Juggling Dynamite

Devoted to helping humans evolve to smarter, more efficient, clean fuel and transport systems, Elon Musk attracts a gaggle of unfounded criticism from fake articles and authors who hate progress and/or work for the fossil fuel industry.    Apparently some people can think up nothing more productive to do than make up fake news stories to throw aspersions at those who are actually improving the world.  Bloomberg took the time to investigate and identify some of those posting fake facts and stories here:  Elon Musk vs the Trolls:

On Sept. 2 the conservative web magazine the Federalist published an article titled “Elon Musk Continues to Blow Up Taxpayer Money With Falcon 9.” The author was identified as Shepard Stewart. Two days earlier, the Stewart byline appeared on a piece on the Libertarian Republic website called “Here’s How Elon Musk Stole $5 Billion in Taxpayer Dollars.” Two days before that, the Liberty Conservative site carried a Stewart article headlined “Elon Musk: Faux Free Marketeer and National Disgrace.”

”Funny thing, though: Shepard Stewart isn’t a real person. “Definitely a fake,” says Gavin Wax, editor-in-chief of the Liberty Conservative. A chagrined Wax says the “Stewart” character “went totally dark on us after we published him.” Wax discovered that a photograph “Stewart” uses online appears to be an altered version of a former Twitter executive’s LinkedIn headshot.

Musk attracts an unusually large and varied number of shrouded online attacks, including phony op-ed pieces, websites with shadowy backers, and individuals who hide behind aliases. “These are tools used by those who don’t have facts on their side…”

The bottom line: Elon Musk attracts a wide array of real and fake online antagonists criticizing his work on electric cars, rockets, and solar panels.

The island of Ta’u in American Samoa, located more than 4,000 miles from the West Coast of the United States, now hosts a solar power and battery storage-enabled microgrid that can supply nearly 100 percent of the island’s power needs from renewable energy. This provides a cost-saving alternative to diesel, removing the hazards of power intermittency and making outages a thing of the past. Learn more here: http://bit.ly/2gwlDc4  Here is a direct video link.

Former MSNBC host Dylan Rattigan is continuing to lead in smart solutions as well:

Why not use hydroponics, solar panels and reverse osmosis water filtration to reduce poverty and conflict, in the United States and abroad? Why not use agriculture technology to help people in inner cities, refugee camps or war zones, and after natural disasters? And why not recruit veterans to help with everything from manufacturing to installation to operations?

Good discussion here on understanding cycles and the probability of investment outcomes as well as why most prognosticators using linear models never see loss cycles coming.  Worth the 40 min.

If you think predicting economies and financial markets is complex and cumbersome – think again. Renowned investor Raoul Pal’s proven probability framework is simple, easy and quick to learn.  Here is a direct video link.

The caveat I would add, is that intellectually understanding cycles and longer term probabilities does not mean you have conquered the human emotional cycle and our tendency to lose patience with our chosen risk management approach when it looks like things are not going as we expect in the short-run.  Cycles are long term predictable and in the shorter run, noisy and distracting.  We also always have to control and manage our capital risk in keeping with our own life cycle above all else. Even if we may be right in our assessment of longer term cycles, it is unwise and counterproductive to lose big chunks of our life savings in the shorter-run.

Via John Mauldin this week, we also get this update from Pal that overlays the US Presidential cycle looking into 2017 –being the first year of a new Presidential term, following a tw0-term President.

I recently noted that since 1910, the US economy is either in recession or enters a recession within twelve months in every single instance at the end of a two-term presidency… effecting a 100% chance of recession for the new President.

The following chart shows every NBER recession since 1910 (in yellow) with the new President after a two-term election marked in white and the new presidents after a single-term presidency in red. Wilson and Eisenhower appear as both. Only Coolidge saw more than a year (sixteen months) from his second-term election and the onset of the subsequent recession at the end of WWI…

Every single US recession bar one (with explainable circumstances) occurred around an election. Only two Presidents in history did not see a recession, and they were inaugurated after single-term Presidents.

Will this time Trump be different?  Unfortunately, as always, we will have to wait to find out.