Friday, July 24, 2020

Friday Links

  • We seem to be paying even more today for a broad bucket of unprofitable hopefuls than we were willing to pay for the FANMAG archetypes before they survived and won their near-monopoly status. Paying >10x revenue for exciting growth stories is historically one of the worst long-term investment methodologies ever. Our research on similarly priced, similarly unprofitable new-issue stocks with similar growth prospects suggests that this is because of their dramatically high failure rate and disproportionate risk of extreme multiple compression. And this is true even excluding the dot-com bubble. Bankruptcy-level losses occur at such high rates that the group of stocks has an actuarial price return risk equivalent to investing exclusively in tomorrow’s levered defaulters. Even if you pick an eventual lottery ticket like the six FANMAGs, at 10x+ revenue you can still lose 80% of your money on a five-year horizon at those purchase multiples due to multiple compression despite the growth. We don’t know of any long-only strategies that have as much asymmetrical downside price return risk as putting all your money in 14x revenue stocks that aren’t producing profits. [Verdadcap]
  • You’re touching on the subject I’m most interested in at the moment. As much as I love Main Street towns our larger institutions dismantled their support structures decades ago. Covid and our national response is finishing off the mom and pops. But what’s the more resilient and sustainable alternative? A far flung subdivision with restrictive HOA off the side of a highway? A condo in a downtown tower? I think the best option (for me) at the moment is an older home on a larger lot that’s just on the edge of a historic walkable town. With a big enough garden there’s a degree of self provisioning. Rainwater capture from the roof, a few solar panels, and a wood stove are good fallbacks to the usual supplies. This isn’t about “self-sufficiency” as much as stop gaps in a crisis. But none of this should be bought with debt. So it’s tricky... [Granola Shotgun]
  • Perhaps God never designed human society to operate at our present level of development. Perhaps he built into humanity a low fertility mechanism to cap human development. Or, perhaps he is simply suppressing our fertility in order to drag us back down to a reasonable position before we innovate obscene post-human technologies. I see precedent for this interpretation in the Tower of Babel story. Sometimes, civilizations need to be reset in order to keep humanity operating in a spiritually productive way. One way of looking at history is that God engineered white civilization to rise in such a way that it would spread Christianity across the world. However, we have now gone too far, and God is suppressing us by flooding the planet with low IQ populations that cannot sustain our advanced societies. [CoC Millenial]
  • In 1962 my father bought his first new car, a six-cylinder Ford Galaxie, for about 2600. It was the bottom­-of-the-line full-sized Ford, with industrial upholstery and no power assists. It didn't even have carpeting. Cheap as it was, my father's Galaxie was a serviceable unit: reasonably economical, reliable, and able to carry our family and all of our detritus on long trips. Not once, however, did we forget we were traveling in a bare­bones transportation appliance. [Car and Driver]
  • In particular, a senior campaign official said a Biden administration would take aim at so-called like-kind exchanges, which allow investors to defer paying taxes on the sale of real estate if the capital gains are reinvested in another property. The official also said they would prevent investors from using real-estate losses to lower their income tax bills. [Bloomberg]
  • Have you followed Peter Turchin’s work on Cliodynamics? His theory is that periods of increased equality and abundant opportunities (say 1950-1960’s) lead to a widening of the elite pool (as more people get the chance to study at college, or new positions in businesses etc). The power-holders can get along in a cooperative consensus-way. However the number of power-holding positions stays roughly the same as the number of contenders increase more than the number of power-holding positions that in turn stops to increase (or increase slower than the number of contenders). For example, the US population has almost doubled since 1960 but there are still only 100 senators, 435 rep., one president and so on at the federal level of politics. Not only in politics but in other areas as well (university faculties, medicine, businesses) competition for power-holding prestigious positions increase as the supply pool increase more than the number of power-holding positions. [CBS]
  • I think this is a good metaphor for the quagmire in which white Americans have found ourselves mired in 2020. In fact, I think it’s an apt description of the endless struggle against the perpetual state of revolution that is liberalism and universal suffrage democracy. I think it also conveys a convincing argument for why dissidents must support Donald Trump for reelection, despite his shortcomings and failure to fulfill campaign promises. I do not think a Joe Biden presidency would be the relentlessly oppressive, tyrannical Marxist surveillance state that we imagine. I think a Joe Biden presidency would arguably mark a return to a less hysterical state of madness (while undoubtedly no less insane, a little less frenzied). Our enemies believe themselves powerless victims. It is boogeymen such as Trump drives them to lunacy. In this way, a Biden Administration would be a form of pressure relief, like the relaxed state of not resisting the Chinese handcuffs. [Counter Currents]
  • "Current illegal border crossings are running about 100,000 per month." For perspective, there are only ~70,000 Lakota people in the US. mass Latinx migration is Mestizo/Oto-Manguean/Mayan colonialism and anti-Siouan genocide. [Hakan Rotmwrt]
