MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is sensible. Given the nature of IQ 100-115 normies, allowing them to run arbitrary code on a machine is equivalent to allowing the GRU or Lockbit to run arbitrary code on that machine.
God did not intend every individual to have access to a universal Turing machine. On the other hand, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds did, and the GNU/Linux ecosystem isn't going anywhere because the internet backbone runs on it. In addition, a huge part of the value proposition of the Microsoft ecosystem (particularly relative to Apple) is that it supports organisations doing their own computing without needing to ask Microsoft's permission. Satya Nadella may not want every worker drone to have a universal Turing machine in their pocket, but he wants every enterprise customer's IT guy to have easy access to one. And in practice that means building machines which offer universal functionality to anyone who knows what they are doing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
For example, a huge reason the California high speed rail has been a disaster is because inland state politicians forced the state to reroute the railroad (which should have taken the direct coastal route from Los Angeles to San Francisco) via a bunch of shithole cities nobody wants to go to, delaying the project by decades by compounding with both of the above issues.
CAHSR did make bad routing mistakes, but going up the Central Valley is not one of them. There is a reason why I-5 goes up the Central Valley, as does the existing freight railway. The Central Valley route is actually straighter (roughly 450 miles vs 470 for the coastal route) and there is a lot more space to build straight and flat.
The big mistakes were how you cross from the Central Valley to the coast at each end of the line. The correct route goes over Tejon and Altamont passes, for the same reasons that I-5 does. In the south, CAHSR proposed to go over Tehachapi Pass - adding 34 miles in length, 15-20 minutes in journey time, and $5-7 billion in tunneling costs. I can't anyone making the case for Tehachapi apart from "relitigating this will just kill the project" fatalism, so I don't know why the decision was made. In the north, CAHSR proposed to go over Pacheco Pass and enter San Francisco via San Jose and the Caltrain route (which would need to be extensively 4-tracked because Caltrain are already using the existing tracks) because Ron Didion wanted direct service to his hometown. You can find people willing to defend Pacheco, but it only makes sense if Caltrain and CAHSR are willing to work together to avoid unnecessary construction, which they are not.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
In general the interplay of devolution and the judiciary is fascinating. It’s like the UK is cherry-picking bits and pieces of US- or Canadian-style federalism without a real guiding principle of who exactly has authority over what. No British constitution indeed.
Not really, no - that England and Scotland have had separate legal systems despite being part of the same sovereign state predates US-style federalism - the Act of Union was in 1707, and it explicitly left Scots law unchanged. The fact that Scotland had its own legal system but no legislature pre-devolution was one of the constitutional weirdnesses that so offended Tony Blair.
Technically the Supreme Court of the UK (mostly just England, Wales and NI) has ultimate jurisdiction over the Scottish Courts, but cases are vanishingly rare and generally relate to ‘devolution issues’ where controversy over the Scottish government’s authority lies.
The Supreme Court of the UK can't hear direct appeals of Scottish criminal cases (this was part of the deal made in 1707), but you are right that this one could be litigated as a devolution issue - the powers of the Scottish Parliament (like every other UK body with delegated legislative powers) are limited by the Human Rights Act, so if the Scottish law JK Rowling was being prosecuted under violated a ECHR right, it would be ultra vires. If the bad actor here was activist Scottish judges rather than politicians and she was prosecuted under Scots common law then there would be no appeal to a UK court, only to the ECtHR in Strasbourg.
That's Tony Blair for you. Same reason the UK now has a "Supreme Court" despite doing just fine without one for centuries.
"Doing fine without one" is misleading. The UK Supreme Court doesn't have a materially different role to the old Judicial Committee of the House of Lords (i.e. the Law Lords) - it just meets in a different building. I agree with you about Tony Blair feeling the need to rationalise things when there was no practical benefit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I don't think the events we are seeing now change the basic structure of US (or Anglosphere more generally) opinion on Israel-Palestine:
- The anti-establishment left has always been pro-Palestinian to an extent which skirts the boundaries of cancellable anti-Semitism.
