Checking on the Snowflake stock price

by philg

On April 1, 2021 I began questioning the value of Snowflake (SNOW) stock relative to Oracle (ORCL). I did a follow-up two years ago, How is Snowflake stock doing?:

SNOW is down nearly 30 percent while the S&P 500, thanks to Joe Biden’s careful stewardship of the U.S. economy, is down 10 percent (but actually that 10 percent over 1.5 years is more like 25 percent once inflation is factored in, a stunning loss of wealth for Americans).

In April 2021, SNOW was valued at roughly 30 percent of the value of Oracle (ORCL), the backbone of business data processing. What is the company’s market cap today, as a percentage of Oracle’s market cap? SNOW is worth $54 billion. Oracle is worth $165 billion. So I think the philip.greenspun.com fact checking department must rate my April 2021 claim as #False. SNOW turned out to be a loser for an investor, but not because 30 percent of Oracle’s valuation was absurd.

Let’s try to figure out how an investor who shorted SNOW on April 1, 2021 to buy ORCL would have done. It’s a touch tricky because Oracle has paid investors a dividend of $1.28-$1.60 per year during this period while Snowflake hasn’t paid dividends (the company has been losing money every quarter so where would the funds for a dividend come from?). It seems that Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance have been stripped of features so I can’t figure out how to get a custom-date-range chart out of either. If we look at the five-year chart on Google, though, we can see that Snowflake has gone down from $236 to about $111 (Sept 26 price) while Oracle has more than doubled (in nominal dollars) from $72 to $168. In other words, Oracle stock has kept pace with inflation in the cost of buying a house (house prices up 50 percent and mortgage rates up to the point that a monthly mortgage payment has roughly doubled) while Snowflake stock, um, hasn’t.

Since there is more to corporate life than delivering profits to shareholders, let’s also check in on “Snowflake’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion” (from the apparently white male CEO):

“While diversity, equity and inclusion has long been a focus for Snowflake, we are committed to doing more. We have the responsibility to lead, and we will do so. Snowflake, under my personal leadership, will undertake a comprehensive review across our company of all of our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to help ensure that we are taking appropriate steps. We have a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion council at Snowflake, and I am proud of the work they have done.”

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are not causes — they are important pillars that are central in what we do as a company. This important effort continues, and we will do our part to lead.”

So… Snowflake is a leader in diversity, but was not a great stock to buy if you wanted to preserve your purchasing power.

For completeness, let’s also look at the S&P 500 on the five-year chart:

The S&P 500 has gone up from about 4,000 on April 1, 2021 to 5,750 today. In other words, someone who bought and held the S&P 500 would have experienced an erosion of purchasing power during this period (up in nominal dollars; down in real dollars adjusted for the cost of buying a house). The erosion is more severe when one considers that the S&P 500 investor owes capital gains taxes (24 percent federal plus up to 13.3 percent California state tax) on what are entirely fictitious gains (due solely to inflation).

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Fifth anniversary of Kamala Harris defending freedom of speech

by philg

Five years ago, today:

In case the above is memory-holed, an image version:

(Professor Saad corrected his typo (“FREE societies”) in a follow-up, so this also reminds me that it has been two years since Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Where’s the Edit button for replies?)

Some other comments from fall 2019:

  • You running for President of China?
  • Sorry you don’t like the constitution. Maybe you should run for leader of a different country.
  • Thank god this hysterical candidate who tramples on the constitution will never be President.
  • Democrats want to ban all speech they disagree with. Bunch of fascists. Good luck keeping the 1st amendment if Dems ever get full power.
  • So you are against the 1st amendment?
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Who is the fink in Lebanon? And why didn’t Hezbollah leaders leave their bunker after the apartment buildings were cleared?

by philg

Hezbollah has been having some difficulties lately in Lebanon, a country that should be a near-ideal host for an anti-Israel organization (almost as good an ideological fit as within Harvard University, Columbia, Dearborn, Michigan, or Minneapolis). Lebanon declared war on Israel in 1948, never accepted a peace treaty (unlike Egypt and Jordan), and never recognized the state of Israel. 80 percent of Lebanese polled were happy about the October 7 attack by Hamas, UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Israel. In theory, almost everyone in Lebanon hates Israel and Israelis and wants to stay at war with Israel. Yet… someone inside Lebanon has apparently been feeding helpful information to the IDF. Without finks inside Lebanon, how is Israel able to identify Hezbollah-affiliated structures suitable for its precision bombs? Are the informers Lebanese Christians (a shrinking minority, gradually being replaced by Palestinian immigrants)? Lebanese Sunni Muslims who don’t want to be ruled by the Shiites within Hezbollah? Junior Hezbollah members who want all of the senior leadership to be killed so that they can advance within the org chart?

