Again: Musk is laying out the flim flam to try to cut Social Security by $500-$700Billion per year [this is 1/3 of the program, roughly, using his ketamine math].
— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 5:06 PM
… Cut off your own head, DOGE. Not like you’re using it for anything but a MAGA hatstand!
The goal of DOGE pretty clearly appears to be:
1.) Blow up discretionary non-defense spending
2.) Find a way to stop paying around 500-700b in Social Security. Cynical take is they'll just target blue state social security payments and hold them.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 5:08 PM
honestly the DOGE program (you can barely call it one) might be the most unpopular policy slate every put into practice in american history tbh
— Reconstructionist (@unavaleable.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 5:17 PM
It’s all bullshit. The real question is whether they stick with it in the face of the incontrovertible evidence that he’s completely full of it. This stuff is very easy to disprove.
— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 5:13 PM
It's honestly hard to come up with a policy program more likely to blow up the GOP coalition than what they're doing
— Reconstructionist (@unavaleable.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 5:20 PM
"efficiency" (destroying anything intoxicated rich guys think is bullshit)
— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 10:18 PM
We make a lot of food. There are some things we import, but uh.. yeah. A bunch of school stable food? It's all agribusiness.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 11:00 PM
Elon: "this will force them to husband their current stock more efficiently!"
Buddy we use just in time logistics, the only stock we have is tied up in outstanding contracts
Elon: "Good news!"— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) March 9, 2025 at 11:23 AM
Now that they have their hands on the levers of power, all they can think about is what's the most spectacularly depraved thing they can do with them. Children playing a game
— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) March 9, 2025 at 3:12 AM
1.) Make Big Trucks more expensive.
2.) Fuck rural communities
3.) No more social security
4.) Also, no treats, fuck you upper middle class.
Honestly just a brilliant platform. Just brilliant.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 5:21 PM
War for Ukraine Day 1,110: One Dare Calls It Treason
J. Arthur Crank
It looks like I picked the wrong time to have insomnia. Also too, it was the wrong time to quit drinking, smoking, sniffing glue, and taking amphetamines.
Nukular Biskits
@J. Arthur Crank:
I see you’re a fellow connoisseur of great films!
Matt McIrvin
Republicans believe, to a person, that this HAS to be done to the US government or some kind of insolvency crisis will destroy the nation. So they’re still on board with this, for the most part. They’ll believe the part that hurts them personally is some kind of unusual mistake. If only the Czar knew!
But it might lose the center.
Basically, the plan is to wreck everything and see what’s “really necessary” by observing what disasters happen, then roll those bits back*. It’s similar to how Earl “Madman” Muntz developed electronics: he’d stalk his engineers with a wire cutter and snip components out of their prototypes until they broke, then say “put that last one back in”. But Muntz’s strategy worked because he was specifically trying to peddle a low-quality product for the lowest possible price. He sold his TVs to people who lived near the transmitter so they didn’t have to work too well at picking up a signal. (He also invented the “prices so low they’re INSAAAANE!” sales pitch later used by Crazy Eddie.)
Do we want a Muntzed government and society–the minimum viable quality for the lowest possible price? Elon Musk thinks so. And Muntz kept the worst circuit failures in his lab; for Musk the lab is the whole country.
*Well, in some cases the plan is probably to let Elon Musk or some friend of his peddle the replacement.
J. Arthur Crank
I often wonder how anyone could have ever listened to or looked up to Musk. When all of this is over, we need to rebuild the Coliseum in Rome and stage contests between Trump voters and Musk admirers. If Americans are not welcome in Europe at that time, I suppose we could build our own replica Coliseum.
J. Arthur Crank
@Nukular Biskits: Have you ever seen a grown man naked?
J. Arthur Crank
OK, it is time to try and kick insomnia in the nuts (you know it is male).
bjacques
@Matt McIrvin: I’d say it’s more like “let’s tinker with your DNA and get rid of that gene that makes your sweat stinky”. Except that gene also allows you to metabolize certain trace elements, makes your spinal column develop normally, and does about 27 other things you wouldn’t associate with it.
And if our resident DJ TBone is in the house tonight, how about a request for some Joey Ramone, in the context of yesterday’s stock market slide?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AW5t2mhEj4Q&pp=ygUbam9leSByYW1vbmUgbWFyaWEgYmFydGlyb21v
Matt McIrvin
@J. Arthur Crank: Tesla and SpaceX were both companies that, on their way up, did some truly noteworthy things that people had thought were impossible or very hard: make an electric car that actually impressed Car Guys; design a private space-launch infrastructure up to and including crewed missions that rivaled the ones with NASA in control. They did cool things like reusing boosters by landing them at the launch site. It was pretty impressive.
It wasn’t Elon Musk’s brainpower doing those things, but he’d bought his way into “visionary founder” status so he could bask in the glory, and it worked for a while. His fans still insist he’s this highly technical brilliant engineer.
I think with Twitter you really saw Musk unchained–parachuting into a company he fundamentally hated and just wrecking it on purpose, then proclaiming he’d made the organization leaner and meaner. Here, the Elon fans claim that everyone he laid off was “pretending to work”, which seems to be the fashion now.
p.a.
tRumpmarket killing my IRA, pls someone tell me where I can join this massive pool of fraudsters living of Murca’s precious bodily fluids.
Of course, only actual fraudsters would view the world as being full of frauds.
Jeffg166
@J. Arthur Crank:
I actually slept well last night. So rare.
Shalimar
@Matt McIrvin: The problem I see with their plan is that cutting 1/3rd of Medicaid and Social Security will signicantly slash the income of at least 10% of Americans to the point where they can no longer live. They seem to think they can get away with that, a lot of them won’t vote (and maybe the plan is to no longer hold votes) and the demonstrations can be put down by the military.
But we saw during Covid what happens when a disease with 1-2% mortality runs through the population. And that was just the percentage of people who got it, not everyone. I think they’re playing with fire on a level none of us can grasp. We have never seen anything as destructive as what’s coming.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: That’s just Muntzing the population. In Germany they called it Aktion T4.
