"Investors purchased $8B of US Treasury Bonds from the non-issuing entity."
If you're Honda, you'd prefer that the purchaser of any Honda is purchasing their Honda from Honda. Honda doesn't care about the secondary sale of any one Honda, per se, but they'd certainly care if people start opening dealerships with fleets of effectively brand new Hondas immediately next to every Honda dealership.
Additionally, every seller that was a previous long-term holder represents decreased demand for Treasuries at the primary auction. Mark Carney put it eloquently yesterday during his speech with his analogy of "taking the sign out of the window". This represents someone taking their bid out of the auction.
Most of the actual wild fires just get put out. The big ones are happening because the build up is too big since all the smaller ones have been put out. It's all in service of the forestry industry.
what difference does the cause make if the end result is exactly the same as a natural event?
secondly, you could just as easily make this a case against CA environmental restrictions on logging. How many houses could have been built with those trees that went up in smoke? How many people could have been employed by the lumber industry? Now all those "green" trees are CO2 warming the atmosphere. It's almost as if CA wants crises (housing, employment, environment) because it gives their politicians more money and power.
Well, for starters, the Dixie Fire burned nearly a million acres and huge swaths of the Plumas and Lassen National Forests - the largest and most expensive fire in California history. It burned 70% of Lassen National Park.
I agree that forests are an economic resource and would argue that a fire, caused by humans and exacerbated by human forest management, is a devastating outcome economically. These aren’t wildfires that are merely periodically clearing the forest floor allowing for better forest propagation, they’re burning hot enough to kill everything - trees, soil, and anything in between. Along many parts of the Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California, you can see aspects of slopes that have been burned at various times over decades and see that those forests burned are struggling to come back. I hiked the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail this past summer and would argue that I have a decent sense of the status quo of the scope and qualities of the devastation of forest fire in those forests affected by those fires I’ve cited.
What difference does it make?
1. These aren’t forest regenerating/undergrowth clearing events - they’re apocalyptic in their devastation. A million acres unnecessarily burned in the Dixie Fire.
2. Forests are limited, threatened resources. Muir wrote a passage calling the sheep herd he was tending in his first summer in his beloved Sierra “hooved locusts” but managed to rationalize the devastation wrought by those sheep immediately after by reasoning that there still remain thousands of untouched high Sierra meadows. Just as there aren’t a thousand Tuolumne Meadows, there aren’t a thousand Lassen or Plumas National Forests. Every single one is irreplaceable on a timeframe that takes into account forest regeneration and the scale of these fires.
3. Paradise, CA. was completely devastated by the Camp Fire - the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history - and started by poorly maintained PG&E power infrastructure. Lahaina, Hawaii was utterly devastated in a similar fashion by a fire with a similar causes Even ignoring that our forests are being irrevocably destroyed, human caused forest fires are engulfing and destroying entire communities, killing people unable to evacuate ahead of wind driven firestorms.
4. Besides forest health, threat to life and property, here’s one that I’d actually expect to land: the threat posed by increasingly powerful fires started by humans and exacerbated by human activity (including the forest management you cited) driven by increasingly extreme weather conditions and events is going to make home insurance untenable. People are already being widely priced out of insurance markets whose actuaries are now pricing in risks that include potential for outcomes like every single home in Lahaina/Paradise/Malibu/Santa Monica is devastated.
What does it matter? Well, even handwaving away the devastation wrought on our forests by man made fire, those fires that affect you and your home insurance bill are essentially that complete set of fires that aren’t naturally occurring events. You don’t have to take my word for it - an actuary will have you understanding it sooner or later.
They don’t sell anywhere near the most cars, and their market share is shrinking. They also are a very VERY young manufacturer. This isn’t the right example to use imo.
Maybe Jeep? Very popular, dogwater quality. They take nearly half of the Consumer Reports “top 10 worst cars on the road” almost every year.
I met a guy in a gas station parking lot in southern New Hampshire who was towing a long trailer with a beat up Subaru Forester. A question of "what the heck is in the trailer?" led to him telling me about his glider and thermals and various techniques for gaining speed / altitude and turning it into distance.
Easily one of the best conversations I've ever had. There was nothing about his set-up that screamed what I imagine would be considered "well-off" in this crowd.
That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.
> That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.
Very much the case! (Well, idk quite what gp imagined, but it's not as expensive as many things.)
When I was learning, around 2020, I budgeted ~$300 / month for glider flying, + ~$600 (I think: they've gone up!) for annual club dues. These days the monthly would be a bit higher, and the dues more like $700-800, I think. Flying as a club member is a lot cheaper than rides; you pay for the tow and for time on the aircraft, but aircraft time is way, way cheaper than power (no fuel to burn, no engine to maintain) and the instructors are volunteers.
NB this is in a club environment. The upside is that it's cheap and the club environment is a really good place to learn by osmosis / watching everybody else / listening to stories / seeing all kinds of different situations. The downside is that it's a huge time commitment. You'll drive 1.5 hrs and hang around all day to get twoish flights, sometimes < 10 min. each. And you have to be willing to commit all of every Saturday (or Sunday) for a year plus: you need to be flying just about every week, and given that some weekends'll be weathered out you have to be ready to take advantage of every flyable weekend. Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
(I did the bulk of my training in 2020 and spring/early summer 2021. This was perfect: I was single and newish to the area I was living in, and thanks to Covid I had nothing else going on in my life. Even as things started to reopen in 2021 it was easy to maintain that "saturday? of course I'm at the field" habit.)
