities in the United States."
8. "Leverage $13 million in FEMP's Assisting Federal Facilities with Energy Conservation Technologies grants to unlock an estimated $260 million or more in project investments, including battery storage projects."
9. "Funded two dozen teams to expand sourcing of lithium from geothermal brines and approved a permit for the Nevada-based Thacker Pass lithium mine."
10. "Automakers are also signing contracts that leverage domestic supply, including Ford sourcing lithium from recycled content through Redwood Materials, GM sourcing lithium from geothermal brines in the Salton Sea with Controlled Thermal Resources, and Tesla sourcing lithium from a Piedmont project in North Carolina."
11. "$7 billion in funding to accelerate innovations and facilities across the battery supply chain from battery materials refining, processing and manufacturing to battery manufacturing, including components, to battery recycling and reuse. These investments will support the development of a North American battery supply chain, help expand manufacturing and recycling facilities in the United States and substantially advance the battery recycling through research, development and demonstration projects in collaboration with retailers as well as state and local governments."
12. Last, we can see quite a bit of additional funding for batteries via:
Infrastructure bill batteries funding
(Source: December 13, 2021 White House Statement)
Author's Assessment Of Government Lithium Support
Point number 9 is one of the more interesting points. Lithium Americas Thacker Pass was approved during the final days of the Trump administration. While the Biden administration is trying to take credit for approving the mine --- this attempt at ownership does show the intent of the Biden administration. Frankly, if Thacker Pass in Nevada were to not be approved, the impact upon United States lithium would be rather stark. It would send a clear message to the industry to avoid investments in United States based lithium. Nevada is one of the most friendly locations for mining in the U.S., throwing a 10+ year project under the bus would hinder future lithium exploration and battery ambitions in the United States.
The Biden administration trying to take credit for Thacker Pass sends a clear message to the U.S. government and state entities that the administration is supporting lithium and is giving its papal blessings to Thacker Pass. In addition, the government is supporting United States battery production, but more on this in a moment. Let's look at Thacker Pass.
Approval Of Thacker Pass
Thacker Pass is the linchpin of American lithium projects. Will the BLM approval be upheld? Having read many of the legal documents via Pacer, I would say it will be upheld. Frankly, the prosecution is throwing many Hail Mary plays but nothing is sticking. Also, if we look at Judge Du's background we can see how she has ruled in the past. A key Hail Mary argument is that Thacker Pass will impact Sage Grouse. We can see that (Obama appointed) Judge Du was not buying such speculation in the past, per a December 2015 case involving Sage Grouse.
December 2015 case involving Sage Grouse
(Source: Apnnews.com, highlight from author)
One of the key points of the prosecution is things that -might- happen. Sage Grouse might be impacted. Rare snails might be impacted. Plants might be impacted, but we cannot prove they will be impacted. Given the footprint and the geographic isolation (One rancher lives within a few miles of the project), the overall takeaway from the above judge's ruling is I would not personally bet on her going with hypothetical scenarios, especially after the Biden administration is signaling its intent towards lithium.
Lithium Americas Battery Ambitions
Disclaimer: Before we get into the battery section do note that you should consider this entire section speculative in nature. This part involves some analysis and guess work. Consider it a "what if" scenario.
Different companies have a different feel. Some are content to simply focus on a lithium project. Others want to be a lithium powerhouse. Either approach is kosher if the management team can take on the associated duties and has the capital and experience to pull it off. Cypress Development is laser focused on Clayton Valley, and being only one of three companies in the valley that have water rights they are progressing quite nicely. Standard Lithium is obsessed with Arkansas with its California project mothballed and that is fine. One day they will get back to that project. Lithium Americas, however, is not content to simply work on one project or even two projects. They are engaged on many lithium fronts, but they are not content to simply be a lithium miner or even a large lithium miner. No indeed. Lithium Americas wants to vertically integrate and become a battery producer.
BLM Documents And Batteries
The battery factory has since been removed from Thacker Pass to my knowledge (as it would require extra permitting), but read below and then ponder what happens if LAC simply moves the battery plant to other property it owns? Reading the old proposal for the Nevada mine at the Bureau of Land Management website, I could not help but notice that Lithium Americas has laid out its plans to build a lithium battery factory. You can read the entire proposal here, but the bulk is located in document "DEIS Chapters 1-6." On page 1-3 we are greeted with:
"Construction and operation of a battery production facility" and "Battery production complex" on pages 2-8.
Now did they at one time want to create this battery complex? Per LAC from Appendix B:
"Due to rapidly rising demand by the uptake in electric vehicles and energy storage, securing lithium supply has become a top priority for battery producers and vehicle manufacturers. Lithium is contained on a list of 35 critical minerals defined by the United State Department of the Interior (83 Federal Register [FR] 23295) pursuant to Executive Order 13817 of December 20, 2017, A Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals. The executive order includes a policy clause for "streamlining leasing and permitting processes to expedite exploration, production, processing, reprocessing, recycling, and domestic refining of critical minerals."
