So, your guy is, once again, ripping off Republicans.

This time by “fundraising” for Hershel Walker with a scheme that quietly gives 90% of every donation to Trump, not Walker.

“Contribute any amount immediately to the Official Georgia Runoff Fundraising Goal and increase your impact by 1200%” which then auto defaults to Trump getting 90% Walker getting 10% with only a hidden link to see how it’s allocated….and the 1200% thing means they WILL try to withdraw the donation 12 times…a scheme they keep using, keep getting caught, are forced to return huge amounts of money, then they do it again.

Just like his stop the steal fundraising where 100% went into his pockets not a dime towards fighting his big lie in court.

Just like Bannon’s fake border wall charity where Bannon stole tens of millions of that money for himself and Trump pardoned him.

No amount of crime is enough for you to abandon the Cons….despite all your claims to the contrary.

Lol. Such stupidity @bobknight33, as expected. No facts, no arguments to make, so let’s make infantile memes to show what serious adults we are instead….and it worked exactly as expected.

BTW- $43 billion won’t solve world hunger for a month…no amount of money can. New IRS enforcement agents make the government money, they don’t waste it. When their directive is to go after rich tax cheats, not anyone making under $400k per year but those making millions and paying zero taxes, yes, that’s an amazing idea that will benefit the country greatly and pay for itself in recovered revenue.

BTW- those empty shelf pictures are from 2000….probably the homeless in cities and lines at borders too. As for vacation, Trump spent 1 out of every 3.4 days, 428 days in total, on vacation as the economy crumbled, pandemic raged, and sedition fomented. Far more than Biden, who has taken way too many days off during the economic recovery, employment boom, and waning pandemic. D’oh!

BTW-Communist China and Vietnam eradicated an enormous lions share of that extreme poverty, well over 500 million out of poverty since 2000 between just those two, going to near 0% poverty by 2015….so much for capitalism’s saving grace, eh? Are you going to go sell the benefits of communism now? Derp.

This is why morons shouldn’t argue, they often make the exact opposite point from what they intended.


🤦‍♂️

When you cancel a project, you don’t lose the money, you just don’t spend it. Really?!

I’m guessing you think I’m “urban” (racist code in the US btw, might wanna go with “city folk”). You would have guessed wrong. The nearest town to me is Eureka, 25k people 25 miles away.

You just don’t understand money if you insist canceling a billion dollar project is the same as losing the same amount of money. Edit: that’s only true if it’s canceled after it’s completed.
I’m using the figures Auto manufacturers gave as their lost production value, not including the collateral damage temporarily closing those plants cost the communities and both up and down supply chains.

Funny, you don’t include hospitals, which the truckers also reportedly blocked.

Protests can be permitted. If you’re disrupting someone else’s or public property without a permit, expect arrest for trespassing/breaching the peace at least.

Odd, if that’s really your position, why would you defend the truckers rights to blockade a city of worksites, job sites, and trade routes…reasons be damned?!?

I’m of the opinion that protests designed to disrupt the lives of people completely uninvolved in your cause always hurt your cause and make you look selfish. I tend to not defend self centered tantrums. I do not put pipeline protests in that category, permanent contamination of watersheds effects everyone, and almost everyone buys oil.

Bob, please read this carefully. I know we fuck around a lot here, but I 100% honestly don't want to see you get hurt financially.

Obviously, if you believe in TSLA, I understand you putting your money where your mouth is (full disclosure: I'm holding POTX and CURLF, so I'm on the same page with what I'm saying on this) but PLEASE don't bet money you don't have on TSLA.

“At 10-times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback (P/E 10, my note), I must pay you 100% of revenues for 10-straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. It also assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company.

That assumes zero expenses, which is hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that expects you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10-years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate.

Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those underlying assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes.

What were you thinking?”

-- Scott McNealy was the CEO of Sun Microsystems
2002

At the peak of the Dot-Com, roughly 30 stocks in the NASDAQ 100 traded above 10 P/E. Today ALL stocks in the DAQ do: the average P/E is ~25.5.

TSLA is at a P/E of 175.

There is no American economy. There hasn't been since since October 3 of 2008. Things got catastrophically worse on September 17th of 2019 when the repo market came within hours of completely locking up in a catastrophe that would have made AIG look like a rounding error. The Fed was forced to firehose astronomical amounts of money into the system to keep this from happening and this was before Covid.

In Jan of 2021, there was $2.6 TRILLION in Zombie Debt out there. That's $2.6 TRILLION on the verge of default at 2021 interest rates. The Fed is now in a horrific position: raise rates and watch massive defaults explode like financial nukes, or keep rates steady and watch inflation implode the economy.

People don't understand how bad this is and how much worse it can get. If the Fed has to raise rates by 500 BP -- and Christ fucking help us if they do -- the first order defaults will be the worst in Capitalist history and the second and third order effects could very well be the nightmare scenario we came within 36 hours of in 2008.

Save your money, Bob. Cash is king. And fuck BTC.

I think the worst part of these summits is their stated goals.
Paris intended to keep warming to 1.5 degrees by 2050 (no real plan beyond then)…but you might recall, 1.5 degrees of warming is considered the tipping point where feedback loops and natural processes outpace human inputs, meaning even if we hit zero emissions by 2050, and if everyone kept to their Paris agreement promises, and if other nations don’t continue to ramp up emissions, and if unforeseen feedback loops aren’t stronger or faster acting than predicted, we still lose control completely by 2050. That’s the best plan we have, runaway climate shifts in <30 years AT BEST….and no one seems to be living up to even that planned disaster of a plan. Emissions aren’t being cut, they’re increasing. Feedback loops are ramping up 40 years earlier than predicted. All the while, people are complaining that gas is over $3 (I haven’t seen it under $4 in decades where I live) and insisting we adopt some heavily polluting power generation instead of investing in green energy solutions. People assume, it seems, that some last minute fix will solve climate change, ignoring the fact that emissions from today are reactive in the atmosphere for between 25 and 150 years, so we needed to be at net zero 25 years ago to even start effecting the atmosphere today…and some emissions from the industrial revolution are still effecting us now. Net zero by 2050 (a pipe dream, and the best plan so far) is planning to fail completely…like turning off the blast furnace in your house when the thermometer hits 450.5 inside and thinking you can stop it from burning down.
If Covid taught us anything, it’s that there is 0% chance humans will be able to cooperate enough to tackle climate change. People were asked to simply wear a mask and distance a bit to save their lives, and enough refused to do it that the methods that worked beautifully elsewhere failed miserably to control a virus. If we can’t pull off such a simple, blatantly obvious plan against a virus, what chance is there of cooperation across the board to sacrifice enormous amounts of money and completely revamp our wasteful way of life in uncountable ways to stop something seen as a future problem by many? IMO, there so little chance of pulling it off that it’s statistically correct to say there’s absolutely no chance at all.

top comment:

"To those who wonder why all crossings aren't rebuilt so that auto haul trucks specifically can clear them... first, this would cost an ungodly amount of money - for one specific type of truck. Professional drivers wouldn't let themselves get caught in this situation. Carhaulers ride very low and their drivers know this. They know this as a fact. I'm a 30-year veteran truck driver, and that includes auto haul, and there is no way a professional auto hauler would have even attempted to get over that sharp crest.

Trailers only bottom out if the drivers puts it there. Trailers only hit low bridges if the driver puts it there. In short, trucks only go wherever the driver puts them - and a low-slung trailer is a hazard the driver is responsible for knowing how to negotiate. Period.

Absolutely no sympathy for this idiot who could very well have killed any number of people. My thoughts are with the locomotive crew, seeing that truck looming ahead and knowing this could very well be the end of their lives and there's nothing they can do about it."

“This family”?
This isn’t one case, Bob. It’s department policy and has been for a long time.

Agreed, it SHOULD be a big payday for these families… unfortunately that’s at taxpayer, not the police’s pension fund’s, expense….but so far in the years of this practice if the victims got anything it doesn’t seem to have payed enough to get the local government to stop it, or enough to excuse blatant and rampant abusive harassment of law abiding citizens as standard policy, even a revenue generator.

How much is the daily harassment of your children, wife, co workers, family, friends, and business contacts at their work and in their homes late at night for years by dozens of aggressive armed men trespassing and peeping in windows and threatening arrest and continued harassment if they can’t come inside to “talk” at 3 am, all because they know you….without you ever being convicted of a crime….worth?….guaranteed none of the victims of this policy have been paid that much.

It is nice to know you at least say you don’t support DeSantis style policing…so I guess you don’t support his candidacy?

Also interesting you love to dismiss constant violent civil rights violations like this by just claiming the victims will get a huge settlement and that makes it ok (most don’t, police have immunity from all but the absolute worst illegal violations, they don’t even pay to repair the doors they destroy breaking in homes with no warrant or the pets they kill while trespassing and spying on citizens….not even for the innocent people they murder when breaking into their homes at 3 am, and when they are brought to account, they often fight cases for decades first, forcing the victims to sue them over and over and over and over....expensive lawsuits against city hall that most victims can't afford to start)….but when it’s a public health issue where they’re considering forcing you to not become a biological viral lab, stopping you from mutating new viruses to release in America, suddenly your rights to be dangerously idiotic and anti science are sacrosanct, no amount of money could make up for a little ouchie, fuck those other people you kill and disable.
Anti vaxers should not only be denied insurance, but also be forced to pay for treatment of their victims.

The problem is, it's complicated.

First off, is the legacy of historical damage still scarring aboriginal communities in Canada.

Even disregarding that complexity though, current structure of governance in Canada makes the problem harder to identify and resolve.

Singh's return question is what would you do if Toronto faced the same problem? The answer is the federal government would by and large do nothing, because water supply is a municipal responsibility and the Mayor and city council of Toronto are responsible for fixing it, and thus federal funds don't go in and instead municipal tax money is used to keep the water supply going. Across Canada that model is working pretty decently, by and large.

The real question then is why are reserves having a harder time? Well, afore mentioned historical trauma aside, reserves represent small communities directly comparable in size and make up as municipal communities. However, the reserves are NOT managed like municipalities. Instead Canada still has a two tiered system of governance, one for reserves and another for municipalities.

In term so governance municipalities report to the provinces and the provinces report to the federal government. Reserves report directly to the federal government.

The affects everything related to governance and is responsible for a host of confusion and difficulty.

Services: Education and Health are provincially funded, and so the federal government transfer money to the provinces and tells them to figure out education and health services. Municipalities then just get those services. Reserves however sit outside that, and get entirely different intermediaries.

Taxation and funding: municipal, provincial and federal governments all gather taxes and distribute funds up and down. Reserves only deal with funding though directly to the feds, again cutting out the provincial intermediary.

Both of the above mean making an apples to apples comparison of communities to try and ensure both are treated 'equally' is impossible. It also means that solutions that work on one side don't in the other.

It's a big mess, and just throwing money at the system and saying that will fix it is just wrong. Not only that, it's been TRIED and failed. The above mentioned differences also apply to rules surrounding transparency, accountability and fraud prevention. Meaning there are a great many more loopholes available on the reserve funding side for anyone involved or attached to providing services(be that council members on reserve, or any number of external entities hired in good faith to perform services). That in turn means the amount of money lost to direct and indirect corruption is harder to find/stop.

So fix all that is the next obvious response. The problem is still complex though because when does 'fixing' becoming simply white folks making aboriginals do things the 'right(white) way that was already the source of lingering historical damage I didn't even consider yet...

It's a hard problem to solve and Singh's just trying to score cheap political points peddling easy and false answers to a complex problem.

Sorry to be the little grey raincloud on this Hate The Hedges party, but you might want to understand the implications of what just happened

Y'know that fund that's getting all attention, Melvin Capital? Yeah, fuck them, right? Fuckin' shorters all shortin' and shit -- they played, they paid!

There's a reason they were bailed out and with all due haste.

Here's the issue: they were VERY good at the shorting game. So good that they actually had to turn away business. They made money like horses makes shit. When clients couldn't get in at Melvin, they went elsewhere. That opened the door to a lot of other firms basically mirroring exactly what MC was doing, which included shorting the fuck outta GME.

Fuck those guys too, right? It's their money, so why should I care?

Let's go back a few year, shall we, to the glorious chapter in finance and economics that was the 2008 Crash. Remember when Paulson lost his shit because he realized that in about 36 hours, the basic system called Western Capitalism was going to shit the bed; the bedroom; the whole house and pretty much every surface above the ocean within a planetary radius? This is sorta like that. Only worse.

The thing about short squeezes is that the losses can be infinite, and that's exactly why WallStreetBets did what they did. They knew if they bought and held -- diamond hands -- the stock would have to rise as the shorters had to cover their bets. Melvin Capital and a shit-ton of other, smaller firms had to do that and ran out of liquidity long before GME was even at $50. For every share of stock they shorted, they need to cough up another share at a higher value -- and they HAD to actually have the higher-priced share.

