Yes, this is the entire thing about why so many people who support Trump do it: he gives them permission to be their worst selves

https://twitter.com/laurarbnsn/status/2053215223616614496

A lot of people want an excuse to be completely narcissistically selfish and not to care about other people. This is the function of Trump, it's the function of Zionism, and it's the function of so many structures that have popped up to try to destroy the power of empathy and compassion, which are both the only true liberators from systems of oppression. Empathy and compassion are the roots of solidarity. That's why we are seeing so much narcissistic selfish cruelty become justified to try to kill solidarity decisively and open the runway fully for capitalist oppression and exploitation.

honestly, I'm not sold on the idea that he's "pivoting." I think a lot of people thought he would be socialist Santa and practice some perfect form of lab grown leftist politics, but he's working within the system.

To me, it's pretty obvious that his opening gambits exist to disarm the most vengeful narcissists who could interfere with his agenda. Hochul, Trump, Jeffries.

If he shuts them up, he has a lot more room to do what he needs to do. If he doesn't shut them up or is openly hostile, they're going to kneecap him at every turn.

https://x.com/moorehn/status/1993528674944258094

he's keeping Tisch because Hochul and Trump wanted Tisch -- in fact, made her a dealbreaker -- and they were likely to make his life hell if he didn't keep her on. So he has to think of the other 8 million people he's not responsible for, and decide what's more important. I think it's a mistake to see this as coalition building with centrists. It's more that he's throwing them a bone to shut them up so he can do his work.

Burry is the investor who correctly called the housing crisis (The Big Short was about him.)

To explain what Burry is saying here:

When companies announce earnings, they do not just announce revenues or profits.

They also have to subtract the depreciation and amortization of their assets -- meaning, what they own that has lost value over the previous 3 months or year because it's old or outdated.

Burry is saying that tech companies are making their earnings look bigger by refusing to subtract the depreciation of their assets correctly.

For instance, the chips used in AI are good for about two (2) years. Then, inevitably, they lose value because faster chips get invented.

The way tech giants are accounting for their giant chip purchases, they're saying that those chips will last double or triple the time -- four years, or even 6 years according the chart below.

This means the tech giants are subtracting less risk from ageing chips to make it look like they're keeping more of their revenues over time. That misstates their financial position and misleads investors.

It's a big allegation because these companies are spending *billions of dollars* on these chips.

https://x.com/moorehn/status/1987927113253667094

The debate has started:

https://twitter.com/thexcapitalist/status/1987942192170590442

This is true and you can see it writ large in much of the DC press corps: They align with establishment power for status and safety and think it's tragically funny that anyone else would refuse to do so out of mere personal disinclination. It's a calculation. I think a lot of them grew up around authoritarian figures where aligning with power was the only way to thrive and they see the "suffering" (poverty, lack of promotions, lack of status) among those who refuse to align with power as confirmation that breaking with the status quo is personally dangerous. What they cannot conceive of is someone who is "successful" (as defined in shallow ways) who has also broken with establishment thinking. This fries their brains entirely.

My theory is that they were both running brothels and essentially this was a fight between pimps

https://twitter.com/samstein/status/1950263483335135529

I think Trump also bought pageants to collude with modeling agencies in pushing young beauty queens/models to supplement their income with sex work

Can someone compile a thread of every liberal now denouncing the famine with their previous tweets and statements full of bloodlust for the genocide? I would do it but I have all the liberals and the pro-genocide people blocked

To everyone asking how all these celebs are "Benjamin Buttoning":

1. Deep plane face lifts (they pull the muscle up, instead of the skin)

2. Fat replacement with a fat matrix donated from corpses (true story)

https://twitter.com/popbase/status/1916802180498989166

The corpse-fat is an injectable called Renuva and it basically provides the scaffolding to hold fat under the skin for years, plumping up undereye hollows, temples, etc. That's why the celebs look younger as well as lifted.

theaestheticguide.com/injectables/a-…

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jo…

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Amanda Palmer. I'm seeing some reluctance to attribute responsibility to Palmer, because her entire shtick is using feminism as a cover for her self-interest.

