EverythingIsFine
No bio...
User ID: 1043
I'd like to post about the Spanish soccer kiss and some developments. Another commenter below posted a take decrying it as a case of classic excessive modern SJW-type media cancel culture crusades gone too far. This is not just a wrong take, it's a flagrantly wrong take and a significant misunderstanding of the "read between the lines" of everyone's statements. Also, the TIMELINE is very crucial to understanding this whole thing. In fact, the opposite is true, this is almost a perfect example of how people in power can't help themselves but to manipulate everyone around them. Below I will explain the exact timeline. (For length I'm making it its own comment, hope that's OK).
Interestingly, our understanding of the facts is very similar. As a background, it's worth noting that Rubiales has VERY extensive list of baggage and accusations from the last five years, including clashes with other officials and organizations, firings, lawsuits, leaked recordings, allegations of everything from sex parties to fraud to assault, and conflict with and within the women's team and their coach too. Regarding the kiss, the Spanish are very physically prone to displays of at times excessive physical affection. This is mostly just cultural, but it's important to note that there IS at least some smaller element of sexism that is baked in. The kiss appears to be one of joy during a massive medal celebration, but of course he's grabbing her whole head and planting it right on the lips, a bit too far. That same night, Hermoso laughs it off but also, critically, says she didn't really like it, "but what can I do?".
People online start to go to war about it, and people within the Spanish soccer community too don't really like the look or the attention. The very next day, which is Monday, a few things happen. According to this article, virtually all 300 people are on the same flight home to Spain, including the team, the coaches, federation people, family, etc. On said flight people obviously notice the growing online criticism. They left that morning, had a two hour layover in Doha, Qatar, and arrived that night in Spain (it's like 22 hours of flight time but going backwards so same calendar day). What happened on that flight?
According to Spanish media, once on the plane - and before the party began - Rubiales approached Jenni Hermoso and asked her to record a video with him apologising and explaining what had happened. This video would be later posted on social media. He said his job was on the line and that he needed her help, but Hermoso refused. Relevo.com reported that both Rubiales and Spain coach Jorge Vilda had spoken to the player and her family in an attempt to resolve the crisis. The incident tarnished the players' victory and they wanted to put an end to the controversy.
So they pressure her to defend him but she basically says no. They record a video with Rubiales ONLY in their Doha layover, which goes out later that night, but only after a statement goes out to a news agency (EFE) seemingly quoting her that basically goes "we were all just really happy and it was natural and no hard feelings". This comes out first and the video after (a bit of difficulty pinning down exact timeline but definitely in this order). Of note is that some media outlets are now alleging that the statement may have NOT in fact been a direct quote from her and the federation made it up (this is not certain however).
What's in the video? I speak Spanish pretty decently, thanks to living in Miami a while, so listening and watching it directly is pretty interesting. This is a horrible apology. I'm going to roughly thought for thought translate the whole video because it's worth noting the tone and words used:
We're in a proud moment for the federation for winning our second world cup, we're very proud, But as well, there's something that I have to be sorry for, which is of course something that happened between a player and myself. There's a great relationship between us both, as well as me and others, and where surely I did wrong and have to recognize it. Because in a big emotional moment, without any bad intention, without any bad faith, well, what happened, happened, it was very spontaneous, without bad faith from either of us. Okay, we understood each other because it was something natural, normal, no big deal, I repeat there was no bad faith; but then it became a big deal and people have felt hurt because of it, so I have to apologize, there's nothing else for it. And moreover, I have to learn that when I am in such an important position like president of a federation, when I participate in ceremonies and things like that, I have to be more careful. [Jump cut]. I also have to make a statement, in this response in front of you all, [unintelligible to me]. I also want to apologize before this person if I did it any other way they will have their reason [?]. [Jump cut] Lastly, yes I'm embarrassed because after one of the best times in women's soccer and in general too, our second world cup, it's hurt the celebration. I think we have to give credit to these women, this victorious team, we have to celebrate it most of all.
Commentary: Note how he focuses on how he's almost forced to apologize, how he created a distraction, and how he minimizes everything that happened. He doesn't even say what he did, he just says "what happened, happened". No big deal, no big deal. It's all about the consequences of his actions and nothing about how it could have made her feel or if he truly made a mistake. No, it's an apology that he "has to" make. This is, IMO, extra clear in the original Spanish and with intact voice inflections, etc. and I've tried to render the overall "vibe" of his comments accurately, though Spain-Spanish isn't my forte.
Tuesday rolls around, it's a big story still, and many people including the prime minister feel that the apology was inadequate.
Wednesday Hermoso releases a statement with her player's union and agency here which basically (and vaguely) says that the federation should take action to prevent bad things and make sure bad things aren't unpunished. It's not very specific but clearly is referring to the kiss, though the whole content is basically just urging better player rights.
Thursday FIFA begins to investigate and step in. Clearly pressure is building to fire him, suspend him, or have him resign.
Earlyish on Friday is a big federation meeting, where Rubiales makes a speech. I haven't been able to iron out exactly who called the meeting and for what exact purpose.
Do you really think I deserve this hunt? People demanding my resignation? Is this so serious for me to resign, having done the best management of Spanish football? Do you think I need to resign? Let me tell you something: I'm not going to resign! I'M NOT GOING TO RESIGN! I'm NOT going to resign! I'm not going to resign! [pause] I'm not going to resign!
Notable is that a very big portion of the audience is clapping loudly throughout. He the goes on to say that though he can't remember clearly it was Hermoso who lifted him up, they almost fell down and then they hugged. He emphasized it was her that picked him up so close, he told her not to worry about a missed penalty, told him he's great, then he asked "A kiss"? and she said OK. He says it wasn't something of desire nor forced and just like kissing his daughters and everyone gets that, even though they are saying the opposite when talking to the media. He says it's fake feminism and people who are all for his rivals. He calls it character assassination. He says that it suddenly ballooned from "no big deal" and then Hermoso didn't defend him and "a statement that I don't understand". He says that people making a big deal about it are hurting victims of real assault.