And here's where things get VERY ugly.

Shorting GME was such a sure thing that a huge number of shorts were placed. In fact, more shares of GME were shorted than actually existed. Oops. But hey, SURE THING, BABY and what's the worst that can happen?

Yeeeah, y'see where this is going now?

So these firms, not only are they broke, they don't have the shares, either. They need to come up with shares, pronto, at any price, because contractual obligations are a motherfucker in the finance world. But again, more shorts than there are shares and the people who have the shares, WSB and 4chan's /biz/, aren't letting them go. The longer they hold, the higher the price will go as short after short faces having to cough up the shares they borrowed.

A lot of people are about to lose a LOT of money -- the kinda losses that have so many zeros attached that looking at the number bores the eyes.

Back to 2008: the reason the whole world almost started Mad Max LARPing back then is that a narrow number of highly-important financial institutions were a wee bit thin on liquidity because they were having to pay it out by the boatload. That's bad. What would be better is if risk were more distributed, and how could that little plan POSSIBLY go wrong? Maybe a Black Swan event involving a huge amount of money that needs to be paid out by all of them due to this annoying bird.

That's where we are now, but no one even remotely knows what that figure is going to be. Again, (potentially) infinite losses multiplied by 150% times the number of shares actually available, multiplied by the dogshit risk factor on the loans and the leveraged payouts -- your best case scenario might be a loss of about $500 billion. Someone has to come up with that money, be it the Fed or other banks/investors, but that latter group has to come up with the money themselves, which is generally accomplished by selling profitable holdings. We all know what happens when a lot of people have to sell, right?

I always wanted to live in interesting times, thus proving what an utter fuckwit I am.

Yeah, I can only say for certain what has happened here. Most doctors that run private practices and are rated well slowly started transitioning to either a service that charges a large amount of money per patient per year, in addition to insurance, or they simply posted on their website they no longer accept insurance. They call it direct primary care, like you pay a fee per month.

https://reason.com/video/doctors-direct-primary-care/

My doctor joined a concierge service called MDVIP. I just checked and he lowered his rates to 1,800 per year per patient. Whether you go or not. He was a great doctor, but I refuse to pay 3600 per year for my wife and me to see a doctor. Not when they will bill our insurance as well for any actual visits/treatments.

Instead we had to switch to Austin Regional Clinic, who has an amazing lab and bloodwork team, but the doctor situation is as I mentioned before. There is no feeling that I have a personal doctor. Usually they schedule me with whichever one is available or a PA. Every time I have to re-list what meds I am on and what existing conditions I have because they don't remember. You would think they could look at a chart, but they are so busy every time. It's like sex in high school, in, out, and thanks for coming.

We've tried some others, even a few private practices, but none have been up to par. All of them seem to be super busy and have trimmed their staff to the bone.

If the ACA isn't changed or doesn't go away, I don't see it getting any better.

I don't think American hospitals would give up an opportunity to make obscene amounts of money for basic care let alone intensive care.

Having them pay insurance premiums or be put in a separate insurance category (high risk fuckwit) would probably make more sense.

I have read NTSB air crash reports for decades...disasters are so rarely the result of just one mistake. And this is the same sort of thing. A series...and then lessons written in blood.

I had a friend who was a trained chemical engineer--he was always upset at BP's budgeting for maintenance and oversight. He felt they had a terrible history of accidents because they were always trying to cut it too close. That you just had to spend a certain amount of money to do chemical process and petrochemicals safely. He was right.

*promote
*quality

It's a huge architectural loss, but I wish they would consider taking the insane amount of money it will take to rebuild and spending it on the needy instead of opulent and ostentatious buildings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

This attitude is prevalent in Nordic countries. As the article states, there has been some slight movement away from Janteloven, but not very much. It is precisely this attitude that allows for people to accept drastically higher taxes, not just for the 1%, but across the board. The social culture is dramatically different in the USA, possibly to our detriment.

Per capita means nothing. All NATO states are supposed to be spending at least 2% of their GDP towards defense. As I said, Norway spends around 1.2% of their GDP, if the USA did the same, we would have a massive amount of money for social programs. Again, I must stress that I am not slamming Norway or other Nordic countries for not reaching the 2%, I am simply pointing out additional reasons why they have more money available for social programs than we do.

