I like this superpositional moment for him. I suspect his insecurities made him want to be caught, and that there is some relief that will come, even if he sent to jail.

They’re surprisingly good, particularly BYD cars, in my experience.

Americans’ vehicles tend to be huge, wildly inefficient for their daily usage, and they throw off externalities like pedestrian and cyclist risks, road damage, and support for countries who use our gas spending to make the world less liberal.

VW, Honda, Toyota, and Datsun capitalized on American vehicle bloat to build massive, multinational companies with products in every segment. The Chinese are going to ruin our domestic manufacturers, once they decide to build bridgehead plants here.

Today, I’m driving an Acura that is made in Marysville, Ohio. Not assembled; it is substantively made here in the States. And, the chain reaction that led to Honda, a Japanese company, exporting profits made from American productivity in 2024, started with the Big Three making massively bloated, inefficient, expensive, poorly designed cars, leaving a gap in the market that foreign companies exploited with right-sized, efficient, affordable, reliable vehicles, starting in the ‘60s and exploding with the ‘73 oil crisis.

I don’t have time to find a link, but there have been studies that demonstrate that the exact choices being made by American manufacturers today—to not fully serve the bottom of the market—sow the seeds of their own future declines in the middle and upper markets.

“Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”

A company wholesale ruined by the exit of its operations expert CEO and the entry of a finance guy.

Please enjoy the recent Chapo Trap House episode on Eric Adams: https://soundgasm.net/u/ClassWarAndPuppies2/799-Swag-on-Loan-From-God-feat-Chris-Robbins-Katie-Way-11824

Adams reminds me a lot of the late-night party mayors of the ‘80s and ‘90s, in DC and Richmond VA. Those guys both went to jail, IIRC.

This is how you get nobility. Before Reagan, wealth typically dissipated by the third generation. We are heading toward the old European model, where families are rich for a millennium.

I have a vague memory that apartheid South Africa hooked them up with the bomb.

That was very helpful, thanks!

Only problem I have left is getting NGINX Reverse Proxy Manager set up, so that I can offer Overseerr webpage. The Let’s Encrypt cert generator keeps throwing an internal error at the last step. Something is preventing LE from reaching my server, and I’m too clueless to solve at this point.

About 25 years ago, I took in a shitty Brazilian-made .380 to be destroyed by local police dept. Filled out the form and answered questions from a young officer who seemed incredulous that I actually wanted a gun destroyed.

After I finished and was escorted out to the reception area, I used the bathroom. When I came out, I heard the officer yell to everyone the back area, “Hey, does anyone want a Taurus .380?”

I have a vague memory of a $10B cash shipment going missing in Afghanistan.

Historically, American millionaires had a much higher rate of prior bankruptcies than the general population. A good way to squelch entrepreneurship is to make failure so onerous that it’s not worth the risk.

China’s system has a potential duality:

Everyone from the top to the bottom plays along when the pie is expanding, and endemic corruption can be treated as a predictable cost of doing business.

However, when the pie stops growing, there isn’t the level of contract assurance that other rich countries offer. The Pareto optimal competition between powerful interests once growth fully stalls will be very interesting to watch. Xi will have his hands full, picking winners and losers, and lots of billionaires and centimillionaires will head for the door, taking significant capital with them. Worse, foreign investment will tail off, and decreased predictability will cause foreign companies to look hard at production in other places. At the bottom of the economic ladder, corruption will be much more apparent and challenging.

Xi’s bet seems to be that he can use technological repression tools to manage discontent in a downturn. We’ll see; he may be right. If the Stasi had had access to Palantir, Israeli spy software, and Chinese hardware, Checkpoint Charlie might still be in place.

I’m older than dirt and have seen lots o’ presidential elections. Polls this far out, for the general election, are utterly meaningless.

I was reading several months ago that there was a time in the mid ‘90s that there were a few gay clubs in Russia that were relatively unmolested by the cops, as long as the local “roof” was paid off.

You’re thinking in the right direction. And, employers are going to increasingly insist on what I like to call repressionware, hardware and software installed in your home workspace that effectively leashes you to work, vitiating many of the advantages wfh gives today.

What about the Dutch?

In 7th grade, many years ago, my school had an excited young teacher who convinced management to let them teach a Logic class. I can’t even remember if the teacher was male or female, but I use the shit I learned in that class constantly, particularly the fallacies and biases we memorized (and then promptly weaponized against teachers, parents, and pastors).

When billionaires attribute their success entirely to their own virtues, skills, or talents, and blame others or external circumstances for their failings, they are demonstrating a self-serving bias, a specific form of the fundamental attribution error. They fail to acknowledge external factors like market conditions, socio-economic advantages, or the efforts of their teams that may have contributed to their success. Conversely, they externalize blame for failures, ignoring any personal shortcomings or misjudgments.

I hate that we’re so petro-bigoted.

You can be a SWAT officer with only three years of experience?

Yeah, there are a few bangers, but it’s just not a coherent moral document, if taken at its full scale.