Looking at Figure 13, we can see the below picture of the former proposed battery facility. The former proposed battery plant appears to be approx. 160,000 square feet by my calculations.
Proposed battery plant
(Source: DEIS - Note the former battery production complex circled in blue)
A close-up view of the battery production complex
(Source: DEIS - A close-up view of the battery production complex)
And we can read additional details of what LAC wanted to put on the property in the past via:
DEIS Document Section 2.2.5.9
(DEIS Document Section 2.2.5.9, highlights from author)
Biden And Batteries
So we know that at one time Lithium Americas wanted a battery factory at Thacker Pass. We also know Biden and crew want to bring battery production to the United States via point #6 above. Additionally, money is available via the government for this purpose via:
Infrastructure bill batteries funding
(Source: December 13, 2021 White House Statement, highlights from author)
At this point the question would be: Where to locate it? While they might put it on the Thacker Pass location, this would come with its own set of headaches. They might also locate it elsewhere to avoid unnecessary legal shenanigans.
Lithium Nevada has two properties that are near Thacker Pass.
Lithium Nevada properties near Thacker Pass
(Source: Arcgis & Type In "Lithium Nevada")
Property #1 is to the east of Thacker Pass and weighs in at 160 acres. Property #2 is comprised of two parts: The north part in green at 215 acres; the south side at 105 acres.
Both properties are zoned as M-3, which falls under mining and commercial use per Humboldt counties codes. I would venture that property #2 is more likely a location to place the plant, but that is just idle speculation. In the end the thing to remember is we can see the intent of the company and the Biden administration concerning EV batteries. It will be interesting to see how LAC and batteries play out. I doubt we have seen the last of this subject.
Commercial Demand
Before we wrap this up, we need to look at news on the commercial side of things. Now I could wow you with a rather long list of demand that is coming, or I could just drop this on you: Volkswagen is set to invest $100 billion into lithium in the next five years. I really do not need to explain why that is significant.
Conclusion
Massive government support combined with cyclopean amounts of capital being invested by commercial endeavors bodes well for the future of EV and lithium. With this, our largest holding is Cypress Development followed by Nano One and then Lithium Americas. Even though inflation fears abound, my personal theory is lithium will reward long-term investors. However, keep some powder dry for when waters become choppy. Remember chaos and rough seas can offer up opportunity.
This article was written by
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Austin Craig
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"Never let formal education get in the way of your learning". - Mark Twain,,,You are here for one reason. You want "actionable Intelligence". If you wanted a history lesson on a company then Google is your friend. My aim is to provide intelligence that you can read, ponder, and then execute upon to make a profit or avoid a loss. A price of a stock is almost irrelevant. It is the last thing to consider when buying a stock. If you don't pay attention to management, financials (go back 3 years), the sector, global macros, your portfolio mix, along with risk/reward for capital used and the company news, you are ignoring all of the things that come before price. Price is mostly real-time sentiment. It is hardly ever a good indicator of value.People who only look at price will fail as investors, because price is a result of fundamentals, news, and sentiment. You have to learn to "take" from the market, if at all possible, make it give you what you want.Use targets, set limits, protect your capital with stops and if something changes fundamentally, review, review, review.You can't read too much. If it was easy everyone would be doing it. Now you have no reason to not get Alpha.
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Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of LAC either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Additional disclosure: We also own Standard Lithium, Cypress Development.
We own LAC long calls as well.
Starlink, a division of Musk’s private company SpaceX, has launched more than 1,600 satellites. It has permission from US authorities to launch a total of up to 12,000 in a programme aiming to provide internet access to most of the planet.
Evasive manoeuvres to reduce the risk of collisions in space were becoming more frequent owing to the number and speed at which satellites were being launched, said Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“Starlink is a big part of that,” McDowell said, adding that it was “highly unusual” for a country to lodge a complaint through an “informational bulletin”. Any collision would be likely to “completely demolish” the Chinese space station, he said.
McDowell added that China was also a big contributor to space junk. “The US space station has several times over the past 10 years had to dodge pieces from the Chinese military anti-satellite test of 2007,” he said. “It’s not like the Chinese had a clean record here. The biggest debris event ever was the Chinese anti-satellite test.”
He said the incidents were a reminder the world had entered a new era in space. “There’s more debris and there’s more active satellites. Things are just getting a lot busier and a lot more crowded up there. It’s a commercially dominated space age … where we’re stressing the space environment for the first time.”
Groan away.
A man and his wife were lying in bed the other night when he noticed she had bought a new book entitled, "What 20 Million American Women Want."
He grabbed the book out of her hands and started thumbing through the pages.
His wife was a little annoyed. "Hey, what do you think you're doing?"
He calmly replied, "I just wanted to see if they spelled my name right."