The Thin Black Duke
@Shalimar: A frightening metaphor that keeps coming to mind is the bizarre saga of Stockman Rush and his submersible. Despite smarter people than Stockman telling him how dangerous the Titanic, Stockman’s wealth and power allowed him to ignore those warnings until finally his unsafe submersible killed him and his passengers. I keep thinking that Elon Musk is Stockman Rush and the United States is the Titanic.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
No one wants to pretend to work anymore.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
You mean, where elections are actually decided in this country?! But how does that fit in with axe-grinding about “Berniebro” leftists on Twitter?!
Just kidding. I agree with your analysis. (I almost always do, BTW.) There’s a lot of commenters looking toward the wrong places to blame this loss, and it makes me crazy, because that’s how we make sure we lose again in the future!
Nukular Biskits
@J. Arthur Crank:
Every time I step out of the shower … and then I scream.
Suzanne
@The Thin Black Duke:
There’s got to be some rich, powerful people who don’t have terrible risk assessment or personality disorders, right? Right?!
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: All of this also runs on a pathological form of the work ethic that emphasizes grind and hustle over craft. Musk has insisted from the beginning that you can’t “change the world” working normal hours–you must work 80, 90, 120 hours a week and catnap on a sofa in your office. It’s well-known that this is not a sustainable way to produce high-quality work and rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, especially if drugs are involved, which they probably are in Musk’s case. (It’s also, incidentally, something that women are much less willing to do, in part because they tend to get burdened with more than their share of family responsibilities–I’ve seen this cited openly as a reason not to hire women engineers!)
But what it does allow you to do is get something, anything out the door faster than your competition, or outrun the regulators or judges who are trying to stop you. Musk has openly bragged about this in the case of DOGE: nobody can stop him because his teenagers work 120 hours a week at wrecking everything.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
If Musk and others want to do that and amass great wealth by providing society with valuable goods and services, I have no problem with that.
When they want to use coercion to impose those values on regular folks without the same level of compensation, then we’re going to have words.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: One of the things that’s happening right now in tech industry is that the barons in charge think they can do this to every company. Fire everyone except the “10x coders”. Use AI and guys working punishing hours to fill the gaps. We’ll be rich!!!
You may have noticed that there doesn’t seem to be quite the same cornucopia of useful wonders coming out of these companies on the regular that there was, say, even 10 years ago. Lots of AI chatbots I guess.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, I actually find a small bit of the AI stuff useful, and I think there are non gimmicky uses for it, but it’s hard to see how the rush to bet all our cards on it will turn out well.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I am working on a project right now that is looking to use robots to do a lot of the physical parts of human jobs, such as lifting and transporting items down corridors. It is staggering to me just how difficult this is to do, for the kinds of tasks that are really laborious for people. They’re not building AI to pick fruit or wash clothes or change a bandage.
Betty Cracker
Forgive the grotesque imagery conjured by the analogy, but this sounds like the Trump version of a pity fuck, and by definition, things aren’t going well for those on the receiving end. Also note the use of “Elon’s baby” in reference to Tesla tanking. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I imagine a panicked phone conversation preceded this announcement.
TBone
@bjacques: your resident TBone is up and at ’em! Thank you! Almost takes the sting out of the Philadelphia Eagles accepting invitation to bend the knees
https://www.inquirer.com/eagles/eagles-white-house-invitation-visit-date-20250310.html
GAH
The Thin Black Duke
@Suzanne: Dolly Parton?
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: Oh, it’s illegal to not buy Teslas now? It’s amazing how many things are suddenly illegal. Is this getting big government off our backs?
TBone
@Betty Cracker: hahahaha I am illegally colluding my boycott! It’s illegal collusion! Perfect call!
The Thin Black Duke
@TBone: Damn it.
TBone
@The Thin Black Duke: ik,r?
🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dL60VXOXtSQ
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Looking forward to seeing how Tesla’s stock does today after that announcement.
Also, too, he’s going to use taxpayer money to buy the Tesla.
Maybe he’ll designate Teslas as a reserve currency the way he did crypto.
ETA: I encourage Tesla to put Trump on TV ads.
Dorothy A. Winsor
“If we eliminated
NGOsbillionaires, like 70% of our problems would disappear.”comrade scotts agenda of rage
One of the linked comments saying all the DOGE crap will “blow up the GOP coalition”. Um, where is the *current* evidence for that? Aside from a couple of (R) House members like Massie who have their own windmills to tilt at, there’s no evidence that this stuff is unpopular with the people who have it in their nominal power to do something about it, ie., (R) klowns in the House and Senate.
Okay, it’s early and the business part of the GOP coalition might finally freak if Wall Street continues to nose dive but then again, maybe not; those sweet, sweet tax cuts and deregulation might be worth a near-term stock market freak out, who the hell knows. And as we’ve seen for close to two generations now, the rank and file people never care about their self-interests so why start now?
Also too, it’s hysterical to see people who are always wrong essentially project that always wrongness onto others when it comes to electoral analysis, particularly as it pertains to 2016 and 2024.
TBone
Temple, Drexel, Swarthmore, Rutgers and U of P per The Inky
TBone
My financial advisor is gung ho buying the dip. Large cap indices out the wazoo. Glad it’s only a relatively small portion of TRUMP TAKE NESTEGG.
🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7hx4gdlfamo
Some European
Baud
@TBone:
The dip ain’t done dipping.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TBone:
It’ll be interesting, aka frightening, to see how this and the massive hack in personnel and spending at the Federal level reverberates throughout various Enormous State Universities (ESU).
Your comment had me see how Univ of CO was doing. Nothing concrete yet but they’re bracing for the worst and I’m guessing every ESU system is going thru the same thing.
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I guess I’ll check in on Bucknell today since I practically live on campus. Any cuts there would prolly decimate my town except we also have fed prison and major hospital. It’ll hurt real good though.
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: Mood, courtesy CSN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS3l_TwPNRY
TBone
@Baud: my guy is prolly counting on that too. He’s got a true poker face and a heart of ice.
YY_Sima Qian
I hate to link to Matt Stoller’s site, as he has turned into militarist & Fascist-curious, but the below article is enlightening on the actual causes for the persistently high egg prices in the US (hint: it’s not the avian flu pandemic), the most damning part excerpted below:
That’s the stark contrast I see between privately owned (including publicly traded) corporates in the US & the PRC.