This ignites quite the firestorm that same day. (The next day, Satudary, FIFA suspended him. Since then, he's been pulled into at least one other avenue of potential firing/suspension as well). Note that Rubiales is not just adding detail but arguably changing the story. The importance of this is made clear when Hermoso finally and directly breaks her own silence, later on Friday FOLLOWING the speech, which in my opinion adds a TON of context to everything. Much as I want to summarize, this would take out the read-between-the-lines as well.
After obtaining one of the most desired achievements of my sporting career and after a few days of reflection, I want to thank, with all my heart, my teammates, fans, followers, media and everyone who has made this dream a reality; your work and unconditional support has been a fundamental part to be able to win the World Cup. In reference to what has happened today [Rubiales’ speech] and while I don’t want to interfere with the multiple ongoing legal procedures, I feel obligated to say that the words of Mr Luis Rubiales explaining the unfortunate event are categorically false and part of the manipulative culture he has created.
I want to make clear that not in any moment did the conversation occur that Mr Luis Rubiales references, and much less that his kiss was consensual. In the same way I want to reiterate how I did in that moment that what happened was not enjoyable.
The situation left me in shock because of the context of the celebration, and with the time passed, and those initial feelings being able to sink, I feel the need to denounce this as I feel that no one, in no work space, sporting or social, should be a victim to this time of nonconsensual behavior. I felt vulnerable and a victim of aggression, an impulsive act, sexist, out of place and without any type of consent from my part. In short, I wasn’t respected.
I was asked to released a joint statement to relieve the pressure off the president, but in those moments, in my head I only had being able to celebrate the historic achievement I accomplished with my teammates. That’s why, in that moment I communicated with the RFEF … and the same with media and people I trust, that I would not be releasing an individual statement nor a joint statement about the matter, as I understood that, by doing it, I would take away the spotlight from a very special moment for my teammates and I.
Despite my decision I have to state that I have been under constant pressure to come out with some sort of statement that would justify the acts of Mr Luis Rubiales. Not only that, but also, via different ways and different people, the RFEF has pressured my close circle (family, friends, teammates, etc) so I would give a statement that had little or nothing to do with how I felt.
It’s not my place to evaluate communication practices or integrity, but I am sure that as world champions we do not deserve a culture so manipulative, hostile and controlling. These types of incidents are added to a long list of situations that us, the players, have been [enduring] for the last few years, for what has been done, for what I have experienced, this is only a drop in a full glass and only what the whole world has been able to see. Acts like these have been part of daily life in our national team for years.
This statement almost perfectly describes how a normal person would react to the situation. Personally, although it sort of has devolved into in some ways a he said/she said, I find her account by far the most credible. The things that stand out, to me:
-
Rubiales outright is lying when he's adding the detail about how it was literally consensual because she said yes to a kiss, that he's making the whole exchange up. She basically says this is why she's speaking now because of him doubling down and indeed adding falsehoods.
-
She was silent because she was genuinely celebrating, didn't want to hurt the celebration, and also needed to process things. Personally, I think we can all relate to this, often our behavior psychologically right after something big doesn't always line up with our true feelings. Fun fact: Once someone threatened to kill me! It wasn't until later that my heartbeat could slow a bit down and despite sort of laughing it off at the time I realized it was actually a bit more serious. This jives with psychological research about how we react to unexpected and even unwanted events, including genuine sexual assault of various kinds. I might add that she might still feel that this isn't a big deal but was more offended by Rubiales' lies and/or general attitude than the actual event.
-
This kind of bad behavior, rather than being a one-off kind of thing, is actually endemic to how the women's team and players are treated.
-
She's been subject to a very significant pressure campaign to generate good PR even if it means lying. This pressure campaign has targeted a lot of people around her, too, which also seems to cross a line.
Ladies and gentlemen, this statement demonstrates almost exactly what feminists have been saying for years.
My take is that the kiss itself, not really that bad, but also something that does reflect on power dynamics, both men/women but also boss/employee. It deserved a real apology which was not given, instead the apology was not only extremely insincere, but also a result of behind the scenes pressure to sweep it under the rug and downplay. Rubiales doubling down was awful and it is kind of dystopian to see so much applause. He's the one playing a victimhood narrative, not Hermoso. Which is crazy! She didn't even talk about victimhood AT ALL until AFTER Rubiales basically lied about the kiss. I might add that Rubiales' version of events is in my opinion not supported by the video of the kiss, where they don't seem to have much of a conversation at all.
This is the key point behind why I bothered digging in to the whole timeline of things and making a whole effortpost. If you look at it all as the same big story, sure you might be inclined to say, yes this is just the media deciding to pillory someone with no due process and demanding blood for a minor infraction. But no, looking at her statement and the timeline, with the background of things not being very sunny within the Spanish federation and the players, it actually and fairly becomes a case of people in power trying to remain in power, especially in the world of soccer, which is well known to be an old boys club as well as infested with corruption on many levels, including FIFA. Far from victimhood being asserted by Hermoso, disproportionate to the actual harm or intent, it's Rubiales first trying to be a victim of persecution, as well as self-aggrandizing (note how many times he gives credit and glory to the federation and organization, rather than the players). Instead, Hermoso is only a reluctant participant in the whole debate who might have though it also wasn't a big deal and wanted to move on herself, until pressure and slander essentially forced her hand.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
Just some anecdata for the Reddit blackout, unless everyone is sick of it; I went through all my own personal subscribed subreddits and looked for their stance on the blackout:
NOT joining blackout: 135 subreddits. Of these, less than 10 actually posted why. Most ignored it entirely.
