More than a few people, including QCOM shareholders are becoming fed up with someone spewing hate and firing people right and left. Christiano seems to be doing a good job threading his way through a maize filled with impediments, political and economic.
One bright spot I see is that QCOM is undervalued, owing mainly to most of its 170,000 + patents, valued on the balance sheet at zero. That means the shares have less downside risk in a market beset by tariff related inflation and reduced consumer discretionary spending. Intrinsic value trumps book value.
We are going through a period where traditional strengths are being discarded. Freedom is now defined by many as simply the right to do whatever you want. It's not, and never was. Freedom is a gift that requires adhering to certain rules, not doing whatever you want. The Old and New Testaments, even the Quran, all agree on this message. The Old Testament states, "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord," in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and warns people to respect their neighbors, including aliens, in memory of the 400 years the Israelites spent in Egypt. The New Testament book of Ephesians is even clearer in cautioning believers not to ". . . let the sun set on your wrath." The Quran accepts Jesus as a prophet, along with Muhammed, who came along much later.
Changes in ideology can spread quickly, as shown historically by their influence from one country or even one continent to another, often in mere months if not years. The evidence is seen in the similarities in paintings, sculptures, and technology, for example, from Persia, China, and Japan, which showed up in European nations only a few years after they appeared in their country of origin. Think about paper (papyrus) and its "modern" development in China and Japan, or Ming blue and white porcelain imitations from Delft and Meissen, or the eroticism of Persian miniature paintings in European paintings less than a decade later.
The present U.S. leadership is heading toward a slow or no growth economy, signs of which are already unmistakable. The effects are magnified because of efforts to destroy not just freedom of speech but freedom of thinking differently; hence, an attempt to quell innovation. Where this mindset occurred elsewhere in the recent past, the results were not just inflation but destruction of the middle class, and fatal mistakes in public policy leading to increasing costs and war, borne by everyone including those who created the mess.
I like to think about Claude Shannon, one of the fathers of modern information technology, who introduced the modern world to the basic math and the need for diversity of inputs to minimize computing error. He, along with John von Neumann, one of whose last lectures at Princeton detailed the design of reliable computers from unreliable components, was given at a time when computers still used vacuum tubes, which got hot and often burned out. He showed mathematically how redundant, independent circuits with components operating independently of one another could not only improve reliability but the reliability would improve with continuing iterations.
The modern day lesson is that, without diversity and independent thinking, you can end up making big mistakes that ultimately may prove your undoing. Think about that.
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