I’m not a big fan of electric vehicles, which still don’t have the range or battery longevity to be tempting as a regular driving option.
Also, outside Telsa (which obviously has some record of financial success), the whole EV space seems screwy. Today’s case in point: A company called Lucid, which I only know from various sketchy speed-test videos on YouTube, paid its CEO $379 million for 2022:
It’s rare for CEOs to rebuke their peers’ outlandish pay packages—mostly because they’d be throwing stones from glass houses—but Lucid Motors’ CEO Peter Rawlinson drew sharp criticism from his EV rival Elon Musk on Monday after earning the title of the highest paid executive in the automotive business.
“Beware any company where leadership compensation is not linked to performance,” the Tesla CEO wrote on X in response to a post about Rawlinson’s pay.
Rawlinson received a $379 million compensation package in 2022 for his role at the luxury EV maker Lucid, including a $575,000 base salary, $5.5 million of stock options, and an incredible $373 million in stock awards, according to a new CEO compensation survey from Automotive News and Equilar.
Notwithstanding Musk’s criticism, Rawlinson earned his huge pay package after hitting market-cap targets for Lucid early last year, SEC filings show. Lucid, like 88% of the 250 largest publicly traded U.S. firms, now uses performance-based compensation for at least some portion of its executive pay.
Snip.
Lucid’s stock fell more than 82% in 2022, and the company earned total revenue of just $608.2 million. Also, when comparing Rawlinson’s pay to his peers in the automotive business, his latest compensation package appears extreme. Rawlinson’s total compensation in 2022 was 11 times greater than the $34 million earned by the second-highest-paid automotive CEO, GM’s Mary Barra, and 21 times greater than the $18.3 million Ford CEO Jim Farley made.
CEOs at fellow EV startups aren’t making anywhere near Rawlinson’s total compensation, either. Rivian Automotive CEO Robert Scaringe earned roughly $1 million in 2022, even though his company is now worth over $22 billion, over 50% more than Lucid Motors’ roughly $14 billion.
Keep in mind that Lucid lost over $2 billion over the last year. Now, startups can take a while before they turn profitable, but paying the CEO of an unprofitable company hundred of millions of dollars to boost the stock price of a money-losing company sounds awful pump-and-dumpish to me. The EV space is hardly free of companies that turned out to be run by fraudsters.
Individuals and institutions were allowed to choose to align their investments with their values. They could sleep at night knowing that their capital was not supporting causes with which they disagreed, morally or politically. The only cost associated with this socially conscious undertaking was a hit to investment returns, which was inevitable but was accepted voluntarily as the price of peace of mind.
But these days, that’s simply not enough for the Big Sisters of Social Justice Warriorhood. Why make something voluntary when they can force it down your throat? Hence the push for Environmental Social Governance (ESG), a backdoor way to impose far-left values on corporations without having to deal with shareholders at all.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) is the biggest trend in finance and business. Index funds focused on sustainability oversee $250 billion of assets. Corporate leaders signaled their alignment with ESG when more than 180 CEOs signed the Business Roundtable statement on business purpose.
In contrast to the older ethical investment movement, which accepted that morally constrained investment strategies incur costs, ESG proponents claim that investors following ESG precepts earn higher risk-adjusted returns because companies with high ESG scores are lower-risk. Thus, their stock price will outperform, whereas those firms with low ESG scores are higher-risk, leading them to underperform.
This supposition conflicts with finance theory. Once lower risk is incorporated into a higher stock price, the stock will be more highly valued, but investors will have to be satisfied with lower expected returns. Unsurprisingly, claims of ESG outperformance are contradicted by studies.
Claims that ESG-favored stocks outperformed during the Covid-19 market meltdown disappear once other determinants of stock performance are controlled for. ESG factors were negatively associated with stock performance during the market recovery phase in the second quarter of 2020.
The corollary of the ESG thesis—that low-ESG-rated “sin stocks” are condemned to underperform the stock market—is decisively refuted by the data. When institutional investors “went underweight” by selling down their holdings in tobacco stocks, it made them cheaper for other investors to buy and make money, especially when they subsequently outperformed the market.
The profit opportunities that ESG creates for Wall Street, however, are clear. BlackRock charges 46 cents annually for every $100 invested in its iShares Global Clean Energy ETF and just 4 cents for its iShares fund linked to the S&P 500.