STILL DECIDING: 9 subreddits. Of those with public vote totals, overwhelming majorities for blackout and majorities for indefinite duration.
YES, for 24-48 hours set duration: 39 subreddits.
YES, for AT LEAST 48 hours: 20 subreddits. Most copied and pasted a vaguely worded post that implied only 48 hours but threatened longer, so hard to say how many conversions to the next category.
YES, INDEFINITELY: 16 subreddits. Honestly I'd be scared as shit as a mod that my mod powers would be permanently taken away from me. I sense from some of these announcements a real grieving process.
Overall if all the fence sitters black out, that's a good 84/219 going dark. I don't plan on visiting reddit those two days, but even if I did, that's a 40% reduction in content (number pretty fuzzy though). Not quite critical mass to be noticeable to me or to another user if I were representative, but surely enough to degrade the experience. A lot of the bigger content subs aren't participating, so maybe more like 30%.
So, my main two takeaways. One, most moderator teams genuinely don't seem to care, at all. I think almost any truly conscientious mod would at least address the issue head on rather than ignore it. The ones who did make an actual post saying they won't participate in the blackout generally had good motivations and impressed me, (which made the lack of response elsewhere even more deafening). One case was /r/manga, they didn't want to attract attention to a copyright-skirting sub. Another few think they are the online equivalent of support subs, or "essential workers", mostly fair arguments. One was scared of the sub being banned as it almost had under previous lax moderation, as a one-man mod team without an easy replacement.
The second takeaway was looking at the general quality of the subreddits that aren't participating. There's a few with obvious admin ties/ mod plants. But the bulk of them were either very small one-issue subs, or in most cases the nonparticipants all had one thing in common: low-effort, often comedic TikTok-esque video subreddits. I enjoy them, obviously, or I wouldn't be subscribed. But only about 3 or 4 that I recall actually decided to shut down (shoutout to /r/videos, a massive sub that is going completely dark). What's the implication of this anecdata? I predict that reddit is clearly headed even more strongly toward TikTokification, if the blackout fails. Ironic, because the official app does so poorly at displaying and loading videos!
EverythingIsFine
9mo ago
As of time of writing, it’s possible the Hunter Biden plea deal may be falling apart.
Apparently the government isn’t after all quite willing to dismiss any future gun related charges after being pressed by the judge. If this is the case it looks like the media circus about the plea deal being unethical might not even have been necessary? It’s my opinion that the court process usually figures this stuff out on its own, unless anyone thinks media attention somehow influences the in court decisions of any interested parties significantly?
EverythingIsFine
1yr ago
I’m going to paste in Matt Levine’s newsletter bit because it’s so incredibly good.
Here is a simple model of a pension fund. You know you will need to pay out a bunch of money 30 years from now, so you buy some 30-year government bonds and hold them to maturity. When the bonds mature in 30 years, you have money, which you give to the pensioners, and you’re done. This model is obviously oversimplified, [1] but it’s a good start.
Let me make three points about this model. First, a financial point: Doing a pension fund this way is expensive. Thirty-year UK gilts (government bonds) paid about 2.5% interest this summer. If you want to have £100 in 30 years, and bonds pay 2.5%, you’ll need to put aside about £48 now, which will grow at 2.5% over 30 years into £100. [2] If you are a company or government, you might not be jazzed about putting aside almost half the money now to pay pension obligations in 30 years. What if you bought some stocks instead? If stocks return 8% a year on average, you can put aside just £10 now to get back £100 in 30 years. That’s a much better deal, for you, now. Of course the gilts pay 2.5% guaranteed, while the 8% stock-market return is just a guess; in 30 years, you (and your pension beneficiaries) might regret your riskier choice. But it saves you money now, and it’ll probably work out fine. Or, you know, you do some mix of super-safe gilts and riskier corporate bonds and stocks, etc., still targeting £100 in 30 years but putting less money in now and taking more risk to get there.
Second, a financial-stability point: Structurally, pensions are about the safest form of investing. Most big investors in financial markets are, to some degree or other, structurally short-term, in ways that make markets fragile. Banks borrow most of their money short-term (from depositors, from capital markets), and if there’s a run on the bank then the bank will need to dump assets to pay back depositors. Mutual funds let their investors take money out every day, and if a lot of investors want out then the funds will have to dump stocks to give them their money back. Hedge funds let investors take money out and also tend to borrow money from prime brokers; if their assets go down then they will get margin calls from brokers and will have to sell assets to meet them. The common theme is:
-
You buy some assets with other people’s money.
-
The assets go down.
-
The people — depositors, investors, prime brokers — call you up and say “you used my money to buy assets, and the assets went down, so now I want my money back.”
-
They have the right to do that.
-
You have to sell assets to pay them back.
-
This makes the price of the assets go down more.
-
Go to Step 2.
More or less every bad story in financial markets is this story, a “deleveraging” or “run on the bank.” Pensions are immune to this. Pension funds own assets (gilts, stocks, etc.) with other people’s money, in the sense that they are ultimately supposed to use those assets to pay benefits to pensioners. But the beneficiaries can’t take their money out if the fund has a bad year. They just have to wait. There are no runs on pensions. The pension has to come up with £100 in 30 years, but that’s it; it can’t be forced to sell early along the way.
This means, for one thing, that if you run a pension you can confidently invest in risky assets like stocks: If stocks go down one year, you can make it up next year; you’re not going to have to shut down your pension fund because investors withdraw money after a year of bad returns. It also means that pensions are not supposed to destabilize financial markets: They are long-term investors and are not forced to sell when markets go down.
