I can't be the only one that noticed. Still, their unions got them the money. And it's still a lot of money. Just a reminder that divided we beg, United we Bargain.

You get your ass kicked you're entire life, you cope with unhealthy life habits, and then some dipshit at Harvard who couldn't do any useful science blames you for it.

The correct framing here is that 80% of health problems in old age could be mitigated if we treated people better and gave them access to better food and more time to spend on self care and more leisure Time. And remember Americans especially are now working more hours than the fucking Japanese so don't tell me we have leisure Time. Your 2-hour commute is not leisure Time

Does that mean we are nationalizing this technology? Because that's sure what that sounds like.

I don't want to waste my time calling out Republicans on hypocrisy. Republicans are quite simply not capable of experiencing the combination of shame and self-awareness associated with hypocrisy. So they are basically immune to it.

When a Republican calls out hypocrisy they don't actually know what the hypocrisy is, but they have seen a pattern where people get upset when they say certain things and Republicans love making people upset.

Trump does one of two things. In this case he was most likely just soliciting a bribe. He probably put some things in the order he knew some of the people with money didn't like and sat back and waited until they opened their checkbooks.

But the other thing he does is push the absolute limits of what he can get away with, go past those limits, get his hand slapped just a tiny bit by the court and then back off a little bit after establishing a new normal where he can commit more crimes and we all just shrug it off because he's making America great again.

So somebody draws the line, he doesn't just step over it he gets in his golf cart and drives a quarter mile over it then the courts yell at him and he backs his golf cart up a few hundred feet but he is still over the line.

That is in high demand and has no sign of losing that demand. The problem with SpaceX is that they have maxed out their demand. They don't have any more customers to grow into. There are just only so many people on this planet who want or need to launch satellites. And you can only launch so many anyway before you start having problems.

That's the difference. You seem to be trying really really hard to hand wave away the coming disaster. I don't blame you. This is bad shit. Also it's really hard for nerds to turn on Elon Musk because he feels like one of us that made good. He's not but it feels that way because he's so weird and awkward that we relate to him on a personal level

Gets their career ended in the next primary election. Trump voters dominate the primary election process and a fucking love trump. And the billionaires like Trump because he takes your money and mine and gives it to them. So you don't have the problem the Democrats have where when they get a popular candidate the billionaires will sometimes interfere with the primary election process to kill them so that the Republican party can win in the general election and keep giving them more free money from you and me.

I don't really know a solution except to do something about the heavy duty voter suppression at the county level so the Republicans can't win general elections anymore. But there doesn't seem to be any willpower to do that. To be fair it's incredibly boring to get involved in county level politics even though that's where literally everything is actually being decided

I watched a tiny handful of savings and loan companies take down the entire country in the 1980s.

The problem here is you can end up with cascading effects. You end up with a large investor who is stretched too thin on SpaceX stock and that takes them down and like a bunch of dominoes they take down somebody else and on and on and on.

The market is currently drastically overvalued. And we have massively deregulated it so the hen house is full of foxes and the roof is about to come down.

So yeah having something as large as SpaceX be a complete total scam is a huge problem for the entire economy and not just markets.

If collapsing investor markets weren't always taken out of my hide I wouldn't care but that's not how that works. Whenever the ultra wealthy and the Epstein class lose a little money and power they always grind me and my class into pulp and we let them do it for whatever is stupid reasons come to mind at the time. Usually culture War bullshit.

The fundamental thing here is our entire investment market system is a house of cards built on bullshit and scamming people out of money that increasingly don't have enough money to keep the scam going. A Ponzi scheme can only go so long. And the laws and regulations and bureaucrats that were preventing it from getting to this point are long gone having been sacrificed in Trump's first term.

It's going to draw everyone into its maelstrom. This is a 1.7 trillion dollar investment scam. That's just too huge. It's going to come crashing down and it is engineered to come crashing down on our heads. The entire system and process sets up a too big to fail structure so that the government will inevitably bail out the big boys and let us flounder just like 2008 only worse.

You really can't put your head in the sand anymore. But I don't see any will on the part of anyone to do anything else. So we're all just waiting to get crushed

The IPO is so huge that if you are a institutional investor with one of those funds that buy stocks for people to invest in then you have to buy SpaceX. It's going to be something like 7% of NASDAQ. You can't afford for that to fail it would take down your other investments with it. It is classic too big to fail bullshit. It basically forces every single institutional investor to buy into it. The rule changes also Force those investors into it.

This also means that if you're buying into supposably safe index or hedge funds you're now at risk because all of NASDAQ is at risk. This basically fucks everything up. It's too big of a scam for our economy to reliably absorb. Ordinarily the government would step in and block this shit because of the damage it would do to The wider economy. I don't think it takes a genius to figure out why that's not happening.

And the SpaceX IPO is just a scam. There's simply aren't enough launch customers to justify the valuation and starlink can't make that up because they're only so many people in the world who can afford $100 a month for internet and don't have access to high quality wired internet. SpaceX is basically out of customers they are maxed out which is why they're pushing this now.

