This season’s flu is seriously awful
+ You need the flu vaccine immediately, if not sooner.
+ You need to avoid crowded indoors. Especially people coughing and sneezing.
+ When in doubt, wear a mask. Wash your hands often.
+ If you get it, instantly get one of four antiviral medications — baloxavir (Xoflusa), oseltamivir (Tamiflu), peramivir (Rapivab), and zanamivir (Relenza). Every day you put off starting the antiviral reduces its effectiveness.
Have one of these at home:
$36 at Amazon. Click here.
My math sucks
It used to be good.
Start with “There is no benefit to putting premium gas in your car. You won’t get more mileage. You won’t get better performance. You are only wasting your money,” says Jack Fredericks, my Ghent, NY car guru, “These days cars have so many sensors, their engines adjust to whatever gas you put in them and run fine.”
Locally in Columbia County, NY “premium” sells at $1.00 to $1.25 a gallon more than “regular” gas. Fill up with 20 gallons, you’re wasting $20.
If you drive 100,000 miles and average 25 miles per gallon, that’s 4,000 gallons of gas — or $4,000 thrown in the nearest toilet.
Caution: If your partner (e.g. wife) drives a BMW or Mercedes and you put regular gas in it, don’t tell them.
Once upon a time, it was called “High-Test.” Then a marketing genius (not me), changed it to Premium.
Which gas would you rather have in your cherished car — regular or premium?
Nvidia shines (as usual). Watch Jensen’s keynote yesterday:
Intel’s first CPU, the 4004, released in 1971 sported 2,300 transistors.
Vera Rubin is Nvidia’s latest chip. It has 227 trillion transistors and can move more data than today’s entire Internet.
Read that again to be properly blown away.
Intel lost the plot because it let Microsoft create the operating system, it let IBM make the first PC and then others. Intel never made software like Excel or naything that ran on its chips (and I think still doesn’t).
Nvidia does it all. The chips. The operating system. The applications. Listen to Jensen talk about the millions of cars (all the new ones) that will soon be self-driving — using guess who’s chips and software. Then there’s medicine, robotics, argentic AI, physical AI, Nvidia Studio, new data centers.
I understood enough of Jensen’s keynote talk to know that AI will not bust. And that soon –sooner than we think — the trillions of dollars being invested in data centers will pay off.
Heck I’m now paying real money every month for two of them — Perplexity and Gemini. And I’m about to peek into Cursor which is Jensen and his people’s favorite AI app. Cursor’s website says it all:
For the Cursor web site, click here.
A closing bit: The New York Times reported that the new Vera Rubin will allow companies to train models with a quarter of the number of chips as the Blackwell. And it can process requests from chatbots for a tenth of the cost,
Children’s books we love
My analysis suggests that the Diary of a Whimpy Kid franchise is now worth around a $1 billion. Not bad from children’s books.
The mess that is Venezuela
Chavez used oil revenues — then at $100 a barrel — to fund benefits for his citizenry. Then the price of oil fell and the state oil company PDVSA went on strike. He replaced PDSVSA’s staff with loyalists and funneled money into social programs instead of maintenance and new investment.
Then it got worse. He nationalized large swaths of the economy: electricity, telecoms, steel, agri businesses, cement, banks, supermarkets, etc.
State-run companies, according to Perplexiity, were used as poticital patronage machines — over-staffed, price-controlled, and under-managed — leading to collapsing produciity, blackouts, food shortages and widespread bankruptcies.
Chavez, who died of cancer, handpicked Maduro, who continued these insanities, bolstering them with fast, easy money from drugs.
Despite Maduro’s arrest, the present bunch of narco-crooks remain in charge — for now.
The only “logic” I can figure for all of this is:
Powerful leaders have super powerful armies to do their bidding (and keep them in power).
Trump is moving towards his own army with ICE, and training our military by sending them into American Cities and abroad to do his bidding. The “long-term” plan is the biggest private army in the world.
That’s my “logic.” If you think otherwise, please drop a comment below, or send me an email.
Grandkids
I moaned to my friend, “My grandchildren only love me because I buy them ice cream.”
My friend replied, ” Be thankful you’re still around to do that.”
Stocks
I bought some more MU, COF, PSLV, LRCX, and, of all things, Nike.
The last time we had craziness — Liberation Day — I sold. Too much. Too late buying it back.
The latest craziness — Venezuela — and maybe soon, Iran (again) and Cuba. I’m sitting tight.
No oil company in their right mind would invest a nickel in Venezuela with the present political mess, the roving armed gangs and today’s ultra-low price of oil.
See you soon — Harry Newton