Third, an accounting point. Take the simple model of a pension: You buy a bond today to pay £100 in 30 years. I said above — with some simplification — that you pay about £48 for that bond. That is the value of that bond: The value of getting £100 in 30 years is £48 today. How do you account for that? What does the balance sheet look like? At some conceptual level, the balance sheet looks like “in 30 years I will have pension liabilities of £100 and assets of £100,” so it balances. But in practice accounting doesn’t work that way. In practice you will record the value of the bond as an asset, today, at £48. But by the same logic, you will record the value of your liability at £48: The cost of paying £100 in 30 years is £48 today, so you have assets of £48 and liabilities of £48 and it all balances.
What happens if interest rates change? Let’s say that the interest rate on 30-year gilts falls to 2%. This means that the market value of your bond goes up, to about £55. Do you have a windfall profit? Can you sell a portion of the bond? No, of course not. The market value of your bond has gone up, but you don’t care about that. The bond, for you, is a long-term, hold-to-maturity investment. For you, the bond pays £100 in 30 years; you don’t care about its market price now. But by the same logic, the present value of your liabilities goes up: Your obligation to pay £100 in 30 years is now “worth” £55, using a 2% discount rate. So your balance sheet still balances.
In the simple case, none of this matters and it is sort of a confusing fiction. You have to pay £100 in 30 years, you have an asset that pays £100 in 30 years, you’re done; market fluctuations don’t affect you at all. Accountants will want you to record the value of your asset and the value of your liability at their discounted present value, and that value will fluctuate with market interest rates. As rates go up, the value of your bonds will go down but the discounted cost of future pension benefits will go down; as rates go down, the bonds will go up but your cost will go up too. In the simple case these things will always offset and won’t trouble you very much.
But once you move beyond the simple case this gets worse. Let’s say you have to pay £100 of benefits in 30 years, and you plan to pay for that using half bonds (gilts worth £24 today) and half stocks (stocks worth £5 today). If gilts yield 2.5% and stocks return 8% per year for 30 years, that will give you £100 in 30 years, enough to pay those benefits. But today, you have assets of £29 (£24 of gilts and £5 of stocks), and liabilities of £48 (the present value of that £100 pension obligation in 30 years at a 2.5% discount rate). So your pension is underfunded, by £19. [3] It happens! It might be fine, if you get the returns you want. But it could make you nervous. One way to overcome this nervousness is to invest in even riskier assets with higher returns, so that next year you have, you know, £33, and are less underfunded.
The bigger problem is what happens when interest rates change. Again, say that the interest rate on 30-year gilts falls to 2%. Now you have £55 of liabilities (the present value of your pension obligations discounted at 2%). The value of your gilt holdings has gone up to £27.50 as rates fell. The value of your stock holdings might not have, though; stocks don’t move automatically with interest rates. Still, let’s say that your stocks have gone up, by 20%, to £6. Now you have £55 of liabilities and £33.50 of assets. You are underfunded by £21.50 instead of £19, which is worse. You have “lost money,” in a very accounting-fiction-y sense. Your actual pension obligations (how much you need to pay in 30 years) have stayed the same, and the market value of your assets has gone up. But your accounting statements show that you have lost money.
Notice that what this means is that, on a reasonable set of assumptions, pensions are short gilts: They lose money (in an accounting sense) whenever interest rates go down (and gilt prices rise), and they make money (in an accounting sense) whenever interest rates go up (and gilt prices go down). [4] Notice also how counterintuitive this is: In its simplest form, a pension fund just is a pile of gilts. The basic default move for a pension manager is to take a bunch of money and put it in gilts. Intuitively, she is long gilts: She has a pile of government bonds, and as rates go down the value of her holdings goes up. But as long as she doesn’t put all of it in gilts, and as long as the pension is underfunded, then she is as an accounting matter short gilts.
I said above that pension funds are unusually insensitive to short-term market moves: Nobody in the pension can ask for their money back for 30 years, so if the pension fund has a bad year it won’t face withdrawals and have to dump assets. Still, pension managers are sensitive to accounting. If your job is to manage a pension, you want to go to your bosses at the end of the year and say “this pension is now 5% less underfunded than it was last year.” And if you have to instead say “this pension is now 5% more underfunded than it was last year,” you are sad and maybe fired; if the pension gets too underfunded your regulator will step in. You want to avoid that.
And so the way you will approach your job is something like:
-
You will try to beat your benchmark, buying stocks and higher-yielding bonds to try to grow the value of your assets.
-
You will hedge the risk of rates going down. If rates go down, your liabilities will rise (faster than your assets); you are short gilts. You want to do something to minimize this risk.
.. continued below
EverythingIsFine
5mo ago
I mean, that’s a pretty neat example right up until you claim it means something. There’s such a giant chasm between being in a war zone and a life and death situation, and the kind of everyday often trivial political shit that I think the analogy doesn’t work at all.
EverythingIsFine
1yr ago
Part 2….
The way to do that hedging is basically to get really long gilts in a leveraged way. If you have £29 of assets, you might invest them like this:
-
£24 in gilts,
-
£5 in stocks, and
-
borrow another £24 and put that in gilts too. [5]
That way, if rates go down, the value of your portfolio goes up to match the increasing value of your liabilities. So you are hedged. You were short gilts, as an accounting matter, and you’ve solved that by borrowing money to buy more gilts. In practice, the way you have borrowed this money is probably not by actually getting a loan and buying gilts but by doing some sort of derivative (interest-rate swap, etc.) with a bank, where the bank pays you if rates go down and you pay the bank if rates go up. And you have posted some collateral with the bank, and as interest rates move up or down you post more or less collateral.
This all makes total sense, in its way. But notice that you now have borrowed short-term money to buy volatile financial assets. The thing that was so good about pension funds — their structural long-termism, the fact that you can’t have a run on a pension fund: You’ve ruined that! Now, if interest rates go up (gilts go down), your bank will call you up and say “you used our money to buy assets, and the assets went down, so you need to give us some money back.” And then you have to sell a bunch of your assets — the gilts and stocks that you own — to pay off those margin calls. Through the magic of derivatives you have transformed your safe boring long-term pension fund into a risky leveraged vehicle that could get blown up by market moves.
