The difference is that the punishment under communism would be meted out to people tangentially involved at the lowest level and be totally disproportionate to what happened.
What Vojita is saying, is that at least in the USA it won't be some poor bridge toll guy getting thrown in jail, the owners of the ship will at least have to pay a fine if not be charged in some manner.
And that is correct. Particularly the disproportionate part.
What I am saying is it will basically leave all of the companies and call it 500k salary having actors in the drama *totally unscathed*. The fines will be paid by insurance. Low guys (the pilot? maintenace people?) might get fired. But senior people almost certainly will not be.
It's still 1000000 times better than what their (and their families') fates would be under communism.
Pilot is probably in the clear, ships crew/officers will have a lot to answer for. I don't think the company leaders will come out unscathed though, your reputation is everything and this will make it tough on them even if the insurance/company pays the fines.
"How does one become so jaded and indifferent (if not outright hate) to their own people?"
One goes to the right preschool, the one that required several letters of recommendation drafted before birth, and then continues to the right "country day" school, the right prep school, Dartmouth, and Harvard Business School, all straight through, or maybe with one "gap" year to go tour all the same European tourist attractions and nightclubs as all the other gap year people.
In the early 21st century, it is possible to go through that entire process, living about 25 years of life, without ever talking to a blue-collar person except in the role of a cashier or clerk.
So of course the lines on the expense part of the P&L are going to seem more vivid, more real, and more important than the people they represent.
Extreme and growing social stratification is a major part of why the elites have the ethics (or lack thereof) that they do today. The reasons why it has happened are numerous, but if you follow them far enough, they all come down to physical separation. I'll leave it as an exercise to each person reading this comment to determine how you would best get people of all American social classes at least occasionally occupying the same space at the same time, not in a service context.
My biggest revelation in moving from a wealthy suburban county of Chicago to semi-rural North Carolina is just how economically segregated Northern Illinois is. I am not talking about race, just economic separation along well defined dividing lines from one town or neighborhood to the next one. Unlike where I’m at in NC.
When my friends ask me my perspective on leaving Chicago, I don’t say how much I enjoy the South, I first ask, are you prepared to give up the following things when you move? Because you definitely are giving up good things in Chicagoland that you take for granted and never think about, and you’re never going to find them down here.
What struck me about Chicago when I lived there was how you could have the Orthodox Jews on one side of the street, the Russians on the other, both of them a block from the Indians, and everything just kind of worked.
That was Devon Avenue and a bit unlike most Chicago areas with their established dividing lines. I loved the Indian section on Devon, used to go eat there a lot.
I noticed this when I went to visit my good friend that moved to Owensboro KY last year. His neighborhood is upper middle class but right outside the entrance is lower income apartments. Downtown Owensboro has 1mm+ luxury lofts along the Ohio River and 2-3 blocks over across "Main Street" are essentially wooden shacks at least a hundred years old. I'm a Detroiter and can vouch for the same segregation by economic status.
My suspicion, having done zero research, is probably Indiana money from Evansville across the river. cheaper taxes and real estate prices on the KY side, which is why my buddy lives there. It's a small town compared to what I'm used to, so it's likely a small percentage of overall prices. Just what I saw on Zillow during a dinner "downtown".
Thanks, I always wondered about that. Kentucky is the rare southern state with bad state finances. Coming from Illinois, that tells me that the Kentucky state government is corrupt.
I worked on about three dozen completed M&A transactions during my career as a junior mistmaker. I worked almost exclusively in service of depositories (i.e., banks) of all sizes. That industry is experiencing ongoing consolidation, and it is exceedingly rare for a non-bank entity to purchase a bank. One of the rationales for those deals (and essentially all “strategic” M&A) is “cost saves;” nota bene that “synergies” are incremental revenues unlocked or created by a combination, whereas cost saves are just that - efficiencies.
The process is obvious. If two businesses who do essentially the same thing combine, they will no longer need two of each of the non-revenue generating jobs. When working on the sell-side, one of the tasks that fell to me as a junior grunt was the first cut of taking the target’s employment roster and “right-sizing” it, with the goal of cutting ~30-40% of the seller’s non-interest expense.
Most sellers went out of their way to protect vulnerable employees (single mothers, those with one household income, those with disabled parents, etc.) and cut those who could better afford to lose their job.
2. Keep certain employed based upon them being a welfare case vs. job performance.
3. Merged bank fails due to mismanagement.
4. Seek taxpayer-funded bailout.
Welcome to clown world. Even if this country comes out ahead on paper, we still lose. This is why they swiftly shut down OWS and turned people against each other by way of identity politics.
I suspect your safety net is far larger than some factory worker who got his job shipped overseas due to M&A, and your timeline for getting a new job is far shorter. Beyond that, totally the same.
"Companies exist to (try to) reward shareholders for their largesse."
That's a deeply controversial statement in the law. Some feel it is axiomatic. Others think it's a drastic simplification of something far more complex. And the whole debate often elides the issue of what the *correct* policy about the purpose of companies should be.
My own view, as a lawyer who does a whole lot of corporate governance work, is that we take too narrow a view of what the interests of shareholders actually are. Everyone from MBAs to lawyers to the shareholders themselves assumes that the shareholders obviously just want the highest possible return of cash this quarter, regardless of any other implications. But in the end shareholders are people. Very few people are driven solely by money and the ones who are are almost universally viewed as d!ckbags.
Shareholders, as people, want to live in prosperous and sustainable communities. They want employees who will go out and sing their praises. They want to be involved in selling incredibly cool products and services. They want to give something back once their businesses succeed. Corporations, in promoting the interests of shareholders, should be free to take all of those things and more into account, not just the one interest out of all of them that is the most corrosive and the easiest to hate.
In your M&A scenarios, the most important decision came far before you got involved. and it was in almost all cases a decision focused narrowly on short-term financial interest. The most toxic aspect of Wall Street today is that it zealously enforces that focus in every case, even on businesses where the ordinary shareholders don't share it.
0-Most of these banks are private, or thinly traded (i.e., not really public); this makes deals harder, because you have to value the buyer’s stock (most bank deals are not cash deals), as well.
1-Community bank shareholders ARE invested (in multiple senses of the word) in the services that their banks provide to small communities; I strenuously believe that these services are very valuable, and I would advise most people to bank at a community bank, because they excel in terms of customer service.
2-That said … if you’ve tied up $100K or $1MM or even more of your own money in First State Bank of Somewhere for years (or decades) with little to no dividend, limited if any liquidity, and challenging prospects to create shareholder value going forward (particularly in the face of the tech spend necessary to keep your head above water vs larger institutions), maybe you start to think about a sale? Particularly if leadership is aging and there is no credible successor in place.
3-People are typically risk averse and loss avoidant. They rue the loss of their job to a successful M&A process, but would they feel the same way about being turned down for a “no-show” job? I.e., they’d expect the local community bank to pay them $50K or $100K a year to do just about nothing and create no value. I think most people understand that that’s not realistic.
I'm an ordinary shareholder in as much my 401k has much of my own wealth investment in these companies. For me personally, I want all my investments to return me the most money they can. For my own personal view,.I honestly don't care about a lot of the sustainable.and community crap of these companies. Maybe I'm just jaded but any company I've ever worked for, the investors and CEOs only ultimately care about the stock price and bottom line.
I brought this up just a few days ago on TTAC on an insurance article. I basically said that it's a contradiction for everyday folks to complain about their auto insurance prices when many if not most everyday people have some form of investment into these companies. Everyone over in TTAC sited greed. Damn straight I want my investments into insurance companies to return me the most it can.
When I am a shareholder, I do not give a damn about quarterly results. I want management to be working on a ten-year time horizon so I can give them my money and forget about it for a while.
Meanwhile management incentives ARE for quarterly results. This is not for my benefit.
My counterpoint is this: Much of what is done by corporations and wealthy people is legal only because they wrote the law to make it legal. To take a rather unimportant example, the only reason that Ticketmaster is allowed to exist is because they crippled the FCC. The only reason poorly maintained ships manned by near slaves and sailed under flags of convenience are allowed in US waters is because the people you are defending wrote laws to make it possible.
Indeed - a corporation’s purpose is to deliver and maximize shareholder value. However, isn’t this a far broader topic than the role of a corporation? Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. I don’t think your point really gets to the heart of the issue, which in my mind isn’t why corporations function the way they do, but rather the broader macroeconomic policies which allow corporations to function the way they do in the #currentyear.
Not sure I agree, at least as a millenial of the milennial class. Wealth continues to be what it was (only amplified) but the explanantion you provided doesn't jive even slightly with the actual people I know who went to the exact schools you mentioned. Maybe they're out of touch, but they lean toward liking america even if they perform leftist obeisance on whatever conscious level.
The people *truly* disemboweling the industry in the nation... are the same people who funded Reagan.. and Clinton.. And yes Biden's political careers. It's not even partisan, the political class are their lackeys. They don't care about America or think of themselves as americans. It's just a profit center.
"I think they're just deeply, deeply out of touch and clueless."
This is charitable - and the Lord commands us to be charitable. Are they out of touch? We couldn't be more agreed. We differ on whether they're clueless or malicious.
10 million Americans having decent factory jobs would not realistically threaten these people. But they act as if such MFG base was a threat and don't *just* ship the jobs away for money but *as if they viewed the competing political power center of manufacturing to be a threat requiring neutralization.*
IMO this qualifies as malice. Without taking anything out of context, you could pick an example at random from yesterday's newspaper: let's go with Larry Summers. His ideas about economics & manufacturing policy have picked this country barer than bones in a desert. He didn't have to do it. And he is far too smart to be called clueless.
Perhaps his biggest crime was meekly stepping down from his post at Harvard instead of standing up to the feminist harridans. Perhaps if he had taken a stance against the ideological totalitarians instead of being a pussy, it might have been a watershed moment.
Perhaps we should bring back the military draft. A U.S. Army unit during WWII would have had men from all walks of life. I'm not naive, the affluent, educated, and connected probably had an easier entry into the officer corps, and yes, because of Woodrow Wilson the military was racially segregated - but even the black units were diverse in terms of socio-economics.
The United States of America made the very CONCEPTS of aristocracy and monarchy obsolete in the late 18th Century. We've since proved, in ten thousand ways and in one-tenth the time, that a nation of free commoners makes an utter, hilarious mockery of the greatest empires and all their trappings & pretensions.
The world's kings and their minions have been trying to undo that accomplishment ever since.
Many of them are not, or do not consider themselves to be, americans.
And this is per their own admission, under government name, in books/on twitter/in fawning ny mag profile.
At this point many of the most powerful people are international. On numerous different axes it would be difficult to append the label "american" to them at all
You presume that our elites ever saw you or me as their own people. In the sense that their ancestors essentially actually owned our ancestors, perhaps. But they are not your countrymen. We the proles have to learn the same lesson Franklin learned in the cockpit and set ourselves on a course of rejecting all the powers of popes and princes. Especially the ones that claim to be our countrymen one moment and then shove a bayonet into our spine the next.
It's important to remember that the cranes that would have unloaded the containers are probably made by a Chinese company (in China) or a finnish company (with as much Chinese labor as they can get away with)
Ha, that was going to be my follow-up statement. It’s been 55 years and to John Q. Public space exploration has stagnated. There’s a huge competency crisis in this country and even normies are beginning to see it. Thats not even touching upon the “baseless conspiracy theories” that we are now being gaslit into believing were always established facts.
I’m not a teenager and I don’t know any teenagers, but were I one today I know that I’d be skeptical as hell about the moon landing.
id be impossible for some kids to believe in the prior accomplishments of america now considering they probably think the governments and presidents of past were equally as retarded as the ones today
awfully sad not having faith in ones own country and people but not that surprising given current circumstances
It took 2 1/2 years to build the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, then the longest suspension bridge in the world. A second bridge, named after Gordie Howe, is being built and it will take about 7 years by the time they are done.
The GHB (why did they name it after a date rape drug again?) is pretty close to being done I think. Really hope they won't shut down the Ambassador Bridge after the GHB is up and running.
The Buffalo-Detroit corridor carries a significant amount of American freight, not just stuff imported from Ontario. A second bridge was needed. That being said, though I'm not a fan of the Maroun family that owns the Ambassador Bridge, the way the Ontario and Michigan governments worked to compete with a privately owned enterprise does not sit well with me. When the Howe bridge opens, I bet the Marouns will lower their tolls to compete.
