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Nikki Haley is attracting a lot of billionaire fundraisers, many of whom have been publicly pushing for big cuts to Medicare.
Cliff Asness, Stanley Druckenmiller, Henry Kravis and Leonard Stern are among 21 hosts of a fundraiser for Haley on Jan. 30
The following day, billionaires Barry Sternlicht will co-host a fundraiser in Miami. Others include Citadel hedge fund founder Ken Griffin and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone.
Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper will host two fundraisers for Haley on Feb. 6 in California, priced at up to $16,600 per ticket, and on Feb. 7, Charles Swindells, former ambassador to New Zealand under former President George W. Bush, will co-host a fundraiser for Haley in Orange County, priced at up to $10,000.
These events are all scheduled for dates after the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, indicating Haley plans to stay in the race past the consequential initial two primaries, which are seen as bellwethers for the rest of the country and often prompt under-performing candidates to drop out.
There's even some flat-out Democratic donors, simultaneously making contributions to Joe Biden's campaign, who have publicly expressed support for Haley or contributed to her campaign in an effort to thwart Trump’s chances of securing the Republican nomination.
Which is more obviously mentally disturbed, Trump or Trump voters? Nikki Haley wants to make major cuts to Medicare while Trump says he now wants to repeal and replace Medicare - no doubt with Trump-care where the helicopter picks you up on your lawn and flies you 15 blocks to the hospital.
A curious world indeed.
We saw a thin young person perhaps 20 years old or so with a huge beard like a coal miner from the 1850s, who was visibly not from Los Angeles, today on the sidewalk outside the restaurant we ate at a few doors from the Writer's Guild.
It wasn't one thing, but everything which made it obvious he had recently arrived from some completely different "foreign culture". All I remember is a huge beard, so obviously not likely to become an actor. My BMW mechanic originally from Bulgaria probably never looked so out of place when he first arrived.
He carried two boxes of pizza in a delivery bag from an adjoining restaurant, and put them on the passenger side rear seat of his Prius purchased from a Toyota of Hopkinsville, Kentucky - according to the name printed on the trunk lid of the car, something which no car seller would dream of doing here.
After he drove off I looked it up on my phone out of curiosity, apparently a very rural town about 70 miles northwest of Nashville, TN and 20 miles from the Fort Campbell Army Base built in 1942 as a temporary training camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopkinsville,_Kentucky
He was obviously delivering food for Uber or a similar service, starting a new life in Southern California.
Just sold our allotment of ABBV shares for this year, with more years of sales to come.
More cash to redeploy when opportunities arise.
I probably bought too much ABBV at the time, but it seemed relatively safe in the early months of the pandemic.
Since March 2020 each share has brought in a 28% compounded annual gain, roughly 20% as dividends which provided our income to live on, and 80% of the annual return as a capital gain on sale.
A steady little earner. ABBV has increased their dividend 31% since March 2020, more than 7% compounded annually.
I didn't own any then, but over the past 8 years ABBV has increased their dividend by 172%, or 13.3% compounded annually.
Good news for China and Russia - Nazi Germany will finally be able to bypass America's ban on helium sales to the Nazi state and will have access to enough helium to keep their entire fleet of dirigible airships safely aloft.
All China has to do is wait out America's advanced semiconductor ban just as the Nazis have, and Russia will be able to import computers and advanced oil and gas drilling equipment.
When South African startup Renergen bought the production and exploration rights for some grassy fields near Virginia, a town in the country’s Free State province, the founders were expecting to find small natural gas reserves that could power nearby mining opportunities.
“We had humble, modest aspirations of setting up a small scale [gas] power station that could deliver a couple of megawatts to some nearby mining opportunities,” recalls Nick Mitchell, Renergen’s chief operating officer.
Renergen had unwittingly struck gold. Today, the company says it has proven helium reserves of more than 7 billion cubic feet at the Virginia Gas Project that could be worth more than $4 billion, and potentially up to $12 billion when including further possible reserves.
The company successfully produced liquid helium from the plant for the first time in January 2023. After delays throughout the year due to a leak in the vacuum seal of the helium cold box, it hopes to begin commercial operations within the next month, extracting helium alongside natural gas, then processing and distributing it to customers, such as Linde, a global engineering firm.
I still have one share of CRWD to keep it in sight.
I think I recall AMZN dropping a lot when they became GAAP positive and people came to learn it was trading at a 1,256 P/E or someting like that.
Good idea. I closed my new month old network security stocks, CRWD, PANW, and ZS for a mere $299 total profit.
So I have an extra $40k in reserve now, in case some interesting bargains develop.
It feels good - which my version of technical analysis.
Corporate farmers pumping out ground water in Corcoran, in California's Central Valley have sunk the surface by 30 inches since 2009 within a 60 mile wide bowl.
$10 million was spent on increasing the size of a levy in 2017 which had sunk 7 feet from 195 feet when it was built in 1983 to 188 feet. The subsidence has additionally crushed residential water wells, homes and farm infrastructure, requiring the installation of $1.2 million of additional pumps in lines which previously flowed with gravity.
Scientists at the NASA lab have formed an unusual bond with Corcoran, spending years tracking subsidence there and elsewhere in the San Joaquin Valley by using radar and satellite technology.
But groundwater means Dollars to farm corporations. In 2026 one Fresno County water district bought 43,000 acre-feet of Boswell water for $43.6 million. “If you’re selling off your surface water rights, you’ve got no business farming with groundwater,” said Doug Verboon, a Kings County supervisor and farmer.
