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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC

				

User ID: 896

MadMonzer

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 896

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.

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.

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.

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.

for a 5-year-old, just waking up is a pretty rich experience already. I wouldn't worry until she's 7 or 8.

Seconded. I am a parent of sons, but I don't think the sexes are that different at that age, and if anything I would expect daughters to benefit more from unstructured time with Daddy. The time of a working father is precious, and you can spend an hour paying attention to your daughter, or you can spend the same hour paying attention to the road while you drive her to whatever enrichment activity you do. You don't take a 5 year old to soccer practice, you kick a ball about with them in the back garden, etc. As far as I am aware, the only activity where people who start at 7 struggle to catch up with the people who started at 5 is violin.

Swimming and riding a bike may be essential life skills for kids depending on where you live, but you can probably teach them yourself.

I recommend YNAB. The only counter-argument is that it is specifically designed to stop you juggling credit cards to manage a temporarily negative liquid net worth, so if that is something you want to do then YNAB won't work for you.

With hindsight, also that anthrax isn't consistent with the MO of any of the likely foreign suspects. The only foreign actor known to have the means and inclination to send anthrax letters is Russia, and Russia had no reason to poison a large number prominent Americans in autumn 2001.

Apparently there is 10% short interest, so someone is willing to sell the stock short. My guess is retail - as you point out any big investor who shorted DJT could expect punishment if Trump wins in 2024.

The most likely scenario for small investors in DJT to make money (other than by selling on to Greater Fools) is that Trump wins the election and a big Russian or Chinese company overpays for DJT in order to curry favour with the US government.

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.

She's 5. I went to the kind of English prep (i.e. private primary - different meaning to the US) school where team sports is as important as academics, and we didn't play "real sport" until year 3 (September after 7th birthday). If getting 5-year-olds into team sports was a good idea then traditional English schools would have done it.

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.

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.

This is classic social psych bullshit in a right-wing wrapper. There are two lying-with-statistics tricks going on here:

  1. Non-standard terminology. The definition of "elite 1%" excludes the vast majority of elites who live in rich suburbs. They define elite 1% as meeting all 3 of postgraduate degree (this covers 14% of the population), household income over $150k (trivial for a two-income PMC couple in a HCOL city - two schoolteachers with masters degrees would probably qualify) and living in a zip code with a population density over 10k/square mile (only a few % of the population - looking at zipatlas.com these zip codes are mostly downtown districts, prisons and campuses with their own zip codes, NYC, and dense inner suburbs of LA.) So the most restrictive condition is the population density one, which is not a measure of eliteness - it is a proxy for alignment with the tribe Rasmussen wants to bash.

  2. Garden of forking paths. The authors switch between "the elite 1%", "elite 1% graduates of a semi-arbitrary list of 12 schools" and "politically obsessed members of the elite 1%" as needed to make the point they are making. We don't know how many other cuts of the data they ran before they chose those ones.

Rasmussen are saying that they have surveyed the elite and found that they are out of touch with America. What they have actually done is surveyed the subset of the PMC that chooses to live in the densest 2% of zip codes, and their interns played with crosstabs until they found some subsets of that group who are, indeed, profoundly out of touch with America. This is about as meaningful as doing some vox pops with stoners in downtown Portland.

See this Arnold Kling post and comments for more details.

I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.

Apart from Manhattanites, quite the opposite. Who has more power and influence - the residents of DC or the government officials who commute in from the burbs? The people of Anaheim and Inglewood or the people of Beverley Hills? 90210 is by the definition used in this study a non-elite zip code.

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).

The obvious problem is that boys will ultimately reject the role models given by the school whether fictional or real or other children. Boys want to become men and they have a strong bias against boys or man-babies who are not real men. And this is why they aren’t gravitating to liberal adult male role models (and the boys who will be selected for the program) — they are not anything like a man.

I profoundly disagree with this statement as written, but I suspect this is not a real disagreement. Boys don't want men as role models - they want older boys (edging into young men as they get older), who they perceive as manly. This is based on my experience of being a boy, teaching boys, and being a father of boys. Someone who is more than 10 years older than me is a poor role model for that reason alone (this applies less to historical and public figures whose youth is well-documented - in that case your role model can be the Great Man when he was younger). The institutions which are best at turning boys into men (traditional boys' schools and the military) work on this principle.

The role of man is pretty specific: self-possessed, strong both physically and mentally, responsible, self-confident, a leader, and so on.