The second big question… Israel recently blew up an underground bunker in which Hassan Nasrallah and colleagues were working. The bunker was underneath six substantial size apartment buildings in a neighborhood where, supposedly, everyone loves and supports Hezbollah. The apartment buildings were destroyed, yet hardly any residents were killed. Supposedly, the building residents were told to evacuate just prior to the 2,000 lb. bombs being dropped. If true, why didn’t the Hezbollah commanders underneath the apartments learn that everyone was fleeing and go somewhere else? (as Hamas has apparently done in Gaza) Did they overestimate the survivability of their bunker?

A related question is what happens to Hezbollah now. The organization has the support of the United Nations. Here’s the Secretary General saying that Israel needs to give Hezbollah time to regroup and rebuild:

Hezbollah also has the support of whoever is running the United States (Kamala Harris and Joe Biden?). Here’s the official whitehouse.gov statement, a couple of days before Mr. Nasrallah met his 72 virgins, in which the Biden-Harris administration officially called for a 21-day ceasefire during which Hezbollah could regroup and rearm:

we call for an immediate 21 day ceasefire across the Lebanon-Israel border to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement

“diplomatic settlement” presumably meant that Hezbollah would remain in power indefinitely. Are there any rival Lebanese groups, e.g., organized by Sunnis or Christians, that are powerful enough to disarm Hezbollah and take over governance of southern Lebanon (where the $500 million/year UNIFIL in theory guarantees that no organization like Hezbollah can thrive)?

Here are the locals mourning a lesser Hezbollah leader early this month (source):

Photos like these, in which the entire neighborhood turns out to support Hezbollah, leads me to the final question of this post… why doesn’t Israel simply destroy all of Dahiyeh, the portion of Beirut from which Hezbollah draws its support? Lebanon is in a declared state of war with Israel so it wouldn’t be a violation of any “international law” to bomb part of Lebanon (just as, apparently, nobody at the UN ever said that it violated any law for the Lebanese to be firing rockets and missiles at Israel for the past year). If the neighborhood that is the core of Hezbollah support were gone, the folks who live there would have to resettle in parts of Lebanon where overt support for Hezbollah might not be as popular.

On the intersection between Hezbollah and Kamala Harris:

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Birthday Reflections

by philg

I’m 61 today, a stereotypical age for a 1950s father to drop dead from a heart attack (that would have been attributed to the stresses of work, adult female supervision, concerns around children, etc.). This post is to reflect on things that I’ve learned in the past year.

From Fort Worth… it turns out that “Brazilian Sugar” is not a doughnut flavor:

From moving my 90-year-old mom out of independent living in Bethesda, Maryland to assisted living here in Jupiter, Florida… nothing in the United States is set up conveniently for old people. Financial services and government agencies require old people people to be competent with smartphones and/or web sites. Being an Internet/email user exposes old people to every kind of fraud (much worse since the lockdowns because old people have been more isolated and, therefore, easier to exploit). We need new structures, such as banking, credit card, and brokerage accounts that can be set up so that a second person’s authorization is required for transactions above a certain size.

From being almost at the end of Year 2 of ChatGPT… LLMs aren’t useful yet for making daily life go more smoothly. LLMs haven’t reduced traffic jams in the U.S. or airline delays and cancellations. LLMs haven’t made it easier to prepare dinner or clean up the house. Maybe LLMs are a game-changer for students assigned to write essays and programmers assigned to write boring code (especially on new-to-them platforms; maybe this explains “Tech Jobs Have Dried Up—and Aren’t Coming Back Soon” (WSJ)), but they haven’t meaningfully touched even a lot of enterprises that are primarily about information processing. For example, I’m an expert witness in an avionics-related case right now. There are more than 25 lawyers and paralegals on each side. Much of what is being done is, in theory, the kind of work that an LLM could do well, e.g., find a relevant document quickly, assemble relevant case law for a dispute that the judge has to settle, etc. Yet no use of LLMs is made at trial.

From Tequesta Indian Village Peace Mound Park, a bit of high ground in the otherwise uninhabitable Everglades that was inhabited prior to the Europeans draining the swamp… a parent was done with his/her/zir/their job when a child turned 13 and heaven was a swamp:

A few things that I’m glad to have done during the year…

  • spend three weeks exploring central and northern Portugal (plus Santiago de Compostela)
  • attend a Formula 1 event in person (not worth a huge amount of time, effort, and money, but the Miami event is well-organized)
  • made it to Oshkosh, as usual
  • saw the second total eclipse of my life
  • take a child on her first visit to the Kennedy Space Center and her first rocket launch
  • get my mother and some of her grandchildren together every 2-3 nights
  • made it to Boston to teach

How am I spending the day? Sadly, there won’t be the kind of theme party that Talulah Riley organized for Elon Musk (source):

For his forty-second birthday, in June 2013, Talulah [Riley] rented an ersatz castle in Tarrytown, New York, just north of New York City, and invited forty friends. The theme this time was Japanese steampunk, and Musk and the other men were dressed as samurai warriors. There was a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, which had been rewritten slightly to feature Musk as the Japanese emperor, and a demonstration by a knife-thrower.

The morning was spent in a 20-year-old Cirrus SR20 with no air conditioning and an intermittent ALT1 failure (a problem that three different Cirrus Service Centers haven’t been able to resolve in nearly two years; this was the first failure after a mid-summer circuit breaker replacement). My 9-year-old copilot suggested Chick-fil-A for lunch. Then we visited my mom. Exciting plans for the rest of the day: Zoom for an expert witness matter; dinner near PBI; pick up the kids’ other grandma at PBI; cake with my mom in her senior fortress.

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Hurricane Helene Holiday…

by philg

…. for the schoolteachers here in Palm Beach County. The forecast called for some rain, winds of about 20 knots, and for the storm to track off Florida’s west coast (i.e., “the other coast”) and then, in a move sure to delight Democrats, directly over Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee (Greta Thunberg may have moved on to Queers for Palestine, but the Wrath of Climate Change God is still just).

With all of the spinning air there was a tornado watch, but that could be a reason to keep schools open. For many teachers and children, school is a far safer place to be during a tornado than home, especially if the home was built prior to the statewide Florida Building Code of 2002.

Every business was open, except for a few restaurants with primarily outdoor seating. We did not lose power even for one second (thanks to the grid hardening initiative approved by Governor DeSantis in 2019 and opposed by Democrats?).

A few palm trees shed fronds in our neighborhood, but this won’t damage even a parked car. It is nothing like being in the Northeast where an oak tree can destroy a house due to the weight being substantially near the top of the tree. (A friend’s house in the Boston suburbs was recently assaulted by an oak tree (fell down on a calm wind day). The removal of the tree via crane cost over $5,000 and only now is he beginning to contemplate roof, window, and siding repairs.)

The event was an interesting study in media-driven fear. A dozen friends and relatives called to see if we had survived the apocalypse. They knew that we lived on the east coast of Florida and that the hurricane had traveled off the west coast, but the media reports that they’d consumed made it sound as though most of Florida was threatened/trashed.

Related… if Americans vote correctly in November, Naples, Sanibel Island, Sarasota, and Palm Beach will be on track for extra federal taxpayer assistance. After Hurricane Ian trashed wealthy west coast barrier island beachfront property in 2022… “VP Harris slammed for saying Hurricane Ian aid will be ‘based on equity’” (New York Post):

Vice President Harris came in for a torrent of criticism after telling an audience that “communities of color” would be first in line for relief in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Ian.

“We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity,” she said during a discussion with Priyanka Chopra at the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum on Friday.

“If we want people to be in an equal place sometimes we need to take into account those disparities and do that work,” she added.

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Our AI Overlords at the railroad crossing

by philg

On my way back downtown from the Fort Worth Stockyards, Uber pinged me. The company’s giant AI brain was concerned that I had been stopped for a few minutes. Our GPS position showed that were in the middle of a road… at a railroad crossing.

Speaking of AI, we have a GE Monogram built-in microwave that has been enhanced with WiFi connectivity and an app. If you request 30 seconds of microwaving and remain within Bluetooth range of the oven, your phone will loudly alert you to the cooking process having completed.

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Why do homeless Americans tend to wear surgical masks?

by philg

I’ve spent a few weeks in downtown Fort Worth, Texas recently. It’s a lively city center with visual art, music, outdoor events in Sundance Square, restaurants, etc. The terrain is well-suited to cycling and there is a bike share system with reasonably good coverage for places that a visitor might want to go. The ethnic mix reasonably reflects recent immigration trends. Spanish is commonly spoken and there are usually at least a few Arabic speakers out and about (the women covered in hijabs, at least). I’m not fitting in that well due to (a) lack of cowboy hat, and (b) saying “hello” to folks encountered while out walking (a sign of mental illness in any true city, but standard practice in our corner of Florida (pedestrians and drivers wave to each other in Abacoa, Jupiter as well if any kind of eye contact is made)).

Texas seems to be home, so to speak, to plenty of homeless people. Nothing like the zombie army you’d find in a California city, of course, but a shocking prevalence compared to suburban or small town Florida. I had remarked on this a few years ago to an Uber driver in Austin, Texas. He was from Afghanistan and I asked him what the situation in Kabul was. He explained that nobody was homeless in Afghanistan because relatives would take in and care for anyone who couldn’t take care of himself.

Outdoor maskers are uncommon in Fort Worth. It’s nothing like my recent stay in Sherman Oaks, California, where I needed to walk only 1 block from my hotel to meet an outdoor masker. However, 100 percent of the outdoor maskers that I’ve encountered in Fort Worth seem to be unhoused (formerly known as “homeless”). I don’t remember seeing unhoused people, even in California, wearing surgical masks prior to coronapanic. Why are the unhoused more enthusiastic today about the protective possibilities of a surgical mask than the general population is? (To be sure, only a small minority of the unhoused in Fort Worth wear masks.)

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What do the United Nations “Temporary” Peacekeepers do when Hezbollah sets up a rocket shop next to their base?

by philg

“U.N. peacekeepers take cover as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel trade attacks” (from state-sponsored NPR, July 2024):

Literally in the middle of this confrontation is the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, created in 1978 after Israel invaded the neighboring country. Despite the name’s indication that it would be temporary, UNIFIL has become one the longest-serving peacekeeping missions in the world.

UNIFIL took NPR on a recent patrol along the blue line — the cease-fire line painstakingly delineated in 2000 after Israel withdrew following an invasion in 1982. Occasional thuds signaled the daily artillery and rocket attacks since Iran-backed Hezbollah began attacking Israel to support Hamas in the war in Gaza.

The U.N. soldiers conduct regular patrols along the de facto border, both alone and with the Lebanese army monitoring the now regular violations of the 2006 U.N. cease-fire agreement. That accord, drawn up after a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah, established a demilitarized zone along the blue line. Violations are reported to the U.N. Security Council.

The attacks on Israel are conducted by Hezbollah and its allies, rather than the Lebanese army. But under the U.N. plan — which envisioned Lebanese government forces securing Lebanon’s border rather than Iran-backed Hezbollah — UNIFIL deals only with Lebanese government forces.

The UN peace experts consume an annual budget of $500 million. Wikipedia says that, in exchange for the $billions spent over the past few years, they’re supposed to “restore international peace and security” and “assist the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area”. Maybe they’ve accomplished the latter goal indirectly because Hezbollah is the legitimate and popular government of the majority of people in Lebanon? But what about “restore international peace”? What do these peacekeepers do when Hezbollah sets up rocket facilities right next to them? (I think the majority of Hezbollah attacks on Israel are launched from the territory that UNIFIL nominally patrols.)

“The United Nations Completely Failed in Lebanon” (Foreign Policy; October 2023) sheds some light on what the goals of this expensive operation are.

U.N. Resolution 1701, which has been in force since 2006, was supposed to ensure the disarmament of Hezbollah as well as the demilitarization of the region south of the Litani River, which is located about 20 miles from the demarcation zone between Lebanon and Israel known as the Blue Line.

