I woke up this morning and went for a leisurely walk before work, came home and then had a shower followed with breakfast. The weather is nice outside and I checked out the news regarding the opening of the CRL project up in Auckland and hopefully it’ll mark the beginning of greater investment into rail. Around a year ago there was talk about a rail project that has been on the plans since the 1950s (link) – how about the Labour Party come out and say “instead of wasting billions on roads of national significance that have an appallingly bad ROI we spend the money on building the aforementioned rail project in Auckland”.
There have been a few hiccups with the launch of the CRL (link) but it isn’t surprising given that the project was huge, at least in terms of projects undertaken in New Zealand, but I’m sure that as time goes on that issues will be resolved and we’ll learn from the experience which will influencer future mega projects. The other thing to keep in mind is that as part of the CRL project has been the bigger project of reinvesting back into the railway infrastructure after decades of underinvestment which goes further back than the privatisation of rail to way back to the 1970s when Muldoon cancelled the massive rail investments that Labour had planned in response to the oil shocks of the 1970s (Muldoon’s answer to the oil shocks of the 1970s was the ‘think big’ projects that did massive damage to New Zealand’s finances which New Zealand to undertake radical reforms of the 1980s).
I was watching a video regarding a recent opinion piece over on the Washington Post (link) regarding the evangelical Christian movement. I’ve watched a video commentary but I’m going to read the article first hand so that I can read the full opinion piece – I’m not a fan of basing an opinion on a second hand inpretation even though I agree with what the YouTuhe commentator was saying. I think it’ll be quite a drawn out blog post because I’ll want to vent a bit about quite a few theological issues I have with the evangelical and non-denominational movement (funny how the non-denomination movement has become a denomination in the process of claiming not to be a denomination).
I saw this video recently regarding the dodgy stuff during the dot-com bubble where analysts were they were going on television cheerleading on and promoting shares of particular companies while behind the scenes they were emailing each other about how crappy they were.
It will be interesting to see what happens when this whole AI bubble bursts and how many analysts who were cheerleading on businesses were saying the exact opposite behind closed doors. It reminds me of an analyst over at Raymond James (link) making insane claims regarding SpaceX and its future share price – I really wish that there were people keeping a record of what these analysts put there and for there to be a name and same session when they ridiculous forecasts crash and burn. I know I’ll be keeping an eye on 2031 to see how this all works out.
This isn’t the first time analysts have ben spectacularly wrong – anyone remember when Intel launched the Itanium? There was IDC that claimed back in 1997–1998 there would be a $38 billion global market size by 2001 and then by mid-2001 they shifted the goal posts to $15 billion by 2005 but the problem is that by 2006 the actual numbers were $3.4 billion. Not to pick on IDC because many other but they all do a lousy job at forecasting – not just off by a small amount but really badly incorrect. If you’re wondering, by 2006 the global server shipments of x86-64 sat at $52.7 billion. I’m always amazed by the fact that anyone pays these analysts given how often they get it so spectacularly wrong. I was calling Itanium a failure back in the 2000s but too bad I didn’t have the ability to charge a premium for my rectum plucks. Given how badly analysts get it wrong – maybe buying a dart board and throwing darts blindfolded at it would produce more reliable forecasts.
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