Weak Signals

A weekly newsletter about the small signals that get lost in the noise

‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation’

Welcome back to Weak Signals.

If you caught the slightly viral think piece that ran in the New York Times Wednesday, you’ll know that the word of the day/week/month /year is languishing.

Per the NYT, “Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.” I’ll confess some of that stagnation and emptiness that we’re feeling got the best of me when I sat down to write Weak Signals over the last month.

Like all of you, and centering this note to Canada for a moment, it’s just been so friggin’ bleak. With lockdowns in both the foreground and background, it gets tough to crank out pithy prose.

But hey - that’s life right.

As Ted Lasso says,

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So let’s get back at it.

Writing is a bit like exercise. It’s a habit that’s hard to get into and out of.

So just like after a long hiatus from the gym, your best bet is a metered approach. Easing back in with less prose and more links for this week’s Weak Signals. Let’s refresh and reset for Spring together:

• Ari Emanuel takes on the World. A long form profile in the New Yorker on what the real-life Ari Gold has been up too since Entourage ended ten years ago. Yes, ten is not a typo and you are officially old.

• Stoicism is Not Enough by Simona Harris. Beautiful prose as always from Harris who uses this essay to tease out why stoicism “is not a sufficient philosophy for a good life, only a survivable one.” Stoicism has become the philosophy du jour in Silicon Valley which is ironic, because by definition, it’s scales poorly. I think that’s a Dad joke which means I’m getting old too.

• Most arguments for getting a COVID-19 vaccination are framed in terms of individual self-interest, as opposed to civic or moral obligation. But is there a civic obligation to get vaccinated? Travis N. Rieder who’s the Director Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University takes that question on in the ethics of vaccine choice. As Paul Krugman pointed out on Twitter: among the many meaty problems the world is grappling with today, (Climate Change, CRT, AI, Bioethics); vaccine uptake is the rare case in which individual decisions about whether to act are crucial to our collective outcome. Quite frankly, that point of view makes me nervous about vaccine uptake and those other meaty global issues.

• This summer a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 76% of those eligible for the full freight of COVID unemployment benefits in the US could be given at least as much for being jobless as they’d earn by working. With Congress’s enhanced benefits make it more remunerative not to work, employers are struggling to attract employees as state ramp back up. The WSJ investigates the ramifications for business with a call to pull back the benefits. More interestingly, Dror Poleg takes on the same question in his substack post on The TINA Economy. Per Poleg, “People are opting out of employment opportunities, not because of laziness but out of an inability to live off the jobs on offer.” This is worth reflecting on, whether you’re an employer or employee.

• The Sinification of the West. An interesting article on what it means to live in a ‘low-trust society’ like China post the cultural revolution and if the West is heading that way, what are the consequences here? A bit dire, but well considered.

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Ahh, this is cool.

Sven Henrich @NorthmanTrader

Every time I'm tempted to want one I imagine in how many ways I would actually crash and burn with one. It does look fun though.

Weak Signals

A weekly newsletter about the small signals that get lost in the noise

'“No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.”

Welcome back to Weak Signals.

For those of you that didn’t catch the last newsletter, it was Part One in a Two Part series to identify and unpack the factors driving the Canadian housing boom. The initial analysis wasn’t intended to be completely original, but I hope it served as a refresher to remind you how we got here.

To quickly review, some measure of population growth, city concentration, easy money, restrictive regulation, principal residence tax treatment and sentiment are bidding up the poles of the Canadian housing market (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal). Post-COVID, that strength is dispersing across the country. Remote workers are shifting to lower cost locales; returning home vs. emigrating in most cases. That dispersion is not coming at the expense of the CA RE barbell. We remain bid.

