Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
I think CRWD is a good one to keep your eye on as it may drop back into an area where it's more tolerable.
As I've said before, I think 2024 will be challenging for the market while interest rates remain up. The December rally was so strong I suspect all the money that had to be invested, was invested. It appears the bears are in charge for the time being. Maybe more buying opportunities in March.
I wonder sometimes why I subscribe to the NYT. They are the king of both sides do it nonsense. It seems almost trivial today but Republicans decided during the Reagan administration to triple the national debt so they could be the good guys. Americans are not so bright, it worked. From the aforementioned NYT:
Readability is excellent in a novel, not so much in a programming language. While one can easily understand a single statement in COBOL it's next to impossible to follow the logic in the entire set of statements. Good luck translating hundreds of reserved words into a mathematically structured programming language. Outside of DoD one of the main backers was RCA. Yup that forward thinking Radio Corporation of America.
Excellent ideas. I've been approached by D. Trump with an opportunity to take door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales training with a dual minor, (may have been a duel minor), in door-to-door knife sharpening for personal protection and Encyclopedia Britannica educational sales. The best part is that I get paid to recruit my friends and family. There's no up-front cost as the bank of D. Trump is offering full-recourse loans with no payments until training has been completed. I also got this cool red hat just for listening to the presentation. This is 2024's can't miss!
As I was catching up on the NYT tonight I was reminded that analysts and news prognosticators have no clue. I think 2024 is a year where I'll stay mostly in treasuries and real estate while the world figures out where we're headed. I don't think we're headed for a crash, but it's good to remember, almost no one sees it coming.
Just got back. Water was a bit cool but we got in anyway. Everyone was voting for Barbados next year where the water temps are 6-7 degrees warmer.
We're taking our kids and their spouse and SOs to the Bahamas for Christmas. We long ago began making donations in our friends and family's names. Job done. No stuff, for us it's just annoying. We'd rather just be together in a beautiful place and enjoy the company.
As I begin to move back into equities I'm in O up over 25% and PFE up 8% and next will be VZ. Treasuries are still great but that time will likely end over the next 12-18 months.
Porsche has mastered this nonsense. Special edition cars intended for collectors. A Porsche 959 sold last year for over $2MM. it had 800 miles on the clock after 35 years. Even their standard GT level cars sell for a premium over the original list years after production as long as the milage is quite low and they have never been raced. Of course the GT level cars are designed for the track.
And they can say this stuff with a straight face. I guess they'll have to water that innovation.
So when NKE was over $122 yesterday and Ms. Reed had a $108 valuation she told her clients to hold? Without selling covered calls against every share?
Nike down almost 12% in the pre-market. That's about $22B. Ouch! Big drag on the DOW 30 this morning.
Maybe Optimus will fix Tesla suspension and steering?...:)
Good call on the bounce Nick.
Snakes don't trust each other..:)
This market has been amazingly resilient. Let's see where we end the day.
That problem might at least partly explain this:
Tesla Has The Highest Accident Rate Of Any Auto Brand
Tesla drivers are the most accident-prone, according to a LendingTree analysis of 30 car brands. It found that Tesla drivers are involved in more accidents than drivers of any other brand. Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers. Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90) were the only other brands with more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers for every brand.
This was not a causal study; the study did not analyze the reason for an incident. But it comes amid news that Tesla recently recalled more than 2 million Tesla vehicles over a safety issue related to its Autopilot software — specifically, a feature called Autosteer, which is part of the driver-assistance system. The recall affects nearly all the cars Tesla has sold in the United States.
Tesla, the electronic car manufacturer, is the world’s most valuable automotive company. It is led by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. He has long envisioned cars that are fully self-driving and has been pushing the envelope on this technology.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statement says that, "in certain circumstances when Autosteer is engaged, the prominence and scope of the feature's controls may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse of the … advanced driver-assistance feature."
The recall is aimed at fixing the system that is supposed to ensure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot. Tesla's auto-driving feature doesn't just take over and let the person in the driver's seat read a book or take a nap. The driver must be prepared to intervene if an issue arises that the feature can't handle.
Like all problems, drinking water will be a poor person's problem. We should, but we won't notice, because poor people who use resources are the great problem this Century. I've been amazed over the last couple of months as the most persecuted group of people over the last several thousand years are now acting like the Nazis who attempted to destroy their culture and society. When fascism becomes OK in the Jewish community I think we're all in deep trouble. After 70 some years, they've become the people who hate them. It's sad.
We learned this lesson quickly when we were focused on building our US market and buying mostly Korean solar panels. Shipping to Oakland was a fraction of the price of moving that same panel to the East Coast. Then the Hawaiian market opened up and shipping was half that of moving to Oakland. We began dropping panels directly into Hawaii at less than 10% the cost of moving them across the country. It was an easy choice.