At the end of that 34-day conflict [in 2006], the U.N. updated UNIFIL’s mandate under Resolution 1701 and tasked it with establishing “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL,” between the Blue Line and the Litani River.

But since 2006, Hezbollah has instead fortified southern Lebanon, particularly towns and villages along the 120-kilometer-long (about 75-mile-long) demarcation line. It has built unauthorized firing ranges, stocked rockets in civilian infrastructure, built tunnels into Israel, and repeatedly stopped UNIFIL from accessing certain areas. The fact that southern Lebanon is mostly populated by Shiites—many of whom support Hezbollah—has created a security and intelligence buffer for Hezbollah.

It’s kind of fascinating that a 46-year track record of failure doesn’t lead to a loss of funding. There is no group of humans on this planet that is more deserving of $500 million/year from the UN?

Related:

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Can Kamala Harris shoot someone who breaks into her house?

by philg

“Harris tells Oprah any intruder to her home is ‘getting shot'” (Reuters):

Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday issued a warning to any potential home intruder: “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”
The Democratic presidential candidate and gun owner made the seemingly unguarded comment in an interview with Oprah Winfrey before a live studio audience when the conversation turned to gun laws.
“I probably should not have said that. But my staff will deal with that later,” Harris said, laughing.

(The intruder doesn’t have to be a “threat to democracy” for gun violence to be justified? Also, if she owns a gun and is planning to use it in a crowded domestic situation, what kind of recurrent training does she receive? I’ve never heard of our future president going to the range. Dirty Harry used his gun regularly to shoot perpetrators, but he also was shown going to the range in at least one documentary film.)

I decided to post this question to a vast panel of gun owners… i.e., a friend who owns a vast panel of guns, (Maskachusetts is officially gun-free, at least when it comes to peasants owning serious firepower, but it turns out that there are exceptions…).

[Massachusetts] has a duty to retreat in general but in a house you have some more leeway I think. In any case I don’t talk like that. I would never presume to shoot someone in my house. 90% chance I can just hold them for the police.

For those who say that it is unrealistic that an intruder might get through Kamala Harris’s Secret Service protection, let me remind readers that a criminal mastermind managed to get a rifle, ladder, rangefinder, ammo, etc. past the Secret Service in Pennsylvania recently.

Also in our chat group, the one Android user marveled at the devotion of the faithful:

Three of the guys i message with are at Apple stores now getting the 16. Apple users are hilarious.

He linked to “Apple Fans Flock to Stores for iPhone Despite Delayed AI Rollout” (Bloomberg via Yahoo):

Apple Inc. fans lined up at stores around the world for the new iPhone 16, shrugging off the fact that the device’s signature feature — a new suite of AI tools — won’t arrive until later.

My response:

they’re as loyal as Hezbollah and Hamas members

From the Deplorables:

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Will Kamala Harris and fellow Democrats have to make Puerto Rico a state before implementing their new taxes?

by philg

Kamala Harris has big dreams for what rich people can do for the U.S. Treasury via new taxes and higher tax rates (see The Harris unrealized capital gains tax and Bidenflation and Unrealized capital gains are already taxed by the federal government… for example).

The typical American of means, however, can already escape federal taxation by moving to Puerto Rico. “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich” (GQ):

In 2012, Puerto Rico had passed two laws intended to make the island a “global investment destination.” Act 20 allows corporations that export services from the island to pay only 4 percent tax. Act 22 goes much further: It makes Puerto Rico the only place on U.S. soil where personal income from capital gains, interest, and dividends are untaxed.

The last big tweak to U.S. taxation was in 2018. Plainly, the rates were low enough that most rich Americans refrained from making the move to the Ritz-Carlton Dorado. But what if Kamala Harris and fellow Democrats are able to deliver on their promise to soak the rich? Wouldn’t there be a lot more rich people who would make the move for 183 days per year in order to avoid losing a big percentage of their wealth? If so, the only way to stop the erosion of expected tax base would be to eliminate Puerto Rico’s ability to offer Act 22 treatment and the only way that I know to strip Puerto Rico of its tax sovereignty is to make Puerto Rico a state.

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