Most US corporations are singularly focused on maximizing profit margin, to align with/ the expectations of Wall Street; they are happy to sell at lower volume to maximize profit & especially profit margin. Martin in particular has written about this before.
PRC corporations are focused on seizing & then defending market share, & growing the size of the addressable market by increasing access> They are more than willing to accept slim margins & make it up in volume. In part, they are forced to do so because there is intense competition in virtually every consumer facing industry. Where there are heavily regulated & [often] state owned monopolies/oligopolies are the providers of utilities (water, electricity, natural gas) & public goods (transportation, telecom), or key inputs into industries & public goods (steel, aluminum, construction), or key enablers to the larger economy (ship building, railways rolling stock), or rent seeking facilitators to the larger economy (financial services), all heavily subsidized & w/ price controls.
US (& to an extent Western) companies would tend to cede market segments to the Chinese competition (& South Korean/Taiwanese before that) because margins have become less than exorbitant, trying to hold on to them would not please WS analysts. However, such preemptive withdrawal allows the competition to rapidly gain revenue, obtain resources to invest in R&D, & soon climb the value chain to gain even more market share. Meanwhile, the US/Western incumbents lose revenue & thus resources to invest to defend their positions, leading to a death spiral.
Baud
Something else for Trump to buy.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: thank you, my mindset is now
Easy come, easy go.
I lived dirt poor almost my entire adult life and I know how to do it. It’s been nice having emotional security and early retirement, but I always know it’s just a charade.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Betty Cracker
@Suzanne: Someone on Bluesky called this phenomenon “Schrödinger’s Leftists,” i.e., a faction that is paradoxically too small to take seriously on policy and yet large enough to blame for lost elections.
TBone
@Baud: illegal collusion!
Princess
@Suzanne: Warren Buffett. JB Pritzker. George Soros did some great stuff.
YY_Sima Qian
Meanwhile, on the Sino-US trade war front:
Most economists had expected the PRC to devalue the Yuan, as the response to the Trump gang hiking tariffs on PRC made goods. Hasn’t happened, which is curious.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@YY_Sima Qian:
Thanks for that. Just another reminder that before the techbros became the #1 source to kill all of us, the Banksters occupied that position.
TBone
TCM ran corporate crime & drama movies all afternoon yesterday.
Betty Cracker
Katie Porter is running for CA governor. (CNN)
matt
If he fucks up my mom’s social security I will devote my life to his destruction.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Eh, that elides the difference between voters and influencers (or propagandists).
Also, too, the controversy over “leftists” is rarely over the legitimacy of their policy goals (although it sometimes is) but over the approach to achieving them.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Interesting. Harris hasn’t said what she’s doing yet.
Someone said the current Lt Gov has the inside track, although she’s not a house hold name (I don’t know it.)
TBone
@matt: we too rely on hubby’s monthly SS income. My only income is annual. Once per year.
TBone
@Betty Cracker: good
matt
@Baud: markets are pricing in Trump’s stupidity and it’s a very expensive bit of risk. This is just the beginning.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: There are “influencers” on all sides, but it’s a dumb, self-destructive and tiresome fight that expends far more pixels than the differences at the core warrant, IMO.
ron
It’s incredibly easy to destroy, hard to build and create. I demoed my bathroom in 2 days. 3 months later and no new bathroom… yet. Fortunately there’s another full bath in the house. In the case of what these assholes are destroying there is no fallback.
And isn’t Musk just implementing project 2025? And I’d pay money to see Trump attempt to drive the Tesla. He can’t drive a car.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Baud:
Reading the CNN article (their non-cable coverage is good), I didn’t realize it was such a crowded field of well-known pols.
Fund raising for such a run has gotta be a bear. You’d think Harris, if she ran, would have a built-in advantage in that regard.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I think it was just the age-old problem: when there isn’t an acute major crisis going on, Americans revert to being demagogue-able with bigoted fears. Even if they themselves are the targets of bigoted fear. And Donald Trump is really good at scratching that itch, always has been.
There is no way around this aside from embracing bigotry, but if you do that, you’re never going to be as good at it as Donald Trump.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I’d never heard of her either. Not that that’s a bad thing. Maybe Californians will prefer someone with a relatively low profile after the ultimate try-hard Newsom.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
If I had my druthers, liberals would ignore them to the extent they use hatred of us as a tool. But that means exercising discipline that I haven’t really seen in us.
eclare
Gawd. 6:48 AM and pitch black. I hate DST.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: My problem with the far left is that I got convinced years ago that they were being unfairly ignored, so they entered my personal Overton window of views I needed to pay attention to, but that exposed me to the ways they’re dumb, in addition to the ways centrists are dumb.
The upside is that I stopped paying a lot of attention to right-wing pundits and “intellectuals” though. Had my fill of attempting to give them their due and decided they were not due anything. Sometimes people do the horseshoe flip though–Matt Taibbi has now decided that Elon Musk’s wrecking crew is a necessary corrective to American empire, I guess.
gene108
@Suzanne:
We can do a lot of things, without really thinking about it, that are incredibly complicated to get a machine to do.
You need calculus to figure out how far a thrown object will travel in ideal conditions. Little kids can do figure this out without knowing any math.
TBone
I’d missed seeing this
https://apnews.com/article/hong-kong-panama-canal-beijing-hutchison-blackrock-rubio-d02a8439cc63d9e740e5154d4e0c56f6
ron
@eclare: just wait until the geniuses decide to make DST permanent and it’s dark at 8am in the middle of winter.
Standard time year round is the way to go if anything is made permanent.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: One of my fondest memories of moving to the NY metro area and see REAL Crazy Eddie advertising.
Not surprised he copied it from Madman :)
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
When it comes to policy, I think the left side does get treated overly dismissively in the public and media discourse.
But that reality does not mean anything goes when it comes to trying to push a position. IMHO.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Biden’s policies were very progressive. He got no credit for them.
zhena gogolia
I’m still constantly hearing, “Where is the Democratic leader to tell us what to do?”