I don't see what developmental aid has to do with anything. I am sure Norway spends money in other places as well. I am pointing out why socialism works in Nordic countries and why it would be a hard sell in the USA.

I understand that you are happy with your situation. In a perfect world, we could all follow a similar rule. Unfortunately to fit into that type of situation you need a population that is of relatively the same mind. In most larger nations that is impossible, there are too many different groups that have competing ideals.

How do they take our money? Half the people who work for Walmart qualify for food stamps, even though they make so much money they could easily pay living wages, give benefits and still make a profit. This happens at big companies all across the country. That's how they take our money. But you, as a Christian, don't give a crap about those employees, they just better get another job and work 80 hours a week, so they don't have to get food stamps, just so the rich people running these companies and the shareholders can continue to reap in the huge amounts of money. Who cares Jesus commanded you to help the poor, and that the rich were going to hell, in modern Christian culture it is the rich who are blessed, and the poor who need to be vilified.

I'd wager most of us are working, probably 40 hours or more. Used to be that one person in the family working 40 hours a week was enough. Now that isn't enough in most cases. That money moved to the top. We have one of the largest and fastest growing wealth and income gaps in the world, and in history. Real world income isn't staying with inflation, but that 1% that modern Christians love so much, is staying so far ahead of the curve.

And as to, "they like making $8 an hour" bull fucking shit. While I'm making well more than that, I know that isn't true. They got the best job they can get. It's not that people aren't applying for the jobs that are out there, the employers aren't hiring the people applying. Perhaps that person making $8 an hour doesn't have a college degree, and can't afford to go to college. I have a worthless bachelor's degree in "programming and applications" which basically means I know how to use Word, which I knew before I had it (I could have taught even the programming classes for all the further we got into the programming). That degree cost me near $25k, and who knows how much it'll cost by the time I'm done paying it off with all the interest on it. Back on point, those people can apply to a ton of jobs, but unless they are qualified they won't get it, and even among those they do qualify for, there are a ton of applicants for each job out there. Nobody is working Walmart, McDonald's, Lowes or whatever because it's their dream job. It's the job they can get.

Why should you make a living off 40 hours a week, but they should have to work 80? Why the double standard? Why say let the rich owners and shareholders take that income that used to go to the workers and just say f the employees, so long as I make a living at 40, those people better just work longer. This is why I HATE Christianity because every person who thinks that is a Christian. Every person who thinks that LGBTQIA+ people shouldn't have equal rights under the law is a Christian. Every person who was shouting "let him die" at the Republican debate in '08 in regards to a guy without insurance, was a pro-life Christian. Every person who cheered at the idea of carpet bombing at the 16' debates were pro-life Christians. It's why, in the unlikely event it is real, I'd rather burn in hell than be around those people for all eternity. I've never met a good right-wing Christian. Never. They are all evil vile people who are full of greed and have zero of the love of Christ. Their witness is a shining example of how evil and vile Christianity is.

I'm surprised that fat tub of lard Trump, who dictated his son's letter, who dictated his Doctor's letter, can swing a golf club as often as he does... a guy who bitched and moaned about how often Obama golfed, and who's own golfing and vacation time has far outdone Obama's golfing and vacation time.

We got a President, flagrantly breaking the emoluments clause, and nobody seems to give a rats ass (save a few on the further end of the left, certainly the mainstream media, which Fox and the right accuse of being far left, doesn't care, nor do even moderate Democrats).

I know you don't believe he, or Fox and the like are the ones doing the lies and deceit... and nobody will ever convince you otherwise. I know, because I too once was a far-right Christian, who only trusted Fox, and thought the science of climate change was a joke, as was evolution and the big bang (though I was an old earth creationist, I could never get into the 6,000-10,000-year-old argument)... then I learned to actually vet my news and information. I have no doubt that most of my anger at the right is the fact I was so easily deceived for over 30, nearly 40 years of my life. Hopefully, in the highly unlikely event that others on the right learn that they are the ones who've been lied to, that they are the ones more guilty of spreading falsehoods, deceit, greed, and setting a horribly bad witness for their faith that does far more harm than good, they don't get as angry as I did and leave the faith all together and then hate all of what they once were a part of.