Speaking of the Ambassador Bridge, during the trucker protest in Ottawa when truckers in Windsor threatened to blockade the bridge, Gov. Whitmer's administration, likely at the request of the Trudeau government, kept access to the bridge closed from the Michigan side for about a day, I think to keep trucks from parking on the bridge in support, despite Whitmer's public statements about how important the bridge is to the Michigan economy. It's one thing to block access to a bridge, that can be handled with tow trucks, but you park a bunch of trucks on a bridge and what are they going to do to open the bridge, push the trucks over the side?
The Old World created the automobile, the airplane, the rocket, the suspension bridge, the skyscraper, the semiautomatic rifle, the supermarket, the hydroelectric dam, the interstate highway system and the telephone.
Now compare that to the Modern World, which counts among its soaring accomplishments the company diversity officer, the autism diagnosis, the no-fault divorce, the environmental regulation, the hate speech law, the birth-control pill, the militant atheist, the class-action lawsuit and the metrosexual.
I prefer the Old World, otherwise known as Western Civilization. The world that was, and the world that can be again.
try oklahoma. of course we do have a big dose of 'them;' my favorite example is from a few years ago when the young son of the social--not society--editor of the tulsa world decided to play their new monopoly game as a tranny. just think about that! beyond pathetic!
Like digging for buried treasure. I just knew if I kept reading I’d get to the Icey rant-a-palooza. Yes! Cannot agree more. We still have pockets of exceptionalism, small islands of innovation and redoubts of integrity. However, I can’t help but feel that—mangling Tolkien—all we’re doing is fighting the long defeat.
I'll tolerate the nonsense from actual Jew-haters before I'll put up with moon-landing hoaxers. So, so many of our society's issues can be traced back to Soviet disinformation.
Like my cousin says, Stanley Kubrick agreed to fake the moon landing, but he said it could only be done with a location shot.
One of my college classmates who remains a close friend sent it to me before I had had a chance to check NY Mag’s website today. He is absolutely their core demographic - 35, highly educated, lives in the West Village, and taking the year off to figure out what he wants to do next (he made $3-4MM after his employer - a startup - sold).
He noticed that a female classmate of ours had “liked” The Cut’s post about the article on Instagram; this surprised me. She is also, obviously, ~35. Moderately attractive, perma-single (or at least no man has made it to social media, and she has attended a number of weddings and parties over the years). She is from a very wealthy Charleston family; she owns a house there and has a place in NYC (hybrid schedule NYC CRE job).
As I commented below, I have nothing negative to say about this woman.
As is fairly widely known on here, I earned an undergrad degree at a small, elite, and certainly elitIST liberal arts college situated in a small town in Virginia. There was literally nothing to do except go to class, study, drink, and (occasionally) sleep.
I was probably in the middle of the bell curve for males in terms of alcohol consumption - about 50 a week (I drink less than 50 drinks a year now). The women drank quite a bit, too. My close male friends and I have observed that virtually all of the women, whether single or partnered, are in far better physical shape than they were when we were in college.
Despite that fact, a number of the women seem to have (voluntarily) given up on finding a husband and/or becoming a mother. Of the most beautiful women in my class (of about 400 grads total):
-One is from a sizable, big money Texas family. She earned a top MBA, lived a charmed life in NYC, got laid off during COVID, and now lives in a small, unremarkable town in rural New England with her dogs. She abandoned the G-wagen and platinum blonde and couture for bangs, bad tattoos, and a Subaru.
-One earned an Ivy League grad degree in applied mathematics (after having earned a BA in Philosophy and a BS in Math) before moving to LA to be a stylist. She lives in Echo Park and posts frequently about her various mental illnesses, the patriarchy, etc. She got married and divorced last year.
I clicked like on the comment, because well-told, but allowing such cruel fates to befall these women's lives makes me shudder.
My college experience similarly combined elitism, challenging academics, and probably the best beauty-to-brains ratio in all of american collegiate life at the time. Difficult to draw comparisons. But it felt like the Studio 54 of its day.
Your stories are just like mine.
The facially flawless, 9.5/10 5'4 waif with the best drawing ability in art classes and 9 figures of connecticut wealth: cats
The gorgeous, zaftig-in-the-cool-way-not-Bryce's-girls east-coast daughter of a local law and political dynasty: MANY cats
Of all the things we've so badly fucked up... how did *this* particular unforced error come to pass?
The Texas girl has siblings who achieved far less academically but are married with children.
The LA stylist has a brother who is gay; their stepfather is a billionaire whose own children reproduced.
Another girl who is not *particularly* attractive but was genuinely nice and down to earth (nothing to prove) works for the investment bank her multi-billionaire father owns (she looks like him wearing a wig). Mid-30s, single, no kids. Her best friend married her brother. Without giving everything away (this is a public thread), you can probably guess where I went to school, which makes it easy to figure out the family I’m talking about here (hint - the I bank is HQ’d in Little Rock and is a sponsor of the Williams F1 team).
As the world burns to the ground, I find the ironies of postmodern society often feel like little victories... the world treats boys like defective girls, but the result is that women became defective men.
Look, I'm boomer and as right wing and anti snowflake as the rest of this readership, but.....I liked the piece. I thought it was well written, thoughtful, and truthful. The author came across not as a dingbat, but a smart pragmatic young woman who perfectly executed the OODA loop within her environment. She observed her status and choices, oriented, decided her way forward, and acted. Admittedly, her brother may be slightly pissed! Thanks for this Sherman.
I anticipated that it would set the tongues wagging in here, which is why I shared it. The comments on the website and on the Instagram post were predictable.
I'm three paragraphs in, and she's said nothing indefensible. It's just not a high-status outlook or "luxury belief" to hold - thus controversial to some.
People [outside of here] may not know this but pure, individualistic "for love" marriage is a nigh-unprecedented luxury of the postwar industrialized middle-class-or-better West. Most other civilizations still have parental input into marriage and most WESTERNERS would have had substantial parental input if not something along the lines of arrangement had they been living in 1910.
Big age gaps work for everyone. He gets youth and beauty and at least some of her best years; she lets him spend time in the investment banking salt mines for a decade+, he gets to enjoy strange women for a decade+ and she gets to take vague, purblind stabs at career before being politely allowed to stop maintaining the illusion of caring.
Honestly it totally makes sense. Kudos to this woman, who seems happily matched.
Ugh. "The oppression of marriage". Then why do women seem to get the best deal out of divorce? I got a buddy going through a nasty divorce and I'm not sure his soon to be ex was oppressed.
It's nasty because of kids and nasty because they were marry for all of 18 or so months.
There was no infidelity. She just thought she could stay at home and be a content creator without actually taking care of the kids while he was doing a real job.
I don't have a problem with splitting it down the middle of the SAHM or SAHD does their actual job. The problem is men can get screwed on this front.
Maybe judges should assign some real value here and if that part of the contract isn't held up then maybe you don't get half?
In a just world, it would be like that. In the real world, my wife thought she could stay at home and be an alcoholic without actually taking care of the kids while I was doing a real job. When the divorce was final I got the kids and she got 60% of our assets. If there was any justice she would have left with her personal effects and not a damn thing more.
That woman is so close to getting it. She puts the words down herself but still can't see. The stuff about girlfriends fixing up their boyfriends but not getting the long term benefit. The observations about two people stumbling to grow up together. "I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling towards every milestone." Well that's the whole point of a marriage, isn't it? The wife helps the husband grow up and she herself is there to benefit until the end.
The author felt herself to be too valuable at age 20 and decided to skip all that. Now she's empty, although still married, and writing for free on the internet. She sees everything more or less accurately but can't analyze the problems at all. She writes she'll expect a lot from him when raising a child. After she admits herself that he has done basically everything for her over a decade? At what point does she carry her own weight? They'll hire a nanny and she'll be posting about divorce in five years.
So I'll add to this that this girl went to the same high school as my wife in Miami and was taught by my sister-in-law there. She just sent this article our way, and if you know Miami and know that the author is a Miami girl, it does make a lot more sense given the values of too many folks down there.
Given what she wanted, you do have to admire her for willing to dive in and go and get it. In that regard she's not too different than other elite school girls, it's just that her chosen "vocation" was a bit of a throwback.
Sometimes I think that women, under the influence of feminism and leftist nonsense have permanently damaged relationships between women and men. Women have allowed themselves to be convinced that they they're all high value and that most men simply don't live up to their now high standards. Sort of a Bizzaro Lake Wobegone where only half of the population is all above average. When I ask them how that math works out they just say that men "aren't keeping up", which would mean there's been a massive change in the past generation or two after thousands of years of human society. They believe that women have finally thrown off the shackles of the patriarchy. They simply can't compute the notion that women have had an equal role in shaping society and that the patriarchy is a fiction.
They put a lot of stock in their financial independence and the fact that they don't need a man. Then they go on Facebook singles groups wearing their casual misandry on their designer sleeves in filtered photos taken from the most flattering angles, ready to take offense at just about anything if expressed by someone with a Y chromosome, and simultaneously complain that they are single and that there are no men worthy of them.
And, of course, bigger picture is that on the exact same arc of women rising to lead modern society - more women in Congress, more women running large corporations, more women in professional careers - modern society has suddenly turned into a frantic, dysfunctional dystopia where everyone is vain, talks a lot, and no one seems to know how anything actually works...
What confounds me is that the political right, such as it exists, has not been able to *capitalize* on leftist lies through truth-telling.
Obviously censorship plays a part, but amazed that the truth is just so well-hidden and so well-lied-about. Blog-dot-jim says the truth is the right's best weapon, but this doesn't seem to be the case, at least at the moment
One note the ship was fully laden with cargo for Sri Lanka. It has not been noted if it was US exports or transit cargo according to the most recent press reports. Also Baltimore is primary a roll off terminal where most foreign cars arrive. Container cargo is the smaller percentage of total imports/exports at Baltimore. Everything you said is true and if you watch the video you will see traffic moving across the bridge moments before impact. The Mayday by the crew saved a lot of lives because it allowed for the bridge to be closed seconds before impact.
Sir Leyland, you are correct I should have said Pilot, also just on the news, the Pilot sent out an emergency call to nearby tug boats just before impact.
One commenter has suggested that Biden pushing the bill on taxpayers protects both the insurers and anyone that might be blamed in the related investigation.
You can bet your ass that the bridge won't get rebuilt in our lifetimes.
And those planes that will be falling from the skies will be commercial. The cloud people fly private, prole.
I concur. They'll clear things at least and then the issue will sit dormant or "being studied" indefinitely. The port, associated businesses and their employees, plus all the commuters and companies that used the bridge, will simply have to deal with a considerably worse situation.
The rash of plane troubles are either narrative establishing efforts (by the media) to guide (ok, coerce) the public to a particular place, or they're a harbinger of things to come. Between this and the misprioritized hiring practices, all post-2021, I'm pretty content to stay on the ground and duke it out with the increasingly inept and comatose "driving" public.
I’d bet real money that a new bridge opens before 2030, and likely well before that.
It’s WAY too vital a piece of infrastructure to leave the ends of 695 dangling over the Patapsco like a tongue hanging out of a dead deer’s mouth to simply do nothing.
It will also be significantly easier to build a new bridge now that they don’t have to build it alongside an existing one, and they will not have to worry about diverting traffic.
We’re talking about one of the busiest roads systems in the country here, meaning one of the busiest in the world. There is no choice BUT to rebuild.
Yup. I've heard early estimates of December 2025. Now that feels very ambitious, but still. 2026 or 2027 is my early guess. I guess the Sunshine Skyway collapse in Tampa is similar to this, and that one did take 7 years or so to rebuild, but it was also over 40 years ago? This is a little more pressing than that one.
Source: I live here and know the hell that the commutes are gonna be with that bridge down and everyone having to go through the tunnels or the city.
At the time the bridge was built 50 years ago, the educated, informed decision was to build a tunnel that would not interfere with river traffic. Instead, to save money, a bridge with no redundancies to prevent catastrophic failure was built.
In the interest of time and money, a bridge again we will get.
Also, they don't let HAZMAT trucks in the tunnels. Nice to have the bridge to save a significant amount of time versus diverting all the way around the city.
That bridge carries more than 11 million cars per year. It is a key part of the Interstate 695 beltway around Baltimore, and one of three links that join the north and south halves of the city. The other two are bridges, which prohibit hazardous materials and have height and weight restrictions. That makes it a key link on trucking routes traversing I95, including those coming out of the Port of Baltimore, which handled $80B in cargo last year and is the 17th largest in the nation by tonnage.