The Trump Department of Labor’s controversial rule on ESG in corporate retirement plans became final in October 2020. In effect, the rule calls Wall Street’s ESG bluff: “You claim ESG investing boosts investment returns net of costs; Show us on the basis of generally accepted investment theories.” Rather than use the Congressional Review Act to nullify this rule, the Biden Department of Labor says it won’t enforce it.
ESG is supposedly about the objective assessment of investment risk. The stated purpose of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), a body supported and funded by Michael Bloomberg, is to provide a disclosure regime that better enables investors to assess risk, climate risk being a major one.
At the same time, the SASB aims to harness the power of capital markets for political ends. Just as the Covid pandemic was sweeping the globe, Bloomberg declared climate change the biggest threat to America and the world. “How do you replace dirty energy?” he asks. “Stop rewarding companies from making it.” ESG thus becomes politics pursued by other means.
Climate risk is primarily about the potential costs of future climate regulation, but the cookie-cutter climate disclosures required by ESG standard-setters are systematically misleading because they treat the world as a homogenous regulatory space. Climate regulations are made by states and vary from the stringent and unachievable in parts of Europe to the virtually nonexistent in many other parts of the world.
Requiring corporations to bind themselves to unilateral greenhouse-gas targets imposes a penalty in competing against companies less beholden to ESG ratings (the unlevel playing field). Forcing corporations to lose market share and shrink their operations constitutes a covert form of divestment. Shareholders lose for no climate gain.
Regulation by governments is not only more efficient but also possesses democratic legitimacy. Proponents claim that ESG is necessary to achieve inclusive capitalism, but political power wielded by a handful of billionaire Wall Street oligarchs provides a pretty good definition of insider capitalism.
The weaponization of finance by billionaire climate activists, foundations, and NGOs threatens to end capitalism as we know it by degrading its ability to function as an economic system that generates higher living standards. This usurpation of the political prerogatives of democratic government invites a populist backlash.
The Real Clear Foundation report leans heavily on the environmental end of things, but ESG also has a strong Social Justice component, as this clip from Joe Rogan’s interview of VJ/Podcaster Adam Curry discusses:
ESG is yet another attempt to impose top-down wokeness by subterfuge on people and institutions that would never voluntarily agree to it.
“I just want to go back to my Tennessee mountain home now.”
Well, you know she’s not gonna go back home.
And I know she’s not gonna go back home.
And she knows she’s never gonna go back there.
And that’s a good summary of many former office workers post-coronavirus: They’re never going back.
With the coronavirus pandemic receding for every vaccine that reaches an arm, the push by some employers to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal.
While companies from Google to Ford Motor Co. and Citigroup Inc. have promised greater flexibility, many chief executives have publicly extolled the importance of being in offices. Some have lamented the perils of remote work, saying it diminishes collaboration and company culture. JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon said at a recent conference that it doesn’t work “for those who want to hustle.”
But legions of employees aren’t so sure. If anything, the past year has proved that lots of work can be done from anywhere, sans lengthy commutes on crowded trains or highways. Some people have moved. Others have lingering worries about the virus and vaccine-hesitant colleagues.
And for [Portia] Twidt, there’s also the notion that some bosses, particularly those of a generation less familiar to remote work, are eager to regain tight control of their minions.
“They feel like we’re not working if they can’t see us,” she said. “It’s a boomer power-play.”
It’s still early to say how the post-pandemic work environment will look. Only about 28% of U.S. office workers are back at their buildings, according to an index of 10 metro areas compiled by security company Kastle Systems. Many employers are still being lenient with policies as the virus lingers, vaccinations continue to roll out and childcare situations remain erratic.
But as office returns accelerate, some employees may want different options. A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about remote work. The generational difference is clear: Among millennials and Gen Z, that figure was 49%, according to the poll by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News.
“High-five to them,” said Sara Sutton, the CEO of FlexJobs, a job-service platform focused on flexible employment. “Remote work and hybrid are here to stay.”
The lack of commutes and cost savings are the top benefits of remote work, according to a FlexJobs survey of 2,100 people released in April. More than a third of the respondents said they save at least $5,000 per year by working remotely.
