Not content with Texas's position as merely one of the worst places in the U.S. to be a child, Governor Greg Abbott is aiming to secure the undisputed title.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/poli...s-child-abuse/
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Not content with Texas's position as merely one of the worst places in the U.S. to be a child, Governor Greg Abbott is aiming to secure the undisputed title.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/poli...s-child-abuse/
Thanks for this. I am sure I read somewhere the claim Giuliani was Trump's lawyer in the Ukraine was false because he was not being paid to be there by Trump. I am not sure we know anyway, as Trump seems to have decided to destroy documents in violation of the law to protect himself, though I assume his lawyers would have told him not to, and I assume they have their own dcumentation of their dealing with Trump when he was 'President'. As it is a law not a convetion, is this another example of Trump breaking the law with impunity?Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
Quote:
Originally Posted by thombergeron
The word 'abuse' is the only word that defines this, but not as Abbott intended. He seems to be like Modi, Xi and Putin, determned to use political power to impose his will on Texas. Which makes it a double dose of abuse. Can anyone stop him?
If the response to Russia's invasion of the Ukraine is intensified to include an attempt to disrupt or halt its oil and gas exports, the Russians have threatened to 'turn off the gas' while the shortage of oil exports could send crude to $300 a barrel. There are several consequences here
One, is that higher prices and disruption would hurt China, dependent as it is on imports of oil and gas. It may be in a semi-state of solidarity with Russia now, but desperate measures by the Russians could force China to assess where its longer term benefits lie, though this might be regime change in Moscow as well as better ties to the rest of the world. By attemting to privilege its role as supplier, the Chinese might ask -at what cost? Or negotiate a 'special price' with Russia, to the latter's disadvantage.
Reports suggest a US team is attempting to bring Venezuela back into the tent, something Maduro for all his anti-American rhetoric would welcome, as would most people in both Venezuela and Colombia. Venezuela has vast reserves of oil, but it is classed as 'heavy oil' which for years meant it was not economical to develop, both in terms of lifting costs, and the modifications needed to refineries to process the stuff. Combined improvements in technology and a higher oil price make heavy oil profitable, thus enabling the US-Venezuela production line (Venezuela needs capital as well as expertise from outside the country) to cut out Russian oil supplies, while alternative supplies of gas to those in Russia exist but have not been exploited so far because of costs.
Iran has vast supplies of gas -could the rapprochement with Venezuela inspire a new relationshp with Iran?
Thus, the higher the price of oil, the greater the opportunity to relieve the world of Russian oil and gas = short term pain, but longer term gaiin for the non-Russian customers, but in the long term a major blow to the Russian economy.
And the obvious irony -to save the world from Russia, 'we' may need to increase our dependence on fossil fuels rather than decrese them, though one assumes at the same time the development of alternative sources of fuel will take on a new urgency.
On Venezuela's vast oil resources here-
https://www.rigzone.com/training/hea...t.asp?i_id=185
and here-
https://www.hydrocarbons-technology....o-oil-project/
I don't know much about Joe Manchin, but it seems odd he is a Democrat when from what I do read, his policy preferences are solidly Republican. But it also seems that he is one of the alarming number of unintelligent Senators and Representatives in Congress these days. For this is what the man has said-
"Faced with rising gasoline prices, many Americans are now looking to switch to an electric car. But the shift away from fossil fuel vehicles has been criticized by Senator Joe Manchin, who has said he is “very reluctant” to see the proliferation of battery-powered cars....
“I’m very reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles,” Manchin said at the energy conference CERAWeek, held in Houston. “I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas – I remember those days. I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly China.”
Manchin, who has taken more money in political donations from fossil fuel interests than any other senator, also said he has “a hard time understanding” why the federal government would invest in a network of electric car charging stations, as the Biden administration aims to do.
“I’ve read history, and I remember Henry Ford inventing the Model-T, but I sure as hell don’t remember the US government building filling stations,” Manchin said to applause. “The market did that.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...e-crisis-fight
For a man who I am told champions coal and petroleum, you have to wonder if he knows where the USA's electricity comes from, how it is generated, and what the volume of electricity is needed to power the EV's that consumers -ie, THE MARKET- want. As for the Feds providing charging points, well, why doesn't the private sector rush in to build them as Rockefeller and Ford did in those old glory days?
The man is in need of an education, but then it is probaby wasted on him, like his votes, only in the Senate, those votes matter.
"All-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles represent a new demand for electricity, but they are not likely to strain much of our existing generation resources in the near term. Large increases in the number of these vehicles in the United States will not necessarily require the addition of new electricity-generation capacity depending on when, where, and at what power level the vehicles are charged."