5 GOP-led states extend unemployment aid to workers who lose jobs over vaccine mandates
Critics says the rule changes in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee are incentivizing people to skip shots, and undermining the White House’s pandemic response.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/27/5-gop-led-states-extend-unemployment-aid-workers-who-lose-jobs-over-vaccine-mandates/
By Aaron Gregg
Today at 6:00 a.m. EST
At least five Republican-led states have extended unemployment benefits to people who’ve lost jobs over vaccine mandates — and a smattering of others may soon follow.
Workers who quit or are fired for cause — including for defying company policy — are generally ineligible for jobless benefits. But Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have carved out exceptions for those who won’t submit to the multi-shot coronavirus vaccine regimens that many companies now require. Similar ideas have been floated in Wyoming, Wisconsin and Missouri.
The next Tesla is proving hard to find
By Chris Isidore, CNN Business
Updated 9:10 AM ET, Sun December 26, 2021
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/26/investing/tesla-ev-stocks/index.html
New York (CNN Business)Finding the next Tesla among electric vehicle stocks is proving to be difficult.
A number of upstart electric vehicle makers' stock prices soared in recent years, as investors looked for the next company to shake up the car market. But all have struggled recently -- as has Tesla (TSLA) itself.
Lucid, which started trading on the Nasdaq in July after a SPAC deal, had its share of good news: Its first car, the Lucid Air, won MotorTrend Car of the Year honors and was certified as having a range of 520 miles on a single charge, the longest of any EV. But company has also disclosed it faces subpoenas from the Securities and Exchange Commission about some of its claims and the SPAC deal, and shares are down from a November 16 peak.
Electric truck maker Rivian had a huge hit with its November IPO, and it also won MotorTrend Truck of the Year honors. Rivian won the race to be the first all-electric pickup to reach market. Shares shot up 29% from the IPO price on its first day of trading, and gained another 71% over the next week.
Rivian was briefly the third-most-valuable automaker on the planet, behind only Tesla and Toyota, despite having yet to report any sales when it went public. When it finally reported its first sales on December 16 they fell short of expectations, and the company cited the same chip and parts shortages dogging the rest of the auto industry. Shares closed Thursday down 44% from that pre-report high, and the sales report proved to be a headwind for Lucid shares as well.
Even Tesla, which earlier this year became only the sixth company to reach a $1 trillion market value, has encountered recent troubles. Shares sank as much as 27% from an all-time high set on November 4 through Tuesday -- before a late-week rally lifted it back above the $1 trillion mark. Still, it is trading 13% below its all-time peak.
Part of the recent problem for EV stocks is the apparent demise of the Biden administration's Build Back Better bill, which had a number of goodies for the EV industry, including enhanced tax credits for buyers that would have allowed automakers to charge more for the vehicles. Build Back Better also includes money for a network of rapid charging stations, which would have answered potential EV buyers' concerns about running out of juice while on the road.
"That was a gut punch to the EV bulls," said Dan Ives, tech analyst for Wedbush Securities. "For incremental demand in 2022 and beyond, the EVs tax credits is a 15% swing factor in demand."
But much of the decline in EV stocks took place before Sen. Joe Manchin said last week he couldn't support the legislation, throwing its future in severe doubt.
Much of the dip is due to continued announcements from established automakers such as Volkswagen, Toyota, Ford and GM about additional investment plans in EVs. The concern is that even if consumer preferences and tougher environment rules are about to create a massive shift from gasoline-powered vehicles to electrics, stand-alone EV companies won't necessarily win the battle.
"There are going to be losers in the battle for EV market share," said Ives. "Rivian coming out of gate with a delivery short fall, that couldn't have come at a worst time. It's a dark cloud on the pure play EV makers. And investors have a lot less patience with any execution missteps."
Tesla has grown to the point where it is profitable and large enough to grow even in the face of increased competition from the established automakers. It projects sales growth of 50% or better this year and beyond. And the stock has mostly bucked the declines in the sector, rising 51% so far this year.
Although that is only a fraction of the 743% gain Tesla stock achieved in 2020, it's better than most of the established automakers other than Ford, whose shares are up 131% this year after posting significant gains in its own EV efforts.
Electric cars have given a jolt to Ford's stock price
Electric cars have given a jolt to Ford's stock price
The two most troubled EV stocks -- Nikola and Lordstown Motors -- lost 27% and 80% of their value, respectively, through Thursday's close, although Nikola's stock surged 18% Thursday after announcing it had finally made its first truck delivery.
But earlier in the week, Nikola agreed to pay a $125 million fine to settle charges Trevor Milton, its founder and former CEO, deceived investors. Milton was forced to resign in September 2020 after questions about company's claims first surfaced. He now faces federal criminal charges.
The founder and CEO of Lordstown was also forced to resign, and the company has expressed doubts that it can remain in business.
The trouble those companies had living up to their early promises means companies like Lucid and Rivian will have to do more to prove themselves before they will be fully embraced by investors, Ives said.