I'd rather bet my ass that they're gonna rebuild that bridge as quickly as possible.
I absolutely hate this, yet another reason why we're likely getting out of the CT suburbs for good this summer. I am glad they moved the barrier south on the east side so that I can at least drive to see my in-laws or sister in law in NYC while paying only the $15 it costs today to get into the city not the congestion crap.
This is going to get really ugly overall though, and I'd imagine will lead some larger businesses to move HQs back to a campus in the suburbs, reversing the last 20 years of trend.
No, if I were like the typical company I'd be on my 7th gender transition and 19th marriage. Also, corporate usually instigates changes; I have moved a lot, but usually against my will in response to business needs.
You say this but bridge lights are pretty vulnerable.
Many bridge lights be effectively turned on/off by radio signal for moments when a boat is passing through. Also, there’s a lot of industrial lighting controllers that both have their management interfaces open to the internet and still use default credentials. This means that your “fancy” bridges with RGB LED arrays (or even the Vegas sphere if configured similarly) can be tampered with by just about anyone with a pulse.
They're exemplary in their patience, explaining to Tyvequious for the 17th time that they're arresting him for Possession With Intent To Distribute, Resisting Arrest and Assaulting A Police Officer without raising their voices.
When the guy clearly deserves a wood shampoo and rough ride to the county jail.
I decided to mostly loaf around Sunday after Mass and ended up watching the “main” from Thermal. A few thoughts, none of them important:
- Racer and Reddit commenters were bagging on the track calling it a wasteland what whatnot. It has to be jealousy, because I think the track looks petty decent for being in BFE.
- This was reinforced by the articles that dropped Monday calling it a rich man’s weekend and crying that the event wasn’t blue collar enough.
- Marshall Pruett is still trying to be Robin Miller, but he has yet to figure figured out that Miller wasn’t simply negative for the sake of being negative. It was because he actually cared. Pruett’s talent starts and ends at jerking off drivers and takes pot shots at Penske.
- The cars are still ugly, but they still race well. I don’t know what they need to do with the cars. The optics of running a 12 year old chassis are bad, but does the car need updated?
- If anything, they should just adopt Formula Nippon regs or something similar to bring down chassis cost and bring in more engine manufacturers. Dallara already makes the current Nippon chassis. Before the DW12 was selected, I believe they also tested the Swift Formula Nippon as well as a Deltawing variant.
- The schedule gap between St. Pete and Long Beach is a joke. Why aren’t they in Mexico or Brazil during the gap?
- The broadcast is boring without Paul Tracy. Guy was hilarious.
- Bring back Thermal or something similar for next year. Give it a true $1M to win and allow anyone to enter. Get rid of the stupid tire rule that resulted in Colton Herta spending the first 10 laps on a leisurely drive. Make the final something like 30 laps. No competition caution. Open tire/fuel strategy.
This event personally did nothing to get me watching IndyCar regularly again, but it was good to see them at least trying something new.
My dad worked for Penske when I was a kid. We met once at MIS in the Penske hospitality tent and he actually sat to speak with me. Wouldn’t want to work for the guy, but I’ve always had the utmost respect for him.
I think that had it been Hamilton rather than Russell behind Alonso that crash never happens.
Because Lewis would have been thinking about what kind of dick move *he* would try if he were the car ahead, and so would have been alert to anything dodgy.
Georgie on the other hand was entirely focused on the hero move he was setting up, and just assumed Fernando would be a compliant accessory.
In Baltimore. Fucking Baltimore! Of all the cities in the US. Not a single road worker was a Black American? And 22 people on the ship, making what, a dollar, three dollars a day?
Our fundamental problem in society is that the people who make decisions rarely have any practical experience actually doing any of the things they are making decisions about. The people who decided that having third worlders with a reputation for faking competence in a wide array of technical tasks pilot a gigantic projectile through bits of critical infrastructure can't steer or maintain a ship any more than the people on that boat could.
Cheap labor seems like a great idea in a board room...but almost nobody in that board room is looking for the cheapest cardiac surgeon when they need one. Or asking for the most discount manufactured parachute when they go skydiving. Cheap labor is abstract and, thus, equivalent. One worker is no more valuable than another. In fact, the more expensive ones are often much more trouble because they're always bothering you with reasons why your plans aren't going to work. The Indian sailors aren't going to fire an email up the chain saying "Hey, the boat is in a bad way and if we don't fix it we're going to drift into a bridge or something and shut down one of the most heavily trafficked ports in the entire fucking hemisphere." They'll just do the head bobble and pretend they understand what you're asking them to do! Score!
I mean, it's not like the ship is going to end up drifting into a bridge and shutting down a major shipping port or anything!
"They'll just do the head bobble and pretend they understand what you're asking them to do" - That sums up my issue with cheap offshore software developers perfectly. I manage two independent teams, one contract team offshore in India and the other full time employees dispersed across the country. The onshore team is invested in the product - they are busting my balls constantly about things that are going to cause problems. 99% of the time, they're right. Their bug rate is so low it's practically 0. The offshore team never says a word about anything...and the churn for rework is tremendous.
That is why they called the raping, pot smoking hillbilly the "first black president" and the actual first "black" president was in reality a half-white, half-immigrant ivy league striver rather than the great-grandson of slaves who endured the Night Riders, Jim Crow, made the Great Migration, and missed out on the generational wealth created by the GI Bill and saw their families destroyed by the War on Drugs. Immigrants are fine, poor Americans, white or black, can get fucked.
I generally try not to hate on the modified Porsche stuff too harshly. Mostly because I don’t have one and cannot afford one so my lamentation should count to no one. That said there’s just something “off” with the Gunther proportions. It looks inflated and bulbous with overly high front fenders and too long an overhang. More Cartoonish than refined design.
Half ass street / race cars has to be some sort of generational thing. You’re either all in one way or the other. A six point is about tops with factory safety equipment. I don’t even like driving my full cage car without helmet as it makes me nervous. Conversely I refuse to cage my c5 while it has stock seats, belts and bags. Like the rest of the car it’s playing pretend until someone gets killed. Guy really got lucky.
As for the boat and Biden…ugh. My thoughts will put me on a watchlist much less the discrediting of any supporters here.
The truth is you can't make a 993 more curvaceous than the Turbo or 4S without ruining the proportions, like those ghastly butt-injection instagram trollops. Better to leave it alone
There is untold grandeur in subtlety. Changing dimensions in millimeters seems like a waste of time on paper but it couldn’t be further from the truth. When you start adding 2-3” of flare things go pear shaped in a hurry. The idea is to look at something and just be captivated without being able to quite figure out why. It’s not glaring and in your face, they just look “better” and more masculine. It’s exactly what makes a Singer the star over these.
So yes, it’s absolutely doable when done right. Maybe in another lifetime I’d be doing it myself.
"That said there’s just something “off” with the Gunther proportions. It looks inflated and bulbous with overly high front fenders and too long an overhang. More Cartoonish than refined design."
The front fenders are horrendous. The lack of sculpting on an otherwise curvy car really throws it off without pronounced arch and definition. Acceptable for an aero build long tail style but the front and rear look penned by different people.
Good design is based on refinement. Singer knows this and exploits upon it. Every element has been retouched with a product designers eye, not necessarily someone purely automotive as they are very in touch with materials and finishes.
When you try to design by exaggeration you near always lose purity of design. Couple that with a loss of direction and cohesive theme and you get this sort of HotWheels looking variant that does some things well but nothing exceptional. The lack of cohesion means you can change lines or features around in the valances but it won’t fix the “off-ness”.
You cannot fix bad design by focusing in on the detail points but you can exemplify good design by doing the same.
Very apt. Any thoughts on the MZR Datsun 240Z? I think it borrows too heavily from Singer when it really ought to pull design cues from other Nissans and it's own racing heritage.
the first one, the stella artois, was neat as an expression of nakai's own personal taste and an extreme looking car with massively wide fenders and elbow deep dish ssr wheels
the rest are cookie cutter and each is built just as horribly as the first making none of them worth the money
but man the original when it was the only one in existence was tough looking
Agree. Also every time he cuts up another car, someone makes a corny cinematic video about it. My friend told me he was going to make a bingo card for the videos, squares include: car owned by by a 20 something manchild whose father bought it new, owner blathers on about “passion,” montage of Nakai cutting up fenders then rubbing roofing tar into the seams, cigarettes and staring, owner helps position the windshield banner, etc.
"my passion for cars is so strong i invited a japanese vagrant over to hack up my fathers investment grade 911 into a mockery of individuality for clout"
He's using the rear wing of a dusty Koenig Competition Evolution Testarossa as a workbench. You can see it back in the corner of his shop, under that pile of A'PEXi titanium exhausts and Seibon carbon fiber hoods.
"This week on Handyman Corner, we're gonna put overfenders on one of those fancy-boy European sports cars. If you don't have titanium aerospace rivets and a hydraulic gun, just use the leftover wood screws from when you built the kids' treehouse. Should work fine. Let's get started."
I kinda wouldn’t mind an RWB as a track rat. They were kinda cool until they overdid it and then sorta sold out to the bug men.
I’d gladly have the dude over to drink Coke, play some Indie Jap Punk and cut on some otherwise lame duck Carrera. Just leave the “real” ones alone. I’d probably stuff an Ls3 in it anyhow.
At least flares are tolerable. I’m not a fan of stripes, especially the “carrera” ones that end up on a lot of 911s. If I ever end up with a 911 that has those, taking them off will be a day one change.
I am convinced that in the not-to-distant future a small number of very talented mechanics and bodymen will all but print money undoing all the damage done by the RWB nitwits.
Alas, it'll probably be someone like Singer, building cars for people who buy Singers.
And what an update it is. I’d go as far as saying that Round 11 in Seattle will go down as the best race if the season.
Once again, the forecast called for light rain. The weather mostly held out, resulting in a track full of tacky dirt that got rutted all to hell by the end of the night.
Rookie Honda rider Jett Lawrence, coming off of a three race win streak, came into the night with a 21 point championship lead over 2nd place Cooper Webb and his Yamaha. Showing immense early in the night, Lawrence was expected to grab another win. The night has other plans.
Lawrence got a fairly poor start in the 450 Main, starting off back in 8th place. This allowed 2023 450 SX Champion (and 3rd corral in points) Chase Sexton to grab the holeshot and put his KTM in the lead. Sexton came into the night 3rd overall in points and 25 behind Lawrence.
Sexton and Webb battled for the first half of the race, displaying some absolute excellent speed and racecraft on both sides. l.
Despite this, Lawrence was coming. At one point, he was putting down times that were consistently ~2 seconds per lap quicker than the leaders. Working his way up to third, Lawrence looked to have his sights set on the overall win. On Lap 8, Lawrence and Webb made contact, putting Lawrence in the dirt.
On lap 17, Sexton managed to stall his bike and allowed Webb to take 1st overall. Around that time, Lawrence got stuck behind a lapped rider and found himself out of contention for the win, some 10 seconds behind.
The last 8 laps featured more bar to bar racing between Webb and Sexton. Webb, who usually rides fairly “calm” in comparison to his rivals, looked to be holding on for dear life later in the race. Nevertheless, he held on tight enough to secure the win by way of a .6 second lead and thus cutting Lawrence’s championship lead to 16 points.
Seattle also marked the return of 250 West after a 6 week break. Levi Kitchen, atop his Pro Circuit Kawasaki, more or less dominated what would be considered his home race, winning by over 18 seconds over 2nd place finisher RJ Hampshire and his Husqvarna. Honda 250 rider Jo Shimoda managed to choke again and barely pulled off a 3rd place finish. Kitchen currently leads Hampshire in the championship by 8 points.
This weekend the series stops in St. Louis for another Triple Crown event featuring triple mains vs. the traditional format. Despite being a “Midwest” stop, the race will once again feature the 250W class.
You can catch this weekend’s race Saturday night at 7:00 EDT on Peacock.
I missed this one due to a party Saturday night, but the battle between Sexton and Webb looked like a dogfight in the highlights. It looks like Cooper raced smarter than anyone else, and it was nice to see Sexton show some grit. In the past I’ve felt like once he loses the lead he just kinda languishes.
I wish they’d do away with the triple crown format, it seems strange and gimmicky, but then so does Feld.