- The pro-establishment left are basically pro-Israel, but need to hold their noses to support an Israel led by the current Likud/religious right coalition, which they hate for essentially the same reasons that secular Jews in Israel hate it.
- The pro-establishment right are basically pro-Israel - previously they were willing to throw Israel under the bus in limited ways in to make nice to the Gulf Arabs, but they no longer need to because the Gulf Arabs are allied with Israel against Iran.
- The anti-establishment right are split between Islamophobes (who support Israel on enemy-of-my-enemy grounds) and Christian Zionists (who support Israel in order to immanentize the escheaton) on the one hand and America Firsters (who think that US military aid to Israel is a waste of money) and anti-Semites on the other side.
With a Democrat in the White House, the pro-establishment left controls the government. If support for Israel on the pro-establishment left was weakening, we would see a change in government policy. What we actually see is the bog standard pro-establishment line on Israel since before Oslo - give them everything they ask for (modulo aid being blocked in Congress) while gently pointing out that American Jewry would prefer a more secular Israel, and that Israel could provide its allies with political cover by pretending to support a two-state solution at some unspecified future date.
While it is true that the core groups making these interruptions are small and heavily concentrated among muslim and "POC" demographics, along with a few white leftists, what's remarkable to me is the wider silence among the broader progressive coalition. Many Jews have remarked upon this, that sympathy seems to be muted or even absent. There is an unwillingness to police these radicals among the wider liberal public, which seems to suggest a hidden reserve of silent sympathy which is not being publicly expressed.
Or it suggests that the pro-establishment left isn't willing to engage in a public intra-left slap-fight in an election year when they can just support Israel quietly.
The UK Labour party's Keir Starmer may try to resurrect matters after the Corbyn years, but one gets the sense he is fighting against his own base which is usually not ending well for leaders in the long run.
Conventional wisdom in British politics is that the median voter hates the anti-establishment left sufficiently that a Labour leader can only win an election if he is visibly fighting against his own base. (This is most obvious viz-a-viz Blair, but the conventional wisdom dates back to the Foot era). Every Labour Prime Minister except Atlee is a hate figure on the activist left.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
I don't know why Russia attacked a nuclear-armed NATO member with WMD, twice, but they did.
You go to war with the enemies you have, not the enemies you would like to have. In particular, we are facing an enemy whose tactics include psyops with the basic theme of "I have escalation dominance because I am a nuclear madman and you are not." Compared to the considered effort that the US and Soviet Union put into not doing that during the OG Cold War post-Cuban Missile Crisis, or the US and China put into not doing that now, I don't trust Putin to make risk-reward calculations about nuclear escalation that I would consider rational.
If Putin really is a nuclear madman and his enemies are not, then French and British nukes don't deter a Russian invasion of Poland, and probably don't deter a Russian invasion of Germany. Unless Russian policy changes, NATO has the choice of nuclear brinkmanship or massive nuclear proliferation. (Polish nukes probably deter a Russian invasion of Poland under any reasonable assumptions). The Russians have involved us in a game of high-stakes iterated chicken whether we like it or not, and iterated chicken 101 is that you should defend Schelling points like, well, a nuclear madman.
From a realist perspective the interesting question is which Schelling point do you defend, and how. The two big options are "Rules-based International Order" - i.e. you defend Ukraine once it becomes clear that Russia is waging an aggressive war of conquest (which it was by 2022, if not earlier), and "Article 5" - i.e. you defend NATO countries only. The "lesson of Munich" is that the stronger but less crazy side should defend the first Schelling point, not the most defensible one, because every Schelling point you fail to defend makes a promise to defend the later ones less credible. We can have an argument about whether the lesson of Munich applies to this conflict - it might even be productive in a way which arguments about who started it are not.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Quant refers to anyone working in a job in finance which requires Masters or PhD-level maths skills on a regular basis.
