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MonkeyCigarette

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  1. Also Elon owned Senator Karen on Twitter this week in a hilarious way. How do we not love him again now that he’s redeemed himself from that horrible Wario skit on SNL: “Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.” Elon then clapped back by sharing a Fox News article that calls her a “fraud” with the caption: “Stop projecting”. “You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend’s angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason,” he added. Then, he wrote: “Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen.”
  2. https://youtube.com/watch?v=8lMOL7GaPWI
  3. Dude I don't know that number, I was making a guess. Call it .02% if it makes you feel better and sure I'll devote some time to dig up some numbers later, but funny how my back of the napkin math is called to question but Brisket's isn't.
  4. As an aside, how great is The Atlantic? Probably my favorite read, does the best job of striking a chord of fair and balanced.
  5. Yes, I know. That's why I said that and was clarifying my stance from hers which was the unvaxxed should be persona non grata at any hospital regardless of classification and status.
  6. I think they can go to private hospitals or clinics where they have to pay premiums, but any public hospital should be off limits.
  7. Biden Won Big With a Bad Hand Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is taking heat for sinking, at least for the moment, the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Act. But before pointing fingers, Democrats should use those fingers to count votes. The past may cast some light on the politics of narrow majorities. Republicans had a bad election in 2000. They lost two seats in the House, reducing their majority in that chamber to a precarious three votes. Republicans lost four seats in the Senate, resulting in a 50–50 tie. Vice President Dick Cheney was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, just as Vice President Kamala Harris is now. And, of course, George W. Bush entered the presidency under the cloud of the Florida recount, having lost the national popular vote to Al Gore. This outcome severely limited the new President Bush’s governing options, especially before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reshaped U.S. politics. Bush shrank his legislative agenda to two broadly popular items: first, a tax cut that passed the House with 230 votes and the Senate with 58; then an education bill that passed early in 2002 with 381 votes in the House and 87 in the Senate. Like Biden’s ambitions, the Bush administration’s first-year agenda was beholden to the least reliable members of the president’s party in the Senate. In 2001, those were Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and James Jeffords of Vermont. Jeffords would switch parties in 2001, tipping the partisan balance of the Senate. The whims and vagaries of those two officeholders transfixed and baffled the Bush White House just as the moods and caprices of Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema transfix and baffle the Biden White House now. Bush took office at a more placid time than Biden did. He arrived with a less ambitious legislative agenda too. But if the times have changed, the grammar of power has not. “When I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner.” That was Washington Irving’s advice to travelers. It’s good advice for politicians too. Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful. In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57. He signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill in March 2021: $1,400-per-person direct payments, $350 billion in aid to state and local governments, an extension of supplemental unemployment-insurance benefits and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. He signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in November. He signed some 75 executive orders, many of them advancing liberal immigration goals. He’s also won confirmation for some 40 federal judges, more than any first-year president since Ronald Reagan, and twice as many as Donald Trump confirmed in his first year with a 54-vote Senate majority. But sooner or later, Biden was bound to bump into congressional constraints. Indeed, from a progressive point of view, it’s a miracle that he did not bump into those constraints even sooner than he did. Had Trump accepted defeat in November with any kind of grace or decency, Republicans would surely have held at least one of the two Georgia Senate seats, and President Biden would have had to negotiate his agenda past Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It’s bad psychology and worse political science to use electoral outcomes to make grand pronouncements about public opinion. But if we should be very careful in our statements about what voters wanted, we can easily see what the electoral system delivered. That system delivered a decisive repudiation of the Trump presidency in the presidential election in November, then a repudiation of the Trump post-presidency in Georgia in January. Beyond that, however, the system did not deliver the opportunity for progressive change that it delivered in 2008, let alone in 1964 or 1932. Instead of fulminating against Manchin for calling quits when he did, Democrats might want to reflect on how much of their agenda got enacted only thanks to the team spirit of a senator from a state that Trump won in 2020 by 39 points. Anybody can win a poker game with a good hand. It takes a real maestro to play a bad one. Biden won a bigger pool with worse cards than any Democratic president ever. He won that pool because Manchin gave Biden more loyalty under more adverse conditions than the moderate Democrats of 2009 gave to President Obama. Perhaps it’s not the nature of Democrats to appreciate the glass half full. But half full it is. The Democrats have a year remaining in the present Congress. That’s too little time to waste on recrimination, but time enough to secure voting rights, to accelerate the shift to carbon-zero fuels, and to complete and publish the investigation into the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. A rebuff is not a retreat. It’s a sign to proceed in a different direction.
  8. Wait, what? You think negative growth rate is good for the economy? Or did you misuse “do wonders for”?
  9. I agree that if you decide to go unvaxxed you should be means tested (e.g. have a high threshold of insurance and/or liquidity to cover your medical costs in a worst case out of pocket) and not allowed public hospitals (E.R., etc.).