  • One could make the argument that Trump has been letting his foes reveal themselves by not taking action, at least until very recently. But his poll numbers have declined since the Black Lives Matter protests began. It’s hard to know how much of this is due to the coronavirus spread or Trump’s handling (or non-handling) of the riots. Either way, the root cause is the same. For a supposed authoritarian nationalist, Trump is far too hands-off. Thus Trump has somehow failed to take advantage of a foreign pandemic, a scared population, and large-scale urban riots. Instead, he’s been too naïve, trusting to the wisdom of the stock market and the fair-mindedness of journalists. [VDARE]
  • The Anti-Poaching reward had jumped to half a quarter’s salary recently for bugmen 3rd class (the median population). This was a necessary thing for the enforcers of the ESA just to motivate those living insects to keep their bugeyes open. Selective breeding encouraged by high-soy replacement and social media engineering had reduced the median population to the spatial and situational awareness of something between a sea cucumber and a strand of kelp. If anything I could count on their ARG headsets to keep them distracted as they walked the streets; their attention was taken by signs and billboards that deposited ₩ in their account every time it registered that they tracked the entirety of the advertisement. [Middle Earth Mag]
  • Very typical of Vaclav Smil, we have Enriching the Earth, about the Haber-Bosch invention of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which was once the "holy grail of synthetic inorganic chemistry." He calls it the most important invention ever because the fixation of nonreactive, atmospheric, molecular nitrogen into usable form is alone what has allowed the world to swell to seven billion people. Leibig's law of the minimum says that plant growth is limited by whatever substance is present in the soil in the least adequate amount. Many times, this is nitrogen, which is why most of the world's civilizations independently discovered intercropping of legumes in order to add nitrogen to soil, as early as 12,000 years ago. Liebeg described agriculture's principle objective as "the production of digestible nitrogen," and as a 19th century chemist noted, "every vital phenomenon is due to some change in a nitrogen compound and indeed in the nitrogen atom of that compound". [CBS]
  • So, you know, they're bolstering the stock market. Okay, there's a floor to the stock market. Everybody knows it's not going below a certain place. That's okay. Let's have a floor for America's working families. [Pelosi]
  • One reason I have had to hide out in cash this cycle is that when people are too optimistic (delusional), no one can make money investing. Either the business operators are overfunded and compete all the profits away (energy, startup sector, "disruptors," Netflix, Amazon) or investors are too optimistic and pay prices for share interests that almost guarantee losses. The willingness to pay high multiples for hypothetical future earnings is an extreme example of double counting. (The Nifty 50 were expensive but they all made money.) [CBS]
  • Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate: "To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?" [Macaulay]
  • Did you know that letterpress printing with a deep impression was traditionally regarded as bad printing? It was only in the last couple decades during the letterpress revival that printing with an exaggerated impression became popular, most likely as a way to show off the uniquely tactile nature of letterpress compared to offset. [link]
  • It’s 2026, halfway through Harris’ first full term, and things seem to be going well. The riots and turmoil and violence of the Trump era seem a distant memory. You feel guilty that you’re more comfortable now than you were then, but you are. Besides, you have more important things to be worried about. A wife and a beautiful baby girl. Things have been strained financially but that bubbly laugh at the end of the day makes it all worth it. Sure tax rates have gone up a bit but you have a good job, you’re stable. You still retain your firearms from the pre 2020 era. You felt like a real rebel when you didn’t register them with the ATF during the required window. You haven’t shot in years and you’ll never take them out of the safe again, but they lend you comfort. “If I really need them, they’re there”. And thankfully you got yours before 24’, because they’re basically impossible to purchase now. Same with ammo, but it’s not like you’re doing any target shooting. You feel the few thousand rounds of range reloads are plenty. You don’t keep up with politics like you used to, Youre a family man after all, but you do still follow some right wing social media accounts. Or you did, until they all started disappearing. And this time they didn’t come back. No new accounts to take their place. You’d heard whispers of Gun confiscations a few years back, but people always talk right? They probably got caught up in some other illegal activity, maybe struck their girlfriend? Brandished? Door to door raids are just sensationalism. Besides, you don’t hear abt them now. You don’t hear about much of anything. It’s been about a year since Trump was convicted on several corruption and treason charges. Last you heard he was being moved to a military prison somewhere out of the country, for his safety. You realize you haven’t even seen a photograph of him since. The media doesnt even mention his name anymore. They did at first, in showing all the “evil” we overcame as a nation. Now the framing is different. A “return to form” for America. You know it was never like this..right? [Returned Redux]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

