Trump uses trial balloons in all his policy ideas. It's a negotiating tactic he took from the world of financial deals. If the trial balloon fails, he reverses himself. I wish more people understood this and also understood that PUSHING BACK ON ALL HIS TRIAL BALLOONS would change his policies.
He walks back his policies ALL THE TIME. Most of us who were paying attention expected him to walk back the tariffs too. I just wish people pushed back like the stock market did on immigration and the other unhinged policies he announces.
For instance: Can we start pushing back against THIS? Can we have a meltdown like the stock market did about THIS?
I think her team knows her core audience is aspirational girlbosses with no self-awareness and more ambition than ability tbh. This would have been a great idea if The Wing were still around and "ladyboss" was still a word, circa 2017. Hillary and her pantsuits etc. It was all part neoliberal movement for respectability politics for women centered around telling them that they should copy patriarchal, individualist and imperialist modes of power.
But after Covid disrupted work, this audience is gone. I mean, Girlboss in Chief Sheryl Sandberg is unemployed and embroiled in a sex scandal. The hustle is over.
It will also be interesting to see how she tries to monetize conversation, which she's really not good at. Her previous podcast series was a dud.
On her cooking show, she demonstrates herself to be abrupt and tactless. (for instance, putting numbers on the jars of preserves she sends to friends, causing them to wonder what their friendship rank is; bragging about taking her husband's made-up last name while talking to a pretty famous single unmarried mother; never asking any of the guests about themselves, as a good hostess would be required to.) Maybe try another form of media, like visuals.
Starting a podcast about corporate women's entrepreneurialism while a recession devastates women's savings and social support and an authoritarian government persecutes women for "DEI" is wildly out of touch. I don't think she has good advisers, at minimum.
I'm really torn on the M e g h a n M a r k l e discourse because on the one hand, her whole transparently fake persona and California girlboss-earth-mother attempts set my teeth on edge, but on the other hand it's absolutely wild to see how she has white women almost literally hissing with envy because she married their white prince. She's annoying BUT they also clearly want to tear her down in self-referential terms that scream of envy and racism
This discourse is not consumable at all because everyone who does a lil video about her flaws is clearly seething that they married some ox who abandoned them in the kitchen instead of a prince who thinks they hung the moon and buys them a home with a berry patch in the back
It's obvious to me that M e g h a n did not grow up with a lot of financial privilege at all (despite her social privilege from good schools) and her overly refined accent and cooking while wearing Loro Piana is a put-on that she created during one of the most spectacular examples of social mobility in our time. But I think she's basically cursed by trying to demonstrate how to be an ideal rich wife (the same thing that made Martha Stewart -- who also did not grow up with financial privilege -- a target of mockery for years before her renaissance). It's like she wanted to be liked and admired and just stumbled onto some kind of white-bourgeois-lady turf war
there's a man across from me dictating a text out loud to his girlfriend where he says he will not give her a ring or make it official but "you have my love" and quoting scripture then saying "as a male I have privileges that the female does not have." i would like to throw something at him on her behalf
"you are loved by me ... you took the necessary steps to earn my love" brother I hate this guy soooo much.
apparently she proposed to him. "Because we are not next to each other, I can't prove my love to you." I can't believe how long and detailed this text is and also how much he has raised my loathing
I don't want to freak anyone out but personally I do not think this crash will go away. I've reported on tech crashes (and financial crashes) in the past and my take is that this is going to drag our unofficial recession into a real recession really fast. More layoffs in tech, higher unemployment generally, not great times ahead.
Usually sudden shocks (like China releasing DeepSeek) don't lead to longer crashes or recessions... UNLESS the shock is letting the air out of some very overinflated tires. We've had overinflated tires for years now.
The market has been at record high after record high for a long time. The tech bubble never popped, or even paused, even when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.
To me it feels like the long, slow grinding crash of the 2008 financial crisis, which actually started in 2006 with a VERY high peak followed by lower valuations on mortgage instruments, and then came to a head only after two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed in mid-2007. (The shock that revealed the overinflated tires). From there it was bailouts and a slow roll to disaster until March 2008 when Bear Stearns itself collapsed due to lack of market confidence.
This is how real crashes come: Slowly, then all at once.
The Bear Stearns hedge funds for those who want to walk down memory lane
I didn't tweet this at the time (because the K h i v e is comprised of psychopaths) but my strong feeling was that Doug would leave K a m a l a after she lost. I don't think she's initiating anything. My impression from the stories he told about them meeting -- how dazzled he was about her job, how he mentioned it constantly -- is that he was hooked on the status her career gave him and without that status, he would seek it elsewhere.
Not that she's not insufferable (as we have now seen) but he is sketchy as hell imo.
The energy they always gave me was of those couples who say they "love to entertain" and the meaning is that they can't stand spending too much time around each other.