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FischerKing

@FischerKing64

Apr 8

A lot of hedge funds and other large institutions that trade securities use borrowed $$. If the equities/stocks/securities they buy fall below a certain value - they get a margin call. Meaning they have to pay up. A lot of screeching is b/c some people are losing real money here.

Of course the reason they've been doing this in such large amounts is because low interest rate environments mean they can get basically free $$ and then gain a higher return. They might borrow at 1% and hope to gain 8% on a trade. This has gone on for years.

It's just been a giant casino to a large degree. Funds playing with cheap money, making big gains, driving the market up artificially. Sometimes they go the other way, and try to drive a stock down. You saw that with GameStop a few years ago, when a bunch of people drove the price up to screw the short sellers. There was panic then too.

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FischerKing

@FischerKing64

Apr 2

Reading this college applications, essays - it's all pretty ridiculous. 4.5 GPAs. 1580 SAT scores. This club and that club. Volunteer work at the hospital or homeless shelter. Math competition.

What a complete waste of a childhood.

It's not just that this is unnecessary, just part of an arms race to get into "the good school." It's that we are completely directing every aspect of someone's life, snuffing out their own potential creativity, so they can get a "good job."

People like to point out the tech geniuses who built businesses in their garage and dropped out of college. Bill Gates and Paul Allen had time on their hands. If they had been directed in all aspects of their lives in this way they would have been competent corporate executives.

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FischerKing

@FischerKing64

Apr 1

Immigrants "do the jobs Americans won't do" not just because of low pay - but because immigrants do them. It becomes a class marker, and Americans feel embarrassed to do them even at reasonable pay. The pay and class thing become a spiral downward.

This will be a tough nut to crack - reinvesting jobs Americans haven't done for a long time with some dignity. It might not even be possible at this point. But I remember driving west years ago and seeing white teenagers working fast food restaurants in North Dakota, which hadn't been a thing in NY for a while. So it's not totally impossible.

The issue with mass immigration and tariffs - reversing them to transform the economy and mindsets - is that this is a project of a generation or two. If Vance loses in 2028, the left and neo-liberals are likely to reverse everything done in this coming 4 years, and render any return impossible.

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FischerKing

@FischerKing64

Mar 31

I don't think there is a "woke left" or a "woke right." I think there are bizarre reactions to conducting an experiment of throwing people together from all parts of the world in the name of economic expediency without ever asking how people would react to it. Multiculturalism isn't natural, doesn't make people happy, and is a challenge to overcome.

When it comes to "racism" - this goes in both directions. People who are the main inhabitants of a place will have racial reactions to feeling that they're being overwhelmed - and the "newcomers" express very similar sentiments. Anti-white rhetoric is every bit as common as "racism" against people who come in.

Even things like the trans craze, which has probably a thousand causes, is related to this total cacophony we've created in previously stable societies in one sense - it is an effort at control. A lot of trans kids are autistic, in need of a sense of order and control - and apparently one way to achieve this is by controlling their own bodies, identities and destinies. This sounds crazy, it does to me too - but there is some literature on it is my understanding.

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FischerKing

@FischerKing64

Oct 21, 2024

1/McDonald’s has had an interesting trajectory. If you watch a film from ca 1980, there are scenes of trim privileged white kids hanging out there (Ordinary People). Kids of doctors and lawyers. Well into the 90s it was still a place that middle class kids held a birthday party.

2/Somewhere around 2000, the marketing shifted to blacks. They showed teens on stoops in Brooklyn calling it ‘Mickey Ds.’ This coincided with the total disappearance of the white middle class birthday party - and the set aside party room.

3/Some time later, the marketing didn’t seem targeted at any group at all. It just focused on tasty food that was almost certainly very bad for you. The market was lower class people who were overweight.

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FischerKing

@FischerKing64

Oct 17, 2024

The unipolar moment resulted in nearly all American foreign policy officials believing they can just go around the world and do anything they want. They were not challenged in this thinking, and now they mostly are incapable of thinking in a new multipolar world. They've become mediocrities trapped in groupthink, despite all the obvious failures.

Something similar seems to have happened in the political parties. An America on top of the world produced the same kind of politician in both parties who thinks we can just borrow $$ endlessly, bully the entire world endlessly, that the debt doesn't matter. And all the real disputes have centered on fairly trivial social issues. Boys in the girls bathroom is important, but not as important as $35 trillion in debt.

On the GOP side, Trump upended this trajectory. He points out things aren't looking so good at home, that the old way of thinking isn't working. He took out the Bush dynasty. And now you have all kinds of people from JD Vance to DeSantis who are new, more effective kinds of figures.

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