It's like the hover tank in Sargent Bilko. Not about being practical, just about if you can get the contract. Human nature is the same everywhere.

And I think it's safe to say they're going to lose sales. I don't think they'll lose all of them but I would expect to lose about half that quarter or about 12%. Worst case it could be as high as 15.

A normal company losing 15% of its sales would be dead meat. Wall Street would cut it up for parts.

But people bought into Tesla when it was so ridiculously overvalued that everybody is afraid of being the one who pulls the trigger. Nobody wants to get caught holding the bag when it eventually collapses.

Meanwhile Elon musk's last two pay packages are worth about $100 billion dollars. If you're wondering how he's going to get that money since those were stock deals he's going to dump the stock into pensions and 401ks. To put that into perspective it's more money than Tesla can make in 50 years with the subsidies...

It's not a question of when company is going to collapse it's just which of the big four are going to buy up the remains and who gets caught holding the bag. I am pretty certain it won't be Elon

After world war II Russia was a burnt-out husk and it never fully recovered. Putting a criminal in charge of the country was the final straw. Russia was never a threat and there was zero reason to have a cold war with them except to keep the military industrial complex going and to line the pockets of well connected defense contractors at the expense of the public at Large.

At this point with Russia not even able to subdue a nation of 20 million it's stupidly obvious they are no threat so we can't use them to go booga booga at voters.

So China is the next step. And China for their part is happy to use America as an external threat to keep their populace in line. Because we've always been at war with Eurasia.

We never fucking learn.

It's just crazy how much money was spend making that mediocre game. Something like 400 million.

You would think the CEO responsible for that disaster would be drummed out of the industry and never work again but I don't even think they bothered to fire him from Sony. I think it's pretty obvious that the fucker was trying to throw money to create a big franchise so that he could move up in the company. It must be nice to waste hundreds of millions of dollars through mismanagement to advance your career and then take absolutely no hit whatsoever.

People were not born voluntarily, once alive we mostly don't die voluntarily. We won't stop voluntarily because it would be akin to dying voluntarily. We have to accept the fact that we are not in fact the Borg, we don't have one hive mind.

Dude you can put solar on your house if you want nobody's stopping you. The problem is that economies of scale are a thing and a utility can produce a lot more electricity a lot more efficiently than you can slapping some solar panels on your roof...

That's got nothing to do with lobbyists that's got everything to do with how just well, everything works. A large public works project is going to be more efficient than a single person doing something. Again, economies of scale.

What's holding back solar is America has close ties to several Nations who make all their money off of oil and we just elected a bunch of people who are wildly corrupt and will cheerfully accept bribes in exchange for blocking deployment of renewables.

Basically China is colonizing Africa using economics instead of the military. It's the same thing America did for the last 100 years or so.

It's that whole belt and road initiative. I don't think Africa is in a position to do anything about it so they'll just have to try and make the best of it but just like the rest of the world has traditionally exploited the whole continent China is going to do it too.

To get back to the article no this is not how infrastructure is going to be built over the next 50 years. Most countries wouldn't allow China to do what they're doing to them. Those loans aren't coming from inside Africa they ultimately track back to China and the African nations are going to end up with a metric shitload of debt that will be leveraged in order to get obedience on a wide variety of issues.

I guess what I'm saying is this isn't some free market miracle like the article makes it out to be. This is a very large country working to put another country that is in a worse position into debt for various foreign policy reasons.

The rapid expansion of the population seems to have been largely due to economic factors specifically the need to have a lot of kids on a farm for labor combined with the requirement for a lot of kids to take care of the parents in their old age.

Also the lack of birth control but that's believe it or not a lesser effect. Japan's birth rate dropped below sustainability even before they had the birth control pill available. Also Japan didn't legalize birth control until 1995 go figure...

Basically polls show women want 2.6 kids however it looks like maintaining the population requires 2.7 kids. So without economic and social pressure to force women into having more kids than they want the human population actually starts to decline.

Now there are a bunch of religious wackadoodles and psychopaths that want to turn women back into property and bring back stuff like marital rape in order to boost birth rates. Not sure that'll work though without the need for a shitload of farm workers and we just don't need that many Farm workers.