I know this is bad but I find something aesthetically beautiful about it. If you have a pot of money that is immune to bank runs, over time, modern finance will find a way to make it vulnerable to bank runs. That is an emergent property of modern finance. No one sits down and says “let’s make pension funds vulnerable to bank runs!” Finance, as an abstract entity, just sort of does that on its own.
Anyway, as I said above, 30-year UK gilt rates were about 2.5% this summer. They got to nearly 5% this week, and were at about 3.9% at 9 a.m. New York time today. You can fill in the rest. Here are Loukia Gyftopoulou and Greg Ritchie at Bloomberg News:
Fund managers running billions for pension funds faced collateral calls on strategies meant to give them exposure to long-dated assets to help match obligations that can extend decades. The so-called liability-driven investment, or LDI, funds were forced to post more collateral after receiving margin calls when gilt prices collapsed.
The central bank stepped in Wednesday after the calls threatened to push the gilt market into a downward spiral. The BOE had been warned by investment banks and fund managers in recent days that the collateral requirements could trigger a gilt crash, according to a person familiar with the BOE’s deliberations before they stepped in.
“The BOE intervention was required to prevent a vicious cycle becoming even more dangerous for pension funds forced to sell their gilt exposures,” Calum Mackenzie, an investment partner at Aon, said after the BOE intervention. “The market’s swift and significant reaction underlined the big risk faced by pension funds who have had or who could have had their liability hedges reduced.”
Firms including BlackRock Inc., Legal & General Group Plc and Schroders Plc manage LDI funds on behalf of pension clients. The pension firms use them to match their liabilities with their assets, often using derivatives.
The size of the LDI market has exploded over the past decade. The amount of liabilities held by UK pension funds that have been hedged with LDI strategies has tripled in size to £1.5 trillion in the 10 years through 2020, according to the Investment Association. These trades are typically used by defined benefit pension schemes. ...
When yields fall the funds receive margin and when yields rise they typically have to post more collateral. After the spike in gilt yields on Friday and into this week, LDI fund managers were hit by margin calls from their investment banks.
LDI collateral buffers are partly set using historical data to build models based on the likely probability of gilt price movements, according to Shalin Bhagwan, head of pension advisory at DWS Group. The sudden recent surge in gilt yields “blew through the models and the collateral buffers,” he said.
And here is the Financial Times on the BOE’s intervention:
The bank stressed that it was not seeking to lower long-term government borrowing costs. Instead it wanted to buy time to prevent a vicious circle in which pension funds have to sell gilts immediately to meet demands for cash from their creditors. That process had put pension funds at risk of insolvency, because the mass sell-offs pushed down further the price of gilts held by funds as assets, requiring them to stump up even more cash. “At some point this morning I was worried this was the beginning of the end,” said a senior London-based banker, adding that at one point on Wednesday morning there were no buyers of long-dated UK gilts. “It was not quite a Lehman moment. But it got close.” …
“If there was no intervention today, gilt yields could have gone up to 7-8 per cent from 4.5 per cent this morning and in that situation around 90 per cent of UK pension funds would have run out of collateral,” said Kerrin Rosenberg, Cardano Investment chief executive. “They would have been wiped out.”
And FT Alphaville has two very good explainers of the LDI problem, one by Toby Nangle and another by Alex Scaggs and Louis Ashworth, which I have drawn on here. And here is Nangle’s prescient LDI explainer from July. Modern finance made UK pensions vulnerable to runs, and then there was a run on those pensions, and the Bank of England had to step in to buy gilts to save them, because that’s what happens in a bank run.
EverythingIsFine
6mo ago
Why is your conclusion that it was all a lie? You are aware that attitudes, especially about sex, hardly move on a linear, one-dimensional scale. History is about things changing in many ways, some good and some bad and many unforeseen. It's about context and tons of interactions with contemporary events. This is extra true in this case because as you start to allude to, these expectations were largely unstated -- and that's because the Sexual Revolution wasn't particularly intentional. There's some early links to feminist movements in the creation of the birth control pill (1960) due to its then-controversial moral implications, but research was heading in that direction anyways and I think that a lot of the movement was simply an intersection between that invention, which allowed wider scale lower-consequence sex (very important!), the happenstance of Vietnam War counterculture already starting to go full steam ahead, and an already-rising incidence rate of what Wikipedia rather blithely calls "non-traditional sexual activity" that had started back in the early 50s. In other words, the Sexual Revolution was more a thing that happened rather than a directed or conscious movement.
Truth be told however, a lot of stuff was happening for women in the 1960s and thereabouts. I feel strongly the Sexual Revolution should be treated as its own thing, but all that stuff makes it hard to be totally certain. Specifically, you had traditional Second Wave Feminists focused on legal stuff and equality, you had a more hippie-based cultural movement, and you had some radicals hanging around as well, as well as some other political events. There were a lot of big legal things happening including sex being allowed into movies and books more, equal pay pushes, and you are correct, a lot more talk about gender roles.
And that's where I think you're succumbing to a bit of presentism. "Normalizing" both the act of sex (particularly unmarried sex) and discussion about sex is by definition contextual. We use the word differently today. Normalizing to someone in 1965 might mean that it's now normal to talk about sex in casual conversation and a heightened awareness of sexual activity, including queer stuff. Whereas in point a above, you say that it's about not shaming each other and not having unfavorable impacts. That's not really what the promise was, if there even was one. The conversation was just getting started, in the public consciousness. So talking about it being a lie just doesn't make sense.