This is especially true in high tech. If you have in-demand skills (full-stack developer, AI expertise, etc.), lots of companies are vying for you, and all of them have remote-work infrastructure already in place. Chances are good you login into a VPN in the morning, communicate via email and Slack, have your meetings on Zoom, code on your laptop, then check your work into a remote repository running a continuous integration/continuous deployment platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc.) that builds and tests your software. There’s zero reason for you to spend your time commuting to the office. And if your current employer won’t let you work from home, another will. And that other company can be located anywhere, and they can hire the best talent for their position no matter whether they have a local office.
I, for one, save just shy of an hour a day working from home rather than braving Austin roads, and my dogs are much happier.
How can you keep them in the big city once they’ve tasted life back on the farm?
Arm’s specialty is licensing it chip design IP to other manufacturers to incorporate into their own designs. Arm has a well-earned reputation for producing designs that squeezes the most performance per watt out of a given die sized. Think of it as an all-purpose CPU mix-and-match design kit, allowing companies to quickly design custom chips incorporating their own special sauce without reinventing the wheel for every JTAG port and ring oscillator. Arm-derived designs have come to completely dominate mobile devices, and Apple, who had previously used custom cores incorporating Arm IP into their iPhone and iPad lines, just this year announced that they’re moving from Intel to an Arm-based custom chip for their Macintosh PC line.
The great thing about Arm is that all they make is money. They license their IP at (for most customers) relatively modest per-chip cost, and most (possibly all) the major chip foundries have licensed their IP for one thing or another. So have most Integrated Device Manufacturers (i.e., chip companies that still run their own wafer fabs, an increasingly pricey proposition), including rival Intel, which has dominated PC CPUs for about an eon of Internet time.
Nvidia currently uses both TSMC and Samsung for foundry partners, both of which have Arm licenses.
A lot of the microwave instant-analysis of “Oh, now Nvidia gets more of that sweet Apple business” is probably greatly overstated, and is at best a minor consideration. The sort of highly parallelized vector processing that Nvidia specializes in is increasingly being used in IT centers and high performance computing for a wide variety of tasks, their GPUs either supplementing or entirely replacing traditional CPUs. Nvidia continues to cram an ever-higher number of CUDA cores (designed for highly parallelized tasks) into its chips. Fully integrating Arm’s renowned power-savings techniques into each of those cores, and being the first to take advantage of that technology, is potentially huge.
All mergers are fought with peril, but if Nvidia pulls off the integration, Intel could be facing the biggest challenge to its dominance since PowerPC and DEC Alpha were pushing it in the late 1990s.
This is an interesting piece on how Boeing lost its way, deliberately deciding to transition from a company that was engineering driven to one that wasn’t, starting with moving its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago:
On the tarmac, [CEO Phil] Condit stepped out of the jet, made a brief speech, then boarded a helicopter for an aerial tour of Boeing’s new corporate home: the Morton Salt building, a skyscraper sitting just out of the Loop in downtown Chicago. Boeing’s top management plus staff—roughly 500 people in all—would work here. They could see the boats plying the Chicago River and the trains rumbling over it. Condit, an opera lover, would have an easy walk to the Lyric Opera building. But the nearest Boeing commercial-airplane assembly facility would be 1,700 miles away.
The isolation was deliberate. “When the headquarters is located in proximity to a principal business—as ours was in Seattle—the corporate center is inevitably drawn into day-to-day business operations,” Condit explained at the time. And that statement, more than anything, captures a cardinal truth about the aerospace giant. The present 737 Max disaster can be traced back two decades—to the moment Boeing’s leadership decided to divorce itself from the firm’s own culture.
For about 80 years, Boeing basically functioned as an association of engineers. Its executives held patents, designed wings, spoke the language of engineering and safety as a mother tongue. Finance wasn’t a primary language. Even Boeing’s bean counters didn’t act the part. As late as the mid-’90s, the company’s chief financial officer had minimal contact with Wall Street and answered colleagues’ requests for basic financial data with a curt “Tell them not to worry.”
By the time I visited the company—for Fortune, in 2000—that had begun to change. In Condit’s office, overlooking Boeing Field, were 54 white roses to celebrate the day’s closing stock price. The shift had started three years earlier, with Boeing’s “reverse takeover” of McDonnell Douglas—so-called because it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant. “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money,” went the joke around Seattle. Condit was still in charge, yes, and told me to ignore the talk that somebody had “captured” him and was holding him “hostage” in his own office. But [President Harry] Stonecipher was cutting a Dick Cheney–like figure, blasting the company’s engineers as “arrogant” and spouting Harry Trumanisms (“I don’t give ’em hell; I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell”) when they shot back that he was the problem.
