Monthly Archives: March 2024

03/29/24

Electric Vehicles — The Market Is NEVER Wrong

Comes now the Biden admin with its lofty Green New Deal that mandated wholesale conversion from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles. To be clear, I am not opposed to electric vehicles.

[For a second, let’s suspend our skepticism as to from whence all that power will come, how it will be distributed by our fragile grid, where the chargers are, how long it takes to charge, and how EV batteries perform in extreme heat and cold. Play along.]

Carmakers — driven by generous government subsidies for their buyers — leapt aboard the train smiling and optimistic. It was a mass hallucination, a bloody love fest.

And then the rains came — customers did not buy the carmakers EVs, inventories grew to troubling levels, and they all re-thought their lofty goals, pushing their mandates to go “all electric” out further and further in time.

The market — as it always does — graded the offerings and said, “Nope.” Continue reading →

03/27/24

CEO Shoptalk: Perception, Perspective, Persuasion

One of the mean tricks of Father Time is he arms us with useful skills late in life that we needed when we were in our twenties and then laughs as we try to share that experience and wisdom with others.

Pro tip: given the choice of discovering wisdom at full tuition or renting it — RENT IT.

Today we discuss the linkage amongst perception, perspective, and persuasion — a lesson I wish I had had when I was a 22-year old platoon leader some 51 years ago or a deflowered entrepreneur a decade later. I, unfortunately, paid full tuition. Continue reading →

03/15/24

Women Athletes Finally Sue the NCAA Over Transgender Athletes

It has taken far too long for female athletes to hold the NCAA accountable for its absurd policies as to transgender men competing in women’s sports as “women.” [That’s sort of an awkward sentence, but I felt like I had to say it that way to be clear.]

This is a class action suit — meaning it is on behalf of all women college athletes — and is centered on Lia Thomas, a mediocre 6’1″ male swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania who transitioned to “womanhood” and then became a champion “female” athlete.

Thomas emerged as a NCAA Women’s Division I Champ in 2022 winning the 500-yard freestyle and named as an All-American in three events (meaning Thomas posted one of the 16 fastest times in those events). Continue reading →

03/11/24

College Sports Are On The Road To Ruin

I have always hated the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) as being a heartless bully and arrogant, arbitrary oppressor of athletic talent that favors the blue blood institutions in every sport. They are also wildly expensive, rake in a ton of money, and have built a financially extorted dynasty that is second only to the British royal family.

The NCAA, however, is not what will exclusively kill college athletics.

There are four things:

 1. The NCAA and its feudal fiefdom;

 2. NIL — name, image, likeness — the ability for a college athlete to be compensated by lending their name, image, likeness to third parties typically in an endorsement marketing capacity;

 3. Unions — there have been a number of unsuccessful and, now, successful attempts to unionize college athletics, typically an entire team, such as the Dartmouth men’s basketball team. Here is that story:

Dartmouth Men’s Basketball Team Votes to Unionize

 4. The transfer portal Continue reading →

03/1/24

AI’s Dirty Little Secret

I believe artificial intelligence’s implementation is going to be huuuuuuuuuuuge, but it has a dirty little secret: it crawls the web with impunity and appropriates trillions of nuggets of information, some of which is protected by copyright, and a great percentage of which the owners of the information do not want to freely surrender without compensation.

The creepy crawlers do not ask permission; they just crawl while you are sleeping.

OpenAI ChatGPT crawler closing in on blogger content in Amarillo, Texas this morning.

Continue reading →