The Sunday Drive - 09/03/2023 Edition [#74]
Musings and Meanderings of a Financial Provocateur
👋🏼 Hello friends,
Greetings from Saratoga Springs, NY! Happy Labor Day weekend. Let's take it easy and enjoy a leisurely Sunday Drive around the internet.
The Sunday Drive is also published at NewLanternCapital.com.
🎶 Vibin'
This week, we lost yet another legendary entertainer. On Friday, September 1st, Jimmy Buffett passed away at the age of 76. Few details have been made public but he is said to have died peacefully, surrounded by family and friends.
These days, 76 years doesn’t seem so old - certainly not to me since that milestone doesn’t feel nearly as far away as it used to.
So this week, let’s vibe to A Pirate Looks at Forty and sip a margarita in Jimmy’s honor. RIP
💭 Quote of the Week
“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” – Jimmy Buffett
📈 Chart of the Week
A lot of wealth has been created in the U.S. over the decades via homeownership, but the degree to which that has accelerated during and since the pandemic is breathtaking. The dramatic recent increase in the cost of homeownership is also largely a function of much higher interest rates which have risen significantly over the last 18 months.
Once interest rates begin to moderate as the economy cools, the large gap between the cost of renting versus owning should narrow and homeownership could become more attainable for those who haven’t yet had the opportunity.
🚙 Interesting Drive-By's
This week we have articles on NVIDIA, longevity, and Gen X retirement:
🚀 NVIDIA: The Distributed Rocketship - from Dror Poleg
Generation-defining innovations. Incredible financial success. Happy employees. How did Nvidia do it?
Not by bringing everyone back to the office.
It embraced remote and distributed work more than any other tech giant. At the heart of the COVID-19 lockdown, in May 2020, CEO Jensen Huang was asked by a journalist, "What do you think of letting employees work out of their homes forever?" Huang responded:
“I got no trouble with it. And I think that there’ll be a lot of our employees who will choose to want to work from home many days during the week, and they would still want to go in because maybe they’ll have co-op meetings. Maybe there is some really close collaboration meetings that they’d have to do. Maybe go into a lab or just go hang out, take a day off. Ha, we’ll take a day off of work and go to the office...
You’re going to get all of that kind of stuff. Some of it is going to be for social reasons. Some are for collaboration. Some of it because you have to physically be there for the lab. But I think we’re going to have people who work from home a couple of days a week, three days a week, four days a week. And I’m perfectly comfortable with all that. And I think digital technology is going to continue to advance. There’s no question we’re going to do this. We’re going to do video conferencing and VR. And we’re going to get much better, much better AI-assisted video conferencing systems and augmented reality video conferencing systems. You know, there’s gonna be all kinds of new innovations in this in this area.” [link]
📈📉 NVIDIA On the Mountaintop - from Ben Thompson
Note: An interesting compare/contrast to Cisco Systems during the mid-1990s, something that I had been thinking about as well.
Now the big question on everyone’s mind is if Nvidia is the new Cisco.
I don’t think so, at least in terms of the near-term: there are some fundamental differences between Nvidia and Cisco that are worth teasing out. The bigger question is the long term, and here the comparison might be more apt. [link]
🤔 We’re at the Longevity Inflection Point - from Eleanor Garth
To me, being able to invest right now into antiaging and modifying longevity, is exactly at the inflection point that being given the opportunity to invest in generated AI was at three or four years ago – I think it’s gonna have that sort of explosion. We’re seeing it with some of David Sinclair’s work, we’re going to see some astonishing things out of Altos and BioAge. There’s a number of companies that are doing really compelling things right now that are going to explode the space. And I’m not comparing us with the end game – I think generated AI has enormous societal changes and economics associated with it, but just as far as the trajectory of the curve for next two or three years, this, to me, is the time to invest. [link]
😳 Generation X is Staring Down Retirement and Student Loan Debt - from Rethinking65
As Generation X comes within shouting distance of retirement, with its oldest members just four years shy of the age at which they can begin drawing Social Security, the retirement plans of these Americans could be disrupted by debt, especially with the student loan-payment pause coming to an end.
Generation X is categorized as those born roughly from 1965 to 1980, which means the oldest members are 58 — only about a year or so away from being able to withdraw retirement funds without a penalty, and less than a decade away from eligibility for Medicare. [link]
👋🏼 Parting Thought
If you have any cool articles or ideas that might be interesting for future Sunday Drive-by's, please send them along or tweet 'em at me.
Please note that the content in The Sunday Drive is intended for informational purposes only, and is in no way intended to be financial, legal, tax, marital, or even cooking advice. Consult your own professionals as needed.
I hope you have a relaxing weekend and a great week ahead. See you next Sunday...
Your faithful financial provocateur,
-Mike
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