Part b might be a valid criticism of second wave feminism, but not the sexual revolution. And it's one I wouldn't be so quick to declare as false. Certainly some feminists declared that loosened gender roles might be better for everyone, but I think the language was (and should be) more of a moral and legal question about rights than an explicit "I Offer - You Receive". In other words, it isn't fair nor just to force (societally and legally) certain roles and restrictions on women because they are people too, even on the off chance it makes society overall worse. And again, here I believe you are projecting what is actually intended as a third/fourth wave feminism criticism onto the second wave. Both the claim about men having no issue doing traditionally female-coded things as well as the activism behind it doesn't historically line up at all with the Sexual Revolution. I would say that for example, a push to accept house-husbands didn't really start to bloom until maybe the 2000s.
EverythingIsFine
7mo ago
I'm doing a fun little assignment where we're supposed to find a few misleading graphs, infographics, or other data visualization and talk about how it could be misleading. For example, I remember this fun one from the CBC in Canada that deliberately misstated the proportion of public funding. Anyone have any other good examples that spring to mind? (Not that I'm trying to freeload, it's not that kind of difficult assignment, but I'm curious if there are any that have just stuck in your head like that one did for months or years?
I don't think that's the most likely explanation. The easier one is more factual: no matter how incompetent a military starts out, after about six months or more of war, certainly a year, even bad militaries get better at war. In terms of the troops doing the actual front line fighting. There's no inherent contradiction of a "Russia has a shit military" type narrative and "it's very hard to retake ground" one. As an aside, I watch the news very carefully and I don't agree at all that the prevailing current narrative is one of "it's NATO's fault Ukraine isn't doing better". There are ammo shortages on both sides of the war, a lot of Western reserves are pretty strained for certain types of ammo and equipment (at least, they want to keep some in reserve for themselves and not totally empty out the shed), and Ukraine has of course found that acting like a petulant child who wants more more more, kinda sorta works? They have always danced a fine line between expressing a desire for more stuff and greater quality stuff, and avoiding acting too ungrateful, and I don't think that's changed very much other than they've finally gotten most of their (realistic) high quality wish list.
In short, I disagree that there is any substantive or coordinated gaslighting going on, in fact (Occam's Razor style) there is a much simpler explanation that requires very little intentional and complex deceit.
There's also, I should add, the element of how surprises are more newsworthy than boring updates. We were almost all certainly surprised that Russia was that awful at a lot of things especially early in the war. Then there was basically a repeat of the original stories but with the Wagner Group as the main character. The need for surprise also twists what kind of news stories are produced especially as the conflict becomes more, might I even say, boring.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I don’t think you can simply call the entire body of WWII scholarship “suspicious narrative building”. I’m especially astonished to see an actual argument… arguing that the West’s meddling caused the war? Dude. It was brutal and vicious German expansionism, abetted by Soviet greed, that caused the invasion of multiple neighbors, an outright war of conquest. And that’s not even getting into the obvious Holocaust and associated war crimes angle. I do appreciate the source but it’s the height of narcisssism on the part of the two Americans quoted to take full responsibility for the UK going to war. They aren’t as influential as their egos think. Don’t forget Poland was the last straw of a long string of events and invasions. If you want to find a culprit, Munich is a good start as even Hitler admitted he was willing to back down if push came to shove. But the acquiescence gave him a false sense of weakness for later moves. In particular, it’s well documented Hitler thought until the very end that the UK wouldn’t join in and was a bit in denial when they did — but a lot of that had to do with his idea of Britain as a racially superior country, and in his schema the racial winners didn’t fight each other, and less the actual actions of the UK itself.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I think in this particular case, though Trump is just a terrible client and that's why MOST lawyers leave him, I believe that here due to the timing the lawyers are dropping out on purpose to try to obtain a trial delay, thus kicking the trial as late as possible (i.e. after the election).
I could be wrong but it seems to me that the recording(s?) in and of itself contains literally 90% of the court case against Trump in one short recording. I think they have him dead to rights. It blows up intent, it blows up the classification issue (though the charges are structured so the classification status isn't all that relevant), it blows up the recipient of that intel, all at once. The relevant laws are relatively broad so I think the only true issue is one of proving intent. I think the orders to move boxes around is more than enough, and if coupled with the broken attorney privilege as you mention, it's even easier. I say that as someone who has never thought any other single legal case against Trump has been worth much.
I don't feel like these responses are "equal". I think a questionnaire with the goal or producing interesting data has to have each point be at least somewhat compelling, even if it isn't always going to be even. 1 and 2 sound so similar and are vague, while 4 is pretty radical.
For example I would say these would be better responses below (plus I would clean up the question phrasing so that the "pros and cons" are more explicit, or move some of the implications to the answer portion). Also, as an aside, the cost of the actual farm land itself is completely irrelevant from a macro perspective, as systemically the costs are aggregated -- unless the individual welfare of farmers themselves is intended to be part of the question? I feel like that's adding too many dimensions to the question however. Ideally, I think you only want to involve two primary "axes" at a time, otherwise it creates too many complications for your data modeling. There's a reason most political tests only try to isolate one at a time. Three is a lot and four is crazy. Right now, as far as I can tell from BOTH the question AND the answers, is you are trying to gauge if the responder thinks food insecurity is a national security issue (1), if they care or agree that developing farmland causes ecological damage (2), if they like or accept globalism as an ideal trade system (3), if they support forcible wealth or resource distribution (4), and how much they value the economic well-being of farmers (5).
Could be wrong about the above, but it seems to me that if you want qualitative analysis you may as well just make it a total free response, or maybe throw in a few "suggestions" as prompts. From a data perspective though, assuming you want to use all questions to generate a holistic assessment, I just don't agree with your current approach.
How I would phrase:
A small but densely populated island country doesn't produce enough food to feed its population. Food production continues declining as both farmland is developed for urban and industrial use. The country has many allies and participates in global trade and so has unfettered access to food imports. Still, government advisers have identified food insecurity as a key vulnerability for the country in the case of a conflict or severe economic shock.
