Misc updates

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I seem to have covid-19, judging by the symptoms; again, after almost exactly a year. I guess the level of antibodies went down during the winter and here I go again. So far, it’s nothing serious, I just get a slight fever (37°C or so) after physical exertion, so I had to cut down on physical activity, especially during the cold. The worrying part is that it doesn’t seem to go away; the situation is unchanged for the last month or so. Another worrying part is that it’s affecting my brain function, most likely due to low-level inflammation level that’s more-less constant, and it appears to affect my brain functions. So far it’s not very serious, but it’s similar to the last time when it was serious; I have trouble focusing and remembering things, my mind is not clear and I tire easily. Another thing is that my immune system is in turmoil and I am more prone to allergic reactions that just flare up all of the sudden. I increased the vitamin intake just to be sure, because this is very tightly correlated with the time I spent in cold and dark; sunlight helped a lot last year, and it gets much worse as the winter progresses, and the obvious culprits might be low vitamin D and melatonin levels, which degrade the immune system, which then becomes both ineffective and prone to overreaction.

Since I’m half-sick and my brain isn’t working properly I haven’t been doing much thinking lately, so I don’t have much to contribute; mostly resting and watching things on YouTube, but I do wish to comment on a few things.

The first is that I observed that people seem to think that investing in Bitcoin or some weird stock is a much better idea than actually working for money, and the worst part is, the economy is in such a state that they might actually be right – if you are locked down, businesses are closing all over the place, and everything is so regulated it’s almost impossible to find something that pays well and isn’t regulated into extinction already, and things like Bitcoin and Tesla seem to go vertical, it’s obvious what will make sense to most people. Of course, in my experience this is always a precursor to collapse.

The second thing I want to comment on is saving money. I saw several situations where it looked like a very bad idea; for instance, kids trying to save money by buying silver and gold, and people trying to save money when it’s obviously that their problem is insufficient income. This made me wonder where the actual limit is, in a sense of who should save money and reduce spending, and who should simply work on increasing their income. It’s hard to tell, but as a general rule, if you find yourself buying unnecessary stuff after you got everything you actually needed, you should probably think about saving. Also, if you have a stable career which brings significant monthly income, and there is no obvious path forward in a sense of an income multiplier, saving money is the obvious choice. Conversely, if you’re a kid who is just starting his career, saving money in gold and silver coins strikes me as a bad move; rather, you should invest in your skills, buy a better computer, buy tools that will increase your effectiveness on whatever career path it is that you chose. Basically, there is a time to invest, and there is a time when investments pay off, and then you save.

The third thing that provokes my reaction is a case of a person who applied for a job and then figured out “oops, I only have a smartphone and I would need a laptop in order to do this”. We don’t live in a parallel universe where laptops are expensive. Sure they are, if you buy a really fancy one, but really, you should only think about a fancy one after you did lots of work on your cheap one. Not to have one at all, today, is actually dangerous, because everything is done over the Internet, and if you actually want to get anything done, you need a proper computer, not just a smartphone. The level of equipment at which you are a “player”, meaning that you can technically do serious work for money online, is so low, you need to be a dumbass not to have a laptop and a smartphone. For fuck’s sake, a cheap Xiaomi phone and an Acer Aspire 5 will get you in the game, for everything up to really, really high levels of professional work, at which point you will already have made so much money with a Xiaomi and an Acer, buying the newest and best equipment will be something you just do in your stride without even feeling the financial sting. Not having a smartphone with a good mobile network contract, and a decent laptop you can use to do work and stay informed, it’s not even borderline careless, it’s actually self-endangerment by outright foolishness. In my case, having less than two fully functional computers at any one time, having only one way of connecting to the Internet at any one time, would be something I would consider risky. Don’t think it’s just because I have money. I had redundancies of that kind even when I was really out of money, because the first thing you need to look after when you’re out of money is maintaining access to means of making money. If you lose that kind of access, your life is basically in danger. Losing access to means of making money, and here I mean access to making money by doing skilled work online, and not chopping wood for pocket change IRL, is something that starts a very steep downward spiral that ends with you starving and freezing on a street somewhere. Never allow yourself to lose full access to the Internet, and full capability to function in an online environment. This means a computer capable of running the right kind of software for the work that you do (whether that’s Office, AutoCAD, Visual Studio, UNIX terminal or Xcode depends on what you do), it means a webcam with a good microphone so you can do telepresence, which is absolutely essential during the lockdown and probably in the future work of any kind, and it means comfortable interface, which means “not phone”; a good laptop is usually fine, and a big monitor, proper keyboard and mouse are usually a welcome improvement. As for the operating system, don’t get a Chromebook if you need MS Office or Xcode for work. Don’t get a Mac if you have to write .NET code. Basically, being able to do work completely online today is absolutely essential, and good smartphones and laptops can be had for so cheap, compared to what used to be the case until very recently, that failure to equip yourself at least in some minimal sense necessary to get started, is sheer fucking idiocy. If you lose your home, you can bounce back easily if you have a smartphone, a laptop and some money saved. If you lose access to the Internet, and/or means of making money online, you are in a much worse peril than if you only lost your home. You basically lost access to civilization.

Free market and value

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I’ve been thinking more about the weird aspects of the free market economy and the concept of valuation in general.

There are two basic ideas about value; first is that everything has some sort of “intrinsic value” and the point of free market is to discover it. The second idea is that there is no intrinsic value, that things are dynamically valued according to utility and scarcity and the market value is the only value there is.

I had a problem with this, you see. The concept that there is no objective value is contrary to my belief system, where certain things are valuable as such, not just because someone put a market price on them. I’m not talking about gold or bitcoin, I’m talking about more fundamental principles, such as virtue or spirituality. Some things can be infinitely valuable even if there isn’t a market value. So, basically, I am opposed to the free market fundamentalist idea that there is no value outside the market. However, I don’t think there is an inherent value to anything material, outside human needs, utility, desire and fear, which create a balance of desirability and scarcity, eventually resulting in market valuation. For instance, water and air are extremely desirable, but if they are not scarce, their market valuation is low. However, if they for some reason become scarce, their market valuation could climb to extremes. Also, some things can be extremely rare, but if they have no utility and nobody needs them for anything, their market valuation can be extremely low, so scarcity is no guarantee of value either. An example are exotic elements found in piles of radioactive waste – all quite rare, but nobody so far found any use for them, and as a rule you have to pay people to take them, not the other way around.

And then it dawned to me: market doesn’t discover the value of things. It reveals a quantified representation of human needs, desires, greed and fear. Market is a mirror in which humanity sees itself through value it puts on things. If probabilistic statistics quantifies human ignorance, marketplace quantifies human values: shelter, food, energy, hygiene and cosmetics, greed, status symbols, sex, guilt, fear. Basically, if Ponzi schemes are popular, what does that reveal? It reveals that people are greedy and stupid, not that the schemes themselves are actually useful, valuable or scarce. They stop being popular only when enough people lose enough money that it becomes common knowledge that they are the opposite of useful.

This is also my answer to the question of inherently worthless assets that trade on the market for often insane amounts of money – why are they popular, why are they valuable, and what does it mean. It’s not the worthless asset that is made valuable, it’s the human greed and madness that became revealed and quantified. You can actually convert greed, madness, stupidity and sin into money, and it’s not only easy, it’s the foundation of the most profitable business models; for instance cosmetics and luxury items are ways of monetizing human vanity.

The more “normal” assets are very easy to evaluate in this manner – for instance, the fact that you buy food gives you the obvious answer that you need to eat in order to survive. The fact that you buy fuel for your car says you need mobility in order to function. However, luxury clothes, watches and cosmetics, they are more difficult, because their function is to create an outward appearance of yourself, and the underlying motive can be dignity, vanity, or in fact anything. It can be samyama on some aspect of God, or it can be deception, of both self and others. In any case, it’s a wonderful opportunity for introspection.

Thoughts on value

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I watched a video today where some average young people were shown watches of various brands, and they tried to guess the price. More often than not, they would be wrong by several orders of magnitude – for instance, estimating a Paul Newman Daytona as something in a $800 magnitude, while the actual price is $250000.

That made me think: are they ignorant, or are we often duped into believing that paying extreme amounts is reasonable, for things that aren’t worth that much money in any reasonable frame of reference? I used to live in a world where mechanical watches were the norm, and it used to be that a watch would justify its higher price by accuracy, durability and actual features, and “brand” was just something that would make you recognise things that were well made. Today, the concept of “brand” is detached from every possible objective criterion of quality, and a brand like Seiko or Citizen can produce a watch that is objectively better by every single metric, compared to top tier luxury watch brands, and yet they are perceived as “mass market junk” that cannot possibly command the price of the “quality” brands. The madness goes so far that actual metrics, such as accuracy, are seen as irrelevant, or even as a property of low-tier watches. I’m not necessarily even talking about quartz watches – for instance, ETA coaxial movement designed for the Omega brand, with a silicon hairspring and non-magnetic properties, is technically speaking the best mechanical watch movement ever made, and yet this somehow doesn’t have anything to do with the price of the watch. Omega Aqua Terra coaxial is seen as a mid-range watch, while some Rolex or Patek that is an order of magnitude less accurate, and also infinitely less resistant to magnetic fields, can command ten times greater price, or more. This is obviously beyond all reason, so why would anyone be surprised that normal people, who didn’t memorise the expensive brands so that they could tell what should be expensive, can’t tell based on the actual features of a watch? If the actual reality is that a technically superior watch can be a thousand times less expensive than a limited-series “haute horlogerie” brand watch, then you can’t really come up with a reasonable estimate of the price based on the inspection of the features of the actual device, which is another way of saying that the price is based on bullshit.