Lifshitz Law Firm seems to be a stock ambulance chaser that just makes their money by unsuspecting retail for many stocks, and has been viewed many times as a scam company themselves. Any of the things it throws at the wall and actually sticks for some relatively small settlement that takes long term litigation, the lawyers make the money; retail not so much. Nobody that big money takes seriously or is to effected by it seems. PLL up this morning and up about %100 for the year. If it was more serious, then a more accredited legal firm would be involved and more news worthy I think. PLL might be guilty as hell, who knows, but this firm isn't going to make to big of wave, if any. Definitely not much defense against all the money in this industry right now. Just saying.
Maybe we should wish for it. PLL gapped up this morning now up $.72 at the moment. Up about %100 for the year. LOL
Earth might get its own Saturn-like rings—made of space trash
Researchers at the University of Utah predict that our planet will get its own bling, via a process that will help clean up space pollution.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90700516/earth-might-get-its-own-saturn-like-rings-made-of-space-trash
BY CLINT RAINEY2 MINUTE READ
For eons, Earth has been deprived of planetary bling—none of Jupiter’s 53 named moons, none of Saturn’s spectacular rings. But researchers at the University of Utah predict that could be changing. “Earth is on course to have its own rings,” one of the researchers, Jake Abbott, tells the Salt Lake Tribune. However, while other planets’ are basically rock, dust, and ice, our rings will be fitting for the planet whose lifeforms are polluting their own sky: “They’ll just be made of junk.”
Even wilder, this is because the researchers say we’ll make them intentionally to clear a path in the sky. Right now, the night sky doesn’t look polluted. But our low-Earth-orbit space race is only beginning: Jeff Bezos wants to send 3,200 more satellites into orbit, while Elon Musk’s Starlink has already put 2,000 in orbit and has plans to launch another 40,000 in the coming decades—15 times the number currently in the sky.
The result is that space pollution keeps growing. More satellites mean more defunct satellites, which mean more satellite pieces. According to the European Space Agency, we currently have 170 million pieces of space debris encircling the planet, some at speeds of up to 18,000 miles per hour. Inhabitants of Earth aren’t really even aware of what’s going on up there: For instance, Russia just blew up a massive broken 4,850-pound satellite last week, creating a cloud of fragments so large that the International Space Station astronauts nearly had to evacuate. (They ultimately just sheltered in place.) The station also had to maneuver three times in 2020 to avoid debris.
Attempts to remove space pollution are very much still works in progress. (The European Space Agency is apparently spending $102 million to retrieve one 247-pound piece of space trash.) The good news—doubly good if metal trash rings sound cool—is that the University of Utah researchers who think we’ll be giving Earth rings are making this prediction because they say they’ve also found the way to create them. They argue their plan could make outer space less dangerous. Their team of robotics engineers has developed a magnetic field they claim can move objects in space, even nonmagnetic ones. In an experiment outlined in their new paper in Nature, the team explains how it was able to move a copper ball through water on a raft by spinning magnets so fast that it created an electrical current. The magnets not only guided the ball’s direction, but could also rotate it. They argue robots could be blasted into space to use this same method, rearranging Earth’s space pollution into nice, clean Saturn-ring-like lines.
A new space garbage scow IPO is closer than many think.
December 1, 2021 06:06 PM ET (BZ Newswire) -- Analyst Color
The international space race is heating up, and some investors see major profit opportunities in the future space economy.
On Wednesday, Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein highlighted the latest developments among companies competing for the lead in the nascent commercial spaceflight industry.
See Also: Space Force General Details Daily Attacks By China, Russia On US Satellites
Here’s a look back at some of the latest news on the space race:
On Oct. 29, Terran Orbital announced plans to go public via a SPAC merger with Tailwind Two Acquisition Corp (NASDAQ:TWNT). The deal values Terran at roughly $1.6 billion. The company plans to construct a manufacturing facility in Florida capable of producing more than 1,000 spacecraft per year.
SpaceX successfully returned its Crew-2 mission on Nov. 8 and launched its Crew-3 mission to the International Space Station on Nov. 11. On Nov. 26, SpaceX and Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk said a production crisis with its Raptor rocket engines is “mush worse than it seemed a few weeks ago” and warned employees that SpaceX faces a “genuine risk of bankruptcy” if the company can’t complete at least one Starship flight every two weeks in 2022.
On Nov. 12, German laser communications company Mynaric ADS (NASDAQ:MYNA) completed its IPO. Mynaric has an in-space test of its satellite optical communication terminals scheduled for the second quarter of 2022.
On Nov. 15, Russia tested a new anti-satellite weapon by destroying Soviet satellite Kosmos-1408 which had been inactive since 1984. The resulting debris cloud forced the ISS crew to take cover and earned Russia harsh criticism from the international space community.
On Nov. 18, Rocket Lab USA Inc (NASDAQ:RKLB) completed its 22nd mission and has now deployed 107 satellites. The company successfully recovered its first stage boosters for the third time.
On Nov. 19, Telesat Corp (NASDAQ:TSAT) began trading on the Nasdaq, essentially taking the place of Loral Space & Communications. Loral owned 64% of Telesat. Telesat is looking to construct Lightspeed, a broadband constellation of 298 satellites that will cost an estimated $5 billion and provide high-speed commercial internet access.
