Screwball

That has been going on for quite some time. I can only imagine how far it has come today (I've been retired for over 6 years). If you can automate a process and eliminate people, they will. I'll give you a couple of examples. 1) I worked for a tire company. I was in the mold division. We made the tire molds that made the tires. They were made out of aluminum (sometimes steel but those were different animals). Our raw material was a big round piece of aluminum. It was a large ring. It would come in on a truck and the shop guys would mount it on a large plate. From there it was turned, shaped, and machined with boring machines and 5 axis CNC machines. Once mounted to the plate it was never touched again by human hands until the final assembly and placed in a shipping box. This was going on in the early 2000s. 2) Assembly plant. This one happened to be washing machines. This is where the automation really pays off. Any repetitive task is target for automation, robots, whatever. They have X amount of assembly lines with workers adding parts at various stations along the line that might be a quarter of a mile long (or longer). The parts come from a warehouse on little trains pulled by a little truck like vehicle. The truck would pull 4 or 5 wagons behind it full of parts. They would go from the warehouse to the proper line, and proper line station, get emptied by a person, then return for more parts at the warehouse. This went on all day every day. There were dozens of these things all over the plant. They were driven by a person. Not anymore. They put something in the floor so the train could follow because they put sensors under the train. The sensors followed the path in the floor. The slowed them way down for safety. You could walk faster than the train but they never stopped except when unloaded and loaded. This eliminated every train driver for each train for each shift (3 a day 7 days a week). This was over 10 years ago. That was by far not the only push for automation. Anything and everything that could be automated will be automated, period. The rest of the story, and kind of funny. The workers could see the future and what this automation/robotic push was going to do. So the natural thing for them, and maybe the only way to fight back, was to sabotage the automation. By accident, they found out a simple bag of potato chips could stop a train. Turns out, a bag of chips bought out of the vending machine had a reflective (silver looking) inside. Guessing it was to help keep light out of the bag. An empty bag of chips with the bag fully open sitting in the aisle where the train ran would make it stop. The reflecting bag messed up the optics of the robot sensor and it would stop dead in the aisle. They would have to call maintenance or someone to come fix it and send the little guy on it's way again. In that world the LAST thing you want to do it stop the line. One day I was there and the process guy told me they had to tell the vending machine people to remove all the potato chips from the vending machines because it was causing too many line shutdowns. Too funny - take that automation.

Maybe they should learn to count. 🙂

Yea, let's take a peek a some of them. First ORCL How about NVDA The MAGS ETF is holding up, but a big red candle today; They are suppose to go from the bottom left to the top right...

They piss away enough money each and every year - and have done so my entire lifetime - to give we the people the same health"care" as these worthless pukes who inhabit DC are fortunate to have. The money we pay on the interest on our debt alone would do wonders... Money is fungible, so just an example. Anyone who thinks these worthless ****s are going to fix this cluster **** (of their own making) has their head firmly stuffed up their ass.

How about some chart porn. First the S&P. Since the recent highs from interest rate euphoria the S&P is now back inside that long candle from back on October 10. Yellow arrow are the rate cuts. And then there is this one - Silver. The June 24th bubble at $35.195 to today at $67.18. What a ride! That's almost a double in 7 months.

A fine line between a genius and an idiot... If Space X IPO's at some point, he might be our first trillionaire.

I plugged the exact same string into Google's Gemini and got this: Just for fun, I did it again; Not good.

Venezuela is all about oil. Simple as that. That's been the plan since we needed oil. Also why the POS Marco Rubio was confirmed 99-0 as the person to make that happen. For every unit of growth, it takes a unit of energy. And now we have all these data centers!!! Git-r-done! No energy, no growth. Physics can be a bitch.

Funny, from that EIA report: I had a little AI conversation with my Aussie buddy. What kind of numbers are we talking about. Somewhere between .6 to 2.3 percent of US annual usage according to that EIA report. How much is that and what does it to? That sounds nuts, but that's what it says.

EV investments. Needs infrastructure to scale. Don't forget the crypto mining uses uses lots one may never consider. Add the data centers and the demand that comes along with them. Remember the "going green" push to use renewables and new tech for power? How long will it take to scale, if it can? Tracking electricity consumption from U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations - from the eia.gov How Much Additional Power Will Data Centers Need by 2035? Crypto is a small percentage but I would guess location may matter for a grid.

The company mentioned in the article above is CoreWeave who IPOed in March. Ticker Symbol CRWV if you want to have some fun. It has, as the article stated, almost doubled this year, but it did take a 10% hit on Friday. Somebody with brass balls can trade that prick, I want nothing to do with it.

Good article. Couple of things that caught my eye; You don't say! No, tell me it ain't so. If it brings down major banks and insurers we know what happens next. We have already watched that movie and it's not pretty.

Well, you have people like Neel Kashkari and Austan D. Goolsbee on the FOMC, but I don't think Neel (cabin a woods or some sort of horse****) Kashkari has a vote right now. Goolsbee is a ghoul and FOS up to his ears. Neel... I remember people defending that little creep back during TARP days. Spit!

This is bigger than people understand. I'm old, will be 70 next year. My crazy retired buddies and people our age are nothing but a heath care bad news machine. Nothing but horror stories. It became worse when private equity started buying the medical system and turned into a profit center. If they can automate it with AI, or find a way to cut costs with it, they will do so. Our health care system will only get worse and our loved ones will suffer. But the stock price will go up. Let's have a little fun... Incorrect. If you ever worked in a hospital, rest home, or assistant living facility you would immediately know what that is. And it ain't dogs. AI will never replace the people who do the incredible work they do in this most challenging industry. My respect for them is off the charts. Too easy to go ask HAL as a student, or a corporation, instead of making it about our people. What can possibly go wrong?

And then there is AI and health care....Good idea? Maybe not. Here is an article about using AI in health care. I'll paste one quote from the article; AI’s errors may be impossible to eliminate – what that means for its use in health care That doesn't sound good. Wonder what a real doctor might say? One of the financial blogs I read has a doctor who has posted there for quite a few years. I think he's a smart and good guy from reading all his stuff over the years, so I trust him. This is his reply to that article which is being discussed; If wasn't already skeptical of our medical system...