This work is just full of happy thoughts..:).
I would give the fairly regular rise of fascism as good a chance of wiping out as many humans as climate change over the next 20-30 years. Climate change might be the trigger, the excuse but continued technological advance will make migrating humans less valuable and climate change will make them a threat, a nuisance. Trump called humans who don't support him, vermin. He's roughly tied to be elected President and we're talking about climate change. I think there's a more immediate issue.
I know that you know both are thinking if they had a trillion humans they'd have several hundred billion to control until they don't need them any longer.
You're preaching to the choir here jbs..:). I went down this rabbit hole 20 years ago when you could still have a great fight with the politically motivated deniers. Unfortunately most of these people are now moving toward an argument that fascism is good for you, (like cigarettes, global warming and apparently slavery). As you noted, it's not going to end well for many because the core problem is too many people and the fascists have the same solution they've had throughout history.
Thank you, I saw that. Since we know we'll continue to get more rain here we need to regrade some areas around the house to make it more resilient. We also replaced the substandard sump pump and are making some other improvements. Trying to run this project from 2000 miles away was almost impossible. Now that we're living here we've made some good contacts and are beginning to build a team for our next project. On a positive note, we called one of the plumbers on our short list and the owner showed up, swam through the very cold water in the crawl space and installed a new and more robust sump pump within two hours. Our fired contractor is still trying to explain to us how it's our fault. What's funny is that he took this job to get the next one. We've been doing this, (mostly my wife), for 40 years and you can't underestimate how many GCs are in the business of sales prevention.
They missed half the story. We're definitely climate migrants as we moved out of Northern New Mexico before the Rockies burn to the ground. There is an ongoing twenty year drought reaching extremes only seen 800 years ago. I'll take extra water but there is a reason we bought property 30 feet above mean high tide here in the mid-Atlantic.
Forty years ago the average number of acres consumed by fire in the US was ~3MM. The worst fire season was 5MM acres in 1988. In the last eight years there have been three fire seasons with over 10MM acres burned and the other five have averaged over 6.7MM acres. Looks like a trend to me.
They apparently decided to throw in a swimming pool with the remodel. Who knew?
It will be interesting to see if McDs even tries to make a decent cup of coffee. A good local coffee house is one of the first things we looked for when we moved here. I might be one of the only people that finds Starbucks coffee just an awful cup of bitterness masked with a hundred different flavors, fillers and spices.
Well, it's different here. We got 3" of rain in the last 24 hours. The basement is sealed and dry but the perimeter sump pump was going on every 30 seconds for about 4 hours. I finally got my umbrella and went outside about midnight and discovered that the sump pump drain exited at a high point next to the house so all of the water simply washed back down against the house. Plumbers!?!
I used two beach towels to create a u-shaped dam and 95% of the water drained out onto the lawn instead of running down the walkway to the house. We'll dry out over the next few days and I'll redirect the water away from the house with a more permanent solution that will include moving the sump pump drain away from the house and creating an appropriately graded area in the low spot where water was accumulating. That was more water than we get in 4 months in Santa Fe..:).
While I have the same opinion of Musk, I don't think focusing on his loses at Twitter / X are important. Space X is currently valued at $180B and Musk still owns 42% of that company. That's about double what he paid for Twitter. It's not his first loser but he did manage to kill an excellent platform for political discussion. Maybe it was worth $30B or about 12% of his net to suppress serious discussions about fascism.
This is how I look at PFE today. One can buy 10,000 shares for ~$265,000 and it will return $1,400 a month. It's like owning a small rental unit that returns net 5% with 8-10% a year growth in value each year over the next decade. Oh, and no tenants..:).
With climate change and overuse, the ice on Mount Everest is becoming less stable. See article below:
Mount Everest Is on Thin Ice
This year was especially dangerous for climbers due to rapidly melting ice. A close-up look at the Khumbu Glacier shows how the mountain is changing.
Lhakpa Rita Sherpa was on the brink of a career-making climb. The 24-year-old had secured a spot on a team of climbers reopening the trail to the top of Mount Everest this year.
Before him stood the Khumbu Icefall, an obstacle course of towering shards and yawning crevasses that leads to the summit. Scaling this frozen waterfall for the first time would catapult him into the big leagues of Sherpas who ferry wealthy foreigners up the mountain for a living.
As Lhakpa Rita and dozens of other Sherpas set out on the morning of April 12, however, their surroundings were on the verge of collapse. A colonnade of icy pinnacles that perennially defined the landscape had melted down to stumps in recent years. A snowy slope at the foot of the icefall had become a pond covered by a mere patina of ice.
The Khumbu Glacier was rapidly changing, said Sonam Tshering Sherpa, an “icefall doctor” responsible for maintaining the icefall route. He had shuffled over the same pond only two days earlier. The glacier, he said, “is becoming a lake.”