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electr...roduction.html
Joe Manchin aside (see previous post), is it the case that to run for office as a Republican, it is essential for the candidate to exhibit their ignorance, as if by doing so they engage with like-minded idiots in their State or District? Do none of these people ever go to school, or what did they do when they were there? Something is seriously wrong in the USA...
Exhibit 1-
"Last year, Alabama lawmakers overturned a 30-year ban on yoga in public schools, passed originally due to the practice’s roots in the Hindu religion. James said he wants legislators to reinstate the ban, while another candidate in the GOP primary is “pro-yoga.” (Tim James wants to be Governor of Alabama, Lord help us All, or maybe Krishna?).
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/under-rada...094503899.html
Exhibit 2-
"Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker cast doubt on the theory of evolution in recent remarks, saying the fact that apes and humans coexist disproves accepted science.
“At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not? ... If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it,” Walker said in an appearance at Sugar Hill Church in Georgia on Sunday.
“Now you’re getting too smart for us, Herschel,” lead pastor Chuck Allen responded."
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/her...181506142.html
Apparently this man was a 'Running Back' in American Football. Well 'Back' seems appropriate. And he's running. Maybe he should be more ambitous and run for the White House?
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022...ion-investment
Jared Kushner's private equity fund got two billion dollars from the Saudis. No rational person would give Jared five dollars to invest when he's not even a successful real estate developer and has no experience with the kind of financial analysis that would make someone successful in private equity. It's either a payoff for services already rendered or a bribe for future services. I expect this will be investigated but will need a smoking gun like actually classified information passing hands. The kind of favoritism towards MBS that likely motivated this transaction would be more difficult to prosecute even though the impropriety is obvious.
Von Tristan zu Marke ist Melot's weg...Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
On the one hand an amusing profile of someone who seems to fall upwards whenever they fail. The giant flop on 6th Avenue was rescued by the Govt of Qatar not long after Trump and the Saudis ganged up on them...
On the other hand the article fails to delineate the links that show this is a deal that consolidates Israel's security-von Kushner zu MBS ist Israel's weg.
What you have here is a love triangle in which Kushner seeks the financial support of Saudi Arabia which will not only benefit and expand on his own investments in Israel, but also expand on Kushner's view that nobody cares about the Palestinians and that the historic 'Arab-Israeli Conflict' can be ended with money, in the form of investments that will in effect, create a network of trade that links Israel to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The individuals involved in Affinity Fund Partners are thus linked to Israel- Maybe you could re-fashion this whole deal into one in which Kushner, the Saudis and Israel are just a group of Russian oligarchs divvying up the Russian and Ukrainian economy amongst themselves, with no regard for what the citizens of those countries want. I guess, since they all hate the Iranians, the deals will go through and Kushner will still be rich, and Israel secure, and the Palestinians, well -fucked.
"Apart from Kushner, there are three other directors on the fund who will also visit Israel, including Avi Berkowitz, an Israeli who served as Trump's aide and was an official representative for contacts ahead of the Abraham Accords, Brett Pearlman, a former senior analyst at the Blackstone Group who later founded and managed Elevation Partners, and Asad Naqvi, a former British partner in Apis, which provides financial services, fintech and related technologies to various sectors. The four will also meet with representatives of Israeli venture capital funds and investment funds who plan to present their portfolio companies to the new American fund, and also try to raise money from Affinity in secondary investments.
The meetings will be with companies in a variety of fields and worth, from companies valued at $300 million to unicorns worth more than $1 billion. The fund is aiming to invest in technology, cyber, fintech, healthcare, clean energy and artificial intelligence companies, as well as traditional industrial companies. It plans to invest in both late and early stage companies. The fund has no intention of meeting with Israeli entities in order to attract new investors, but only with companies in which it wants to invest itself. Another member of the fund, who is in charge of relations with Israel, is Aryeh Lightstone, former chief of staff of the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman."
Jared Kushner coming to Israel in search of tech investments | Ctech (calcalistech.com)
MBS and Biden have not talked to each other since the Inauguration in 2021, so we can't be sure that Kushner threw daddy-in-law under the bus in his deposition to the Jan 6th committee, but either way it doesn't matter if Trump gets back into the White House as this Affinity is with Israel and the richest Arabs, not Trump or the Palestinians, or the Yemeni victims of the war nobody wants to talk about. As for Israel and its 'curious' relationship with Putin's Russia, who knows, maybe ten years down the line, Affinity will have offices in Washington DC, Jerusalem, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Moscow?
So relieved to wake up and find out Macron won. Democracy’s not entirely lost…yet. Now I can go about my day in ‘relative’ peace, only worrying about Ukraine, the state of LGBT people in Florida, women in Texas etc. etc.