This made me think further, and I remembered a similar video where someone was asking people on the street how much do they think a gold coin was worth, and I think most of them would rather take a $5 candy bar than a $500 coin, or something like that. It makes you wonder how well we would fare if we had to trade gold and silver for goods and services in some post-apocaliptic scenario. If I showed a Krugerrand to random people, how many would understand that this thing costs $1900? After all, it’s just a coin, and coins are perceived as something of low value today. As for gold, most people never saw gold in person, except in insignificant amounts used in jewelery. Any estimate of value would probably be wildly off.

I can’t really blame them – I was shocked to learn how much an ounce of Rhodium was. I know that it’s a Platinum-group metal, and I expected the price of Rhodium to be comparable to that of Platinum, but it is not. It was – up until 2020, when the price went off exponentially for some reason I won’t even pretend to understand because it’s probably something to do with some industry or another, and it’s now in the order of magnitude of 20000 USD/oz, which is about ten times more than gold, and 16 times more than Platinum.

One conclusion is that our intuitive sense of intrinsic value can be wildly off. Supply and demand as a measure of value can produce very weird valuations where, at least temporarily, complete garbage can appear to be precious, and otherwise precious things can be valued as garbage. More often than not, market valuations are a measure of human greed and fear, rather than intrinsic value. Also, people tend to value things that other people value; when they see that something is commonly perceived as precious, they will usually adjust their sense of value to match. That’s not the case just with watches or precious metals; it extends everywhere.

In any case, it’s a very interesting line of thought.

Lights off, but buy a Tesla

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The EU is implementing new 2016-2019 laws, designed to “save energy”, among other things by turning off the lights in businesses overnight. To quote a site that commented on it:

“The European Commission’s snappily-titled “Ecodesign Working Plan 2016 – 2019” will require all light fixtures and accessories sold after September 2020 to meet improved efficiency targets. In the previous version of the rules, studio and theatre lighting was exempt from the targets, as long as the lights designed for this purpose were not used domestically. But this exemption has now gone missing.”

 

Basically, replace all the tungsten filament light sources with LED because nature and ecology and electricity is precious, but we are supposed to believe their propaganda about switching our ICE cars to electric. Let’s all buy electric cars, because electricity is green and abundant, and fossil fuels are evil.

If you believe they won’t pass a law restricting private ownership and use of electric cars, being the worst “pollutants” and “waste” of energy as soon as people transition to them, you obviously haven’t been paying attention.

My take on r/WallStreetBets

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There’s been lots going on regarding r/WallStreetBets and I’ve been paying attention, of course. Let’s summarize.

r/WallStreetBets is a Reddit group where traders evaluate investment options. The opinions on who they actually are, are divided, but it is my opinion that at least a percentage of them are professionals: expert traders who do this for a living, some of whom used to work for Wall St. hedge funds, investment banks etc. I’ve seen media portrayal of r/WallStreetBets as a band of disenfranchised millennials who are trading with welfare money out of their moms’ basements, and this image is very misleading. The part of them being millennials might be true, but think Elon Musk. Some of those people could invest 10M USD just for shits and giggles. I’ve seen reports of some players using 640M USD. Those are not what you would expect to see if you trusted the “main stream” media, were you by some chance foolish enough to do so. No. The top 1% percent or so of r/WallStreetBets are basically super-wealthy people who habitually invest in the stock market, and have a very large portfolio, and a comparatively small amount they can gamble away on questionable things.

