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.

Jello Molds and BLM Yardsigns

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My brain isn’t good at much. I don’t have a knack for math. I’m lousy at remembering names of human beings. And I bet if I tried to be an actor, I’d forget my lines. I am, however, very good at analogs and metaphors, and they’re always creeping into my head, uninvited.

The latest one involves something in which I have a weird fascination, which is the peculiar and frankly gross recipes that seemed so popular from the early 1950s until the early 1980s. I run across these on a daily basis. Here’s just a small sampling, with a particular emphasis on what seems to have been a fetish in the United States: Jello-O based molds. Shield your eyes, Frank.

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Crumblin’ Down

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Happy December 26th to you Slope. As we begin to close the book on 2024 and look forward towards 2025, I thought it was a good time to look back at my primary call for 2024. This year I was focused on Tom McClellan’s 10-year crude oil analog, and what it was forecasting for the 2024-2026 time period. Let’s take a look.

You can read Tom discussing the analog here, just after the 2020 Covid crash. In the article he states:

“I first discovered this relationship back in 2008, when I looked at a log-scaled long-term chart of crude oil prices and noticed that it looked an awful lot like the chart of the DJIA.  So, I put the two on a chart together but was not really satisfied with the way that the pattern details lined up.  After some tinkering, I found that offsetting the crude oil plot forward by 10 years made for a much better fit between the two plots.

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Torrential Tesla

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For those not acquainted with my TSLA bona fides, I have been writing in the most glowing terms about Elon Musk and his creations for over a decade. Here is just one example from almost a dozen years ago (a post so old, the graphics don’t even exist on the server anymore!) in which I wrote:

Within days, I’m picking up a Model S (long-since reserved; there’s a one-year wait). I have a deep fondness for Tesla; their founder, Elon Musk, is an incredible entrepreneur; the attention to detail to the product line is Steve Jobsian, and the chart looks poised to break out. I’m going old school and buying a bunch of stock for my kids, getting it in certificate form, and shoving it into a safe deposit box. I think this company has a very bright future ahead.

I’d say I nailed that prediction, wouldn’t you?

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