-
Do nothing because the country’s aggregate wealth and income is maximized by specializing in other products and importing food is cost-effective.
-
Raise tariffs, use subsidies, or other measures to incentivize farmers to grow more food and protect farmland, even if it raises the price of food, land, or taxes, because it is a national security vulnerability and to be more self-sufficient.
And leave it at that. Narrow it down to an assessment of issues (1) and (3) of the five listed above from your original question. Aren't these realistically the only true options? Basically original options 1 and 3, because 2 brings ecological conservation and farmer's welfare into the mix for no reason, forces them to be coupled, and is the only place it's mentioned, while 4 doesn't even make sense. Farmland is by definition already used macro-wise to farm, and changing who exactly owns the farmland (it's implied that all farmers are exploited share-croppers in the question, but not stated) isn't going to magically change aggregate food production? And an important final detail: Is the population of the island increasing, increasing rapidly, or flat? (Plus, one wonders how big the deficit is -- implied is that all the solutions would be effective)
I might be missing your point about philosophical vs practical views entirely, but I've always thought that a lot of the compass quizzes I've taken are at least partially true to life?
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
Wouldn’t your point be considerably undermined by the near indisputable fact that Nazism was, in actual fact, a severe threat to both fundamental human right to life as well as world peace? And the fact that despite all this FDR actually failed to bring the US into war against the Nazis? There is no global Jewish conspiracy.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I think presumably the implication is that the FBI believes that ISIS truly does recruit online and that by re-routing some of the would-be terrorists to them, they are taking away "real" terrorists. This assumes that a) there is a finite number of people who would commit a terror attack for ISIS online (thus being a sort of zero-sum thing), and b) if the FBI doesn't help them, they will go to someone real who can. I think assumption A is probably fine, I don't really think that the FBI is somehow generating additional potential recruits by their actions, so a fixed pool generally seems to make sense. Assumption B is a bit trickier, but from a law enforcement perspective, is it truly worth the risk of ignoring potential terrorists because you're hoping that they aren't serious and that they will grow out of it or something? Furthermore, I don't have much sympathy to be honest for the so-called "false positives" in this kind of scenario. Even if you are (let's say) hoodwinked and egged on by the FBI to do things you don't want to do in actuality... nothing's really stopping you from just stopping these conversations? Unless their process violates assumption B (the honey traps somehow radicalizing MORE than a comparable "real ISIS" control group) I can't see this being a concern keeping many people up at night. It's not like going to a terrorist training camp is the kind of "whoopsie" that anyone could be suckered into doing.
EverythingIsFine
11mo ago
It was compared to having velcro shoes type flag
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
Yeah that’s exactly where it breaks down, that’s a misunderstanding. Germany declared war on the US! Not the other way around. It wasn’t actually a total given that we would have preemptively declared on them first. And if we had declared first, it would have been a much more difficult sell to the public. Being the recipient, even if it may seem a bit of a technicality, nevertheless quieted a lot of domestic opposition. On top of all that, there’s the military reality of the Pacific campaign — pure numbers aren’t useful, as you need lots of ships to make use of those numbers, and time. While Europe was a lot easier to just ship over men by the hundred thousand much sooner, once the war is truly Axis vs Allies.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I mean, friendly reminder that criminal cases like this require unanimous juries, as they should. Not a single dissenter. That's always a bit of a high bar. The article rightly points out that this is potentially more of a judge issue than a jury issue, for allowing a certain line of defense with a very tortured fruit of the poison tree type argument. I wish we had a slightly better system for voting in and retaining judges.
EverythingIsFine
6mo ago
Here’s my take. Compliant with my own “50 year rule” that holds that any political injustice or status quo that’s persisted for more than 50ish years should be accepted automatically and we simply move on (since by that point most people originally involved are either dead or too old to matter, plus “sins of the father” rhetoric), I think a two state solution is just permanently dead.
What Palestinians, broadly speaking, need most is a return to open elections (new leadership - the PA has been useless for years and doesn’t actually seem to care about getting an actual solution) coupled with a sustained series of publicized Kumbiya moments of forgiveness and unity. Ideally with a charismatic leader on one or both sides. Then a sustained push for equal rights. Possibly combined with some mild economic and land reform/incentives. This will probably work fine for the West Bank and Gaza will probably remain slum-like, without a great near term solution. Focus on the equal treatment bits and learning to live as a multicultural society. I’m not saying Israeli government is like Apartheid, and we shouldn’t treat it the same, but if we are honest it certainly shares some attributes and Israeli doesn’t yet treat all Arabs the same.
I think this approach is completely plausible. It just will take work and a willingness from Palestinians and Israelis alike. For those who think a lifetime of war and conflict and oppression is inevitable, as well as those trapped in the recent news, I think it’s helpful to continue to consider what a medium term resolution can or could be like.
EverythingIsFine
1yr ago
I feel a lot of empathy for this point of view and I almost agree, but there are at the same time some implications in your comment that are truly horrifying.
The notion that any degree of actual attempt at political involvement is an actively bad thing is one that is acutely poisonous to democratic society at large, in addition to being morally repulsive to me. What happened to civic duty and responsibility? Meaningfully participating in communities more broadly? I’m not sure you can simply separate “oh, this is a local issue” and “oh, this is a national issue I am powerless about”. People drastically undersell the network effects of sharing their own opinion, let alone actually volunteering for a candidate. While it’s true a lot of people find themselves in an endless cycle of outrage and fear, egged on by the national media and political cycles, it’s also seems to be true that the antidote is the moderating influence of interpersonal discussion. It’s not a catalyst for more outrage, it’s a set of social brakes.
Perhaps this is an inaccurate read of your comment but my first impression was definitely one preaching political inactivity as a virtue, which it is not.
