Good morning. Hello. How are you? #693
Walmart, the climate bill actually made me feel a stir of hope for the first time ever, the business models of optometrists, Wish 30th anniversary.
Good morning! Hello! Happy Friday! I have to work this Friday, that is BS, working on Fridays is BS. I went to Walmart this morning before writing this GMHHAY again, forgive me, east coasters. I feel so transgressive. Giddy. One needs a little sin in their lives. While I was dropping off the recycling, the Brandi Carlile (no Y, no S) “Sinners, Saints and Fools” came on, and I thought “I wonder which one I am, well I’m not very sinny anymore so I guess I’m a saint” and then I just laughed, because the answer, of course, always, is A and C. A sinner and a fool, that is all of us. I mean, just look at me. I went to Walmart at 7 AM instead of being a good boy who deserves fudge and writing this post first.
Brandi Carlile is so cool. She brought Joni Mitchell on stage last week did you hear? Joni’s first live appearance in, like, decades or something. I mean how cool is that? How cool do you have to be to get Joni freakin Mitchell out of retirement my god.
Walmart had no baby corn, which was a shame since I’m a can short in my FIFO stack. No un-crumbled Feta either, which is weird. Pre-crumbled Feta just isn’t as good, even if you’re gonna crumble it. Plus Jane likes crumbling Feta, even if she makes an unholy mess.
(n.b. All cheese varieties should be capitalized. Though I just learned that part of the definition of proper noun is that it “does not take a limiting modifier,” at least according to the pre-selected top Google definition, but this, of course, is BS because the pre-selected top Google definition for “limiting modifier” includes “only” and one of the first examples on that page is “Only Jack eats ice cream” so what the f ever. Henceforth, all cheese varietals will be capitalized. Man if I ever sell a book to an actual publisher with an actual editor again, it is going to be a brawl).
Got Jane a new LEGO set this morning, ages five and up. She’ll be five in three months so that seems close enough. It is a cute little fruit stand food truck.
All right so I did some digging into the climate deal last night. Shit wait we better check the headlines before we write this in case something huge happened and I am living in oblivion: generally not a risk when you do this first thing in the morning. Ok, we’re good.
First off, the deal’s not a done deal yet because of Kristen fuckin Sinema. Also I just want you to know that twice already in this GMHHAY I almost swore but did not, but I could not restrain myself when it comes to Kristen fuckin Sinema. Anyway, the killing off of the carried interest tax exemption is apparently a bugbear with her, so she might kill the deal. Doesn’t look like she’s said one way or another yet. In my world, there’s also a slowly unfolding drama about whether they killed off a lovely little tax break called QSBS that I love, and it will suck for me if they did, but I would live with it. Anyway, just bear in mind the thing still not make it.
(If I were still a tech and VC writer I would write a long passage here about the squeeze that small VCs will feel from this, how there probably ought to be some exemption on the carried interest exemption for the fist, like, $250k or something, and this will definitely change the structure of many small funds, and if it goes into effect this year, and QSBS survives, you might see a bunch of small-time, single-fund CCs suddenly decide they want to be entrepreneurs instead, but I don’t have to do that anymore. Though I did have a looooong conversation about all this yesterday with my old VC partners and it’s very interesting if you live in that world.)
And there is some other bullshit with it as well. Joe wrung a bunch of tax breaks for natural gas pipelines and a bunch of other energy shit that he cares about because he is, well, a senator from West Virginia who also has no spine and no imagination so yeah, that makes sense. And there are new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico, which is complete and utter BS.
Also the EV tax credits are great but the income limits on them are dumb probably a bad idea. I mean, yes, I am compromised in this opinion as I exceed the income limits and I am in the market for an EV, but not really, because I don’t particularly care about the tax credit. BUT, a) lots of rich people do care about the tax credit because lots of rich people are greedy AF, b) there’s clearly a little “commodification of luxury” going on in the EV market, most of the EVs (except maybe the Volt) are aspirational, and aspirational products in expanding markets work their way downstream quite quickly and c) it is a fairly solid theory in social benefits — Bernie says this all the time about universal college — that any benefit that is universal is harder to kill off than a benefit that’s only targeted to “the poor.” I suspect if some non-partisans ran some studies on this, we’d see that a universal tax cut accellerates EV adoption more than an income-limited one. But, hey, we’ll take what we can get.
But all that being said, the rest of the bill is fucking awesome. Like the rest of the bill is so awesome when I was reading the details (here is a one page summary) I started to get chills. I literally felt, like… hope? Like… there is a chance — a chance, a small, delicate chance — that we maybe don’t burn the world to the ground?
Like I felt that, for a fleeting second, sure, but… it was the first time I have ever felt that feeling in my life.