It is possible that the billionaire class will dismantle capitalism and our modern technological society bringing back a twisted form of feudalism but if they do that the lower cast will almost certainly lose access to reliable food and medicine that allowed the population explosion in the last hundred years or so. And that's without talking about things like world wars brought on by mass unemployment and stuff like that...

Assuming our species doesn't wipe itself out we are probably going to plateau and start to decline in population.

On the other hand ask any expert in foreign policy and they will tell you that at any given time the world is a couple of mistakes away from a large war and this time we have nuclear weapons. I could very easily see us putting crazies in charge of the arsenal too

In either a great way or a horrifying dystopian way.

Either we get rid of billionaires and ruling classes and we rule together without demanding leaders control us or we let the billionaires take over and become trillionaires and then completely dismantle capitalism. Once that happens the economy collapses, all of us basically regress into feudal poverty and about 1% of the population will still have modern technological civilization and the other 99% will have basically nothing.

That's the plan anyway. People keep asking if none of us have any money who's going to buy the billionaires' products?

You think they haven't asked that same thing? You don't think Elon Musk and Bill Gates have noticed that they are completely dependent on you and your filthy little consumers and worker bees in order to have their wealth and prestige and power?

Of course they've noticed it and of course they don't like it. They are taking steps to eliminate the dependency.

That said I don't think they're clever enough to pull it off completely and I think eventually they will start world wars and go nuclear but time will tell.

Maybe when the raccoons take over as the next dominant species they'll be better off than we were. Or it could be beavers. They're pretty close to having opposable thumbs with a few mutations.

Ford made the news because they were complaining about not being able to find 5,000 Machinists but it turns out the reason they can't get those workers is they built the factory in the middle of nowhere and nobody wants to live out in the middle of nowhere for a job where they can be laid off at any time without any other jobs around. It's basically a company town at that point and you're fucked if you live there because it's only a matter of time.

Meanwhile even if the factories come back the jobs don't because the vast majority of the other work is automated. 5,000 machinists sounds great but that's for auto work. Most of the stuff we make these days as a species can be made by robots and machines. So you can do all the tariffs you want and you might get the factories back here but you aren't getting the jobs.

The only reason you see so many people in factories overseas is there paid slave labor wages and if they try to unionize their fascist government just kills them and harvests their organs.

They're all good reasons to use tariffs to force industries to come back even if we don't get the jobs. Not having semiconductors built here as a national security concern.

But we need to stop talking about bringing back jobs with tariffs because that's just not going to happen.

So the trouble is that they aren't really quite becoming Banks. Like the article says they aren't becoming consumer Banks like we are used to seeing they're becoming trust Banks which aren't regulated like you would expect.

However you can bet your ass that they are going to advertise that they are banks and heavily imply that your deposits are FDIC insured.

If a Democrat is in the White House at the time they implode some of them might go to jail but you're still not going to get your money back.

And eventually a republican will get control of the White House and pardon them so they'll do a few years in jail and walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars.

Tariffs are a bad thing from a pure economic perspective. They introduce inefficiencies, and make things more expensive. This is a basic concept of macroeconomics.

However, some things are more important than making the most money. Among them, national defense. In America, both parties have decided they don't want to work with China anymore, for varying reasons of ideology, ethics, and self defense. And they have decided that is more important to them than economic efficiencies.

It's likely intended for military purposes (or more precisely, an attempt to get funding to build them for military purposes).

But everything I said was a fact. If that makes you uncomfortable what the hell does that say about you?

So apparently Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Donald Trump sucked Bill Clinton's dick and Vladimir Putin has the pictures.

Stop, read that again, Google it, and just Jesus fucking Christ what the hell is wrong with our world?

Anyway, I doubt Trump sucked Clinton's dick. Although given some of the freaky shit guys at ivy League schools do in those gentlemen's clubs who the hell knows? The point of something like that would be to have pictures so that both sides could use them for mutually assured destruction...

I think it's much more likely though that Epstein was exaggerating for effect but that Putin really does have some extremely damning compromat on Donald Trump.