Coyote Blog

Long before he was President, I would tell everyone who listened that one of Trump's two main business skills was to be able to walk out of the (frequent) bankruptcies of his various ventures with far more money/value than one could rightly expect from his position in the capital structure.  I am not sure if this is chutzpuh or negotiating acumen or related to the other skill, one which almost by definition has to be a skill of every Manhattan developer -- he had connections.  You or I could bring as much money to the table as we would like and we could still never get a building built in Manhattan, at least not without a lot of payoffs.

Anyway, it seems that the egregious Adam Neumann of WeWork has the same skill set.

COVID has not been easy, but our service business has managed to continue to serve customers in the same ways we always have.  As I have written before, other companies in the service sector seem to have a different attitude and to be mailing it in, with the average loss of corporate IQ being about 20 points, and probably 40 points in the financial services sector.  I have been working every day until after midnight because I have to spend my 8-5 job tediously coaching service providers through their jobs so our company can get what it needs.  I have a 40+ person reminder list on my desk of service providers I have to call every day to remind them they owe me something.  I then start my real day in the evening, getting done the actual work I have to do for my company.

Here are two stories from this morning:

@FISGlobal, formerly Worldpay and a bunch of other names, is a large credit card processor with who we have about 7-8 accounts.  I just was set up on their online portal last month and tried to log in the first time.  I had the user name and password right (everyone should use Lastpass or something like it), but they insist on also asking me challenge questions (eg name of first pet) that I get wrong for the obvious reason that I have not set them yet.  You can set them the first time you log in, but either I did not or I have not logged in yet.  I tried every reset mechanism they have but none of these will proceed without... wait for it... answering the challenge questions.  So I tried to call.  No luck. Absolutely no phone number.  So I emailed.  Two days later I have had no response.  It is simply astounding that one of the top merchant processors in the world cannot manage to fix a 60-second log in problem on less than a 48 hour (and counting) turnaround cycle.

So I tried today to find a phone number.  I finally called the Worldpay general number and they said they could not help me.  I asked for the correct phone number, they said they could not give it to me.  I insisted.  I got grumpy.  They finally gave me an 800 number.  It turned out it was the number for office depot.  I almost have to respect the customer service agent for giving me a fake number like I was some creepy dude in a bar, but I still cannot log in.  As soon as things get better, I am switching providers.  The other merchant processors may have been just as bad in COVID, but at least their support is reachable (I have had good experience with stripe in my online accounts).

@USbank.  These guys are really headed to the hall of fame of service fail, even against the low bar of other banks.  Previously I wrote about my experience last month, where I needed their deposit slip template for the MICR data on the slip so I could get deposit slips made by a 3rd party printer.  I have accounts with 44 banks, including some really small ones, and 43 immediately produced this when asked.  For US Bank I went to every branch of theirs in town and NO ONE had ever heard of such a thing nor could they produce it.  I waited on hold for 4 hours with their customer service and they had no idea, but read up in some book and decided that I could have one for the cost of $500.  LOL.  Finally I just bought $19 of their own deposit slips that I was never going to use but I could send to the printer as a template.

So over the same period I have been trying to change our corporate name on an account to reflect our post-merger status (same FEIN, different name and structure).  I again go to the local branch folks, and to the 800 number, and they promise service, but nothing happens.  So I call back and they have never heard of the request and we start over.  In the middle of this I now need to open a second account (we have campgrounds in rural locations and in two places US Bank is the only reasonably close choice).  So I go to the branch (the world of banking makes you show up in person to open a corporate checking account, even if you have to fly across country to do it) to open the second account and all seems well, they ask me to come back.  So I come back the next day, and it is not ready.  We set an appointment, and I come back then.  Again it is not ready -- they tell me (wait for it) that my corporate name has changed with the state.  No shit, I answer.  I am pretty sure the dude I am talking to is one of the ones who I had asked for the name change to be done earlier and dropped the ball.  He says they are going to have to close all the accounts and start over.  When I seem impatient, he gets mad at me and tells me it is my fault for, get this, not telling them the corporate name has changed.  Aaarrggghh.  But bankers are one millimeter from government workers and you have to be obsequious and pretend that they are infallible and so I said yes sir thank you sir when can I come back yet again for the new accounts?

