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I thought California was voting on a wealth tax this year? NYT just reported on it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/technology/california-wealth-tax-page-thiel.html?smid=url-share
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Nah. I think unemployment is going to win. Everything in the world is monetized right now, and people will eventually stop buying and cancel subscriptions etc.
I chatted up a guy behind the desk of a combination pawn shop / gun shop yesterday. He is the owner. I asked him how Christmas was going. He said fine overall but that he’s buying more guns than selling.
If you want an indicator of financial tightness in flyover country, keep an eye on how often rednecks relinquish their guns for cash.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)In a party that decries white privilege, newsome is the paragon of white privilege.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Education is a special industry. It fails in preparing its customer, and the customer decides to buy more education.
racket
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Appalling.
There is no “pain” signal on most of the taxes you list, because they are both mandatory and insidious. We all debate income tax rates but look at the amount of tax you pay on utility and telecom bills.
bullshit.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Yuck.
amazing that you had a friend good enough to warn you.
I bet that made conversations with the wife touchy for a while.
that said, you could tell me my house is going to be worth half what it is in two weeks and I’m not selling. So, I can relate to your wife I guess.
I think we might be in for a very rough patch for a while, but what else am I going to do? I’m still in accumulation mode but even if we’re in asset preservation mode I don’t know where I would put any money. Bonds are a loser, stocks are overvalued, cash is a loser, real estate is overvalued and hard to cash flow, so I just keep a balance of all of them and hope for the best.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)we complain about asset inflation and home affordability but ignore the risks in asset ownership. Homes aren’t easy to maintain, and the stock market goes down, spectacularly at times.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Laurie sounds awful, but in a DEI awful way.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)We have normalized and protected incompetence. We stopped championing excellence and became skeptical of it as an elitist thing.
We have cultivated a culture of entitlement that drives achievement lower and reward expectation higher.
We have allowed people to bolster their profiles via grievance vs via competence.
We have trained a generation in playing the DEI game, to the point of creating a trans identification fad that is only just now slowing down.
In short, we have taken a community minded, Protestant work-ethic based, patriotic culture and sold it out for consumerism and stupidity. But it’s not my fault because I am oppressed and traumatized by the way you guys look at me.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)She’s a political disaster who would only get elected because of her name. She’s from the grievance tribe.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)It will be funny when there is a 6-month wait for assisted suicide. Well, not funny ha ha, but funny ironic.
I have a family member who was just informed of a 4-month wait to see a neurologist. So, I guess we are there now here in the U.S.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Intellectual laziness is literally a talent these days. And we wonder why we are dumbing down.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)[quote quote=10732]Not that it means anything in the context of this thread, but one of my favorite breakfast places in San Jose is for sale. How do I know this? There is a notice posted stating an application to sell the business has been applied for. WTF! We really are on a downward spiral predict by Ayn Rand. One must receive permission from the government to sell a business? Other than another revenue stream, what rational is there for this kind of bureaucratic fuckery?[/quote]
maybe it’s related to the actual location?
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)This is not shocking. Some of the restaurants with the biggest value grabs like chipotle have already hit the skids. We’re gonna see a lot of this over the coming months and any limitation to snap payments bleeds over into fast, casual, and fast food very quickly because like it or not, most snap recipients are not indigent. They are just pushing dollars out into the economy. That would otherwise have to be used to pay for food if they didn’t have snap.
it’s fascinating politically. People have to start paying student loans and are threatened with having to pay for their own groceries and so restaurants suffer and it gets stuck to the ruling party. All of it is healthy but the politics are gonna hurt republicans in power.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)I provide our folks with a very nice high deductible plan plus an HSA contribution that roughly equals the deductible.
They pay 25% of premiums, I pay 75%.
Our premium increase for 2026? 17%
It’s a broken system, largely because of the misuse of “insurance” to cover things like birth control, childbirth, and testosterone replacement. Insurance should only be for things you don’t want, like broken limbs or cancer, not for things you consume as a matter of living or vanity.
and don’t get me started on weight loss drugs. They are amazing. Don’t get me wrong, but an insurance plan “insuring” a fat person only to turn around and pay for weight loss drugs isn’t insurance, it’s a transfer payment.
my opinion? Treat healthcare consumption like we treat any other consumption. Allow people to insure against true risks and provide risk assessed payment plans for everything else.
I’d rather have childless cat ladies paying off their birth control debt in their 60s than to have the government supplying it.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)