We've been saved from fascism and the fatalism of certain factions who think there's no material difference between Macron and Le Pen. "The lesser of two evils is still evil" they say not realizing the origin of the quote is Ralph Nader and the consequences of this kind of nihilism is actually evil. The difference between Le Pen and Macron is a difference between the world being set ablaze and there still being significant problems but a chance of dealing with them.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
An acquaintance of mine tried to tell me the climate change policies of the two parties is not materially different. When I asked him whether there's a difference between the U.S. being in the Paris Climate Agreement and it not being in it he said no because the Paris Climate Agreement is not sufficient. Imagine a world where degrees of change don't matter; yes there's a possibility of some kind of cliff but when you don't know exactly where that point is, some mitigation is better than none.
And yes, Florida's don't say gay law is abhorrent. Just disgraceful as is Texas' law making abortion illegal after six weeks.
Not sure in this life if every choice isn’t one between two or more evils. Acting too slow or too little on climate change can have dire consequences, but the actions required to slow or halt the change can neither be inspired nor compelled by one leader, one party or even one group of nations. If we want to act effectively and democratically we need an educated populace, something I’m doubting these days the world will ever have.
I just always wanted to be a sparkling Disney princess dressed in pink, sitting in my tower spinning thoughts into theorems. But no, DeSantis’s is cracking down on math books as well as fantasy kingdoms and dark skinned people. There’s just no place down South for a princess to go and vote these days. That’s why I’m stayin’ North of the Mason-Dixon.
People are driven to become educated about subjects they feel are of great immediacy. And yet, in the world of the pandemic people sought out information and it was often unreliable. In the case of climate change, there is only a sense of urgency among people who are already informed or take the word of the vast majority of the informed who tell them the window for acting is closing. If more people were motivated to learn about environmental science, there would still be a deluge of misinformation to overcome.
Related to this, Elon Musk wants to buy twitter because he believes that social media should operate under a principle of free speech absolutism. Twitter, in his view, is like the public square. It is a modern-day acropolis where he dreams people can exchange information in sound-bytes, through memes, and where skinny white kids are able to say the n word behind a veil of anonymity and use the kind of invective people used to call harassment. Of course social media is not like a public square because it's easier to falsify information, easier to embolden people who don't feel social pressure to be honest and decent, and misinformation can be concentrated.
In a world where even private forums don't engage in content moderation simple incorrect answers are likely to win out. I'm not saying that Elon Musk taking over twitter harkens the coming of the apocalypse but it does show how confused people are about why speech protections should mostly be used to protect people from official sanction. We are not at risk of having a ministry of information because well known falsehoods about elections or vaccines are not given space in private forums. If we can't even exclude crackpots from the conversation, we can't overcome the noise they make for long enough to have a conversation.
IMHO....Both Liberals and Conservatives have forgot that "Freedom Of Speech" also includes "freedom to disagree".
also that it doesn’t include the freedom in incite insurrection or violence.
You may enjoy the discussion by the brilliant, if now deceased Rick Roderick, on 'freedom to' ...timed at c27'48" (but the whole lecture is worth attention)Quote:
Originally Posted by MrFanti
Rick Roderick on John Stuart Mill on Liberty [full length] - YouTube
If Trish were to say that the Earth is round and you were to say the Earth is flat would that be a simple difference of opinion or would one of you be wrong? I don't actually think free speech absolutism is a coherent philosophy when enforced in private settings because it forces people not to use their critical reasoning ability to discriminate between differences of opinion and factually incorrect statements. Requiring online forums to publish harmful, false information brings on an epistemological crisis because it compels people to treat bad faith statements as though they are as worthy of a place in the discourse as good faith opinions.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrFanti
If someone were to assert that it's their honest opinion that the election will be held the day after it's really held, is that something someone should allow to be published? In my opinion they would have a moral obligation to censor it because it's false and will lead to people not voting. If someone says that arsenic is a treatment for covid and it's their valid opinion should that be published? What about someone saying there are 50,000 destroyed ballots in a dumpster with a Chinese shipping receipt when there's just been an attempted coup?
The idea that governments should not proscribe speech protects society enough from the slippery slope. Forcing people to publish false, hateful nonsense or even deciding to publish such nonsense because you think it provides a forum for disagreement really enables the dissemination of propaganda and pollutes the discourse. Online forums are not like a sidewalk or a public space in my view.
To be clear, I'm not saying someone should be legally prevented from allowing toxic things to be published in a forum they own but let's stop pretending it's a public good or should be an obligation.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
The harm principle is a sound one, as Roderick's lecture shows. I think the difficult area is where the word 'harm' is replaced by 'hurt'. It may be morally and legally wrong for a person A to harm person B, for example by striking them with a stick and stealing their wallet. It may be morally wrong, but should it also be illegal for Person A to publicly ridicule Person B as a 'dumbass N****r'?