Postscript:  Please!  Will someone please come up with a way that I can convert cash and personal checks in rural locations into dollars in my Phoenix bank account?  I pay credit card processors about 3%, I would happily pay 3% to Walmart or someone else to do cash concentration for us.

My sister has a podcast that seems to be doing well on theater and its potential trans-formative effect on people and communities.  The Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote about it here.

My son has a blog on economics as applied to Sci Fi/Fantasy realms and board games.   Having survived a period of sometimes nearly debilitating OCD issues, he is also writing about what he learned, eg here.

My daughter continues to work through art school (which is like a million times more work than my engineering degree, shattering a lot of stereotypes I had).  She has updated her portfolio here.

Via USA Today:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced that he’s abandoning a plan to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The project's cost has ballooned to $77 billion.

“Let’s be real,” Newsom said in his first State of the State address on Tuesday. “The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.”

Hurray!  This is long overdue.  I was writing about how dumb an idea this was back in 2008.  I remember it because I was on Fox and Friends in the worst time slot ever to talk about it.  Not only was the interview at like 4AM Arizona time, but the segment immediately before I discussed economics and public policy *yawn* they had 8 cute maltese puppies frolicking on stage.

Everyone, including I would bet California officials but probably excepting elements of the fawning media, knew the cost estimates were a joke.  In 2010 when CA said $30-$40 billion I said it would take at least $75 billion and when CA belatedly adopted that number I doubled it to $150 billion and I think that is still low for what it would have cost.  This was all at a time when you could fly Burbank to Oakland on Southwest for $90.

But because it seems to be a rule that no CA politician can remain sane for more than 5 minutes straight, here are the next lines of the story:

Newsom, though, said he wants to finish construction already underway on a segment of the high-speed train through the Central Valley. The project would connect a 119-mile stretch from Merced to Bakersfield.

“I know that some critics are going to say, ‘Well, that’s a train to nowhere.’ But I think that’s wrong and I think that’s offensive,” Newsom said. “It’s about economic transformation. It’s about unlocking the enormous potential of the Valley.”

This is absolutely absurd.  If you started with a clean sheet and studied what the Central Valley really needed for "economic transformation," I am willing to bet a high-speed rail line from Merced to Bakersfield would not be in the top 100 items, maybe not the top 1000.  Probably first on the list for the Central Valley economy would be to stop applying minimum wage rates based on San Francisco to poorer rural areas of California.  If you wanted to limit yourself to infrastructure projects, the Central Valley would probably beg for water infrastructure projects, not a silly overpriced train.

Who says that professional sports have nothing to teach businesses?  Pro sports team owners have perfected the art of promising the world to local citizens to get taxpayers to pay for their billion dollar stadiums (which in the case of NFL teams are used approximately 30 hours a year).  The Miami Marlins in particular have perfected the art of building a good team, leveraging its success to get a new stadium deal, and then immediately dismantling the team and buying cheap replacement players.

In the business world many corporations have taken the Miami Marlins strategy.  Tesla took $3/4 of a billion dollars form NY taxpayers to build a factory in Western New York, only to employ a tiny fraction of the promised employees.  In fact, one academic studied all the relocation subsidies NY has made in the recent past and found none of the gifted companies fulfilled their employment promises.  In Mesa, AZ there is a factory that I call the graveyard of cronyism where not one but two sexy high-profile companies have gotten subsidies to move in (FirstSolar and Apple) only to both bail on their promises after banking the money.

So it should come as zero surprise that the Trump-facilitated crony Foxconn deal in Wisconsin is following the same path.

