Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Patrick Boyle" channel.

  1. The right answer is let the USA and European makers go and make whatever they need to make. Stop subsidizing EVs. BYD and China are going to undercut the auto industry over time with cheap EVs, and the makers are going to be forced to make EVs over time to stay competitive. EVs inherently cost less to manufacture and BYD is demonstrating this. By subsidizing EVs in the USA and Europe, we are simply paying taxpayer dollars to support unions and keep the prices of EVs artificiality high.
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  2. Just one small thing: I lived through the implementation of proposition 13. The issue at that time was the increasing value of property, and the corresponding increase in property taxes, was throwing retired people out of their own property that they had paid off. This was because they lived off fixed income, and the property tax was becoming unpayable, resulting in the sale of property. Good for new residents buying property, bad for retirees. Because older people vote more than younger ones, this resulted in the "taxpayer revolt" and the passage of prop 13. Would that pass today? A good bit of the exodus from California is due to retirees moving out of CA. Not from property tax increases, but because all of the costs, including taxes has risen, and the differential of property values in CA vs. other states, makes it attractive to move away. Thus fewer people would vote for a prop 13 today.
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  3. California is an island, geographically and politically. I'm currently sitting in Kauai, which does not appear to care about waste of either water or power. The water surplus is obvious on Kauai if you are trying to stay dry here. The power surplus is largely due to solar power, which the power company made obvious by rejecting new requests from homeowners to connect their solar panels to the power grid due to overloading from the existing power surplus. So why isn't California the beneficiary of the same principles? For water they have turned down all efforts to modernize the water system and collect the water falling on the state, even though it is far in excess of the needs of California, even with the incredible waste of it by well connected agricultural interests. For power, California leads the nation in both power company solar sites and individual houses with solar, but manages to be on a upward spiral of prices for it even though solar is now cheaper than most power sources. The issue is our socialist government, which generated a huge surplus under Governor brown by dramatically increasing taxes and fees for everything under the sun. You pay fees here for sitting down at a restaurant vs. take out, you pay fees to buy computer monitors, and the purpose of that fee was to dispose of the lead in computer monitors. What lead you say? Yes, Virgina, computer monitors used to have lead in them. The commuter lanes put in to ease traffic are now being sold to the highest bidder. The list goes on and on. So California had a surplus from all of those fees and taxes. Where is it? Its in bureaucratic waste, government workers retirement and salaries, etc. It doesn't matter how much money the government takes in, it will spend that and more. CA has already instituted universal heath care via "Covered California" and will institute universal basic income when it thinks they can get away with it, despite the fact that any reasonable payments of UBI will still leave people homeless.
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  4. China followed the Singapore model of economics, a dictatorship that was organized around capitalism. The west assumed that this would in turn lead to political liberalization. It hasn't worked that way so far, and China regressed into a Mao style dictatorship yet again. Now it is seeming more likely that the west will embrace French style socialism than China will embrace liberal politics.
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  5. Time to stop throwing taxpayer money at EVs. The press is partially responsible for the slowdown in EVs, playing up every EV fire, cold weather charging issue, and publishing worst case estimates of charging. Did you know that you will be searching for an EV charger every day and that it will take 8 hours to get a charge? The bottom line is that the governments around the world need to back off and realize they can't force feed EVs to the public. The advantages of EVs will win out over time.
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  6. Intel believing that their CPUs could efficiently run AI tasks is the second time they made that error. The first time was Intel believing that the graphics built into the CPU would be more effective. Turns out having the graphics in a separate chip with its own memory was far more efficient, even if it necessitated moving data back and forth between CPU and graphics memory. Its part of the reason they lost that business to Nvidia.
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  7. Literally decades ago, computer scientists were saying that graphics cards could be used for general calculations. Smart people could have used that simple proclamation to predict what happened with Nvidia now. Thus it is not about investing in a sector whose players may not may not succeed, but investing intelligently as opposed to just throwing money at poorly understood technologies.
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