Political correctness is the term used used to censor public discourse where the language used is considered offensive, so the right to offend has in fact been if not abolished, then made subject to 'hate speech' in law, and may be cognizant of the prevailing public mood which I think in Europe and North America finds such language redundant, as well as hurtful.
That said, it has been quite a shock to realise that people defending a worthless jerk like Chris Rock consider his public ridicule of Jada Pinkett-Smith close to a joke or some 'light hearted' remark, in spite of the fact that the man had ridiculed the woman in public before and the Oscar night gig seemed to show some disturbance in Chris Rock's mind worthy of a long talk with a therapist. There could even be a deeper issue here if there were some evidence, for example, that Pinkett-Smith rejected any sexual advances Rock made when they were making the film 'Madagascar' suggesting Rock had spiteful reasons for insulting her in public.
The point being that instead of Chris Rock being held responsible for his offensive language and attitude, he is defended as the victim of assault, yet the right to be offensive to me was an example of where this right to offend became a right to hurt, and I don't think I can accept that. In this case, two men were compromised, and both actions require an equally robust and negative judgment.
I don't know much about Elon Musk, other than that he owns a car company, has been on The Big Bang Theory and has funded some sort of space travel. If he has or can raise over $40 billion to buy Twitter, the real question is why can't he raise say $5 billion to end homelessness in San Francisco or for that matter California, as $5 billion should be enough. I think if Americans had the balls to do so, they would take away all the Billions owned by these people, say leave them $1 billion and take the rest and spend it ending homelessness, poverty and unemployment. Musk doesn't need $40 billion, he can even survive on $4 million or 1, so take it away from him and do something useful with it. Just as every millionaire 'Christian Pastor' should give away every cent they have earned. Boom!
Anything that is privately owned is usually incentivized to maintain decent ethics because people can find alternatives if they permit harassment, racism, or dangerous misinformation. Elon Musk has put almost no thought into what his construction of free speech means because he is now saying that he thinks speech should be permitted as long as it's legal. Yet what is legal varies a great deal depending on where you are.
Let me put this bluntly: if he wants to turn a forum that is already too permissive of bigotry into a place where people send Jews pictures of ovens with a trail of dollar bills leading to it, why would people post there? Why would anyone allow themselves to be subjected to harassment, much of which is legal. By the way, I'm not saying Jews are a special case. And still I received an email from twitter once telling me that user "diejewdie" did not violate their terms of service. I'm sure many people have stories like this. What if this was no longer something that slipped through their algorithm but was actually permitted?
Gab is already a twitter alternative that all of the Nazis moved to as a protest to twitter. Public personalities are probably not going to flee right away but if Musk actually allows the kind of harassment that goes on at Gab, people will leave.
But more than that, if you allow it to become a cesspool of conspiracy theories and misinformation about important civic matters, it will cause harm. Elon Musk is an idiot. At the beginning of covid he said he thinks coronavirus worry is overrated. Here we are 7 million deaths later. He said it would be over by that summer. He called a hero who saved children in Thailand "pedo guy" because the person didn't think Musk's contraption to enter the caves would work (the device looked like a coffin and probably would have served as one). He's a piece of shit.
I'll say it again...Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
BOTH sides can't stand when someone has a different opinion/view than themselves.
Hence why BOTH sides are vying for CONTROL.
Part of FREE speech is to be able to DISAGREE.
Both sides have side-stepped that or have forgot it.
It's also a slippery slope when government controls media (See Cuba/China/Russia/Venezuela/N Korea/WW-2 Germany)
You don't have to say it again because you didn't say anything to begin with.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrFanti
A. The government in the US has never controlled twitter. The question is whether misinformation and harassment should be allowed on the site by the people who OWN and MANAGE IT. The government has nothing to do with this discussion.
B. Certain things are not matters of opinion but matters of fact. It's not stating an opinion to assert nefarious things happened and then provide no evidence of it because none exists (ie the election fraud garbage). That's called lying. In a bunch of the examples you provided tyranny was actually enabled by systematic lying.
Also, just to move on since I know you're going to repeat yourself, Tesla has lost over 110 billion dollars of its market cap. The market cap is the total value of all the stock traded in a company. Tesla is trading at a PE ratio of 118, which means that if you buy Tesla and they paid out every penny of earnings to shareholders as dividends, you'd receive less than 1% of what you paid. The market must have built in assumptions about a fast growth rate for the company. It will be interesting to see what that's based on.
