Author: Muttrox

Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

For decades, I’ve been told I need to read the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. It’s one of the greatest fantasy series ever they said.

They were wrong.

This book is utter trash. It reads like a 12-year old girls fanfic about her favorite horse. A decent premise, with terrible characters, terrible plotting, terribly written. One giant wish fulfillment spew of dreck. It turns out that McCaffrey is the first woman to win a Hugo, and the first to win a Nebula. The committee must have been super drunk during those years.

Among Others (Jo Walters) – How did this win the Hugo and the Nebula. Barely fantasy, could have told what little story it has in under 100 pages. (And while I’m picking on women authors, The Doomsday Book is depressing pablum for several hundred pages with zero fantasy or science fiction.)

Dead Wake, by Erik Larson. Actually all of Erik Larson. Erik Larson is vastly overrated as an accessible historian. I’ve had the misfortune of reading three of his books, and they are all… meh. His fundamental flaw is throwing any random facts into the narrative, regardless of whether they support the narrative. The onslaught of irrelevant names and dates keeps the reader from actually following the history. His most recent work, The Splendid and the Vile is a perfect example. It takes everything interesting about World War II and Churchill and ignores it for countless pages of his daughters social adventures at garden parties. Who could possibly give a shit is beyond me.

If you like to read accessible history, stick with David McCullough, Steven Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, maybe Walter Isaacson for biographies.

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders. Everyone else loves this book. I don’t. An interesting conceit, done poorly.

Coming in a couple days later to add another. Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice. WTH. Why is this a classic? It’s terrible. Just terrible. A bunch of psychosexual bullhockey that makes zero rational sense. How this ever got turned into a series of successful books, movies, and now a TV show — there’s no accounting for taste.

I get asked this a lot. Muttrox, what is your take on Elon Musk? Up or down? You have his cars, you’ve given him lots of money, how do you feel about that?

The bad:

He’s an asshole. Personally and professionally. Even worse than an asshole, he’s an asshole unnecessarily. Just because he is and he can.

He’s a sellout to China. The dictionary definition of selling out – he says things he knows are wrong to carry water for a foreign power and put more money in his pocket. Not great!

His new set of right wing views are noxious (especially considering how much government aid went into propping up Tesla).

He didn’t invent Tesla, and should stop acting like he did.

He shouldn’t be so rich. Crazy.

But:

All his Twitter awfulness comes down to a larger issue. The problem is that there’s only a few social media companies with unaccountable owners who can set their own policies for those platforms. Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is the first time there’s been an owner who supported the right in the platform, but the problem is that it shouldn’t come down to the decision of him. Trump should have banned from these platforms long ago, but the conservatives were right to worry how the decisions were made.

His right wing views are noxious, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. He’s allowed to change his mind and have whatever opinions he wants. You don’t like them, stop paying attention.

And, on balance:

What I really think is that these critiques this misses the larger point. Elon Musk became the richest man in the world. And what did he do? He basically invented the electric car industry. Without him, there is no doubt in my mind that we would be much further back in the electrification of personal vehicles. He significantly changed the curve of history. This is one of the greatest things we have done to combat climate change. Twenty years ago, would you have paid out 50 billion dollars to electrify a significant portion of US cars, and get the flywheel rolling so every other OEM was moving to electric only? Of course you would have. You would have paid 500 billion dollars. Well guess what, Elon did that. He deserves the rewards for it.

What about his other companies? A battery company, again making a direct push against climate change by supporting electrification. A solar panel company. Space-X, increasing the odds humanity can expand off of earth. Notice the theme? All these companies are tackling existential threats to human existence, and doing a pretty decent job at it.

I don’t care about the other stuff. Let him own Twitter and do whatever he wants. It’s always been a cesspool, now it’s a cesspool with a slightly worse owner. Who cares. The man has done significant work to save humanity. That vastly outweighs all the rest.

Muttroxia: How to Improve Professional / World Cup Soccer: I said it all four years ago. Nothing has changed. All these ideas would make the sport better.