But now we have more information about how she moves. She is not a feminist.

She exploits other women financially, taking their labor and not paying them.

She earned their trust and swore to be their friend and advocate, then sent over a dozen women to a rapist who she knew to be a dark, abusive monster.

She is a rape survivor herself, and built her public image and her art around the pain from that -- but when a woman who was raped BY AMANDA'S HUSBAND came to her, she told her she was basically just one of 14 other women who had the same experience -- meaning Palmer knew Gaiman was an alleged serial rapist and an abuser -- and dismissively, dehumanizingly called her "another suicidal mass left on my doorstep."

Then she refused to talk to the police, so that the victim could never receive justice.

The allegations against Gaiman are that he's a rapist. Palmer would be the accomplice.

All this horror ...why? So that Palmer keep her social position and her big houses. Which she has now lost to the same rapist she spent years covering for and enabling.

Amanda Palmer is not a fucking feminist. Do not defend her on feminist grounds. She should be in jail.

Indigenous Americans -- Navajo and Apache -- created an effective way to limit wildfires. It worked for centuries.

Their method would have addressed the same conditions that led to the Palisades fires: Overgrown brush from several wet years becoming tinder in a dry year.

The U.S. government has never adopted their methods.
Link here:

science.org/content/articl…

I think the way New Orleans officials are emphasizing the safety of tourism while several local citizens died is gross. But I also understand where their fear comes from. After Katrina, New Orleans was completely abandoned by the government and by tourists for years. It made it that much harder, and took that much longer, to rebuild and repair the city. The trauma of being financially abandoned is really strong in that city, and it's for a reason imo. Tourism brings about $10 billion a year to New Orleans, and accounts for around 75,000 jobs there. It's close to half the city's overall revenue -- an enormous percentage. A drop in tourism would be catastrophic for many New Orleans residents who work directly in hospitality -- and that's before you get to store owners, who are mostly mom-and-pop shops especially in the French Quarter.

bizneworleans.com/tourism-is-eco…

I just want to editorialize here and say that choosing this route will backfire on them. They chose terrorism so they could increase the murder charge, but what that does is also bring up the ideology behind the shooting. And if they're going to try to defend healthcare insurance abuses on ideological grounds, they will absolutely create a far worse situation in public opinion than already exists. If prosecutors are planning to defend the healthcare insurance system on ideological grounds...good luck

https://twitter.com/kaoticleftist/status/1869389780313928172

I'm sorry but I am deeply skeptical that a guy who planned out an audacious killing to the second, wearing imperceptible clothing, was caught at a McDonald's with a manifesto and the same fake ID he used at a hostel. Come onnnn. It's not that people don't make mistakes, it's that a guy who plans an audacious assassination with almost no evidence is not a guy who's going to carry around a manifesto with him

Because it revealed who she really is. Disrespectful, snotty, deeply unserious. It exposed her frivolity and her arrogance completely. A total lightweight, unprepared to deal with serious issues. Zero gravitas. Just ego.

https://twitter.com/taliaotg/status/1853969785744203993

People who are reflexively dismissive about accountability and apologies are deeply dangerous and unworthy of holding a high position. It tells you EVERYTHING about a person.

Watching a video of a man who bought a $15,000 house in France (the cheapest house for sale in France) and he recorded 30 days of renovations, which involve demolishing the entire inside down to the studs. Maybe more than the studs, because he had for remove walls, ceilings, floors, and joists. I am not exaggerating when I say I started this with very low expectations and now I think it's the most compelling thing I've watched in months Really starting to understand those older Italian men who gather outside construction sites every day just to watch the proceedings

I saw a TikTok from a young woman about how she paid $1000 to go to a yacht event in Monaco and people invited her to parties on some yachts "because I was dressed to impress...you can dress to show you bring value to the yacht."

And I don't know if anyone will tell her that cute dresses are not why young women are invited to yacht parties. She's getting cooked in the comments -- but only because other young women don't think the dress is cute, not because anyone is pointing out the obvious fact that inviting young women with no money onto yachts is the equivalent of "ladies night" at a bar. The young women -- in any dress -- are there to bring the old men in.