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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • I regularly encounter, and have for the last at least 5 years have encountered, many, many people, who use the term … whatever stupid number of D Chess move phrase… to genuienly, earnestly describe something they think actually is an extremely intelligent strategy.

    … Especially when it comes to large scale economic/political/business strategy.

    Yes, a lot of people also use the term sarcastically as well.

    … Which is why I asked you to clarify what you mean.

    You then replied with further explanation.

    You could have just said you were joking at that point, but you did not.

    … Now that I have taken your explanation at face value, now you just say you are joking.

    Thanks for wasting my time with a schrodingers shit post.


  • I mean… I may be wrong about this, but I think its just a gigantic pile of cash.

    Its a revenue budget surplus, not like a … state version of a soverign wealth fund.

    Can’t be legally ‘invested’ in anything. It’s just locked in as giant pile of cash, with no interest rate, no ability to invest it in one thing or another. Only either do nothing, or spend it on government costs.

    You are basically saying ‘spend all the money now, because prices will be much higher later’.

    But uh… if they just… you know…didn’t wipe out a progressive income tax source of funds… that is you know, ongoing, a flow, not a static total…

    The state would yes, still have to cope with rising general costs… but this would be augmented by that flow of rising amounts of tax revenue.

    If your scenario is agnostic massive inflation, that the dollar goes down in value generally, then it would be much better to keep the flow going, as that will be balanced on both the spending and revenue side by whatever the inflation is.

    The inflation would increase both state budget costs and state budget revenues from taxes, as both incomes and sales prices would rise, thus so would income and sales tax revenue.

    And then in that scenario, yes, still use the static pool of reserve cash to shore up irregularities in that flow, maybe to help subsizide at a state level some of the rising consumer price burden, or maybe sure, spend it all at once to try to build some kind of massive infrastructure project that generally supports economic activity, or start giving it out as small business grants, or start a state backed entity to provide some kind of locally sourceable vital staple consumer good.

    But you can do all that without massively destabilzing your state budget flows by cutting out the income tax revenues.

    It is not a 5D move to stop inhaling a third of the oxygen you normally breathe before you use your reserve of calories from eating breakfast to fuel you to go run a mile.

    You could… just use those deposited breakfast calories to run a mile… and keep breathing normally the whole time. That’ll probably result in a better mile time.





  • Washington state is basically a wonderland for giant megacorps hiding under a trench coat that’s made of rainbows and gentrification.

    MSFTs main campus just literally is the size of a city.

    They literally have their own private bus system that gets employees all around the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond region to and from their main , city sized campus, if not other campuses as well by now.

    Boeing cannot be allowed to fail or even held accountable no matter how much and how hard they fuck up… because manufacturing jobs and national defense.

    Amazon just bought a huge chunk of Seattle, basically downtown Seattle, and owns nearly every building in… something like an 6 block by 6 block foot print.

    The most actually progressive thing about the state’s economic structure is that it gets a huge amount of its power generation from dams, actual renewable energy, has very good water management, and comparatively good public transit for the population size of its cities, at least compared to other states. Yay light rail, but also Seattle is one of the hilliest cities in the country with extreme grades and elevation changes, so uh, good luck commuter bikers.

    But uh yeah, cost of living is insane, housing prices are insane, and so far nobody seems to have any actual plan to address that beyond subsidizing a few extra hundred apartment units a year in Seattle such that they’d be affordable to a family making 90k a year, when they’d normally only be affordable to family making 140k a year.

    When Seattle says they’re making ‘affordable housing’, that means affordable to median wage workers… not affordable to the … something like 40% of the population that is moderately to significantly poor.

    You could completely solve homelessness in the state with something like a 0.5% tax on revenues of the top 100 corps by revenue in the state.

    No one has ever even proposed anything like this, to my knowledge.




  • I mean collectively by collectively.

    Different groups with different specific membership criteria, different descriptive attributes… often, in general, tend to behave differently.

    Try writing a history book involving dynamics and differences between groups that doesn’t involve this. Or a medical study. Or a psychological study.

    Statistics is the art of going from an unfounded stereotype or complete guess to an actually valid characterization of specified groups according to descriptive parameters.

    Of course… these are general descriptors of a group, and do not accurately and perfectly describe every member of a group.

    No, I wouldn’t personally accept responsibility for something a bunch of people my age did… but I would accept that it would be reasonable for other people who didn’t know me personally but just knew my age group to make certain reasonable assumptions about me that are actually borne out my the data.

    Of course, one should always just have that as a kind of background knowledge and not judge every single book you meet by its cover, you should read the contents of their character if you want to really know them.

    But at the same time, that is very time consuming to do with… literally everyone, so it is useful to have basic guidelines for what to expect from certain kinds of people, but not actually judge them or act toward them in a prejudiced way untill they specifically, individually confirm or disconfirm their sameness or difference from your preconceived notion.

    Like uh… I am a millenial, and I know it is statistically valid for me to assume myself and other millenials have actual, comprehensive computer troubleshooting skills than boomers or zoomers.

    I know a boomer is more likely to be a big Led Zeppelin fan, and a zoomer is more likely to be a fan of whateve is on Lo-fi girl… and I know that millenials are more likely to still be using the term ‘doggo’ and ‘chonker’ unironically, as well as think that the dialogue in the Borderlands games is cool.

    Do I use doggo and chonker? Yeah, you got me, I still do sometimes.

    Do I think Borderlands style, ‘Millenial writing’ is good? Fuck no, I hate that shit, bounced off those games half for the bullet spongy gameplay I just didn’t like (Im much more of a realism/tac shooter/milsim kinda guy when it comes to gunplay) and half for the character writing that I found to be just fucking awful, rude, crass, annoying, self-important, cringe inducing.

    I did like the art style though.

    But anyway: I would not be surprised if someone just knew my age, that I like video games and am a dork, didn’t know me beyond that, and then kinda assumed I was into Borderlands for the writing. I would be miffed if they were 100% convinced of this and acted as if it was true without ever actually asking me, but if they did ask, I wouldn’t be offended by the question.


  • … The boomers have majority supported Republicans … for the last 20 years.

    Which I specifically mentioned.

    Your own source shows:

    50-64 at a 56 to 43 for Trump
    65+ tied at 49 to 49

    Wonderful, great, a few of them finally realized that maybe now that they actually need Social Security and they want to actually draw from their 401ks… after majority supporting 401ks over unions+pensions for 20 years.

    How typical. A few of them finally figured out maybe spending 20 years supporting corporate profligacy and then betting their retirements on the stock market … is bad, when the obvious problem with a stock market based retirement plan… actually looks like/is actually happening, to them, personally.

    You are bringing race into this. I did not.

    If you purely go by age alone, which is how you actually define a Boomer…

    30-39 (16%) is 50 to 46, Harris.

    40-49 (16%) is 48 to 50, Trump.

    They are neatly both 16% of the total sample, so…

    30-49 is 49 to 48, Harris.

    Wonderful, younger Millenials to younger to mid GenX went for Harris by a point.

    But I am not talking about them, I am talking about Boomers, over the last 20 years of their existence.

    A tiny bit of the older ones shifted course after it was too late to undo what their disproportionately large, wealthy, and influential generational cohort has supported for 20 years.

    I guess ‘they’ll be sorry/regret their decisions when they’re older’, another common boomerism often directed toward anyone younger than them that makes a life choice or holds a worldview they disagree with.

    This is a perfect time to laugh at Boomers collectively.

    They got what they said they wanted, and only now, after its all too late, did they almost, but not quite, flip over to ‘this is not what i wanted.’

    If this isn’t clear, obviously not all boomers individually deserve this scorn, but uh, collectively… they do.


  • Kentucky’s bourbon industry is now utterly fucked from inevitable or already declared retaliatory tariffs…

    Time to lower the state’s tax revenue even more!

    Half of Kentucky’s bourbon is exported, and Kentucky makes 95% of the bourbon in the world.

    It is a major segment of their economy, and now half of it is in extreme danger.

    So of course, with that ongoing disaster… it is now time to eliminate income taxes… and presumably make up the difference with sales and/or property taxes?

    … Roughly 35% of Kentucky State Government inflows come from its income tax, about 5% comes from property taxes, most of the rest is sales tax.

    If they just removed the income tax, they’d blow through their entire state savings/trust fund thing in 2 or 3 quarters, if they didn’t pull in additional revenue from elsewhere or just lop off about a third of their spending… which mostly goes to funding schools, paying teachers, and funding medicaid.

    Just a bunch of geniuses over there.

    ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ indeed, fuck.


  • What will be extremely funny is if the market drops so fast that the ‘circuit breakers’ get triggered.

    Basically, the SP500, the DJIA… most modern exhanges have rulesets that say if a particular stock… or entire market… drop too much, too fast, trading on them is then just ended, for the rest of the day… I think there are some theoretical scenarios where the trading pauses can last more than a day.

    If that manages to happen… Trump will have literally broken the markets.

    Seeing as I don’t have a 401k: This would be extremely funny.

    Even if the markets don’t crash that fast…

    We are looking like we will have such massive drops in so many stocks over… the past few months, and likely next week…

    Well… a lot of companies … finance a lot of their operations with debt. (EDIT: In particular, leveraged buyouts, ie, buying another company, with a loan) Debt based on their shares as collateral. So… when your stock goes down enough… now the lenders want … more stocks, more money, a higher interest rate, whatever is built in to their exact contracts.

    Basically, we’re probably gonna start to see a bunch of people and companies get margin called.

    And that will further intensify panic and general chaos.

    (Elon Musk in particular is extremely likely to be utterly fucked by this kind of scenario)

    EDIT: Whoah BOY its monday now, update time!

    https://seekingalpha.com/news/4429010-asia-stocks-panic-selling-tariffs-circuit-breakers

    Multiple Asian markets blew out their circuit breakers and halted trading.

    Japan, SK, Taiwan at least had this happen.

    US and EU markets, as far as I can tell, are dropping/dropped hard, but have not yet hit any circuit breaket halts.

    The SP500 did momentarily enter Bear Market territory, which is defined as a 20% drop from the last high… which was in mid February.

    So uh yeah, welcome to Great Depression 2.0 everyone!








  • Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:

    Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.

    MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)

    Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.

    … Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.

    The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.

    … It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.

    All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.

    Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.

    But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.

    Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.