Viva La France! Let’s go!

How many of these did you know already?

Born in the USA (Bruce Springsteen): This song is not a patriotic anthem. It’s a rather depressing tune about a veteran who’s having a hard time in life. Extra points for the Reagan campaign cluelessly using an anti-America song as their theme.

More Than Words (Extreme): This is not a touching love song about declaring emotions. It’s about getting laid. If you screw me, that will show your love more than words will.

Won’t Get Fooled Again (The Who): This is one of the all-time anthems, an eight minute lesson in aggression and defiance. Or so you would think from the music. The message is truly about acceptance, and is passive. In the story this song comes from, the good guys have finally deposed the bad guys and everything is okay. Only it’s not, the new boss is the same as the old boss, the slogans on the left are the same as the slogans on the right, everything is the same as ever. Oh well, that’s how it goes, smile and grin at the change all around me, I won’t get fooled again. I won’t get fooled by revolutionary rhetoric and the idea that anything really changes. Kind of a downer, really.

Every Breath You Take (The Police): Not a love song, a psychopathic stalker song.

Norwegian Wood (Beatles): This is a song about arson. The girl won’t put out, so her house gets burnt down.

Paul McCartney explained that the term “Norwegian Wood” was an ironic reference to the cheap pine wall panelling then in vogue in London. McCartney commented on the final verse of the song: “In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn’t the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn’t, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.

I have no idea how I stumbled on her. Musgraves doesn’t write the most sophisticated music. Simple chords, simple melodies, simple playing… but done well. Nothing wrong with that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OFv566mj7s

I was surprised to find out she’s categorized a country artist. Her voice has that lilt but the music isn’t particularly country. Her other songs haven’t really done it for me. This one does!

How about them Celtics, eh? I am a hardcore fan and these last couple years have been amazing. Barring serious injury, this years edition will go down in the history books as one of the best teams ever to take the floor.

I have also followed Danilo Gallinari in his Hawks career. Gallinari is a good player. He can create his own shot and take over an offense for short stints. As an individual he is an asset to any team.

But as a team player? Not so much. The Hawks have never learned to play team ball and he’s an example of it. When he gets the ball it stays with him. Much like Jaylen Brown until recently, the entire flow of the offense stops. (The Number 21 ballhog in the league years ago.) Like Jaylen Brown he could do good things one on one, but it isn’t worth it to destroy the group dynamics.

Defensively, Gallinari is ordinary. The Hawks have never been good at defense, mostly because Trey Young refuses to try. Seriously, watch Trey play defense for a few minutes. Everyone blows right past him. Gallinari plays decent enough defense to try and cover for the five-on-four dynamics teams have against the Hawks, but is he anything special? No.

These Celtics thrive on team chemistry. They traded for Derrick White because he is a team player. They traded for Malcom Brogdon because he is a team player (and being incredibly gracious and quiet about leading the bench instead of starting). Gallinari does not fit into this team.

These Celtics don’t need Gallinari. They are already the best team in the league by a healthy margin. They are already improving even more as their defense is improving. They have Rob Williams returning soon, they are going to be even more dominant. They already have the deepest bench in the league, the next best options from Gallinari are great (Payton Pritchard would be starting on most teams, he barely even plays for us.) We’re going to get that 18th banner with or without him just fine.

Now is the time to get rid of Gallinari. Trade him for some draft picks, or money that can be used to keep the team together, or something. Get value while we can, but he doesn’t belong in Celtics green.

A few thoughts on Warnock beating Walker.

First, the national media continuously contrasted this race with Kemp/Abrams, but they had it all wrong. Kemp had enormous advantages.