As you suggest, minimal moderation is not going to be as easy as he seems to think. If Twitter turns into a troll-ridden cesspool that will be very off-putting for users and advertisers. He is probably not doing it for financial reasons, but he will still need to service his borrowings after paying 38% above market valuation for a company that is not profitable.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
For a supposed business genius, Musk does not have great record of actually generating profits. Telsa made profits only in the past 2 years and his other projects are still making losses. I wonder how long financiers will continue to indulge his erratic behaviour, vanity projects and personal fixations? Tesla stocks (on which the Twitter financing is secured) have fallen since the announcement so it seems there are concerns already.
This is a good recent article on how social media have contributed to the breakdown on social cohesion and trust in institutions. In particular, it encourages aggressive/extreme views at the expense of more moderate views and promotes tribalistic mob dynamics and confirmation bias.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-babel/629369/
The textbook model, in which the unfettered market achieves the best outcomes because good products outcompete bad products, clearly does not apply to the market for information. For most products, people can generally make reasonable judgements about how well the product performs. This does not work for information because many people lack objective criteria for sorting good information from bad, and are influenced by various biases. This was less of a problem in the past because information was filtered through a limited number of mass media gatekeepers, but the digital age has led to a fragmentation of sources.
1) I can't think of any country whose Government does not limit the media in terms of an absolute right of expression. The mere fact that it is illegal to encourage criminal behaviour suggests that there will always be legal constraints on the media. Moreover, I think most people if asked, would agree that this is a good thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrFanti
2) The argument at issue here is not so much about content, but form, and instead of using the 'relative' concept, think in terms of what has been called 'Equal Validity'.
The assumption here is that two contradictory statements are equally valid: Abortion would be a fair topic to discuss. But Abortion appears to be a good example because of its complexity, and even then the validity of one argument can, it seems to me, only be valid if those opposed to it agree that legal as well as moral rights are taken away from the citizen in order to 'preserve life'. The validity of one side of the argument, thus depends on the denial of the other, but where this denial in reality is more than a difference of opinion, but impacts the human subject in real time, and in terms of the practice of the law. Moreover, denial of abortion can in some instances, cause harm to the pregnant woman, so the 'free from harm' argument with regard to the foetus suggests either that the pregnant woman's value is diminished by her foetus, or that the argument is so flawed that it cannot be right.
But think of the statement 'The Earth is Flat' -is the disagreement in fact two sides of an 'equally valid' claim? If science can prove the Earth is not flat, surely there is no equality in the claim that it is? On this basis, the Equal Validity argument is without merit.
There is an interesting discussion of this in a review of Boghossian's book Fear of Knowledge-
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame
3) The Elite, not the Social Construction of Reality. Rather than the more familiar 'social construction of reality' I want to suggest that most of our dominant discourses in politics and philosophy have been created by elites -not just western philosophy. It was sort of amusing to see Boris Johnson in India having a red dot painted onto his brow, being the signifier of a Brahmin, for what other caste could he be in a Hindu context? The point is that I have taken up Derrida again, and can now see how he argues that so many real people have been left out of the dominant discourses, or 'marginalized' that the 'disappearance of humanity' that you find in the philosophies of Nietzsche through Heidegger to Derrida expresses the way in which people can often 'see' the world they live in and assume they are unequal and unrepresented because they just ain't worth it. It is the link between Marx and the present, and the prevailing idea that as long as elites determine the discourse, real change will not happen. It also explains why there has been so much hostility to the idea of being transgendered, as well as its real political challenges, in schools, in sports -the existence of a gender that cannot be simply defined in terms of 'Either/Or' or which insists on being an additional category, or a spectrum of categories, challenges the vertical control of the narrative as well as its legal forms, just as Critical Race Theory challenges these structures to both acknowledge the way they are shaped by Race, and do something to dismantle them.
These ideas, about what has been repressed, excluded, pushed to the margins, for the benefit of a few, emerges from this fascinating lecture, not as forbidding as it might seem-
307 Derrida and the Ends of Man (Rick Roderick) - YouTube
Sometimes people are so desperate to persuade others that they resort to lies, slander and deliberate misinformation. They say things they don’t even believe because they think those lies support their position and will help win others to their side. When you’ve lost this much intellectual integrity you’ve lost the right to claim the ears of your fellow citizens. Once you lose the attention of the intellectually honest, you limit your audience to those who are already on your side. There is no need to persuade them…they only need to know the new lies that are to be spread today.
This is a useful way to think about it. The other thing about information is it's not clear people are even attempting to sort their information based on accuracy. I suppose that's why you mention biases.Quote:
Originally Posted by filghy2
Do people want to be informed or entertained? Do they want to be outraged or frightened? The outrage works best if they tell themselves they're reading the truth, but also if what they're reading is selected to heighten that outrage or is simply untrue. The whole idea that people can hear every viewpoint and decide what is true depends on people actually wanting to listen to every viewpoint instead of just the ones that trigger the right part of their brain.