EverythingIsFine
6mo ago
I think you might be mixing up your timeline. Trayvon Martin (2012), Eric Garner (2014), Freddie Gray (2015 - Ferguson riots attached), Philando Castile (2015) and other moments like Kaepernick (2015) and the Charleston church shooting (2015) ALL predate Trump. The racial unrest wasn’t invented by progressives. It was already there.
The double impact of the video of George Floyd (2020) and Trump’s own, self inflicted “both sides” response to the Charlottesville protester killings (2017) has far more to do with it than some progressive scheme to make Trump look bad. In particular that 2017 event was tied to Confederate backlash… which even extended to efforts within Southern states to remove Confederate flags. Mississippi removed their own flag in 2020. Even South Carolina stopped displaying it. While there was certainly national pressure to do so, it wasn’t progressive-exclusive.
And speaking in terms of the historiography, it’s also a big mistake to say that the sentiment was new. Many historians have long felt that Reconciliation was a bit too lenient. Since about the 60s I would say, reaching stronger mainstream around the 80s. Many blamed civil rights “taking too long” and Jim Crow type discrimination and political repression “lasting too long” on Reconstruction. Perhaps out of political convenience (easier to blame the past), but again, this wasn’t something new in response to Trump.
EverythingIsFine
6mo ago
It's really a marketing failure, if anything. While Congress doesn't get as much done as IT wants (and promises), legislation that changes American Life writ large is still somewhat common. When it happens, they don't often talk about it very loudly. The election cycle is basically every two years, but many of these big bills take about three years to come to fruition or be noticeable (just to throw out a typical number). They manage to pass at least two bills per year I'd estimate that have a noticeable impact on the median American. So there's often an awkward timing thing where they can't take credit too quickly, or people get impatient, but often they wait too long and then it becomes awkward to take credit because the other party might now be in power and they don't want to make their opponents look good.
EverythingIsFine
7mo ago
I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's not really about the kiss and what's an appropriate punishment. It's more about the culture surrounding it and how it's dealt with that is highly problematic. The first instinct of the federation and of Rubiales is to lean on Hermoso to make a situation that Rubiales caused go away, and to try to guilt trip her and her friends and family into doing so (the coach apparently tried no less than three times on the plane trip). The second backup plan is to make the bare minimum apology, where the subtext is extremely loudly insisting that not only is the infraction so small, but also that people are just being jerks to insist on ruining the moment, and that his only true crime was being "too good at his job" or something. He likes to talk about the moment having "bad faith", but that's bad faith right there. At no point does Rubiales say something like "I made her uncomfortable", or talk about respect, or display any remorse. It's all "oops I guess I was caught". And then the Friday speech. Oh boy, the speech. It's throwing water onto a grease fire. I cannot understate how shocked I am that he's being applauded loudly by so many people in the room. At this point he has faced honestly very little actual repression. It's mostly online. People (rightly) think he's insincere.
But making such a fiery speech and claiming his own victimhood as more important and real than the victimhood of someone else, while behind the scenes him and his bureaucratic, domineering friends are the ones laying it on? Hypocrisy. He's the one that worsened the situation again further. The situation looks even worse for him if they did in fact fake the Monday quote from Hermoso (source here) which seems more likely than not. Hermoso herself and her family didn't seem to want it to be such a big deal based on Monday alone, or even during the week, refusing to be baited out by reporters on multiple occasions. Now of course the media might have been making things worse, but the only official action was FIFA beginning to look into it. It's important to note again that he's only actually suspended on Saturday, after he ignites the firestorm. I don't think that's a coincidence.
And of course the thing underlying it all: As Hermoso alludes to, and apparently a LOT of other players on the women's team believe, there were and are actual big issues going on behind the scenes in Spanish soccer that mean that it's not actually a given that Rubiales deserves to have his current job. The tip of the iceberg, as it were. In particular, there was a whole heavyhanded incident back in September where a group letter from 15 players resulted in the federation going public first and accusing the players of blackmail and trying to pull a coup on the coach, with bad feelings all around. For what it's worth, those tensions didn't appear to involve assault or anything like that.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
I think it's as simple as: SE is positioned as a high-quality Q and A site above all else. In particular high-volume users and mods are particularly prideful about this and really, really hate low-effort stuff (plus, again, pride). SE rightfully banned chatGPT and AI content both in answering questions as well as (AFAIK) posing questions, both in generation as well as clarification. This lead to the site more or less continuing as before as well as a lot of bans and mod action to preserve this, coordinated with the site/network as a whole. They then did an about-face, threw the gates open to AI content, and have forbidden mods for banning people (or even doing more regular moderation) for AI content-related stuff. The manner in which this was done feels to some like shoving it down their throat.
So the mods and hyper-active users are unhappy. It should be mentioned that although SE feels like a Wikipedia-type site, and operates similarly in some ways, it's NOT. It's owned by a for-profit ed-tech company.
EverythingIsFine
10mo ago
This is just off the cuff but honestly I’d expect the 90s research to be better not worse. My impression is online IQ tests with heavily self selected populations are too influential and hurt generalizability.
This is completely correct. It's not even up for debate, really: You can find the 2021-22 financial statment here and scroll to Page 4. In ONE YEAR, they (Wikimedia) received 160 million dollars in donations and in the SAME YEAR spent literally twice as much money (6.2 million dollars) in just processing those same donations than they did on internet hosting itself (what people assume the money is spent on) -- which was only 2.7 million dollars. Look at those two numbers. 160 vs 3 million. They aren't even in the same ballpark. 15 million dollars they literally just gave away in grants and 88 million dollars in salaries and 18 million on "professional services", which is odd for an organization that primarily (as far as I assume most donors are concerned) simply runs Wikipedia and literally prohibits (most) paid editing...
More options
Context Copy link