Dana Blankenhorn

Subscribe at Substack

This blog is now available at Substack, where you can subscribe to have it delivered to you. 

Next Stage of the Cloud Boom

It’s cheaper for most businesses to rent a cloud than own one. But it’s even better to be one.

That’s why Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are the five most valuable companies in America. Each is worth over $1 trillion. Each put the “ante” of $1 billion/quarter into cloud construction in the last decade. Each continues to pour $3-5 billion more of cash flow into their networks every 90 days.

Policymakers focus on the services these companies provide, but it’s the cloud that makes them powerful. Microsoft isn’t software. It’s cloud and software, which lets it take cash from competitors. Google isn’t services, it’s services and software, which also let it take cash from its competitors. Only Facebook, so far, is refusing to rent capacity, and even it sells access to what’s becoming a global fiber network.

That’s where we are today. Where will we be in 2025, if man is still alive?

Arborists on Offense

In cities built in forests, like Atlanta, it’s time for city arborists to go on offense.

For too long, they’ve been playing defense. That is, a developer (or homeowner) would decide to cut down some trees, and there would be a process the arborist could object to. That’s defense.

Offense is something else.

It starts with a much bigger budget. Use the money to hire summer workers who will comb the city on foot and by bike, with cameras, identifying lots without tree canopy. Fine those suckers, preferably through a property tax surtax from which they can’t escape. Those same summer workers can identify lots with a full tree canopy. These property owners can apply for a bonus, again in the form of a property tax abatement. The bonus would be smaller than the penalty, providing money for the arborist’s budget. The workers are also more likely to grow up as supporters of trees.

The arborist should also work with independent groups, like Trees Atlanta in Atlanta, to offer property owners advice on what trees they should plant where. Trees Atlanta can use existing programs to pay for those trees where people can’t afford them. And before poor people start futzing about huge trees falling on their houses, there are plenty of smaller trees to choose from.

We can argue about what defines canopy. Is it just the unbuilt areas of the property, or does it include roofs? Trees over a roof can cut cooling bills. But solar panels on a roof can do the same thing.

The arborist should also work with property owners and non-government agencies to get trees on roofs. Every flat roof can be a garden. Every small roof can have a canopy.

A city that wants to grow, expanding the amount of land that’s built-up, has a responsibility to let arborists go on offense. Otherwise, it’s part of the global warming problem. You don’t want that to be your political obituary. Or the actual one for your children.

Lessons of the Labor Shortage

There are three reasons for the current labor shortage. 

Two are signs of failure. One is a sign of success.

First, the failures.

The refusal of many employers, especially in the food service industry, to pay a living wage has long been a disgrace. They got away with it, in part, because America welcomed millions of immigrants, especially from Latin America. With the flow cut off, and other workers forced to fend for themselves for nearly a year, is it any wonder they won’t come back without more money?

This statement is controversial. I have friends who insist “people don’t want to work,” because they get more money not working. It’s not true, but my friends won’t budge. It might be because these friends are locked-in to their current positions, their current pay scale, their current lifestyle. I hate to say this of people I love, but there’s also some racism involved.

Why Tech Should Buy More Media

Ever since Microsoft tried, and failed, in cable news with MSNBC, tech has been leery of investing in media.

There have been exceptions. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Marc Benioff bought Time. But these were personal investments, not corporate. They were made for political reasons, not business ones.

The result is that the media remains run by conservatives, by junk men, and by useful idiots. Fox News has been joined by OAN and Newsmax. Local papers are being destroyed by hedge funds like Alden, who are more interested in the tax breaks than the product. CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times  remain committed to “both siderism,” which allows the right to drive the agenda.

This is threatening the country, the economy and (most important) tech. Billionaires like the Smith family, which owns Sinclair, come from the resource industries. They see labor as fungible. They see the world in black-and-white. They don’t see change and they don’t want change.

Change is what tech thrives on. It’s what tech produces. Brains are the gating factor to technology growth and it’s clear that today’s conservatives hate brains. Otherwise, they would have endorsed the vaccine and wouldn’t have pushed Trump.

A half-century ago the right saw this kind of threat and acted. The myth of the “liberal media" is based on the idea that reporters were professionals, but it didn’t understand how Vietnam was a Cold War activity. It didn’t see the coming resource wars. Only the resource industries, the oil guys and lumber guys and real estate guys, saw that.

Trading vs. Investing

People are always being told to invest in good companies and ignore the daily price fluctuations.

That makes sense. But the advice on what to buy often doesn’t.

Take the chip sector. If I want to make money today, I buy Nvidia. (I did a few years ago, and my retirement account is better for it.) But I watch it closely. There are things that could send the stock crashing down. For one thing, its effort to buy ARM Holdings, the British chip design house, could fail. China’s government must approve it. So must ours. That is unlikely to happen, but it could.

Another risk. Stock buyers could decide Nvidia is overpriced. Right now, it costs about 25 times sales, and over 90 times earnings, to own Nvidia stock. That’s expensive no matter how you slice it. It there’s new demand in other sectors of the economy, that could easily go down. An end to the current chip shortage would also hurt Nvidia.

Watch Them Squirm

The 2022 campaign isn’t happening on the streets. It’s happening in the suites.

You won’t be able to follow it by looking at campaign ads or finance reports. You must dig deeper, smell it out.

It’s most visible when a party suddenly changes course, when it goes “whoopsie” or “I didn’t mean that.” That’s a sign key support is dissipating, reflected less in money on the campaign balance sheet and more in a certain silence come next summer and fall.

The issue is vaccinations. 

Suddenly, after going further and further out on a limb for months in their condemnations of Dr. Fauci and the Biden vaccination plan, after telling 1,000 lies that their supporters believed (microchips), Republicans are seeing that limb chopped off behind them. They are quietly falling all over themselves, telling constituents to get the shot.