Some thoughts prompted by recent news/events. Tuesday, Feb 15, 2022

While we westerners hypocritically enjoy oil/gas products and self-righteously condemn/regulate our USA energy industry, Russia gains leverage and our gas prices go up. Fact.

Let’s prioritize, praise and loosen regulations on our native energy industry. We can continue to, in the meantime, innovate on so-called clean energies.

The USA is prone. With a partly senile Neville Chamberlain leading and surrounded by ideologues who prioritize social issues important mostly to the rich but not helpful to the working class. Our hope is that business people continue to drive value creation, we experience a reversion to pragmatism politically, and democrats give the middle finger to the establishment and vote red to force dem leadership to return to serving working people

Continued housing price increases is a major problem. We need local regulators to unleash entrepreneurial developers to build supply ASAP. Allow high density condos to be built, manufactured homes to be installed, etc. If we don’t allow new supply to come fast, we will continue to see working folks priced out of buying homes and suffering from increased rent prices. As an owner of a large amount of real estate, what I am proposing is against my pecuniary interest because regulations cause real estate prices to go up… however, the concern for what's best for people should and does supersede.?

We shouldn’t be worried about inflation of goods. We should be worried about our most talented people going to work at big companies that are plateauing instead of joining entrepreneurial companies like Rex (or worse yet… going into politics!). Creative, entrepreneurial people can and must invent the way forward for humanity to have ever decreasing costs for goods and services.

The USA and the West need to build manufacturing infrastructure. This should start ASAP. It’s a gaping hole, and leaves us very much at the mercy of other countries for critical supplies in a time of crisis. I would imagine we’ve all learned this the hard way when we couldn’t get simple medical supplies when covid first struck. We need to have internal self-sufficiency or at the very least redundant suppliers who have a low correlated political risk to each other. Mexico is a great place to start investing more heavily into with joint ventures that help supply stuff currently available to us in places like Asia.?

Keeping housing prices down for the working class must be made a key initiative for our nation, including the federal, state and local government; and privately led entrepreneurial companies. Prices will continue to go up as governments create more money, causing asset inflation. One of the greatest checks against centralized powers (big tech, big gov, big media, etc.) is property/money; and the working class up to now has mostly aggregated their property/power via their personal home… this is vanishing before our eyes and we cannot let it.?

- regulations are what drive up housing prices most. The inability for entrepreneur developers to build density, whether in plots horizontally or vertically with high rise condos keeps the supply low while the demand continues to grow. Places like Seattle and San Francisco are prime examples

- Building highways are also key bc unlocks fast access to more land for folks, enabling them to commute easily to downtowns while living 60 miles away

- Tech entrepreneurs need to disrupt the real estate industry, causing services to become more efficient and lower cost: maintenance services, constructions, transactions costs, financial services, insurance, etc. This will drop housing costs.

- Lowering regulation or deregulating also in the field of driverless cars, enabling very low cost taxi transportation for homeowners who live far away. They can do their work in the taxi car while being transported at a fraction of today’s cost because driverless car will transport them. They could then live easily 90 minutes away and have pickup at their home door and dropoff at the office door. Unlocking an insane amount of cheap land (which we have plenty of in the USA and which is mostly not domiciled.?

- Deregulating by the SEC so that blockchain can allow ownership by retail investors, thus opening the way for the working class to own real estate even if they choose not to own a personal house or both own and invest.?

- Deregulating for tunneling. This will make way for more cheap land in two ways. By turning highways and streets into buildable land. And, secondly, and far more importantly, enabling people to live even 120 miles away and still get to work quickly and safely

- Air taxis are not the way. First, because gravity requires constant energy consumption to fight against. And secondly because people will not enjoy seeing cars flying around everywhere like birds. Third, environmentally, we’ll likely kill off a ton more birds and exacerbate air pollution.?

- Going next level with manufactured housing. Creating custom made homes using 3D printing. And, doing a better job at quickly manufacturing houses on scale.??

Very happy that the Canadian truckers took their courageous stance. Power to the people!