1. He was the incumbent. There has to be a convincing reason to unseat the incumbent. There wasn’t. Note that Warnock was also an incumbent and won.
2. The Governors race is not nationalized. Governors have a large indirect impact on federal elections, but the impact is indirect. This is very different than a house or Senate race. The stakes were lower.
3. He had proven himself competent. I disagreed with him on policy, but never felt that he was going to undermine democracy or start a war with a crazy tweet or not understand his own job or pass policies just to piss off the other side or any of the craziness that surrounds the Trumpites.
4. Kemp was not Trumps man. He had differed from him, done it publicly, and did it while governing (not as part of a campaign).

We voted for Abrams (of course), but we are okay with Kemp winning. He has done a decent job and will continue to do so. He follows a line of Georgia governors who campaign as right wing culture warriors who then govern from the center, mostly avoiding culture wars in favor of economic prosperity.

The runoff was a partisan election. As most are these days. My Democrat friends from out of state are fond of mocking Southern Republicans, but they are just as ideological. If the Democrats ran a bag of sand for the Senate, I’d probably vote for it and they would also. Republicans can hardly be blamed for voting for Herschel Walker. This was a race between Democrats/Biden and Republicans/Trump in proxy form. Warnock and Walker’s own particular stories and competencies barely mattered. I doubt any of my Democrat friends can identify a specific policy Warnock particularly champions or breaks from the Party on. It doesn’t matter. Warnock is senator 51 for the Democrats, that all that mattered. Republicans can’t be blamed for using the same logic.

I was not surprised Warnock won. I felt all along he had the edge, and publicly predicted it on election night. (That’s one for Muttrox!) After all Warnock won the first election. He didn’t get to 50%, but he won. So, what are the factors that would change the outcome in a runoff?

1. The stakes were lower on both sides once the Democrats had the 50^th Senate vote. Democrats wanted the 51^st seat, but it wasn’t critical. The GOP had already lost the Senate either way so Walker’s win wouldn’t be as important. Which of those motivations would be bigger? Hard to say, but I felt that the GOP would be less motived than Dems.
2. The Libertarian candidate had just over 2%. All else being equal, there is no reason to think they would go disproportionately for the Republican candidate.
3. Another factor I haven’t seen reported anywhere. Runoff day was crummy. It had rained for several days, it was wet and grim and miserable. Bad weather always depresses election turnout. At the margins there will be some voter who was barely motivated enough to vote and the bad weather is enough to keep them home. But since the Democrats had disproportionately voted early, it didn’t matter as much on their side. Bad weather hurt the GOP more.

Some things that don’t matter.

1. Advertising: I don’t know why candidates bother to spend so much money on TV ads. I don’t know a single person who has ever changed their mind because of a TV ad. Nor do I know someone who decided whether to vote or not based on being “activated” by advertising. A giant waste of everybody’s time and money. Election after election proves that it just doesn’t matter, but they keep pissing away money.
2. Candidate Quality: Walker was a terrible candidate. Of course it mattered. Just not as much as people think. See the beginning of this post – in a partisan election, it just doesn’t matter who the candidate is. (And concussions are serious! Our son just had one, and he is still recovering a couple days later. Herschel took a lot of hits over his life. It showed. He thinks almost as incoherently as Trump.)
3. Voter Suppression: The evidence is that most of the issues the left gets worked up about don’t matter. Be angry about gerrymandering, not the lack of maildrop boxes.
4. Corrupt Secretary of State: I crossed party lines to vote for Brad Raffensperger. He’s a Republican executing laws passed by a Republican congress, but as far as I can see, he has played everything above board, and has done his job with great professional competence. Oh, and his tape recording of Trump blatantly meddling with the 2020 election is just wonderful. Wouldn’t that be precious if that’s what finally took him down. Sigh – I can dream.

Our household is very happy that Warnock won, and Georgia gets a bit bluer each year. These are historic times, we’re overjoyed to be part of it.

Peter Rabbit was asking for it. He went into Mr. McGregor’s garden, “ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes“. He deserved everything he got. He is made out to be a hero, he’s not. He’s stupid selfish vermin. He should have been put in a pie like his filthy thief of a father.

With age comes wisdom.

