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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Contra Scott's too much money in dark almonds piece, I think the reason that political campaign donations are relatively low is that it's really hard to buy an election. Bloomberg tried to back in 2020 and his campaign went nowhere. Money does matter, but the candidate matters a lot more. $1 to Trump makes a bigger difference than $3 to Harris. And Trump appearing on Rogan might have been worth $100 million, but he didn't have to pay a cent.

yeah. Hype is overrated, as is money in politics. Look at all the hype over bitcoin over the past 3-4 years yet the price has hardly done anything; meanwhile unsexy SPY/voo crushed it. VC/crypto bros showered $ on Trump for his support; if i had to wager, they will see big fat zero for their efforts. It's hard enough to pull the levers of power by the very people who are are in power...good luck doing it indirectly. Politics in the US is influenced by seniority and connections, which is how such underwhelming choice as Harris got so far anyway. She had paid her dues.

Bitcoin is at $81,000 right now...

Over 3 years (from the last ATH in November '21) it's roughly even with SPY, maybe a little behind. Over 2 years it crushes SPY. Over 4 years (and any further) it crushes SPY.

Comparing it to spy actually handicaps it in favor of bitcoin. A more appropriate comparison controlling for volatility would be something like 2-3x SPY, like UPRO, which beats Bitcoin by a bigger margin. Controlling for volatility, Bitcoin has , as of Today, slightly greater returns and vastly more volatility which makes it worse .

But so far, yes, you're right that Bitcoin as of now is the better performing asset nominally speaking.

UPRO doesn't seem to have performed that well.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/upro

On 1/1/2020, it was at $36, now it's at $95. Tesla went from $36 to $335. Bitcoin did even better, going from about $7,000 to $88,000 today. Even Apple went from $74 to $224, it did better than UPRO (and pays dividends). Microsoft did similarly well.

It's not like Microsoft or Apple were unheard of back in early 2020, they're basically blue-chips.

ETFs are generally mediocre investments and have management fees, better to just pick out stocks or crypto specifically. If we look at just the 1 year, Bitcoin is up 140%, UPRO is up a measly 100%. UPRO might be a decent investment but it's not a great one.

A decent amount of volatility is good. You want to get in before the institutional investors, not after they've pumped the market up to high heaven. They're already all over ETFs.

It has done well but it hasn't exactly been 'belly button lint in exchange for untold riches' if you've jumped on board any time since like 2016.

If you jumped onboard 14 hours ago, you'd already have made 7-8% profit, which is what SPY might make in a year. It's at 87K now, rising to 88 as I write this post.

Untold riches for nothing is a very high standard that we've only ever seen with bitcoin and ETH (which was originally distributed to BTC addresses). There used to be BTC faucets where people gave them away, evangelizing to new users.

Hype can certainly help. Without some positive attention even the best product will sit on the shelf. On the other hand most people will be smart enough to notice when the sales pitch is overselling the actual product.

Kamala had a lot of negatives that were pretty obvious. She’s annoying and has a nervous laugh that’s obnoxious. She can’t give interviews, and when she does, her obvious non-answers are barely comprehensible. She cannot generate enthusiasm for her own ideas. Her rallies needed concerts just to get people to show up. At the end of the day, all the marketing in the world can’t make New Coke taste good.

She is a caricature of everything the right attributes to the left. But we're talking an extremely shallow pool of choices.

It continues to strike me as odd that a party that dominates the Ivy Leagues and Wall Street has had to field back to back candidates that went to Delaware and Howard grads.

And the party that loves the uneducated went with the Ivy League; both Bushes went to Yale and Trump to the University of Pennsylvania.

And Vances is OSU>Yale IIRC. A path generally only for the hyper gifted.

Undoubtedly he’s smart, but hillbilly kid who enlisted and became a military journalist in Iraq is one of those stories Yale admissions would love, not that I’m sure he didn’t also do very well on the LSAT.

You would think so, but actually admissions stats indicate a strong discrimination effect at Ivies against rural kids.

Really? A straight married middle aged woman who dresses professionally, supports Israel, is seen as moderate by the progressives in her base, is the caricature of everything attributed to the left? I'd have to disagree pretty heavily.

I would have thought that a young LGBTQ Palestine defender who is single or promiscuous, has had multiple abortions, supports UBI, and has blue hair would be the choice of caricature for the right leaning among us. Do I misunderstand what the right attributes to the left? Is being 'annoying' and not generating enthusiasm all it takes to be a leftist caricature?