This is all harder to do as a Real Adult with responsibilities. Some folks manage to do it, but it's harder. Commercial operations, where you go and get a whole bunch of flying in relatively quickly, are also an option---but I hear there's a wide range of quality, and even the best won't get you the seasoning / airmanship you get from hanging around at the field every weekend for a year, flying in all sorts of conditions and taking advantage of the unofficial ground school from all the other instructor/student pairs there at the same time.
The economics change first once you've got your rating, when you're no longer doing short training flights and the bulk of your flying is (one hopes!) longer soaring flights; and then again when (if) you buy your own glider---but it's still that few thousand bucks / year order of magnitude. Expensive, but doable, especially compared to power.
Gliders themselves range from "surprisingly inexpensive" to "less expensive than a new powered aircraft", more or less. I'd expect to hear something like $5,000 for a Schweizer 1-26 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_SGS_1-26: classic glider, still widely flown by a devoted community, but appreciably lower performance than gliders built after the massive jump that came with the switch to fiberglass); I have a part-share in a Jantar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SZD-41_Jantar_Standard, early fiberglass) that totals $25,000 or a little less, with reasonably nice avionics.
So, all told, yes, flying gliders costs a meaningful amount of money, but isn't terribly terribly expensive. The question to ask yourself is really not whether you've got the money, but whether you've got the time.
You need to keep your nose on the grindstone for years to progress to glider cross country flying. Then you end up as an instructor and have to finagle time in your own glider. There's a bunch of time upgrading and updating flight instruments. You need a viable glider club to have enough people to get you in the air between working on club aircraft, equipment and airfield issues.
These guys had a big oxygen tank.
It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.
Thanks for sharing this detail. I've been interested in taking some form of flight training for a long time and finally have the financial means to do it, but I haven't decided whether to go with glider or powered flight. Your comments makes me realize that the time commitment might be larger than I can manage at this stage (two kids 1 and 5) and so may need to wait until a little later in life.
I want so badly to try and talk you into flying gliders, because it's amazing: way, way more fun (IMO) than the overwhelming majority of the power flying you can do as a civilian. And there are people who make it work! But ... probably this is wise, and better to make thoughtful decision.
It seems like this gets easier as the kids get older; I've seen parents of teenagers make it work. For some folks it's a family affair---several kids & one or both parents learning to fly. These families have been uniformly super fun to have at the field! For others I think it's a matter of the kids being old enough to have some independence, + I'm sure a very supportive partner.
So don't give up on gliders forever! I'm expecting times in my life when I can't get out to the field enough to stay proficient & safe, and I'll have to quit flying for a little---but a dearly hope not forever. It's just that, likewise, now's maybe not the right time for you.
> Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
They take more calendar time, but do they take more instruction? Because if they make the same progress per session, I don't see why you would think it inferior to spread it out over several years.
If you don't go often enough you definitely won't make the same progress per session. You'll spend most of each session trying to remaster what you lost from the last one.
For powered flying, one a week is already on the low end... most instructors would recommend 2-3x/week.
Flying skills are very perishable, especially when first learning. This is why there are several different rules about recency of experience before you can do things like carry passengers, recurrent training requirements, etc.
I didn't realize the skills were so perishable, but once you point it out it seems obvious.
Since you also mentioned powered flying, and since I imagine there are a lot of transferable skills, do people commonly learn both?
This reminds me of the scene in Margin Call [1] when the analyst discovers that their assumptions for the risk of highly leveraged positions are inaccurate.
> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia. Times New Roman was among the small set of typefaces bundled with early versions of Windows. It was also promoted as “web-safe,” meaning webmasters could reasonably assume it would render properly across platforms. In the early era of digitalization, choosing Times New Roman was often less a deliberate endorsement than a default imposed by limited options. Over time, the habit hardened into a standard, and institutions began to require it without much reflection, effectively borrowing their own authority to confer authority upon the typeface.
> And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?
Based on what? Biographical accounts by successful founders?
Nassim Taleb's Fooled By Randomness [1] covers the topic of mis-attribution of some causal factor X (i.e. grit) to some phenomena (i.e. business success) that can be effectively explained solely by randomness. In the specific case of successfully starting a business, causal factors are often mis-attributed post-facto through a lens that blatantly ignores survivorship bias [2].
is grit not required to make it to land in the survivorship bias pool? If your first failure is too hard on you and you quit, then, by definition, you can't succeed. Maybe grit doesn't count when everything goes your way always. I'm not sure anyone has experienced success without grit, but I could be entertained by anecdotes.
First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.
These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
I (mis)attributed an element of pre-destination to the word emergent that apparently doesn't map to the word properly used.
That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage.
It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination).
This feels like one of those moments where you're witnessing history be made in real-time. And I hate it.
It takes approximately zero effort to see how this could be both monetized and used for harm. This episode of Black Mirror is writing itself and congratulating itself in the comments.
At what point is the internet just ... dead? AI posts with AI comments generated for the sole purpose of spamming affiliate links to drop-shipped products we don't need to generate ephemeral satisfaction in fulfilling our purpose as an economics unit of consumption? Where do I sign up for the beta?
If you're Honda, you'd prefer that the purchaser of any Honda is purchasing their Honda from Honda. Honda doesn't care about the secondary sale of any one Honda, per se, but they'd certainly care if people start opening dealerships with fleets of effectively brand new Hondas immediately next to every Honda dealership.
Additionally, every seller that was a previous long-term holder represents decreased demand for Treasuries at the primary auction. Mark Carney put it eloquently yesterday during his speech with his analogy of "taking the sign out of the window". This represents someone taking their bid out of the auction.