All of this is helpful at the margins, but in a healthy male-dominated community, prowess is necessary and sufficient. Boys and young men respect people who are good at something they value. A huge part of the role of the teachers (and particularly the younger teachers who are the right age to be role models to the older boys) at a traditional boys' school is to maintain a culture that values the right things - academics, athletics, fieldcraft (developed through the cadet corps or through adventurous school trips), male-coded fine arts, effective public speaking. Sensitive new-age guys and nerds who were high status in my school included the virtuoso solo cellist in the school orchestra, an internationally competitive fencer, two geniuses who won national competitions in their subjects, and the guy who repaired hi-fi equipment to a professional standard using the school workshop.

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?

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.

“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.

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.

Tolkien's presentation of Minas Tirith is similarly idealised, but nobody writes about Tolkien as a promoter of classical (or any other) principles of urban planning. Tolkien clearly did have an idealised view of a traditional English rural life which was being rendered obsolete by industrialisation, but when he tries to put it on the page he falls into the classical historical-nostalgist trap of writing out the reality of peasant life. The only working-class hobbits we see are the two Gamgees (and we don't see much of the old Gaffer), who enjoyed the favour of their aristocratic patron. If I use race as a metaphor to explain the English class system to Americans*, this is like writing the Antebellum South from the perspective of three planters and a house slave, which is what Gone With the Wind does, and is widely panned for in the current year.

In the world we live in, the dominant demographic trend of the last 250 years (in England - it is more recent in other places) is people voluntarily and knowingly moving from the Shire to Minas Tirith for a better life.

In so far as the Shire is paradise, it is because it (for reasons not explained) remains rightly-governed and unaffected by the rising Dark despite Arnor falling around it. (Rivendell and Lorien are similar, although the reasons that they are unaffected are more obvious) The implication of the appendices is that once Aragorn (and his heir Eldarion) consolidated the Reunited Kingdom, the whole Kingdom enjoyed this level of peace and prosperity.

* Something I feel entirely justified in doing given that the traditional English class system is fundamentally about oppression of the indigenous population by Norman settler-colonialists.

Eric Raymond (ESR) is an open source pioneer and also a libertarian activist and gun nut. The original version of the quote (which appears to have originally been a Colt Corp marketing slogan) is “God created man, Sam Colt made them equal.” Sam Colt invented the revolver, which was the first gun to be a practical sidearm.

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.

Both are Maiar. Sauron is clearly more powerful (both in various mundane ways like army size and territory controlled, and through his power over the Rings), but they are at the same level of the divine pyramid.

Saruman believes that he can master the Ring, and that if he does he will be stronger than Sauron. There are strong hints that he is wrong about this, but the matter is never settled as his orcs grab the wrong hobbits and Frodo escapes across Anduin with the Ring.

Besides, Saruman wasn't planning for "what happens after Sauron is defeated", his entire rationale for throwing in with Sauron was that he was convinced he was going to come out the winner, and Saruman wanted to be on the winning side. He had lost all his wisdom, and wasn't capable of foreseeing that the Hobbits would survive and come out the victors and he would therefore need to be three moves ahead in destroying their homeland. He didn't see this because he didn't want to see this, he wanted the position as trusted viceroy after the victory of Sauron.

This isn't my reading. By the time the Fellowship reach Rohan, Saruman has already attempted to double-cross Sauron (by attacking the Fellowship at Rauros with the intention of stealing the Ring and taking it to Isengard). See this Brett Devereaux post for why Saruman's plan was very unlikely to work. My understanding is that the Unfinished Tales confirm this reading, and that Saruman had been actively concealing the likely location of the Ring (which he had guessed based on Gandalf's excessive interest in the Shire) from Sauron several years before the events of LOTR - with the implication that the offer made to Gandalf before imprisoning him (to join in a Saruman-led scheme to use the Ring to defeat Sauron and seize power for themselves) was sincere.

having been a Brit moving to a Red American town

This is an unfair advantage in two ways:

  • As a Brit (or any other European or Asian immigrant), you are coming from a neutral position rather than the default hostility that would have faced OOP as a Blue Triber (even a Blue Tribe heretic).
  • A great many foreigners suspect that the British are still the master-race that invented the modern world and built the British Empire and have the Right Stuff in reserve somewhere in case it is needed. If you can plausibly LARP being a British traditional elite (RP accent, classical British style etc.) then you can play that to your advantage.