If the will existed, America could wall itself off from the rest of the world, expel all - ALL - the troublemakers: The illegal aliens, the H1Bs, the Deep Staters, the career criminals, the elected Democrats, the welfare queens, everyone - and be our own self-contained little world. EVERYTHING we need to construct, operate & populate a moden industrial civilization exists in the Lower 48 + Alaska right now.
The rest of the world needs America far more than America needs the rest of the world.
Let’s start with giving all US counties the ability to join a bordering state, then watch the rapid and spectacular domino effect take place and realign the country. Then all the leftist thugs and their minions will be clustered in a few blue roach motels.
I see variations of 'purity tests' on the horizon should that geographic realignment take place. It would be the Divided States for sure, and there would be considerable upheaval (to put it very lightly) for a number of years before things hopefully settled out. Many of the Blue Islands are coastal cities already well set up for trade with their ports and road and rail infrastructure. Not to mention many factories being located there or nearby. The Seas of Red have the food, so ultimately, trading and cooperation would be necessary for both groups to do well and not simply subsist.
And what is the criteria you'd use in deciding? And what criteria would you not want me using when deciding whether to let you buy the house next to me?
In my heart I’m An-Cap; some of us live exactly like this, but instead of ‘neighbourhood’ they say ‘compound’, and I know a few ranchers in Canada who have several families on the property.
I’ve never heard of someone doing this in a civilized area vs. the sticks, but I don’t see why a few families couldn’t agree to go in together on a subdivision and have a neighbours of their choosing.
"If the will existed" - but, apparently, it does not.
These are fringe views - even among honest, God-fearing, populist Trump supporters and conservatives. People (the normies) would need to be onboarded, via some sort of massive propaganda apparatus, and significant coordination mechanisms *including criminal justice.*
Which is to say, we'd better stop "wishing in one hand" on this blog. The shit hand is getting really full
Debating deleting the above comment, but, on serious note, you wrote: "If you have to propagandize and/or civilly punish broad swaths of the population to get your way, you don’t have justice on your side."
This is really funny, given the state of american media and american jurisprudence. Doesn't current media propaganda paint white parenthood as evil, interracial parentage as the highest good, white men as evil, white people as traitors to humanity (and one another), white existence separate from extreme diversity as the ultimate sin, black-on-white revenge violence as justifiable, etc?
And does not the current system punish loads of people for simply trying to maintain a modest existence in the country of their ancestors, to defend themselves or their homes, to protest an obviously stolen election, etc? Is not importing tens of millions of 75-iq beggars & literal cannibals an act of outright traitorousness - a crime carrying the punishment of death?
I'm sure that I'm misreading your comment but we're already in an environment where outright evil is being propagandized and resistance to that evil is being criminally & civilly punished. Do you truly feel that it would be immoral to sanction the people perpetrating this evil, destroying (whatever remains of) this nation?
You'll have to pardon my enthusiasm. You're obviously a solid guy and I know I'm not alone in appreciating the sense and moderation you bring to these debates. You make some great points - though I wish I saw it in the @Tim way. The West's predicament can be a class struggle and an identitarian one as well. The enemies can be class members above, below, left and right--and identity or affinity groups similarly arranged.
I think I get so carried away because if one wants to even slighly check the system, one has to do something (however stupid and pointless, "Beam Me Up" representative Traficant) that is anti-system. I continually make the mistake of falling ass-backwards into the illusion that electing Trump or Ramsawamy or RFK Jr would make a change. That probably is an illusion - or it may be only barely true. What I wonder is, is it fair to call this predicament brinksmanship, or would it be more appropriate to call it war?
To me it looks like war - moderate centrist people and right wingers alike are getting flayed alive these days - because they either didn't get the memo, didn't like the memo, refused to believe the memo, or remain unwilling or unable to take decisive action. I should be the last to call anyone out on inaction. But this struggle might be more dire than it appears. And if that's so, we are running out of time.
I don't think it exists either. And on top of that, this isn't merely a geography problem to be solved, the connections, identities and loyalties of everyone are very, very intertwined and a simple us vs. them movement does a great disservice to the welfare of all involved. Or maybe a catalyzing event(s) happens and we all get real black and white about things and act/move accordingly. I've been thinking more so lately, and semi-humorously relaying to others, that the reason no one has acted on any of these mounting, compounding issues is that the shelves in all the stores are still fully stocked.
That’s the case for sure. I was stationed on Oahu and they say that if the ships stopped coming the islands would be out of food in 4 days. You could hope they would get serious about food production in that case…
For the will to exist the problem has to first be understood. And that's why the fiercest battle is for control of the narrative. Because if you have control over the outlets of information then your narrative gets out and everyone else is a "conspiracy theorist" who can be dismissed.
I lived in Korea in the early 2000s before free trade happened and they were quite self-sufficient and proud of it.
Most of the cars were a little sad, but they could be repaired anywhere, and you could get a Matiz for a little more than a new scooter if you wanted.
Grocery stores were a little unusual. The Home Plus (a Samsung/Tesco partnership) had an entire aisle, a long one, of nothing but processed, tinned pork, and Spam was only a tiny section. Our first trip to the grocery store, we walked out with an overflowing shopping cart that was incredibly heavy and spent about $60USD.
People were tiny. When we started visiting again in 2012 there were a lot of properly fat people.
Found the reader who has total ignorance of american politics and corporate behavior!
When phased in that way, who could possibly disagree?
It's just that over a certain level, *no one* in American political or corporate life ever gets punished or feels the negative side of accountability.
In a simple sense - communism can be worse (certainly!), but the percentage of people avoiding accountability cant go below 0%
The difference is that the punishment under communism would be meted out to people tangentially involved at the lowest level and be totally disproportionate to what happened.
What Vojita is saying, is that at least in the USA it won't be some poor bridge toll guy getting thrown in jail, the owners of the ship will at least have to pay a fine if not be charged in some manner.
And that is correct. Particularly the disproportionate part.
What I am saying is it will basically leave all of the companies and call it 500k salary having actors in the drama *totally unscathed*. The fines will be paid by insurance. Low guys (the pilot? maintenace people?) might get fired. But senior people almost certainly will not be.
It's still 1000000 times better than what their (and their families') fates would be under communism.
Pilot is probably in the clear, ships crew/officers will have a lot to answer for. I don't think the company leaders will come out unscathed though, your reputation is everything and this will make it tough on them even if the insurance/company pays the fines.
Well said!
All the effort to drive costs down as much as humanly possible and no thought given to their own countrymen.
How does one become so jaded and indifferent (if not outright hate) to their own people?
unless they arent american in the first place
and yes the gumption wanks 911 is still dumb and competing in a (somehow) highly competitive niche
It’s the pursuit of the almighty dollar combined with Oikophobia, hate of one’s home country and culture.
1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil”
But the lack of money is the cause of most problems.
I'd argue it's the concentration of money in the hands of a few that's the cause of most problems.
And that.
"kinds of"? I don't think the authors of the KJB would have wasted words like that. "All evil", surely?
You are correct.
And a pedant, alas!
"How does one become so jaded and indifferent (if not outright hate) to their own people?"
One goes to the right preschool, the one that required several letters of recommendation drafted before birth, and then continues to the right "country day" school, the right prep school, Dartmouth, and Harvard Business School, all straight through, or maybe with one "gap" year to go tour all the same European tourist attractions and nightclubs as all the other gap year people.
In the early 21st century, it is possible to go through that entire process, living about 25 years of life, without ever talking to a blue-collar person except in the role of a cashier or clerk.
So of course the lines on the expense part of the P&L are going to seem more vivid, more real, and more important than the people they represent.
Extreme and growing social stratification is a major part of why the elites have the ethics (or lack thereof) that they do today. The reasons why it has happened are numerous, but if you follow them far enough, they all come down to physical separation. I'll leave it as an exercise to each person reading this comment to determine how you would best get people of all American social classes at least occasionally occupying the same space at the same time, not in a service context.
My biggest revelation in moving from a wealthy suburban county of Chicago to semi-rural North Carolina is just how economically segregated Northern Illinois is. I am not talking about race, just economic separation along well defined dividing lines from one town or neighborhood to the next one. Unlike where I’m at in NC.
I knew it, obviously, just never thought about it until I moved to a place that’s pretty much the opposite.
I’m also not saying that it’s a bad thing, I’m all for people living with their tribe.
When my friends ask me my perspective on leaving Chicago, I don’t say how much I enjoy the South, I first ask, are you prepared to give up the following things when you move? Because you definitely are giving up good things in Chicagoland that you take for granted and never think about, and you’re never going to find them down here.
What struck me about Chicago when I lived there was how you could have the Orthodox Jews on one side of the street, the Russians on the other, both of them a block from the Indians, and everything just kind of worked.
That was Devon Avenue and a bit unlike most Chicago areas with their established dividing lines. I loved the Indian section on Devon, used to go eat there a lot.
Yep, I know Devon. Pronounced like the drug dealer, not the guy from "Knight Rider."
Had that Patel Brothers store with the racist "Celebrating our food..Our culture" over the front door.
'Had that Patel Brothers store with the racist "Celebrating our food..Our culture" over the front door.'
Somebody I'll be a billionaire and I'll put that same sign over Applebee's.
I like going to the synagogue but the truth is that I feel more at home in a kosher restaurant than in a shul.
Where people have no community and no sense of their neighbors, they feel safer banding together by class.
I have neighbors with a tenth of my net worth, and neighbors with 10x mine. But we do know each other.
I’m the same with my neighbors in NC. I much prefer living in an economically mixed area. People talk to each other over here.
I noticed this when I went to visit my good friend that moved to Owensboro KY last year. His neighborhood is upper middle class but right outside the entrance is lower income apartments. Downtown Owensboro has 1mm+ luxury lofts along the Ohio River and 2-3 blocks over across "Main Street" are essentially wooden shacks at least a hundred years old. I'm a Detroiter and can vouch for the same segregation by economic status.
What kind of industry or jobs are there in Owensboro to support expensive real estate?
My suspicion, having done zero research, is probably Indiana money from Evansville across the river. cheaper taxes and real estate prices on the KY side, which is why my buddy lives there. It's a small town compared to what I'm used to, so it's likely a small percentage of overall prices. Just what I saw on Zillow during a dinner "downtown".
Thanks, I always wondered about that. Kentucky is the rare southern state with bad state finances. Coming from Illinois, that tells me that the Kentucky state government is corrupt.
As a counterpoint:
I worked on about three dozen completed M&A transactions during my career as a junior mistmaker. I worked almost exclusively in service of depositories (i.e., banks) of all sizes. That industry is experiencing ongoing consolidation, and it is exceedingly rare for a non-bank entity to purchase a bank. One of the rationales for those deals (and essentially all “strategic” M&A) is “cost saves;” nota bene that “synergies” are incremental revenues unlocked or created by a combination, whereas cost saves are just that - efficiencies.
The process is obvious. If two businesses who do essentially the same thing combine, they will no longer need two of each of the non-revenue generating jobs. When working on the sell-side, one of the tasks that fell to me as a junior grunt was the first cut of taking the target’s employment roster and “right-sizing” it, with the goal of cutting ~30-40% of the seller’s non-interest expense.
Most sellers went out of their way to protect vulnerable employees (single mothers, those with one household income, those with disabled parents, etc.) and cut those who could better afford to lose their job.
That is your counterpoint?
1. Merge banks because there’s money to be made.
2. Keep certain employed based upon them being a welfare case vs. job performance.
3. Merged bank fails due to mismanagement.
4. Seek taxpayer-funded bailout.
Welcome to clown world. Even if this country comes out ahead on paper, we still lose. This is why they swiftly shut down OWS and turned people against each other by way of identity politics.
“Bailout”
You do realize that the taxpayers made a profit on TARP, the last taxpayer-funded “bailout,” right?
Meanwhile, they got hosed on the automaker and airline bailouts.
Disagree.
I, along with a team of ~35 others, lost my job to M&A in 2019. Live by it, die by it. None of us cried over that.
I got a text 5 minutes ago from a friend whose entire team just got blown out (not through M&A); it happens every day.
I suspect your safety net is far larger than some factory worker who got his job shipped overseas due to M&A, and your timeline for getting a new job is far shorter. Beyond that, totally the same.
Yes.
Jack and I went back and forth (one-on-one) a few weeks ago on a similar topic.
No one is entitled to a job. Companies exist to (try to) reward shareholders for their largesse.
"Companies exist to (try to) reward shareholders for their largesse."
That's a deeply controversial statement in the law. Some feel it is axiomatic. Others think it's a drastic simplification of something far more complex. And the whole debate often elides the issue of what the *correct* policy about the purpose of companies should be.
