Donald Trump talking about buying Greenland might be crazy. But crazy is not the same as wrong. Go long on beachfront property near Greenland’s capital city of Nuuk – soon to be known as “The Riviera of the Frozen North.” The cultural climate will change, too. The social media fad will pass. One day we’ll all wake up thinking, “Whose bright idea was it to put every idiot in the world in touch with every other idiot?” Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Instagram will be the mood rings, Nehru jackets, Cabbage Patch dolls, Pet Rocks, hula hoops, and attempts to stuff a record number of people into a Volkswagen Beetle of the 2020s. Everybody will return to chatting over backyard fences, calling on the phone just to say hello, and sending postcards from vacation trips – “Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.” As a result, Big Tech will go the way of the Big Three automakers, and Michael Moore’s 2029 feature film will be about lives of economic desperation in Cupertino, California. trips – 'Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.' LETTER FROM THE EDITOR “ Everybody will return to chatting over backyard fences, calling on the phone just to say hello, and sending postcards from vacation
Speaking of automakers, the self-driving car will turn out to be a flash in the pan. By the time self-driving car software gets smart enough to know how to negotiate America’s traffic jams, it will be smart enough to know that only an idiot wants to negotiate America’s traffic jams. The self-driving car will refuse to leave your driveway. A great excuse to – always – work from home! Then, because we can’t go anywhere and are watching too much TV, the celebrity index will crash. “Personalities” and “Boldface Names” have already been vastly oversold. There’s an enormous glut in this market. Just open a copy of People or Us at random, point a finger at a pictured celeb, and ask yourself, “What is this person celebrated for ?” I’ll bet you don’t know, and I know I don’t... Plus, fame is a commodity that’s grossly overpriced. Take Kylie Jenner for example, whoever the heck she is. (I vaguely recalled that she was some kind of Kardashian with her former dad now being her other mother, or something like that.) So I Googled her. (Which I won’t be able to do later this decade because Google’s parent company Alphabet will be in Chapter 11 along with Studebaker- Packard.) Kylie is 22. Kylie started her own makeup company. Kylie’s net worth, according to Forbes magazine, is $1 billion. That’s a lot of lip gloss... The entire market capitalization of Revlon is only $1.29 billion. There’s going to be a big sell-off in Kylie and all the other Kylie-alikes. Supposedly famous faces will face a major downturn – a bear market among the barely recognizable. The trouble is, how do you short a celebrity? (Never mind that many
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December 2019
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