Peter Thiel’s departure from the board of meta/facebook is further bad news for that damned platform run by profit-by-human-exploitation mofos. The only voice providing a diversity of thought / ideas is gone from a powerful monopoly in control of so much of our data / communication. Further heightening the importance of the mission at Rex to create a new tech ecosystem grounded in virtue and focused on serving people?

It’s amusing how the government is so worried about inflation, being that they are the primary cause. It’s like the rabble rousers and the bouncers are one in the same at a bar

$100 per barrel oil. And the bad news is… it can get a lot worse still. The good and ironic news is that this crisis is self-inflicted because our frackers locally in the USA will save us if we let them

Cathie Wood and her team at ARK are leading thinkers in the tech space. Foolish to bet against. They have vision and courage, and will prove to be invictus. And, more importantly and refreshingly, they are good people in an otherwise darkened tech leadership world?

Glad we had Eminem performing at the superbowl with his surprisingly consistent look of: “I’m a rebellious teeny-bopper, fresh out of rehab”

I hope we’ve all learned forever that scientists should only report actual findings and be required to list all root sources of funding they received plus any other conflicts of interest (prior, current, future economic ties). And, then, people can decide what to do. Scientists must be descriptive, not prescriptive

US politics has reduced itself over the many years to a circus. Our current Jester-in-Chief could make us all laugh a lot more if we didn’t feel badly doing so. I can’t tell whether this all means we’re nearing the end of our great nation’s flourishing, or have reached the apex where who runs the country for 4 years is largely irrelevant (like a business so great that even bad management can’t stop it)

Hard to predict the future of office-based real estate… but I’ll do so anyway! Offices will face serious headwinds over the next 3 years as most come to believe (half correctly) that working remotely is “as productive” as working together in person. We’ll then face a pull back to somewhere in between prior office occupancy rates and today’s mass exodus because creative teamwork is exponentially more productive together over the long-term. Businesses will come to this realization, perhaps painfully. There’s a reason phenomena like agglomerations around certain industries happen (oil in the permian, fashion in Milan, finance in London/NY, software in Silicon Valley, cars in Detroit historically, film in Hollywood, etc.). The reason is that humans communicate far more quickly in person and develop relationships locally that form the relational bedrock that facilitates very fast, almost intuitive communication and the environment for serendipitous overflow / cross-pollination of ideas. That being said, some work is less creative and more process oriented, and thus can be done remotely. In summary, my prediction is we will see a continued high level of vacancy in offices for ~3 years and then see about half retreat back going fully in person. The other half will likely have fully remote and a hybrid of part remote, part in office.?

While I do predict some reversion to office after a 3 year winter of continued vacancy, I strongly think that the disbursement of people away from New York and California toward places like Austin will see a knock-on effect that is far more pronounced than a boomerang with some people returning to San Francisco, LA, New York, etc. The main reason is that most migrants will stay, thus pull behind them their grandparents, parents, siblings seeking to be closer to them. Plus businesses will pull additional talent needed to grow. Lastly, key supplier businesses (eg a key part supplier to Tesla) will also relocate to be closer to the businesses they are serving so as to be more responsive to pivots and secure the long-term relationship with their customer. All of this will build on itself, developing a life of its own. Although some people will indeed boomerang back to where they moved from, most will stay because of a variety of reasons: the quality of life, especially with modern, readily accessible amenities like air conditioning, is extraordinarily high; the costs are lower; the regulatory and government environments are far better; the culture is more open-minded and less judgmental; moving is extremely painful so no one will want to do so except for strong reasons; cognitive dissonance will set in where the initial decision will be rationalized as smart even if it was in fact dumb; and lastly opportunities will abound as the new areas are booming.?

Canada is invoking emergency powers to end demonstrations… wtf. The ability to peacefully protest is at the heart of a self-governed people. Bye-bye democracy if the people cannot protest

Just got a nice endorphin bump as a Texan when I heard Texas is suing Meta (aka Facebook) for a boatload. Hook ‘Em / Gig ’Em

Novak Djokovic is a human rights hero