My own view, as a lawyer who does a whole lot of corporate governance work, is that we take too narrow a view of what the interests of shareholders actually are. Everyone from MBAs to lawyers to the shareholders themselves assumes that the shareholders obviously just want the highest possible return of cash this quarter, regardless of any other implications. But in the end shareholders are people. Very few people are driven solely by money and the ones who are are almost universally viewed as d!ckbags.
Shareholders, as people, want to live in prosperous and sustainable communities. They want employees who will go out and sing their praises. They want to be involved in selling incredibly cool products and services. They want to give something back once their businesses succeed. Corporations, in promoting the interests of shareholders, should be free to take all of those things and more into account, not just the one interest out of all of them that is the most corrosive and the easiest to hate.
In your M&A scenarios, the most important decision came far before you got involved. and it was in almost all cases a decision focused narrowly on short-term financial interest. The most toxic aspect of Wall Street today is that it zealously enforces that focus in every case, even on businesses where the ordinary shareholders don't share it.
I’m going to push back on this.
0-Most of these banks are private, or thinly traded (i.e., not really public); this makes deals harder, because you have to value the buyer’s stock (most bank deals are not cash deals), as well.
1-Community bank shareholders ARE invested (in multiple senses of the word) in the services that their banks provide to small communities; I strenuously believe that these services are very valuable, and I would advise most people to bank at a community bank, because they excel in terms of customer service.
2-That said … if you’ve tied up $100K or $1MM or even more of your own money in First State Bank of Somewhere for years (or decades) with little to no dividend, limited if any liquidity, and challenging prospects to create shareholder value going forward (particularly in the face of the tech spend necessary to keep your head above water vs larger institutions), maybe you start to think about a sale? Particularly if leadership is aging and there is no credible successor in place.
3-People are typically risk averse and loss avoidant. They rue the loss of their job to a successful M&A process, but would they feel the same way about being turned down for a “no-show” job? I.e., they’d expect the local community bank to pay them $50K or $100K a year to do just about nothing and create no value. I think most people understand that that’s not realistic.
I'm an ordinary shareholder in as much my 401k has much of my own wealth investment in these companies. For me personally, I want all my investments to return me the most money they can. For my own personal view,.I honestly don't care about a lot of the sustainable.and community crap of these companies. Maybe I'm just jaded but any company I've ever worked for, the investors and CEOs only ultimately care about the stock price and bottom line.
I brought this up just a few days ago on TTAC on an insurance article. I basically said that it's a contradiction for everyday folks to complain about their auto insurance prices when many if not most everyday people have some form of investment into these companies. Everyone over in TTAC sited greed. Damn straight I want my investments into insurance companies to return me the most it can.
When I am a shareholder, I do not give a damn about quarterly results. I want management to be working on a ten-year time horizon so I can give them my money and forget about it for a while.
Meanwhile management incentives ARE for quarterly results. This is not for my benefit.
My counterpoint is this: Much of what is done by corporations and wealthy people is legal only because they wrote the law to make it legal. To take a rather unimportant example, the only reason that Ticketmaster is allowed to exist is because they crippled the FCC. The only reason poorly maintained ships manned by near slaves and sailed under flags of convenience are allowed in US waters is because the people you are defending wrote laws to make it possible.
Legal fictions, I believe, is the correct term.
And no company is entitled to good and loyal employees. The company must be worthy of that proficiency and loyalty.
Of course they aren’t!
Indeed - a corporation’s purpose is to deliver and maximize shareholder value. However, isn’t this a far broader topic than the role of a corporation? Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. I don’t think your point really gets to the heart of the issue, which in my mind isn’t why corporations function the way they do, but rather the broader macroeconomic policies which allow corporations to function the way they do in the #currentyear.
Not agreeing or disagreeing, but "mistmaker?" - Nice!
I can’t take credit for that one, sadly.
it is a nice turn of phrase, so you get credit for introducing me to it.
Not sure I agree, at least as a millenial of the milennial class. Wealth continues to be what it was (only amplified) but the explanantion you provided doesn't jive even slightly with the actual people I know who went to the exact schools you mentioned. Maybe they're out of touch, but they lean toward liking america even if they perform leftist obeisance on whatever conscious level.
The people *truly* disemboweling the industry in the nation... are the same people who funded Reagan.. and Clinton.. And yes Biden's political careers. It's not even partisan, the political class are their lackeys. They don't care about America or think of themselves as americans. It's just a profit center.
Who, exactly, are the people you are thinking about?
I don't believe the people I'm talking about are evil. I think they're just deeply, deeply out of touch and clueless.
"I think they're just deeply, deeply out of touch and clueless."
This is charitable - and the Lord commands us to be charitable. Are they out of touch? We couldn't be more agreed. We differ on whether they're clueless or malicious.
10 million Americans having decent factory jobs would not realistically threaten these people. But they act as if such MFG base was a threat and don't *just* ship the jobs away for money but *as if they viewed the competing political power center of manufacturing to be a threat requiring neutralization.*
IMO this qualifies as malice. Without taking anything out of context, you could pick an example at random from yesterday's newspaper: let's go with Larry Summers. His ideas about economics & manufacturing policy have picked this country barer than bones in a desert. He didn't have to do it. And he is far too smart to be called clueless.
Larry Summers should face a public accounting, Robespierre-style.
Perhaps his biggest crime was meekly stepping down from his post at Harvard instead of standing up to the feminist harridans. Perhaps if he had taken a stance against the ideological totalitarians instead of being a pussy, it might have been a watershed moment.
So stupid as to be indistinguishable from evil is a common refrain of mine.
Even that gives them charitable benefit of doubt.
Should we?
[Edit: I believe at dinner table in mixed-political company we should, for persuasive purposes. But in our heart of hearts... should we?]
Perhaps we should bring back the military draft. A U.S. Army unit during WWII would have had men from all walks of life. I'm not naive, the affluent, educated, and connected probably had an easier entry into the officer corps, and yes, because of Woodrow Wilson the military was racially segregated - but even the black units were diverse in terms of socio-economics.
Know why? This is why:
The United States of America made the very CONCEPTS of aristocracy and monarchy obsolete in the late 18th Century. We've since proved, in ten thousand ways and in one-tenth the time, that a nation of free commoners makes an utter, hilarious mockery of the greatest empires and all their trappings & pretensions.
The world's kings and their minions have been trying to undo that accomplishment ever since.
Many of them are not, or do not consider themselves to be, americans.
And this is per their own admission, under government name, in books/on twitter/in fawning ny mag profile.
At this point many of the most powerful people are international. On numerous different axes it would be difficult to append the label "american" to them at all
You presume that our elites ever saw you or me as their own people. In the sense that their ancestors essentially actually owned our ancestors, perhaps. But they are not your countrymen. We the proles have to learn the same lesson Franklin learned in the cockpit and set ourselves on a course of rejecting all the powers of popes and princes. Especially the ones that claim to be our countrymen one moment and then shove a bayonet into our spine the next.
covid ousted the brownshirts pretty damn quick
talk about sobering
It's important to remember that the cranes that would have unloaded the containers are probably made by a Chinese company (in China) or a finnish company (with as much Chinese labor as they can get away with)
Your bridge write up should be the lead article in a national paper, if we had one that was worth a damn.
The kicker? That bridge was supposed to be a tunnel! https://twitter.com/charlesbonnerjr/status/1772792317667103036?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1772792317667103036%7Ctwgr%5E53fe1fd0e48f42c95570510c20ba8939d8029183%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F638870%2F
how are you supposed to build a bridge underground
Back then the US could do anything. Now, not so much.
We don’t even remind anyone anymore that we put a man on the moon.
i usually fall back on how nobody has conclusively proved we havent gone
even the countries who would benefit from calling the us out on it
what did he say
also didnt they have a craft up there recently or was that someone else
Ha, that was going to be my follow-up statement. It’s been 55 years and to John Q. Public space exploration has stagnated. There’s a huge competency crisis in this country and even normies are beginning to see it. Thats not even touching upon the “baseless conspiracy theories” that we are now being gaslit into believing were always established facts.
I’m not a teenager and I don’t know any teenagers, but were I one today I know that I’d be skeptical as hell about the moon landing.
id be impossible for some kids to believe in the prior accomplishments of america now considering they probably think the governments and presidents of past were equally as retarded as the ones today
awfully sad not having faith in ones own country and people but not that surprising given current circumstances
Can you imagine building the Golden Gate now? It would cost a trillion dollars and take fifty years.
But AI can produce pretty pictures of how it would look if we could build it.
I hate the modern world and its inhabitants.
its not all bad
its got racecars and you guys in it
Bullshit.
You know damned well it wouldn't get done at all.
Look at all the BS with the rebuilding of the oakland bay bridge! And it's all ready failing because they let a chinese company build it!
It took 2 1/2 years to build the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, then the longest suspension bridge in the world. A second bridge, named after Gordie Howe, is being built and it will take about 7 years by the time they are done.
The GHB (why did they name it after a date rape drug again?) is pretty close to being done I think. Really hope they won't shut down the Ambassador Bridge after the GHB is up and running.
The Buffalo-Detroit corridor carries a significant amount of American freight, not just stuff imported from Ontario. A second bridge was needed. That being said, though I'm not a fan of the Maroun family that owns the Ambassador Bridge, the way the Ontario and Michigan governments worked to compete with a privately owned enterprise does not sit well with me. When the Howe bridge opens, I bet the Marouns will lower their tolls to compete.
Speaking of the Ambassador Bridge, during the trucker protest in Ottawa when truckers in Windsor threatened to blockade the bridge, Gov. Whitmer's administration, likely at the request of the Trudeau government, kept access to the bridge closed from the Michigan side for about a day, I think to keep trucks from parking on the bridge in support, despite Whitmer's public statements about how important the bridge is to the Michigan economy. It's one thing to block access to a bridge, that can be handled with tow trucks, but you park a bunch of trucks on a bridge and what are they going to do to open the bridge, push the trucks over the side?
the flat earthers are jumping at every chance to say that we didnt actually go
no they cant prove we didnt and every shred of evidence proving we did goes ignored
such fun
i hate conspiritards
*Allegedly put a man on the moon.
Now we have NFTs and 3D porn. That’s progress.
Sadly, human civilization peaked in the Jetsons cartoons.
now we can have an nft of naked astronauts with their tits out and buy them with fake crypto coins i just minted
its all coming together
They better be in a Miata floating through space.
how do i make a miatacoin
maybe i can rugpull everyone else and make a profit unethically
The Old World created the automobile, the airplane, the rocket, the suspension bridge, the skyscraper, the semiautomatic rifle, the supermarket, the hydroelectric dam, the interstate highway system and the telephone.
Now compare that to the Modern World, which counts among its soaring accomplishments the company diversity officer, the autism diagnosis, the no-fault divorce, the environmental regulation, the hate speech law, the birth-control pill, the militant atheist, the class-action lawsuit and the metrosexual.
I prefer the Old World, otherwise known as Western Civilization. The world that was, and the world that can be again.
i too have those old world blues
homesick for a place im not even sure exists anymore
Oh, how can you not?
try oklahoma. of course we do have a big dose of 'them;' my favorite example is from a few years ago when the young son of the social--not society--editor of the tulsa world decided to play their new monopoly game as a tranny. just think about that! beyond pathetic!
like that meme with the girl and the twin towers
Like digging for buried treasure. I just knew if I kept reading I’d get to the Icey rant-a-palooza. Yes! Cannot agree more. We still have pockets of exceptionalism, small islands of innovation and redoubts of integrity. However, I can’t help but feel that—mangling Tolkien—all we’re doing is fighting the long defeat.
I'll tolerate the nonsense from actual Jew-haters before I'll put up with moon-landing hoaxers. So, so many of our society's issues can be traced back to Soviet disinformation.
Like my cousin says, Stanley Kubrick agreed to fake the moon landing, but he said it could only be done with a location shot.
2.6 km vs the Channel Tunnel, which is over 50 km
with a tunnel boring machine or via the inundation of pre-formed sections method most recently and spectacularly employed by the Chinese and Germans.
The Cut strikes again, and the girls are BIG MAD:
https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-marriage-younger-women-older-man.html
Get your popcorn ready!
someone told her commas were free and she went nuts
Hahaha 🤣😂
There is nothing wrong with women who are this clear-eyed and merciless about it all.