So we can dump on him/her more effectively, I guess.
sentient ai from the future
@Baud:
probably pretty well, which he will take the credit for. but if you watch these things you also know that its pretty common to see a huge loss like yesterday followed by a modest gain that in isolation looks large but isnt near closing the overall loss. i figure a gain of 5-6% is possible to likely
Baud
@sentient ai from the future:
Right. Oh well. As long as it heads down over the long term, I’ll be good with it.
eclare
@ron:
Totally agree.
WereBear
@The Thin Black Duke: Nothing can dent the confidence of a trust fund baby white man.
Not even reality.
TBone
Treasure of the Sierra Madre keeps coming to mind, especially with today’s On The Road.
Perspective 🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tH2w6Oxx0kQ
YY_Sima Qian
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Any analyst or politician that crows about how the US capital markets accounts for 70% of the global market capitalization (w/ only 5% of the population & ~ 25% of global nominal GDP), is showing fealty to the capital owners. The stratospheric valuations only provide very limited benefit to anyone below upper middle class, if at all. High profits for corporation means the surplus went to the capital owners behind the producers, & not to the mass consumers.
WereBear
@Baud: These people sell crappy products with marketing. That’s all.
End of line.
WhatsMyNym
@Baud:
Has anybody actually seen a Tesla ad? Ever?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Betty Cracker: That would be hilarious if Trump got a lot of Maga Hats to buy Teslas while as the same time they take out all the charging stations in their Red counties as communism!
sentient ai from the future
@Baud: my broker doesnt allow me to bet on inverse-strategy funds like TSLS (or obvious scams like crypto) so i dont have a dog in this fight. i expect the spread on options is large enough to make it an expensive bet, and one tied to exactly how much money tsla will lose, which i am not willing to do the work for.
so like you, i’m just going to rubberneck.
WereBear
@Princess: Buffet is a guy with great PR, like Musk.
WereBear
@Betty Cracker: Smart girl :) as they say in Jurassic Park.
TBone
WuTang
https://bsky.app/profile/wutangforchildren.bsky.social/post/3lk2q4vxnl22u
(Video clip of deep sigh 😆)
YY_Sima Qian
@TBone: The value of the sale at ~ US$ 23B is higher than CK Hutchinson’s market capitalization, so Li Ka Shing made bank.
Concern w/ ownership of these civilian ports was always driven by moral panic. It is extremely far fetched that these ports could become supply depots for the Chinese PLA Navy, staging grounds for the Chinese PLA Marine Corps, & launch pads for the Chinese PLA Rocket Forces. These ports under the ownership US financial interest will not significantly benefit the US or disadvantage the PRC, especially w/ an investment firm such as BlackRock being the owner. They are interested in making money, which means catering to the traffic supporting PRC related trade, carried by PRC shipping lines, since the PRC is by far the largest trading nation in the world. Just like the Panama ports catered to the US related traffic (~ 70% of the total) when they were owned by CK Hutchinson.
Jackie
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Thanks for my genuine first laugh of the morning!
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: As ever, it’s the definition of “them” that is my sticking point. If you’re talking about Chapo Trap House douchebags, okay, I agree. If you’re talking about anyone who preferred Warren to Biden in the 2020 primary, I don’t.
IMO, people who don’t deserve to get hit catch strays from both sides in this fight.
YY_Sima Qian
@WereBear: The real brains of the operation was Charlie Munger.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
Agree.
Every bit of data indicates that it’s white working class voters who are fairly socially conservative and hate “woke stuff” who have been leaving the Dems for multiple cycles now…. but instead we’re directing ire at annoying campus Gaza protestors. Bang-up strategy. Coalition building at its finest.
It tells you a lot about how some people feel entitled to some votes but not others.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The other thing is that my online friend circles have a lot of scientific, academic and creative people, comedians and writers and such, who I follow for mostly non-political reasons, and these people have a really strong tendency to be some kind of left radical and go on about how liberals have betrayed them, to the point that one feels guilty for just being a liberal after a while.
I mentioned that I saw the British comedian Nish Kumar perform recently, and his act is very angry and political in a lefty way. The thing that struck me, though, was he didn’t really spend a lot of time bashing liberals for being feckless or secretly malign (aside from one or two obviously facetious jokes), and that surprised me, I think because my expectations for such discourse were formed on social media, where if you’re a lefty complaining about the right you *must* get in a whack at the supine and crypto-fascist mainstream left as well.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@WhatsMyNym:
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/03/23/im-now-constantly-seeing-tesla-ads-on-youtube-but-is-it-the-way-to-go/
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Legitimate jokes are fine. But if you can dish it out, you better be able to take it too.
Almost Retired
@Betty Cracker: Here’s one Californian who agrees with the idea that a lower profile, low key governor would be a nice change, although maybe it’s impossible to hold that position and be low-profile.
I’m “meh” on Porter, but so far I do like the Lt. Gov.- Eleni Something-polous (I’m not good with Greek names). Waiting to see, of course, what MVP is going to do. An embarrassment of riches, and I’m happy to see the well-coiffed backside of Gavin’s head.
TBone
@YY_Sima Qian: thanks, I was surprised by that news for some reason.
@sentient ai from the future: I pinned my guy down a while back and made damn sure he won’t buy crypto or Elno stuff (unless it’s in one of the index funds which I’d need a week to comb through).
Geo Wilcox
@TBone: Not us, we pulled it all out in Jan. at the tip of the peak. Our rep called us to ask why and we said Trump. Told him the economy would tank in a couple of months. He hadn’t read Project 2025 but I had…
WereBear
@YY_Sima Qian: Interesting!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Almost Retired:
Alas, to paraphrase a great movie line:
In 2028
TBone
@Geo Wilcox: I’m not at liberty to withdraw inherited IRA funds without significant penalty and since I don’t want to fund these fucks through tax and penalty, I’m stuck like chuck.
I AM able to cash out on the portion I let financial advisor have to play with though, as well as some regular stock account money I rolled RMDs into. But I’m holding steady for now.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Whoever it is, they’re very loud, and they get the attention of the MSM.
gene108
@YY_Sima Qian:
This is very much the reason Ford and GM have so many expensive SUV’s and pickup trucks in their sales offerings and almost no affordable cars.
It works okay until it doesn’t. GM went bankrupt in 2008, because so much of their car lineup were high margin SUV’s and pickups that they didn’t have much to offer in fuel efficient economy cars when fuel prices spiked a couple of years earlier and sales started falling.
I feel like Wall Street is setting up U.S. automakers for a similar type of fall by their focus on profit margins over everything else.
Market share used to be important for publicly traded companies in the U.S. Somehow in the last 10 years that changed with the focus being solely on profit margins.
WereBear
@Geo Wilcox: A while ago now, my work switched the company who managed the 401k, and I got to sit with a three reps and told them they think this Trump thing is so glorious but I know it’s not. Added that I managed to not lose value during the George W Bush Recession, so they don’t have to tell me anything.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes and no. They pretend (to themselves, even) to believe it, in the way fundies pretend to believe that the Rapture will happen soon, while sending their kids off to Christianist colleges so they can get a good job and support a family.
To steal from Orwell, it’s just duckspeak. They know what they’re supposed to believe and say, so they ‘believe’ it and are quite happy to say it as if they believe it deep down, because Dear Leader doesn’t want any ‘deep down’ to exist within them.
@J. Arthur Crank:
Speaking as a fellow insomniac, is there ever a right time to have insomnia? But I agree that times like these are the worst.
TBone
Shout out to ProstrateDragon for this wonderfully calming entry yesterday 🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TFvYXfBephk&pp=ygUKcmFyZSBlYXJ0aA%3D%3D
sentient ai from the future
@TBone
oh, i don’t have “a guy” i have a service (the big v) and i do a fair number of smallish bets, probably lose more than i’ve gained on those bets but it is important to me to try and express my values through this, as i express them everywhere else.
i had a good number of bets on renewable infrastructure that were going gangbusters prior to the election. i sold nearly all of it while it was doing its initial crash when it was called for the shitbird, and none of it has done anything but continue to decline in value since then, so i did indeed lock in at least some of my gains there.
the bogleheads will screech about “timing the market” but there is currently no way to buy or sell securities outside of linear time. that i know of anyway.
ETA: also re the “need a week to comb through” i can strongly suggest a subscription to morningstar, they give you a lot of tools to do that sort of thing. john rekenthaler retired but he was a strong and consistent voice on the platform in debunking the propaganda that “social security is in trouble!”
it’s been worth its weight in gold for me, because it has guided most of my best bets.
The Thin Black Duke
Kamala Harris will never be POTUS because White America will never admit their mistake in not choosing her the first time. Governor of California might be an easier lift. Maybe.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: They like to talk about how there’s this immutable cycle where nations collapse when, through an excess of democracy, the people realize they can vote themselves the treasury. Then they elect kleptocrats who vote themselves the treasury.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@gene108:
That focus goes back a lot longer than that. I’m trying to remember a really good piece that went thru the timeline of the proverbial “MBAization of American Business”.
This is a real deep dive and it’s hard to pull out good summary statements:
https://www.gmo.com/americas/research-library/the-curious-incident-of-the-elevated-profit-margins-part-1_whitepaper/
This one has a nicer graph that shows historical trends:
https://www.levyforecast.com/special-report-margins/
sentient ai from the future
@Matt McIrvin: i would find that model more believable if it were, for instance “through an excess of sloth and ignorance enabled by successful democracy, they believed the kleptocrats who campaigned on the idea they could vote themselves the treasury, which the kleptocrats, in turn, stole.”
but occam’s razor and all that.
Professor Bigfoot
@YY_Sima Qian: I worked for MESNAC for a few years; and one thing I often said was that they thought long term, and almost every US company I ever worked for focused strictly on “next quarter’s numbers.”
WereBear
@The Thin Black Duke: THey won’t admit their mistake choosing King Jerk the first time.
WereBear
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I read that! Maybe here :)
Almost robotically fixed on profit. One trick ponies.
Professor Bigfoot
Long term thinking.
“If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for 10 years, plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years, educate children.” -Kong Fu-tze
WereBear
@Professor Bigfoot: Since long term thinking is impossible for Wingnuts, we are observing their Extinction Burst, writ large.
(From a viral TikTok)
They see the frantic activity. We see what their version of “winning” looks like. Evangelicals lost a lot of people to megachurches and MAGA. Both have been collapsing of late.
For red states, already draining people, it could come to them trying to close their borders. I can see that as an even more fracturing event.
Matt McIrvin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: “Neutron Jack” Welch, who made GE into a hellhole of stack-ranking and quarterly mass firings in the 1980s, was big on the idea that the ONLY responsibility of company management was to increase shareholder value, and anything else from fostering a decent working environment to creating good products should be done only if it was the optimal way to increase shareholder value. The entire corporate world eventually took that idea to heart, and companies became increasingly unmoored from what they professed to actually be doing.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: He has a lot of that inhuman techbro which I remember from Robert McNamara and Vietnam.
sentient ai from the future
@Professor Bigfoot: careful with that double-edged sword, eugene.
the silly valley people have “longtermism” as a funhouse-mirror-on-ketamine version of this, that inverts the humanistic values youre implying.
i recall years ago going, naively, to a presentation by “the long now foundation”, a creation of STEWART NOT RUSSELL Brand (the Whole Earth Catalog and WELL guy) and the presenter was Ray Kurzweil, who i didnt know at the time was completely batshit. however, during the course of his presentation, which was extremely well attended, i realized how unmoored from reality his ideas about the future (and, you know, statistics and basic ideas about falsifiability and what constitutes science) actually were.
and i see echoes of that lunacy in the neoreactionaries like curtis yarvin *spit* et al, and these fucking goons have taken over our federal government.
hitler was derided as a clown initially too.
Geminid .
Yesterday Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) commander Mazloum Abdi signed a landmark agreement in Damascus.The agreement lays out a framework for the integration of SDF forces into the Syrian army, as well as principles for future governance in the areas the SDF controls in Northeast Syria.
These processes will take months but the agreement may yield some tangible results shortly; the SDF says it and Syrian army forces will conduct their first joint anti-ISIS operations in coming days.
