Like commercial fusion power, Tesla’s robotaxis are always just around the corner but never quite here. In the case of Tesla, it doesn’t really matter because the marketing is the product. “There’s an old adage in the auto industry that if you want to move a product you have to “show the car.” Tesla is […]
I see where Russia is turning to cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions. Seems like there’s a new cryptocurrency every day. Scam? Ponzi scheme? Part of your retirement portfolio? To answer this question for myself, I have to compare crypto to its alternatives. I’ll focus on Bitcoin because it’s been around awhile and seems to have a […]
Climate change is already doing a lot of harm. One of the harms is the drying of land masses. The people who live on these land masses depend on fresh water not only to drink but to grow crops for food. As surface water disappears, humanity is dipping into the corpus of its geological endowment, […]
Looking back, I realize that I came of age near the end of a golden age for universities. As an undergrad at UT-Knoxville, tuition* was ca. $160/quarter for a full load. As a grad student, I got 36 months of stipend from an NIH training grant, and my mentor’s grant paid my stipend for the […]
You don’t have to be looking to buy or sell a home to know there’s a nationwide problem with the housing market. Of course, some locations are stressed more than others. And the stress spills over into the rental market. I’m certainly no expert. We lived in our first house for 35 years. That was […]
When I started my faculty position at the age of 32, the university had a defined benefit plan. They would contribute 6% of my salary to my retirement investment, pre-tax. I could contribute up to 60% from my salary pre-tax, but to get the university contribution, I had to contribute at least 4%. Such a […]
Jonathan Last has an excellent piece at The Bulwark on the clusterf*** that is the Bezos WaPo and what it says about the business model of journalism in America. “The internet revolution was about lowering to zero the marginal cost of distributing content. The AI revolution is about lowering to zero the marginal cost of […]
Recently, Trump said he was “thinking about” ending capital gains taxes on home sales. Who benefits? “The biggest beneficiaries of such a change will likely be longtime homeowners in the country’s more expensive housing markets. “Removing or increasing the capital gains limit — currently $250,000 for single homeowners or $500,000 for married couples — on […]
Trump was recently in the news promoting a switch from high fructose corn syrup to cane sugar in Coca-Cola, which he’s claiming credit for. Look, I’m not the world’s best biochemist, but this looked like marketing hype to me. Why is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) problematic but cane sugar—which is a disaccharide of glucose […]
Look, if they were serious about making America healthy, here is a short list of things Congress and the Administration can do: • restore and expand Medicaid benefits; • restore and expand SNAP; • eliminate the Medicare Advantage plans; • support and expand childhood vaccinations; • replace our current nightmare of private insurance with single-payer, […]