McDonnell’s stock price had risen fourfold under Stonecipher as he went on a cost-cutting tear, but many analysts feared that this came at the cost of the company’s future competitiveness. “There was a little surprise that a guy running a failing company ended up with so much power,” the former Boeing executive vice president Dick Albrecht told me at the time. Post-merger, Stonecipher brought his chain saw to Seattle. “A passion for affordability” became one of the company’s new, unloved slogans, as did “Less family, more team.” It was enough to drive the white-collar engineering union, which had historically functioned as a professional debating society, into acting more like organized labor. “We weren’t fighting against Boeing,” one union leader told me of the 40-day strike that shut down production in 2000. “We were fighting to save Boeing.”
Snip.
If Andrew Carnegie’s advice—“Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket”—had guided Boeing before, these decisions accomplished roughly the opposite. The company would put its eggs in three baskets: military in St. Louis. Space in Long Beach. Passenger jets in Seattle. And it would watch that basket from Chicago. Never mind that the majority of its revenues and real estate were and are in basket three. Or that Boeing’s managers would now have the added challenge of flying all this blind—or by instrument, as it were—relying on remote readouts of the situation in Chicago instead of eyeballing it directly (as good pilots are incidentally trained to do). The goal was to change Boeing’s culture.
And in that, Condit and Stonecipher clearly succeeded. In the next four years, Boeing’s detail-oriented, conservative culture became embroiled in a series of scandals. Its rocket division was found to be in possession of 25,000 pages of stolen Lockheed Martin documents. Its CFO (ex-McDonnell) was caught violating government procurement laws and went to jail. With ethics now front and center, Condit was forced out and replaced with Stonecipher, who promptly affirmed: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” A General Electric alum, he built a virtual replica of GE’s famed Crotonville leadership center for Boeing managers to cycle through. And when Stonecipher had his own career-ending scandal (an affair with an employee), it was another GE alum—James McNerney—who came in from the outside to replace him.
As the aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia recently told me, “You had this weird combination of a distant building with a few hundred people in it and a non-engineer with no technical skills whatsoever at the helm.”
My late father used to complain bitterly when a formerly good restaurant became a mediocre one through cost-cutting. “When the bean-counters get control, it’s all over.” As especially striking observation, since my father was an accountant…
I’ve reported on the problems of Tesla Motors before. Elon Musk’s California-based electric car company has a slavishly-devoted fanbase quick to attack critics, but thus far Tesla has produced more hype than profits. “The more cars it sells the more cash it burns.”
Now Coyote Blog has offered an extensive roundup of just how dire the economic straits that Tesla is in are:
The first quarter of 2019 was a disaster, with deliveries down despite initiation of Model 3 sales in Europe. Worse, since the Model 3 seems to be cannibalizing Model S and X sales, Tesla was not only selling fewer cars but its mix shifted to lower priced less profitable cars. It lost an enormous amount of money, and only after the conference call with analysts about first quarter results did Tesla reveal that this loss would have been far worse without a huge sale of government EV credits
Tesla burned a staggering amount of cash in the first quarter, and was forced to pay off nearly a billion dollars in debt when the stock price did not remain high enough for the debt to convert. While Tesla’s cash balance at the end of the quarter looked OK, there were two huge red flags. First, the cash barely covered a huge hole Tesla had in its net working capital. Second, given the large number of vehicles Tesla sold in its end of quarter push in the last 2 weeks of the quarter, it appears that Tesla was nearly out of cash in Mid-March and perhaps days away from a default (analysis below).
The Tesla financial statements still include a number of unexplained oddities, including a billion dollars of accounts receivable, or about 20% of quarterly revenues. How does a company that demands payment in advance before delivery have 20% of its quarterly revenues tied up in receivables?
Tesla announced, out of the blue, that it was closing all its retail stores and going online only. Given the drop in demand for the quarter, it was a head-scratcher as to why eliminating the sales force was going to help. The decision seemed to be almost off the cuff, as Tesla seemed surprised that they would still have to continue paying their expensive long-term mall leases. After this was revealed, Tesla partially reversed the closure decision, but no one — including their own retail folks — seems to know what the plan is now.