Life is merciless
why did i read the whole thing
Nelson voice 'HA HA'
why would sherman do this
he made me read about some navel gazing waif whinging about aging and stuff
"Her looks make her an 8. Then she opens her mouth and instantly becomes an Ohio Hard 4."
she spent the whole piece saying just that
tiring
He was attempting to FORCE you to learn speed-reading (critical in information age)
thank you sherman
digesting massive volumes of pointless words was a skill i picked up in school
i dont remember any of it
To follow up:
One of my college classmates who remains a close friend sent it to me before I had had a chance to check NY Mag’s website today. He is absolutely their core demographic - 35, highly educated, lives in the West Village, and taking the year off to figure out what he wants to do next (he made $3-4MM after his employer - a startup - sold).
He noticed that a female classmate of ours had “liked” The Cut’s post about the article on Instagram; this surprised me. She is also, obviously, ~35. Moderately attractive, perma-single (or at least no man has made it to social media, and she has attended a number of weddings and parties over the years). She is from a very wealthy Charleston family; she owns a house there and has a place in NYC (hybrid schedule NYC CRE job).
bet shes miserable
do you have her insta by chance
It’s private.
I have nothing bad to say about her, and I keep in touch with her intermittently.
I know so many of these women from college.
Some of them, last I saw them 5 or 10 years ago, were breathtakingly, stop-you-in-your-tracks-on-the-sidewalk beautiful.
Alas, so many of them are such pains in the ass that they're destined to die alone.
All that potential. Multiple thousands of years of conscientious breeding to produce such exemplary creatures...
all of that effort and work... POOF!... gone
This is why the Bene Gesserit would never work in real life.
Perhaps. If I'm understanding the gom jabbar correctly they're doing what they're doing at gunpoint-
-and a lot of things work at gunpoint that mightn't otherwise
Like getting a nation of people to file taxes!
As I commented below, I have nothing negative to say about this woman.
As is fairly widely known on here, I earned an undergrad degree at a small, elite, and certainly elitIST liberal arts college situated in a small town in Virginia. There was literally nothing to do except go to class, study, drink, and (occasionally) sleep.
I was probably in the middle of the bell curve for males in terms of alcohol consumption - about 50 a week (I drink less than 50 drinks a year now). The women drank quite a bit, too. My close male friends and I have observed that virtually all of the women, whether single or partnered, are in far better physical shape than they were when we were in college.
Despite that fact, a number of the women seem to have (voluntarily) given up on finding a husband and/or becoming a mother. Of the most beautiful women in my class (of about 400 grads total):
-One is from a sizable, big money Texas family. She earned a top MBA, lived a charmed life in NYC, got laid off during COVID, and now lives in a small, unremarkable town in rural New England with her dogs. She abandoned the G-wagen and platinum blonde and couture for bangs, bad tattoos, and a Subaru.
-One earned an Ivy League grad degree in applied mathematics (after having earned a BA in Philosophy and a BS in Math) before moving to LA to be a stylist. She lives in Echo Park and posts frequently about her various mental illnesses, the patriarchy, etc. She got married and divorced last year.
I clicked like on the comment, because well-told, but allowing such cruel fates to befall these women's lives makes me shudder.
My college experience similarly combined elitism, challenging academics, and probably the best beauty-to-brains ratio in all of american collegiate life at the time. Difficult to draw comparisons. But it felt like the Studio 54 of its day.
Your stories are just like mine.
The facially flawless, 9.5/10 5'4 waif with the best drawing ability in art classes and 9 figures of connecticut wealth: cats
The gorgeous, zaftig-in-the-cool-way-not-Bryce's-girls east-coast daughter of a local law and political dynasty: MANY cats
Of all the things we've so badly fucked up... how did *this* particular unforced error come to pass?
I wonder what their parents have said or done?
The Texas girl has siblings who achieved far less academically but are married with children.
The LA stylist has a brother who is gay; their stepfather is a billionaire whose own children reproduced.
Another girl who is not *particularly* attractive but was genuinely nice and down to earth (nothing to prove) works for the investment bank her multi-billionaire father owns (she looks like him wearing a wig). Mid-30s, single, no kids. Her best friend married her brother. Without giving everything away (this is a public thread), you can probably guess where I went to school, which makes it easy to figure out the family I’m talking about here (hint - the I bank is HQ’d in Little Rock and is a sponsor of the Williams F1 team).
Agreed. I REALLY wonder about the parenting part.
And what media, friends and environments shaped them
As the world burns to the ground, I find the ironies of postmodern society often feel like little victories... the world treats boys like defective girls, but the result is that women became defective men.
Brilliant!
Look, I'm boomer and as right wing and anti snowflake as the rest of this readership, but.....I liked the piece. I thought it was well written, thoughtful, and truthful. The author came across not as a dingbat, but a smart pragmatic young woman who perfectly executed the OODA loop within her environment. She observed her status and choices, oriented, decided her way forward, and acted. Admittedly, her brother may be slightly pissed! Thanks for this Sherman.
I enjoyed it, as well.
I anticipated that it would set the tongues wagging in here, which is why I shared it. The comments on the website and on the Instagram post were predictable.
I'm three paragraphs in, and she's said nothing indefensible. It's just not a high-status outlook or "luxury belief" to hold - thus controversial to some.
People [outside of here] may not know this but pure, individualistic "for love" marriage is a nigh-unprecedented luxury of the postwar industrialized middle-class-or-better West. Most other civilizations still have parental input into marriage and most WESTERNERS would have had substantial parental input if not something along the lines of arrangement had they been living in 1910.
Big age gaps work for everyone. He gets youth and beauty and at least some of her best years; she lets him spend time in the investment banking salt mines for a decade+, he gets to enjoy strange women for a decade+ and she gets to take vague, purblind stabs at career before being politely allowed to stop maintaining the illusion of caring.
Honestly it totally makes sense. Kudos to this woman, who seems happily matched.
Be sure to dig into the comments.
Holy shit they're great. thanks!
Stopped about ten paragraphs in.
If she’s happy, and he’s happy, what more matters?
Ugh. "The oppression of marriage". Then why do women seem to get the best deal out of divorce? I got a buddy going through a nasty divorce and I'm not sure his soon to be ex was oppressed.
Is your buddy a “ CIS-male?”
WELL THEN OF COURSE SHE WAS!!1!
They split it right down the middle, and gave her the better half?
It's nasty because of kids and nasty because they were marry for all of 18 or so months.
There was no infidelity. She just thought she could stay at home and be a content creator without actually taking care of the kids while he was doing a real job.
I don't have a problem with splitting it down the middle of the SAHM or SAHD does their actual job. The problem is men can get screwed on this front.
Maybe judges should assign some real value here and if that part of the contract isn't held up then maybe you don't get half?
In a just world, it would be like that. In the real world, my wife thought she could stay at home and be an alcoholic without actually taking care of the kids while I was doing a real job. When the divorce was final I got the kids and she got 60% of our assets. If there was any justice she would have left with her personal effects and not a damn thing more.
Did not yet read past the title, but I will. Don't think this is anything new- what was the maiden name of Mrs Irving Berlin?
Can anyone explain which purpose the HDMI meant to serve? I read that part twice and am still confused.
A prop to explain her presence at the HBS party (is how I read it).
Is the implication that the cord fit the party's theme?
Just that the party might have involved multimedia.
A connection so that they could show a video?!
That woman is so close to getting it. She puts the words down herself but still can't see. The stuff about girlfriends fixing up their boyfriends but not getting the long term benefit. The observations about two people stumbling to grow up together. "I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling towards every milestone." Well that's the whole point of a marriage, isn't it? The wife helps the husband grow up and she herself is there to benefit until the end.
The author felt herself to be too valuable at age 20 and decided to skip all that. Now she's empty, although still married, and writing for free on the internet. She sees everything more or less accurately but can't analyze the problems at all. She writes she'll expect a lot from him when raising a child. After she admits herself that he has done basically everything for her over a decade? At what point does she carry her own weight? They'll hire a nanny and she'll be posting about divorce in five years.
So I'll add to this that this girl went to the same high school as my wife in Miami and was taught by my sister-in-law there. She just sent this article our way, and if you know Miami and know that the author is a Miami girl, it does make a lot more sense given the values of too many folks down there.
Given what she wanted, you do have to admire her for willing to dive in and go and get it. In that regard she's not too different than other elite school girls, it's just that her chosen "vocation" was a bit of a throwback.
Sometimes I think that women, under the influence of feminism and leftist nonsense have permanently damaged relationships between women and men. Women have allowed themselves to be convinced that they they're all high value and that most men simply don't live up to their now high standards. Sort of a Bizzaro Lake Wobegone where only half of the population is all above average. When I ask them how that math works out they just say that men "aren't keeping up", which would mean there's been a massive change in the past generation or two after thousands of years of human society. They believe that women have finally thrown off the shackles of the patriarchy. They simply can't compute the notion that women have had an equal role in shaping society and that the patriarchy is a fiction.
They put a lot of stock in their financial independence and the fact that they don't need a man. Then they go on Facebook singles groups wearing their casual misandry on their designer sleeves in filtered photos taken from the most flattering angles, ready to take offense at just about anything if expressed by someone with a Y chromosome, and simultaneously complain that they are single and that there are no men worthy of them.
It's very depressing.
They think they're above those lonely guys. They think their grandmother settled for their grandfather.
And, of course, bigger picture is that on the exact same arc of women rising to lead modern society - more women in Congress, more women running large corporations, more women in professional careers - modern society has suddenly turned into a frantic, dysfunctional dystopia where everyone is vain, talks a lot, and no one seems to know how anything actually works...
Weird.
how could this have happened
Well said!
What confounds me is that the political right, such as it exists, has not been able to *capitalize* on leftist lies through truth-telling.
Obviously censorship plays a part, but amazed that the truth is just so well-hidden and so well-lied-about. Blog-dot-jim says the truth is the right's best weapon, but this doesn't seem to be the case, at least at the moment
One note the ship was fully laden with cargo for Sri Lanka. It has not been noted if it was US exports or transit cargo according to the most recent press reports. Also Baltimore is primary a roll off terminal where most foreign cars arrive. Container cargo is the smaller percentage of total imports/exports at Baltimore. Everything you said is true and if you watch the video you will see traffic moving across the bridge moments before impact. The Mayday by the crew saved a lot of lives because it allowed for the bridge to be closed seconds before impact.
There's reason to believe that the (local) PILOT, not the crew, issued the Mayday.
Sir Leyland, you are correct I should have said Pilot, also just on the news, the Pilot sent out an emergency call to nearby tug boats just before impact.
One commenter has suggested that Biden pushing the bill on taxpayers protects both the insurers and anyone that might be blamed in the related investigation.
You can bet your ass that the bridge won't get rebuilt in our lifetimes.
And those planes that will be falling from the skies will be commercial. The cloud people fly private, prole.
"And those planes that will be falling from the skies will be commercial. The cloud people fly private, prole."
Unfortunately for them, even the mighty G6 cannot occupy the same space as a Delta 757 with an ALL BLACK WOMYN crew!
Rob Schneider said it out loud:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KZ_rQ3Lt8jY
"WOOO!"
"What?"
I concur. They'll clear things at least and then the issue will sit dormant or "being studied" indefinitely. The port, associated businesses and their employees, plus all the commuters and companies that used the bridge, will simply have to deal with a considerably worse situation.
The rash of plane troubles are either narrative establishing efforts (by the media) to guide (ok, coerce) the public to a particular place, or they're a harbinger of things to come. Between this and the misprioritized hiring practices, all post-2021, I'm pretty content to stay on the ground and duke it out with the increasingly inept and comatose "driving" public.
I’d bet real money that a new bridge opens before 2030, and likely well before that.
It’s WAY too vital a piece of infrastructure to leave the ends of 695 dangling over the Patapsco like a tongue hanging out of a dead deer’s mouth to simply do nothing.
It will also be significantly easier to build a new bridge now that they don’t have to build it alongside an existing one, and they will not have to worry about diverting traffic.
We’re talking about one of the busiest roads systems in the country here, meaning one of the busiest in the world. There is no choice BUT to rebuild.
Minneapolis had the I35 bridge collapse in Aug 2007. The new one opened in Sept 2008. I expect this will be similar.
Yup. I've heard early estimates of December 2025. Now that feels very ambitious, but still. 2026 or 2027 is my early guess. I guess the Sunshine Skyway collapse in Tampa is similar to this, and that one did take 7 years or so to rebuild, but it was also over 40 years ago? This is a little more pressing than that one.