On Nov. 20, Astra Space Inc (NASDAQ:ASTR) completed its first orbital launch with its Rocket 3.3 model LV0007. Astra shares are up 14% in the past three months after the company went public back in July via a SPAC merger.
On Nov. 23, Blue Origin announced former NFL football player Michael Strahan and U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard’s daughter Laura Shepard Churchley will fly on its next New Shepard mission, NS-19, which is scheduled for Dec. 9.
On Nov. 24, Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc (NADAQ: SPCE) announced Keisha Schahaff of Antigua as the winner of a charity contest to fly in a future SpaceShipTwo suborbital flight. The event raised $1.7 million for Space for Humanity’s Citizen Astronaut Program.
Benzinga’s Take: It’s still extremely early to pick one or more long-term winners among stocks with exposure to the space race. Musk’s comments on SpaceX’s precarious financial condition are a reminder for investors of how high-risk space investments are at this point in the game.
You would have to have that if there is going to be any quality of taste. TTTV (Taste The TV) sounds like a good candidate for the JAAC (Just Another Acquisition Corp.) merger. LOL
Of course next will be the machine to synthetically dispense the food in it's desired form.
Soon to be the next IPO play in a stock market near you.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/23/taste-the-tv-japan-invents-lickable-screen-to-imitate-food-flavours
Taste the TV: Japan invents lickable screen to imitate food flavours
Prototype uses carousel of canisters to create flavour samples on hygienic film over flatscreen TV
Yuki Hou, a student at Meiji University in Tokyo, demonstrates the Taste the TV lickable screen. Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
Reuters in Tokyo
Thu 23 Dec 2021 05.17 EST
A Japanese professor has developed a prototype lickable TV screen that can imitate food flavours, another step towards creating a multisensory viewing experience.
The device, called Taste the TV (TTTV), uses a carousel of 10 flavour canisters that spray in combination to create the taste of a particular food. The flavour sample then rolls on hygienic film over a flat TV screen for the viewer to try.
In the Covid-19 era, this kind of technology can enhance the way people connect and interact with the outside world, said Homei Miyashita, a professor at Meiji University in Tokyo.
“The goal is to make it possible for people to have the experience of something like eating at a restaurant on the other side of the world, even while staying at home,” he said.
Miyashita works with a team of about 30 students that has produced a variety of flavour-related devices, including a fork that makes food taste richer. He said he built the TTTV prototype over the past year and that a commercial version would cost about 100,000 yen (£653) to make.
Potential applications include distance learning for sommeliers and cooks, and tasting games and quizzes, he said.
Miyashita has also been in talks with companies about using the spray technology for devices that can apply a pizza or chocolate taste to a slice of toasted bread.
Yuki Hou, 22, a student at Meiji University, demonstrated TTTV for reporters, telling the screen she wanted to taste sweet chocolate. After a few tries, an automated voice repeated the order and flavour jets spritzed a sample on to a plastic sheet.
“It’s kind of like milk chocolate,” she said. “It’s sweet like a chocolate sauce.”
That is what we have been led to believe. But in the article I referenced, the author is arguing that it is nothing but "The Great Inflation Lie: The Fed Won't Stop Inflation" and that "both Government and the Fed want inflation to run very high". Then he goes into why but also stated where the few comparisons to now was a time with high inflation and low Treasury rates being very beneficial to equity holders. His view also was that;
"The Fed cannot and will not hike rates anytime soon. And if they do, it will be an immaterial rate hike that will have an insignificant impact on inflation.
The government will continue to ensure there is a high amount of liquidity in the financial system. The Bubble of Liquidity will remain large."
In his conclusion he states;
Don't be fooled by Fed Chair Powell's hawkish talk. After all, he has a hearing to keep his job coming up in January. Treasury yields are NOT pointing to a recession and/or deflation. They are telling us that liquidity will remain high and that the treasury market is not buying the hawkish story the Fed is selling.
We are seeing dynamics that the stock market has not witnessed for over 70 years. The inflation rate will remain above the 10-year Treasury rate for a sustained period of time, creating an environment of high inflation and relatively low-interest rates. Historically, this dynamic has been very beneficial for equity markets!
Right now, it is a fantastic time to be an investor and the worst time to be sitting on cash. Investors want to be exposed to equities that benefit from high inflation, while also benefiting from low treasury yields.
Now weather or not he is wrong or right in his theories, I'm not qualified enough to answer definitively, but he does have some points to ponder and back up his conclusions. Is it all noise and just him trying to sell his wares, you decide.
I found this excerpt particularly interesting.
A significant amount of inflation is the only solution that the U.S. Government has to manage its debts and obligations.
With debt levels far beyond the pale of productivity levels (i.e., embarrassing debt to GDP ratios), the U.S. and other developed economies are mathematically and factually unable to ever grow their way out of the debt hole they have been digging us into for years.