The glacier has long been the gateway to the top of Mount Everest. It’s a rare source of drinking water in a windswept wasteland and home to Everest Base Camp, where thousands of people visit every year, many of them staying for weeks. Now the glacier is in trouble.
A rise in temperatures across the Himalayas is thinning its ice at an accelerating clip. Growing activity at Base Camp, built directly on top of the glacier, is compounding the problem.
Glaciers worldwide are melting more quickly, but researchers say the ice loss across the Himalayas has become especially rapid. That threatens to disrupt vital waterways that feed the Indian subcontinent, disrupting agriculture and living conditions for hundreds of millions of people.
On Everest, the fallout is more immediate. Nepal’s government is weighing whether to relocate Base Camp down the mountain, a contentious move that would make an arduous climb even longer—and more dangerous. Eighteen people have died on the mountain this year, according to the Himalayan Database, making it the deadliest stretch in Everest’s history.
The ice melt is eroding a pillar of Nepal’s economy. Mount Everest stands at the center of a tourism industry that in 2022 supported more than a million jobs and contributed $2.4 billion to Nepal’s economy, or 6.1% of its GDP, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.
The Himalayan valleys depend on climbers and hikers from around the world who sleep and eat at tea houses along the route to Everest. Ethnic Sherpa people carry supplies from village to village on yaks or on their own backs, sometimes in loads as heavy as 175 pounds.
The nerve center of this economy is Base Camp, where tents with beds and en-suite bathrooms are equipped with electricity and heating. Kitchen tents prepare meals worthy of hotel menus in Kathmandu. Wealthy clients, who pay as much as $160,000 to climb Everest, can fly into the camp’s heliport.
“Better facilities, better food. It’s like you’re at home in the cities,” said Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, a Nepalese climber who founded his own expedition company, Imagine Nepal. Many of his clients spend more than a month at Base Camp to adjust to the shock of breathing at high altitudes, where the air has less oxygen, and practice climbing the icefall nearby.
In early April, a team of icefall doctors opened the route through the icefall for the start of the climbing season. They maintain the ladders and anchors that climbers use to scale the giant ice blocks, known as seracs, that form the Khumbu Icefall. The accelerating melt had transformed their work from a weekly job to a daily one.
The icefall doctors weren’t alone in noticing changes. When Khim Lal Gautam, a surveyor for the government of Nepal, visited Base Camp in spring 2021, he was stunned by how loud the sound of meltwater—rushing beneath the glacier’s surface—had become.
Operators were clearing away debris from on top of the glacier to create plots for tents, allowing sunlight and other sources of heat to penetrate the ice.
An engineer by training, Gautum estimated the use of propane gas across the camp was enough to melt three billion kilograms of ice every season. Campers tended to urinate outside, dumping around 4,000 liters of warm liquid on Khumbu each day, he said.
“A very alarming situation,” Gautam said. He helped prepare a 2022 report to Nepal’s government that recommended moving Base Camp, adding: “If this human pressure continues at the current condition, the base camp may soon be left without any ice.”
Operators questioned whether any other location was feasible. The report recommended the area around Gorak Shep, a tiny hamlet further down the trail—but it doesn’t have a good supply of water, so Sherpas currently carry it in, in 8-gallon barrels on their backs. Khumbu provides water, as well as a flatter surface for camping and proximity to the icefall, making it a convenient training ground for the glacier’s deadliest stretch.
Moving the camp down to the Gorak Shep area would also make the climb to the top more dangerous than it already is.
On April 12, a team of 26 Sherpas working for Imagine Nepal departed from Base Camp carrying rope, tents, oxygen cylinders and other equipment. Their mission was to reopen the route at the highest reaches of Everest leading to the summit.
Standing in their way was the icefall. Only days earlier the icefall doctors had set the trail through the frozen maze. Imagine Nepal’s Sherpas would be among the first to test it.
Dawa Gyalje Sherpa, the team’s leader, planned to have the group relay the equipment up the mountain that day in stages.
Sherpas assigned to carry cargo at higher stages of Everest would travel light through the icefall, saving their legs. The strongest climbers would hit the icefall with heavy coils of rope bundled on their backs, moving quickly to avoid avalanches. They included his close friend Pemba Tenzing Sherpa, with whom he had set a goal of climbing all 14 of the world’s peaks above 8,000 meters. The two had already conquered nine.
Pemba Tenzing brought his nephew—Lhakpa Rita, the first-timer.
After the group departed base camp, the two men pushed ahead of the pack with Da Chhiree Sherpa, a close relative of the team’s leader, and 31-year-old Lakpa Sona Sherpa.
About halfway up the icefall the group reached the “dum,” or sink, known for its instability. In the predawn climb, the dum was frigid and its hulking seracs were shrouded in darkness. All that Lakpa Sona recalled was the path directly in front of his headlamp and the sound of spiky crampons chewing the ice.