The original quants built the computer models that allowed banks to efficiently trade and risk manage derivatives. These jobs still exist, and are still well-paid, but they are no longer as prestigious in geekworld as they used to be when derivatives were a largely unexplored growth area for the banks. Nowadays, and particularly on this forum, quant is likely to refer to someone who uses high-end maths or computing skills working for a hedge fund (or a proprietary trading firm like Jane Street, which is functionally similar) - effectively they are trying to build computer models that beat humans at playing the stock market. These buy-side quant jobs are the best-paying jobs you can get as a pure shape-rotator who sucks at office politics, which is why a lot of quants are quokkas.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It is a running joke in British sports policy that we can only win Olympic medals in sports where you compete sitting down (rowing, canoeing, sailing, equestrianism and cycling). This isn't entirely fair - the modern UK is diverse enough that sometimes a Caribbean immigrant like Linford Christie wins a sprinting event or an East African immigrant like Mo Farah wins a long distance race. It also looks like we have been picking up medals in swimming since Rio.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The thing I have been noticing recently is, when a project inevitably blows past all budgets and timetables, people are like "we should just finish it, the cost won't matter decades from now".
Given the politics of Anglosphere infrastructure projects, this is a rational defensive measure. The main way special interests block projects is by using one set of proxies to drive up the cost by lobbying for scope creep (particularly through the environmental review process) and then using another set of proxies to blame the project's proponents for uncontrolled cost escalation and demand that the project be killed for cost control reasons.
If project supporters commit to going ahead regardless of cost escalation, then this doesn't work (until the cost reaches macro-economically significant levels like CAHSR of HS2).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Americans thought that America represented the spirit of humanity long before they were plausibly correct to do so. Novus Ordo Seclorum is definitely making that claim. Arguably Americans thought that America represented the spirit of humanity long before there was an America - John Winthrop's City upon a hill speech is arguably making the claim in 1630.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
At world market prices, HFCS was more expensive than cane sugar, so the only products which contained HFCS are ones that are intentionally made to American recipes. HFCS was an originally an American work-around for a cockamamie government sugar policy, and is now the driver for that policy (because of the lobbying power of Archer-Daniels-Midland).
This is starting to change as cane sugar prices have increased since 2010 and the Chinese are getting into the HFCS business in response.
I am going to call bullshit on this study. There are already a couple of posts in the thread pointing out that children of strict parents won't give honest answers to the survey which reflects on their parents, and that parents won't give honest answers to questions about their kids' mental health that reflects badly on their parenting. Given the existence of social desirability bias, I don't even trust parents reporting their own parenting practices - the reported high quality of "very conservative" parenting could be interpreted as "Very conservative parents are more likely to know the correct answers (as determined by a conservative think-tank) on a how-to-parent quiz."
But even if they have 100% honest answers (which they don't) I don't think this study does what it says on the tin:
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Child response bias. They spoke to 6643 parents, of whom 2956 had one or more teenage children who could have been included. (Were the other 3687 parents included in the study? They don't say). Only 1580 children were included - that is a 52% response rate. Are the teens who responded representative of the whole sample?
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Over-reliance on parental reports. The published results just don't use the child questionnaire data that much. It is used as part of a mostly parent-reported "index of mental health", and as one item out of six on a mostly parent-reported "index of relationship quality". The methodology section of the paper doesn't say how they combine households with child and parent questionnaires with households with only parent questionnaires to get a single set of results - this seems like the key step in the process to me, and it could mean that the published results are almost entirely parent-reported. "Parents who think they are good parents also think they have well-adjusted kids" doesn't seem like an interesting response to me, and could be Dunning-Kruger just as easily as actual parenting quality.
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Chart-crime. The correlations between parenting practices and mental health, and the correlations between adverse experiences and relationship quality on mental health, are shown on different graphs with different scales, concealing the fact that the impact of relationship quality dwarfs the impact of parenting practices. The text points out that the impact of relationship quality is larger. This isn't that bad - I have put out worse charts myself, with the excuse that I was running for public office at the time.