Foxconn Technology Group, a major supplier to Apple Inc., is backing down on plans to build a liquid-crystal display factory in Wisconsin, a major change to a deal that the state promised billions to secure.

Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou, said high costs in the U.S. would make it difficult for Foxconn to compete with rivals if it manufactured LCD displays in Wisconsin. In the future, around three-quarters of Foxconn’s Wisconsin jobs would be in research, development and design, he said.

They added this:

The company remains committed to its plan to create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, the company said in a statement.

Yeah, sure.  Anyone want to establish a prop bet on this one?  I will take the under.

At Atlas Oscura.

By the way, if you are tired of killing time (or your kids killing time) on airplanes watching movies, this is a solitaire pen and paper take on D&D.  Every time you open a door there are 36 possible rooms/corridors beyond that you resolve with a die rolls, then more rolls to determine encounters.  Requires a sheet of graph paper for the dungeon to get mapped and to track character skills/etc.

In my extended article the other day about Tesla I wrote of Elon Musk

Elon Musk is not the smartest guy in the world.  He is clearly a genius at marketing and brand building.  He has a creative mind -- I have said before he would have been fabulous at coming up with each issue's cover story for Popular Mechanics.  A mile-long freight blimp!  Trains that run in underground vacuum tubes!  A colony on Mars!  But he suffers, I think, from the same lack of self-awareness many people develop when they are expert or successful in one thing -- they assume they will automatically be equally as brilliant and successful in other things.  Musk creates fanciful ideas that are exciting and might work technically, but will never ever pencil out as profitable business (e.g. Boring company, Hyperloop).

Seriously, go back and look at old popular mechanics covers.  Here is one in my domain:

The magazine specialized in really cool ideas that 14-year-old geeky boys like me ate up in the 1970s.  But most of them share in common with Elon Musk's ideas that they will never be practical.  So it is not surprising that Popular Mechanics put out an absolute puff issue on Elon Musk, apparently aimed at helping the man Popular Mechanics loves rehabilitate his reputation after getting some bad press for making false promises and breaking securities laws.   The piece was such a hopeless PR piece masquerading as journalism that the Atlantic felt the need to call them out for it.

Other readers, particularly journalists, were flabbergasted, including several Popular Mechanics staffers and contributors who declined to speak on the record because they feared jeopardizing their jobs. “It’s not the job of a magazine to do some PR recovery efforts for somebody exhibiting unstable behavior just because you like that he makes cool cars and rockets,” one Popular Mechanics writer said. (Disclosure: I worked at Popular Mechanics as a web intern for about a month in 2012.) For many journalists, the essay collection was a love letter bursting with unbridled, unfiltered admiration for Musk, a public figure the magazine covers, regularly and objectively. The material reads as if it came straight from the public-relations managers whose jobs are to make their boss look good.

In response to criticism the Popular Mechanics editor said:

D’Agostino said he decided to do the project after reading a slew of negative press of Musk and his properties, and, as he put it in the final collection, “myopic and small-brained” criticism. He cited as examples news coverage of the misleading tweet about Tesla, the ensuing SEC debacle, Musk’s weed experience on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and the entrepreneur’s relationship with the singer Grimes....

Musk, he said, is a good representative for the Popular Mechanics ethos. “It’s always been a magazine about what’s possible and the people who sort of tinker with things and solve problems with the aim and goal of improving human life and existence, and using technology to make things better,” he said. “When you look at someone like Elon Musk, we kind of think of him as one of us. He’s doing something very Popular Mechanics—you don’t know if it’s going to work, but he tries these things and gives it his all.”

I am perfectly willing to acknowledge Musk's good points, as I did in my long essay linked above, but in my opinion Musk is leading a lot of very naive investors over a cliff.  Go read the Tesla fan boards and the $tsla tag at twitter and you will see a series of investors who have never bought a stock before talking about how they put all their savings into Tesla.  Ugh.  Magazines like Popular Mechanics have some responsibility not to shamelessly tout a high-risk stock to naive investors.