White flight everywhere. We are running out of places in America to run to. Most white people in America cannot return to the place that they were born and raised because “It has changed”, though if they were to say how it has changed, that would be a thought crime. The cost of housing soars as we run out of places to flee to.
https://blog.jim.com/politics/state-of-the-left-singularity/

Anonymous said...

Check out this NY Post article yesterday, "Joe Biden’s disastrous plans for America’s suburbs":

Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/21/joe-bidens-disastrous-plans-for-americas-suburbs/

It relates to some predictions that I have for the 2020s:

* The next admin will fill nice suburbs with blacks, who will beat up their residents, trash their schools, and ruin the public spaces. They will do this for many reasons: "the solution to pollution is dilution," the sheer enjoyment of rubbing white liberal hypocrites' faces in it, and to spread the financial burden of blacks from very stressed places to places that are awash in wealth and have been writing big checks about how they love diversity.

* Thanks to this, "de-policing," and corona, rich libs will flee cities and targeted suburbs to the last remaining whitopia states - the mountain west and the pacific northwest. The libs will ruin these places just like everyplace else. Picture drag queen story hour in CDA, Idaho this decade. Insane bolsheviks already have a stronghold in Moscow.

* Remember that the Mississippi river / Great Plains red states have been filling up with Mexican farmworkers. The grain crops in the Kwa are grown by fat Cruz cucks who ride herd over totally illegal slave laborers.

* By the end of the decade, the electoral college map will be dark blue or bluish purple everywhere. Notice that Kanye is holed up with some thugs in Cody, Wyoming right now. Liz Cheney won her statewide, at-large seat in Congress in 2018 by only 68,000 votes. Libs can flip Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana by moving to quaint small towns within a short drive of some of America's best national parks.

* The market bubble will crash during this decade. ZOG will have to pick and choose what it spends money on when the bond bubble gives out. Boomer finances will be wrecked: their stock and bond investments crushed and their pensions and social security cut.

As a result of the trends above, there will be no whitopias to go to and people will be too underwater financially to move anyway.

The safety valve for whites who are smart enough to organize politically has consisted of two things, money, which buys them: safe places to live. This safety valve is going to be cut off for the first time since the country became majority nonwhite.

You can't buy your way out of being a kulak, but only when the safety valve is gone will whites who are smart enough to be effective at organizing realize this.

League of Women Voters said...

The Trumps’ marriage was soon so troubled that sources close to them say Maples often stayed in Florida when Trump flew up to New York to spend the week. The staff reported seeing Trump on his plane with models. It was clear theirs was not a marriage for the ages.

In mid-April 1996, while Marla was still at Mar-a-Lago, the National Enquirer’s Wayne Grover called Trump in his New York office. “Look,” Grover said, “we’ve got this story.” He knew what Trump’s reaction would be, but he had to forge ahead. “Marla was caught by the cops under this lifeguard stand on the beach near Delray in the middle of the night having sex with your bodyguard.”

Trump was disbelieving. The cops might have caught him on the beach a few miles south of Mar-a-Lago having sex, but not his wife. And not with his employee. “No, no, that’s not the way it was,” Trump said, as if he had been on the beach that early morning. “Goddamn it, I’m going to sue you guys for fucking lying about this. I’ll have your ass ten times over.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/trump-marla-and-the-epic-battle-for-mar-a-lago

CP said...

The Aspen Country Day School in in Aspen, Colo., Thursday, July 23, 2020. The private school has seen enrollment inquiries double as more second-home owners settle in the Roaring Fork Valley.

https://coloradosun.com/2020/07/27/urban-exodus-colorado-resort-towns-second-home-buyers-school-enrollment/