So where do we go from here? Going through the factors one-by-one:

• Could federal policy shift around immigration in the near future? Conversely, could Canada become less attractive to immigrants? At the moment, none of our political parties are making any overtures to stall out immigration. Equally, per Google search data, Canada is the most desirable place to immigrate on Earth. Conclusion: Status Quo

• In a country with 65.8% home ownership, one of the highest rates of home ownership among advanced economies, what’s the likelihood a Federal Government will institute a capital gains tax on principal residences? While I fully expect new and novel taxes in the coming years, the cross-party coalition of Canadians who have accrued equity in their homes makes principal tax policy politically fraught. Conclusion: Status Quo

• Will we see cities pursue more friendlier pro-development policies? If you want the 10,000 word primer on how municipal housing regulations end up acting like a cartel to prevent developers from producing new homes - read this. If you want the Coles Notes version: the government has failed and will continue to fail to incentivize home supply where people want to buy. Conclusion: Status Quo.

• Over half of Canada’s population growth has accrued to three cities since 2000. Suddenly, we’ll spread out. Beyond a rise in rates, the next most common best bear case is that knowledge workers, untethered from the office will move from expensive to cheap cities. I have sympathy for this idea, particularly when it comes to the U.S. I do not believe it’ll end up making a measurable difference to the Canadian market, however. For one, respectfully, our alternatives don’t poise quite the same cultural cache. Halifax is beautiful. It is not Miami. Equally, unlike the US where the draw is NE to SW, or SW to SE/S, our smaller cities are more North. The weather is typically worse not better. Beyond weather and cultural cache, few Canadian cities sustain strong immigration networks which promote clustering. Canada’s KBI economy is disproportionately diverse. Immigrating KBI workers are just as likely not to come to Canada in the first place as they are to come to Toronto and then move. Red/Blue political dynamics? Non-existent, at least as a tax consideration level. Finally, given how nascent remote work is, people still have to pop into the office here and there. A Nashville to New York flight on random day in May: $56. A Toronto to Halifax flight on that same day: $336. Conclusion: Surprisingly Status Quo

• If Interest rates rise, how tolerant will Canadians remain of debt? In a debtor nation, the concept of ‘cheap’ vs ‘expensive’ housing doesn’t turn on the sticker price of a house, it turns on the cost of servicing the mortgage. If rates rise, servicing costs rise as well. But not to worry, we’re all in good company. MMT be damned, the government either can’t afford to pay higher interest rates either. Conclusion: Maybe some moment on the margin but lower for longer. Status Quo.

  ---

  So I’m a huge bull apparently. Well yes, mostly.

  But there’s always two sides to the market so if I can’t see it, I’ll at least try to imagine it.

  What about consumption and our relative appetite for housing? I was a bit dismissive about the consumption angle in Part I, but I challenged myself to revisit it. Per Douglas Porter, Canadians love to consume housing. As stated above, 65.8% of Canadians own their homes. Our house price-to-rent ratio is among the highest in the world. Holding those end-user consumers constant though, what about the other 34.2%? What do they do? While they rent of course but unlike most markets, Canada’s rental stock is primarily controlled by individual investors.

  

  Canadians not only consume their own houses at faster rate vs. the rest of the world, they are far more likely to consume housing again through the purchase of a rental property. Per the CMHC, over 90% of Canadian rental ownership is dominated by individual investors and Private Corporations.

  Looking at the 25-year Sharpe Ratio of Asset classes, you understand why. Over that timeframe, multifamily residences (a large subset of rental units) has outperformed the S&P 500 by 3x.

  

So what could change then?

Well short term, we’ve already seen rental rates go down and CAP rates turn negative. But what if medium to long term, the power dynamics between tenant and landlords simply change.

Over the past fifteen years, we saw a cultural shift in our collective approach to debt. It went from vice to virtue. What if, when it comes to housing, people just stop paying their rent and that’s becomes the moral thing to do? What if, more provocatively when it comes to housing, people stop paying their mortgage and that’s ok as well.

My Weakest Weak Signal Yet: Hovering somewhere between an ‘unknown known’ and ‘unknown unknown’, an existential risk, however faint, to the Canadian housing market is simply a shift in power between tenant and landlords.

What would cause the shift - an emerging progressive political wing, class consciousness, generational divide and Bill C-97 | Canada federal right to housing legislation.

Other things will matter more in the near term.

If this is at all prescient, nothing else will matter in the long term.

Weak Signals

A weekly newsletter about the small signals that get lost in the noise

“The Truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.”