Source: I live here and know the hell that the commutes are gonna be with that bridge down and everyone having to go through the tunnels or the city.
At the time the bridge was built 50 years ago, the educated, informed decision was to build a tunnel that would not interfere with river traffic. Instead, to save money, a bridge with no redundancies to prevent catastrophic failure was built.
In the interest of time and money, a bridge again we will get.
Also, they don't let HAZMAT trucks in the tunnels. Nice to have the bridge to save a significant amount of time versus diverting all the way around the city.
That bridge carries more than 11 million cars per year. It is a key part of the Interstate 695 beltway around Baltimore, and one of three links that join the north and south halves of the city. The other two are bridges, which prohibit hazardous materials and have height and weight restrictions. That makes it a key link on trucking routes traversing I95, including those coming out of the Port of Baltimore, which handled $80B in cargo last year and is the 17th largest in the nation by tonnage.
I'd rather bet my ass that they're gonna rebuild that bridge as quickly as possible.
M.T.A. Board Votes to Approve New $15 Toll to Drive Into Manhattan
https://archive.is/irMNh
I can see the argument for it, really. I do, however, object to motorcycles paying $7.50 when EEEBS pay nothing.
I agree, and there are efforts underway in that direction:
https://www.amny.com/news/nyc-pols-e-bike-license-registration/
Well, the city just wants to know whose e-bike just spontaneously exploded at two in the morning and burned down that 30-story apartment building.
So if it was some illegal from Guatemala, they can drop the charges and issue an apology.
And provide a new eeb, sourced from China at taxpayer expense!
Always at taxpayer expense.
The main reason I'll never be rich is that I can't get "using other people's money" past my conscience.
I absolutely hate this, yet another reason why we're likely getting out of the CT suburbs for good this summer. I am glad they moved the barrier south on the east side so that I can at least drive to see my in-laws or sister in law in NYC while paying only the $15 it costs today to get into the city not the congestion crap.
This is going to get really ugly overall though, and I'd imagine will lead some larger businesses to move HQs back to a campus in the suburbs, reversing the last 20 years of trend.
TO THE SUBURBS!
TO THE CITY!
WFH!
RTO!
TO THE SUBURBS!
It's all so tiresome.
It is, but companies are like us. Just trying to get the best deal they can for themselves and pay as little as they can for output.
"companies are just like us"
No, if I were like the typical company I'd be on my 7th gender transition and 19th marriage. Also, corporate usually instigates changes; I have moved a lot, but usually against my will in response to business needs.
I mean they are just like us in that they want to minimize their own costs and expenses like we do.
So you’re saying a Hyundai crashed in Baltimore. Have we conclusively ruled out teenage gangs being responsible?
The lights went out when they hacked it with a cell phone.
You say this but bridge lights are pretty vulnerable.
Many bridge lights be effectively turned on/off by radio signal for moments when a boat is passing through. Also, there’s a lot of industrial lighting controllers that both have their management interfaces open to the internet and still use default credentials. This means that your “fancy” bridges with RGB LED arrays (or even the Vegas sphere if configured similarly) can be tampered with by just about anyone with a pulse.
https://codykretsinger.com/info/This-Little-Light-of-Mine.html
Sad, comic, twist: someone was on the Key Bridge trying to hack a road crew's Hyundai (car) but accidentally hacked the Maersk's Hyundai (ship).
That's no Palisade... that's a CARGO SHIP!
Well, I didn't see 37 cops behind it with their guns drawn, screaming "DRIVER, SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!!!"
That sentence is about 7 "FUCKING"s short. IF YOU FUCKING <inaudible> I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU. DON'T MOVE! WALK FUCKING BACKWARDS TOWARD ME!"
It's the key putting the citizen, presumed innocent, at ease so that you can cooperatively resolve the situation.
Of course! The fuck is wrong with me?
I really have no excuse, watching all those cop cam vids on YouTube.
Wisconsin is wall-to-wall scumbags, apparently.
I have seen more GOOD police behavior from Wisconsin than bad. Either they're just good at propaganda or maybe trying to make up for the Konerak Sinthasomphone thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer#Late_20s_and_early_30s:_subsequent_murders)
I'm a little reluctant to go to Arizona or Colorado.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhWF239Bclg
They're exemplary in their patience, explaining to Tyvequious for the 17th time that they're arresting him for Possession With Intent To Distribute, Resisting Arrest and Assaulting A Police Officer without raising their voices.
When the guy clearly deserves a wood shampoo and rough ride to the county jail.
Might be a LITTLE early for that!
Still—ouch! 😲
I decided to mostly loaf around Sunday after Mass and ended up watching the “main” from Thermal. A few thoughts, none of them important:
- Racer and Reddit commenters were bagging on the track calling it a wasteland what whatnot. It has to be jealousy, because I think the track looks petty decent for being in BFE.
- This was reinforced by the articles that dropped Monday calling it a rich man’s weekend and crying that the event wasn’t blue collar enough.
- Marshall Pruett is still trying to be Robin Miller, but he has yet to figure figured out that Miller wasn’t simply negative for the sake of being negative. It was because he actually cared. Pruett’s talent starts and ends at jerking off drivers and takes pot shots at Penske.
- The cars are still ugly, but they still race well. I don’t know what they need to do with the cars. The optics of running a 12 year old chassis are bad, but does the car need updated?
- If anything, they should just adopt Formula Nippon regs or something similar to bring down chassis cost and bring in more engine manufacturers. Dallara already makes the current Nippon chassis. Before the DW12 was selected, I believe they also tested the Swift Formula Nippon as well as a Deltawing variant.
- The schedule gap between St. Pete and Long Beach is a joke. Why aren’t they in Mexico or Brazil during the gap?
- The broadcast is boring without Paul Tracy. Guy was hilarious.
- Bring back Thermal or something similar for next year. Give it a true $1M to win and allow anyone to enter. Get rid of the stupid tire rule that resulted in Colton Herta spending the first 10 laps on a leisurely drive. Make the final something like 30 laps. No competition caution. Open tire/fuel strategy.
This event personally did nothing to get me watching IndyCar regularly again, but it was good to see them at least trying something new.
Anyone will to take pot shots at Penske isn't all bad....And Tracy is pretty awesome in person as well.
My dad worked for Penske when I was a kid. We met once at MIS in the Penske hospitality tent and he actually sat to speak with me. Wouldn’t want to work for the guy, but I’ve always had the utmost respect for him.
Totally agree on Marshall Pruett vs Robin Miller
Tried to watch st Pete, picture quality was so hazy I shut it off. Spoiled by liberty media won't lie.
At the Detroit Grand Prix, I once ran into Robin Miller and I asked him, "Are all race car driver's short... well besides Michael Waltrip?"
He answered, "I thought you asked about race car drivers."
" Justice For Fernando! "
I think that had it been Hamilton rather than Russell behind Alonso that crash never happens.
Because Lewis would have been thinking about what kind of dick move *he* would try if he were the car ahead, and so would have been alert to anything dodgy.
Georgie on the other hand was entirely focused on the hero move he was setting up, and just assumed Fernando would be a compliant accessory.
I think this is well said.
Fernando will not have done himself any favors in terms of moving to Luigi Hamiltone’s seat next year.
genuinely laughing at Luigi Hamiltone, which is so bad a joke it's funny.
That name needs to stick, it’s perfect.
I hope he throws a banana peel out of the cockpit next race.
If someone can pressure from behind, why not from in front?
George thinks all other drivers are compliant accessories... He needs to be Magnussen'ed to his career's end.
In Baltimore. Fucking Baltimore! Of all the cities in the US. Not a single road worker was a Black American? And 22 people on the ship, making what, a dollar, three dollars a day?
Let's put Third Worlders in charge of a mobile object the size of a skyscraper.
That's fucking BRILLIANT.
Our fundamental problem in society is that the people who make decisions rarely have any practical experience actually doing any of the things they are making decisions about. The people who decided that having third worlders with a reputation for faking competence in a wide array of technical tasks pilot a gigantic projectile through bits of critical infrastructure can't steer or maintain a ship any more than the people on that boat could.
Cheap labor seems like a great idea in a board room...but almost nobody in that board room is looking for the cheapest cardiac surgeon when they need one. Or asking for the most discount manufactured parachute when they go skydiving. Cheap labor is abstract and, thus, equivalent. One worker is no more valuable than another. In fact, the more expensive ones are often much more trouble because they're always bothering you with reasons why your plans aren't going to work. The Indian sailors aren't going to fire an email up the chain saying "Hey, the boat is in a bad way and if we don't fix it we're going to drift into a bridge or something and shut down one of the most heavily trafficked ports in the entire fucking hemisphere." They'll just do the head bobble and pretend they understand what you're asking them to do! Score!
I mean, it's not like the ship is going to end up drifting into a bridge and shutting down a major shipping port or anything!
"They'll just do the head bobble and pretend they understand what you're asking them to do" - That sums up my issue with cheap offshore software developers perfectly. I manage two independent teams, one contract team offshore in India and the other full time employees dispersed across the country. The onshore team is invested in the product - they are busting my balls constantly about things that are going to cause problems. 99% of the time, they're right. Their bug rate is so low it's practically 0. The offshore team never says a word about anything...and the churn for rework is tremendous.
>head bobble
made me lol
The Elites actually hate black people. One of the reasons why all the racism BS is so farcical.
That is why they called the raping, pot smoking hillbilly the "first black president" and the actual first "black" president was in reality a half-white, half-immigrant ivy league striver rather than the great-grandson of slaves who endured the Night Riders, Jim Crow, made the Great Migration, and missed out on the generational wealth created by the GI Bill and saw their families destroyed by the War on Drugs. Immigrants are fine, poor Americans, white or black, can get fucked.
not just the blacks it seems
I was responding to a comment about the general population of Baltimore but yes.
I generally try not to hate on the modified Porsche stuff too harshly. Mostly because I don’t have one and cannot afford one so my lamentation should count to no one. That said there’s just something “off” with the Gunther proportions. It looks inflated and bulbous with overly high front fenders and too long an overhang. More Cartoonish than refined design.
Half ass street / race cars has to be some sort of generational thing. You’re either all in one way or the other. A six point is about tops with factory safety equipment. I don’t even like driving my full cage car without helmet as it makes me nervous. Conversely I refuse to cage my c5 while it has stock seats, belts and bags. Like the rest of the car it’s playing pretend until someone gets killed. Guy really got lucky.
As for the boat and Biden…ugh. My thoughts will put me on a watchlist much less the discrediting of any supporters here.
R.I.P. America. I so briefly knew you.
Well, regular 911’s look inflated and bulbous, so they had to turn it up to 11 for their target market. Garbage in, garbage out.
The truth is you can't make a 993 more curvaceous than the Turbo or 4S without ruining the proportions, like those ghastly butt-injection instagram trollops. Better to leave it alone
There is untold grandeur in subtlety. Changing dimensions in millimeters seems like a waste of time on paper but it couldn’t be further from the truth. When you start adding 2-3” of flare things go pear shaped in a hurry. The idea is to look at something and just be captivated without being able to quite figure out why. It’s not glaring and in your face, they just look “better” and more masculine. It’s exactly what makes a Singer the star over these.
So yes, it’s absolutely doable when done right. Maybe in another lifetime I’d be doing it myself.
"That said there’s just something “off” with the Gunther proportions. It looks inflated and bulbous with overly high front fenders and too long an overhang. More Cartoonish than refined design."
YES
THANK YOU
The front fenders are horrendous. The lack of sculpting on an otherwise curvy car really throws it off without pronounced arch and definition. Acceptable for an aero build long tail style but the front and rear look penned by different people.
looks like a marshmallow after you take it out of the microwave
also that car really shows how hard it is to improve on the design of a car without making it worse
singer made it look easy
Good design is based on refinement. Singer knows this and exploits upon it. Every element has been retouched with a product designers eye, not necessarily someone purely automotive as they are very in touch with materials and finishes.
When you try to design by exaggeration you near always lose purity of design. Couple that with a loss of direction and cohesive theme and you get this sort of HotWheels looking variant that does some things well but nothing exceptional. The lack of cohesion means you can change lines or features around in the valances but it won’t fix the “off-ness”.
You cannot fix bad design by focusing in on the detail points but you can exemplify good design by doing the same.
Very apt. Any thoughts on the MZR Datsun 240Z? I think it borrows too heavily from Singer when it really ought to pull design cues from other Nissans and it's own racing heritage.