The corporate farms in Corcoran, include Sandridge Partners, the J.G. Boswell Company, Hansen Ranches, and the Vander Eyk Dairie.
Boswell is by far the most prominent agricultural operation in the area with 82 active commercial water wells. The publicly-traded farm company started in Corcoran in 1921 and has grown into a $2 billion international enterprise. Boswell executives at the company’s headquarters in downtown Pasadena, where the Rose Parade takes place, did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment.
The town of Corcoran, which now lies in a flood-zone due to subsidence, is known as the home of a tough state prison that once housed Charles Manson. Corcoran rests alongside Highway 43, roughly 200 miles from both Los Angeles to the south and San Francisco to the north. Nearly 30% of the town’s working-age residents work in the farming industry, and more than 30% of residents live in poverty.
The state of California is trying to enforce the requirements of a 10-year-old law which limits groundwater pumping to the recharge rate that major landowners in a half-dozen regions — including the Tulare Lake Basin — have blatantly resisted.
Farm managers and shareholders have taken to calling California's groundwater law "a government created drought"
Possibly only a new Federally-funded water project pumping in water at enormous expense from elsewhere can keep the Corcoran valley in alfalfa. Of course these costs will have to be bourne by the taxpayer as these costs are too onerous to be economic in a farming business. - https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-12-27/tulare-lake-land-barons-defy-calls-to-cut-groundwater-pumping
I'd suspect undercover Israeli operatives were targeting specific people walking on the route to the grave of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani on the fourth anniversary of his assassination in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in 2020. Soleimani directed Iran's external terrorist groups.
A lot of top terror group leaders gathered in one procession in Kerman hit by two blasts. Iran’s state-run news agency as saying 103 people were killed and 188 were injured.
That's tremendous
43 percent of all banking systems are written in COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), which handles those $3 trillion daily transactions, including 95 percent of all ATM activity in the US, and 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions.
There's a BIG job ahead
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) remains the top mainframe programming language used today, especially in industries like banking, automotive, insurance, government, healthcare, and finance.
Schools and universities stopped teaching COBOL decades ago because newer computer languages are more power, more versatile and easier to maintain.
Only a tiny fraction of programmers know COBOL and few who know it like to use it because it's cumbersome, reads like an English lesson with way too much typing, the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors.
IBM’s approach to this problem is fairly straightforward: Rather than relying exclusively on a limited pool of human programmers to solve the problem, IBM has built a generative AI-powered code assistant (watsonx) that helps convert all that dusty old COBOL code to a more modern language, thereby saving coders countless hours of reprogramming.
It allows programmers to take a chunk of COBOL and enlist watsonx to transform it into Java. But of course, it’s not quite that simple in practice.
IBM’s Vice President of Product Management, IT Automation, Keri Olson, explains that watsonx is an end-to-end solution that involves a multi-step process to perform these kinds of complex code translation tasks. After IBM and the customer have a thorough understanding of the application landscape, the data flow, and the existing dependencies, “we help them refactor their applications,” she says. “That is, breaking it down into smaller pieces, which the customer can selectively choose, at that point, to do the modernization from COBOL to Java.”
Many who remember IBM’s previous AI experiment, Watson Health, are hesitant to trust another big AI project from the company because the previous one failed so miserably and didn't deliver on its high-flying promises.
There's plenty of carnival barkers who claim there's going to be a global financial collapse in 2024 . . . just like every year . . . PFE and MSFT to declare bankruptcy!
Ending Medicare benefits is the only way to avoid a complete economic collapse, they say . . . older Americans blow their brains out to avoid facing 'the truth'.
Numerologists point to today's "Doomsday Signal Calendar Repeat" of 123123, proving this is the very last day before total collapse
Actually, 2024 is the year my Mom hopes to get off the real estate ride. She's become tired of being strapped in for the ups and downs
New details about China's "Whether a Spy or Weather Balloon" are released
China's "Whether Balloon" connected to a US cellular network to both send and receive communications from China using burst transmissions of data over short periods, providing proof it whether it was a spy platform flying through regulated airspace for civilian and military aircraft rather than a weather balloon.
A “highly secretive court order” from the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to collect intelligence about the balloon while it was over US soil. This allowed US intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance on the balloon as it sent and received messages from China, including the contents of the communications.
The cell phone data sent and received by the balloon proved conclusively that China's military had directed the balloon over the US and military bases and was collecting intelligence.
NORAD took precautions to hide anything that might have been problematic for the balloon to see while it traversed the United States.
After the ballons's communication had proved the balloon was a deliberate spy platform, and intellegence analysts had collected all of the information they deemed important, the White House ordered the balloon was shot down.
Xi angrily denied this was an open invitation to foreign military aircraft to fly over China at these low altitudes to check on Chinese whethers
A US Air Force Captain looks down on China's Kinderkraft Platform
A happy and prosperous New Year to you as well.
I'm not near the coastline but my Dad once seriously wanted to buy a large home on the sand in Seascape, CA.
At the time we were staying in a home across the street from beachfront homes, built on a hill some 20 feet above the 12 homes actually on the beach.
Two months prior, waves had mounted the patios of the sand-front homes (the patios were some 6 feet above the sand), traveled through the sliding glass doors (suddenly minus the glass) and had exited the front doors of these homes into the street behind. So the owner of one of these homes was selling for a significantly discounted price.
My Mom said, "That's a wonderful idea Chuck. I wouldn't worry too much about periodic storms.
The way I see it, anyone who can afford a home on the sand could also easily afford to redo it periodically.
I'll leave the decision up to you."