The word gatekeeper is often used negatively to imply a paternalism or an attempt to filter information in a way that might keep people in the dark. But it used to be that at least there were people making some judgements about what is credible and what is not which I think is preferable though we're not going back entirely.
Finally, I am interested in following Tesla stock simply because it will be interesting to see what happens if earnings growth isn't consistent in the next five years. It's not going to continue to trade at 184 times earnings (the site that said 118 used ebitda for the ratio which looked better for Tesla) if their earnings are flat. Musk's net worth is tied to the price of his stock, the stock is trading on great expectations, and the company's CEO is a very public clown. It will be interesting to see though I'm sure he'll be fine...
It is kind of an interesting strategy though to sell cars that are environmentally friendly and then clearly cater to people who are less environmentally conscious politically (he's retweeting Mike Cernovich on twitter).
This is one of the best expositions of CRT applied to the law I have seen or read. The keywords are 'Preferential', 'Colour Blindness', 'Affirmative Action', 'Asymmetrical', with some fascinating insights into Plessy-v-Ferguson, Martin Luther King's 1963 speech at the climax of the March on Washington, and some brutal comments on the law....and it's not too long.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Race, Gender, Inequality and Intersectionality" - YouTube
I guess you don't necessarily need to believe in something in order to make money from it. That said, it doesn't seem like a good strategy to antagonise your customer base by becoming too publicly associated with right-wing views.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
I don't think there is much doubt that the market for electric vehicles is going to grow strongly. The question is what will happen to Tesla's market share once the established manufacturers get into EVs in a bigger way.
I don't want to read any more about this disgusting human being who went to Buffalo to shoot African Americans at a grocery store and murdered 10 people.
He wrote a manifesto, which I also don't want to read, and the fact that he may have live streamed his shooting is repulsive beyond words. The forums he posted on are littered with the kind of stuff that will inevitably be in his demented manifesto. Again, I don't think it's an acceptable thing to facilitate discussions among white supremacists as they share their hateful ideas and feed off of each other's stupidity. You can't keep people from talking but you don't have to make it easier for every hateful person to find their group of likeminded haters and conspire to commit similar acts of mayhem and murder.
Your anger is justified, and you have not lost the moral argument. But you have lost the process by which laws are made, and in which the Constitution is used to justify an extension, not a reduction of the firearms that can be legally obtained, or for those determined enough, illegally obtained. There is a long list of mass murders, be they targeted at people because they are Gay, Hispanic, Black or Asian, and it is therefore no surprise that the teenager in this case says he is not guilty, because in his eyes, I daresay he doesn't believe he has committed a crime.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
The States you read about are on the road to independence, and there is nothing you can do about it. States Rights is no longer the base of local decision, but the precursor to State Independence or so much Autonomy Idaho may as well declare itself to be a separate country. This could just be a phase the US is going through, but who is going to reverse the process that is energising individuals to take the law into their own hands, and how can it be achieved when the Supreme Court is now dedicated to returning most if not all decisions before it, back to the State they came from?
More people are going to die. And is it not the same people who say they are 'Pro-Life' who defend the guns that kill?
Last night Channel 4 in the UK aired a profile of Elon Musk. I admit I knew next to nothing about him so I was surprised to find out he was born in South Africa, but not surprised to discover he doesn't do failure, and takes a dim view of anyone who criticises his companies, especially if they work in them. What struck me most about him, is not so much his enthusiasm for space travel and the plain stupid idea that humans can populate Mars, but that I wonder if he has chosen a project that is not that difficult to achieve.
Think about it, once you have the machines and the fuel to get humans to Mars and back, all you need is a safe network of domes within which humans can live without having to wear specially designed suits. Setting aside accidents which I am sure will happen, and unforeseen environmental impacts on such a planet, as per The Martian, the project is not that hard to achieve.
Now compare the Mars missions with something closer to home: Homelessness. I wonder, does Musk not address a problem he can see every day if he lives in LA or San Francisco, because it appears to be a problem without a solution that does not bear with it the accolades that one assumes will accompany a 'manned' mission to Mars?
It has been calculated that the cost of ending homelessness in the US is $20 billion, so why don't America's billionaires agree to chip in a billion of their own money to end it? The stats are there, the justification is there, the pay-off would not just be the end of the visible signs of failure , but become part of a success story in which people without a home have a home in which they can live with dignity and one hopes, turn their lives around from whatever it is that has left them on the streets.
Maybe Musk should be more concerned with Main St than Mars. Or maybe he doesn't care.
Stats here-
"According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States. That is a big number, yes, but let’s put it into perspective:
- Americans spend $19 billion a year on unplugged appliances.
