Category: More Money Than Brains

We Don’t Need No Flaming Racin’ Cars

Alternative Subsidy More Money Than Brains Roadkill 11 Comments

It’s a Hot Wheels track!

The second day of Formula E testing has been canceled after a fire brought the first day of running at Valencia’s Circuit Ricardo Tormo to an early halt.

After Robert Shwartzman’s DS Penske stopped on track in the morning session, the car’s battery was removed by supplier Williams Advanced Engineering. It subsequently caught fire, resulting in a paddock evacuation and one WAE staff member being taken to a local hospital as a precaution. […]

The fire is the first incident of its kind in Formula E’s 10-season history, but follows one at July’s World Rallycross event at Lydden Hill in the UK which destroyed Special ONE Racing’s cars and equipment, ruling it out for the remainder of the season.

h/t Allan

Nothingburger trials

Cronies Mischief Is Important More Money Than Brains Surveillance State 44 Comments

It’s not actually the case that bail violation charges against Tamara Lich were dropped, but rather that they were stayed, so that the prosecution could “focus” on the current trial. For a charge of mischief, it’s seems that Lich and Barber were charged based on the hope that enough evidence to convict them would magically appear afterward. So far, the fishing expedition seems to be reeling in very little.

The trial was originally scheduled to be finished on Oct. 13 but it has been stalled by delays related to the disclosure of evidence and legal arguments about the admissibility of testimony and social media posts.

The Crown is expected to call more witnesses before it completes its case. Justice Heather Perkins-McVey has said she expects the legal arguments in the case will be lengthy and complex.

The lawyers have struggled to set time to continue the trial because of conflicting schedules and scarce court time.

We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars

Alternative Subsidy More Money Than Brains 45 Comments

Via The Truth About Cars;

A Mercedes store operator said he has a more than six-month supply of EVs compared with about a 50-day supply of gasoline-powered vehicles.

“The EVs are coming whether or not you asked for them or earned them,” he said. “There is too much of a price premium — especially at the top end of the EQ lineup — and almost no [lease] support.”

The executive said the EVs lack the “lust factor” of Mercedes’ gasoline-powered flagship models, such as the S-Class sedan and AMG-GT coupe.

“Our cars need to be ‘want’ cars,” he said. “The S-Class has maintained good loyalty because it’s aspirational. An EQS is not something that most people aspire to own.”

The rest goes onto explain how they’re running out of stupid rich people.

Now Is The Time At SDA When We Play “How It’s Going”.

Alternative Subsidy More Money Than Brains Roadkill 22 Comments

How it started:

E-scooters are now available for rent in Saskatoon.

The City announced on Wednesday it has agreed to let Bird Canada and Neuron supply about 500 e-scooters for shared rentals. Personal e-scooters are still not allowed, according to a City of Saskatoon news release.

“We believe this shared e-scooter pilot will provide benefits to our community, and we look forward to seeing it in action,” Jay Magus, Director of Transportation, said in the release.

And how it’s going.

We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Buses

Alternative Subsidy More Money Than Brains 33 Comments

Where I come from, we call this “gettin’ an education”.

Emile Lauzzana, the environmental sustainability director of Michigan’s fourth-largest school district, recently told the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education that the district’s electric bus fleet has had “a lot of downtime and performance issues.” […]

“We’ve been learning a lot about this technology,” Lauzzana also said. “Electric buses are approximately five times more expensive than regular buses, and the electrical infrastructure, which was originally estimated to be only about $50,000, give or take, for those four buses ended up being more like $200,000.”

Lauzzana explained the district attempted to utilize “Vehicle to Grid” interconnection, which helps push energy back to the grid when buses are not being used, but that the “technology was not working.”

“I will say that I have a number of colleagues in different states who are facing similar challenges,” he added, noting the differences between electric cars versus buses. “For the school bus market, it’s been challenging for us.”

WTFTX?