After spending a lot of time over the course of a year with my nephew who's an Elon Musk fan-boy and an avid consumer of conspiracy theories, I mentioned to my Mom how similar I found her grandson to my father who died a couple of years ago.
I sort of got to see first-hand what my Dad was like at age 28. I grew up constantly entertained by Dad's belief that all of his own personal failings and mistakes were somehow inexplicably caused by either immigrants, large banks or insurance companies. It was easy to see why he had dropped out of law school as that requires logic and his own wandering "logic" had followed only his own internally inconsistent rules.
My Mom replied, "I wish my grandson all the luck in the world because he's going to need it."
I can't add anything to that.
Thank you for that PANW tip. I had previously unloaded our higher priced shares of PANW when it reached a new high, because it was running too hot and I felt it was ready for a pullback. You tell me this pullback is now, odds on likely, completed - so back in the soup.
This morning I got stopped out of one of the stocks I bought yesterday to create a $350 tax loss to hit my taxable income target. This was BMY at a $2 loss.
This leaves only the crazy excess amount of TSLA, 800 shares to be exact, which continues to insist on creating short-term profit rather than a loss. So I'll have to sell that off as a short-term gain sometime next year - probably after the first week, since you've indicated that's a historically strong period of time. I guess it largely depends on what Tesla does.
Tesla is volatile, but we can take some risk so maybe I'll just change the current stop-loss to a trailing-stop after the first of the year and let it decide the market decide when this chunk of TSLA is going to depart our portfolio.
To compensate for that short-term TSLA gain we'll have to reduce our IRA to Roth rollout by the same amount.
Even all planned out on spreadsheets you never know what's going to happen until after it's happened.
That's something to consider with today's batch of "stocks that should have created short term losses" that I have to carry over to 2024 for sale.
I can always wait the extra five trading days to see how much 'worse' the short term gains will become.
But it's definitely not stuff I'll be holding for a long term gain.
A lot of it is TSLA. I needed volatile things to potentially create that short-term loss to finalize our tax year.
Our taxes are pretty much done real-time in my Excel sheet. In March I'll do them in TurboTax, but there's rarely a variance between the two.
Finally a combination of the AMD short and BMY short gave me the required loss.
But I've got far larger short term gains to take January 2 on trades that went the wrong way on other stocks.
Nick - Your short-term trading skills far exceed mine.
For tax reasons, I need to find a way to lose $350 in the market before the market closes on the 29th.
Granted the markets are fairly placid during this week, but you'd think it would be easier to lose money than this.
Whether longs or shorts, almost all of my trades are in profit.
My short of 200 shares of AMD is showing the most promise.with an $82 loss on a $28,350 "investment".
Short 200 shares of META with a gain.
I hoped TSLA would see more decline and give me a quick loss on $600 shares. But now I've a short term gain I'll have to take next year on January 2.
Maybe to assure a quick loss, I should have tried for a quick gain.
Mariah Carey at our Whole Foods doing an Amazon return herself while her chauffeur waited in her new white Rolls outside. License plate Mariah!
It must be nice to feel normal and part of society sometimes - when you want to.
The best November / Decembers we've spent have been in Australia or New Zealand. Don't want to test that out post-pandemic just yet.
Much easier for you to using your own boat.
We make donations rather than gifts as well, initially at my Mom's insistence. Although only my sister and I complied she says, not my little brother and his adult children.
But we still need Amazon to buy the usual stuff for home like a replacement lamp slider dimmer, which I think our housekeeper sprayed with some "cleaner". I may go to our ACE hardware which is quite good.
And we were buying new bed duvets /covers - and I've been trying out different front-zip shorty wet-suits. They offer previously tried out suits at a modest discount, and buying cleaning supplies so 'she' can ruin more dimmers.
Interesting the many different ways Amazon deals with returns - even selling large packs of "mystery boxes" in places like Tennessee of accumulated returns. They ask now if you're returning the item with all tags in like-new condition to pre-route where your return goes.
I've never seen Amazon.com slow down on searches or switching between accounts or pages like it does since Nov25 Cyber week.
Customer service is still tremendously wonderful, but they've had a problem with returns sent through their 'UPS store no box required QR codes". The item is sometimes delivered to Amazon but not scanned in correctly somehow, or perhaps it's they won't be scanned in for months. They see this and immediately give me the credit, but it takes using their call-me feature. Interesting to see four duvet covers get sent as one return and a fifth one different only in color sent someplace else. Maybe already sold? The Amazon return desk people at Whole Foods have to follow explicit instructions on their scanner for each return. Some all together, others one per bag with their own tag.
What an amazing business Amazon runs though. They do hire very smart managers.
During this busy shopping season I've been surprised how often the AMZN website is slow to respond, maybe giving priority to other AWS customers?
Such an interesting idea having bought and sold VZ earlier this year when it carried a 36 handle.
My perception is AT&T has a toxic legacy of debt to equity, but at 1.331 it's actually just lower than Verizon at 1.36 which can limit decisions even though rates have probably peaked.
And many perceive PFE as over-indebted with a debt to equity ratio of 0.63 but they don't have formal subscription customers - they are subscription customers, but they're not seen that way. Just like a predictable shift to 5G and everyone needs all new products - very similar businesses in a way.
TMUS with a 1.164 debt to equity has a spoiler parent hiding their 2.34 debt to equity in Europe where that all seems very normal.
EBITDA creatures like Iron Mountain.
We're still content with our August 2017 Samsung Note 8s. Lots of potential for wireless.
