HamsterHookah

I get it-- we want to see how far a mad man can take it. It's like if the Joker was a congressman. @Captainant thanks for the call-out-- I didn't read that part.

This is probably more common that just Santos. Maybe someone who works in/around The Hill can comment. But even when I was at Deloitte, you didn't need a receipt for anything under $50 so naturally every personal meal and everything was $40-49.99 range. That was common practice.

Tesla bulls.

Interesting and topical read based off our conversation yesterday, I saw today: High-Earning Men Are Cutting Back on Their Working Hours While most U.S. workers are putting in fewer hours, men in the top 10% of earners cut back their time on the job the most, according to a new study: https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-earning-men-are-cutting-back-on-their-working-hours-11674697563?

Fair enough.

Yep, it was known.

The Chevron buyback has really colored your thinking today, I bet.

In for more Tommy W.

He's pathological. He will keep escalating this behavior until it's impossible not to remove him or prosecute him. He's ill.

Troph taking everyone to school for the last two pages. You love to see it.

EPS out front shoulda told ya.

It looks like Tesla is rebounding? At least the stock a bit? Decent-to-good earnings and numbers came out yesterday or today I guess is the impetus.

New way to think about Man bites dog, dog bites man.

I’ve never seen In Bruges (which I think has them both?) by the same director but was pleasantly surprised to see this director did 3 billboards which was one of the best movies of the last decade in my book.

https://www.si.com/nfl/2023/01/26/cowboys-fire-two-assistant-coaches-playoff-loss

I can’t quantify this, but it feels like Elvis has suffered from “famous musician biopic fatigue”, post-Rami’s Mercury and Rocketman (and even Weird Al and Pam and Tommy to a lesser extent). Not boring well for Amy Winehouse in FY24.

We all belabored this point when we said you can't give Dak a big deal. You have to do one of the binary things: Draft a QB who is awesome and win or pay an elite QB who is awesome to win. You can't pay a guy like Dak and win because the money needed to buy the elite talent at other positions is then gone. As you've said, we made our bed.

I can see where you are coming from, but ultimately I disagree and I liked it. The movie felt like an adaption of a play. Maybe it was because I had just watched and fawned over the Coen Brothers adaption of MacBeth, starring Gleeson as King Duncan, or maybe it was because the movie had strong "Waiting for Godot" vibes (which, Beckett was an Irish playwright, after all), but it was undeniably crisp, beautifully shot, scored, and acted. Ultimately it's a story about a 1923 Irishman's mid-life crisis and wrestling with his life. It's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" but before having to be on your deathbed to contemplate a life well-lived and the use of one's scarce energy, time and resources to leave your mark. It's about a very flawed, pride-filled/egotistical (confessed as much to the father) man who isn't all that special or uniquely talented or smart. In that sense a lot of us can relate; I know I can, at least. I think the self-mutilation was a little lot much and drove it to the absurdism, but it also reflected the despairs and the mental illness that was probably just as prevalant but undisclosed or discussed in 1923 Ireland. What am I missing about Barry Keoghan's acting that was superb and masterful? He played a young abused man with some mental slowness well enough, but for me it was Colin Ferrell who was the MVP. His character demanded more of him by struggling through a broader range of emotions and mindsets and Ferrell killed it.

