It could be another election year October meltdown, as the next needed interest rate move increasingly becomes upward & the typical election year moratorium comes to an end.  The public is going to become increasingly aware of what's going to happen.  There's going to be a time when they're either going to have to do something about 4% inflation or admit the real target isn't 2%. They can let inflation run 4-5% for maybe 2 years before the cat gets out of the bag. They've currently kept it at 4% for 1 year.

Of course, the official CPI could go down.  Something needs to go down to offset housing but lions aren't seeing any magic since the last minimum wage increase.  They had to free Putin to contain oil prices.

This year's rent increase was 8.4%, the maximum under the state's new rent control law.  The state limits rent increases to 5% + official CPI so that would be 8.4%.  Pay animals more & the landlords are going to get their cut.

The good news is they offer a 13 month option which only goes up 5.9% so that's a no brainer.  They're predicting lower inflation in the long term, the same as the bond market. Lions have no delusions that rent inflation will ever be less than 5%. Still, something else needs to drop 3% for inflation targeting to work.

The day job had the double whammy of hardware costs tripling after 2020 while foreign currencies lost buying power against the dollar so they lost their hardware business.  A venture in Mexico went belly up & a venture in Australia had to cut back.  They only make money from subscriptions now.  Sounds like they're on the verge of the extra effort on all weekends stage which always comes before either the buyout or the RIF.  So it goes with the places lions can get into.

Strangely, some places stop giving you things to do before the wheels fall off & other places go the 24/7 hail mary route.  The current place seems to be the hail mary route.

The lion kingdom's feeling on their AI effort is it's pretty desperate.  Their current price point & size of their data set is just nowhere close to what it takes for AI to be viable.  It still costs zillions of dollars for AI to be worth the investment in training & even outperform deterministic methods.  They might be able to do non realtime image recognition.  Maybe they could analyze full sky images for solar power.  How do you promote something based on an improved ability to detect transients, noise, usage patterns, something commodore 64's can do?

Lions would just pivot & sell self driving wagons.

A self propelled, narrower version of this with leash interface & pneumatic tires would be the best thing ever made.  A combination of efficientdet & UWB might be really close, but the leash just works.  The leash is a tiny component.  That might be the lion kingdom's future rural vehicle, definitely the immediate need after moving.  

The fabric container could be collapsible to customize the length.  Then the lion kingdom would strap on the trail shoes & hoof it to town on the unimproved soft shoulder with the robot & a bunch of reflectors in back, maybe rear view glasses.  At least there is a soft shoulder.

A month after Nvidia was the golden child, Goog is now the must have stonk & NVDA is junk.  You can't win.

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Back to a 7:10 minute mile after 7 weeks, but the ankle wasn't happy.