Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Doesn’t evoke the prettiest images but my first thought was “out his nose????”
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)It’s not exactly provocative to say that democracy will fail. It never has survived for long.
That’s the reason the national government was established as a republic. But the people are catching on that they can still vote themselves largess. That’s, of course, the end of any democracy: When the majority votes for the goods of the minority.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)I have no interest in talking to the IRS, but this brings up a conversation I had earlier today with a client of ours. He was lamenting some poor manufacturing performance with a lot of it attributable to poor labor productivity and turnover.
We discussed that the whole “COVID hangover” has really been a “COVID re-set” to the values and motivations of the work force. This is in the private sector, mind you. The work force has become less effective and more entitled than possibly ever.
If that’s in the private sector, I can’t even begin to imagine how the government is doing.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)They are going to eat her up. She might as well have said “yeah, they are ugly, but they deserve respect.” Even if she’s right, she’s wrong.
The WNBA is a disgrace. Born on third base and think they hit a triple.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Imagine a world where a local community elects a prosecutor that won’t prosecute certain crimes due to politics. You know, crimes like, say, lynching.
You might want the governor to have some power to stand on the side of justice in such a case.
I’m betting that this “fascism” is a vestige of reconstruction. And it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Why is it that our population has become so ignorant of the downsides of direct democracy?
Democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner.
There has to be mechanisms for protection of minority rights, whether the minority is a disenfranchised but newly freed slave or a white kid who deserves not to be assaulted at the local convenience store.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Trump is out in front of everyone all the time with no prompter. He’s bound to meander. But at least we know.
Did anybody see the vids of Biden at G7?
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)All this because some meddlesome judge read his sweetheart plea deal.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Ridiculousness on a global scale.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)These things always turn on the democrats.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)Sorry. I got zero notifications that it was down.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)I think my first paid job requiring me to show up to a job site was pulling sweet corn in a field. I was 13. I think I got paid something like 25 bucks a day.
Same summer I worked on a potato grading machine on a potato farm. Did that for several years from 13-16. I think I got paid $8 a truckload that we loaded. Some summers it was good money. We could probably load 7-8 trucks in a day. One year potatoes were rotten from too much rain, and it took forever to grade in enough potatoes to load a truck. We might load 3 trucks a day. Not so good.
I was fortunate to do a lot of physical jobs for pay back in my teen years. I was a hard worker so never lacked for a job.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)This only hurts low skill workers further. Look for service levels to continue to deteriorate because of all the people lucky enough to get a $30/ hr job having to do the work of 3 people previously.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)I like zeihan.
He doesn’t go off on one of the more salient topics: fiscal policy. We are financing bigger deficits than ever right now, and not really batting an eye at them.
The treasury had been funding the government with a bias for shorter term instruments in an apparent bet that interest rates will go down at some point, kinda like a person who buys a new house on a 5 year ARM thinking they will refinance in the next couple of years. At some point they will have to shift to the long bond.
When the treasury moves long I think we will finally see what a mess this is. My par number for long bond interest is about 7 percent. This is based on nothing more than basic math of 3 percent “new normal inflation” plus 2 percent “risk free return” plus 2 percent long bond term premium. Thats 7 percent.
In other words, I agree with zeihan that now’s the time to borrow because rates are likely to go up, not down. He just takes a more tortured way of getting there by explaining it via demographics and capital flows. If rates do go down it will be political and not mathematical reasoning that wins the day.
And, no, I’m not massively shorting long bonds on my hypothesis of 7 percent par. I’m a big believer that markets can stay irrational far longer than I can stay solvent. It would not shock me if interest rates are lowered as a sop to Wall Street yet again, of course leading to continuation of the massive asset bubble we are in.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)The numbers issues are a big one. Fewer and fewer people trust the reported inflation numbers, and jobs numbers include part time jobs where people hold 2 or 3 of them.
GDP reports are supposedly “real” and so inflation adjusted, but with what inflation index? That’s the rub.
I think our economy is doing just ok, and is way too dependent on government and healthcare jobs, which aren’t always value creating.
I think our fiscal policy is a true train wreck.
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)End of the article says they already moved HQ to Austin in 2020. Of course I have no idea what that means. A corporate HQ for a massive company can be 10 people.
I wonder how many employees this pulls out of California?
____________________________________________________________
Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)