Welcome back to Weak Signals.

As long time readers know, Weak Signals is a free weekly (ish) newsletter where I share small conjectures on how the news of today will reverberate and influence the world of tomorrow.

I write about what I’m interested in; the markets, real estate, politics, digital eCommerce, the zeitgeist as I see it, and then I share my predictions about what’s to come.

Weak signals are the small signals that usually get lost in the noise.

Weak signals are ideas about the ‘and then what.’

But given that Telsa and Bitcoin are both down 15% since I pushed publish, Weak Signals is definitely not an investment advice newsletter.

The usual disclaimers apply.

Without further adieu, this week we’re returning to an old Weak Signals canard - pontificating on the Canadian housing market.

This is a Part I of II.

If you want to skip to the punch line, most of my conclusions will borrow liberally from Philo’s Housing Medallions Substack note.

In Part II, I’ll translate his imputed income stats into Canadian figures, add a bit more editorial on RE as an inflation hedge and weave in a bit about Bitcoin just to be abstruse.

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Let’s dig in.

I think I touched a bit of a nerve and ended at least one friendship (for awhile) with my beatification of Elon Musk and BTC two weeks ago. The best response I got on that note though wasn’t from someone on either side of the debate. It was a simple retort from a notoriously grumpy, but fairly astute reader.

They correctly noted, you (me) can invest as quixotically as one would like - BTC, NFTs, ICOs, whatever; the simplest path to wealth creation in Canada has been to own your own home, and nothing will likely surpass it as an asset class in the near future.

And using a fifteen-year lookback window, they are not wrong.

Since the 2008 GFC when the Canadian housing market dipped for about six seconds, it’s been nothing but blue skies. The median home price in Canada is $531,000 USD, 56% higher than the average US home price of $340,000. Housing’s share of Canada’s nominal GDP is over 9%, more than double the current U.S. ratio of 4.3%. By some measures, 60-65% of the average Canadians net worth is now tied to their primary residence, up from for 51 per cent in the early 2010’s.

So while a lot of ink has been spilt on the the resilience of the Canadian housing market over the past year, strength in Canadian RE market has been a systemic phenomenon for over a decade now. If you live here, this is nothing new, but it’s worth unpacking what exactly fueled the the on-going real estate boom in Canada and what’s to come of some of these factors in a post-COVID world, which we’ll took on in Part II.

While let’s figure out how we got here first. It’s a few things really:

• Population Growth: Of all G7 countries (Canada, US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan) Canada has had the highest population growth over the past thirty years - 1.2% per annun, driven primarily by immigration

• Urbanization: Canadian RE (the expensive part anyways) is a bit a barbell. Vancouver on one end | Toronto and Montreal on the other. Over half of Canada’s population growth has accrued to those three cities since 2000, and more of our total population is concentrated in our largest cities relative to American metropolises.

• Access to cheap money and a new-found tolerance for leverage: Depending on your vantage, leverage is just a fancy way of saying debt but the concept of dissonance reduction is real. As the the most indebted people on earth (176% debt to income at last glance), Canadians have a new national past time other than hockey - buying on credit.

• Tax treatment: Tax shelters aren’t supposed to be literal, but in this country they are. You’ve got to love the symmetry.

• Interventionist policy: Housing regulation drives up cost by either reducing the prospective supply or increasing the cost to build. Per the stats, Canadian governments at all levels are more interventionist than their American counterparts. Places like San Fran are starting to give us a run for our money though.

• “Canadians simply value homes as a consumption good more than most”: This last one is in quotations because I’m aping it directly from BMO Chief economists Douglas Porter January report - the ‘Unbreakable (Canadian) Housing Market.’ Porter believes “on balance Canadians have made a collective choice to allocate more resources to (and thus ‘consume’ more) housing than other countries.” I share it because Porter voice carries some well earned weight, but personally I’m not convinced. If paying more for housing is a consumption choice, I don’t believe it’s a conscious one. Maybe the invisible hand stoking Canadian RE is wearing a Rolex and we’re all unwittingly paying up for a Veblen good? I have my doubts….