- Americans spend more than $35 billion a year on gym memberships.
- The US government spent around $718 billion on its military in 2019 alone."
- How Much Would It Cost To End Homelessness In America? (globalgiving.org)
"Former President Donald Trump, in a series of posts on his Truth Social platform Wednesday morning, encouraged Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz to "declare victory" in the Republican primary despite being deadlocked in a two-way contest with former hedge fund manager David McCormick."Dr. Oz should declare victory," the former President wrote of his endorsed candidate, instructing him to take a page from Trump's own playbook in 2020, when he declared "Frankly, we did win this election" while votes were still being counted."
Trump encourages Dr. Oz to declare victory in too-close-to-call Pennsylvania Senate race - CNNPolitics
Maybe best to scrap voting altogether, and appoint all the Senators and Representatives. Who should do this? Hmmm..The Wizard of Oz?
Elon Musk owns a big chunk of a company that made about 6 billion dollars last year. The reason I put it that way is because the market cap of Tesla has ranged from 1 trillion dollars to about 650 billion dollars. And not to be pedantic but the value of a company if one isn't hoping to sell at an inflated price is the income its assets produce over time or the liquidation value of its assets if it's not a profitable company. So he does own something very valuable just based on what Tesla sells. But man he is an incredible buffoon and is behaving like an incredible buffoon every day.
He has recently been accused of offering a flight attendant on a private jet a pony in exchange for sexual favors. His response is that it's a liberal attack on him. It is so obviously the Trump playbook and such a childish non-response to the revelation that he paid a woman 250,000 dollars not to sue him and not to talk about why she's getting the money.
Musk is becoming a right wing cult figure and it's actually not hard to figure out why. People on the left will not worship him or tell him his ideas are worthwhile when they're facile and lame. People on the right will worship a man with money. But I've asked it before, who on the left who is in the market for an electric car would buy a tesla? The problem is that enough people will and the company does not have to trade at inflated valuations for him to be very very rich and obnoxious.
I thought about buying put options on Tesla a month ago. But since I don't have any experience pricing options or trading options I didn't do it. But I looked at the price of the options with various expiration periods. Bill Gates had a short position in Tesla, which means he's done reasonably well in a bad market.
I think it's hilarious to watch the whole thing unfold from both sides....Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
At first he was the darling of the left. He and his Tesla, Liberals loved him and Conservatives hated him.
Now, Liberals can't stand him and Conservatives love him!
Big question now is: Are Liberals who worshipped him going to sell their Tesla's now?
The only reason I would buy stock in Tesla is to make money, on the basis that over the next five year the company will face more competition, and be vulnerable to a takeover -that's where you make the money, on the share price you are offered by Ford or whoever is taking over, the main caveat being that Tesla's share price might have fallen so the offer would have to reflect the value of the company, not just its share price. I think when the price is right or the conditions favourable, Musk will sell up to fund some other venture, probably mining on the moon, Total Recall-type jaunts to Mars -the real one or a fake one, but definitely not ending homelessness in San Francisco, or LA, or Fremont.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
Musk has said he is opposed to subsidies, but Tesla would probably not exist without them, so Tesla is little different from Chinese companies subsidized by the State. Entrepreneurs in Free markets? Ha-ha.
FT has been doing a survey -the first link is on the EV market, the second an intriguing assessment of how 'green' the EV is, and right now, not so Green, and one doesn't envy the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo which produced most of the world's Cobalt essential for EVs -they have been screwed over so many times it is hard to imagine them benefiting from the trade, though someone else will.
Tesla and subsidies
Tesla's dirty little secret: Its net profit doesn't come from selling cars (mercurynews.com)
Electric vehicles: the revolution is finally here | Financial Times (ft.com)
How green is your electric vehicle? (ft.com)
Americans spend 35 million dollars a year in gym memberships, yet we are the fattest nation in the world. Go figure.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Lets say hypothetically Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg each contributed 5 billion dollars to fight homelessness in America. Are they contributing the money to the cities where homelessness is a problem and letting those local governments use that money as how they see fit. Or are they financing a private organization that will be in charge of building affordable housing, providing mental health services, sending drug addicts and alcoholics to rehab, and creating job training programs. Because to tackle a problem like homelessness, I think there has to be a cooperative effort between both the private and public sector. Especially since the latter hasn't been able to solve the problem on its own or in certain cases has made it worse.
For instance like what happened recently here in NYC. Apparently there were 2,000 vacant apartments run by the city that were specifically earmarked for homeless families. But because of staff shortages, a cumbersome application process and the typical red tape, those apartments were never filled. So instead of going to homeless shelters and screening/selecting 1,500 families and 500 single adults to house in those apartments, a committee is going to hold hearings next month to see why there was a problem in the first place. You know instead of being proactive and trying to solve the problem.
As someone who routinely reads the medical records of homeless people, along with what I see on a regular basis on my commute to work, there are going to be few individuals who are going to need long term treatment in a mental health facility before being placed in supportive housing where they can receive it as an outpatient. I know the words "mental institution" bring up memories of a past where patients were treated inhumanely. But I think we come along way since then and know more about how to treat mental illness than just giving a person shock therapy. So the question becomes once again who is in charge of running a facility like that and who would be the most effective at it.
Finally, I have never been someone who thought like a fiscal conservative. Having said that, with all the money that has been spent in the past two years when it comes to the fight against Covid and the war in Ukraine, I have been wondering not about the amount of money that is being spent, but if there is a breaking point when that bill is going to come due. Also when I hear someone say, its going to cost x amount of dollars to solve a particular problem, I'm starting to wonder how did they come up with that particular figure and why is it going to cost that much.
Your fascinating post raises two important issues, around what I would call 'Intelligence' and 'Delivery'. In the first case, as you raise the question, where does the intelligence come from to quantify the cost of ending homelessness, or for that matter the cost of not ending it? Some answers may be in the links below to the articles on Finland, which claims to have solved most of its homelessness problem, you may already know about it.
Housing is a human right: How Finland is eradicating homelessness | CBC Radio
Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need (scoop.me)
'It’s a miracle': Helsinki's radical solution to homelessness | Cities | The Guardian
The second is a phenomenon you refer to which we have in the UK, and that is the poor record on 'Delivery' by Central and Local Government. It is quite dispiriting to visit a country like Germany where everything seems to work, not because it does all the time, but because across a wide range of issues in housing, transport and the environment, there are structures and systems in place that are accountable to local people and which the authorities fund, and most of the time they deliver what they are supposed to. Talking to Germans, their concerns are not so much about public services but issues such as immigration.
Consider that in France, Italy, Germany and Spain there are high-speed rail links between major cities, and that these have most of the time been completed on time and without going over the budget, the link between Madrid and Seville is one good example. The line is 472 km where in the UK the high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham is 215km and after 11 years of the project has yet to lay more than a mile of track, while costs have escalated vastly from the original figure, and the proposal to extend the link to Manchester has been dropped -how can Spain do something we can't? And as the link shows, the US is also spending vast amounts of money on what may become 'forever projects', if that is not too cynical.
New Starts: Spain’s Dirt-Cheap High-Speed Rail, Upgrading Toronto Commuter Rail, NYC Elevator Woes (nextcity.org)
Covid has been a lamentable example of Delivery failure. Boris Johnson may brag about the speed and efficiency of the vaccine development and its nationwide distribution, but most of that success was down to non-government organizations or the NHS. His own Government was not only slow to react, but failed to incorporate the lessons of Exercise Cygnus that was a trial run for an epidemic -so there were major supply chain problems with PPE, the Test and Trace system that cost staggering sums of money didn't work when it was first implemented, and a member of the Treasury team resigned in disgust earlier this year at the billions of pounds lost to fraud from people claiming money from a Govt that couldn't stop giving it away.
I don't know how we ended up in 2022 after a century or more of public service, with such dismal and costly failures. I think it feeds into the general view some have the Govt is not the solution to the problem. The perception here, for example, is that however well-intentioned they are, Biden and Harris can't deliver, either because of a hostile Congress, or because they don't know how. Is there a paralysis of policy implementation? I don't know, but the general feeling is that things don't work anymore, and we can't keep blaming Covid. Brexit has cost this country billions, but where's the debate on that?
My other point about the Billionaires is merely to register my 'disappointment' that they are sitting on vast caches of wealth but either do not invest in the economy and jobs -or, as in the UK the preferred investments for Hedge Funds seems to be property and restaurants- while Elon Musk proposing to throw money down the Martian hole is beyond contemptible. There are times when a hitherto unknown Trotskyist in me thinks 'take it all away from him, and give it to the workers'.
I see Peter Navarro has been indicted, and complains, bitterly, " “Who are these people? This is not America. I was with distinguished public servants for four years. Nobody ever questioned my ethics.”", but wonder, what did he actually do when he was in the White House where I read his job was " to "defend and serve American workers and domestic manufacturers." " for which he was paid £183,000 pa. And the man has a PhD from Harvard!
I wonder too what Kellyanne Conway ($183,000) actually achieved in four years, her job being described as "she advises the president, tweets a lot, and makes television appearances to defend the administration"...
The list of adviser's and their salaries is in this link-
Meet Trump's 22 Highest-Paid Staffers, Who All Earn $183,000 + a Year (businessinsider.com)