Now it looks like al-Sharaa may have completed a similar framework agreement in Suwayda Governate in southwestern Syria. This has not been officially confirmed. Pictures show al-Sharaa conferring with a circle of 25 or so Suwayda leaders including Druze, Muslim and Christian clerics.
This would be some more good news, and it’s badly needed after violent clashes in northwest Syria last week claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians and combatants. That was the worst bloodshed in Syria since the Assad regime’s collapse last December
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear:
I wish I could believe they were the ones having the extinction burst.
Another Scott
@Baud: The trouble, as always, is – if one gets out, when does one get back in??
Dollar cost averaging, baby!
;-)
Still, people should remember things like the DJIA dropping about 50% between ~ 1965 and ~ 1970. It can and has happened.
The lessons might be:
1) Don’t expect investments in manufacturing 20+ years ago to continue to provide profits going forward without new investments.
2) Don’t repress your people so that they have to run boycotts, protest, and even burn cities to get attention of politicians and change for the better.
3) Don’t get involved in a land war in Asia.
4) Don’t send hundreds of thousands of youngsters off to fight involuntarily in that land war in Asia.
5) Don’t be complacent.
Maybe??
Something something the future looks obscure. Be careful out there.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
YY_Sima Qian
@gene108: Lots of hot money, from all of the monetary easing, sloshing around the capital markets looking for high returns, & the hot money prefers highly profitable capital light operations. Which is why software Big Tech (the “Magnificent 7”) became grossly overweighted in market capitalization.
That is, until the AI bubble formed & corporations/analysts/policymakers alike became convinced that stockpiling Nvidia GPUs (which is very capital intensive) was the shortest path to the holy grail of AGI/ASI, which they believe will confer the winner of the race overwhelming & insurmountable advantage.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Matt McIrvin:
I knew it was something 80s and didn’t want to knee-jerk blame it on Reagan, although I’m sure the economic policies that went full steam in that time helped contribute to the environment Welch operated in.
My wife’s uncle was a GE VP back then and, of course, loved both Reagan and Welch.
catclub
I would say that you cannot make big trucks too expensive.
Once you are willing to spend $75k on a fucking pickup truck, all bets are off.
Another Scott
@ron: Maybe we need half-hour-wide time zones??
Living at the eastern edge of a time zone is different from living at the western edge (an hour different! funny how that works out!!). Since the boundaries are drawn to avoid population centers, they can actually be wider than an hour, making it worse.
Dunno.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: You’ll also notice that, after an initial spectacular success that made Welch’s ideas the new dogma, it wasn’t even good for GE. The company really doesn’t even exist any more–for a while they were more a real-estate company than anything else, and they sold off the appliance and electronics businesses; it’s all broken up now and the jet-engine division is theoretically the successor company.
catclub
And this ‘violent clashes’
might be whitewashing revenge killings against the Alawites.
trnc
Elon will not be taking any of those chances.
The Thin Black Duke
@catclub: Meanwhile, most of us will never own a new car. These are gonna be fat times for repo men.
catclub
I want my own 1 minute time zone.
BellyCat
@The Thin Black Duke: Several months ago (and unfortunately I forget where I saw this analysis), a study found the percentage loss for misogyny was about double the percentage loss for non-white race.
This fucking country. Kamala would have been amazing.
sentient ai from the future
@catclub: to be scrupulously fair, not only are recent model big trucks expensive, they are also extremely unsafe for anyone outside (sight lines, vertical front fascia kill people but at least they look mean so that the owner can get some gender affirmation from it)
Matt McIrvin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: My dad was a software-engineering manager at GEISCO (the computer time-sharing division) and got the hell out early in the Welch era, observing among other things that they refused to adjust to the coming of personal computers.
After he left, GEISCO actually had a pretty good thing going in the GEnie online service, but they refused to treat it as anything but a way to monetize excess capacity during off hours.
NotMax
@Another Scott
The World’s Silliest Time Zones.
;)
Scout211
Trump posted (well, his minions posted) that he is buying a Tesla in order to increase the stock value. Do MAGA’s know he hates EVs? And that he doesn’t drive?
And in local news, Katie Porter is running for governor and Kamala Harris will announce her decision by the “end of summer.” This governor’s race is getting super crowded.
p.a.
You all seem pretty in tune with the financial implications of Preznit dumbfuck, so I’ll tell you something you already know. Know your processing fees, if any, when mucking around, and the comparative admin fees of your F&T moves. (From & To) They add up.
Thanks to the bonddad blog & Calculated Risk warnings, I was able to minimize my exposure in my 401k investments with mortgage components in W-time; my $ went down, but not to “oh shit” levels. And since at the time it was basically self-administered, no fees for moving out/in funds.
ETA: fuck Milton Friedman
catclub
ummm, they did pretty well long terming the judiciary.
WereBear
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: He created Autism Speaks to “help” an autistic grandchild, while this organization dehumanizes people and flirts with eugenics, which is where most of what they call research is focused.
The child’s parents found it so insulting and non-useful the families are now estranged.
But that’s Jack. He knows what’s important. To him.
sentient ai from the future
@catclub: you do, kinda, it’s called your longitude.
i find it absolutely fascinating that i was not told anything about this scientific advance in the late 1600s while going through school in the US.
TBone
@WereBear: one prick tony. Heard that on NPR one day about Dubya.
catclub
What gender affirmation is it when a tiny woman is driving a giant vehicle?
YY_Sima Qian
@Professor Bigfoot: MESNAC is a maker of equipment for producing specialty rubber, correct?
Took a quick look at their website, the emphasis on smart manufacturing is notable, but also par for the course for Chinese manufacturers these days. That’s been the focus for 5G & AI applications in the PRC, to enable smart manufacturing, to reduce cost, improve efficiency, improve quality, & improve competitiveness in general.
This was the ideal behind “Industrialization 4.0”, 1st promoted by Angela Merkel over a decade ago. The PRC government was frightened that China will be left behind again, after spending so much time & resources to catch up. So it launched the “Made in China 2025” program as the answer to Germany’s “Industrialization 4.0”. Except the German effort has languished, Corporate Germany got complacent on buying cheap Russian energy & selling expensive capital equipment to the PRC (ironically, supporting the “Made in China 2025” effort), while the PRC program has been full steam ahead, & the strength & unity of effort further bolstered by the Trump-Biden tech war.
catclub
@sentient ai from the future: “Longitude” was a good book! H1 !