Sampath CEO of VZ consumer group is in Business Insider this month selling his heavy implementation of AI into all parts of the VZ business - of course customer service and internal workflow. He says, "Everyone claims they love technology, but no one's using it at scale", hmmm?
I'm happy with the dividend as they bring new drugs to the market.
For me Pfizer's turn-around began with Scottish-born former CEO Ian Read.
From Wikipedia: In 2010 when Read "took over from Jeffrey Kindler as Pfizer’s CEO, the drug firm–the world’s largest–was facing the impending patent expiration of Lipitor, the bestselling drug ever made, and the utter failure of one of the most lavishly funded research laboratories on the planet to develop much of anything."
Viagra, introduced in 1999, was merely a Pfizer blood pressure drug reapproved for a new use, which so impressed talking heads on CNBC at the time. Pfizer at the time fit well with the Jack Welch CNBC world of non-serious people.
By October 2015 during the Drug Pricing Firestorm, Forbes journalist Matthew Herper, wrote how "Read, with his calculating mind, must get through the public’s rage over six-figure price tags for breakthrough drugs, yet also keep Pfizer’s pricing power more or less intact. Doing so is absolutely critical.
34% of Pfizer’s revenue growth between 2012 and 2015 came from increasing prices on existing drugs (which is something shared by AbbVie and most drug companies) New medicines, especially for cancer, are selling for $100,000-plus–prices that were unimaginable five years ago." Yet the math of avoided costs supports these prices
In January 2019, Albert Bourla succeeded Read as CEO at Pfizer. In September 2019, Pfizer announced Read would retire as executive chairman at the end of 2019, ending a four-decade career there.
I think Read and Bourla replaced some very silly prior management who knew a lot about golf. The recent Seagen acquisition doubles Pfizer's cancer drugs in pipeline, where they already have sales force employed.
What I liked about ABBV was their escape from insurance reimbursement prison with the purchase of Allergan, which few pharma investors seemed to have understood at the time. I'll let Pfizer surprise me.
Pfizer's GLP-1RA drug danuglipron, Pfizer will redevelop as an improved once a day pill, which analysts are currently VERY focused on, is part of a very crowded market.
The first GLP-1 injected drug, Exenatide also sold as Byetta, approved in 2005 can be made as a generic by Teva as part of a settlement with AstraSeneca, some time very soon - it was post 2017 depending on the terms of a confidential agreement.
As of a week from now, Medicare drug co-pays are zero after the $8,000 out of pocket cap is met.
Unless Republicans score really big with stupid self-harming voters like "Tea Party Seniors with Guns", on January 1, 2025 the Medicare drug out-of-pocket drops to $2,000 and the bizarre pharmacy "doughnut hole" is eliminated. This is greatly animating creeps like the Koch and Murdoch families.
All very favorable for pharma even if the trade-off is negotiated prices as is the custom in every nation in the world, apart from the US until this past year. Health care is not going away and radical anti-vaccine, anti-health Republicans can't legislate it out of existence,
I may have just talked myself into buying some NKE
LOL
The thing about shoes is they wear out at a predictable rate and consumers in first world economies replace them at a stable rate. People don't walk less or more based on their income or their impression of the economy or wold events. - Shoe sales did decline during the Covid quarantines.
Why were investors spooked by Nike?
Nike's profit was up 21% over last year, even more on a per share basis because they've reduced the number of shares.
Nike expected global revenues to increase on par with incomes, yet they increased by only 1% and they now expect them to continue to increase by only 1%, and investors don't like surprises.
So investor's could fear is that some consumers are now preferring to buy sports shoes made by another brand like Puma perhaps, but Puma revenue declined by 1.8% and Adidas revenue declined in December by 6.8%.
Christmas spending is up between 6% and 9% this year over prior years.
But spending on clothing and accessories have increased by 21% - yet that huge increase in clothing sales is NOT going toward sport shoes - or any shoes.
Dress shoe sales may never recover to pre-pandemic levels.
> > > While clothing sales are up 21% this Christmas, shoe sales in America have been flat since 2017. < < <
Nike bucked that trend for a while being the most popular brand and stealing market share from other sports shoes. But Nike profit continues to increase as they sell ever more costly "limited edition shoes".
What could this possibly mean? Probably most Americans, like myself continue to opt for less casual shoes and less showy shoes with little reason to buy new shoes.
I now wear slip-on Merrill Jungle Mocs almost exclusively which are very comfortable and I don't wear shoes at home. I take new Merrills out of the box to weddings, and I have a number of partially worn Merrills. I buy them for about $50 on Amazon, so I can quickly verify I have bought 5 pairs of Merrills since 2016, and I bought no sport or dress shoes. One pair of shoes every 18 months - apparently that trend is now not unique among Americans. It doesn't mean anything to me, they're just shoes. I don't think I've bought any socks for more than ten years.
The demand for Nike's entire special edition collection sports shoes has collapsed in Africa, China, the US and Europe, and they don't understand why.
I suspect the bottom has fallen out of this silly collectors market. Marijuana retailer have been among the groups especially taken with displaying their collections for admirers behind glass with gallery lighting.
Limited-edition Nike shoes are of course never meant to be actually worn or used because they'd lose value and collectors would suffer a loss on resale at the Sotheby's Auction House, and not fetch the $18,000 Reserve Bid.
Selling limited-edition Nike's you've actually worn is something like trying to sell a worn-out Picasso painting you mistakenly used as bed linens. 5 Nike Sneakers Every Collector Needs https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/5-nike-sneakers-every-collector-needs .