One of those questionable things is investing in shares of failed or deeply distressed companies, where the Wall St. professionals, namely the hedge funds, are betting on them going belly-up in the very recent future, and are invested in short-selling their shares, which basically means “borrowing” shares now, to be paid at a later date at the price as it is on that date, and selling them now, at the current price. If the price goes down as expected, they sell expensive, buy cheaper and pocket the difference. In cases where they are betting that the company will declare bankruptcy before they need to purchase the shares, they gamble by “borrowing” more shares than there actually are in existence; one such case was “caught” by the r/WallStreetBets analysts, who found out that the shares of GameStop are shorted at a record rate of 140% of total shares in existence, which means the hedge funds who were betting heavily on the company going belly-up in the short term could be caught with their pants down if the price of the shares happened to be driven up by, let’s say, record demand from a huge number of Internet traders from r/WallStreetBets. Initially, it was seen as an opportunity to make money, because the investment funds will be forced to buy the shares at higher prices to close their short positions, but very quickly it evolved into “payback time, bitches”, because those hedge funds apparently have many things to account for, such as people’s homes being foreclosed, or people’s businesses struggling because all the credit money circulates in the upper echelons of Wall St., never trickling down into the actual economy, and they are seen as someone with a deep insider connection with any sitting government, because they finance politicians from both parties, and so the government keeps bailing them out whenever their gambles fail to pay off. This was seen as a “let’s see you get out of this” situation, and that is when large groups of young/disenfranchised people started gambling on GameStop shares with money they couldn’t afford to lose, basically throwing their livelihoods on the line in an attempt to damage the “system” they perceived as inherently oppressive.

At some point the GameStop shares jumped from the initial $17.25 to $483, but later fell down to $225. It is my opinion that this will be hugely profitable for those who bought below $100 and sold above $400, but I also expect the short-sellers to have bailed themselves out quite early, and then used the momentum to make money out of it, and the millions of amateur traders who came to the party too late, and those who naively hold on to the stock for too long, will be left with the bag, even poorer than they were before. This just can’t end well for the majority of investors because the fundamentals of GameStop aren’t good enough to justify anything even approaching this astronomic valuation. What needs to be seen is whether the hedge funds that were caught with their pants down already closed their short positions accepting a limited loss, because if that is so, remaining in GameStop shares might actually help the hedge funds recuperate their previous losses. The ability of professionals to out-manoeuvre hysterical mobs who think in memes and emotions should not be underestimated. r/WallStreetBets movement can basically execute only one manoeuvre at the time, because if they try to introduce complexity, they disperse, and, although the “leaders” of the movement are highly competent and intelligent, the mob they are guiding has huge inertia, measured in days, in a job where seconds can make all the difference. It is therefore my opinion that it is quite possible for the movement to produce real and significant effects, but it is also almost certain that most of them will incur heavy losses.

There was talk about r/WallStreetBets trying to influence the silver market, silver being the most “shorted” thing in existence today. As a result, the silver prices spiked and the retail sellers of physical silver sold out their inventory within a day. People on r/WallStreetBets concluded that the idea must come from the hedge funds themselves, who are trying to disperse the attack on GameStop, but I would not be so sure. In fact, I think r/WallStreetBets “short squeeze” of GameStop seems to have given some very smart people an idea, because it is known in the precious metals market that the prices of silver and gold are being artificially suppressed for a very long time, and the supply side hasn’t really recovered from the shortages that became visible around April last year. Also, Tesla is really ramping up their car production, and they need significant amounts of silver to put each of those cars on the road. r/WallStreetBets might actually have very little to do with the rising prices of silver and gold, because I expected those to rise before GameStop was even a thing, for completely unrelated reasons, having everything to do with the fundamentals. Sure, I wouldn’t mind someone accelerating the process, but I certainly don’t rely on that alone.

My opinion on gold and silver is known, as is the fact that I’m heavily invested in gold, and to a much lesser degree in silver, because I expect the financial system to be restructured with gold as one of the main pillars of currency, together with real-estate mortgages and sovereign bonds. For that to happen, the price of gold will have to go up by an order of magnitude, and I don’t know what silver will do. Also, I expect the real-estate prices to collapse, because they are currently maintained at this level by artificial means. The entire system – governments, banks, stock market, businesses – is presently stretched beyond the expected breaking point and the only thing keeping it together is a combination of inertia and unwarranted optimism. This overextended rubber band will break, and when it does, I don’t want to be anywhere near. I see this stock market madness of inflating certain shares far beyond their fundamentals as a symptom of desperation, and historically it is a precursor to the collapse.

Sure, there is good money to be made in this phase, if you’re positioned well, you know what you’re doing and are willing to gamble, but my assessment is that when this thing starts to unravel, huge amounts of money will start collapsing into precious metals as the only remaining safe haven, and I want to be there already when that happens. The only reason why we haven’t had hyperinflation in the Eurodollar zone already is because all of the money is basically locked in the upper echelons of finance and business, none of it trickling down to the masses, so basically the wealthy have so much cash they can’t decide what to spend it on, and the masses are starved for basic liquidity and fundamentally disenfranchised. Also, the system is so hyper-regulated, it is almost impossible to do business at all. If you think this can end well, I have a piece of real estate on the Moon to sell you.