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: It did not escape my notice at all :) and it was just as bad as Sears.
For the youngs, it was once a titan of commerce. but the Ayn Rand loving capitalist who drive it into the ground was helped by the online retailer crisis, though their stuff could have easily translated.
But they sold JUNK. It’s more profitable.
Millions for marketing, but not one cent for the actual product or satisfaction of the consumer. It’s ALL in the marketing, see? That’s why Mitt Romney did a load of wash and became the White Horse Prophecy.
Matt McIrvin
@catclub: Before time zones, towns were on something like local solar time and everyone generally used the clock at the railroad station. But that made railroad schedules hard to wrap your mind around because every town had a different clock setting.
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: 80s & early 90s was when the big corporations pivoted away from investment in fundamental research, since such activities most definitely did not maximize shareholder value in the short, medium or even long (at least in the time horizons of the Chairmen/CEOs) term.
TBone
@sentient ai from the future: yes Morningstar was introduced to me years ago during my last law office stint by one of the elderly “of counsel” partners, Italian guy who was cool as hell.
I cannot look every day or invest the time that would be needed to figure out exactly what I’m holding because diversification was my parents’ strategy and I’ve stuck to that like crazy glue. If I pay that much attention, it will drive me crazy and negate the purpose of a peaceful early retirement. It’s why I pay a fee to my financial advisor and let him do the work so I don’t have to. Vanguard has the rest of the bulk and I just can’t get granular enough to oversee all of it.
Elno will negate the peaceful early retirement.
WereBear
@catclub: Oh, sure, and we see how well they sold it. Now the consumer opens the box and it’s all broken pieces.
Wingnuts know how to grab power and money. They don’t know how to grow or keep it, though.
The very power their trained courtiers on the SCOTUS handed to Trump is the thing that’s hanging him, isn’t it? They could have to walk it back, or it will collapse on them, too.
I wish them a very sharp bunch of dilemmas as they “feel the pain” too.
Like the way the Murdaughs held the South Carolina low country in thrall like a medieval lord, until the careless ways and murder sprees did them in.
Essentially, criminals usually have to brag about their crimes. Hidden power is heady, but that implies one must heed consequences.
They skate so close to that event horizon they wind up sucked into the black hole.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: Man, Sears. They were the Amazon of the early 20th century! I remember that in the 1980s, they were experimenting with an electronic catalog stored on laserdisc, which you could play with at some of their mall stores.
But in the 1980s and ’90s, they decided to de-emphasize the catalog business in favor of those shopping-mall anchor stores, which turned out to be exactly ass backwards. And then Mr. Randite decided it could conquer the world by being divided into warring fiefdoms at odds with one another.
WereBear
@catclub: She is more likely to own a horse ranch.
Matt McIrvin
@YY_Sima Qian: Why have a Bell Labs when you can free-ride on government research? And now the same guys are killing government research–presumably we’ll free-ride on the rest of the world’s science, because nobody is doing it here any more. Unless we decide that it’s all a plot to hide the flat earth and put 5G in your DNA.
NotMax
@Scout211
FYI: It won’t be the Orangegarch’s first Tesla.
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: MAGA will try to shut down scientific exchanges, too, since they (& much of the natsec “Blob”) have decided that the US has been taken advantage of through these exchanges.
Geminid .
@Geminid .: I thought this report from Rsgip Soylu was kind of funny:
Last weekend an Israeli newspaper reported that Israel wasn’t invited to Nato’s annual “resilance and emergency preparedness” exercise scheduled this coming September in Bulgaria.
Some Israelis speculated that this was due to the Netanyahu government’s recent pledges to protect Druze and other minorities in southern Syria. But it turns out Turkiye has vetoed Israel participation in new Nato exercises for over a year.
Soylu wrote this story up in more detail for Middle East Eye:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/turkey-blocks-israels-nato-military-drills-until-gaza-truce
Israel has observer status with Nato. They’ve been members of CENTCOM since 2021 but right now none those countries want to exercise with them either.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: I was under the impression that he had the exact opposite opinion. The MBA schools are pushing the “shareholder value” idea.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/does-jack-welch-think-shareholder-value-is-a-dumb-idea/
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: The one I really lament is Hewlett-Packard. Such a brilliant company that made brilliant products, from oscilloscopes to calculators: indestructible, well-designed, logical to use but somehow made with the understanding that they would be used by intelligent people who were willing to do some studying to harness their full power. Probably because they started with laboratory and test equipment. But after a series of mergers the brand just degenerated into a name that meant nothing, and you could see the joy leach out of the place.
YY_Sima Qian
Good WaPo article on the impact of PRC & Canadian retaliations (gift link below):
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: Interesting. The article notes that the concept was popularly associated with Welch and treated it as a reversal.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin:
@Shalimar:
@Baud: Musk is the ouroboros of GOP political theology.
NotMax
@RevRick
Nice one!
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Professor Bigfoot:
The problem with “shareholder value” as the MBA schools have defined it is that it becomes synonymous with short term rent-seeking as opposed to strengthening the organizations and maintaining long-term customer and employee relationships.
You need people inside that know their shit on production, distribution, management and accounting.
You need your customer-facing employees to be good at that portion of the business – from sales staff to customer service.
You need good risk managers for the protection of employees and of consumers of your product.
Sadly, none of these things factor into the short-term rent-seeking that is so beloved by the MBA class, because that costs money that they’d rather pay their executives and second tier shareholders.
You also need to remember – most shareholders have put zero into company coffers – their share purchase did nothing to infuse the company with investment. They’re simply swapping money for someone else’s share.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: this person disgraced my entire sex.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina
catclub
Maybe in your experience. In mine she is using a 9 passenger ( Denali? Exurban? Behemoth?) to transport two kids to daycare. and blocking the parking lot.
Matt McIrvin
@TBone: I didn’t work for them, but I worked closely *with* them during that era. It wasn’t the happiest place on earth.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Check out the comments on this thread and you will know why I think it is necessary for someone like me to make a contingency plan.