All savvy collectors know, they're supposed to buy at each limited run at retail, preferably under $1,2000 and hope for big appreciation on your purchase, just like all collectibles. The margins on this silly business for Nike have been astronomical.
A bio of the wealthiest of the Dodger's owners:
Mark Walter
Born in Iowa, Walter, 63, went to Creighton University and Northwestern University Law School. His net worth is estimated to be $1.3 billion. Most of Walter’s fortune derives from his stake in Guggenheim Partners, a 12-year-old firm founded with family money by a descendant of mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim.
Magic Johnson
Arguably the greatest Laker of all time, Johnson, 64, is not expected to have a major decision-making role in terms of player personnel, but will be the public face of the franchise. He is a member of the basketball Hall of Fame and was a three-time NBA MVP. The Lakers won five titles while he was with them and his No. 32 has been retired by the team.
Peter Guber
Guber, 81, is chairman and chief executive of Mandalay Entertainment Group and has produced or co-produced a lengthy list of films, including “Rain Man,” “Batman,” “The Color Purple,” “Flashdance” and “Midnight Express.” Guber has been a part owner of the Golden State Warriors since 2010. He is also a professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, Television and Digital Media and has his own website, https://www.peterguber.com.
Todd Boehly
Boehly, 50, is president of Guggenheim Partners. He joined them in 2001 to establish and lead the corporate credit business for the firm. Before that, he was vice president at Whitney & Co., where he initiated the firm’s bank loan investing business. He has also worked at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he concentrated on leveraged finance.
Bobby Patton
A longtime client of Mark Walter's Guggenheim Partners, Patton invests in oil and gas and real estate in Texas. A 2010 story from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described Mr. Patton as a “rancher-investor” and a “big player in political donations” in Texas. He also serves on the board of Security Benefit Corp. and on the advisory council of the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts.
https://www.latimes.com/sports/la-xpm-2012-may-03-la-sp-0503-owner-bios-20120503-story.html
The latest AI language algorithms, such as GPT-4, pose a challenge to the current state-of-the-art processing hardware, and GenAI accelerators aren’t keeping up.
Currently, no hardware on the market today can run the full GPT-4. - https://www.eetimes.com/parsing-the-mindboggling-cost-of-ownership-of-generative-ai/
The model training and inference scenario today is carried out on extensive computing farms. The job runs for a long time, consumes a sizable amount of electric power that produces copious heat at mindboggling costs. Nonetheless, the farms deliver what’s expected from them.
To size the task, training a GPT-4 model on 32bit or 64bit arithmetic may require more than one-trillion bits stored on the fastest versions of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) DRAM. The performance necessary to train such a massive model calls for tens of petaops running for weeks—an annoyance but not a roadblock. To accomplish the job, the computing farms consume megawatts with total cost of ownership in the hundreds of billions of dollars. No, not a perfect scenario, but a working solution.
As opposed to model training — model inference is usually performed on 8bit arithmetic that still produces large amounts of data in hundreds of billions of bits must deliver a query response with a latency of no more than a couple of seconds to keep the user’s attention and acceptance.
Considering that a vast potential market for inference encompasses mobile applications at the network edge, a viable solution must provide high throughput of more than one petaops with implementation efficiency exceeding 50%. The solution must minimize energy consumption, possibly less than 50 watts per petaops, at an acquisition/deployment cost in the ballpark of few hundred dollars.
The main bottleneck is the connection between memory and processors. Intel is expanding memory inside processors while competitors are building smaller processors inside each cluster of memory.
Intel is dedicating a huge portion of their new Arizona fab to consolidate many modules on glass substrate expanding beyond limits of silicon technology with an array of patented techniques developed by Israel-based Tower Semi (NYSE:TSEM) whose recent purchase by Intel was nixed by China.
McKinsey estimated that in 2022, Google search processed 3.3 trillion queries (~100,000 queries/sec) at a cost of ¢0.2 per query, considered to be the benchmark. The total annual cost amounted to $6.6 billion. Google isn’t charging fees for the search service. Instead, it covers the cost via advertising revenues. For now.
The same McKinsey analysis priced each ChatGPT-3 cost at ¢3 per query—15× larger, with 100,000 queries/sec costing $100 billion annually.
Incidentally Frank McCourt, prior owner of the Dodgers bought the team from Fox and the Murdoch family in 2004 and sold to the current owners as part of his 2012 bankruptcy which coincided with his divorce.
McCourt was a Boston real estate developer who moved to Los Angeles after his bid to buy the Boston Red Socks came in second-best.
McCourt still owns the parking lot surrounding Dodger Stadium and initially proposed the sky gondola network, likely seeing a use for the parking lot overlooking all of downtown Los Angeles as something other than mere parking.
McCourt subsequently bought French Ligue 1 club Olympique de Marseille from Margarita Louis-Dreyfus for €45 million on October 17, 2016.
The ownership group of the Dodgers have pretty reasonable plan to broaden their fan base to more upscale residents in a metropolitan area of 12.87 million residents.
Where they started
In 1957, then Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley moved the team Brooklyn to Los Angeles wanting to build a new privately-financed 56,000 seat stadiumin Chavez Ravine, a hilly area near downtown populated mostly by Latinos. After a public referendum narrowly passed the mostly empty housing units in Chavez Ravine were razed for completion of Dodger Stadium in 1962.