For those who don't want to read my whole essay, the biggest problem at Tesla is that Musk has promised a lot of things, all of which take capital which it is increasingly clear Tesla does not have.  The promised Semi, pickup truck, coupe, solar shingle, China expansion, EU sales of the model 3, expansion of the sales and service network, bringing body shops in house, implementation of full self-driving -- not to mention repaying a growing accounts payable backlog and over a billion dollars in debt coming due in the next 6 months -- all will require billions of capital and Tesla is hitting bottom.  Musk claims he will be able to fund this with organic cash production but this almost has to be an outright lie.  He needs to raise equity, but has not done so when his stock was at all-time highs.  Now that he is in trouble with the SEC, rumors swirl that he may not be able to raise new capital.  If he cannot, Tesla will be bankrupt in 6 months or less.  Tesla might survive if it can find a white knight (though many of the obvious candidates have turned him down) but this is a lot of risk for noob investors to take on and a lot of risk to simply IGNORE in a Popular Mechanics puff piece.

Postscript:

By the way, is the balance problem on Elon Musk coverage really a dirth of hagiography? This is the man the press explicitly calls the real life Tony Stark.  If anything, he needs that guy referred to in the final seconds of the movie Patton, the person who rides with the Roman general during his Triumph and whispers in his ear that all glory is fleeting.  I have no problem talking about the wonderful things Musk has helped push forward (and I do) but good God aren't you obligated to also include stuff like this, out of his own mouth?

1/ This is crazy. Either this is a total BS excuse (which his $tsla fanboys will likely swallow) or Musk is the worst CEO of a $50 billion company I have ever heard of. $tslaq @TeslaCharts https://t.co/oeTfN9UaNU

— Coyoteblog (@Coyoteblog) October 18, 2018

You can click on the tweet and see my whole response, but eschewing 3rd party dealers and having its own sales and service network has been a Musk strategic pillar for 8 years.  The production ramp for the Model 3 is years behind.  And the CEO just looked at the map and realized they did not have enough service locations even for their less-than-expected sales?  This may be a great idea man and visionary and man who can get great efforts started, but this is not the tweet of a great, or even a good, CEO.

Last week I was walking through one of our area's  large upscale resorts.  The resort was hosting what looked like a huge conference of a large franchising organization.  What struck me immediately in the lobby and everywhere on the grounds was how many people of color were there -- it might have been as many as half.  And the crowd was WAY more than half women.  I don't want to argue right now about buying a franchise as a path to entrepreneurship -- there are pros and cons.  But it really helped reinforce something I always suspected -- that entrepreneurship is a particularly important path of self-improvement for women and people of color.

These all sound like worth progressive goals, and in fact many progressive profess to support entrepreneurship.  Here is a screen shot from Beto O'Rourke's web site a loyal reader sent me:

Amazing.  We are going to promote entrepreneurship by showering the economy with regulations (1000 new bills a year in progressive CA) and making sure many of the returns from an entrepreneurs' money and effort go to other people.**  This is like saying we really want to promote the growth of the rabbit population and we are going to do it by putting out lots of rabbit traps and making sure all the carrots the rabbits are eating are given to others.

** By the way, perhaps the #1 great progressive misunderstanding is that without one single government intervention, the vast majority of the entrepreneur's efforts go to others.  Employees will earn far more in total than will the entrepreneur herself, and  consumers will be left with far more value from the products and services they buy than the entrepreneur ever got back in profit.  Steve Jobs created far more wealth and well-being for the rest of us than he did for himself.

Is it really worth it to ban straws? #StrawBan pic.twitter.com/TCbc6bEyER

— The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 10, 2018

It is useful to have an algorithm for spending your travel (hotel, air) loyalty points.  Years ago I generally saved them for big vacation trips, usually to Europe or Hawaii.  These were the most expensive trips I took and it felt good to bring their cost down.