Tesla constantly fiddled with its prices and model lineup. It cut prices several times, but also announced a small raise as well. It eliminated certain options for cars, added new ones, and then reintroduced eliminated ones. Even long-time Tesla watchers are confused about the model lineup today.
Tesla continued to see an outflow of executive talent, including the exit of their very well-respected new General Counsel after just over one month on the job (Mr. Buttswinkas returned to his old law firm and purged Tesla from his resume). This seemed to parallel the rapid exit of an outside chief accounting officer last year who gave up millions of dollars to exit in just 60 days.
April car deliveries stayed on the same pace as the first quarter — ie, way worse than Tesla’s guidance
Elon Musk continued to get in trouble with the SEC, firing off production and sales guidance on Twitter that was different from Tesla’s official published guidance. Mr. Musk and Tesla are still guiding to a total delivery number for the next year that is well in excess of what most anyone else looking at the first four months believes is possible
Tesla announced a reveal of their Model Y crossover that will not go on sale until at least the end of 2020. Unlike past Tesla reveals, this one seemed hastily set up and the prototypes shown were weird. They looked more like the existing Model 3 with a few modifications than a promised crossover that could incorporate a third row of seats. Tesla asked customers to start making deposits (skeptics will argue that the whole point of the reveal was just to get some free financing from Tesla fanboys) but unlike past reveals, this one fell flat. There was apparently little interest in making deposits, though Tesla (unlike with past products) has not revealed the deposit numbers.
On top of all this, it announced out of the blue that it’s going to be make itself into an “autonomous taxi company”:
Musk has a demonstrated pattern that whenever he needs the stock price to be higher, or he needs to sell stock, or he needs some other kind of favorable financial outcome, he will do a new product demo. It worked for battery swap and the solar shingle and the model 3 and the semi, so it would work again. The model 3 reveal had collected hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in the form of deposits. That’s what he needed now. The problem is, they didn’t have a prototype to show. I believe Musk had the company hastily create a Model Y prototype built on top of a model 3. It did not really have to work, it just had to be something he could talk about. Interestingly, his VP of engineering quit at exactly this time, for reasons unknown — was their some internal dissention about this Y prototype?
Anyway, the Model Y reveal was essentially a flop, and likely garnered few deposits. Certainly not enough to fill in Tesla’s growing cash hole. And by Mid-March, Tesla may have been almost out of cash. Tesla says it delivered half its vehicles for the quarter in the last 10 days of March, so about 31,500 were delivered in those hectic days. At an average price of $50,000 each that would mean Tesla brought in nearly $1.6 billion in cash those last 10 days (this is conservative, may have been more if the average price was higher). But they only had $2.2 billion at the end of the quarter, meaning Tesla was scraping bottom in mid-March, particularly since hundreds of millions of that cash is restricted and not supposed to be spent.
Somewhere in this period of March-April, after his usual product reveal trick with the Y did not work, I think Musk came to the conclusion that the Tesla car business as currently defined was not going to work. Or, more accurately, it was never going to make enough money to support its sky-high stock valuation. I have always said that Tesla would make a fine $10 billion niche car company, but nothing about it justifies a $50 or $60 billion valuation. But at this point Musk can’t accept a $10 billion company, even though that would ostensibly still leave him a very rich man. But like Ken Lay at Enron, Musk has borrowed against at least half his Tesla stock and a falling stock price could lead to financial death by margin call (Musk, for some reason, also mortgaged all his multi-million dollar homes last December). His other investments are also struggling — SpaceX has been unable to attract the capital it needs of late and Musk has poured a lot of money into the Boring company, an absolute embarrassment of a company that helps refute, in my mind, his “smartest guy in the world” rep.
As Musk looked around for a way to save the stock valuation, the Lyft and Uber IPO’s must have had an influence. Uber is losing as much money as Tesla and folks are talking about it IPO-ing at a market cap of $70 billion. What if Tesla could call itself a ride-sharing company, only better. Wouldn’t that garner Tesla an even higher valuation?
Having not read The Smartest Guys in the Room, I am at something of a disadvantage when it comes to the collapse of Enron, but it seems to me that Enron was a profitable venture before wild over-expansion, shady regulatory arbitrage and outright accounting fraud brought it to bankruptcy. By contrast, Q4 2018 was the first time Telsa ever posted back-to-back profitable quarters.
