A few of you may recall that my next door neighbor put their house up for sale for the rather lofty price of $22.5million. It wasn’t that long ago that a house put up for sale in Palo Alto would be sold within hours. This time it took about ten months.
As you’ve surely gathered by now, I’ve spent the past week in North Carolina, which means I am also in the Eastern Time Zone.
I see Rivian vehicles every day, both in the form of cool-looking trucks as well as shiny new Amazon vans. I’ve always thought they looked sharp, and Tesla has quite clearly turned its back on this entire sector. As a chartist, I continue to think Rivian (RIVN) is good-looking, particularly given the strong surge in volume attendant with its rise.
Early in 1993, next door to Prophet’s first office in downtown Palo Alto, there was a computer store. It was kind of a shady place. The guy who owned it wasn’t very honest, and it was clear that he was pretty fast-and-loose with what he sold, how he treated his customers, and how he ran he business. He was basically kind of a scumbag, from what I could gather. He just gave off that vibe.
One day, I saw a man in front of the computer store picketing it. He had a big sign he was carrying that said something like “This store sold me a broken computer and won’t refund my money” or something like that. I honestly don’t remember the sign, but the thrust of it was that this customer was so unhappy with how he was treated that he was actually picketing the place. I’d never seen anything like that, nor have I since. The guy was basically doing what Yelp does, except it required him to march up and down the sidewalk with a homemade sign.
(more…)In Louisiana, where I grew up, the local weatherman was pretty much a celebrity. Why would that be? Because he was important, all year long. The weather changed a lot, and during hurricane season, it was particularly important to stay on top of the weather. Indeed, as a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to track, on graph paper, the various storms and hurricanes as they moved toward us. It was the first sign that I like drawings which showed dynamic change. I could longitude and latitude the hell out of that paper.
Here in Palo Alto, it’s a different story. I offer to you Exhibit A:
