sp3ctr4l

Sorry I may have edited my post since you read it, I quite genuienly mixed up two 20th century right wing ghoul economists.

Milton Friedman, basically the modern godfather of globalist, neoliberal capitalism... aka, the 'Chicago School' of economics, strongly rejected both Marx and Keynes.

Also, pioneered the shock doctrine of massive austerity, union crackdowns and removal of workers rights for the greater population of Chile, by personally advising and greatly influencing the economic policies of Augusto Pinichet, who had just come into power after executing a very violent and bloody right-wing, military junta style coup.

Oh, and Friedman's underlying monetary theory he uses as the basis for his understanding of economics has been pretty much thoroughly refuted, but all the idiot 'free market' conservatives or turbolibs (cough they have almost no differences economically cough) you've ever met who tell you that you are the one who doesn't understand economics ... well they haven't read any of those thorough and well evidenced refutations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman

Just uh, ctrl+f 'criticism of published works' and you can see that basically every kind of economist from all kinds of different economic schools and political ideologies, US economists, non-US economists, have criticized Friedman at essentially every single point of his theory.

...

EDIT:

Wait, no, fuck, that's not Friedman, that's a different right wing ghoul economist, damnit!

Sorry, I do literally get them confused.

This is Murray Rothbard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard

Even more right wing and more bonkers, belonging to the 'anarcho capitalist' Austrian School of economics.

I am so tired, so very tired.

Rothbard was a foundational figure of both the CATO and Mises Institutes, who are somehow even more extremist in their advocacy of no holds barred, free market competition than Friedman, yet they largely fail to have any kind of useful solution to the problem of ... a free market, in capitalism, always tends toward oligopoly and monopoly over time... but they hate the idea of something like an anti trust law that would prevent this, because government bad... but also the mythical perfectly comepetive free market is good and desirable... they just... won't actually advocate anything that could possibly maintain even a semblance of what they claim to love.

(Anarcho Capitalism is extremely confusing in the sense of it not making any practical sense in the vast majority of real world economic cases, it seems mostly to just exist a a sort of self fulfilling virtue signalling ideology?)

The Austrian School also has a very, very strange philosophical basis in what they call 'praxeology', which more or less eschews using actual empirical data and falsifiable theories to understand economics, and instead focuses on using word games to define their economic worldview into existence, and also deride all others as 'internally contradictory'.

...

For whatever reason, a lot of right wing US based economists not only happen to be old bald dudes with glasses... but they love bowties.

Thats probably why Tucker Carlson used to wear one back in the late 90s / early 00s, before Jon Stewart roasted him so badly, on his own show, that I don't think Tucker has worn a bowtie since.

.Apparently most subpoenas for information are in fact signed by the attorneys. Only if the opposing side or the reciever wish to challenge it does the judge get involved.

Yes the entire point of the typical subpoena process is that everything goes through the judge who then lets the other legal team know, because pretrial discovery procedures are massively influential as to how a case can later play out when its in a further stage of trial.

For a great example of this, see how badly Alex Jones got fucked because he (and his lawyers) kept stalling and lying during the discovery process.

So it doesn't seem like him signing it is abnormal. News stories do mention that the court date didn't exist. I imagine that is probably common as well if the date hasn't been set. But maybe not.

No, I think this is the core of your confusion.

Read the entire complaint the Defense submitted.

I linked the actual pdf of the whole thing in my main post.

Read the entire couthousenews article I also linked and quoted from.

The vast, vast amount of media outlets covering this story are:

1. Obviously downplaying tons of details that make the DA look bad

2. Frankly, are written by people with less expertise and knowledge of this level of intricacy of the legal system than you or I.

...

The Defense asserts that:

The Prosecution served Aetna with a subpoena, which has a specific court date set for them should they not comply.

That date did not, does not, and never did exist within the system of the Clerk of the Court.

What that means is the Prosectution did not make the Clerk, the Judge, nor anyone else aware of the fact that they had subpoena'd Aetna.

This also means they falsely threatened Aetna with a specific court appearance date that did not exist, was not real, was totally fabricated.

...

Yes, this technically is a 'procedural mistake', but only in the sense of entirely not filing your tax returns for 5 years is an 'accounting mishap'.

It is an egregious affront to, again, the concept of a fair trial, because it demonstrates a willful and intentional lie.

They intimidated Aetna with a fabricated threat.

I didn't think you were arguing that, no worries m8.

I was just trying to throw in some relevant numbers to attempt a more realistic estimate of the situation.

I agree with you that the 60% figure for BNPL is not actually evidenced, and is likely an exageration, so I tried to do the author's work better than they did and come up with a more defensible figure.

I used to be a copy editor for a while, and oh man, yeah, it absolutely annoys me to no end when a person tries to argue in a direction I generally agree with, but they do so sloppily, with bad citations, logical leaps, lack of approoriate levels of knowledge leading to them making inferences and deductions that do not actually follow.

The secret ingredient to coax lead to transmute into gold is the horrific suffering of the wicked.

You gotta keep your ratios on point, and make sure the bile and phlogiston levels are all in balance as well.

In American schools?

Normal public schools?

Economics is an elective, only available at fairly good schools, usually only taken by overachievers.

Most US Public schools don't even teach the basics of taxes or finances as it applies to an average person who is going to like, work a job that is taxed, buy a car with a loan.

Our education system has been intentionally destroyed by Republican s for decades, the result is that roughly within +/- 2 years of when I graduated college... US average adult literacy rate has been plummeting.

The average US adult now reads at a 6th grade level, average math skills are also terrible.

Uneducated people are easier to lie to and trick.

Oh yeah, absolutely, it is ludicrous when people do that.

If you have decent sidewalks, intetsections that are not a 1/2 mile apart, and god forbid, regular low grade inclines at crossings and other places, so that a wheel chair bound person could actually get around?

Well then blamo, throw a back pack on the frame of your chair/scooter, now you can actually go to a local bodega and buy some groceries!

Makes it easier for people who use a cane or crutches, or have a non obvious outwardly presenting neurological or muscular condition of some kind, etc.

But, US infrastructure broadly isn't ADA compliant in the poorer areas seriously disabled people most commonly live... and we literally can't, or struggle much more seriously in physically getting to an actual town hall.

Fucking... after a two months of aquatherapy, well now all I have the option to do is show up for basically the night swim at the therapy pool.

My problem is not that I need directed care ... I was taught the excercizes/stretches, learned them, remembered them. I do the ones I can at home, out of a pool, every damned day.

The problem is it costs 5 dollars, in cash only, to attend.

I can't fucking get to an ATM!

I told them this and they just said uh well you'll figure it out.

Nope, never did.

There are no ATMs within over a mile of a walking roundtrip from me.

And the sidewalks don't even exist near where I live, and/or they are cratering into sinkholes or erupting out of the ground. No joke, there's one spot where the ground expanded and the sidewalk is entirely snapped in half, at about 40 degree angles.

But at this point, I am extremely used to falling through the cracks in systems, that are designed based on assumptions... that make no sense to hold, because ostensibly the entire point of these systems is that they are to help those who do not have those basic societal assumptions.

You tell people in these systems this, and every fucking time, no one has ever told them this before, this thought had never occured to them, or they get angry at you.

It is astounding.

As well as working the fields, in the US, producing US food.

I think its something like 70% of farm laborers in the US have now just quit, vanished.

So we're gonna have a famine now, or just replace migrant laborers with imprisoned slave labor, because US farms absolutely cannot afford to operate by paying a wage that would convince nearly any actual 'legal citizen' American to do the work.

('legal citizen' in quotes because apparently citizenship can now just be revoked for... any arbitrary reason)

Shit's extremely difficult, complicated, and dangerous.

Its a fucking crime we call that 'unskilled labor', fucking no way, picking and harvesting as fast as US farms demand is absolutely a complex and difficult skill, the kind of thing that people can and do have competitions of.

Yes, ideally, but the US system is completely rigged in a million different ways to make the emergence of a meaningful 3rd party almost impossible.

The way we award seats, first past the post, is horrendously flawed, and means that if every specifically defined area just barely has a majority... the net effect is a government that is way, way out of sync with what the broader population actually wants.

And this is all rigged by regularly and precisely redrawing all those specific geographic areas to make it so they are either clearly gonna be Rep or Dem, or 51-49 split that looks 'reasonably fair' on paper, but in practice, almost always goes to that 51.

...

Ironically, if Musk goes through with making his own third party... he, the literal richest man in the world, is basically the only person that could possibly pull that off.

That is how huge of a role money plays in US politics.

Takes the richest man in the world to be even maybe potentially able to counteract all the rest of the combined lobbying money of other corporate lobbyists... and thats assuming he was able to basically shut the fuck up and let at least strategically competent people run the whole show.

Going by the probably actually legit poll Elon commissioned to be run about possible support for an Elon party, here are the numbers I ended up with:

(will update in a moment, gotta go find my old post)

...

Ok, heres the full poll:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4pZVo0ZnrQyElZQzdNtt7CQ1zwTypuS/view

Here's some rough, but reasonable math to extrapolate.

If you say half of the 'somewhat likely's actually go for it, then you get this:

Republicans who join Elon Party: 34.25%

Independents who join Elon Party: 28.25%

Democrats who join Elon Party: 13.75%

...

There are more Dem voters than Republicans.

But there are also more independents than either.

Roughly 32% Reps, 33% Dems, 35% Indp.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/

So, throw that in with those previous calcs, and you end up with:

Reps: ~21%

Dems: ~28.5%

Elons: ~25.5%

Indps: ~25%

or, normalized to remove remaining Indps:

Reps: 28%, Dems: 38%, Elons: 34%.

...

So... theoretically, the Dems are still the largest, Elon is now second behind them, and the Reps are now a third party, less popular than having no solid political affiliation.

So if Elon actually goes through with this, I think you end up with a good number of corpo Dems leaving the Dems, so the Dems now have an easier time shifting to the left.

The Reps lose 1/3 of their voters, and basically just become a cult of idiot racist nazis, paleocons, theocrats, MAGA nutjobs.

Elon party ... basically becomes the 'centrist'/libertarian/ancap/corpo party.

Conversely, roughly 10%+ of the US has a negative net worth, ie, they owe more debt than they have assets.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br-202.pdf

And I say 10%+ because this is from 2022, and in general, credit scores have been nose diving and car/home loan delinquencies and tenant evictions have been skyrocketing, since 2022.

We've also got roughly ~40% at least using BNPL for something.

We also know that ... having a negative net wealth is, while not exclusive to poorer people/households in terms of their yearly income... it is much, much more strongly correlated with that.

Though this may change in 'fun' ways now that the housing market is collapsing, bye bye remnants of the 'middle class'!

So anyway, I think a more realistic number for uh... people who are worse than living paycheck to paycheck, people who are actually living paycheck to loan repayment...

Its somewhere between ~10% and ~40%.

... Which is still really fucking bad, as that means something aporoximating a quarter of society sre now just literally debt slaves.

...

So basically, we have:

A ~20% debt slave class,

A ~50% exploited and struggling worker class (who is often in total denial about this being the case),

A ~25% petitie bougeois, decently paid worker / small business owner class (who routinely gaslights and belittles everyone below them, and aspirationally sucks off and praises those above them),

A ~5% capitalist owner class, that gets astonishingly more powerful and wealthy as you increment up each percent and then tenth of a percent, etc.

The SP500 hitting highs is a lot less good news when you realize most of that is simply due to the dollar devaluing against other international currencies.

That isn't asset appreciation, it's currency devaluation.

EDIT:

I m on mobile and don't have the ability to make my own chart with DXY and SP500 normalized to each other, but uh...

https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/%5EDXY/SPY

Look at this in YTD, then in 1Y, then 5Y.

Normally, these two things move in the same dirrction, though the SP500 tends to grow much more when the DXY grows a little.

Well, now, basicslly since Trump took office, they're moving in the opposite direction.

So, yeah, this is now what is called a 'melt up', where stocks climb higher, but not because of any kind of underlying fundamental strength of the US economy but because the USD has lost about 10% of its value compared to the currencies it most often is traded against.

Yeah, I am not only currently in a very, very unwalkable city...

I also literally cannot walk, not much further than uh... half a kilometer, without extreme pain, and that is using a cane and braces.

Fortunately my physical therapy is yielding good results in terms of regaining range of motion and stamina, but it is slow and painful.

That being said, a year ago, I was in a wheel chair.

So the improvements are real.

Hopefully by either the autumn or winter I'll be mostly back to my previous level of mobility, and able to rent a car or moving truck or something and move to a less shitty area.