It's Probably Nothing More Money Than Brains 20 Comments

On the collapse of Silicon Valley and Signature Banks…

I have watched with increasing alarm as seemingly every reporter on the planet gets the story completely and totally wrong about what happened, why it happened, and why it will have dramatic and far reaching ramifications in areas far beyond finance. And if you are wondering why you should listen to me instead of the prestigious “journalists” at publications like the New York Times and Wall St. Journal, allow me to gloat for a moment and point out that I was the first person to publish an article publicly predicting the collapse of Signature Bank back in December when the stock cost $140, the company was worth almost $10 billion, and every single professional “analyst” and “journalist” in the world thought it was a great business that was bound for dizzying heights.

One may wonder how your humble narrator came to make such a spot on prediction. All I can say is that it’s really not that hard. You google stuff, read some SEC filings, do some basic addition and subtraction and voila: you see that a bank like Signature is a straight up criminal enterprise. At that point it’s easy. You publish on your substack, send a few tweets, maybe make a few phone calls, and (mostly) wait around until BOOM! down goes the 3rd largest bank failure in American history.

Long piece, grab a coffee.

More: If we look at the banks that have failed so far, we see a few common threads emerging, with fraud and Ponzi-like thinking at the heart of them. The question now will be how much of this toxic stuff there is tucked away inside other banks. If it’s largely isolated to the shadier side of the finance industry, the backstopping by the globe’s central banks might be enough to contain it. We’ll see.

h/t Melinda Romanoff

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

More Money Than Brains War On Agriculture 22 Comments

Stephen Thompson (letter to the editor) in Ontario Farmer: Farmland bubble likely to burst

At this time of year farmers become giddy when talking about what people are paying to buy farmland, especially in recent years when prices have skyrocketed.

Agriculture’s talking heads try to normalize the situation by claiming things are fine, even as the excesses become ever-increasingly wretched. Particularly cringe-worthy is the claim by some lenders that they don’t have a problem because their farm borrowers have oodles of equity.

Unfortunately, this type of claim ignores the reality that this isn’t earned equity, but speculative equity based on land prices that aren’t tethered in any meaningful way to any earnings component for that land.

Astute investors pay heed to two long-standing investment ‘Bibles’ as well as one relatively recent book and even a movie. The first is the 1841 book by Scottish author Charles Mackay -‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ the second is the 1949 book – ‘The Intelligent Investor’ by legendary Wall Street investor Benjamin Graham; the third, published initially in 2000, is ‘Irrational Exuberance’ by US economist Robert Shiller and the movie is ‘The Big Short’ released in late 2015.

The common thread of all four references is the emphasis on the danger of investing in something that has either no earnings potential or an earnings profile completely estranged from the market price of that asset, as is presently the case with farmland.

Another common denominator is the significance of the fear of missing out, also a large part of today’s farmland price scenario.

That we are in the midst of a farmland speculative bubble is not open for debate or even discussion. In addition to having thrown any sort of price/earnings multiple restraint out the window, we farmers fundamentally believe “this time it’s different” (it never is) and we believe the talking heads when we should be paying no attention to them at all. The result, in too many cases, is that farmland is being bought as a ‘trophy’ simply because we can.

The worst part about being on the other side of the psychological mania inherent in any investment bubble, as was well demonstrated in the Big Short, is that you can be wrong for years and be widely ridiculed for being wrong, but bubbles always eventually burst or deflate rapidly when least expected.

Via Ian Cummings

Killing innovation

It's Probably Nothing More Money Than Brains 35 Comments

As the economy lurches deeper and deeper into a centrally planned model, is it any wonder that the speed and depth of innovation seems to be stagnating? Our friend Eugyppius crunches some numbers from a recent study and finds that the news is not good.

Via a statistical measure known as the “CD index” (for “consolidating” or “disruptive”), the authors can (very roughly) measure the foundational nature of any given paper, by looking at how often later citations of that paper also cite earlier work.

When the CD index of papers in different scientific fields is plotted over time, we see a pervasive collapse in innovative, foundational work across all fields, converging towards the same baseline.

A narrow research focus is above all a careerist tactic. Self-citation, a lack of currency with new publications, and the tendency to cite the same stuff over and over again, are all just symptoms of dimmer people publishing too much.

 

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