Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

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Whoa, this is quite cool! See, I gripe about AI a lot, but only because I think the valuations of stocks like NVDA are beyond insane. There are segments of the AI business, however, I think are tremendously exciting. Image generation, for example, is like magic to me, and I just discovered another one this morning (in my quest to create the audio version of my revised novel) which is a real kick: instead of using a robot voice for text-to-speech, it uses my OWN voice.

Click here to listen. You’ll see the Play button in the lower left corner. It isn’t precisely like me, but it is sure close, and take it from someone who has done voice work before, this is a HUGE relief that this exists! Recording the written word with one’s voice SUCKS, trust me!

Sinking the Middle Kingdom

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This one chart says it all. The desperate and cynical Chinese Communist Party has tried harsher and harsher measures to recapture the image of prosperity, which peaked literally in August 2008, which was eons ago. Besides making short-selling illegal (which is always a sign of a doomed market), the latest scheme is buying TRILLIONS in stock as a “rescue package”. The result? The last few days of price drops have been erased. What a joke. The money is going to be GONE, but believe you me, the market is going to cut through to new lows, and probably for years to come. China is screwed.

Small Cap Gap Zapped

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Wait a second, is this even legal? Every futures quote on my screen is red! Of course, red can be meaningless, like the fact that the /ES has collapsed 0.04% as of this moment, but I’ll take it.

More important, I was pleased to see that the small caps, after absolutely exploding higher five days in a row, got stopped short this morning at its gap. It exceeded the gap, yes, but by 0.07%, so, umm, yeah, I can totally live with that.

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Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Bitcoin

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I’ve mentioned in recent months that, after years of struggling to figure out what on earth crypto was good for, I finally hit upon the truth: it’s a gambling token. Pure and simple, it’s a new way for people to get their gambling ya-ya’s out of their system, and by all measures it has been tremendously successful, since the combination of the Internet and the blockchain has created the world’s most vibrant casino.

Indeed, the animal spirits take all kinds of forms. Most recently, the notion that ETFs would push Bitcoin to a million dollars (by 2030, according to Cathie D. Wood, and in “weeks or days“, according to Samson Mow) cranked the price of BTC much higher as the big day approached.

Of course, in one of the great “sell the news” events of financial history, BTC has become blown to pieces, starting with the moment those ETFs were rolled out. The level of surprise about this should be precisely zero.

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