S&P 500 returns this decade:
2020 +18.4%
2021 +28.8%
2022 -18.2%
2023 +26.2%
2024 +24.9%
2025 +17.8%
2026 +10.7% (so far)
15.7% annualized for the 2020s and nothing close to a boring year yet
What happens when you use up all your strategic reserves, but you’ve also conveniently monopolized oil via Venezuela and Iran, oh and represent a party that wants to “drill baby drill” domestically as well. You replenish the stockpile, and while doing so, imanufacture a MAJOR economic catalyst. 💥
Seems strategic.
Elon Musk just measured your existence by how many times your atoms have been inside a dying star.
Musk: “How many times have your atoms been at the center of a star? I think it’s like on average three or four times.”
Every atom in your body has already survived the core of a star.
Multiple times.
Crushed under pressures that would flatten planets.
Superheated to millions of degrees.
Blown apart in explosions so violent they forged new elements.
Then gravity pulled those scattered pieces back together.
New stars formed.
And the cycle repeated.
For 13.8 billion years, your atoms have been fuel for the most violent process in the universe.
And they are not done.
Musk: “In terms of existence as measured by the number of times your atoms will be at the center of a star, we seem to be roughly halfway.”
Halfway.
Your atoms have been through the furnace three or four times.
They will go through three or four more.
But right now, in this impossibly thin sliver between cycles, those atoms are doing something they have never done before.
They are conscious.
For billions of years before you, they burned through stellar cores with no awareness.
No memory.
No sense of what they were or where they had been.
After you, they will return to that state.
Unconscious matter drifting through space until the next star claims them.
This is the only moment in their entire journey where they can look back at the stars that made them and understand.
Musk: “If you want to look at the big picture… that’s the really big picture.”
The big picture is not that we are small.
Everyone already knows that.
The big picture is that we are temporary witnesses to a process that does not need witnesses.
Stars do not need observers to burn.
Atoms do not need anyone to understand where they have been.
The universe ran for billions of years with no one in it.
It will run for billions more after the last conscious thing disappears.
But right now, matter is examining itself.
That has never happened before in 13.8 billion years.
You are not a person who happens to contain ancient atoms.
You are ancient atoms that briefly figured out how to think.
The universe did not design consciousness.
It designed stars.
Consciousness was the accident.
And the accident is half over.
Jeff Bezos on NYC spending:
"If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, packages would take 6 weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it."
The Alaska Senate just voted 19-1 to end local sales taxes on gold and silver and reaffirm the metals as constitutional legal tender after a 40-0 vote in the House last week.
The bill will soon be transmitted to @GovDunleavy for his signature.
@SoundMoneyDef