Two things have killed this algorithm for me.  One is that most major airlines don't have squat for points availability on popular Trans-Atlantic and Hawaiian routes (British Airways, I am looking at you).  The second change was that I started to read some of the web sites focused on travel points, for example the Points Guy.

There is good information on these sites, but a lot of the detailed strategies are way to arcane and time-consuming to bother with (e.g. Take your American Express points and convert them into gift certificates denominated in Ecuadorian currency, and then apply these for double credit... etc).  But the one takeaway I have had is to think of your points like a currency with a constantly varying exchange rate to dollars, and find the opportunities to spend the points at the best exchange rates.  TPG  maintains a monthly estimate of the value of each type of reward point.  Expected value is between 1 and 2 cents a point for most.

My new algorithm is to use my points when I am getting at least 2 cents for them, and hopefully more.   Take hotel points for example.  From time to time I will find that there is some squeeze in hotel rooms in a city I want to visit and the price of most hotels have risen 50-100% for these days.  This is a great time to use your points, particularly if you are locked into the dates and can't go on a cheaper date.  The reason for this is while the price in $ goes up, the price in points does not.  There may be some hotel chains that limit availability, but Starwood for example does not.  Let me give an example.

In several weeks I am taking my wife for a nice weekend to see her friends in Manhattan.  We are locked into the dates.  But it turns out that there is some UN event and all the hotel rates have skyrocketed even higher than usual NYC hotel rates.  It was just going to be too expensive to stay in a really special hotel.  Until I thought of the St. Regis.  It is not my first choice, but it is in Starwood and with the Starwood Amex card I have a zillion points.  Turns out for a basic room the nightly rate had gone all the way to $1500 (welcome to NY).  But the points cost for the same room was the same as it ever was, 35,000.  I was effectively getting 4.3 cents each for my points.  One could argue that since this was not my first choice, I should compare it to that alternative, but even with a cheaper rate at that hotel this was still 2.6 cents of savings for each point.

For American Airlines, I try to do the same thing.  Most transcontinental flights have no points availability, or have availability at really bad exchange rates (The one exception I have found is Cathay Pacific, which takes American points and tends to have a lot of award seats).  I increasingly use my points domestically.  When rates shoot up for a particular flight, there still may not be availability but sometimes the opportunities are there.

I am not actually active in the residential home market, so I can (without losing any money) call market tops and bottoms from semi-random variables.  In 2005, I wrote here about a possible housing top when I overheard a dentist tell a doctor about all he money he was making flipping raw land  (I will apologize to dentists here, but when I studied investing at HBS 30 years ago I had a professor who would ask the class, for a bad investment, "who do we sell this to?"  Answer:  Doctors!   And if it is a really, really bad investment, who do we sell this to? Dentists!)

Anyway, I was out on my super-dorky but easy-on-the-knees and fun to ride elliptical scooter the other day and stopped to take a picture of a quiet intersection near my home:

I only got seven of the signs in my picture, but there were eight different open house notices for homes all within an easy walk of this location.  Reminded me of 2009.

Postscript:  By the way, I always feel bad about joking at the expense of doctors and dentists and their investments, so I will share one of my personal great moments in investment savvy.  In 1984 I graduated as a mechanical engineer that had a lot of background in programming and micro-computers (my specialty was control theory and something awkwardly called interfacing microprocessors with mechanical devices, which we just call "robotics" today).  I had lots of good job offers, and most were for about the same amount of money except one outlier that did not pay nearly as much but instead paid in all these crappy pieces of paper called options.  Hah!  I wasn't falling for that, and I turned them down and worked for real money.  That company I turned down was Microsoft and just the options they offered in the offer letter, I remember calculating once, would be worth more today than all my cumulative lifetime earnings to date.

This comes to us from that bastion of freedom called Canada, where half of Americans wanted to run when Trump got elected.

It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984**.

Canada’s Competition Bureau, an arm’s length agency funded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to the tune of almost $50 million annually, investigated three organizations accused of denying mainstream climate science for over a year, following a complaint from an environmental group.

The bureau discontinued its 14-month probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”, according to Josephine A.L. Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Competition, Deceptive Marketing Practices Directorate.

But it will re-open its investigation should it receive relevant new information from the public.

The complaint was filed by Ecojustice on behalf of six “prominent” Canadians, including former Ontario NDP leader and UN ambassador Stephen Lewis.

It accused three groups, Friends of Science, the International Climate Science Coalition, and the Heartland Institute of making false and misleading claims about climate change, including that the sun is the main driver of climate change, not carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

When it launched its complaint in December, 2015, Ecojustice told the National Observer it would press the Commissioner of Competition to refer the matter to the Attorney-General of Canada for “criminal charges against the denier groups”.

**I presume the author is referring to the general understanding of what 1984 was about, rather than Hillary Clinton's revisionist opinion that 1984 was a cautionary tale about the danger of not having enough respect for government authority figures.

Bizarre misreading: @HillaryClinton thinks the lesson of Orwell's 1984 is that you should trust experts, leaders and the press pic.twitter.com/7rPbrq11fV

— JamesHeartfield (@JamesHeartfield) September 12, 2017

The world's most amazing achievement ever? How about the 78% percent reduction in extreme world poverty from 1981 to 2015. pic.twitter.com/N66RbXqAAC

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) April 30, 2017

The problem with wind power is that electric utilities have to be prepared at any time for their power production to just stop on short notice.  So they must keep fossil fuel plants on hot standby, meaning they are basically burning fuel but not producing any power.  Storage technologies and the use of relatively fast-start plants like gas turbines mitigates this problem a bit but does not come close to eliminating it.  This is why wind power simply as a source contributing to the grid makes very little sense.  Here is Kent Hawkins of Master Resource going into a lot more depth:

How do electricity systems accommodate the nature of wind and solar? They do this by having redundant capacity almost equalling the renewable capacities as shown in Figures 5 and 6 for two jurisdictions that have heavily invested in wind and solar – Germany and Ontario, Canada.

Figure 5 – Duplicate capacity requirements for Germany in 2015.

Source: See note 4, sub point a.

 

Figure 6 – Duplicate capacity requirements for Ontario, Canada, in 2018

Source: Ontario Power Authority[5]

In both figures, the left-hand columns are peak demand requirements and include all the dispatchable capacity that is required to reliably meet demand and provide operating reserve. In the right-hand columns, if you look very carefully, you can see the capacity credit for wind by the slight reduction in “Peak Demand + Op Reserve.” In summary, when wind and solar are added, the other generation plants are not displaced, and, relative to requirements, wind and solar are virtually all duplicate capacity.

Wind might make more sense in niche applications where it is coupled into some kind of production process that can run intermittently and have its product stored.  I think T Boone Pickens suggested having wind produce hydrogen from water, for example, and then store the hydrogen as fuel.  This makes more sense because the total power output of a wind plant over a year can be predicted with far more certainty than the power output at any given minute of a day.  This is one reason why the #1 historic use of windpower outside of transportation has been to pump water -- because the point is to fill the tank once a week or drain the field over a month's time and not to make absolutely sure the field is draining at 10:52 am.  The intermittent power is stored in the form of water that has been moved from one place to another.

Before discussing the Disney Magic Band, I got to thinking about this from this article linked by Tyler Cowen:

The syringe slides in between the thumb and index finger. Then, with a click, a microchip is injected in the employee’s hand. Another “cyborg” is created.

What could pass for a dystopian vision of the workplace is almost routine at the Swedish startup hub Epicenter. The company offers to implant its workers and startup members with microchips the size of grains of rice that function as swipe cards: to open doors, operate printers, or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.

