Comment Re:Thankfully (Score 3, Funny) 104
As the Italians say, "traduttore traditore." I'd translate what that means into Engish but it loses something.
As the Italians say, "traduttore traditore." I'd translate what that means into Engish but it loses something.
Even aside from the issue of accurate validation,, Trumpâ(TM)s properties are likely already mortgaged to the hilt. Thatâ(TM)s not particular to Trump, itâ(TM)s sensible business practice. Property gives you access to credit, so you take advantage of that credit to obtain money to grow your business. Mortgaging your property is the ordinary profit maximizing thing to do.
But what you canâ(TM)t do is leverage your property *twice*. So even bonafide real estate billionaires donâ(TM)t have access to limitless instant cash. Independent estimates of Trumpâ(TM)s wealth puts it at a little over 2.5 billion. Thereâ(TM)s probably not a billionaire in the world who could scare up almost 20% of his net worth in cash overnight.
Assuming his properties are mortgaged to the max, such a big cash demand could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction where he sells one property, lenders whose loans are secured with that property demand their money back immediately, forcing him to sell another property and so on.
If Trump can somehow turn this IPO into a fair amount of ready cash, that could spell the difference between financial survival and ruin for him . Heâ(TM)s just got to sell his believers in buying in.
Common denominators... common... *communist*!
This kind of math is un-American.
It's also *smart*, which acting classy often turns out to be. What people want from the leader of a company in an industry that is having these kinds of problems is maturity, perspective, and thoughtfulness. Naked opportunism and unbridled competitiveness at any cost isn't a good look when people need reassurance.
For that reason, not twisting the knife is the most effective way to twist the knife, especially when you can pretty much count on your competitor to do the twisting for you. Also, if a quality error happened to be discovered in an Airbus product shortly after the CEO was gloating about Boeing, that would be catastrophically bad.
This *is* real science. It's just not by itself a sufficient basis for making any kind of evidence-based decision. Nor *could it possibly be*.
I had a friend in collge who participated in a nutrition randomized control trial . For months he had to carry around a gym bag; not only did everything he eat and drink come out of that bag, all his urine and feces went into containers in that bag so they could be weighed and analyzed to ensure he was complying with the research protocol. If he snuck a candy bar or a soda the researchers would know, and he'd lose his "job" plus the bonus for completing the study. While I'm sure that study got high quality data given the immense care it took, it surely tracked only *markers* (like blood lipids) rather than *outcomes* (like heart disease). That's because the outcomes we're interested in usually take decades to develop. It's hard enough finding people to live out of and poop into a bag they carry everywhere for *six months*. You'll never find anyone to do that for *ten years*.
So in nutrition, even an RCT can't be treated as some kind of gold standard for evidence-based decision making. If an RCT proves A causes B, B will never be C, the thing we're actually interested in. B will at best be *correlated* with C. So whether we're talking RCT or cross sectional studies, we are just making a case for some kind of correlation. You need *multiple kinds of evidence*, repeated by multiple researchers multiple times. With that volume and variety of evidence, you eventually develop a picture which connects the dots between A and C in a way that is unlikely to be false in any of its particulars. Useful results are *always* big picture results.
So what should be the gold standard for evidence-based decisions is a systematic review paper published by a scientist current working in the field, and in a well-known journal. This is the *minimal* level of evidence that people outside a field should pay any attention to, at least for the purposes of guiding decision making.
Driving down the wrong side of the street may get you to work faster, but also leads to fatal head on collisions. But other than that, it can work!
Venezuela
That's a punch straight to my McRibs.
If there's no explicit or implicit threat, then not really. I mean, I suppose a President or their representative could say "Industry X, clean up your act, or I'll use my executive powers and/or petition Congress to pass new laws to force you to clean up your act." The latter is more strident, certainly is a threat, but not one that implies any unconstitutional threat (unless, of course, specific remedies are not available via Executive Powers or Congress refuses to play ball). In the case of the bully pulpit, it's the equivalent of a parent of an adult child telling them stop eating so much junk food, in the latter it's the adult parent saying "You won't be allowed to eat from our fridge and I'll ask the Johnsons not to let you scarf back their food either."
Well, that's kind of where concepts like conspiracy come into play. Clearly wagging your finger at Facebook and X and telling them to stop spreading naughty stuff doesn't even represent much of an implicit threat. Strongly implying to your supporters that they can prevent Congress from certifying the electoral votes seems a fundamentally different activity.
Presidents lecture and cajole all the time. The notion of the "bully pulpit" pretty much goes back to the beginning of the United States. That's not to say that all statements made by a President or member of the Administration is merely finger wagging. But telling people to eat less sugar or telling social media to stop assisting in the spread of misinformation are both more examples of a President using their moral authority (such as the office of the Presidency or individual Presidents may have moral authority). If Mark Zuckerburg or Elon Musk feel coerced by a US Administration lecturing them, perhaps it isn't SCOTUS they should be consulting, but the mirrors one presumes they have in their houses.
I'd argue overhyping is inherent in any kind of marketing and sales. I mean you never see a Ford commercial that says "Yeah, our F150 has four wheels, pretty much performs within the same parameters as our Dodge and Toyota counterparts, mileage isn't really any better, and our heated seats have about the same likelihood of malfunctioning and burning you alive as your neighbor's brand new Ram."
Everything in capitalism is one degree of fairy tale or another. It's how you beat out competition that are selling essentially the same product as you are. Am I the only person that watched the "It's Toasted" sequence from Mad Men? I don't actually think I'm going to have an orgasm if I chew minty gum, but the implication is kind of there.
Has a President or members of the Administration using the bully pulpit ever been seen as anti-constitutional? Surely an Administration has the right to lecture, cajole and whine. If Federal agents are showing up and forcing Mark Zuckerberg to type "I will not repost Nazi slogans" two hundred times, well sure, at that point lines have been crossed. But finger wagging, even vigorous finger wagging?
Only if you're recycling the plastic into more plastic. And that's worthless.
What you should be doing is recycling it back into fuel for electricity production- but nobody wants that even with all the scrubbers- they made it illegal to EVER open a 2nd garbage burning electric plant in Oregon.
Why does manglement has to always be this brain-dead?
Here's the real problem with all of this. It isn't economically viable simply because the externalities aren't factored in at the point of initial manufacturing. We have built an economic system that is heavily reliant on basically mortgaging the present and demanding the future pay for it; a sort of vast buy now, pay later (and by later we mean decades). If manufacturing plastics, glass and everything else had the long-term costs factored in up front, I suspect recycling in all cases would look more attractive.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth