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by Money Mark is 22 years old now. It aged well.

Bildzeitungsproblem

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Das Problem mit der Bild Zeitung kann man ganz einfach lösen: Wenn 50 Restaurants in Hamburg Aufkleber in ihre Tür hängen. Neben der Info ob man denn nun mit Kreditkarte zahlen kann, oder nicht kann ja ein kurzer prägnanter Hinweis indizieren daß “Bildredakteure hier nicht essen dürfen”. Das triggered sie dann gleich, so dass sie, Streisandt effect be damned, sich gleich im Netz und im eigenen Blatt jammernd darüber auslassen werden dass sie das nicht verdient hätten.

Und irgendwann sind dann nur noch Leute dort die noch schlechter schreiben als ich.

middle ground

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There is no middle ground with humans. Masks were so sparse, nobody could get them. Then they started up littering the storm drains. It seems there never was a moment when we just enough of them.

2020

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Wikipedia has a random page function. Which is great. Usually a good way to escape the filter bubble – or news in general.

This robot karaoke however brought be right back where my mind was before.

I don’t get baseball. And the Japanese affection is equally strange. Having a Spot & Pepper dance routine in front of empty seats is as bizarre as the attached flat screens, flags and caps.

Interesting is also the complete absence of Japanese characters on all signs and logos.

This is not how it works

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The attorney general is the head of the jurisdiction. The jurisdiction is the part of the government that making decisions based on the law. Laws are being made by the legislative. In the US divided in Senate and House of Representative. Finally there is the executive. Like the President or the FBI. All being bound by laws. This is how it was set up in every decent democracy. The US was one of the first ones in modern times.

A person got shot by the executive. There was no court case. This is not how ‘law and order’ works. If the executive gets praised for this kind of direct action by the head of the jurisdiction then what the founding fathers had in mind is no longer the guiding principle of what is going on.

This is fucking bad. And indicates that violent mobs are very much active. If the executive is not abiding the process defined in the constitution then it is not different from a violent mob. Uniform or not.

“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.