NASDAQ where the shares get listed knows this but they're going to make so much money off of the launch of this IPO and the trading of the stock they couldn't say no. More importantly they let muskrat break and bend rules all over the place making this a extremely high risk investment unless you are part of the inner circle that will be protected. If you have less than a billion dollars in your bank account you are not part of that circle.

Eventually all this bad stock is going to have to go somewhere. Traditionally it would go into public pensions but we've been using those to dump bad stock for so long there's no way they can absorb it. Over and over again we see rules around 401ks being changed. They're going to dump it into your 401k.

Because you currently have a measure of control over your 401k I'm sure you're telling yourself that as a sophisticated investor you will avoid those traps and it's those other suckers who are going to get stuck with the bill.

Now we're going to ignore the fact that the economy is heavily interconnected and when all those other suckers lose their money it will have effects on you. We're just going to pretend they all shoot themselves or something.

Here's the thing there's a hierarchy of suckers. You are in that hierarchy with everybody else. It is a little harder to get to your money. It is not impossible for somebody who has a trillion dollars. Rules can be changed and more complex traps laid. And when you wake up one day and you have $0 in your bank account and investment accounts you're going to stop and ask yourself how could this happen but that's not going to get you your money back.

I used to think the old farts around here would safely die before the shit hit the fan for them but Trump is moving things so fast so badly I don't think that's the case anymore. And with AI data centers basically doubling the price of electricity and water the shit's going to hit the fan all at once. So unless you are planning on dying before the midterm elections I don't think you're going to escape this shit.

Because without recurring revenue you're not going to be able to make enough money to keep your software business afloat. I watched several software companies in the 90s and early 2000s go tits up because they just sold their software and everybody bought it and it worked and it was fine and it was great but nobody ever bought more software because the software they had was fine and great so the company eventually sold to everyone who could buy and they went out of business.

If you're going to run a service you need to have all the infrastructure that goes with that and that's where the cost is and always has been. Not the building of the app any schlub has been able to do that for ages. It's building out and maintaining the back end while getting enough customers or monetizable users.

Trump just created a 1.7 billion dollar slush fund for him and his buddies. You don't need to excuse anything. The news media is 90% billionaire owned and they just won't cover it when all this shit's going on. A large percentage of voters are either low information or bad information voters and a little voter suppression at the county level takes care of the rest.

Barring a miracle we're going to be a Russian style dictatorship in 10 years and a techno feudal hellscape in 20 or 30.

But at least trans kids can't play sports right? Is it the culture War fun?

What pisses me off is that if the press actually talked about the recession we are in, and it is a recession if you take out the ridiculous amounts of money spent on AI slop we are in a deep recession, then people would wake up and poll numbers would collapse and while the current Republican party in charge of everything wouldn't do anything to help they would at least stop making things substantially worse.

But because they control the media now, literally 90% of all media is owned by billionaires and if you're paying attention you are really seeing them exercising that power fully for the first time ever, well it's simply not allowed to talk about it.

But what's frustrating is people can see it happening but because the economy is a large complex thing it hasn't hit them personally yet and there's a core of about 20% who it probably never will with another 20% who will probably escape the worst of it and because of all that without someone explicitly telling them the state of the economy they just blitheringly and blissfully go about their lives thinking everything is fine and if you're struggling it's because of some moral failure or another...

This is why people call journalists the 4th estate and why it's such a huge problem that they are now completely under the control of billionaires. In the past what would stop that is journalists could do muckraking to make money and then on the side real journalism but the billionaires figured that out so if you're a muckraking journalist they will sue you into Oblivion like they did Gawker.

People really don't realize the importance of the institution of journalism or what journalism actually is. To be blunt I only know because I took some courses in high school along with some mid-level college history courses.

Ordinarily with prices this high somebody would take the plunge. I would bet money that in 10 or 15 years we're going to find out they were colluding. It'll take that long for the Democrats to put the regulatory apparatus back in place assuming we aren't knee deep in the El Naranja's third term.

So basically I suspect the memory producers have all agreed not to increase production and there's no way a new player could enter the market because with the complete lack of antitrust law enforcement the memory manufacturers would just drop their prices and run the newbie out of business.

This is exactly what happened with LCD panel prices until, as usual a democrat, stepped in and enforced the law so that the trusts were broken up and prices immediately plummeted.

Folks need to understand the bureaucrats are more than just the annoying guy at the DMV. They're the guys that make it so that large corporations can't manipulate markets to screw you over. Or they used to be anyway. Now they're just unemployed.

Journalists want to use the terms that are being given to them by the people involved in the story. It's a vulnerability in the basic concept of journalism.

Also 90% of our news media is owned by billionaires now and they are exerting their power so any attempt to push back against any narrative that inconveniences the ultra wealthy just gets you fired. During the last election I watched Donald Trump lose his marbles multiple times on stage without it being covered meanwhile Joe Biden stutters a bit and we get a 3 week media cycle.

I watched a couple dozen journalists get dog walked because they pushed back against that narrative and were immediately fired by their billionaire bosses.

The fourth estate has fallen. Virtually all the institutions designed to protect you have broken down. That is going to get real bad real soon and there's fuck all we can do about it