  10. Washington, on only 5 days of rest after losing to the Eagles and essentially ending their playoff hopes, should come in dejected, tired and give up if down early, right?
  11. Other people’s freedom to choose is so offensive to some people.
  12. For those who are healthy, fit and young, I’m not sure your numbers jibe. That said, I agree with your perspective and it’s why I am vaccinated, but I do understand and sympathize with the “Joe Rogan Defense”, let’s call it, of “I’d rather get Covid and get over it because it won’t hurt me and I’m more worried about an unforced error I.e. vaccine injuries.”
  13. What about vaccine injury? Half the world is vaccinated, you think there aren't going to be some unfortunate outcomes for, albeit, a very, very small % of people? I mean, you give 7bn people a piece of spearmint gum and there are going to be injuries and long-term issues for a very, very small contingent. It's very easy to assume you will be the 98%, and I did and do, but it sucks for the 2% who "win" the lottery and end up with an auto-immune issue or worse, because their body doesn't handle the vaccine well. I, for one, am both fully vaccinated (2 shots, no booster) and sympathetic to those folks and generally default to a policy of "mind my own business and give people the freedom to make their own decisions". But I've noticed a lot of people these days find it really easy to make personal decisions with other peoples bodies and spend other people's money.
  14. I think this is the best way to describe the last few pages: everyone agrees that things are broken, but we disagree in the direction that things are broken because our values and goals are different (simplifying):
  15. "1973 was the first year where it became clear the economy was walking down a new path. The recession that began that year brought unemployment to the highest it had been since the 1930s Inflation surged. But unlike the post-war spikes, it stayed high. Short-term interest rates hit 8% in 1973, up from 2.5% a decade earlier. And you have to put all of that in the context of how much fear there was between Vietnam, riots, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John and Bobby Kennedy. It got bleak. America dominated the world economy in the two decades after the war. Many of the largest countries had their manufacturing capacity bombed into rubble. But as the 1970s emerged, that changed. Japan was booming. China’s economy was opening up. The Middle East was flexing its oil muscles. A combination of lucky economic advantages and a culture shared by the Greatest Generation shared – hardened by the Depression and anchored in systematic cooperation from the war – shifted when Baby Boomers began coming of age. A new generation that had a different view of what’s normal and expected hit at the same time a lot of the economic tailwinds of the previous two decades ended. Everything in finance is data within the context of expectations. One of the biggest shifts of the last century happened when the economic winds began blowing in a different, uneven direction, but people’s expectations were still rooted in a post-war culture of equality. Not necessarily equality of income, although there was that. But equality in lifestyle and consumption expectations; the idea that someone earning a 50th percentile income shouldn’t live a life dramatically different than someone in the 80th or 90th percentile. And that someone in the 99th percentile lived a better life, but still a life that someone in the 50th percentile could comprehend. That’s how America worked for most of the 1945-1980 period. It doesn’t matter whether you think that’s morally right or wrong. It just matters that it happened. Expectations always move slower than facts. And the economic facts of the years between the early 1970s through the early 2000s were that growth continued, but became more uneven, yet people’s expectations of how their lifestyle should compare to their peers did not change." This is a really good read: https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/how-this-all-happened/
  16. post WW2 prosperity was artificial and never meant to be permanent at scale.
  17. Hi Tantric. Hope you are well. I nominate you for King of us all.
  18. You and I fundamentally disagree about almost everything, but I appreciate this response.
  19. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/investing/elon-musk-11-billion-dollars-taxes/index.html Musk received 25.5 million split-adjusted options in 2012, and had 22.9 million of those options vest over subsequent years as Tesla hit certain operational and financial targets. But he didn't have to pay taxes on those options until he used them to buy shares. Since that block of options is due to expire in August 2022, Musk finally started the process of turning them into shares of stock in early November. And he documented those trades in SEC filings, as company insiders are required to do. When he exercises the options, the value of the newly purchased shares are taxed as income — a 40.8% rate for someone in Musk's tax bracket.
  20. Just read that Musk's effective tax rate was 40%. What more do you people want? 40%, wow.
  21. Yes. I think most people, at least in the last page or so, are more or less on the same page and can get behind what you just said. Where I am confused is do we live in the idiot world that neither side wants to quantify value for people so they can understand the benefits and savings to both society and themselves personally? Or do we live in the idiot world that politicians and strategists haven’t figured out this is a way to create consensus and unity around what are ignorantly divisive programs? Because I 100% believe the math and modeling works for all— the part and parcel— it’s just not being communicated and very few people have the access to the data and the time to create the case.
  22. how do I share it where it's both a) secure so no doxing of anyone and b) i don't need anyone else's personal emails/information? Is there a surly slack channel?
  23. In my youth I ate rare. As I got older medium-rare. In my 30's and beyond I become a medium guy. One of the best steaks I've ever eaten was medium well-- though every time I ordered medium well after that it was horrendous so I am back to medium.
  24. Paypal Mafia and knowing all the Silicon Valley OG's, too.
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