It is too late to fix all the past mismanagement. It is also impossible to force new generations to pay for debt accumulated by the older ones by taxing them to death and forcing them to be productive in the labor force well above the age of 75. Not only will it result in political unrest, but there are simply not enough young people to tax due to an aging population, and a wave of baby boomers retiring soon.
The only way to deal with this black hole is through inflation.
They have a point.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/586496-democratic-critics-link-party-problems-to-bad-messaging?rl=1
Democratic critics link party problems to bad messaging
BY AMIE PARNES AND MORGAN CHALFANT - 12/21/21 06:00 AM EST
Democrats are attributing a string of White House missteps in recent months to poor strategy and messaging from President Biden and his advisers.
For the last part of 2021, as multiple crises emerged, the White House has struggled to offer up a consistent message that could unite not only the country, as Biden pledged during the 2020 presidential campaign, but his party. Democrats have been unable to beat back Republican criticisms about rising inflation.
They have’t offered a narrative that would persuade a pessimistic American public about the direction of the economy and the coronavirus pandemic. And headlines have been dominated by Democratic infighting over Biden’s massive social policy and climate legislative proposal — most recently with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) giving it a possibly fatal blow on Sunday.
“I do think that the White House should go back to the drawing board and figure out, really think it through, what they want to say between now and next November,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow of governance studies at Brookings Institution who served as a policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton. “What overall message do they want to convey? Not details of this or that but the overall message because that’s certainly gotten lost.”
“The overall point is that messaging is not a response to a crisis,” Galston added. “It’s part of a strategy and the White House really needs to have a theory of the case and then build their messaging on the strategy.”
Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said Biden’s vision for the country has been lost in recent months as the White House has grappled with the multiple crises.
“I don’t think America fully understands where Democrats want us to go,” Simmons said.
Democrats need to raise the bar to talk more about the destination America is headed toward and talk more about the people standing in the way, he said.
“The broader challenge is that Republicans have a narrative about the country and they've identified liberals and Democrats as the villains. The Democrats need to be more about the villains,” Simmons added.
One Democratic strategist said the problem is far worse saying the White House “needs to completely reprioritize their priorities.
"They need a wholesale revamp of their entire communications, political and strategy team,” the strategist said.
The persistent coronavirus pandemic has dampened public opinion. Biden has made strides in vaccinating a large slice of the U.S. population, but his embrace of more controversial policies like vaccine mandates have opened him up to Republican attacks. And while Biden campaigned on defeating the virus, the more contagious omicron variant has now sprung up, complicating the recovery and causing uncertainty among Americans. Cases are currently on the upswing due to the delta and omicron variants.
Republicans have also painted a skewed picture of the economic recovery, blaming Biden’s policies for rising prices while at the same time minimizing the employment gains.
Jobless claims have declined to the lowest levels since the 1960s and the unemployment rate has sunk to 4.2 percent.
Meanwhile, annual inflation, driven by the pandemic and related government spending, hit its highest rate since 1982 in November and polls show voters increasingly worried about the rising costs of goods. A recent CNN poll found that roughly seven in 10 voters believe the federal government is doing too little to reduce inflation or address supply chain disruptions.
Biden’s approval rating stands at about 44 percent, according to an average of surveys from FiveThirtyEight, and has remained low despite the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan and $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law the president successfully ushered through Congress.
Strategists believe that the economy and the coronavirus will be top issues in the 2020 midterm elections.
“Democrats haven’t really put together any kind of unified message on the economy that highlights any of the real gains we are making,” said Democratic strategist Max Burns.
The White House’s answer to concerns about inflation has largely been to argue that Biden’s sweeping climate and social policy package will lower healthcare, childcare and other costs for American families.
But that package has become imperiled with Manchin's statement Sunday that he is firmly against the legislation as it now stands.
Democrats say the internal party fighting about the legislation has hurt Biden and the party, playing into a Republican narrative of Democrats being unable to deliver. While the White House has devoted substantial time to trying to sell the Build Back Better bill to the public, that has been a complex and risky exercise because the package has changed and evolved. Biden, for instance, used to tout a provision for free community college that was ultimately cut from the package.
Some Democrats say the White House deserves more credit for its messaging strategy in the face of multiple crises. Biden’s approval rating started to take a hit over the summer amid the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan and has remained low amid public exhaustion with the seemingly never-ending pandemic.
“There’s no question we the American people are exhausted and frustrated by COVID. But the White House is doing what they should be: showing the President taking action on what people are worried about, like prices, vaccines, jobs,” said Eric Schultz, a former spokesman in the Obama White House. “As a Party, Democrats have to speak with one voice, not fight each other, but take action together.”
That might be tough to do, Galston said, until the White House rethinks their entire strategy.
“If they have one, they’re doing a very good job of keeping it secret,” he said.
Did you happen to catch the article from SeekingAlpha titled "Big Crash Coming, According To Treasury Yields Dec. 19, 2021 10:35 AM ET". Interesting take and comparisons of only a few times in recent history.