Tesla could be a profitable company if it concentrated on manufacturing luxury cars and selling them through a traditional dealer network, just like Mercedes and BMW do today. Instead, Musk continues to chase the Next Big Thing in order to keep the overinflated stock prices high. (And it wouldn’t hurt if they did their manufacturing in a state with much saner cost, tax and regulatory structures than California.)
As the author notes: “This is the company that is going to spawn a thousand business school case studies.”
Success as a reporter on the CIA beat inevitably meant finding out government secrets, and that meant plunging headlong into the classified side of Washington, which had its own strange dynamics.
I discovered that there was, in effect, a marketplace of secrets in Washington, in which White House officials and other current and former bureaucrats, contractors, members of Congress, their staffers, and journalists all traded information. This informal black market helped keep the national security apparatus running smoothly, limiting nasty surprises for all involved. The revelation that this secretive subculture existed, and that it allowed a reporter to glimpse the government’s dark side, was jarring. It felt a bit like being in the Matrix.
It’s a long and informative piece, even if you don’t accept all of reporter James Risen’s analysis. And it really does show how badly our national security agencies leak…
The recently discovered vulnerability in Intel chips is really, really bad. And fixing it requires about a 5-30% performance hit on every OS that runs atop Intel processors. (Here’s a nice layman description).
Germany outsources censorship. Evidently you’re not allowed to say anything critical of Muslims or “Muslim refugees,” ever. “How the Germans can’t see that such a law, in the hands of the wrong party, could be devastating is a mystery. I can only conclude such occurrences have no precedent in their country from which they could draw obvious lessons.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinds Obama-era memorandums on state-level legalized marijuana. Popehat thinks this is, at present, mostly cosmetic due to the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment. I oppose federal marijuana prohibition on constitutional grounds: Regulating marijuana is not an enumerated power of the federal government, regulation is neither necessary nor proper (thus no 9th Amendment justification), and thus a matter entirely for the states absent any interstate commerce under the 10th Amendment.
“Mayor Sylvester Turner’s press secretary was suspended for two weeks without pay after she failed to turn over thousands of documents required to be released under Texas law. Darian Ward was asked to turn over emails relating to her work on non-city related projects, including a private side business called ‘Joy in Motion Productions.'” She must have gone to the Hillary Clinton School of Email FOIA compliance…
Dave Chappelle has a point. As gross, disgusting and socially unacceptable as having Louis C.K. masturbate on the phone with you is, if you let that dissuade you from pursuing a career in a field as hotly competitive as standup comedy, that’s on you. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
A new global trade agreement that eliminates tariffs on more than 200 kinds of IT products should result in lower prices to technology buyers around the world as it is implemented over the next three years.
The tentative deal, struck on Friday at a World Trade Organization meeting in Geneva, affects a wide variety of products ranging from smartphones, routers, and ink cartridges to video game consoles and telecommunications satellites. It covers US$1.3 trillion worth of global trade, about 7 percent of total trade today.
This is one of those pieces of Snooze Inducing News that could very well turn out to be A Great Big Hairy Deal. Free trade is a win-win for the nations involved, so this could potentially help alleviate the real nasty recession that’s careening down the pike at us.
A complete list of the products covered range from the excessively specific to the frustratingly general (“memories”). But a whole lot of them look related to semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, an industry that American and Japanese companies dominate. (Almost makes me wish I hadn’t sold all my Applied Materials stock. Almost.)
“This is America: You can go to the bookstore and buy yourself copies of everything from The Basketball Diaries to The Motorcycle Diaries to The Turner Diaries.”
On the other hand, the DEA can just take your money without a trial.
Verizon buying AOL. Remember when AOL was important enough to merge with Time Warner as an equal?
So former Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan is going to form a tranny wrestling league? The proposal seems as ill-conceived as his entire post-Melon Collie career…
Says Perry: “When you’re fishing, you go where the fish are. I’m not out here forcing anybody to rent a van and head to Texas. We’re just giving a sales pitch here. It’s up to them to make the decision.”
“Straight-up competition between the states, the way our founding fathers envisioned it when they crafted that 10th Amendment.” And then SF Gate offers up a definition of the Tenth Amendment, for all those Californians unfamiliar with that quaint and curious document known as “The Constitution of the United States of America.”