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“The greatest economy ever”

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The stupid man in charge keeps repeated that he – singlehandedly – created the greatest bestest Economy the world has ever seen. Great economy should reflect in employment statistics. At least that is what the mantra has been: Great economy. Everybody works. Everybody happy.

Looking at the employment statistics of this century, as officially reported, one can not really see when that orange man got elected.

Stock market would be a different view. Yes. But jobs he created as well or bad as the man before him. If those guys have an influence on this at all.

If the non GOP political forces would have any sense, then they would communicate this clearly. Instead they let themselves get dragged into a discussion about an old lady and her face mask use while she got her hair done.

TSLA in September 2020

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OK. This is funny. The market cap of Tesla, Elon Musks electrical car company, is 442 billion US dollars right now. Based on Q2 2020 they do sell 362,600 cars a year.

Dividing how much Tesla “is worth” (according to the people who buy ownership of it in form of stock) by the numbers of vehicles it puts on the road each year you end up with 1.2 million dollars.

So – somehow – each car that gets sold represents that Tesla will make 1.2 million dollars in the future. You own stock, so that the company will -at least- generate the amount you paid for it and give it to you. Teslas are not cheap. With 66,188 USD revenue per car made they rank second of all non specialized car makers. Right behind Mercedes Benz with 72,288 USD per car.

The made up indicator of market cap per car made for Mercedes is currently 22941.

So “market cap per annual car made” is 53 times higher for Tesla than it is for Daimler Benz.

Which would mean, that Teslas people are so smart, they could go home after the first week of the year, while Mercedes engineers would still need to work all year long to generate the same value.

Good old Ford Motor Company has a market cap of 4800 USD per annual car made right now. Tesla people supposedly generated the same value in one and a half days, while Ford people would have to toil a complete 365 of them.

If this makes sense to you, then please get in touch. There is this awesome bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan that I could sell you for a really good price.

Los Angeles Earthquake

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… is still an occasional topic of my dreams. Even months after I moved. Back in the day I checked the Internet to see if I slept through one and put it into my dream so that I didn’t need to wake up. Just as Freud wrote that one would do.

Strangely I never had fire nightmares. Even though an hour of wind from the wrong direction would have incinerated the house on one occasion. And a couple of times the smoke became annoying and I had packed my valuables in preparation of getting the fuck out of there …

looks like a trap to me

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Graph from a recent WSJ article. I think by volume of Assets under Management Robinhood is still negligible. Late 1944 with American, British and Russian tanks closing on its borders Nazigermany came up with the idea of the “Volkssturm”. Get men that were still left in the homeland, and that lacked bonespur excuses, and arm them. Old dudes, young kids. Throw them into the final battle. As if it would matter. It did not.

Luckily todays battles are less gory, less deadly. In the end of the bubble (it is one when news outlets keep repeating the word “bull market” a bit too often) you throw in the unwashed masses. Hook them up with an app that lets confetti rain on them when they unlocked accomplishments. And then suck out of their 401k s what you can get.

Calling it Robinhood shows chutzpah. You know, since, well taking from the rich giving to the poor.

Or to illustrate it with a technical drawing:

Racism Is Not Getting Worse, It’s Getting Filmed

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Will Smith said in 2016. I believe it is the case. Being white I can not and not having been to the US this year I can not judge what recent developments are like. Living in DTLA, Santa Monica, Venice, Hollywood Hills and Malibu did probably not present me with a representative experience of the country, state or even city.

Still: If we are in a crisis right now, then we are in one that is amplified, if not entirely created, by our changed habits of media consumption.

Phones generate outrage. What triggers will get amplified. Things as simple as the body posture while consuming information might have an impact: Skimming over the vast surface of a 0.7 by 0.6 meter newspaper your arms are open, your chest breathes freely. On a phone your shoulder are slumped, your head is bent forward.

It has been suggested that body posture influences our cognitive system. I personally can see this. This is not the only reason we are in the state that we are in. 70 inch phones are not a solution either.

Suckerberg

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Five years ago Mark Z could be heard speaking Chinese. Officially it was since he wanted to connect to his inlaws. Since his spouse was a Bostonian which parents had arrived with the ‘boat people’ after the US loss of the Vietnam war people accepted this as an explaination.

There is just one problem: Mark had wrapped his head around Mandarin. While his wife spoke Cantonese to her parents. Who had been in the country since 40 years and probably picked up a bit of English along the way. Both Mandarin and Cantonese are being spoken in China. But they are very different.

The real reason why Mark tried to learn Mandarin was since he tried to get his product into China. More than in 6 people on this planet lives in China. Marks raw material is people. He harvests their attention and sells it. Him not trying to get into China is like Exxon ignoring Saudi Arabian oil.

He failed.

China understood what he had made is very simple to build. Actually it could be made much better: WeChat has many many more features (hooks into people) than Marks Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp combined.

This (and the title) might suggest that I dislike Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t. I would not care about the person. It is just that he has the wrong position and job. Sure he made this thing and nudged it towards success and market dominance. He is really good at that part. And showed great instincts for the matter at along the way. Matter at hand is the construction of a ‘social network’. It is NOT what people would benefit from. What would bring the world further along. His lip service to those aspects are ridiculous claims. In any language he speaks. He does not build communities. His job is it to keep people using his product. He is much like the Tobacco industry in the 50-70s in that respect. Getting more users and getting them hooked more is the goal. Who cares if people die of lung cancer later or countries are internally at each others since they feel so divided.

Our current troubles are entirely related in human nature. The bad aspects of it that get willingly or unwittingly amplified by Facebook.

WeChat users started wearing masks real quick. People getting their information by the censored and controlled Chinese outlets behaved much better for the greater good than Marks billions. Something he could have controlled and changed with great ease. It is not that his believe in democracy would be the reason for him not doing this. Nobody at Facebook understands or cares. Trump took 2016 away without them noticing that he do so on Facebook. Cambridge Analytica behaved like the fox in the henhouse. And nobody at Facebook noticed. I doubt somebody could pull of the same stunts in China.

Image by Bob Bicknell-Knight “Mark’s First”, 2019

read it

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Instead of holding it up into the cameras in the end of a PR walk Potus should maybe open the Bible and read it. If he would happen to look at Matthew 12:25 he would find:

Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.

The amount of division in the US in 2020 is far greater than that of 2016. Of course the reflex of any good MAGAite would be to claim that this is all the FakeNews and Dems fault. However, if they would be asked to pin point where Mr T has done or said anything that would be actively inclusive, that was an attempt to unite instead to divide they had a real hard time finding anything.

Sorry boys

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I don’t think she’ll be back anytime soon.

The Crown S2E7 “Matrimonium”

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Netflix. Oh Netflix. Imagine they would not exist, imagine steaming would have happened, and we would have gotten just the usual junk. We didn’t. In the end it is all HBOs fault. Would they not have elevated the medium of TV 20 years ago those bits streaming onto our screens might be mush and junk. It is not. Occasionally there are real gems. Like Episode7 in Season 2 of “The Crown”. It has amazing moments of camera work. Yes, it over does it with the BlowUp meets blue-lit-silhoute porn schema. But only by a couple of takes. The concept is still brilliant. And it is not the only moment / picture that is noteworthy. The 3 red pearl strings is a stroke of genius. Vanessa Kirby gets to wear stunning things, her make up is wonderful. Her performance holds it all together. IMDB does not list a DP, which is a shame. Music choice is awesome as well. It has been a while since I hear Henryk Górecki. Max Richters Vivaldi work I had never heard before. If you are in the same boat change it. It is great. Can’t wait to go through the full piece. “Dies Irea” by Zbigniew Preisner I had not heard either. It is well placed in the show, and I enjoyed listening to it.

pstoedit? Don’t

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I hope you have more luck with pstoedit than I just had. It is easy to waste an afternoon on what Wolfgang Glunz has cobbled together. I am sure it is entirely my fault why nothing worked. Neither under OS X, a generic AWS linux install or Windows 10. Error messages are kind a meaningless. One can dive down into indivual ratholes that they each offer. But nothing actually ended up working. All I wanted was to generate a couple of HPGL test files for the Deskjet 750c plus sitting here. It is OK hardware and the size is rather tempting. It works, just that I need to start generating HPGL files now. Which is not so easy in 2020. pstoedit can probably do this. It claims to, and I should not know why it would not. Just that I didn’t see it doing it. The fact that most of the links on the pstoedit.net did not work should have been a clear indication.

I am sure there are true gems in those 47969 lines of code that Mr Glunz wrote. Just if it can not be compiled, and if so gets upset about ghostscript issues it is not real helpful.

For me it was a complete waste of time.

But that was my fault. I could have spent a month making it all work. Or, even better, realized that pstoedit is a dead end. If you can make it work out of the box it will probably be awesome. If not: Move along. I have no idea where to. That far I have not gotten yet. There is only so much frustration I can take each day. pstoedit was a quick way to get to todays quota.