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Missing regression. They have the data to compare parenting practices to relationship quality, but they don't. Given that "does authoritative parenting improve child mental health by improving relationship quality or via some other mechanism" is an interesting question, I assume they ran the regression and didn't report the results because they didn't like them. The text even asks the question, saying that the large impact of relationship quality on mental health is evidence that parenting style works via relationship quality. But it isn't the evidence you are looking for - you need to show more of the correlation matrix.
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Reverse causation and how. The aspects of "authoritative parenting" which correlate best with mental health are "My child completes priorities I set for them before they are allowed to play or relax" and "My child follows a regular routine", and "I find it difficult to discipline my child" (reversed). Those are measures of a parent's success at implementing authoritative parenting, not their commitment to doing it. And when you correlate that with parent-reported mental health, the direction of causation is obvious to anyone who has parented a difficult child. (I have a diagnosed ASD son - I speak from experience). IFS are putting out an "umbrellas cause rain" study.
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Genetic confounding. They mention this possibility, but dismiss it. I am not going to try to work out whether the stuff they cite to say that this study isn't genetically confounded does in fact say that, but my prior is that everything is genetically confounded. Grading on a curve, at least they considered the possibility.
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Talking around the 1 vs 2 parent question - WHY? This is the IFS we are talking about, 2 parents being better than 1 is a big part of their raison d'etre. But I can't find a clear discussion of it anywhere in the paper. They show breakdowns based on divorced/married/never-married status and high-low quality relationship with current partner (not co-parent!), but not the straightforward is the kid still living with both biological parents test. Do they have a dataset which shows that 2 parents are not, in fact, better than 1 and chose to hide it? (This is consistent with the small impact on child mental health of "Has a parent who used to live with you stopped living with you?")
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Inconsistent data presentation. The way the correlations between parenting style and parent demographics, and relationship quality and parent demographics are presented is completely different to the way the correlations between child mental health and parenting style, and child mental health and relationship quality are presented, in a way which confuses the fact that they are effectively different cells in the same correlation matrix, and also makes it hard to compare effect sizes.
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Missing regression. Why not compare adolescent mental health with parent demographics directly? You have the information. Haidt did it - he found conservative adolescents are healthier (particularly daughters). Again I unfortunately have to be specific.
I don't think this is unusually bad for a think-tank writing up some survey research - I do think they made more mistakes than usual because the underlying study is more complicated (there are four major groups of variables with unknown causal links between them - mental health, relationship quality, parenting practices, and parent demographics). But there is enough hinkiness that I can't trust the results, and I don't have a good response if I try and beat a tofu-eating attachment parent with the study and they say "correlation is not the same as causation". I do wonder why the main author (who is an economist at Gallup) didn't run the paper past a professional statistician - Gallup must have them on staff.
Haidt's work is much better at explaining why he thinks his theory is causally correct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
There were fewer 'instant fail' conditions that would render you unable to continue as a functional member of society.
Probably only true for men. If you were a woman, getting pregnant out of wedlock pre-Roe (and pre-modern contraception) was an instant fail, as was marrying a shit-tier guy (drunks, criminals, drifters etc.) There were also a lot of ways a young woman could breach propriety which were in effect instant fails because they made it unlikely that a non shit-tier guy would want to marry her.
It is also worth remembering that the point at which a 100-IQ hard-working guy can come back from a serious injury (even one under sympathetic circumstances like battlefield injuries or workplace accidents) that leaves him unable to do heavy manual work was post-WW2 in most places.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It's an honor to be a recognized name enough to make this list. I don't comment that often but I like to think that I have a pretty good AAQC-to-comment-ratio to compensate. Actually AAQC as shorthand should probably also make the list.