In any case, the common thinking is that some combination of immigration, urbanization, taxation, debt, policy and consumption has brought us here.

And where is here exactly?

While, twelve months into a global pandemic, the Canadian housing market (the parts that matter anyways) show no signs of relenting. We are up 22.8 per cent YoY. Compositionally, demand has shifted from the core to the outer suburbs, and from condominiums to freeholds, with drivable cottage country being bid up the most. But despite prognostications signaling the death of the CBD and the condo market that services it (aka - yours truly), it’s not a tale of two markets, yet. At this stage, all levels of the Canadian residential market have gone bid. Simply speaking, for the average Canadian, in 2020 - their house makes more than they do.

So knowing where we are, where are we going next and why? And is there anything else beyond the six factors I listed above that might drive future moves in the price of Canada RE?

I’ll try my best to answer these questions in Part II.

More to come.

Thanks as always for your time and attention.

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Weak Signals

A weekly newsletter about the small signals that get lost in the noise

“In winter we close the windows
and read Chekhov,
nearly weeping for his world.

What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.”

Welcome back to Weak Signals.

Inspired by the long weekend, I attempted something a bit ambitious this week. Fair warning, I don’t know if I quite landed the rocket. So for those of you who want the Coles Notes, feel free to watch the two-minute primer below. I promise I won’t begrudge you.

But for those of you brave enough to pack a parachute … strap in, we’re headed to Mars.

Lily’s Show @LilyKnightShow

#Bitcoin explained by a 3 year old 🙃

I first started following Bitcoin in 2014. It was at the tail end of my prop trading days. That I didn’t buy BTC when it trading sub $1,000 tells you a lot about why it was the end, not the beginning of my prop trading days. But I digress. For old timers like me who were watching BTC then, the narrative in 2014 turned mostly around ‘libertarianism’ and the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange fraud.

The promise of Bitcoin in 2014 (scarcity, divisibility, utility, and transferability) was the same then as it is now. The emphasis was different though. Step into any forum or tweet-thread extoling the virtues of BTC, and it read way more like a political theory lecture than an economics class.

You were far more likely to encounter commentary on autonomy, political freedom, state skepticism and resistance to government censorship than you ever were store-of-value, digital-gold, diamond hands, and have fun ‘being poor’ memes.

This was 2014. Big Time.

Then Mt. Gox hit, and it was the closest the crypto-currency came to dying.

For those that don’t know, Mt. Gox was one of earliest, and at the time, the largest bitcoin exchanges in the world. It abruptly closed down in 2014 when it was revealed its own owners were co-conspirators in a massive coordinated theft. They lost 850,000 Bitcoins. 7% of the total float. About $42.5 Billion USD of coins at today’s price.

So for me at the time, that BTC, an instrument of libertarian politics was almost brought down by a fraud committed in the absence of regulations had a certain symmetry to it.

Maybe we do need some regulation after all?

In 2014, to my mind, Bitcoin always felt a bit destined to fail. Per those forums and tweet-threads, BTC was at its core, a political ideology wrapped in a technology, counter to the mainstream. It was either too unregulated or too powerful for it’s own good, and more than anything, if it got too big, it would get banned.

So I didn’t buy it, I have fun ‘being poor’ and I stopped paying attention (mostly 😉) until last week.

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There’s been a lot of ink spilled on Telsa’s announcement that the EV car manufacturer has allocated $1.5 Billion of its cash reserves to Bitcoin. Telsa, who intends to use their BTC reserve to facilitate payment for cars in the future, is inarguably one of the most forward looking, climate sensitive companies in the world. Their cryptocurrency investment, however, raises questions.

For one, how does it reconcile with Telsa’s climate and environmental aims: Bitcoin is by its structure, energy intensive. Equally, what does this allocation say about Telsa’s priorities? Their BTC investment is equivalent to their 2020 R&D budget.

That seems, off?

But while Telsa and Bitcoin are very different things, they share similar trajectories. Both have ratcheted to higher and higher valuations as their individual narratives have strengthened, Cassandra’s be damned. I don’t know where Telsa’s stock goes from here, although you could do worse than Ben Thompson’s take, ‘Mistakes & Memes. Telsa; the original meme stock. Elon Musk; the meme master’,

In the micro stock-price sense - where Telsa goes matters.