The injections have become so popular that workers at Epicenter hold parties for those willing to get implanted.

“The biggest benefit I think is convenience,” said Patrick Mesterton, co-founder and CEO of Epicenter. As a demonstration, he unlocks a door by merely waving near it. “It basically replaces a lot of things you have, other communication devices, whether it be credit cards or keys.”

If you are like me, your immediate reaction is "Yuk, I can't imagine doing this."  But my second reaction is that there is really a step change in convenience here that folks who have not tried it may be underestimating.

The reason I know this is from my experience with the Disney Magic Band, a waterproof bracelet about the size of a small watch.  Here is an example, which includes my awesome customized tiger striping I painted on the basic orange band:

At Disneyworld, this band acts as

• Your room key, activating the electronic locks on your room
• Your credit card and wallet, with the ability to pay for anything anywhere in the parks and affiliated stores and hotels with a touch to the reader at every register (most require a 4-digit PIN number to be entered as well)
• Your park entrance ticket
• Your restaurant reservation
• Your ride reservation (Fastpass)

One can easily navigate a multiday trip through Disneyworld without a wallet or keys and just this on your wrist.  It is pretty compelling.

I love these US Army intelligence maps from Western Europe on December 15 and then on December 16, 1944 (before and after the German invasion).  A useful lesson for folks who do not greet all intelligence reports with a lot of skepticism.

Guess where I am supposed to fly on Saturday?

Hurricanes #Madeline and #Lester churning westward across the Pacific, latest NHC / CPHC forecast tracks included pic.twitter.com/2ldwQ1F3Qg

— NWS OPC (@NWSOPC) August 29, 2016

Update: This will totally paint me as a geek, but does this remind anyone of the Romulan plasma torpedos in the Star Trek episode "Balance of Terror"?

I migrated my server and in the process lost a block of 10 dedicated IP addresses I had.  So I tried to sign up for the 10 addresses again, and got this:

Due to the global shortage of IPv4 addresses, we are now required to request justification for dedicated IP address requests. Each dedicated server comes with 4 dedicated IP addresses, in addition to the primary shared IP address. Additional IP addresses must be requested in blocks of 4 IPs ($16.00/month for each block of 4). Please be aware, at this time, the only acceptable justification for a dedicated IP address we can accept is for use with an SSL certificate. You will need to provide at a copy of the certificate(s) which will be installed, however, we do not need to install the certificate for you.

Obviously IPv6 is meant to relieve this but it is still a minority of Internet traffic.

This is something I have long suspected.  A short unexpected braking from one care propagates into a small traffic jam.   Reminds me of waves propagating in a flowing fluid.  Does traffic have a Reynolds number?

via Twisted Sifter

Courtesy of the House Committee on Natural Resources comes this map of Federal "footprint", land either owned by the Feds or under some sort of Federal designation that has substantial impacts on property use.

You can click the map to enlarge it or else just go to the map with layers here.   Click the details button in the upper left to see the legend.  Beware, the map is pretty slow to function for me.  You might find an alternative that works better here.  You won't find a lot of private land west of Denver.

For much of the 19th century, the US had a sensible land policy that promoted homesteading and outright private purchases of Federal land.  Then this policy stopped, and what we have now is most of the land west of Denver managed by special interests who will fight tooth and nail to keep the land out of private hands and in their own control.

I present, the shrinking American middle class.  2/3 of the losses were because they moved to "rich".

via Reason

I will add to this that even our poor are materially better off than the poor in European socialist / 3rd way countries. Here is the absolute well-being by income percentile of the US vs. Bernie Sander's beloved Denmark.

Bought me this bad boy at Costco.

I traced a world map on the pumpkin, and then thinned the pumpkin skin in the land masses without cutting all the way through.  Since there are no holes, you will need an electric light to illuminate it.