This. AAQC nominations are an important part of the culture of this forum, something that noobs won't necessarily be aware of, and involve a non-obvious process to nominate. Should definitely be in the glossary.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
26d ago
Joe Biden was VP to a politician who emerged from the universe of big-city political machines run out of Black churches, and won the Democratic primary against several progressive candidates who were both more charismatic than him, largely based on the support of those same machines. Black Christians worship on Easter Day in the same ways as white ones, except given the increase in evangelical self-ID among white Republicans who wouldn't darken a church door, they are probably more likely to show up.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
Now I'm seeing Ingsoc everywhere.
This is deliberate. Nineteen eighty-four (Orwell always spelt out the title) was intended to be a self-preventing prophecy about what was, in 1948 when he wrote the book, a plausible future. In particular, he deliberately set out to write about the nature of totalitarian socialism, rather the accidents of any particular form of it, in order to provide a fully general warning. The name Ingsoc suggests that it evolved from a form of "national socialism" but there are also a lot of hints in the book that Ingsoc actually evolved from some kind of communist-adjacent movement. But by 1984 it has lost almost all traces of the original cover story (economic egalitarianism for communism, racial-national renewal for national socialism) and has gone mask-off about the purpose of power being power, as O'Brien so memorably puts it.
As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out re. superintelligent AI, acquiring power is an intermediate goal of almost all optimisation processes. And totalitarian socialism is the best way for a movement that has or can reasonably hope to achieve control of a state to consolidate and extend its power in the medium term. So every political movement that doesn't have guardrails against it "wants" to become totalitarian. At the time Orwell wrote the book, the western democracies had weakened their guardrails deliberately in order to mobilise against the Axis, and a lot of people (cough, Joe McCarthy, cough) wanted to weaken them further, at least notionally in order to defeat the Soviet Union. A well-targetted memetic immune system in the minds of the elite (the "High" in Goldstein's theory of oligarchy) and potential counter-elites (the "Middle") is a powerful new guardrail. And it still works.
You should be seeing tendencies towards Ingsoc everywhere - Orwell wants you to be on your guard against totalitarian tendencies, regardless of whether they wrap themselves in the Bible, the Flag, the Constitution, the Universal Brotherhood of Man, or Martin Luther King's burial shroud. And he wants you to have the language to call them out. Above all, he wants you to focus on the correct target. Newspeak and doublethink should be scarier than swastikas or hammer-and-sickles.
You will notice that when we want to call out totalitarian tendencies, we still use language taken from Nineteen eighty-four. Orwell was very good at what he was doing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
As a Brit who has bought two houses, sold one, and walked several friends and work colleagues through the process, the attached articles about the English process (Wales is basically the same, Scotland and Northern Ireland are very different) are accurate. Some thoughts about how the system works in practice:
- Even before you look at the 2nd commission for they buyer's agent, England has lower % commissions - admittedly based on higher average house prices. "Standard" commissions for a full service bricks-and-mortar agent are 2% outside London, 1.5% in London, and are negotiable down on large transactions so in practice the commission is a flat £7,500-£10,000 for houses in the £500k-several million price range. (In all cases add 20% VAT on top). Discount agencies like PurpleBricks or Yopa charge a flat fee of roughly £1,500, but as far as I can see they do the bare minimum work not to get kicked off the property websites (which don't accept FSBOs).
- Given the existence of Zillow-style property websites (the main ones in the UK are Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket), I don't see what MLS or buyers' agents add to the house-hunting process. Before property websites, a thorough house hunt with no buyer's agent involved speaking in person to 5-10 estate agents in your target neighborhood to see what was on the market.
- I can see the advantages of both parties being represented in complex negotiations - but if you are in complex negotiations you are probably in a chain, and the norm in the English system is that all of the estate agents in the chain are supposed to work together to keep things moving forward - in practice this means that the agent I hired to sell my first house acted as an informal buyer's agent on the purchase of my second house. And I wouldn't trust someone being paid by the seller to represent me in any case!
- If you hire a cheap lawyer to do the conveyancing, it costs about £1,500 for the buyer and £1,000 for the seller. This is usually fixed-price work, not hourly. A licensed conveyencer (i.e. a paralegal who specialises in uncomplicated real estate transactions) would cost about half that. De facto this goes up sublinearly with price because people doing bigger transactions tend to use fancier lawyers. Some of this covers work that would be done by realtors in the US (negotiating the non-price parts of the contract) and some covers work that is done by the title company (like local searches and organising the closing).
