Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I don't really see how one reasons to the omnibus position. If the drag on prices caused by the Jones Act is not worth the benefits then we should repeal the Jones Act regardless of whether we implement tariffs that have a similar effect on prices. Similarly, if we think the benefits of tariffs would outweigh their costs we should implement them regardless of whether we repeal the Jones Act. I don't see how the two policies are linked except rhetorically.
Obviously, people would horrifically oppose it, but what would they say when they oppose it? What would the reasoning be? How would that reasoning come across to the people who would respond with a different choice from the list?
I would say that we should just repeal the Jones Act and not do tariffs. Indeed, if tariffs would have a similar effect on prices as the Jones Act (potentially worse) they undo all the benefits of repealing the Jones Act! Instead of replacing one drag on US prices with another we should just get rid of the bad drag on prices.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Sure. My point is that consumers use artist identity markers as a way to find kinds of music. Obviously the consumers don't have to share the identity markers to like the music.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think it's simpler. We might ask "is there a perceptible statistical relation between an artist's identity and the music they make?" I think the answer to this is clearly yes. This is probably most obviously true with with black people but it's not hard to suppose a case for others. Think about how much music is about love and relationships, for example. Might gay people enjoy a song more if the lyrical content was aligned with their own attraction? How many straight guys are singing songs pining for their lost love (another man)?
This isn't to say that only people of a particular identity can make a particular sound or that people of a particular identity must have a particular sound. Just that there is a perceptible relation such that consumers can use artist identity as a kind of crude filter for sound.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think the idea is that relatively little of the 75% of discretionary spending by women is being captured by games while a lot of the 25% of discretionary spending controlled by men is captured by games. This makes appealing to women relatively more attractive as a vector for making money. You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Iowa is not exactly a reliably red state either. We're not taking about Texas here. Obama won it by almost 10 points in 2008 and by over 5 points in 2012. "Dem wins Iowa by 2-4 points" is not, historically, a crazy outcome.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Ok, but how does this relate to the OP? This is true whether or not there's a leak of some specific passwords in a publicly accessible excel document. Somebody has to have access to maintain voting machines and by the nature of maintenance would be able to compromise the thing they're maintaining.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
The meeting was with Blue Origin executives which is Bezos' space flight company. Presumably WaPo doesn't endorse Harris and maybe Trump steers some NASA contracts Blue Origin's way if he wins. This hearkens back to the JEDI military contract during the Trump administration, which allegedly went to Microsoft over Amazon for political reasons (including alleged interference by Trump).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I do not find Bezos' denial that this was politically motivated very credible. Just earlier this month the Post editorial board endorsed both a Senator and a House rep. Apparently Bezos came around to these principles in the last two weeks. Or maybe endorsing Senators/Reps moves the needle for voters in a way it doesn't for President? Does endorsing these candidates not create an appearance of bias the way endorsing a candidate for President does?
Also this:
I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.
Does Bezos understand this makes it look more like a quid pro quo? If the meeting is something that had been scheduled months ago and just happened to fall on the same day then it could excused as a coincidence. "The meeting (quo) wasn't set up until we killed the endorsement (quid)" looks worse! Not better!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Indeed, "abuse that will result in your children being taken away" is not some objective thing in the universe. It is relative to a very particular social construction (laws).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
In fact if your child had cancer in their penis or breasts then not cutting them off may very well be abuse.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Is it also political when the state wants to give children blood transfusions and parents object?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
The state, obviously. They're the ones who pass the laws defining abuse!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
It is good when abusive parents lose custody of the children they are abusing.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think "unable" is the wrong word. The United States government almost certainly could do this. The problem is lots of politicians (I suspect primarily Republicans) are skeptical of the kind of national database that would have to be constructed to do so. What is going to be on the cards? Are we just adding a photo to your SSN card? But that wouldn't establish where you live for voting purposes. Will it also have your address? So the federal government is going to have a database of the address of every citizen?
Lots of politics groups in America are suspicious of the federal government knowing too much or having too much power which hampers our ability to coordinate that way and is why so much is done by states instead.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
"Losing money" is not, by itself, what I object to. Approximately every company loses money in some quarters. Even billions of dollars. It's the scale of the loss relative to incoming revenue. If you look at Twitter's first 10K after going public you will see there was only one year (2011) in which their losses are more than double their revenue. If you look at their first 10Q after going public you will see they were actually profitable that quarter! Meanwhile DJT is posting losses on the order of 10-20x revenue. As far back as I can find data for Twitter, they were not posting losses like that.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Evidence that Twitter's fundamentals were "similarly dismal?" As of Twitter's last 10Q they were reporting $1.2B in revenue against $1.5B of expenses for a net loss in the $300M range. I think having expenses that are around 25% higher than revenue is pretty different from having expenses that are 1000-2000% (10-20x) higher than revenue, as DJT reports.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think one important distinguishing point you don't mention re:Hawaii is that Nixon, presiding over the session, sought and received (unanimous) consent from both houses of Congress to count the alternate slate of electors for Kennedy. The then-operative electoral count act had specific provisions for Congress to decide which sets of electors ought to be counted. Trump's plan relied on the Vice President having unilateral authority to decide which set of electors should be counted. It's obvious that Trump's plan is indefensible because ~0 people who supported that plan would support Vice President Harris doing something similar with respect to the 2024 election.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
As of Gamestop's latest 10Q they reported assets of around $5.5B against 386M outstanding shares. Valuing Gamestop strictly as a pot of money implies a per-share price of around $14/share vs its current closing price of $21/share. Having a tradeable stock ticker is valuable but I am not sure it is worth $3B!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
According to the USA Today article you linked Truth Social had $8.3M in legal expenses and $3.1M in technology expenses for its streaming service. Assuming both of these go to 0 that still leaves them with ~$8M in losses against 800k in revenue. Do you think Truth Social increased it's revenue 10x in the last three months? Did they reduce a bunch of other costs by 90%?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I think DJT has become a meme stock the same way GME and BBY were before it. Nobody buying DJT at $30 a share is doing a rational valuation based on its actual business. We are talking about a company that, in the three months ending June 30th, had revenue of $800k against operating costs of $19M. You can go read the latest 10Q yourself. Their own calculation shows an outstanding share count of 191M shares against $341M of equity. That's an implied share price below $2, assuming DJT was breaking even in its operations. So, what's the path for DJT to 20x its revenue without any increase in operating cost?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I have a lot of sympathy because I have a pretty similar story. When I was in high school I worked at {local pizza joint} that was sold to new owners and rebranded a couple years after I left. I put it on my first resume and the background check company my first employer used couldn't verify through whatever their normal means are that I worked there. I ended up having to reach out through several layers of friends to get the original owner of the place to write a letter confirming I worked there. It would have been way easier and more convenient to just leave it off. If someone wanted me to prove I worked there again today I'm not sure I could do it. Maybe a dozen people had contemporaneous knowledge and the only ones I'm still in regular contact with are my family.
The Jones Act requires the ships be built in the United States.
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