Posted here:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167198536
That's just his type of humor. Not everybody gets it, but can be at times funny and just one style of dealing with all the things going on. We all handle things differently, but he's not one the crazies or nefarious out there and there is some usage and validity to some of his graphs and things that he posts. At least as much as anybody else among all the views of the market out there.
Maybe I'm wrong and he's just another crazy Canadian taking over the US. On second thought, it might be better than what we have right now attempting to. LOL
It's ironic, but this year I sold my 40 yr old little truck that got 45-60 mpg on a consistent basis depending how I set the IP from power to mileage. Sold it for 2 1/2 times more than what I bought it for in 81 new. Less than a 100k miles on it, original and most of it's life garaged or covered. 81 VW rabbit pickup with 1.6 diesel in it. No, it didn't have all the electrical bells and whistles, but it had plenty of torque for how small it was. And the gas mileage was great. There were other vehicles as well even older that got over 30 on a regular basis. That was before all of our great tech, but they didn't seem to fit with big oil pushing our need for big and powerful. They basically only made the Caddy pickup here in the US for three yrs and just stopped even when they were selling them as fast as they could make them, still heavy market demand.
Had an article filed on that under GMOs. Yes the process is different, but as I understand it, whether you add or subtract, the result is a modified structure change and have effects (good or bad) on our biological structure. You are what you eat. I guess since GMO was turned into a dirty word, they had to come up with something. I'm no scientist, but it seems that there would be a chance for some of the same dangers and unknown effects long term from the results. Maybe it's just counter intuitive for our limited knowledge on it and be left up to scientists, but there is a danger in that when the scientists are directed and getting paid by big business for profit. I suppose in the future, we'll look forward to "edited" humans when we merge into machines. The process is for both plant and animal.
This article was from the Guardian about 2 1/2 yrs ago. At that time European countries were saying that it should be regulated the same as GMOs, but no similar requirements in the US.
Crispr gene-editing will change the way Americans eat – here's what's coming
Karen Weintraub
Thu 30 May 2019 01.50 EDT
Soon, soybeans will be bred to yield stable oil without the addition of dangerous trans fats. Lettuce will be grown to handle warmer, drier fields. Wheat to contain less gluten. And pigs bred to resist deadly viruses. Someday, maybe even strawberry plants whose delicate berries can be picked by machine instead of by hand.
Ten years ago, such genetic changes would have been considered science fiction – or so far off into the future of breeding as to be almost unimaginable. But gene editing, particularly with a tool called Crispr-Cas9, has made it much easier and more efficient to tinker with the genomes of plants and animals. The first Crispr-edited products will begin reaching the market this year, and researchers believe it’s only a matter of time before US grocery shelves could be filled with gene-edited produce, grains and meat.
The technology will be subject to stringent health and environment review, as well as labeling requirements in the EU, but not in the US. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued a statement last March saying it would not regulate crops whose genetic changes could have been produced with conventional breeding. The European court of justice, by contrast, ruled last summer that gene-edited crops should be regulated as GMOs.
The scientific challenges have been largely settled – or at least there’s a clear path toward resolving them, according to scientists in the field. But political and social ones remain.
“The questions outstanding going forward are regulatory and PR and marketing and commercial launch – the things that matter the most, obviously, outside of the science,” said Rodolphe Barrangou, a distinguished professor at North Carolina State University and editor-in-chief of the Crispr Journal.
Crispr technology is still in its infancy. Short for “clustered regulatory interspersed short palindromic repeats”, Crispr was first used in cells with a nucleus only six years ago. It takes advantage of the natural immune system of bacteria to make precise cuts in the target genome. This can be used to delete a few letters, turning a gene off, or dialing it up or down, or it can force a change in the genetic alphabet, giving the plant or animal new functions. It’s not a perfect process, but it’s much more precise and easier to work with than previous gene editing techniques, according to scientists. Researchers say many of these new functions will be copied from nature, making, say, a hothouse tomato as disease-resistant as a wild one without sacrificing flavor. But others could be entirely new – and likely to raise more concern.
Unlike genetic modification, gene editing doesn’t require transgenics, the movement of genes from one species to another. So, if there are dangers to GMO foods – which some, but far from all scientists believe – gene editing that simply removes genes or copies sequences from similar species is likely to be safer.
Essentially, gene editing accomplishes what conventional breeding would, just more efficiently and more easily, according to Zachary Lippman, an expert in the genetics of flowering plants at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. “This is a tool that creates what nature could create on its own just never got around [to] or had the opportunity to create,” he said.
Lippman said Crispr is an incredibly useful tool in research, allowing him to ask new questions of the tomato plants he breeds, by fast-forwarding the research process. “The amount of genetics that we’re currently able to do has at least quintupled in the last three years,” he said. It also allows breeders, who have maximized their crops for current conditions, to now ready their crops for the challenges of climate change, said Lippman, who was recently named an investigator with the Howard Hughes medical institute.
