I keep hearing people say "who does the president owe so much money to?" but we already have such a list of debts and creditors from his financial disclosure form. It's Deutsche Bank, etc. Am I missing something?
Some of the stuff some of you are describing about how you think the Deutsche Bank loans work doesn't make any sense.
I think some of you are referring to this allegation, but this isn't what "underwrite" means, and your source is the non-banker son of a late DB banker. He was also a source for the NYT's David Enrich, who didn't follow this angle, presumably for a reason. forensicnews.net/2020/01/03/tru…
The NYT article on Trump and Deutsche Bank makes DB look shady in a number of ways, some of which involve Russia, but it does not suggest that a Russian bank actually bears the credit risk associated with Trump's DB loans. nytimes.com/2020/02/04/mag…
What David Enrich wrote in the NYT about the source for this article is that "he has a maddening habit of leaping to outrageous conclusions and then bending facts to fit far-fetched theories." And Enrich, keep in mind, has done damaging reporting on Trump and DB.
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People complain about the subway in New York, and certainly it's experienced a decline in public order, but it's still basically a normal place. Whereas the last few times I've taken the subway in LA, it's been horrifyingly gross. latimes.com/california/sto…
This, of course, is a policy choice. Do we want people who can afford to be in a car to be willing to get on transit? Then you have to arrest people who commit crimes on the system.
The Red Line in LA also only runs every 15 minutes, even at rush hour. The system could be genuinely useful -- the traffic on the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour sucks. But they don't run enough service and they've let the conditions become squalid. It's sad.
People who haven't updated their takes on Medicare since ~2007/8 really need to. Health care cost growth has come in way below forecast & reforms have cut some costs. As of '07, Medicare was forecast to be 8% of GDP by 2035. Current forecast is under 5%. joshbarro.com/p/nineties-2-e…
Basically the cost trajectory of the Medicare program looks way less dire than it did, and the choices we need to make to make the program long-run sustainable -- on either the tax or spending side -- have gotten way more modest.
As for Social Security -- its 75-year actuarial deficit is estimated at 1.2% of GDP. It's easier to accurately forecast Social Security spending than Medicare spending. This is manageable with really any of: benefit cuts, tax hikes, and/or deficit financing.
People are making fun of this, but a built in smart scale sounds useful (just add ingredients directly to the bowl and read the weight), and if it works correctly, the feature that automatically adjusts speed as the viscosity of the contents changes would be convenient, too.
Plus, KitchenAid is far and away the brand leader here. A KitchenAid stand mixer is a status symbol of a "serious" home cook. If you want to convince people your machine is differentiated, it might even make sense to take this gimmicky high-tech branding tack.
We have some guest columnists coming in next week while I'm on vacation (and I think they're going to be really good!) but I suspect within a couple of years it'll just be possible to automate the newsletter when I'm away.