Blake Koger

It's been said that I am passionate about three things: K-State sports, politics and anything that involves winning...

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

Really don't know how I should take this text from my manager.. do you think it was meant as a compliment? #work #dailyaffirmation

[Greg Price @greg_price11]

Yesterday: Biden answers "No" when he was asked if he'll deploy more troops to the Middle East.

Today: Pentagon announces that more U.S. troops are being deployed to the Middle East.

Somebody's running the country and it definitely it's Joe Biden.

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Iran and Israel about to go at it, and nobody is sure who the US president is

[Casey Means, MD @CaseyMeansMD]

Mainstream media so obviously and amusingly showing their cards with their predictable article viciously insulting the historic Senate roundtable on chronic disease and nutrition, calling it “boring” and “woo woo.”

The @TheAtlantic author of this “article” (cough pre-planned hit piece cough), a 2015 *journalism* graduate, seems to believe she knows MORE about the chronic disease epidemic than Harvard and Johns Hopskins’ senior physicians @ChrisPalmerMD and @MartyMakary , as well as the other esteemed health and fitness advocates devoting their life to helping wake up America to the plummeting health of our population across the lifespan. In fact, in an overt display of LACK of journalistic integrity, she didn’t even mention that any physicians were there. Just left that out and called this event a ploy for “relevance.”

My favorite: she put metabolic dysfunction in literal quotes (“metabolic dysfunction”) like it’s a right wing fueled myth 🤣

She mocked the idea of “doing your own research” … god forbid we take any interest in our OWN health while Rome is burning and 30% of teens now have prediabetes and young adult cancers are skyrocketing. If things are all so black and white, why would it be dangerous to do your own research?

Why doesn’t mainstream media want Americans to ask questions? Why do they think that’s dangerous?

Share this disgraceful article with your thoughts and comment below as one way to let mainstream media know we are ALL wise to their playbook and aren’t letting it fly.

[Liam McCollum @MLiamMcCollum]

Dave Smith: Do you think lockdowns worked

Chris Cuomo: … the government will say yes

[Christian Malazarte @ChristianMalaza]

You can tell when @ComicDaveSmith is saying something that really connects because everyone's listening to him. The room is silent... 🔥🔥🔥

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

Presidents Trump and Biden are colluding to lock America into a head-to-head match-up that 70% say they do not want.

They are trying to exclude me from their debate because they are afraid I would win. Keeping viable candidates off the debate stage undermines democracy.

Forty-three percent of Americans identify as independents. If Americans are ever going to escape the hammerlock of the two-party system, now is the time to do it. These are the two most unpopular candidates in living memory.

By excluding me from the stage, Presidents Biden and Trump seek to avoid discussion of their eight years of mutual failure including deficits, wars, lockdowns, chronic disease, and inflation.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Blinken says that Ukraine will be joining NATO. Under Article 5, this means that an attack on Ukraine will be considered an attack on the United States. If you want World War 3, vote Biden in November.

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@CoachWrigley Wow, congratulations! So glad to see the progress. I hadn’t heard this was happening. We’ll be back up to save JCCC Track someday down the road, but very happy STA no longer depends on their facilities.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

The State of Our Union

[Kashyap Sriram @kashyap286]

Study this chart of General Electric. That massive uptrend from 1981-2001 happened under Jack Welch's leadership. Business school professors eulogized him and financial journalists wrote fawning articles about his leadership style. Everyone praised him as America's greatest CEO.

During his tenure, if a GE division wasn't #1 or #2 in their line of business, the division was either shut down or sold. Company executives called him "Neutron Jack" because he would fire the entire staff right up to the janitor, leaving only the buildings standing.

GE is still around but the stock has been a dud for two full decades.

Why is that?

The divisions that weren't #1 or #2 turned to an age old trick - financing their customers' purchases so they could inflate revenues and move up to the pole position in their industry.

It worked. It worked so well that lending money to customers became a bigger business than manufacturing aircraft parts or the other industrial components.

Then the investment bankers got involved. Why stop at vendor financing when there are a whole host of other loans that can be made, using the strength of GE's balance sheet?

GE Capital was created as a wholly owned subsidiary and in keeping with GE custom, it set out to be #1 or #2 in every market it entered. Sub-prime mortgages? No problem. Borrow and lever that 8 to 1. Make risky loans in emerging markets? There's enough funny money on Wall Street and the GE name is enough to get any deal done, no matter the economics.

Like a fish swallowing a whale, GE Capital gorged itself on debt, blew up, and took down the entire company. The company founded by Edison which had survived two world wars and the Great Depression was done in by the corporate culture Welch established.

Big Tech today, run by Welch-like egomaniacs, is following the same path as $GE. Instead of vendor financing, they are taking equity stakes in their customers and round tripping their investment as revenue. $AMZN-Anthropic, $NVDA-CoreWeave are just the two most outrageous examples; I'm sure there are several cockroaches in hiding.

Because investors are rewarding sales growth and don't care about the balance sheet or other metrics, and tech executives get most of their pay as SBC, they are going all-out to show growth at any cost. Cloudflare $NET spends 40% of revenue on sales and marketing, routinely trash talks their sales force in quarterly calls, and recently fired their "President of Revenue", replacing him with a current Board member Mark Anderson.

(Side note: Mark's most recent achievement was serving as the CEO of analytics firm Alteryx $AYX since October 2020. Under his tenure, the AYX stock price went down 70% during the strongest bull market in tech we've ever seen. But Cloudflare decided he was just the kind of go-getter they needed. I'm sure no personal favors were involved).

The Big Tech earnings growth the market is obsessing over is not real organic growth. The whole thing is built on a house of sand, with plenty of shadow debt like CoreWeave's $2.3 billion debt collateralized with depreciating inventory and likely sitting idle in a warehouse somewhere.

Sub-prime mortgages killed GE Capital and brought the whole system tumbling down. I suspect the next credit event won't come out of CRE or the banking system - it'll come from the private debt market and the business development companies that helped fuel the massive Big Tech earnings beats.

This is the risk no one is talking about. But rest assured, it's real. And when it comes crashing down, several of today's storied names will join Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing in the Hall of Infamy.

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@DietCoke82 @RampCapitalLLC this your new place? 👀

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@RampCapitalLLC Seems largely related to consumers/society demanding “new” things more frequently. Free money and cheap products (relatively) made that too easy. Look at sports complexes (ahem Royals) and university campuses as examples too, every leader seems dead set on building something new.

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@Jordan_ICT @TheAggievillain @Coachreem4ever @CoachJTang @djkrazya2000

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@RampCapitalLLC You a member at Shadow, Ramp?

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@richfalkwallace Would love a copy please.

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@djkrazya2000 @jmeitksu @DScottFritchen @Whitney_Hartman @KSUWindbreaker @ksu_FAN Probably M but could squeeze into a S if it runs bigger.

[Rep. Dan Bishop @RepDanBishop]

My team and I are reading through the omnibus bill today - all $1.7 trillion and 4,155 pages of it.

Follow along for some of the most egregious provisions in the bill ⬇️

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@Stanimal032 This is basically what it’s been since season 2. Just some absurd storylines and constant Beth drama ever since. Wonder why we keep watching it during each episode.

[Blake Koger @BlakeKoger]

@DerekYoungKSO @KellisRobinett @GPCwallace What was the holdup with Bishop a few years back? Something like no degree? Maybe it because Canty left early? Also surprised his NFL career wasn’t as promised. Need a “where are they now?” series from Kellis.