Wish that were true. But wealthy sex pests with outsized political influence are hitting record levels

I will say that this reads like a real Bush Era classico sychophant. You really get the sense his tongue is up in there. It’s cringe, but it’s not phoned in.

Lots of things don’t make sense when you’re drunk

It’s late, I’m drunk, I barely remembered to get the seat up before doing my business, and I’m used to living on my own.

Certain toilets are on the small size for my… equipment. And I periodically find my dongle touching porcelain. This also results in some backspray which is annoying to clean up.

I’ve found it easier and less messy to piss standing. But I also got a fancy bidet for my wife’s Christmas present years ago. It automates the whole task of opening and closing, does a bit of self-cleaning, and saves us a few bucks on toilet paper month-to-month. So its less of an issue.

We have a toddler in the house. We keep the lid down because it gives us a few extra seconds in case he slips past us into the restroom and wants to splash around.

Only thing you can do is crack a door and take a peak.

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

Epstein’s interactions with Clinton can be traced to the early 1990s. After donating $1,000 to Bill Clinton’s presidential election campaign in 1991, Epstein donated $10,000 to the White House Historical Association in 1993 and, accompanied by Maxwell, attended a donors’ reception hosted by President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

…

Clinton and Epstein appeared to be on friendly terms; a photo from 2002 shows them together during a stop in Brunei, and in an interview that year Clinton praised Epstein as a “highly successful financier” and “a committed philanthropist”.

…

According to one of his lawyers, Epstein was “part of the original group” that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative, a flagship program of Clinton’s philanthropic work. This relationship extended to Maxwell as well – she and Epstein were invited guests at events early in the Clinton Foundation era, and Maxwell was noted as the likely social “glue” connecting Epstein to Clinton’s world.

none of them should have more than a few percent in them

Tesla makes up 2.3% of the S&P 500 and 4.5% of NASDAQ. Then you have business downstream of Tesla - Luminar Technologies sells the majority of it’s LIDAR systems to Tesla, Hertz’s EV fleet is plurality Tesla, Panasonic co-owns Gigafactory 1.

I was more speaking of the lenders who enable Musk’s bullshit like buying Twitter or fucking around with our elections.

They do it so they can be first in the door for future IPOs. JP Morgan has been a close ally of Musk’s for decades. And he’s repaid them with numerous opportunities to resell their debt. The Twitter loan was a small price to pay by comparison.

😏

there’s a far bigger gap in intelligence

You’d never know it when you listen to YouTube Atheists talk. It’s all the same reactionary clickbait bigotry we’ve come to expect from the Internet.

Most Bond villains are just eccentric billionaires using Sci-Fi technologies to become trillionaires through commodity speculation.

That’s what Jaime Diamon and Warren Buffett have been doing for the last fifty years.

If you can’t read that as “US are bad guys” that’s on you, brother

Epstein was a major fundraiser for the Democratic party. Trump is the head of the Republican party. And it’s a two party system.

You spend enough time with New Atheists, and you very quickly discover why the movement tripped over its own dick and died back in the '00s.

Christopher Hitchens secularizing the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Sam Harris secularizing Islamophobia, Richard Dawkins secularizing misogyny. Joel Osteen juice and crackers seem far more attractive than some greasy, hollow-eyed Objectivist preaching nihilism and genocide in the name of corporate profits.

Big Tech keeps building smarter devices

Smarter or just louder?

It’d be nice to see the lending market smarten up and tell him to pound sand.

Because the stock valuation has inflated so far beyond the company’s actual revenues, its been pushed into a number of major index funds and become a “must buy” for 401ks and other retail investment accounts. This creates a kind-of self-fulfilling overvaluation as a result. I don’t think there’s any real market mechanism that will devalue Tesla in the near future. Kicking the Tesla tentpole means shaking up the entire S&P 500. Even the mega-hedge funds with the ability to do it don’t have a strong monetary incentive to try.

At the same time, the kind of stock growth Elon is expected to deliver in the next five years is astronomical relative to their core position. Either he’s going to Tulip Mania his company again or he’s going to fall far short of the mark.

I worry he’s going to fuck out space industry in the process of fleecing NASA though.

NASA’s been a contractor’s boondoggle since at least Reagan. The Challenger Disaster can be linked directly back to an outsourcing scandal that was covered up and buried under Reagan in order to keep Thiokol Chemical Corporation (now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman) financially insulated.

I would argue that SpaceX exists precisely because NASA has become a budget of money to be siphoned from. The Space Industry was fucked in the 80s and never really recovered, leading to our reliance on Soyuz rockets for much of the Bush Era and creating an environment at Boeing so toxic that we’ve largely lost our ability to do space flight domestically.

For all the talk of Moon bases and Mars missions, it seems the real money in aerospace is just spewing up endless waves of cheap disposable satellites for commercial communications. That’s going to be the limit of US space technology for the foreseeable future.

Thatcher single-handedly bringing down the last remnants of UK Imperialism from inside 10 Downing Street is the base-est most pro-gamer move in the country’s history. Even Liz Truss and her assassination of Queen Elizabeth II can’t compare.

Also, the machine costs $500B/year to operate and generates less than $2B in gross revenue. So John Shareholder is going to need a multi-trillion dollar bailout in a year or two.