I wonder how much longer hegseth will last. He seems to be causing more problems for trump than he’s solving.

Transneft is the largest oil pipeline company in Russia for context. It’s state controlled and moves about 80% of the crude and 30% of the oil products.

China’s not exactly flush with cash to buy debt with at the moment, they’re having their own struggle party at the moment, although they tend to be less vocal about it. After all, their real estate market basically got massively over leveraged and a lot of capital disappeared and turned out wasted.

The Saudi’s too are having a bit of a liquidity problem at the moment, they’ve made a lot of commitments on weird mega projects and spent a lot of money trying to diversify their economy and repair their image, much of it with limited success.

Prices really haven’t come back to normal. Average prices is around 7 dollars a dozen, with lows around 5 dollars a dozen depending on area.

In 2019 it was between 1.30 and 2 dollars a dozen.

The H5 bird flu strain hasn’t been contained, and it probably never will be, it’s been rampant for nearly half a decade at this point and they’re still nowhere near containing it. It’s endemic in the migratory bird population. At this point the only flocks that won’t be routinely wiped by it are smaller flocks in better conditions.

Beyond the reality of higher turn over in flocks due to routine outbreaks, it also gives them an excuse to steadily press up prices to pad margins.

The prices are also still like 5X what they were before this bout of bird flue started over 5 years ago.

More like with debt, but who will buy the bonds that fund that debt?

They could probably start by putting all the units they’re holding off the market back on the market, but that wouldn’t let them keep rents artificially high.

And if they did that then they couldn’t exaggerate the value of the buildings, since the theoretical earnings is based on the average rent multiplied by the total number of units.

And if the value of the buildings dropped because the average rent fell, then they would suddenly be over leveraged on all the loans they’ve taken out with the buildings as collateral, and they couldn’t take out new loans to pay the interest on the old loans.

We wouldn’t want a that to happen now would we?

It’s a matter of optics and positioning, he’s saying he wants to do these things, he’s saying “ here’s how we do these things, and the average citizen of the Empire State won’t pay a dime for it” and he has the mandate of the public in NYC to do them.

If the state legislature blocks these, it’s on them to explain why they won’t do it. They have to go to their constituencies and tell them that “no we will not raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for public services”.

In wealthy bedroom communities lavished in generational wealth like Mount Kisco and Whiteplains, that will go over just fine. But In Schenectady, Rochester and Buffalo, that’s going to ruffle some feathers.

Sure upstate dislikes NYC for taking up all the oxygen in the room, but their fundamental gripe is with the elites of NYC who refuse to spend a dime to support them. The elites of NYC in the suburbs throwing out fire and brimstone about spending money on public services will strike a sore spot with upstate voters desperate for public investment.

The legislators from upstate will say “We shouldn’t be letting NYC spend 9 billion dollars on their public services when ours are falling apart.” And the public there will say “yah! Let’s raise taxes on the NYC rich to pay for our public services!” and now the legislators who don’t want to tax the rich have to explain why they will be funding no ones public services.

All he has to do at that point to get these past is say “ let hit the rich NYC elite piñata a little bit harder and we can fund my proposal and stuff in upstate”. Without control of NYC proper’s politics, the rich are caught between a rock and a hard place, the actual legislative influence of the communities they live in is tiny compared to NYC and upstate.

Well of course, if an initiative for a public services decreases revenue it’s a failure! I mean, clearly the goal of a public services is to make money! Not, you know, provide a service to the public, what an absurd notion!

Can’t wait to see which way Eric Adam’s independent run splits the vote in the general. I bet that Curtis Sliwa will be competing with Eric Adam’s voters.

the consent manufacturing machine is really at full tilt right now.

I think Israel is reaching the end of the patience of a lot of public figures in the west and they’re trying to regain the news cycle by pivoting the focus away from their attempts to clear out the strip of people for the sake of land development.

Major mainstream media outlets were finally starting to go “hey they shot at a bunch of people waiting in line for food… what the fuck?” and so now a new conflict must occur to lead news cycles and force public figures to take a side.