In the macro story-sense and in this stories sense - it doesn’t.

Telsa pulled forward the adoption and advancement of EV cars by tens years. Elon Musk has singularly done more for climate change than any individual on earth. History will judge him fondly, independent of his companies success or failure.

Returning to my 2014 thesis, how did Telsa’s purchase of BTC just alter it’s trajectory.

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My favorite book of the past five years was undoubtedly the best seller ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah Harari. In Sapiens, Harari doesn’t introduce many new ideas, but what makes the book special is how he crystalizes, connects and contextualizes so many big ideas together.

One of the most powerful ideas Sapiens introduced to me was ‘intersubjective realities.’

As Harari tells it, while both animals and humans experience 'objective reality' (e.g., trees) and 'subjective reality' (e.g., feeling pain), only humans experience 'intersubjective realities' (e.g., human rights, corporations, money).

• “Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans."

• “Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories”

Intersubjective fictions that take become shared fictions. There’s something very McLuhan about shared fictions; particularly their reliance on language and writing to bridge, than shape reality.

• “Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, but it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality."

In Harari’s telling, language the original tool. And as McLuhan says, ‘First we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.’ And when it comes to money (particularly fiat), the ultimate shared fiction, the ultimate tool, applying Harari, you truly understand the value of belief.

So how does this all relate to Bitcoin and Telsa’s Treasury investments?

Going back to Bitcoin’s foundation, decentralized currency, by definition contrasts with centralized currency. It pushes back at state authority. As Satoshi wrote in early threads, “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.”

Centering this in the here and now, governments around the world were already systemically pursuing loose monetary policy pre-COVID. Now it’s just straight Modern Monetary Theory YOLO.

But to quote Bill Marshall, “Modern Monetary Theory is not a revolutionary new system or drastic threat to the current establishment; it is the current establishment. MMT merely describes the global economy today: the existing fiat currency system. Governments are not constrained in their spending by a need to raise revenue.”

So where does Bitcoin come in? As Mike Co says, if Modern Monetary Theory is the thesis, then Bitcoin is the antithesis. To MMT and those in power pushing it the world over, BTC is the theoretical nemesis. BTC takes a drastically different philosophical approach to money creation and access than MMT.

“Bitcoin could become a universal economic escape hatch to allow individuals insurance against local economic meltdown. Anyone with internet access can potentially access this alternative store of value to guard their wealth.”

But we knew that already, right?

Back in 2014, Bitcoin was destined to fail, intuitively, because it represented a threat to the system. It was a political ideology wrapped in a technology. I wouldn’t have been able that articulate then. I’m not sure how well I’m articulating it now, but it’s always been sort of understood.

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So how did Telsa change the politics of Bitcoin?

Telsa has changed the calculus on Bitcoin’s narrative because it’s made it almost impossible to ban.

Telsa investment has removed the largest existential threat to Bitcoin.

Telsa has reshaped the reality of Bitcoin.

Telsa’s has pushed Bitcoin from intersubjective reality to shared fiction.

Dan Monocellular Held @danheld

6/ In 2020, Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy, rocked the world when he announced that he was going to take the billions MicroStrategy had in cash and put it in Bitcoin.

cointelegraph.comMicroStrategy’s CEO reveals the company’s surprising Bitcoin buying strategySuch an effort shows dedication to the asset class for the long term.

Today, MMT is expressed in policy through asset buying, debt monetization and quantitative easing. MMT’s loose money STAB drives asset price inflation (which does a lot of things but for the sake of simplicity makes stocks go up). Stocks going up spur confidence as individuals feel positive about the direction of the economy. Companies balance sheets are improved and they are inspired to invest, hire and spend as well.

But what instead of taking newly found capital to invest and spend, people, but more importantly companies, invest in Bitcoin instead?