Also included is the ability, finally, finally, for Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and that alone will have such a huge, huge impact on American health care it is staggering. Just tossed in on the side.
And a minimum income tax for corporations. Not a huge one, to be sure, but the first ever and no more Amazon and all these people paying zero percent income tax. Fantastic.
And more than a hundred billion dollars to beef up the IRS for high-end tax enforcement.
Massive extension of clean energy tax cuts, and not just a return to the old: an increase from 2 years to 10 years on the cuts, making it much easier for solar companies, etc., to plan capital deployments.
Rebates to install heat pumps! That is huge! Heat pumps are awesome.
A requirement for the battery tech in EVs to be American and not Chinese. Fantastic. I mean, I am not a gung ho “made in America” kind of guy, but America has a stricter environmental regulatory regime and is, you know, not totalitarian, so that is good.
Sixty billion for long-income communities to address the disproprotionate burden of pollution and climate change. Twenty billion to cut emissions in the environmental sector, which is so, so huge. Methane leak penalties, raising more than $6 billion from the oil and gas industry, which will be reinvested in leak reduction.
This bill has to pass. I never really thought it was possible before. It will be heartbreaking if it fails now.
Went to the eye doctor yesterday, my eyes, they’re going crazy. I mean, they’re fine, ish. My nearsightedness got better a bit, so my far-away glasses prescription went down a smidge. My reading glasses, though, got much stronger.
The optometrist was an excellent salesperson, I mean it was really something. So I am not unaware of the increased success of online companies like Warby Parker and my beloved Zenni optical, and I knew that there was some sort of symbiotic relationship between the eye doctors in an eye place and the people who sell glasses out of the eye place (look at all these big technical terms I’m using). But I always kind of thought it was like hair salons, where one was paying rent to the other or something. But man, this lady, my optometrist (who had a peculiar predilliction for mentioning in-laws: mother-in-laws, sister-in-laws. She seems happy about the various families she’s married into) she was committed to selling me some glasses. At one point she even said “if this keeps up we’ll go out of busines.” To which I inadvertantly laughed, and she sort of back pedaled. I asked her about it, I was like “doesn’t one of you just rent from the other” and she said no, they were all a single business, and the glasses carried it, or, really, the insurance payments. She seemed very aggreived that I was not planning to use my insurance glasses credit at all. I was like “I mean, can I donate it to someone needy?” And she laughed and said no, which, of course, but that would be cool. And I was like “do you have some dumb 80’s nerd glasses that cost exactly the same as my insurance benefit that you can just buy and then I’ll donate ‘em to the Lions”? (my dad was very involved with this program). Again, no. “You really ought to find a different business model,” I said, “those companies go away.” Then she told me about some eye place in Chapel Hill that did that, stopped taking insurance (it was weird to me that she equated “different business model” with “stop taking insurance,” which is when I realized they pretty much live off of insurance), and now she got all their business, so that wasn’t gonna work.
In the end, I realized that I kind of don’t like my Zenni aviator sunglasses, cuz they’re a little too small, Zenni is too chicken to put my giant lenses in full-sized aviators, and this place also had actual Ray Bans, not knock-offs, so I treated myself to a set of actual Ray Ban aviators for the first time since I stopped using contacts.
But this does seem weird, though. I almost want to go into business with her and develop some new economic model for Optometrists.
Then they forgot to give me my reading prescription, so after all of that I can’t order new reading glasses yet anyway. They said they’d email it but they have not yet. I guess I will call them in a bit.
Public service request: The Cure are re-issuing Wish for its 30th anniversary and the vinyl pre-order is sold out everywhere I usually shop. If you see it online, can you let me know? I really want it. I don’t own Wish on vinyl and i’ve been chatting about it with some friends recently, and even though “Friday I’m in Love” is my absolute least favorite Cure song, I still love the rest of the record. That laser light show for Wish at the Museum of Science in, like, 1992 was awesome.
Okay. That’s it. Have a lovely weekend. Emma pointed out I used the same photo of Jane for two issues: it really was a good photo. So here are two different, new photos of Jane.
Moody and Quiet mix today, lotta new stuff, just a couple old ones, including a song from Wish because I listened to yet yesterday and man I want that re-issue. Been on a Gastr Del Sol kick too lately. Gastr Del Sol are kinda how Andy Shea and I became good friends, and I hadn’t listened to them in ages so I listened to all their albums again and man they are still so awesome. New Sun’s Signature (Elizabeth Frasier) song out today too.
Have a lovely weekend. Much gardening to do. Talk to you Monday!
The Cure are selling it on their site, if you haven't tried there yet... lots of cool bundle deals, too.
https://store.universalmusic.com/thecure/