- Solicitors get paid anyway, so they feel less urgency about closing transactions than estate agents do - particularly the cheap ones. (At the price level where people have family solicitors, the solicitor will feel the amount of urgency appropriate to the quality of the client relationship).
- A major bogosity of the English system is that it takes a long time to actually close a sale after an estate agent tells you the seller has accepted your offer. The traditional target is 6 weeks from acceptance to exchange of contracts - closing is traditionally 2 weeks after exchange but can be delayed further to fit around removal arrangements etc. The actual average from acceptance to closing is 12 weeks. Obviously delay creates the risk of the seller (in a rising market) or the buyer (in a falling market) opportunistically renegotiating the offer - something referred to by the lovely technical terms gazumping and gazundering respectively (both of which are generally understood by the housing-obsessed English public). It isn't clear why this is, and multiple attempts to fix it have failed.
- England has a Torrens-like registered title system, so a single Land Registry fee covers deed recordation and title insurance (including for any mortgages).
So the total cost of an English residential transaction (excluding the mortgage broker and taxes) looks like:
For a £300,000 semi in the burbs outside London (full service/discount):
- Estate agent £6,000/£1,500
- Seller's solicitor £1,000/£500
- Buyer's solicitor £1,500/£750
- Local search fees £300
- Land Registry fee £150
- Total £9,000/£3,200 (3%/1%)
For a £1-2 million London townhouse:
- Estate agent £7,500-10,000
- Seller's solicitor £1,500-£3,000
- Buyer's solicitor £2,000-£5,000
- Local search fees £500
- Land Registry fee £500
- Total £12-19k (slightly over 1%)
For a US comparison, you would need to add the title company fee and any county deed-related fees to the realtor commission to compare to the UK total.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Just because you’ve been psyopped into believing it, doesn’t mean it’s “true”.
The problem with the view that ethno-nationalism is "truer" than civic nationalism is that French ethnogenesis is something that actually happened. The France of Louis XIV was a dynastic-religious state where elites had to speak French in order to communicate with the Court, but Louis didn't care what his Breton, Norman, Gascon etc. subjects spoke or identified as as long as they paid their taxes and were good Catholics. The France of Emmanuel Macron is a nation-state where everyone (except unassimilated immigrants) speaks French and identifies as French. This change happened because someone (mostly Napoleon) made it happen.
And the way it was done was the way IGI-111 says it was done, which is why IGI-111 thinks about his Frenchness in the way he does.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Of course, this is very loose. The Bushes are New England WASPs, as is say Mitt Romney’s ancestry.
GHW Bush was Blue Tribe and everyone knew it - in 1988 that was perfectly compatible with being a conservative (to the extent that he was) and a Republican because the party system had not fully aligned with the culture war, but the Red Tribe ultimately rejected him - the 1992 presidential election was the last time a Republican underperformed in the South.
GW Bush became Red Tribe by religious conversion - he left the (predominantly Blue Tribe) Episcopal Church and joined the (mixed-tribe, but he was in an evangelical-aligned congregation) United Methodist Church, announced that he had been through a born-again conversion experience, and generally said and did the things that Red Tribe Christianity requires of its adherents with visible sincerity. (He also bought and lived on a dude ranch, but that wasn't decisive.) Jeb Bush didn't, so the Red Tribe treated him as outgroup and decisively rejected him in the 2016 primary.
Mormons are neither Red nor Blue Tribe - they are their own tribe. They are political allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it (just as African-Americans are not part of the Blue Tribe). Romney was only able to win the 2012 primary because Gingrich and Santorum split the tribal Red vote, allowing him to pick up a lot of delegates with narrow pluralities in winner-takes-almost-all states.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
So this is a SPAC deal. SPACs are an alternative way of taking companies public (i.e. turning a company owned by a small group of shareholders who all know each other into a company owned by stockmarket investors) which became popular during the pandemic for reasons which are not clear to me, but may be something to do with COVID and associated government policy making a conventional IPO harder. The basic idea is:
- A financial sponsor (the bank, hedge fund, or private equity shop organising the SPAC) launches a company whose only asset is the cash the investors put into it. Typically the sponsor gets 20% of the equity in the SPACco but only puts in a small amount of money to cover operating expenses (this acts as a fee for the sponsor). The outside investors put in the money to fund the acquisition (usually hundreds of millions, sometimes low billions) and get 80% of the equity. The SPACco is a public company and may be listed on a stock exchange (DWAC was on Nasdaq). At this point investors are investing based on their confidence in the sponsor's ability to do a good deal.
- The sponsor has two years to find a company to buy. (If they don't, the investors are reimbursed with interest and the sponsor is out of pocket for operating expenses and any legal/banking fees associated with failed deals). The shareholders in SPACco must approve the deal, and there is usually a provision for dissenting investors to pull their money out.
- There are various ways of structuring the deal, but the usual end state is that the merged company ends up with the assets of the business being taken public and most of the SPACco cash (companies going public are almost always seeking to raise money to fund further expansion) and owned by a combination of the SPAC investors, the sponsor, and the former private shareholders in the target company.
- The merged company either takes over SPACco's existing stock market listing, or seeks a direct listing if SPACco didn't have one. In either case the share ownership is sufficiently dispersed (among the SPAC investors) that there is no need for an IPO to create a liquid market.
- Usually, the sponsor and target shareholders are subject to a 6-month lockup, but the SPAC investors can sell immediately.
Looking at EDGAR filings, DWAC was incorporated in May 2021, listed on NASDAQ in September 2021, and first agreed in principle to buy Truth Social in October 2021 (before Truth Social launched). So since then, DWAC shareholders knew that they were likely to end up owning Truth Social, and the shares traded on that basis. In other words, the original DWAC investors have had the chance to sell at a profit to people who actually wanted to own Truth Social for several years now. It isn't clear how many of the new DWAC investors were people who wanted to give money to Donald Trump for nefarious reasons (the largest single shareholder in DWAC apart from the sponsor was TikTok investor Jeff Yass who invested around the time Trump flip-flopped to oppose requiring ByteDance to divest the US business of TikTok). and how many were hoping to make money flipping a Trump-themed meme stock. (I find it unlikely that anyone involved actually values Truth Social this highly as an ordinary business).
When the merger finally closes after two and a half years of malarkey, we expected to see a small bump in the stock (because of reduced uncertainty), but we have seen a much larger bump (>50%). This is pure meme demand - anyone who know what they were doing could have bought DWAC stock at much lower price than they are now paying for DJT stock. The $3 billion (now $5 billion) is the value of Trump's 58% stake in the merged company (which owns Truth Social plus about $300 million of DWAC's cash), based on the price at which DWAC investors are selling small numbers of shares to meme-stock buyers in the public markets. The other 42% is owned by DWAC shareholders - roughly speaking 8% by the sponsor and 34% by the outside investors.
How can Trump get this money out? For the duration of the 6-month lockup, he can't. (He can't even pledge the shares to secure a loan). After that, he can sell shares in the market, but if he sells more shares than the demand from meme-stock buyers the price will collapse. The cash would come from meme-stock buyers. He also has the option of selling a large block of shares to someone who is willing to overpay as a way of bribing him. There is no way he can get billions in cash out of DJT honestly (unless the underlying business of Truth Social takes off in a way which would justify the valuation). Any cash he does get out will come from investors who were happy to lose money, either because they wanted to give money to Trump or for the lulz.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
crushing anti-development rules on the North
This is incorrect. Both conventional wisdom and the linked article say that the government imposed crushing anti-development restrictions on greater Birmingham (which is in the Midlands, not the North) in the false belief that this would benefit the North. These policies worked, in that Birmingham's economy was levelled down to the point where you can now lump the Midlands in with the North and not look like an obvious idiot. The 1950's governments also tried to level down London in the same way (again - click the link), but it only partially succeeded (they did ensure that the population of Greater London fell by 1.5 million between the 1951 census and the 1988 nadir) because office-based knowledge economies can work around building restrictions by repurposing existing space, whereas building-based economies can't. But the success story that is modern London doesn't kick off until Thatcher repeals these kinds of policies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Banging on a door for the purpose of threatening the occupant is absolutely a crime in most jurisdictions. (In England and Wales, it is legally an assault).