In spite of the destruction of this Latin neighborhood, due to their location, they started with a large number of Hispanic fans and in 1980 they hired Mexican baseball star Fernando Valenzuela to capitalize on this further. The Dodgers teams says 43 percent of their fan base this season was made up of Latinos. Nineteen percent speak Spanish only, 53% describe themselves as bilingual and only 28% speak English only. In 2010 the Dodger trademarked the name "Los Doyers" used by more than 1/3 of their fans. Many fans at home watch the game on TV while listening to the radio play-by-play by Hall of Fame broadcaster Jaime Jarrin — “the Vin Scully of Latinos.” https://muertolandia.com/blogs/news/origins-of-los-doyers-from-la-dodgers
What could be ahead
Over the past 20 years Silver Lake and the other neighborhoods surrounding Dodger stadium and the adjoining Police Academy have "gentrified" as younger home owners have sought bargains.
Dodger stadium is also a mere 3 miles from Staples Center where the LA Lakers, Clippers and the LA Kings play in a auditorium for 20,000 to far more affluent fans selling lucrative broadcast rights. They also need some world-class players bringing in new demographics.
Charter Communications "Spectrum SportsNet" has signed a $1.5 billion deal 20 year deal with the Lakers and signed a 25 year contract to broadcast the Dodgers for $8.35 billion, which will probably translate into a channel that costs $30 a month to view. - https://www.nexttv.com/news/charter-dtc-offerings-for-lakers-and-dodgers-should-launch-ahead-of-2023-24-nba-season-cost-as-much-as-dollar30-a-month
Even though the Dodger stadium parking lot handled a vast number of Covid vaccinations during the pandemic, the owners group wants to more easily bring in non-local fans with a new gondola system with several stations between the stadium and Union Station, moving 10,000 people per hour. Critic see fans parking in many Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods to avoid the $35 parking at Dodger Stadium. - https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/traffic-filipino-protests/dodgers-gondola
The current owners of the Dodgers have cash if they need it to create a winning team in the premiere market.
The first five are multi-billionaires or close to it:
Mark Walter,
Magic Johnson,
Peter Guber,
Bobby Patton,
Todd Boehly
Billie Jean King,
Ilana Kloss,
Alan Smolinisky,
Robert L. Plummer
and Stan Kasten, Manager
California cops and firefighters are taking their pensions to Idaho’s ‘Little Orange County’
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-12-21/california-cops-firefighters-flee-california-take-pensions-to-eagle-idaho
The recent mayoral election in this sleepy, conservative town nestled in the foothills outside Boise didn’t hinge on which Republican candidate was a fiercer supporter of former President Trump, or who was a stronger opponent of abortion. The key issue? Who was the least Californian.
Both staunchly conservative candidates were 'refugees' from the Golden State. The incumbent had arrived in 2003 from Orange County with little more than the shirt on his back. His challenger, a retired Santa Clara County fire captain, came about a decade later with a six-figure pension courtesy of California taxpayers.
That made him, and the hundreds of other retired California cops and firefighters flooding into the town in recent years, seem practically socialist to the old guard who find it hard to trust new arrivals with pockets full of government cash.
“It’s ludicrous” that they call themselves Republicans," Mayor Jason Pierce said during an interview on election day in early December. “You find a lot of Californians who move here don’t realize how much [liberal] baggage they’re bringing with them. Why they even support Medicare, which is straight-up communism!”
And that’s the irony: Whether locals like it or not, California public pension money is the lifeblood of the economy in this small-government, Republican boomtown.
It’s a phenomenon happening across the West, as tens of thousands of California’s career civil servants — people who devoted their working lives to making state and local government function — decide California is no longer their home.
Nearly 90,000 members of CalPERS, California’s main public employee retirement system, received their payments outside the state, according to a Times analysis of 2022 data, the most recent year available. Those Golden State exiles collected more than $3.6 billion in state pensions.
And that’s only CalPERS members. The totals don’t include retirees from local governments that have their own pension plans, including Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles.
Almost all the top out-of-state destinations in the CalPERS data are low-tax havens: the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe, the desert suburbs of Reno, and Lake Havasu, Ariz.
But no zip code outside the state received more CalPERS money than 83616 in Eagle, a suburb with about 30,000 people located hundreds of miles from California.
New arrivals roll in beneath a road-spanning arch with a giant rendering of a bald eagle. California expats are easy to find.
In early December, the street was lined with campaign signs touting Pierce and his challenger, Brad Pike.
Pierce arrived in 2003 from Yorba Linda with a wife, two young kids and no job. He was so determined to raise his children somewhere that aligned with his values he was willing to restart his IT career from scratch.
As mayor, Pierce said he is routinely contacted by more recently arrived Californians who see garbage on the streets and, instead of picking it up themselves, ask him why the town doesn’t hire more maintenance workers. “So, you want your taxes to go up,” he said he asks them. “You want more government?”
He finds it particularly hard to understand how retired police and firefighters, who often collect more from their California pensions than their local counterparts earn in salary, can consider themselves conservatives.
“They actually want to give the same kind of benefits to officers and state employees here,” Pierce said. “And, it’s like, wait a minute, you literally created a huge deficit in California and now you want to do the same thing here?”
"Virtually a communist", Brad Pike, a retired Santa Clara County fire captain, holds an American flag while campaigning for mayor in Eagle, Idaho.
His challenger, Pike, said he felt whiplash moving from one state where people accused him of being too conservative to another where he’s suspected of not being conservative enough.
He’s been a Republican for 41 years, he said, and left California in part because of the arrogance and entitlement he felt from Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown, who ran the state with no meaningful opposition and almost no regard for the feelings of Californians like him.
When he arrived in Idaho, he felt like he was finally able to “exhale,” he said, to “relax and enjoy life.”