Interesting read on the topic from NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/business/dealbook/demographic-crisis.html Today’s 5-year-olds have it even better than you think. In the wealthiest nations, more than half of these tykes will live to at least 100, the Stanford Center on Longevity expects. But a society full of centenarians poses a profound challenge for the world’s advanced economies and many of its companies: How do you adapt to an older world and pay for the inevitable pension time bomb ticking in the background as this super-ager cohort approaches retirement age? As the Stanford center puts it: “The 100-year life is here. We’re not ready.” The real-world effect of the worries about the long-life paradox were on full display this week: In France, nationwide strikes and protests brought the country to a standstill at the government’s deeply unpopular attempt to reform pension rules; in China, authorities reported that the population was falling for the first time in six decades; and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, business leaders and policymakers grappled with the consequences of this demographic conundrum. The ticking time bomb In France (life expectancy: 82), workers and students took to the streets to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s push to overhaul the pension system and raise the minimum retirement age to 64 from 62 by 2030, an attempt to tame the country’s ballooning social welfare costs. (In the United States, where the life expectancy is 77, the typical retirement age is 67, but workers as young as 62 can begin collecting Social Security benefits.) France spends just over 14 percent of its GDP on pensions, one of the highest rates among the group of rich countries that comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “We need to work more,” Macron said in a New Year’s address, to “pass on to our children a fair and durable social model, because it will be credible and financed in the long term.” The situation is more grim in China (life expectancy: 78), which is confronting a shrinking population. One reason: It costs more to raise a child in parts of China than it does in the United States, a reality that’s pushing families and professional women to choose not to have children (despite a number of government inducements to get them to do so). The not-too-distant impact: a shortage of workers could imperil economic growth and torpedo Beijing’s ability to raise sufficient funding through taxation of the younger, working population to support the biggest population of pensioners on the planet. and At the World Economic Forum, organizers tried their best to change the gloomy Malthusian narrative about aging. Talk of time bombs or a “silver tsunami” were out, replaced by high-level discussions on what the forum calls the “longevity economy.” A central theme: If we’re expected to live longer, we’re going to have to adjust some life goals and work longer, too.

Probably, because as yourself stated, he wasn't looking at the entire problem in a holistic way (which is to say, economics + sociology/psychology). Talking about anything number driven (economics, data modeling, forecasting) without adding in the human judgment impacts is a worthless exercise in my opinion. Your article does a good job of going into the drivers of why people still work their fingers to the bone, the various advances in technology, products and qualities, as well as the innate brokenness of human beings that amplifies greed and selfishness and self-satisfaction. IMO.

Probably more to do with 200,000 really talented, impressive resume'd folks are on the street right now who are hungry and desperate and the competition is as fierce as it has been in a long time. I do wonder if the inflated salaries, perks and equity days are over for a long while or if this is just a blip. I can't imagine being able to get to an offer stage and being able to materially negotiate as a lot of people will take offers as is to get insurance, pay bills, etc.

And since this might be a catchall thread for Google, there is a discussion to be had that is more existential to Google's existence than a small layoff. The DOJ trying to dismantle them and unwind some of the M&A that made them a monopoly. From the DOJ's suing them and their complaint: Competition in the ad tech space is broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable. One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising. Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies. Google’s plan has been simple but effective: (1) neutralize or eliminate ad tech competitors, actual or potential, through a series of acquisitions; and (2) wield its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products while disrupting their ability to use competing products effectively. Whenever Google’s customers and competitors responded with innovation that threatened Google’s stranglehold over any one of these ad tech tools, Google’s anticompetitive response has been swift and effective. Each time a threat has emerged, Google has used its market power in one or more of these ad tech tools to quash the threat. The result: Google’s plan for durable, industry-wide dominance has succeeded… By deploying opaque rules that benefit itself and harm rivals, Google has wielded its power across the ad tech industry to dictate how digital advertising is sold, and the very terms on which its rivals can compete. Google abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches. Google uses its dominion over digital advertising technology to funnel more transactions to its own ad tech products where it extracts inflated fees to line its own pockets at the expense of the advertisers and publishers it purportedly serves.

Tried to edit to add a link for the Okta interview I referenced, as an aside: https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/28/starting-up-in-a-downturn-how-okta-built-its-enterprise-company/

100% agree with the bold and I think it's been proven time and time again that recessions/bear-markets birth a lot of the unicorns and eventual winners in their categories years later. The founder of Okta's interview years ago has stuck with me in that way where he credited to being started in 2008-2009 recession as the only reason they were successful. I'll have to find it and post it for entertainment sake if anyone is into getting their jollies by reading about this kind of stuff like I am. That said, I think there is a lot of shareholder value to be had at some of these big techs and activist investors are right to buy a material % of the business and advocate for change (and thus enriching themselves when the price goes up). Salesforce has something like 4 activist investors right now. Disney is fending off one, and will probably end up winning that one. GE just divested, Honeywell divested before due to activism and has been better for it. The list goes on. An interesting one to watch right now is Gutuam Adani getting pestered by the same activist investors who blew the whistle on Nikola (EVs) who got their CEO in criminal trouble.

I assume you read the article you posted, but this seems pretty spot-on, even if it's 15 years old (truth is timeless, after all), which implies that working a 15 hour week or semi-retirement hours is probably not fulfilling to human beings: