There are a couple of things that seem to make a difference in traffic to Slope: (a) the amount of new content; (b) the drama – particularly downward drama – of the market.
If I am running a normal pace of content (something like six or seven posts per day), and the market is pretty much not doing anything particularly interesting, traffic to the blog is breathtakingly steady. In spite of the many thousands of people that visit, and the tens of thousands of circumstances in their lives, human nature is, on the whole, incredibly consistent, and traffic moves up or down literally just a few tenths of a percentage point from day to day.
If the market makes a big move – – most particularly a downward one – – traffic can soar. Slope is not uncommon in this respect; many of us surely remember when ZeroHedge was so buried with traffic during the debt crisis of August 2011 that their servers crashed from the load. Just earlier this week, on Wednesday, the modest down-move the market made pushed Slope’s traffic impressively higher.
Then, of course, is the sheer volume of new posts that I and fellow writers put onto the site, and that’s why my blogger’s guilt kicks in so hard during those rare instances that I travel. I know some financial blogs that put up a post literally once every few weeks, but frankly I don’t see how they can call themselves a blog – particularly a financial one – with such sparse offerings. My readers have grown accustomed to Slope being a very chatty place, and I feel the tug of conscience when a post is more than a couple hours old.
But I find myself in Seattle, having flown up here on Thursday evening. The reason? A fencing 
tournament, of course! How else could children with the surname of Knight pass their free time?
I must say, the temptation to pull up stakes and move up here is pretty strong. I can’t imagine my house being worth much more than it’s worth right now, and even though most parts of the country would consider Seattle “expensive”, it’s quite cheap compared to Palo Alto. The main appeal, of course, is the grey, rainy weather, which agrees handsomely with my personality. I can never really get enough of grey gloom, particularly when there is good chai to be had.
I spent a chunk of Friday touring the Boeing factory with my young son. It’s funny, because I’ve never really toured any factories before in my life, but in the past couple of months, I’ve visited two of them – Tesla’s, in February, and Boeing’s, just yesterday.
A few things stuck out for me during the tour:
+ The factory is really, really, really big; the tour guide mentioned multiple times that it was the largest building on the planet, as measured by volume;
+ The complexity of the process of creating commercial jets is simply beyond my comprehension; as one glances down at a row of 787s being assembled, the details get lost by the scale. It’s a little like looking at Manhattan via Google Earth and trying to understand what’s going on in the city; there’s just too much, and you can’t really see the people, even though you know they are there;
+ Putting together commercial jets is a shockingly manual process. Whereas a Tesla car is assembled almost entirely by robots, the planes are just too big and complicated to make such a thing practical in the present day. I saw a lot of fellow humans picking up stuff, toting it up staircases, and walking into the fuselage to shove more bits and pieces together. There are tens of thousands of people working in the factory, and they put the planes together, bit by bit, piece by piece, part by part. The finished result is gorgeous, but there’s an awful lot of talent and coordination involved. Putting together a car is kindergarten compared to what I saw at Boeing.
I’m not a plane buff or anything, but the 787 is admittedly a really beautiful creation, and the features & benefits to future fliers make the present fleet an embarrassment. The Dreamliner is 70% quieter, 30% more fuel-efficient, and is, on the interior, far kinder to the human bodies on board. The tour guide pointed out that every single person getting on board the plane could bring on the largest carry-on permitted and have no problem finding a space for it. What a sharp contrast this is to the present day, where it’s every man for himself when it comes to overhead bins!
The also mentioned that the wings can move up to 22 feet, so that in turbulent situations, the wings “flap” and absorb most of the nastiness, leaving the fuselage largely at peace. I’m a nervous flier, so I wouldn’t be too pleased to see a wing outside my window flapping, but, well, they designed it that way.
I know the Dreamliner got some bad press a few weeks ago due to batteries, but the grounding on the planes is going to be lifted in a few days, I’m told. It’s nice to see that there’s still something in America we can manufacturer in a big way which is successful, forward-thinking, and employs a lot of folks in good-paying, skilled jobs.