So it was a shock when the mayor’s supporters attacked him from the other flank, accusing him of being a RINO (Republican in name only) and a Democratic “plant.”
“I came here looking for anything that’s not the liberal, socialistic view of the government in California,” Pike said.
Asked if he thought it was hypocritical to complain about socialism in a state that provides him a $123,000-per-year pension, Pike said, "I figure anybody who raises such questions is just jealous."
“This is a free country, you have the option to go anywhere you want,” Pike said. “I’m not ashamed to say that I brought my CalPERS pension to Idaho.”
A pension is a guaranteed payment for life after retirement. Decades ago, they were a standard benefit of career-level corporate and government jobs in America. But they’re almost unheard of in the private sector now.
Instead, companies offer retirement savings plans like 401(k)s, which the employee can invest, tax free, with the hope that it will grow into a tidy nest egg. But regardless of what happens with those investments, once the employee retires, the company is off the hook.
In 2000, as pensions were rapidly disappearing elsewhere, California Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation giving state employees one of the most sweeping and generous pension plans ever created.
It granted more than 200,000 civil servants the ability to retire at 55 and, in many cases, collect more than half of their highest salary for the rest of their lives. California Highway Patrol officers did even better: They could retire at 50 and receive as much as 90% of their peak pay as long as they lived.
County and local governments in California that were not part of the state’s plan quickly adopted similar policies so that their best employees wouldn’t jump to state jobs.
Supporters of the measure — mostly public employee unions — sold it with the promise that it would impose no new costs on California taxpayers. To finance it, the state employees’ pension fund would make wise investments and the money would grow fast enough to pay the bill in full.
That’s not what happened. Successive market downturns — including the dot.com bubble burst and the housing collapse of 2008 — made a hash of those rosy predictions and state and local governments have spent years shoveling billions of taxpayer dollars into their plans to make up for the losses and keep them afloat.
In 2016, Davis admitted signing the measure had been a mistake, but little has changed. That means, every year, thousands of Californians in their 50s walk away from government jobs with plenty of time and money on their hands. Many of them are looking for greener pastures.
Jorge Grajeda retired from the Long Beach Police Department in September. He was born in Mexico and moved to Southern California with his family when he was 5. He was living the American dream in his early years as a cop, but as his responsibilities grew, he couldn’t help noticing the bite taxes took from his paychecks.
“I was paying some years $40,000 in income tax,” Grajeda said, and getting what felt to him like very little in return.
“I didn’t get subsidized housing, I didn’t get lower utility bills” that the government offered lower income people. “Nobody looked out for me,” Grajeda said.
And the sense of pride and accomplishment he felt in being a police officer eroded quickly, around the time of the national reckoning on police brutality that followed the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
“We used to go places and people would wave to us,” or pay for our coffee, but in the last 10 years, “pretty much all of that went away,” Grajeda said. Now, he said, “it’s all about race.”
Every time you stop somebody, or pull them over in their car, they call you “a racist Mexican,” Grajeda said. “It shouldn’t be like that. It should be about right and wrong. If you do the wrong thing, there are consequences.”
Recruitment at police departments suffered as a result of the changing political climate, forcing cops already on the job to work extensive overtime, Grajeda said. The money was great, but the endless hours were wearing him down. That’s when a sergeant he was working patrol with mentioned, almost in passing, a small town in Idaho called Eagle. It sounded like life would be simpler there, Grajeda thought, "Just like the rural Mexico of his childhood."
Today, Grajeda owns four houses in the Treasure Valley, as the area surrounding Eagle is known. He lives in one with his family and rents out the other three. He had never imagined owning so much real estate, but the prices and interest rates were so low in Idaho before the pandemic, when he started looking, he couldn’t pass up the investment opportunity, he said.
“I was feeling so burned down, frustrated, stressed” as a police officer in Long Beach, Grajeda said. When he visited Idaho, he was struck by how safe he felt. “That’s how it used to be when I was a little kid,” he added.
A retired sergeant from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who asked that his name not be published because of credible threats from an ex-inmate he helped arrest, arrived in 2019 with his $128,000 pension and guaranteed health coverage.
Does he feel any remorse for leaving California, the source of his retirement income?
“You get over that real quick,” he said, laughing at the question. “You put 30 years of blood, sweat and tears into the city. You don’t feel guilty at all.”
He lived in Southern California his whole life and used to love it, he said. But he too had grown to view the state as a toxic stew of crime, homelessness and liberal policies that made police work seem thankless.
A woman feeds one of her goats on her property next to a new housing development in Eagle.
The day he turned in his badge and gun he snapped a photo of the department’s Monterey Park headquarters in his side-view mirror as he pulled away. He sent it to friends still on the job, wished them luck and drove straight north, not even stopping for gas until he crossed the California border, he said.
He has two grown daughters who live in Southern Idaho now too. One is a real estate agent, the other is a hairstylist, and while neither could hope to afford a house when they lived in California, he said, they own four between them in Idaho.
“They’re killing it,” he said, sounding every bit the proud father. “It’s like a dream.”
His daughter has sold about 20 houses to colleagues from the LASD, he said. Most of them are retired, but some are still working and have arranged their schedules so they can make the commute.
He lives in a master-planned community called Legacy with enormous gates, wide boulevards and its own three-hole golf course. It’s known locally as “Little Orange County,” and it looks like a slice of Irvine plunked in the middle of rolling prairie.
As he stood in the sand on the beach in his backyard, casting his fishing line into a man-made lake, he pointed to the other houses around the water, listing off the departments their owners worked for: Santa Monica PD, LAPD, California Highway Patrol. Nine of the 11 houses within sight were occupied by former California cops.