• The action takes money out of the fiat system. | Fine but nothing new

• It validates Bitcoin as a store-of-value which inspires confidence in it from investors for another. | This helps but it isn’t everything

• If Bitcoin sits on the balance sheet of fortune 500 companies, then banning Bitcoin would cause stock markets to fall, defeating the whole idea of MMT theory to begin with. Which sort of makes it hard to ban. | Ohh this is new

Telsa’s purchase of BTC is a Trojan Horse for the crypto-currency into fiat. What Telsa disclosed in it’s 10-k is that it had updated it’s investment policy to provide them with more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash.

A modest way of describing reality.

As the rest of the S&P 500 follows, reality reshapes.

Telsa pulled forward the adoption and advancement of EV cars by tens years.

Elon Musk singularly done more for climate change than any individual on earth.

What he just did with Bitcoin matters more.

🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

Diamond hands, you just hit escape velocity.

Weak Signals

A weekly newsletter about the small signals that get lost in the noise

‘If you’re feeling called to explore a life outside the boundaries you've inherited … don’t let old

stories stand in your way.’

Welcome back to Weak Signals.

Before we jump in, an above the line cheat sheet on the $GME saga and a video that perfectly sums up the week.

Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente

This video perfectly sums up last week

The GameStop short selling stock saga is front and center this weekend, to say the least.

What began as a brilliant trade idea, hive-minded on Wallstreetbets, transformed into a surrealist spectacle of internet meme culture torching Wall Street to the tune of billions. There are so many layers to this story, with so many twists and turns, that if you were following in real time, it felt like you were mainlining the internet.

The story seemed to reach a boiling point Thursday morning when Robinhood cut off the retail traders from buying $GME, but with the stock still above $300 as of Friday’s close, the trade, and this story still have legs yet.

Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath

Listen to this. 🔥🔥🔥 I love my bestie @DavidSacks ❤️❤️❤️ https://t.co/iY1E7britK

Rafa @Rafa0x_

@DavidSacks on the @theallinpod 🔥🙌 https://t.co/uXjWLbkdDN

I loved it but I want to be careful with it.

This story obviously means something, but to borrow from Benedict Evans; it is a bit of a Rorschach test. This story can mean everything, and anything and nothing, all at once.

· Is this a story about the long maligned ‘dumb money’ retail investor, (who FYI, was never that dumb to begin with), empowered by open market access and aggregated buying power, trouncing the very serious investor?

· Is this the new playbook for how to hack political elections?

· Is this the Capitol Hill Riots recast online?

· Is this a story about power – who has it, how is it wielded and for whose benefit?

· Is this a dire warning that social media has the ability to catalyze mass instant global action? And how that ability could cause cataclysmic consequences if we all jump to the wrong conclusions on the wrong story at the wrong moment?

· Is this a story about the uselessness of short-selling? (Perhaps the most specious take of all.)

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As I said, this story means everything, and anything and nothing, all at once.

The whole saga feels like the opening to Dickens Novel.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…..

In last week’s Weak Signals, I hypothesized a new dialectic emerging around the place of meditators who control access to society.

The internet empowers us.

Paradoxically, the internet consolidates power.

Beyond the X and O’s of the story, that was the tension being expressed this week, and it’s why people found themselves beside strange bedfellows in their shared response.

We are crossing a chasm in real-time. The role of centralized authority (and who it serves) will continue to a flash point of debate as this dialectic finds new means and modes of expression.

Last week’s it was Trump being de-platformed by Big Tech.

This week it was about Wall Street de-platforming retail investors.

Next week, it’ll be about…

I guess this is all just a really long winded way of saying Bitcoin.

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• As one of the largest money managers in the world and a devoted systems thinker, what Ray Dalio thinks of Bitcoin is well worth reading.

• The only thing classier than Greg Norman’s Golf Swing is his house.

• One of the past times I’ve picked up during COVInfinity is watching architectural videos on Youtube. I like to think of it as a high-end HGTV’esque escape. Michelen starred chef, Fina Puigdevall Catalonia home is one of my favorites. Set in the foothills of the Pyrenees, her house is other worldy.

• On the off-chance next week’s Weak Signals goes out after kick-off - I’ve got Tampa Bay. Who do you have? Let me know.