If you take the numbers for spending and just look at competitive elections, the correlation is very weak if non-existent. Harris and Clinton both outspent trump and yet lost their elections.

More money tends to be spent on individual competitive elections, but the spending on competitive elections is not correlated well with winning, and there are way more safe elections than there are competitive elections. So more money tends to get spent over all across the many safe elections than on the few competitive, and very few donations go to the unfavored candidates in safe elections. Creating the illusion that higher spending correlates with success.

Ultimately the money flows to those liable to win because that is the best spend per dollar for someone trying to buy influence. And those safe seats need lots of money for their campaigns as a way to reward to those who have worked for them, but can’t be guaranteed further promotion do to a lack of opportunities. The rewards being things like lucrative consultant positions.

Lmao, who needs a processor?

Like, people really do be showing how little they know about consumer electronics when they say “yah this phone was 100% built in America”, or that they’re a grifter lying to their audience.

I don’t think there even is a facility In the US that could even potentially make the panel for the display. And there is exactly one fab that could make a modern processor for a smartphone SOC, (excluding intel’s facilities, but they do X86 chips so not really relevant for a smartphone.)

I think this might be part of the whole “bring in military to crack down on protests”

Trying to throw red meat to the “law and order” crowd. Spin a narrative that these people opposing his gestapo are “mass looting and destroying our cities” intentionally escalate the situation by throwing national guard and marines at the situation, then position him self as the only person who can handle it.

Specifically, it’s for the rural folks who have been slipping in their unfaltering support for him due to his fucking with their economic situation. The disruption and halting of a lot of programs and subsidies for farms has been legitimately horrifying for a lot of them, as have been the counter tariffs on American food exports. Not to mention the worries about being unable to get seasonal labor for farms. Like a lot of people in these communities were all in for trump, but, now the flags are coming down and the hats are off.

It’s a lot harder to alter/forge/discard hundreds of thousands of paper ballots than digital ballots, and thus requires a lot more people.

More people involved means more people who could speak out or slip up and reveal the plot.

This is why paper ballots will always be more secure, not matter how good encryption is, how hardened and secure the machines are or how many safe guards are put in place in software.

In addition to what they mentioned , I hate airports so much, they feel super alienating and hostile, even down to the architecture and interior design. Everything is stupid expensive and since they won’t give you a meal on the flight most of the time, and security hates people bringing food and drinks through, you kind of have to get something there. Airport security is also just a nightmare in general, having to pull my luggage and outfit apart and then reassemble it quickly so I don’t hold up the line is just stressful.

The fact that Amtrak doesn’t have security, complex boarding, or assigned seats is probably one of the biggest reasons I will always choose a train for travel if it’s a practical option. Most of the travel I do is in the northeast and mid-atlantic, so that works for me, I’ve even taken the train out to Chicago a few times, it was about 5 times longer than the flight would have been but still, cheaper by 100 dollars and way nicer. If I have to use a plane to make a trip, it legitimately makes me try to avoid the trip. Would be nice if we had more high speed trains than just the Acela to make more routes practical.

i don’t think this will go well for trump ultimately.

Like, two ways this goes, the national guard shows up, says “there are no ongoing and active riots so we’re done.” and leave

Or they just make a big PR mess for trump by massively over reacting to something.

it is the nature of personalist authoritarian regimes. Anything that presents them with information or outcomes that don’t serve the leaders goals gets turned in to an enemy, even if it’s the dumbest strategic choice possible.

They have an incredibly favorable Supreme Court, and rather than working with it to consolidate power, they are throwing rocks at it for not letting them do what ever they want.

It’s a pattern across a lot of dysfunctional organizations, when a leader doesn’t accept “not possible” for an answer. Doesn’t care about the dissent presented by subordinates and dismisses it as disloyalty. If you don’t want to get fired, you just go along with the boss and never present him with the reality.

The real messes occur when this kind of behavior scales. When the subordinates of the leader start doing the same to their own subordinates. When people start lying to their superiors about what is happening because they know the boss doesn’t want bad news or to be told their idea didn’t work. You get a game of telephone where information is distorted as it moves up the chain.