Ferris Bueller and George Bailey Were Right
"Life moves pretty fast, you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."
Fast? We’re in Chuck Yeager (RIP) breaking the Sound Barrier territory these days and we could use some of his attitude.
Some business leaders have that attitude:
WSJ Article on Oracle, Hewlett Packard, and Elon Musk moving from California to Texas.
Moves by high-profile companies to Texas from California are likely to improve the personal finances of executives and offer employees more affordable housing—but make little difference to the firms’ tax bills.
“A lot of it, honestly, is just long-term workforce availability,” said King White, chief executive of Site Selection Group, a consulting firm that helps companies decide where to open or move facilities.
Companies have also grown frustrated with the cost of attracting and keeping employees, as living expenses soar in Northern California especially, and as regulatory mandates expand. “The compounding effects of California’s economic and political environment is making it more difficult to run a business effectively,” Mr. White said.
Recent study by the Virginia Realtors on why Virginia faces a similar reality.
"Between 2010 and 2018, the Commonwealth of Virginia grew by more than half a million residents, ranking 9th in terms of overall population growth. The state experienced strong natural population increase (i.e. more births than deaths) and steady international immigration; however, Virginia was one of only two states in the top 10 to see negative net domestic migration, where the number of people moving out of the state to other places in the U.S. was greater than the number moving in. (California was the other state with negative net domestic migration.)"
Speaking of Reality and Elon Musk, this article shares Musk's views on our need for electricity and Electric Vehicles (EVs) going forward. Spoiler math alert:
Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated that the world’s electricity consumption would likely double as EVs become the norm. While this doesn’t account for the additional energy needs created by our increased reliance on digital devices (something that’s already hard to calculate as electronics become more efficient), he believes it will create massive demand for nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal energy solutions if sustainability is to be entertained.
Personal note - our family built a facility in the late 90s and used geothermal for the offices. Great investment. Highly recommend.
Speaking of Electric Vehicles and the GO Attitude, Volkswagen is a critical leader in the move originally investing over $50 BILLION to mass produce EVs per this 2018 Reuters article and now they have bumped it up to $86 BILLION just two years later.
VW definitely found the skinny pedal on the right a few years ago.
Here is the VW link to inform on lithium mining which is going to be a major geopolitical force as we transition away from combustion engines.
VW’s Board Endorses Turn to Electric this week:
shares rose nearly 8% on Tuesday after the car maker’s top shareholders and union leaders publicly backed Chief Executive Herbert Diess’s strategy to refocus the company on electric vehicles.
The action by the company’s directors late Monday, including confirming several top appointments by Mr. Diess, put an end to weeks of internal wrangling over the pace of change at the world’s biggest auto maker by sales. The CEO’s push to accelerate the shift to electric cars and quickly fill empty executive positions had met opposition from labor leaders, who under German law hold half the seats on Volkswagen’s board of directors.
While Toyota’s leader warns of too much hype over EVs.
saying advocates failed to consider the carbon emitted by generating electricity and the costs of an EV transition.
Toyota President Akio Toyoda said Japan would run out of electricity in the summer if all cars were running on electric power. The infrastructure needed to support a fleet consisting entirely of EVs would cost Japan between ¥14 trillion and ¥37 trillion, the equivalent of $135 billion to $358 billion, he said.
“When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?” Mr. Toyoda said
Still, as Musk points out, the world will need more energy generation and storage.
Critical to that is natural gas which is why Russia’s construction of massive pipelines to Germany (Nord Stream 2) and China are so important to understand in the grand scheme.
From Geopolitical Futures Daily on December 3:
Russian gas to China. The 690-mile (1,100-kilometer) middle section of the China-Russia East natural gas pipeline started operations, carrying Russian gas to Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei in northern China. The Kremlin projects that by 2025 Chinese demand for Russian gas via the pipeline could reach 38 billion cubic meters annually.
Recent articles from Geopolitical Futures on Russia’s New Economic Model and China staring “down a financial reckoning” are must reads.
More than complicating China’s place in the world is this op-ed about forced labor for picking cotton in China.
In 2018 more than half a million ethnic minorities—from Kazakhs to Uighurs—were coerced into China’s cotton fields through Beijing’s “labor transfer” program.
These are the findings of my new report on forced labor in China’s cotton production published by the Center for Global Policy. The U.S. government recently banned all cotton and related products from a state-owned paramilitary entity in Xinjiang on forced-labor grounds, but the true extent of this injustice runs much deeper. Xinjiang’s entire cotton production is tainted with coercion.
Xinjiang is the largest cotton-growing region in the world, producing 85% of Chinese cotton and 20% of the global supply. Lavished with government subsidies, Xinjiang cotton has become central to global supply chains.
Recall DNI John Ratcliffe’s WSJ op-ed China Is National Security Threat No.1
The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically. Many of China’s major public initiatives and prominent companies offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.
The irreverent and hysterical folks over at South Park made big waves with their episode Band in China. Warning - cartoon violence and profanity. Mickey Mouse drops quite a few F bombs.
They also apologized to China:
Let’s pivot back to the Commonwealth.
State Senator Chap Petersen penned an op-ed in the Richmond Times Dispatch calling for Campaign Finance Reform.
State politics should be about what’s best for Virginia — not George Soros or the Koch brothers…. The federal courts repeatedly have upheld the constitutionality of such limits…..It is a matter of preserving democracy for Virginians, at least those who run for office with the intent of representing their community. Without these limits, our state will continue to be a plaything for out-of-state donors. And the commonwealth deserves much better than that.
Imagine if the federal elections had as much money coming into the US as out-of-state donations click their way into Virginia’s political coffers.
Speaking of “the Commonwealth deserving much better”…
State Senator and candidate for governor, Amanda Chase wrote on her Facebook page this week in separate posts:
Tuesday morning at 4:25:
President Trump should declare martial law…
One wonders if she’s aware that a militarized civilian government might not support her views on the Second Amendment and mask mandates. I won’t even speculate on vaccines.
The next day at 11:48 pm she posted :
Make no mistake. We are at war. The Democratic Party hijacked our 2020 Presidential Election and have committed treason.
Martial Law. War. Treason.
But Chase did manage to include a donation link for her campaign.
Looks like tele-evangelism has given way to PoliVangelism as a means of separating people from their money.
Two National Review articles on the 2020 election being neither rigged nor stolen.
Before you ask, Virginia’s Constitution Article IV Section 7 states:
Each house shall judge of the election, qualification, and returns of its members, may punish them for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds of its elected membership, may expel a member.
More from Virginia:
Virginia joined the antitrust law suit against Google.
And after the first three quarters of the year, Virginia had already far exceeded our record of drug overdose deaths with 2,053. The previous record was 1,626.
At that rate, Virginia will have 2,737 drug overdose deaths for 2020 or 7.5 per day.
Still here?
As a reward for your gluttony, here is a thought provoking article from First Things - The Road to Revolution:
The classic theory of revolution was formulated by Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution that “it was precisely in those parts of France where there had been the most improvement that popular discontent ran highest.” Revolution is not generally provoked by deteriorating conditions; rather, complaints tend to increase after conditions have already begun to improve. “The regime destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than the one that immediately preceded it, and experience teaches us that the most hazardous moment for a bad government is normally when it is beginning to reform.” The absolutist government of Louis XIV had provoked less resentment than did the milder rule of Louis XVI
Sounds a lot like American cities this summer, doesn’t it?
Of course, 2020 could have been worse…
It always could be worse.
Good time of the year to remember what really matters. Especially when things move so fast.