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.

A Valentine Story

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Even by the standards of the eighth grade, she was way out of my league. I was new there, having only moved to California in the summer of 1979. It was not an easy move for me. That’s a lousy age for most kids in the first place, and to be taken out of your life-long home and moved across the country to a totally alien environment makes it worse. Still, there was something mesmerizing about her. She was beautiful. She was intelligent. And she was kind.

I’ve written about that era years ago, and although the vast majority of people here won’t remember it, I won’t revisit that memory. This is about a few years later, after the break-up. She was gone but definitely not forgotten.

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ChatGPT: the NFT of 2023

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Let’s get this out of the way first: the product’s name is dumb. I’ve heard enough people stumble over the name, get it wrong, or not remember it at all to know that, from a marketing perspective, the name sucks. In case you’re interested, it clumsily stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer.

But we’re not here to talk about product names. This company, OpenAI, and its principal product, the aforementioned terribly-named invention, has been slathered all over the news for weeks now, and any company that is even vaguely associated with AI has seen their stock explode higher.

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Judge Me in One Month

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Go ahead. Mark your calendars. Bookmark this page. I’m prepared to be judged by the group’s one-month-older selves. Because this week was unhinged and, in retrospect, will be seen as idiotic. Let us take two specific stocks.

The first is Buzzfeed. This was one of the many SPAC Wrecks of last year, losing about 98% of its value. It was a garbage stock. A wreck. A low-volume pile of trash. And deservedly so.

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Within Range

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Yep, we’re going to talk about Tesla again. Why? Two reasons. One, I’ve found that financial instruments are like people – – you get along well with some, and not-so-well with others. My experiences has shown me I get along with Tesla. I tend to understand it. The second reason is that I believe Tesla’s behavior is enormously influential to the psyche of the entire stock market. Now that we’re past the TSLA earnings report, we can consider this effect, which at the moment is very positive.

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