But even that isn't necessary. The point of banging on the door is to claim escalation dominance by sending a credible signal that if she escalates to calling for a tow he can counter-escalate to a beatdown. The appropriate response by the authorities is to send a cop to the guy's house to politely inform illegal parking guy that actually the Westphalian State has escalation dominance round here and that if he escalates to a beatdown the cops will counter-escalate to a jail term, felony record etc. If that threat is credible, then it doesn't need to be followed up. And if the cops tell the unfortunate lady what they have done, then she now has escalation dominance in the original dispute. This is easy police work that a rookie cop could handle.
In a place with minimally effective policing (which, for example, included 95% of the UK in the nineties and 99% of the UK in the noughties, and in the present non-ghetto neighbourhoods of most Continental European or Australian cities, and all of 1st-world Asia) a threat of a beatdown by one adult neighbour against another is empty. I haven't seen the Reddit post that the OP is referring to, so it isn't clear to me if this was a case of a place where there is no effective policing (far too much of the US because the US is, for reasons that are not clear to me as a Brit, shockingly bad at basic police work) or whether this was a case of a woman scared into submission by an empty threat (in which case someone who knew the local situation should have told her to call the cops).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
“God created men, Richard Stallman made them equal” —new motto of the Free Software Foundation, probably
And Eric Raymond merges the Coltian and Stallmanian concepts of equality. Which is more dangerous to the irresponsible user is left as an exercise to the reader.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
It is worth noting that the liberal elite/centre-left establishment/Deep State/Blob do not have the same kind of hate-on for Reagan that they do for Bush Jr and Trump (and, as far as I am aware, never did - although I was too young to be following US politics when Reagan was in office.) For example, Reagan usually comes slightly above average in historical rankings of Presidents by academics.
The anti-establishment left hate Reagan because he successfully claimed the moral high ground for the US at a time when the anti-establishment left had been rooting for the Soviet Union with varying degrees of plausible deniability for decades. The pro-establishment left are broadly pro-Reagan because he gets the credit for achieving two long-term uniparty goals - winning the Cold War and working with Volcker and the congressional Dems to clean up the Nixon/Carter economy.
Ackman is still a nominal Democrat (he is backing Dean Philips in the primary) and Jamie Dimon is not Jewish.
If education-based polarisation is the driving force behind the Trump-era party divide, then the fundamentals are going to push Jews (as the most educated and formal-education-valuing demographic) further into the Dem camp. For example, looking at the names in Hanania's Tech Right, the Silicon Valley elites moving right look less Jewish than the Silicon Valley elites staying on the left. Hanania wants a big Jewish move to the right over Israel because the existence of a smart right gives him a chance at influence. But the reason why it won't happen is that the MAGA right has adopted (what Hanania and most Jewish elites, for the same reason, would consider) stupid as a tribal value.
It wouldn’t shock me if in a generation Jews and southern redneck culture begins sharing memes.
The defining feature of non-Hasidic Jewish culture is the embrace of book learning taken to a sometimes-ridiculous extreme. One of the main defining feature of southern redneck culture is suspicion of book learning. This is a big gap to bridge.
I worry about you, @KulakRevolt. That was a long post - it must have taken several days to research and write. And despite ample opportunity, you seem to have managed to write the whole post without once thinking about the Roman Empire.
Are you okay?
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