It could also upend agriculture, boosting the health, shelf life, off-season availability and transportability of fruits and vegetables, said Haven Baker, chief business officer of Pairwise, a North Carolina-based startup that uses Crispr technology both to edit large-scale crops like corn and soy, and specialty crops like berries and snackable vegetables. Baker and the company’s CEO, Tom Adams, said they would like to see berry plants modified to make them easier to pick by drone or other machine rather than by hand, bringing down labor costs and avoiding arduous work. “These are the type of questions we’re thinking about – to really use Crispr technology not to maybe solve one disease problem, but to really solve the entire industry’s problems,” Baker said. “We see this as the beginning of a 25-year cycle of innovation that will greatly improve agriculture around the world.”
Although most Crispr gene editing is still taking place in labs and research greenhouses, the future he envisions isn’t far off. The first gene-edited products are expected to reach the market as soon as next year: a shelf-stable soybean oil that has less saturated fat and no dangerous trans fats, from a Minnesota-based company called Calyxt, and an improved variety of waxy corn – used as a thickener and stabilizer in many food products – from Corteva Agriscience, the agriculture division of DowDuPont.
But the public and governments around the world are still unsure how to deal with gene-edited crops and livestock.
Jennifer Kuzma, co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, said US consumers are willing to pay 20% more to avoid GMO foods, and nearly half of the public reports actively avoiding genetically modified ingredients and food. There hasn’t been much polling data on consumer views of gene-edited foods, because they are still so new. People may be slightly less concerned with gene edits than with swapping in genes from distant species, she said, but generally, “I think people are bothered by that human-controlled laboratory step”.
She also said that she sees industry making many of the same public relations mistakes with gene editing that they made with GMOs. The industry is fighting labeling and regulation and not being as transparent as it should be about the challenges and shortcomings of gene editing, she said and wrote in a recent article.
Public reaction may ultimately drive government regulation – which is not yet a settled issue. While the USDA has said it would not regulate the technology for certain genome-edited plants, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has suggested it might treat all intentionally edited products as drugs, which would mean heavy oversight.
If strong government regulations are imposed, gene editing will be finished before it really begins, said Alison Van Eenennaam, a cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Davis. “We can stop having this discussion because we’ll never use it. It’s just done,” she said. Van Eenennaam said she was frustrated by campaigns that unnecessarily derailed a lot of the potential of GMOs, and she sees the same thing happening again with gene editing. “It’s much easier to frighten someone about something,” she said.
Others think government regulation is essential for reining in bad actors and keeping food safe.
Jaydee Hanson, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Food Safety, a Washington DC-based advocacy group, wants companies to publicly release a complete genetic sequence of their Crispr products, so people can look for unintentional mutations and other problems. Now, for instance, when a potato turns green, that’s a sign it is releasing toxins and shouldn’t be eaten, he said. But if the green gene were accidentally turned off, potatoes could release toxins without the warning.
Industry and some academics say these off-target effects can be managed. They happen all the time in regular breeding and always have, said Bernice Slutsky, senior vice-president of the American Seed Trade Association, a trade group. Any plant or animal is already the product of mutations from hundreds of millions of years of evolution, Lippman said.
Hanson said he was also worried that with Crispr, as with many technological advances, most of the benefits will go to larger, more industrialized farms.
Gene-edited seeds can be patented, meaning the farmer will have to pay more to use them, which boosts the cost to farmers as well as the sellers, Hanson said.
Even changes that seem to benefit animal welfare are really about profit, Hanson said. Editing cattle genes to prevent horn growth and the need to de-horn the animals is really “about making it cheaper to have 140,000-head dairies, because it’s one more step you don’t have to take”, he said. “If you wanted to raise more humane animals, you’d raise animals like the dairy I used to work at when I was a kid – you’d have 40 animals instead of 140,000 and you’d be able to know the name of every cow.”
On the flip side, Hanson acknowledges that, though he does not see evidence of it being used that way, gene editing could potentially be used to cut down on the need for pesticides. And Van Eenennaam worries that if rich countries shut down gene editing, poor countries that really need increased productivity, fewer pesticides and healthier foods won’t be able to benefit.
This article was amended 4 June 2019 because an earlier version suggested that soybean oil naturally contained trans fats. Soybean oil only contains trans fats due to the process of hydrogenation that extends its shelf life. This has been clarified.
Well you know how that goes......it just keeps going. Just another tool in the new GOP's toolbox. The old GOP is still around, just going extinct. I really miss them. Hoping for rebirth.
What do you think?
120 days ...Trump back for a swearing in by April aka the original (Republic) constitutional swearing in time.
I'll have to put that on my "check it out" list. Darn thing is, I'm getting older fast and that list isn't getting shorter. Pretty soon I'll have to put a couple on my bucket list. LOL
It seems that is something humans can't seem to grasp to well. Even after several million years of schooling. That no matter who kills or fights who, we still have to live together in one group on one shrinking marble. Even expanding out into space, it will still be in groups that have to depend on others for survival. "There can be only one" or "survival of the fittest" (or richest or most powerful) mentality will only be a detriment to all.