While I agree with most of what you write:
Similar to interracial relationships. There may be nigh unanimous support for interracial relationships at Harvard, but you won’t see many except some White/Asian pairs, you see far more at your local Walmart
This isn’t true. Until last year the freshman classes in the Ivy League were like 12-15% black, those students (especially in that class and that environment) weren’t only dating other black people.
Isn’t this “what’s cool in Brooklyn” coming to flyover country 15-20 years later, but in an (inevitably) altered form?
‘Elite’ or niche subcultures never become common in the same form. So the libertine sensibilities of the Greenwich Village beatniks in the ‘50s became free love for college students (a much smaller proportion of high school graduates back then) in the late ‘60s and then became John Hughes / suburban teenage picket fence Americana for the wider middle class in the very late ‘70s and ‘80s. Teenagers who had casual sex in 1985 didn’t typically share the leftist, third worldist politics of many of the hippies on communes eighteen or twenty years earlier.
2rafa
3d ago
China wanted its bubble to pop because BYD's engineers can rent condos for far less per square meter than what GM engineers can.
China didn’t want its bubble to pop and the state took extreme action to (1) prevent the housing bubble from popping and (2) once it partially did, prevent on-paper values from collapsing to prevent extreme public anger. To illustrate, while data is scarce, since the bubble burst in 2022/3 Chinese house prices have fallen by about 2.5% per year. The worst affected cities maybe 5%.
By contrast, after the US housing bubble burst in 2007, property prices in the worst affected cities (like Phoenix) fell by over 50%.
2rafa
4d ago
I actually think this is why he and Bannon got along so well, because Bannon has also had a very Forrest Gump kind of life.
2rafa
4d ago
This:
Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence.
ie “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” was a favorite discussion topic both on the SSC open thread and on this forum in the early days, and still comes up occasionally.
I don’t think it’s a hugely useful conversation. Almost nobody beats the market in the long term, and if you can consistently beat benchmark by a few percent a year for a decade or two you’re a star fund manager.
To make the kind of return you’re describing you need to gamble or cheat (or both, as the latter generally amounts to the former).
If I was gambling, I’d try to ride the comedown of the emerging markets bond boom of the last couple of years (which is inevitable whenever larger cracks appear in the global credit market).
2rafa
4d ago
What ideas are those? Every big Euro and most US VCs and a lot of other private equity is super into early-mid stage defense now, the big private companies like Anduril and that German drone company are valued lik AI firms, and the big public companies are trading at tech-level multiples priced to perfection for insane earnings growth over the next few years.
2rafa
6d ago
Ghislaine had mostly moved on with her life after 2008. She was dating the Gateway PC guy and then that younger man and doing her rich woman ocean charity BS project.
2rafa
6d ago
My boomer uncle has read a bunch of Unz (even though he doesn’t like him) and Jared Taylor lol. Honestly, though, I think it’s clear that while, after his first conviction, his friends would still mostly see him one on one or in private, his social calendar shrunk considerably and he spent most of the day online in the usual places curious people inhabit.
If he was 10 years younger he’d probably have been here.
This is true and succinctly put in a way it often isn’t, but I agree with the others that it’s more a temporary feature than a permanent one.
The right got so tired of losing that to some extent it redefined winning to mean “a Republican president doing anything”. Fuentes was cheering on the US regime change op in Venezuela, relative economic libcons were begrudgingly saying well tariffs on China are probably necessary etc.
The left is still in the wilderness. Part of it is that Trump hasn’t actually done anything to hurt upper-middle class progressives yet. The Roe reversal doesn’t affect them because they live in blue states. Tariffs were limited / chickened out of pretty quickly, at least the ones with the potential for the most serious impact. Few illegal maids and housekeepers and gardeners have been deported yet. The economy is fine, markets are strong. What is the message from the left? ICE shot someone in Minnesota? Most Americans don’t care.
More options
Context Copy link