At least it's Harvard that controls our future water. Michigan would probably let former Buckeyes dehydrate.

The Harvard endowment lost like 90% of its value in 2008, right? So probably they're betting the wrong way.

I thought it was called "crisertunity".

I guess the Harvard ideal really is a philosophy not of opportunity but of opportunists.

2: No, FWICT the most value the endowment lost in a single fiscal year was 29% (6/30/08 to 6/30/09, over which same period the S&P lost 26%). Presumably decent risk-balancing.

So presumably they're holding California almonds too.

This brings to mind Piketty's analysis about how larger college endowments get better returns, with Harvard in a class by itself. Presumably investments like this are one of the reasons why.

I do want to highlight this one line:

"We're having more heat and more drought," says Willy Cunha, a vineyard manager in the county. That has put a premium on land with good water, he says. "It is like California beachfront property. God isn't making any more of it."

Im ded. I mean, you can quibble about net beachfront property, I suppose. Gross, gross beachfront property, though...

8 would be a good comment, but it definitely isn't here.

Maybe Harvard put all its money into bitcoin and this water thing is them trying to claw back some of their losses.

But seriously, I think this makes a good case for progressive taxation. If the wealthy are able to use their structural advantage to produce higher returns on assets than the rest of us plebes, its appropriate that they pay higher taxes to balance out that advantage.

But I'm guessing Harvard doesn't actually pay taxes?

To the city they have a Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) which I think is about 25% of what they would owe in property taxes if they were for-profit. Income taxes, nothing that I know of.

I think capital gains would be the issue here. Not that I know the answer.

In fact, God is making less beachfront property, by any reasonable definition. The harder question is coastline.

Sinking coastlines tend to be heavily indented, actually. So more beachfront.

Interestingly, in contrast to Piketty's more global assessment, more recently they don't seem to have been outperforming the market, or even tracking it. If I'm reading the reports correctly, on average every year since 2010 their investment return has been 7.6% of net assets, but the S&P's real annualized gains have been 10.6% over the same period.

(And if you expand the scope to 2005-2018, the returns come closer but Harvard's are still lower.)

In fact, God is making less beachfront property, by any reasonable definition. The harder question is coastline.

But at least it's no longer true that once it's developed, we're stuck with that.

Anyone else remember when this was the plot of a James Bond movie?

Christopher Walken could sell me on anything, tbh.

Or you mean the other one, Craig#2? That was not a good movie.

Harvard hired James Bond to manage its endowment? That's going to end badly.

Bond. James Bond Bonds.

18: Wasn't it the plot of a Superman movie? Yes, it was!

Meanwhile, criminal genius Lex Luthor learns of a joint U.S. Army and U.S. Navy nuclear missile test. He then buys hundreds of acres of worthless desert land out west and reprograms the test's two 500 megaton missiles, one of which to detonate inside of California's largest fault line, the San Andreas Fault, which will cause everything west of the fault to sink into the Pacific Ocean and leave Lex's desert as the new West Coast.

I remember that. Luthor's girlfriend pulled the kryptonite off Superman because her mother lived in California.

Spoiler Alert!

But did Mr Kevin Spacey hold conferences in an airship? Suavely toss his competitors from said airships into the San Francisco Bay? Gleefully deploy Molotov cocktails in confined spaces? Machine-gun his own drowning workforce to an accompaniment of hysterical laughter? No, sir, he did not. These honors belong to Mr Christopher Walken.

Kids today don't even see Gene Hackman.

Shit. Whatever. The point still stands.

It has been my lifelong ambition to pull off a really good Christopher Walken impersonation.

Hot Take: Superman was Brando's best movie except for The Godfather.

Well, get in front of a mirror. You're gonna need it in the desert.

24: I thought her mom lived in Jersey which meant Superman was honor bound to save Jersey first which meant he didn't get to California in time which meant he had to do the time travel thing that made no sense. I hope Harvard's wealth managers have priced all of that in.

I haven't seen Brando except in Apocalypse Now which objectively sucked. And Superman I which was really startlingly good.

32 is probably right.

33.1 !!!

Just Brando or the whole movie?

I guess there must be worse Brando than Last Tango in Paris but I can't think of it right now. Blond British Brando in Burn! was a trip.

30: Have you seen "A Streetcar Named Desire" or "On the Waterfront"? Although I could see thinking that he's trying a little too hard in those.

Brando definitely. The movie as a whole is a mess. IT has great stuff in it (the AirCav sequence! the band-aid speech! The silent mutual throttling scene!) But as a whole, just WTF. Biskind is great on that. Like, the Filipino fixers had actual corpses on location for Kurtz's camp. JFC.

I haven't seen those, but for the former I can extrapolate based on Ned Flanders's portrayal.

I can dismiss The Wild Ones by extrapolating from that stupid hat.

The movie as a whole is a mess. IT has great stuff in it (the AirCav sequence! the band-aid speech! The silent mutual throttling scene!)

I haven't seen the movie in ages, but in my memory almost all of the scenes of them on the boat on the river are solid (and every time I watch a movie with Lawrence Fishburne I'm tempted to go back and watch Apocalypse Now to marvel at how young he was).

41.2: I could go back and watch myself watching Apocalypse Now to marvel at how young I was.

42: But actually I couldn't do that, because I didn't have the foresight to film myself.

Best post-Godfather Brando is The Freshman.

I didn't see that either.

Christopher Walken (at his current age) would make a great Kurtz.

Brando was terrible in Mutiny on the Bounty, too. Much worse than in Apocalypse Now.

41: Other people are watching Blackish and holy shit did that hit him.