They’re about 90% Republicans, he said. His own, spotless garage is adorned with enormous, red, white and blue banners reading, “Let’s Go Brandon” and “Trump 2024 Take America Back.”
Like many cops, he said his disillusionment with California’s government stems from the sense that police department leaders and politicians no longer have their backs.
Cops not only have to worry about the most violent and unstable members of society they’re asked to confront on the street, he said, they also have to worry about prosecutors trying to score points with liberal voters by “hanging them out to dry” when things go wrong.
It takes a toll. “I’ve stood on the front lines at protests with people spitting in your face, throwing bottles and rocks, and you couldn’t do anything,” he said. “That was just silly to me.”
If people in California are upset that so much pension money is fleeing the state, it’s their fault for electing politicians who don’t support the police, he said, adding, “If those guys weren’t in office, I tell you right now, 70% to 80% of us would still be in California.”
It’s a sentiment widely shared by the California exiles, whose takeover of Eagle now appears to be complete. Their preferred candidate, the former Santa Clara fire chief who was accused of being too Californian, won the run-off election by a landslide.
I passed a display kiosk yesterday that was not logged in and quite visibly running Windows NT.
Support for that ended July 2003.
Most Bank ATMs run on embedded Windows XP, the successor to NT, which loads from read only memory. They run on secure internal bank networks, but still.
"Support" for Windows 10 for retail users ends October 14, 2025.
I looked for bargains but I didn't find any.
The father of my niece and one of my nephews is half-Jewish and my nephew's best friend in high school on the big island of Hawaii is one of Roseanne Barr's sons. As a consequence he's been quite influenced by the antisemitism of Roseanne Barr, a mentally ill antisemitic Jew who supported Trump.
At least Roseanne has an excuse. She's entertaining, irritable, charismatic and it doesn't take you too long to confirm to your own satisfaction that Roseanne is indeed seriously mentally ill.
My nephew is Elon Musk fan-boy and was not a very good student. I'd describe his preferred form of education to be watching conspiracy theory videos on YouTube. He's intellectually lazy and primarily works as a waiter at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, while also being an actor.
I've provided him some blunt assessments of where his alternate reality world will get him, as my Father was also partial to a right-wing conspiracy theory occasionally.
I told my Mom how much my nephew reminded me of my Dad. Her comment was, "Well I wish my grandson all the luck in the world because he's going to need it."
I owed it to him to share with him his grandmother's opinion.
My sister and her husband, who spent many long hours for 23 years running their own restaurant in the Napa Valley are startled by the "different value system" of their son and daughter. I don't think they really had time to spend with them until they moved to Hawaii.
That's the thing about relatives. I theory they're related to you, but it' sometimes difficult to remain convinced of that.
My youngest nephew is a very kind, intelligent and good hearted young man who has clearly inherited much of my favorite grandfather the Russian immigrant. He's going to continue greatly enjoying his life and will bring a lot of joy and love to others. He's an absolute delight.
Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/13/stephen-miller-is-an-immigration-hypocrite-i-know-because-im-his-uncle-219351/
It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.
He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906.
That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.
What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.
I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.
I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America first” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.
Like other immigrants, our family’s welcome to the USA was not always a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law, there was no state-sponsored violence against us, no kidnapping of our male children, and we enjoyed good relations with our neighbors. True, Jews were excluded from many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns, couldn’t join certain organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good.
As in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America.
Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump's grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the United States, and his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. (Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife’s own citizenship.)
These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. When confronted by the deaths and suffering of thousands, our senses are overwhelmed, and the victims become statistics rather than people. I meet these statistics one at a time through my volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global nonprofit that protects refugees and helped my family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story of one such man I have met in the hopes that my nephew might recognize elements of our shared heritage.
In the early 2000s, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. Joseph was actually a member of the state-approved Coptic church but was nonetheless immediately subjected to torture. “They smashed my face into the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons for the others to see.”
Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other men, little food and no proper hygiene. Some died, and in time Joseph was stricken with dysentery. When he was too weak to stand, he was taken to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon regaining his strength, he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years.
Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion. He worked any job he could get, saved his money and made his way through Sudan. He endured arrest and extortion in Libya. He returned to Sudan, then kept moving to Dubai, Brazil and eventually to a southern border crossing into Texas, where he sought asylum. In all of the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable, exploited and his status was “illegal.” But in the United States, he had a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.
Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child. He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for every day of his freedom and safety. He bears emotional scars from not seeing his parents or siblings since he was 14. He still trembles, cries and struggles for breath when describing his torture, and he bears physical scars as well. He hopes to become a citizen, return to work and make his contribution to America. His story, though unique in its particulars, is by no means unusual. I have met Central Americans fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped kidnap-bride from central Asia.
Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in world history and a nation made strong by immigrants. Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human. Trump publicly parades the grieving families of people hurt or killed by migrants, just as the early Nazis dredged up Jewish criminals to frighten and enrage their political base to justify persecution of all Jews. Almost every American family has an immigration story of its own based on flight from war, poverty, famine, persecution, fear or hopelessness. Most of these immigrants became workers, entrepreneurs, scientists and soldiers of America.
Most damning is the administration's evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me. History will be the judge, but in the meantime the normalization of these policies is rapidly eroding the collective conscience of America. Immigration reform is a complex issue that will require compassion and wisdom to bring the nation to a just solution, but the politicians who have based their political and professional identity on ethnic demonization and exclusion cannot be trusted to do so. As free Americans, and descendants of immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.