Hey Elon. 🖕🏼

The headline reads 

Musk Melts Down as Tesla Stock Price Plunges

Which is just fine with me. He is posting all manner of nonsense to try and promote the company. And reposting drivel from whackadoodles who have "an opinion" that matches his. 

Then he went off on some wild conspiracy that naturally named other people who are more liberal … including (you could have surely predicted this) George Soros. Because apparently, he is the evil billionaire while musk is a folk hero. 

Whatever. 

About the access to social security data.

 There is a 22 year old college dropout with some absurd “fraternity name” accessing social security information for reasons that are not in any way clear. 

And he has absolutely no authority to do so other than Elon musk directing him too. Last I checked Musk has no government role and no ability to authorize people to access personal information with no oversight. 

This is on you, Senator. You need to hold him  - and musk - accountable for their actions. 

At least by asking a simple question: what is your plan? What are you doing with that data? 

Come on. This is a matter of responsibility with data that can be badly misused.  

And by the way, Musk making bold comments about there being 150 year olds getting social security is just dumb. Just a small amount of research should tell you that the code for the system is written in cobol; 150 years is a default value. 

So clearly musk has no clue what he’s talking about and is simply trying to confuse you for his own purpose - whatever that may be. 

Do your job. Hold him to account for this. 

Crypto con

First, let me say that I find crypto to be, well, confusing.  Sure, its decentralized money.  But when you talk to someone who supposedly knows about it, you get a confusing bit of jargon, coupled with a sense of it being important and you wouldn't want to miss out on it!

Then along comes T-rump and he says he wants to create a "strategic crypto reserve" which is weird for two reasons: its a decentralized non-government type of thing, so a government having invested in it makes little sense.  

But the second reason is maybe a little more disturbing.  He picked several types of crypto currencies to be included.  Some are the bigger ones that you might expect.  But a few are smaller and don't make any sense.  Until you take a look behind the curtain and see that there are people involved with these currencies, who are allied with him or are donors to him.  So he's including them as a favor in a way.

And here's the reality of creating a strategic reserve: the government will be transferring OUR tax dollars to the owners of these crypto companies.  People who support him will be taking our money, because T-rump said so.  I got issues with that.

And then there's this rare "moment of honesty" from someone high up in one of crypto companies.  In an interview, he was calling crypto a form of gambling.  An investor is hoping for something good to happen.  

Meanwhile, there are several crypto companies that advertise themselves in a way that is adjacent to gambling - though they are careful never to call themselves that for fear of running afoul of the law.  But make no mistake they are offering the same allure as putting money on a sporting event.  Its wild.

And then there are the sports leagues that see an opportunity to get into the crypto game.  They see an opportunity to "engage with fans" and have them be able to purchase something affiliated with the team AND to be able to use that currency to make in-game wagers.  

So.... maybe I do actually understand crypto.  Its a way for some unknown entity, or perhaps one that is known - like your favorite team - to put their hand in your pocket and take some of your money.  Under the guise of "you wouldn't want to miss out!"

A terrific show

LAist has another great podcast series about the space race. This one is called "the other moonshot" and it's about the black engineers who helped get us into space - all the while fighting rascim. 

https://pca.st/podcast/cb671760-4298-013b-f171-0acc26574db2

surely a recession is looming... could a depression be on the horizon too?

As we look at the economy, and the harm that is being done to it - without any thought whatsoever - it becomes clear that we will have a significant economic downturn coming in the near term.

Delon Trusk are dismantling government and slashing payroll without really thinking about the broader economic impacts.  They're thinking like business people.  If you lay off employees at a company, you impact those people, and the local economy in a targeted area.  And the company can right itself and focus on whatever business, while other companies likely will compete for the business that's been dropped.

But if you lay off significant numbers of government employees, that has a broader impact to the country as employees provide services everywhere and there isn't anyone who can step in to a lot of this.  And there is nothing that can fix it.  Unemployment goes up, and businesses that support the people employed will also wind up having an impact.

Consider that if you cut a significant number of people who live in DC then there is an inventory of apartments, there are fewer people getting their suits pressed, restaurants won't be frequented for lunch, and so on.  The downstream impact could be catastrophic.

In fact DC has already put together a multi year forecasted budget and they see that they'll have greater than a $300 million budget shortfall each year - meaning that they won't be able to fund schools, libraries, or even pick up garbage.

Its bad.

Then we look at the ripple effects to housing, cost of living, and consumer confidence.  The stock market is a reflection of that to a degree and traders have no idea which way things will go and so the market goes down.  

Which will likely lead to a recession sometime later this year.

Recession
a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.

And as unemployment starts to spike, while companies are unsure what to do, and really do you trust the knuckleheads in key financial positions to account for inflation?  We may be headed to a depression, as early as 2028 by definition.

Depression
A depression is a severe and prolonged downturn in economic activity. A depression may be defined as an extreme recession that lasts three or more years or that leads to a decline in real gross domestic product (GDP) of at least 10% in a given year. Depressions are far less common than milder recessions. Both tend to be accompanied by relatively high unemployment and relatively low inflation.

 

A 5 year passage of time

When the pandemic started closing everything, my wife and I took a trip down to the Fairchild Botanic Gardens in Miami. 

Being an outdoor garden, they planned to stay open as long as they could. But the county had other plans and they wound up closing a few days after we went. 

They didn't re-open for several months so I only had a few pictures from that visit (as well as some others over the years). They helped my mental state during the closures and whatnot. 

I took the picture on the top in March 15, 2020. 

I went again today, a week before the anniversary of that date and recreated the picture in front of the same rainbow eucalyptus they have growing there. 

The world is very different. And yet here I am in front of a tree that doesn't care what we're  doing. It just grows. 

Leon Lederman

The name might not be a well-known household name, but Leon Lederman won a Nobel prize in Physics back in 1988, for his work with neutrinos.  Its a widely recognized piece of work that he undertook with other physicists to revolutionize how we think about subatomic particles.  And yes, you may also realize he is the discoverer of the Higgs boson particle.

But here's the thing.  In 2012, he started suffering from dementia.  The general care for it was covered under Medicare, which is good. But, as he needed more care, like an aide, or to stay at a memory care facility, Medicare didn't cover that.  

So in 2015,  his wife sold his Nobel prize for just a little over 3/4 of a million dollars.  Because they needed the money to continue to pay for his care.

A Nobel physicist who revolutionized our understanding of the universe had Medicare, and *still* had to sell his medal to cover expenses.  

He died in 2018, and the NY Times did an obituary for him: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/science/leon-lederman-died-particle-accelerators.html

There is something so wrong with this situation, with what we have for healthcare in a first world nation, one of the wealthiest EVER.  We can't even care for our people, even the ones that contribute to our betterment.  

What is wrong with us?!