Month: March 2024

Waymo is getting ready for freeway driving in California:

California regulators on Friday granted Alphabet’s self-driving car division Waymo permission to expand its robotaxi service to include highways in several Bay Area cities and large swaths of Los Angeles, a massive expansion that comes amid concerns about the impact more driverless cars will have on city streets. The decision by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) allows the company to deploy its robotaxis on local roads and freeways at speeds up to 65 mph.

A few weeks ago Waymo began testing freeway driving in Phoenix without a safety driver. They didn't say when they might start in California, but they now have permission.

As always, forget about Cruise and Tesla and all the others. Waymo is the gold standard in autonomous driving, and they already have a fair amount of experience with trucks on highways. By this time next year I imagine Waymo will be all but 100% capable of driving anywhere there's a paved road.

You have questions. I have answers.

Question: What is DWAC?

Answer: DWAC is a SPAC.

Q: Thanks a ton.

A: I just had to get that out of my system. A SPAC is a Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle—a big pile of money that does nothing, but is nonetheless traded on the stock market. Eventually, a SPAC buys some private company and bingo, the private company is public.

Q: Swell. And DWAC?

A: DWAC stands for Digital World Acquisition Corp. It went public in September 2021 with $1 billion in investor commitments. In October, DWAC announced that it planned to merge with Donald Trump's media company, whose main asset is Truth Social, Trump's personal Twitter clone.

Q: That was quick! So DWAC was formed for the specific purpose of acquiring Truth Social and taking it public?

A: No, no, no. That's illegal. It's a total coincidence that DWAC's founder, Patrick Orlando, had been discussing this with Trump since March and then formally announced the deal just a few weeks after DWAC went public.

Q: Oh.

A: Save the sarcasm, smart guy. Orlando says the discussions weren't "substantive." And eventually the SEC approved everything—though only after a long investigation. In 2023 DWAC had to fire Orlando and pay a bunch of fines, which they blamed on, um, "unprecedented headwinds."

Q: I'll bet. But everything is all set now for the merger?

A: Well....

Q: Oh Christ. What happened?

A: Yesterday two separate lawsuits were filed. Orlando is suing DWAC for stiffing him on the shares he owns, while the two original architects of Truth Social are suing for more or less the same reason.

Q: That sounds familiar.

A: Yeah, Trump has a habit of screwing his former partners when they're no longer of any use. But despite the lawsuits, DWAC is still planning to go ahead with the Truth Social merger. Its stock price is up to $40 and its market valuation is up to $1.5 billion in anticipation of the deal.

Q: But that's only because of the $1 billion it already has in cash, right?

A: Ah, no. They had to return all that money thanks to their unprecedented headwinds.

Q: So they don't have any money anymore?

A: Not at all! They raised new money later—though only about $300 million.

Q: But they're worth $1.5 billion anyway?

A: Yes, though when you add in Trump's ownership stake in Truth Social, the number of shares outstanding will increase from 37 million to 133 million after the merger. This suggests investors are foreseeing a true valuation of $5.3 billion. Trump's share of that will be around $3 or $4 billion.

Q: Wow! Truth Social must be doing really well.

A: Not really:

Q: wtf?

A: It's a little hard to wrap your head around, isn't it? But thanks to MAGA Nation, DWAC's stock skyrocketed after Trump won the Iowa Caucus:

Q: Let me see if I have this straight. Trump has a crappy, money losing social network that he himself has valued on financial disclosure forms at $5-25 million.

A: Right.

Q: But then a Miami financier with Chinese backing proposed to give him a gift by engineering a merger that effectively valued the company at a billion dollars or so.

A: Correctamundo.

Q: That fell through, but eventually some new benefactors ponied up. Then Trump's ever-gullible fans went nuts and pushed DWAC's stock so high that Trump was likely to score more than $3 billion from the merger.

A: True, but Trump wanted more. So his finance buddies found a way to screw all the original founders and push Trump's stake up to nearly $4 billion.

Q: Damn. Must be nice.

A: Indeed. Even the investors will make money. Basically, mom-and-pop stock players who adore Trump are shoveling a whole lot of money his way. Eventually it will all collapse, but by then all the rich folks will be out.

Q: Wait. That's sort of like....

A: Yes, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. After going broke in the early '90s, Trump put all his crappy assets into THCR and floated it on the stock market. His fans bought the stock while he took home millions in pay, until eventually the company declared bankruptcy a few times. The stock went down to 2¢ and the remains were auctioned off to Carl Icahn a few years ago.

Q: Is that what's going to happen with DWAC?

A: Who knows? But I imagine that's the plan.

Of course, keep in mind that there's a six-month lockup on the stock following the merger, so Trump can't cash out right away. Even if the merger goes ahead on schedule, there's no telling how much the stock will be worth when the lockup expires.

Q: Probably a lot, though, especially if Trump wins the election.

A: Yes, probably a lot. After all, Truth Social barely has any revenue. Its value is almost entirely based on the value of Trump's tweets. If he's president, his tweets will be worth a lot.

Q: Damn.

A: Yeah. Damn.

America's manufacturing construction boom continued apace in January:

This is mostly due to a series of federal government initiatives: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act. In total, manufacturing construction has more than doubled over the past two years, from an annual rate of $90 billion in late 2021 to $225 billion today.

Here is Hilbert on the bed with me getting his head scratched. You can't hear it, but he was purring his furry little face off while this was going on.

Finally:

The U.S. military will be conducting airdrops of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the coming days amid tense negotiations for a pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas, President Joe Biden announced on Friday. The mission is designed to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza as Palestinians struggle to get food, water, medicine and other aid.

I get that airdrops are something of last ditch effort, pretty much the worst possible way of getting aid into Gaza. And the amount of aid that can be airdropped is probably too small to make much of a dent in the starvation of Gazans being used as a deliberate weapon by Israel. Why not use ships and landing craft instead?

But it's something. And it's a deliberate provocation to Netanyahu, practically daring him to do something about it.

So yeah, it's a day late and a dollar short, but maybe it's a start.

Ranked-choice voting has been gaining popularity lately, and that's sparked a MAGA backlash. But why? There's no obvious reason it would benefit either Democrats or Republicans. Nevertheless, conservative groups have launched a large number of very well funded and coordinated attacks on RCV. Alaska, for example, approved RCV in 2020 but opponents have now gathered enough signatures to put a repeal measure on the ballot in November. This was the result of an upset election in 2022 that denied Sarah Palin a seat in Congress.

The most surprising thing about all this is that apparently nobody knows for sure why MAGA opposes ranked-choice voting. Even election expert Rick Hasen is unsure:

“I would guess,” Hasen said, “that the reason for the fear of ranked-choice voting is that it could help elect more Republican moderates rather than more extreme Republicans.”

I guess this could be the reason, though it's hard to believe that RCV strategies aren't available that favor just about any kind of candidate. Another possibility is good old conservative paranoia:

Soros conspiracy theories are common among RCV critics. In fact, the title of Snead’s new book is The Case Against Ranked-Choice Voting: How George Soros and Other Billionaires Use a ‘Dark Money’ Empire to Transform America. His co-author is Trent England, the head of a group called Save Our States that was founded to defend the undemocratic electoral college, but is increasingly targeting ranked-choice voting.

Maybe RCV really does help elect more moderate candidates. For my money, though, the more likely reason for MAGA opposition is simpler: RCV tends to be favored by liberalish good government groups, and by definition this is the Deep State working to entrench its power. If they're for it, MAGA is against it.