Month: April 2024

I'm sitting in a waiting room with nothing better to do, so here's how Truth Social is doing:

Keep in mind that the actual value of TMTG is about $2 plus the value of the Truth Social platform. In other words, about $2. Maybe $3-4 if we're being generous. In other words, it still has a ways to go before it hits bottom.

But the stock isn't plummeting just because people are figuring out it's a scam. It's also because of an announcement that management plans to sell more shares:

The filing describes a plan to offer more than 21.4 million shares of common stock, issuable “upon the exercise of warrants,” the filing shows. Stock warrants give their holder the ability to buy shares at a predetermined price within a certain time frame.

Trump Media predicted in the filing that it will receive “up to an aggregate of approximately $247.1 million from the exercise of the Warrants.”

The idea here is that holders of the warrants will exercise them to buy newly issued stock at $11.50 per share, which will net the company $247 million but dilute the value of all the existing shares. The warrant holders can then turn around and sell their 21 million shares on the open market at a profit. The warrants are held by ARC Global Investments, which is controlled by Patrick Orlando, who set up this whole deal until he was fired last year. He's currently suing Trump Media.

But that's not all! There's also this:

The company also seeks to offer the resale of up to 146.1 million shares of stock from “selling securityholders,” 114.8 million of which are held by Trump himself. Trump owns 78.8 million shares of the company, and stands to obtain 36 million “earnout shares” if the stock stays above a certain price for enough trading days.

I don't even know what this means. Some of Trump's earnout shares accrue if the stock stays above $12.50 for 20 days over the next 18 months, which is pretty certain. Others have different requirements. But what does it mean to offer them all for resale? Beats me.

In any case, this has all spooked shareholders, who had plenty of reason to be spooked already. I expect further declines.

"Remember when we could take a vacation?" say the Trump apologists. Indeed I can. It was last year.

It's April and we've had a lot of rain this year, so I figured I should go out and take some pictures of the local wildflowers. They are pretty much the same wildflowers as always, but they're new pictures of the same old wildflowers.

This one is a white morning glory, also known as a moonflower, shortly after a brief bit of rain on Sunday.

A team of researchers says the global economy is becoming more fragmented:

To measure this phenomenon, we introduce an index of geopolitical fragmentation distilled from diverse empirical indicators. To do so, we rely on the use of a flexible, dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility. Then, we employ structural vector autoregressions and local projections to gauge the causal effects of changes in fragmentation.

Um, OK. It's pretty obvious there's no point in my reading the paper, since I have no hope of understanding it. So here's the bottom line:

The impact on the US economy is, once again, too abstruse for me to understand, but the authors basically say that fragmentation has been good for the construction industry and bad for the transportation industry. It's been sort of bad for manufacturing and durable goods, and meh for everything else.

The moral of the story is that.......we should work to become less fragmented. More globalization, please.

Every once in a while, when I'm bored, I'll pull up some big information source and just browse randomly to see if I find anything interesting. I was doing this a couple of nights ago and came up with this:

The death rate from Alzheimer's disease has increased about 10% since 2000. This is age-adjusted, so it's not due to the aging of the population. In any event, this isn't what was interesting.

It's always been the case that women get Alzheimer's at higher rates than men. No one knows for sure why, but the best guess at the moment is that women have better immune systems than men, which produces more amyloid plaque in the brain. This in turn produces higher rates of Alzheimer's. However, this is also not what was interesting.

What's interesting is that the increase in Alzheimer's deaths is due entirely to women. The death rate among men is exactly the same as it was in 2000 while the death rate among women has increased significantly:

In 2000, women died from Alzheimer's at a rate about 15% higher than men. Today, it's about 30% higher. This is age-adjusted data, so it's not because women live longer. You get roughly the same results if you plot the death rate for a single specific age (like, say, the death rate at age 75).

This is mysterious. Women are dying from Alzheimer's at a much higher rate than men, and the gap is getting bigger over time.

Why?

Madeleine Kearns says this about abortion over at National Review:

The pro-life side can afford to acknowledge the best pro-choice arguments — a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, the intense difficulties an unplanned pregnancy can cause, the asymmetry of reproduction between the sexes, etc. They have counter-arguments for each of them.

But the pro-choice side cannot afford to acknowledge the legitimacy of the pro-life argument — that what’s being aborted is an innocent human person. If they did, they’d lose the moral high ground.

What does this even mean? What moral high ground? We pro-choicers are happy to acknowledge the argument that abortion is murder. What choice do we have? We just don't believe it. We don't believe there's any moral valence to ending this:

Most people agree with us, as the almost unanimous support for IVF suggests. But as the embryo grows it becomes more and more human-like, and at some point it's close enough to human that most people think it shouldn't be aborted short of an emergency. Obviously that point is a gray area, and just as obviously, people disagree about where it is and who gets to decide.

There's no science to settle this. Nor is there any particular moral high ground. Just a vast gulf of different opinion.

Wheel of Fortune has been on for something like 40 seasons, and you'd think that by now the basic strategies would all be no-brainers. And yet, you'll constantly see this dumb move. You're in the bonus round and the category is "What Are You Doing?" The puzzle looks like this:

E __ T __ N __      __ __ __ L E S

It's obvious that the last letter of the first word is G, but contestants almost always pick G as one of their letters anyway. That's dumb. You already know it's a G! Pick some other letter that might fill in a spot you don't know!

How can they still be doing this after so many years?

I don't remember what got me interested in this, but here are the unit costs for the most popular (and expensive) fighter jets in the world:

These are "flyaway" costs. That is, the cost per unit of the latest batch on the assembly line. It is not the total procurement cost, which includes the entire cost of R&D. On that basis, it's widely agreed that the F-35 is the most expensive weapons procurement program of all time.

In any case, take these numbers with a grain of salt. It's all but impossible to get reliable, current figures even for American fighters, let alone Chinese or Turkish fighters. The F-22, in particular, which was discontinued years ago, appears to be an abyss impenetrable to human understanding.

For reasons of geometry, there aren't a lot of nebulas visible in spring. But there are plenty of galaxies around, which is why it's called galaxy season. Unfortunately, I've already taken pictures of most of the galaxies big enough to capture with my telescope, so there's not much to do in spring.

Last year I was stuck at City of Hope starting in April, so this was no concern. This year I was stuck. So last week I took a picture of the Sombrero Galaxy, M104, which is famous but a little smallish for my equipment. Still, here it is. The top picture is the usual view: a very bright center with a dark dust lane across the edge, which gives it its name. The bottom picture is deliberately de-stretched so that you can see the bright core.

According to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, here's what the US tax system looks like today compared to 1980:

For most people in the middle and upper middle classes, not a lot has changed. Tax rates are a few points lower than they were in 1980, but that's it. There are two big changes:

• Tax rates of the poor have gone up.
• Tax rates of the very richest have plummeted.

If Saez and Zucman are correct, the burger flipper at the Omaha McDonald's really does pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett.