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awinder

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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/awinder; my proof: https://keybase.io/awinder/sigs/_o4vqfTId9tejqT066NEwmX9cEwNtOKfYKa9W5IEjNs ]

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Bailing out companies keeps people in jobs & backstops the assets that comprise retirement/pension systems, both of which keep people in their homes. You could find ways of keeping more people in their homes but they’d almost certainly include bailing out companies, it’s easy to implement and cost effective.

One does not simply become a citizen, most have to convert from a work visa to a permanent visa (requires wait time + process), and then more wait time before being allowed to apply for citizenship. So there’s workers at twitter who can’t merely say “the boss is crazy, I’m out of here”. They have to line up another job and get their visa in order before they can go. No one is asking you to care or treat people differently, though people might judge you based on the thoroughness of your understanding & compassion for the situation.

You can balance the real dual-interests at play here through progressive taxation, allowing for transfers of wealth that only marginally accelerate society-wide wealth disparity. The slaves/serfs lingo is a little stretched when it applies necessarily to other people, and those other people have had their entire lives to benefit from the wealth of the other person anyways.

By:

1. Not labeling people who disagree with you as “part of a professional managerial class” / people who don’t want to work (propaganda) 2. Actually citing personal experience (just saying you have personal experience isn’t a debate/argument)

You’re:

1. Not actually detailing your life experience

2. Repeating tropes and stawmanning arguments that others aren’t making

3. Framing people you don’t agree with as “PMC people”, i.e. you’re not engaging with their arguments

Your final sentence applies in spades to how you’re arguing across the thread. Ridiculous.

“Things were different before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In those days, sailors were required to train for a regular Navy profession, known as a rate, before they could attempt the SEAL course. Dropouts from the course could return to the rate they had trained for.”

Pre-2006 you’d basically do as you suggested, you’d make it into intelligence/nukes/etc. and then you’d try out for SEALs. Now you play a <1-in-10 lottery where you have to avoid an overzealous training instructor kicking you while lugging a 300lb log amongst other challenges. If you don’t make it you complete a filler job class under SEALs and you’re stuck.

You’re straw-manning this issue & the challenges detailed. SEALs is hands-on work, no one is making an “I’m-too-good” argument because they went to college. There’s people who almost made it through SEALs who would be immense assets elsewhere in armed forces — and prior to 2006 they would have been.

Berkshire had a (especially relative to the market) very good year and it’s the highest weighted constituent in XLF. Also a lot of the active fund companies had this same sort of trend where they went about 2x in market cap in a 12-16 month period in 2020-2021 and then gave about half the growth back (or more) in 2022.

You would compare your fund to an index maintained by a company like MSCI or S&P Global which covers Fictionaland. And you’d probably have a number of indexes for Fictionaland that could match depending on how your fund is composed.

You can compare Fictionaland funds to the S&P 500 and this can be a useful exercise. But you can’t determine if your Fictionaland fund is “good” unless you compare to a representative index — this is one with overlap of securities, but with likely different weights from the underlying index. And you’re going to have peer funds by other companies with slightly different methodologies, you’ll all compare to the same index, and your relative performance amongst competitors will mostly determine if you’re doing good.

Edit: I missed the management/performance question. If you run an ETF you are going to report holdings frequently, typically every day. If you run a mutual fund it’ll be less often, like every 60-90 days. So over time, you’ll be able to understand a bit about the trading methodology.

This is a pretty good jumping off point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht

Yeah West Germany successfully pushed for western-held war criminals to be released in the early 1950s. Rearmament and relaxing of the terms of reparations happened very rapidly, within a year individual pieces are being rolled back. There’s kinda a general history of rapidly needing the Germans after WW2 and a lot of people got second chances (also see Operation Paperclip). West Germany used these opportunity to try to rewrite history, gain more government independence, dramatically lessening whatever “spirit-busting” was a part of WW2 reparations.

I don’t see a lot of current generation German spirit-busting going on. The 90s saw the myth of the clean wehrmacht finally addressed, this abhorrent stuff is being investigated by younger-gen German academics while the surviving vestiges of people who were empowered around the end of nazism and the power vacuum following try to fight back.

It’s also kinda difficult to separate the self-loathing from being part of a dark system, from the direct affects of reparations, from becoming ground 0 at the Cold War, from knock-on effects of any of the above. But one thing is for sure, prevention of fascism was definitely not a highest good, or at least for long. We released the war criminals and rearmed them the second that an ascendant Socialist power needed to be addressed, with 0 pushback on the demands.

The Twitter Files 4 years ago

This law does not apply to a single actor included in tweet thread. It applies to government employees & administrative positions, which even Ro Khanna isn’t, and that’s the closest it gets to applying.

Yeah and then Holmes was given a trial by a jury of her peers, and she became a convicted felon. Welcome to a legal system not adjudicated by twitter shitposters.

I sincerely don’t think there is any action that could be taken to convince people who were conspiracists about government money that there’s not a conspiracy of government justice. But that’s ok I guess because the rest of the normal world can just snort in derision and move on.

“Apple does not claim a cut of the exchange of stocks, but they do claim a cut of the transaction fees for the exchange of stocks.”

Are you sure / how? I’m not going to sign up for robinhood to confirm but my brokerage transacts with my bank, not in-app purchasing, pretty sure robinhood is the same. I’m pretty sure the differentiation is that stocks aren’t considered digital goods. And neither is coinbase’s mainline business which is allowed to facilitate buying & selling crypto without paying fees, even on their transaction fees, which users pay.

Apple says they paid out 60B in App Store revenue to developers in 2021, if you used the 30% figure (which is unfair because they charge 15% on +1yr subscriptions and <1M revenue) that would be like 26B in commissions. Take that for what you will.

Personally I would skip, or at least smell-test, such calculations by a trip to the publicly available hard data:

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/947c0c3...

Twitters cost of revenue was 1.7B in FY2021. That includes their data centers, operations salaries, depreciation of assets, and AWS costs (plus other categories, it’s defined in the financials). There’s also a delta of 400M from FY2020 and over half of it is salaries.

So from these pieces of coarse information and the suggestion in this piece that storage costs alone are around 1B, I can surmise that these envelope calculations are off by a lot.

I would love to know the mystical mechanism by which a legislative representative spreads money to federal and state AGs, and then how those AGs spread money around their respective offices, without any of this ever leaking out. And then you have a partisan angle so yeah, whither the Republican state AGs?

SBF and the gang aren’t going to be able to con more people, the companies are in bankruptcy now so their books are being poured over, and there’s multiple state and federal investigations ongoing. Presumably the Bahamas has some sort of law enforcement system as well. Just because the US hasn’t descended on the Bahamas with apache helicopters in a month or two doesn’t mean “they got away with it”, people need to stop being so hysterical.

Caroline quote is hysterical — that is both a mathematically and philosophically flawed argument. Befitting of someone who would blow out an $8B+ hole in another companies budget by… making leveraged double or nothing coin flip bets.

The source is down on the Singer quote (actually he’s quoting Wilbin) but the context of it is a discussion of how donated dollars travel further in poorer nations. I can’t find any related text around the quote that suggests any nefarious insinuation.

Absent the last several months was there really a lot of people confused on EA forums about the moral weight of intentional fraud? These are pretty elementary issues in non-insane branches of utilitarian moral philosophy…

Why would one conman’s association with an ideology condemn the entire ideology? Because he said he was using it as a ruse? Why are you still selectively believing the conman?

Down in the comments on a linked article exposes the detail:

“This article is badly misinformed on a key point. Booz didn't receive anything upfront to set up recreation.gov. They funded the upfront costs out of their own pocket, and in return they stuck a deal with the US Gov't to collect a per-transaction fee to recover those costs (as well as cover ongoing maintenance and administration). The quoted figure of $182 million is their estimated revenue over the 10-year term of the contract, not an upfront payment. You may not like that arrangement, and maybe you think it was corrupt, but you don't have to misrepresent it.”

So realistically what’s happening is that if BLM or whoever set up the site and maintained it, they would have had higher base fees to close the budget gap. Now if the fee is higher with BAH running things that would be a good reason to maybe not structure things in such a way on future contracts, but I’m not convinced it is meaningfully so.

This is also a downstream consequence of never raising tax revenue while starving out budget lines that aren’t DoD. I’m not like a BAH fanboy or whatever but they’re a distant consequence of a system of government that doesn’t tax (or even enforce tax) appropriately on its richest members.

Bingo, and the line from electoral politics -> regulation is straight, legal, and requires one step. While filtering political donations through judicial + investigative bodies with egads of separate oversight & career employees & little to no electoral influence would be impossible to manage. Not for 28 million, you would have to buy a loooooot of people off and get extremely lucky. That’s why it doesn’t happen. The get out of jail free card, that is.