Author: Muttrox

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?

I recently got a Tesla. It may end up being the subject of many posts because I am indecently in love with it.

How much cheaper is it to operate? This does not account for purchase price, tax incentives, cost to rewire a garage outlet to 240v etc. Or that I can charge for free at work. Just looking at mile to mile costs.

Total driving and electric usage so far: I used 262 kWh to travel 1,057 miles.

I pay $0.106 per kWh on my electric bill (That’s an all inclusive rate, which bakes in all the random fees and sales taxes. The ‘pure’ rate is $0.083, so I’m taking a 27% hit here). That works out to a total expenditure of $28.29 to travel those 1,057 miles.

My last car got roughly 18 miles to the gallon in the real world, so that would have equated to 59.3 gallons. At $4.00 per gallon, that’s $237.10 to go the same distance in a gas car.

All in all, the Tesla costs ~12% as my last gas car to drive. Wow. 12%. Over eight times cheaper.

I thought I had mentioned this one already. I don’t know anything about this band, but this song is great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kXDMPwfMc

I watched the video just now for the first time. They look exactly like the music made me think they looked. Posting this, then going to see if their other material is also good.

I saw the Rolling Stones for first time in 2015, and it was maybe the best show I’ve ever seen. Mindblowlingly good. I got to see them again this week. How was it? Honestly, not nearly as good. But still a great show.

Mick: Amazing. At 78, looks and moves like he is 50. Especially compared to Roger Daltrey who is just done, it’s amazing how good his singing is. It probably helps that his style was never to push the vocal limits, it was always about the phrasing, the groove, the style.  And he plays a great guitar and an amazing harmonica!

Keith: Oh, this hurts. This hurts. I hope he was just mailing it in. I hope it was just an off night. Because if not, he has lost more than a half-step. On most songs it felt like he was going through the motions, and not particularly well. He woke up for Honky Tonk Women and his own material, but mostly might as well have stayed in the background. He flat out missed many riffs. Listen to this solo in Sympathy for The Devil below. The same riff repeated endlessly, a striking lack of confidence and creativity. The guitar tone was awful as well, enormous attack creating unpleasantness on many songs. The beginning of Start me Up was just… wrong.

Conversely, Ron Wood was marvelous. Every time he stepped up to do a solo, it was like a new concert. Blazing solos with touch, and feeling, and plenty of grit and balls. He was everything you’d expect and more. I just wish they’d let him talk, he’s got some great patter.

Steve Jordan: He gets an A in difficult circumstances. It’s not easy filling the shoes of such an amazing drummer as Charlie Watts (Number two on my list of “drummers I would get for my fantasy band”). If you played a recording of this show and compared it to Charlie, you’d be hard pressed to find much difference. That somewhat makes sense, since he’s been working with the band for 30+ years. The only off-note for me, the very distinctive beat of Satisfaction was changed for some reason.

Catalog/song choices/arrangements: One of the great things about these old bands (McCartney, The Who, Queen, etc.) is their catalogs are ridiculous. They could have played another thirty songs that everyone knows. They didn’t, they pulled out a few obscure ones, and that’s to the good. Each night they do one song that’s voted in. Our show featured She’s a Rainbow. Not in my top fifty, but I guess the Ted Lasso fans took over. I wish they had a few more non-hits from their grand slam of albums (Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street), but it’s hard to complain too much. They threw in Let’s Spend the Night Together and Slipping Away, some of my faves. Miss You is a huge high point of the night, the extended breakdown is wonderful.

Here’s a plug for The Session. If you want to understand how songs are put together, listen to the 20 minutes on Honky Tonk Women.

The rest of the band was predictably amazing. They’ve been playing together a long time. A special shout out to Sasha Allen. Filling the shoes of Merry Clayton in Gimme Shelter is about the toughest job out there. But she was the latest of the Stones singers to rise to the occasion. She was dressed much like Tina Turner, from whom Mick Jagger stole most of his stage moves. (My video from last night was too big to load, this is from a couple months back.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhG5okqMA34

Opener: The Zac Brown Band was very competent in a genre I don’t care for. Their hit song Chicken Fried sounds like a parody of country music. I’m not exaggerating, I heard it on the radio and started laughing. The lyrics are literally one country music stereotype after another. That said, they are good performers. They unexpectedly covered Bohemian Rhapsody, and ya know what – it worked! Maybe I’m the jackass here.

Highlights: Tumbling Dice, Miss You, Gimme Shelter, Connection, Slipping Away, patter about Atlanta, Honky Tonk Women, Paint it Black, real time requests, Gimme Shelter, Sympathy for the Devil, shoutouts to Charlie, and also let’s not forget Gimme Shelter.

Lowlights: Let’s call them mediumlights, as there were no true lowlights. Shattered (still a boring song), She’s a Rainbow (still a Sgt. Pepper wannabe), and (ouch) mostly Keith.

Summary: There ain’t nothin’ like ‘em. The Stones are the Stones. I likely won’t ever see them again, but grateful I got to be there. I spent a lot of the next day in the basement, playing along to their greatest hits. It’s the Stones baby.

Who doesn’t like a little Johnny Cash? I’m particular to his later career. This is a simple song done well. Crazy catchy, and the the mix of pop sensibility and sincere spirituality is a winner.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jiMXK9eDrMY

This is the 3rd Trump Report Card. I did it once before he took office, and once at the end of year one. I’ll stick to the same categories. (Also at the end of year two, I tried to list 10 good things about Trump.)

Global Warming: F. From Day One, Trump did everything he could to roll back and sabotage any efforts to address climate change. Pulling out of the Paris Accord, changing the cost of a ton of carbon, removing all mentions of global warming from federal websites, etc. History will not treat Trump or the GOP kindly. Fortunately the trends already in motion minimized the damage done. The private sector stepped up, and technology trends (many goosed under Obama’s stimulus package) accelerated. Renewable energies are now economically competitive with fossil fuels.

Nuclear Weaponry: C. He threw away NATO and buddied up to Russia. He used unnecessarily harsh language, and escalated tensions in Korea. But in the large picture, not so bad.

Pandemic: D. A new category! First, ere are some positive things the Trump administration did:

• Shut down China travel early (even if done poorly).
• Operation Warp Speed.
• Not overly politicizing first round of stimulus relief.
• Buying 100 million doses from Pfizer and Moderna. This was done when it wasn’t at all certain either company could successfully develop a vaccine. Buying enough for 100 million Americans was a pretty good gamble.
• The pressure he put on the FDA was good. They were overly conservative, never properly balanced the urgency of the situation against their normal process.
• …and many of the countries that had much better leadership had lots of problems, the connection between bad policy and outcome isn’t quite so black and white.

But here we are a full year later, and there was never a federal plan. There was never any federal plan. Even the most diehard libertarian understands this is where big government is needed. It takes the vast powers and scope of the federal government to deal with a problem that crosses borders — but Trump wouldn’t. He constantly undercut scientific advice. Not only didn’t he rally the country around mask wearing and social distancing, he did everything he could to undercut it. Even after getting the actual disease, he didn’t change his tune. History tested Donald Trump, and he failed. Hundreds of thousands of deaths are directly attributable to him.

Threats to American Democracy. Fail

He is the biggest threat to American Democracy since The Civil War. He gets a zero.

• Trump believes he is above the law. He believes the law is there to serve him. That’s what we call a king, it’s what we got rid of. One of many examples, firing his handpicked Attorney General for refusing to corruptly stop the Mueller investigation.
• Trump implicitly and explicitly refused to help and be the President for states that didn’t vote for him.
• Trump lies constantly. Ignorant and venal, he further drove the discourse of the country into the gutter. Democracy doesn’t work without shared facts, and Trump refused to truck in facts.
• The undermining of basic facts is incredible. Right now, the majority of the GOP honestly believes the election was stolen. Think about that. They don’t believe the mass media, the many non-partisan groups, the experts in the federal government, fact checkers, or the unending string of court losses. The credibility of every neutral group has been attacked steadily so Trump can simply assert lies and his followers will believe it.
• Remember Russia? Maybe you’ve forgotten their stated goal: To make Western Democracy unable to function productively. Can anyone doubt their success? And while Trump may not have actively sought out Russian help, he was eager to accept what they gave. Treason.

The rest: Some other things happened, but anything else is chicken feed compared to these four.

The Celtics need to make some moves. Things aren’t going so well this year. Instead of competing with Philly and the Nets, they are barely ahead of the Knicks.

For the last several years, Boston has had too many decent players. We’ve gotten a million draft picks, and so we’ve had lots of players that require minutes and time to see if they’re any good. It’s time to start make those tough decisions and thinning the herd.

Semi Ojeleye is a decent player. He plays strong defense, hits some 3s, and doesn’t mess up much. But he also has no real upside. After four seasons with the Celtics, he isn’t going to show you anything new. Standing around the perimeter and making a good pass or shot is not enough. Can’t or won’t drive, can’t or won’t dribble towards the basket.

When you’re thinking about trade pieces, you should be thinking about upside. Not just who is good (Taytum Brown Smart are untouchable), but who might get better. When you think about it this way, Semi is done.

Trade pieces (in vague order of ‘dump him’ to ‘well, if we have to’):

• Semi Ojeleye: Will never be better for the Celtics.
• Jeff Teague: I love Jeff Teague, but it turns out I love the Jeff Teague of several years ago. He’s toast. Only problem is, who would take him?
• Carsen Edwards: He got his chances, never showed much. Sorry Carsen, it’s just not working out.
• Romeo Langford: He got his chances, never showed much. Sorry Romeo, time to move on.
• Tristan Thompson: I love the guy, but like Teague, my impressions are of the Tristan Thompson of past years. Especially because Robert Williams is suddenly realizing his potential, we can afford to lose Thompson. Thompson is a great complementary piece, but I’d be willing to see him go, and we can get a good price.
• Kemba Walker: I love the guy. And he’s a very good player. But a couple seasons in, I don’t think he’ll every be the great player we need for a point guard. He is still highly valued around the league and we can get a good price for him. Of note, Kemba didn’t lead the team in assists per game last year (that was Marcus Smart) or this year (Smart and Taytum). I want a point guard who make other players better with assists. I want a point guard who doesn’t set up endless plays of Brown and Taytum isolations (even though that mostly works). I want a point guard who doesn’t have to be hidden on defense.  (By the way, can you believe that James Harden is leading the league in assists right now? By a healthy margin, at 11.1 a game.)

If you drive a Soul, you have no soul.