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Kumar Thangudu
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Quick Thoughts After A Talk with a Moroccan Black Cab Operator

Kumar Thangudu
A photo from 2021. Bankside.

I'm tempted to publish more often and write more often, so I will.

I love it when all of you respond with thoughts and commentary, so thank you to those of you who have. I've been shocked at the growth in subscribers.

I'm in London now. I had a 1.5 hour chat with a Moroccan London black cab driver.

Here's what the black cab looks like.
When I was younger, I wanted to buy these and run them on Waste Vegetable oil in the US as delivery vehicles. The weight ratio is ugh. You have to clip an add on in that burns the waste vegetable oil hot before it goes through the engine, otherwise it will congeal on the inside of the engine.


I avoid the metro like the plague because of fear of getting sick when there's no sun and it's all crowded into close quarters. The woes of paranoia. 

We discussed the daily over-reach of the British government into the lives of those that do real measurable work with viable output. I consider most of the tech sector to be fake work with negative energy return on investment, with no viable long term yield.

London cabs cost about 70K GBP and between licensure and maintenancee you spend 6k-8k GBP a year. Still a viable job if you're living outside of the city center of London, but you get rekt otherwise. He can pull between 400 GBP to 1000 GBP per a day.
Source: https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates


Numerous taxes and fees have popped up. This particular cab driver bought a property 30 years ago and had benefited greatly from renting it out. 4 kids, takes vacations, etc.... Few are as lucky from what he told me.

This all brings me to my point, things that very few people in tech seem to understand that I think about as I travel.

TLDR: Dear America, you're about to get Europe'd and you'll have wished you owned assets that haven't been expropriated by our elites and their cheap ill gotten gov't capital gains. 

Most people in tech fail to understand the following: 

  • Hot Potato Money - Most venture and private equity returns were hot potato with pension money (ie - few to no productively profitable companies for the amount of capital deployed per the duration deployed - in chemistry terms - negative energy return on investment) - most LP returns came from hot potato money so even if you think "my venture fund is pure" it very rarely is. No VC wants this sort of parasitic analysis done on their fund, but ALL or most of them are beneficiaries of the gov't recycling money into their funds and them taking a vig. 
  • Forms of Gov't Debt - High pension, infrastructure, and taxpayer debt per taxpayer in your locale control your quality of life. @truthinaccounting - the higher these debts go - the worse the quality of life - and they pit the pension'd class vs. everyone else. 
  • Greenback Boomerang - Most of TESLA and NVIDIA is shadow banking greenback boomerang dollars. https://bit.ly/greenbackboomerang…
  • US Dollar reigns supreme - The US dollar won't be disintermediated by bitcoin anytime soon. CCP government wants a strong US dollar.  http://bit.ly/oildollar 
  • Lithium Ion Pension Scams and Greenback Boomerangs - You cannot get venture returns investments on lithium ion batteries when they have 6x-100x the farm to fork cost/kwh unless there's a racket involved. There are fools who will claim that the LCOE is lower, but 9/10 they are physicists who do not study grid topologies, chemical workflows, etc... limited in their cognition and understanding of the problem. 
  • "So you understand tech so well" - Most IPV4 address allocations outperformed other assets at scale with monstrous dividends to play with from ISP ownership to recieve them.
  • We're all gonna be gov't contractors shortly - we're going to be Europe'd. - 50% of GDP will become gov't expenditure in the USA in 24-48 months or less. 
  • Mo Debt, Mo Venture money- The broker the gov't, the more insane the investment to chase yield - there will be even more venture money shortly in the system. 
  • Labor Racketeering with Gov't dollars - Productive Pension money will lock up licensed labor with "roll ups" bidding up the cost of everything. The jaws of occupational licensure will be felt acutely in every part of your life. My friend Adam taught me about this for years. 
  • You're getting Europe'd Right before your eyes - The economically productive folks are wrangling the politburo to line their pockets and none of you have protested.