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Adam's avatar

Great write up Steve. Also looking forward to your updated model portfolio with current company valuations. Appreciate your posts.

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Unemployed Value Degen's avatar

Thank you

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Blake's avatar

and, tariffs raised 80 billion in revenue last year for the US, the income tax 2.3 trillion. So, we'll have to increase tariffs by 25 times their present rate to replace the income tax. Should be interesting.

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Unemployed Value Degen's avatar

I completely agree, the real problem is the level of spending.

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jeff klugman's avatar

thanks for the update. a different way to explain jevons that i, at least, found easier to understand, was that people thought that as coal powered engines became more efficient there would be reduced demand for coal. instead, as the engines became more efficient and cheaper to run, many more uses were found for such engines and coal demand increased.

as for the sell-off in acdc, a lot of the gains in all energy related stocks was based on "big data centers need big energy". the clearest example for me was landbridge, which has a nonbinding letter of interest with some unnamed hyperscaler to set up a data center in the permian- supplying a complete package of nat gas for power, water for cooling, and produced water offtake injection, localized in texas so not crossing state lines, and in the middle of nowhere so not stirring up nimby problems. lb was down 18% yesterday after sharp gains since going public. and all this movement was before anything was built or drilled, just on the potential prospect of a data center.

you can already run lower end ai's on your laptop. if energy efficiency increases then ai adoption becomes much cheaper and thus will be quicker and more widespread, as jevons noted. but it's less clear what the implications are for energy. it would appear to point to more widely distributed lower capacity energy production. thus also the hit to nuclear.

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KD's avatar

Spot on except the claim China is lying. The US has attempted to restrict technology exports to China to prevent them from developing more sophisticated AI, so in all likelihood, necessity was the mother of invention, and China had to figure out how to do AI better on the cheap. They are graduating more engineers every year than exist in the entire US, so there is plenty of human capital available. Also, major breakthrough on fusion sustaining a reaction for 1066 seconds, using their superconducting tokamak that the West can't duplicate as reported in Oil Price.

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Blake's avatar

Hey, maybe economists keep talking about the value of free trade the way they do for the same reasons doctors keep talking about germs causing disease-RFK jr. may question the value of modern medicine the way Oren Cass criticizes free trade, but one is just a much a crackpot as the other.

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Sam L's avatar

Would be great to get updates on BW as well

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