The group reached their destination, high above the icefall, at 7 a.m., where they dropped off the ropes and caught their breath before heading back down to Base Camp. There wasn’t much time to waste. The sun was rising and conditions on the icefall were about to deteriorate. On the way down they passed Dawa Gyalje, who was still climbing up.
At 10 a.m. the group arrived back at the edge of the dum. The sun was out, and the glacier was heating up. Lakpa Sona stopped for a cigarette break as his teammates continued on. From his perch, the Sherpa watched as Pemba Tenzing led his nephew through the forest of jagged seracs below. Da Chhiree took up the rear.
When the trio reached the opening of an icy gorge, each climbed down a ladder one at a time, Lakpa Sona said. Then Lakpa Sona noticed a huge serac looming precariously over the gorge and his colleagues, who were about 50 yards away. It was the size of a building, dwarfing neighboring ice formations.
Lighting his cigarette, Lakpa Sona looked back at the serac just in time to see it come crashing down. He rushed toward the accident, but the collapsing ice had blanketed the glacier’s jagged surface, flattening it into a white slope. The gorge was gone. He radioed his teammates, but there was no response.
Dawa Gyalje later arrived on the scene, where he spent the next 45 minutes calling out to the buried Sherpas. By 1 p.m., the ice was too unstable to navigate, forcing the team to suspend the rescue effort.
The icefall doctors were called in to reset the ropes so the Sherpas could return to Base Camp. The fresh ropes led the men directly over the spot where the ice had swallowed their colleagues.
“There was no alternative path,” Lakpa Sona said.
A trip down would usually take Dawa Gyalje three hours. This time, it took 10. He was exhausted and dreading the moment he would approach Base Camp and have phone reception. He needed to call the families of the dead Sherpas.
“All the way down I was thinking: What answer do I have to give them?” he said.
In the days that followed, a crevasse opened up at the site of the accident, widening so much that a trio of ladders had to be fixed together to bridge the chasm.
The route to the top of the world’s highest mountain was intact, just barely.
https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/mount-everest-khumbu-glacier-base-camp-4933d951?mod=hp_lead_pos7
Twenty some years ago I would argue with idiots who believed that global warming was a hoax or at best caused by natural forces. Of course no educated human who wasn't being paid to make that argument - made that argument. Now we're in the teeth of this problem and even the rather dubious supporter WSJ has this on the front page.
Mount Everest Is on Thin Ice
This year was especially dangerous for climbers due to rapidly melting ice. A close-up look at the Khumbu Glacier shows how the mountain is changing.
Lhakpa Rita Sherpa was on the brink of a career-making climb. The 24-year-old had secured a spot on a team of climbers reopening the trail to the top of Mount Everest this year.
Before him stood the Khumbu Icefall, an obstacle course of towering shards and yawning crevasses that leads to the summit. Scaling this frozen waterfall for the first time would catapult him into the big leagues of Sherpas who ferry wealthy foreigners up the mountain for a living.
As Lhakpa Rita and dozens of other Sherpas set out on the morning of April 12, however, their surroundings were on the verge of collapse. A colonnade of icy pinnacles that perennially defined the landscape had melted down to stumps in recent years. A snowy slope at the foot of the icefall had become a pond covered by a mere patina of ice.
The Khumbu Glacier was rapidly changing, said Sonam Tshering Sherpa, an “icefall doctor” responsible for maintaining the icefall route. He had shuffled over the same pond only two days earlier. The glacier, he said, “is becoming a lake.”
More here if you subscribe to the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/mount-everest-khumbu-glacier-base-camp-4933d951?mod=hp_lead_pos7
Thanks for all the information Elroy. I can tell from your response that my original question was rather murky. The photo below is from the home listing. It has an automated pool cover and in the winter an additional winter cover. I'm quite familiar with pool chem management as I was board president of a local pool club and certified as a pool operator and a life guard until recently.
My question is regarding the resistive equipment installed at the far end of the pool to allow one to swim against an adjustable current. I'm unfamiliar with these devices and, of course, the realtors are clueless. If we can agree on a price I'll be able to order an inspection and get much more information. Just wondering if you or your club use something like this?
And just a note regarding 3ppm. I was a chem Nazi and made my employees keep the pool below 2ppm at all times. Even the vegans and ultra skin sensitive members stopped complaining. Welcome to Santa Fe. Yup, I've got stories.
Question for Nick and Elroy. We're bidding on a house with a resistance pool. If you have any experience with the maintenance required or any other insights, I'd appreciate it.
As I begin to move back into dividend stocks in 2024, I'm going to focus on those with qualified dividends. It's just a personal preference and will make our financial life more simple. This will include selling the last of our rental houses so we can really retire.