Dana Blankenhorn

I Know Things Look Bleak Now But…

I didn’t think Vladimir Putin was stupid enough to invade Ukraine.

I was wrong.

He’s just that stupid.

While most of the Internet (and all of Ukraine) is either fighting or cowering in fear right now, I want to offer some reasons for hope.

Aphorisms for Today

Freedom is never given. It must be fought for. In many ways.

Some battles are lost. The war never is.

We can never again trust oil and gas. But the Sun shines, the wind blows, the rivers roll, and we live on a molten rock.

The further you go down the road to perdition, the harder it is to find an exit ramp.

Diplomacy is about finding that exit.

Evil abides. Good must also.

Buy when everyone is screaming sell, sell when everyone is screaming buy.

Know that there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

Some tunnels are longer than others.

Liberty for me but not for thee spells tyranny.

Feel free to add your own in the comments. 

Facebook’s Bigger Problem

Meta Platform (uh, Facebook’s) market cap has dropped 38% since its “disappointing” earnings release. The numbers weren’t all that bad. They make the shares look cheap, a price to earnings ratio under 14.

But before you run to your bookie, Facebook has a bigger problem than metaverse software, Europe’s privacy laws or media schadenfreude.

Its cloud is not set up to do what its software proposes to do. And it seems to be doubling down on that bad design.

I call Facebook a “Cloud Czar” because it has 15 hyperscale data centers around the world. They’re bought with cash flow. Once open, they drop its hardware and scaling costs to near-zero. You can count the companies sharing this advantage on one hand – Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.