#McGregorwasright

Everyone has their odd loves. One of mine is Paradise Theater, by Styx. This is a great album. Maybe you know Too Much Time on my Hands, or Best of Times. You should learn the rest. It’s a great album, with just about every track a winner. One of my deepish cut favorites is this track, Snowblind. Moody and rocking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSXTu-WllZ8

They had great harmonies, great melodies, great songs, and very underrated guitarists. This album has many creative touches all throughout. The last few minutes of side two, from the middle of half-penny two-penny until the last tinkling rolls of State Street Sadie, are as a good a medley of musical ideas and themes as anyone else has ever pulled off.

If you ever liked this album, pull it out and give it another try. And if you have never heard of this album, give it a try.

A Tesla costs a lot of money. Mine costs far more than any other car I’ve ever bought. It was two and a half times as much actually, and I got the cheapest Tesla you can get.

You get a lot for that money. It’s an amazing machine. It shouldn’t be called a car. It’s a car like an i-phone is a phone. An Iphone is not a phone (“To me the phone is just a seldom used app on my phone.“). An Iphone is a software platform. The Tesla is a software platform thrown onto an amazing piece of hardware.

Like the Iphone, your first one is an experience in product design. It’s truly a joy to drive. Everything about it gives happiness. Yes, it’s expensive, but it’s also a remarkable piece of machinery. The folks who designed this deserve many awards.

But.

While the car experience has been nothing but amazing, the experience with Tesla overall has not. The purchase experience is awful. Let’s not even talk about the months of wait time to actually get one. Let’s start with the actual purchase. I hit the button, spending the most money I’ve ever spent on anything outside of houses and college tuition. Do I get “Welcome to the Tesla family!”? No. Do I get “Congratulations, you just made the best decision of your life!”? No. I get instructions to add my drivers license, call my insurance company, track down form 392-Q for tax reasons, get here fifteen minutes early, use the side door, and can we send you marketing updates? It’s miserable. It takes a joyous occasion and ruins it.

The real schizophrenia is the nickel-and-diming and pricing strategy. Consider these three examples:

1) The live street view (where you see a real-time abstracted visual of the world around you, complete with trash cans, pedestrians, and traffic lights with the actual color displayed) ends up costing an additional $10/month.

2) Garage Door Opener is not included. Home link and garage door opening is pretty much standard on every car but the Tesla. They deliberately hold this feature back unless you pay them over $300.

3) Floor mats are not included.

Compare the cost of these features against the purchase price of the actual car, they are basically nothing. But the spirit of them is some financial analyst figuring they can squeeze a few more bucks out of each customer. These are features that obviously should be bundled in with the original purchase. Doing it this way just gets me pissed off.

And that’s how Tesla is. You pay a lot of money for an incredible product, and the rest of the experience sucks.

It was six months from the order to ownership of the new Tesla. That’s very different than other makes. I can’t just walk into a Tesla dealership and drive out in my new car. Six months is a long time! A couple months in, I wanted to change the color. That would have meant going to the back of the line. Not worth it!

I strongly considered upgrading to a higher-level model and paying several thousand dollars more just so I could get it a few months earlier (the higher the level, the shorter the queue).

Mrs. Muttrox put in an order last week. It won’t be ready until January of 2023, ten months away! We’d definitely pay some extra money to get it tomorrow.

What we’re seeing here is the value of time. Like Disney World, the currency of time has real value. People will pay extra to reduce wait times. Particularly people with the means of your average Tesla owner.

That leads to the arbitrage opportunity:

Find the best selling Tesla model and options. Order five of them. Wait the many months. Pay for them (yikes, I could have gottten a house instead!), drive them home. Congratulations, you now own five new Teslas that you don’t want. Now turn around and sell them. Find some Tesla buyers who will gladly pay you full price for a brand new Tesla. Full price, plus several thousand dollars tacked on for the convenience of getting it today instead of ten months from now.

Could this work? Is it happening already?