Most of the disagreements with the leftists in the party and here are not about policy at all. Both the ends of the horseshoe are uncomfortable with non-white people having too much say. MAGA right wants to kill us and DSA left and their enablers within the D party merely want us as trained monkeys clapping and telling them how virtuous they are. If we have the temerity to disagree with them they want us to STFU. The Sanders campaign had a well documented and a well known problem with non-white staffers. Warren fan club is tone deaf to the voices beyond their own circle.
When push comes to shove I simply have no confidence that anyone will have my back. My trust in Ds is eroded after how they treated Joe Biden. Ds like NP who I had great respect for before she headed the Push-Biden-Out efforts didn’t have the back of their incumbent President. So I have little confidence that they will have the backs of non-entities like me.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: it is partly why I don’t ever use a printer nowadays even though I have a Cannon. It is only used for scanning and I don’t even do that very much anymore. I should scan some important stuff for storage but I detest that kind of work now. Outgrew it. Fireproof lockbox will suffice…for now. Easy to grab n go.
Heading to library right now to take care of some paperwork for hubby. They do the printing!
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Oh, that’s just what we need. //
evodevo
@gene108:
An example I remember from reading about canal tow horses was that the first few times they tried out machines to do the work, was that these ended up being pulled into the canal by the weight of the barges, something that the horse teams learned to do physically to compensate for the forces involved. The teams never faltered lol.
evodevo
@sentient ai from the future: People tend to forget that it took a couple months for the 1929 market to crash, and 3 years before it reached its nadir, and the resulting Depression didn’t reach its lowest point till 1933 (hmm…what else happened that year…), so we have a lot more time (even though things seem to be moving at light speed) before the results of Trumpian destruction really hit the system..
Professor Bigfoot
@YY_Sima Qian: That’s right— they purchased the company I worked for, Test Measurement Systems, Inc. for our tire test machine capability— it’s very difficult to apply large forces to a dynamic object like a tire and then measure tiny forces generated by the tire and we were good at it for a small company.
BUT— well, corporate management tended to change rather more quickly than one expects, and the guy who decided to buy us was gone within two years and the expected strategy never materialized.
They still have the TMSI brand name, but I don’t think anyone who was associated with the company back then are still with them. They still have their name up on an office building in Akron (part of that strategy that never materialized).
Professor Bigfoot
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: as the kids today say, (100 emoji!)
Back inna day the guy running the company worked his way up from the factory floor and thus knows the product and knows the business.
The idea that the only stakeholders who matter are the shareholders leads to ignoring how important an organization’s staff and especially their CUSTOMERS are to their success.
u
@Baud: Anybody who says that he/she is “changing the world” is mentally ill. Hitler “changed he world” (in a negative way). Elon is a glorified salesman; that’s all he’s ever been. The products that “he” creates are created by the people that he hires — and most of those products are shit. An asshole with delusions of grandeur, whose fan-boys are among the stupidest people on the face of the earth.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: When I was an undergrad, the one outfit EVERYONE in our electrical engineering school wanted work for was HP.
When we had “career day” and recruiters came on campus, the HP interview list was ALWAYS packed.
Not any more, I’m afraid. Now HP is just a printer company.
u
@evodevo: My father was a recent high school graduate in 1933. The experience influenced his political ideology (“Fuck the rich!”) and his personality in general for the rest of his life.
Professor Bigfoot
“There is no horseshoe. There is only white people who are at best uncomfortable with any power being held in Black hands. Those white people are at all points of the ‘left-right’ spectrum.”
TBone
@evodevo: that was before the existence of electronic trading and digital money though. We’re now at the speed of light almost.
evodevo
@TBone: You could move a lot of it to an IRA account at a credit union without penalty and be getting 4% on CDs right now. It’s a lot safer than the Markit at the moment, and I just renewed an IRA CD at 4% for a year. We’ll see what’s going on by this time 2026.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: Tell me about it. I was once half of an Amiga dealership.
WereBear
@catclub: Yes, where I am, an extravagant SUV is the thing. From visitors, that is: natives would not have the Mercedes version, or whatever it is.
Citizen Alan
@Suzanne: i will say it once again, louder for the people in the back. Wealth beyond a certain point corrupts everyone who obtains it. There is a reason why Jesus said that you cannot serve both God and mammon and that the people who chose the latter will all burn in hell.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: i genuinely half expect an announcement any day now that every federal law clerk in the country will be fired and the judges expected to write their own opinion using ChatGPT.
Citizen Alan
@Baud: on paper, I agree, with ninety nine percent of what the DSA proposes for the nation. And yet I still utterly despise them as an institution, because I think they are nothing but a bunch of crackpots, narcissists, and saboteurs financed primarily by american and foreign oligarchs for the twin purposes of undermining the democratic party while making genuine socialism look ridiculous.
Citizen Alan
I’m pretty sure that’s the position of the supreme court right now
Professor Bigfoot
@Citizen Alan: When William of Ockham agrees that your “conspiracy theory” makes perfect fucking sense…
tam1MI
The Gazassholes did not want to be part of our coalition. Especially since our coalition has a hefty amount of Jewish people in it.
tam1MI
This exactly where I am when it comes to the Dems. I will cynically vote for Gavin Newsom when he wins the nomination in 2028, but I am under no illusions that any elected Dem is out for anyone but themselves.
suzanne
@tam1MI: Plenty of people who support the rights of Palestinians to either their own state or equal citizenship within Israel are part of the Democratic coalition. (Including a fair number of Jews.) Any implication that supporters of the rights of Palestinians in Gaza are not Dems, is, quite frankly, pretty Islamophobic.
dnfree
@Baud: In 2000 I learned what was meant by “Don’t try to catch a falling knife” with regard to tech stocks.
dnfree
@tam1MI: There’s a huge gap between “trust (all?) Democrats” and “trust (no) Democrats, they’re all the same.”
dnfree
@Professor Bigfoot: You worked in the tire industry, broadly speaking? I used to be a programmer/analyst for Kelly-Springfield, subsidiary of Goodyear. Went through the Y2K remediation in Akron because they brought each plant location there to test.