Everyone tries to be Singer. They are the “Rocket Bunny” of that genre. (I don’t like RB but it’s what everyone who does tries to copy).
The MZR cars seem to fall into modern tuner vs refinement, but it also seems they might offer different packages.
Wasn't asked, but big fan of their Evolution model. Just the right amount of width. Not too "pompado." Muy bien
You know how long it takes to design a car? They make thousands - THOUSANDS - of drawings before they start sculpting the full-size clay models.
Eh, doesn't look too bad from here. At least it's not Mansory.
Fair warning, Not Safe For Lunch:
https://www.mansory.com/aston-martin
If you hate the Gunther don’t google image search RWB..
the first one, the stella artois, was neat as an expression of nakai's own personal taste and an extreme looking car with massively wide fenders and elbow deep dish ssr wheels
the rest are cookie cutter and each is built just as horribly as the first making none of them worth the money
but man the original when it was the only one in existence was tough looking
If RWB stayed a one-off or even a handful of cars owned by the same friends who did track days together for whatever, I’d hate them a lot less.
yes that exactly
mass producing them was a mistake
Usually is.
Agree. Also every time he cuts up another car, someone makes a corny cinematic video about it. My friend told me he was going to make a bingo card for the videos, squares include: car owned by by a 20 something manchild whose father bought it new, owner blathers on about “passion,” montage of Nakai cutting up fenders then rubbing roofing tar into the seams, cigarettes and staring, owner helps position the windshield banner, etc.
"my passion for cars is so strong i invited a japanese vagrant over to hack up my fathers investment grade 911 into a mockery of individuality for clout"
please fill your stomach with 10w30 posthaste
He only LOOKS like a vagrant.
He's using the rear wing of a dusty Koenig Competition Evolution Testarossa as a workbench. You can see it back in the corner of his shop, under that pile of A'PEXi titanium exhausts and Seibon carbon fiber hoods.
RWB is for the same guy who'll Liberty Walk an F40.
i dont know who did that but i hate him
drywall screws in carbon bodywork are you kidding me
"This week on Handyman Corner, we're gonna put overfenders on one of those fancy-boy European sports cars. If you don't have titanium aerospace rivets and a hydraulic gun, just use the leftover wood screws from when you built the kids' treehouse. Should work fine. Let's get started."
what if red green was a billionaire
maybe that
I kinda wouldn’t mind an RWB as a track rat. They were kinda cool until they overdid it and then sorta sold out to the bug men.
I’d gladly have the dude over to drink Coke, play some Indie Jap Punk and cut on some otherwise lame duck Carrera. Just leave the “real” ones alone. I’d probably stuff an Ls3 in it anyhow.
a track rat is probably what it ought to be in the same way a drift missile is a tool for a job that just happens to look fit for purpose
would be far more digestible if it were a flood damaged base model too
Many of those RWBs have totally unmodified engines. All that bodywork... all that tire ...
for a max of 280 hp.
Guess they won't be chirping on their way out.
At least flares are tolerable. I’m not a fan of stripes, especially the “carrera” ones that end up on a lot of 911s. If I ever end up with a 911 that has those, taking them off will be a day one change.
I am convinced that in the not-to-distant future a small number of very talented mechanics and bodymen will all but print money undoing all the damage done by the RWB nitwits.
Alas, it'll probably be someone like Singer, building cars for people who buy Singers.
100% agree.
The Gunther stuff looks like absolute shit. They are everything a Singer isn’t.
'Isis did it'
Weekly Supercross Update
And what an update it is. I’d go as far as saying that Round 11 in Seattle will go down as the best race if the season.
Once again, the forecast called for light rain. The weather mostly held out, resulting in a track full of tacky dirt that got rutted all to hell by the end of the night.
Rookie Honda rider Jett Lawrence, coming off of a three race win streak, came into the night with a 21 point championship lead over 2nd place Cooper Webb and his Yamaha. Showing immense early in the night, Lawrence was expected to grab another win. The night has other plans.
Lawrence got a fairly poor start in the 450 Main, starting off back in 8th place. This allowed 2023 450 SX Champion (and 3rd corral in points) Chase Sexton to grab the holeshot and put his KTM in the lead. Sexton came into the night 3rd overall in points and 25 behind Lawrence.
Sexton and Webb battled for the first half of the race, displaying some absolute excellent speed and racecraft on both sides. l.
Despite this, Lawrence was coming. At one point, he was putting down times that were consistently ~2 seconds per lap quicker than the leaders. Working his way up to third, Lawrence looked to have his sights set on the overall win. On Lap 8, Lawrence and Webb made contact, putting Lawrence in the dirt.
On lap 17, Sexton managed to stall his bike and allowed Webb to take 1st overall. Around that time, Lawrence got stuck behind a lapped rider and found himself out of contention for the win, some 10 seconds behind.
The last 8 laps featured more bar to bar racing between Webb and Sexton. Webb, who usually rides fairly “calm” in comparison to his rivals, looked to be holding on for dear life later in the race. Nevertheless, he held on tight enough to secure the win by way of a .6 second lead and thus cutting Lawrence’s championship lead to 16 points.
Seattle also marked the return of 250 West after a 6 week break. Levi Kitchen, atop his Pro Circuit Kawasaki, more or less dominated what would be considered his home race, winning by over 18 seconds over 2nd place finisher RJ Hampshire and his Husqvarna. Honda 250 rider Jo Shimoda managed to choke again and barely pulled off a 3rd place finish. Kitchen currently leads Hampshire in the championship by 8 points.
This weekend the series stops in St. Louis for another Triple Crown event featuring triple mains vs. the traditional format. Despite being a “Midwest” stop, the race will once again feature the 250W class.
You can catch this weekend’s race Saturday night at 7:00 EDT on Peacock.
I missed this one due to a party Saturday night, but the battle between Sexton and Webb looked like a dogfight in the highlights. It looks like Cooper raced smarter than anyone else, and it was nice to see Sexton show some grit. In the past I’ve felt like once he loses the lead he just kinda languishes.
I wish they’d do away with the triple crown format, it seems strange and gimmicky, but then so does Feld.
I say this all the time. SX is treated as a circus and not a legitimate motorsport because it’s ran by a circus promoter.
Things aren’t going to truly progress until they get someone serious behind them.
Cooper Webb is one of the greatest racers of all time. A racers racer. Ice in his veins.
People bag on the guy, but I genuinely like him. I especially like when he plays mental games with the other riders.
If the will existed, America could wall itself off from the rest of the world, expel all - ALL - the troublemakers: The illegal aliens, the H1Bs, the Deep Staters, the career criminals, the elected Democrats, the welfare queens, everyone - and be our own self-contained little world. EVERYTHING we need to construct, operate & populate a moden industrial civilization exists in the Lower 48 + Alaska right now.
The rest of the world needs America far more than America needs the rest of the world.
Let’s start with giving all US counties the ability to join a bordering state, then watch the rapid and spectacular domino effect take place and realign the country. Then all the leftist thugs and their minions will be clustered in a few blue roach motels.
Stranded on islands of blue in a vast sea of red.
Hey, do you suppose they'll start looking at each other and hallucinating hot dogs & hamburgers?
I do.
The great part is that the blue encampments will have nothing to barter with for food.
Not true. Readers of 'The Cut' will have something to trade.
Only if there’s a shortage of red state women. The blue state Karens will self deport after the realignment.
They'll have the ports. I guarantee you'd see them prefer to pay top dollar for overseas food rather than trade with rural fascists.
I see variations of 'purity tests' on the horizon should that geographic realignment take place. It would be the Divided States for sure, and there would be considerable upheaval (to put it very lightly) for a number of years before things hopefully settled out. Many of the Blue Islands are coastal cities already well set up for trade with their ports and road and rail infrastructure. Not to mention many factories being located there or nearby. The Seas of Red have the food, so ultimately, trading and cooperation would be necessary for both groups to do well and not simply subsist.
See, I've long thought that neighborhoods should be like clubs where you have you be approved by the existing residents in order to move in.
So I'd be okay with this.
Why?
If I have to live next to somebody, I want a say in who that somebody is.
We can have only SOME neighborhoods being shitholes or ALL neighborhoods being shitholes.
I say "Some."
And what is the criteria you'd use in deciding? And what criteria would you not want me using when deciding whether to let you buy the house next to me?
In my heart I’m An-Cap; some of us live exactly like this, but instead of ‘neighbourhood’ they say ‘compound’, and I know a few ranchers in Canada who have several families on the property.
I’ve never heard of someone doing this in a civilized area vs. the sticks, but I don’t see why a few families couldn’t agree to go in together on a subdivision and have a neighbours of their choosing.
We did this once. It was called redlining.
"Redlining" was banks being financially responsible, and not lending money to people who couldn't pay it back.
how could they do something so terrible
Last time we tried that it ended up in the War of 1812.
"If the will existed" - but, apparently, it does not.
These are fringe views - even among honest, God-fearing, populist Trump supporters and conservatives. People (the normies) would need to be onboarded, via some sort of massive propaganda apparatus, and significant coordination mechanisms *including criminal justice.*
Which is to say, we'd better stop "wishing in one hand" on this blog. The shit hand is getting really full
The Reconquista took hundreds of years and was followed by a Golden Age.
Good times, weak men, etc
Good books on subject?
Apologies, but not from me.
"Developing The Will" is what I shall now call my design for an FTL colony ship, so we can start over elsewhere.
im voting for you
Debating deleting the above comment, but, on serious note, you wrote: "If you have to propagandize and/or civilly punish broad swaths of the population to get your way, you don’t have justice on your side."
This is really funny, given the state of american media and american jurisprudence. Doesn't current media propaganda paint white parenthood as evil, interracial parentage as the highest good, white men as evil, white people as traitors to humanity (and one another), white existence separate from extreme diversity as the ultimate sin, black-on-white revenge violence as justifiable, etc?
And does not the current system punish loads of people for simply trying to maintain a modest existence in the country of their ancestors, to defend themselves or their homes, to protest an obviously stolen election, etc? Is not importing tens of millions of 75-iq beggars & literal cannibals an act of outright traitorousness - a crime carrying the punishment of death?
I'm sure that I'm misreading your comment but we're already in an environment where outright evil is being propagandized and resistance to that evil is being criminally & civilly punished. Do you truly feel that it would be immoral to sanction the people perpetrating this evil, destroying (whatever remains of) this nation?
really wish more people understood this
i dont want to play fair
i want to win
You'll have to pardon my enthusiasm. You're obviously a solid guy and I know I'm not alone in appreciating the sense and moderation you bring to these debates. You make some great points - though I wish I saw it in the @Tim way. The West's predicament can be a class struggle and an identitarian one as well. The enemies can be class members above, below, left and right--and identity or affinity groups similarly arranged.
I think I get so carried away because if one wants to even slighly check the system, one has to do something (however stupid and pointless, "Beam Me Up" representative Traficant) that is anti-system. I continually make the mistake of falling ass-backwards into the illusion that electing Trump or Ramsawamy or RFK Jr would make a change. That probably is an illusion - or it may be only barely true. What I wonder is, is it fair to call this predicament brinksmanship, or would it be more appropriate to call it war?
To me it looks like war - moderate centrist people and right wingers alike are getting flayed alive these days - because they either didn't get the memo, didn't like the memo, refused to believe the memo, or remain unwilling or unable to take decisive action. I should be the last to call anyone out on inaction. But this struggle might be more dire than it appears. And if that's so, we are running out of time.
why bother with right vs left when both sides are massively retarded
I don't think it exists either. And on top of that, this isn't merely a geography problem to be solved, the connections, identities and loyalties of everyone are very, very intertwined and a simple us vs. them movement does a great disservice to the welfare of all involved. Or maybe a catalyzing event(s) happens and we all get real black and white about things and act/move accordingly. I've been thinking more so lately, and semi-humorously relaying to others, that the reason no one has acted on any of these mounting, compounding issues is that the shelves in all the stores are still fully stocked.
That’s the case for sure. I was stationed on Oahu and they say that if the ships stopped coming the islands would be out of food in 4 days. You could hope they would get serious about food production in that case…
You mean one can't subsist on a diet of only pineapples?
Have you seen how many free range chickens exist on the archipelago? When the spam runs out, start chasing the yardbirds.
For the will to exist the problem has to first be understood. And that's why the fiercest battle is for control of the narrative. Because if you have control over the outlets of information then your narrative gets out and everyone else is a "conspiracy theorist" who can be dismissed.
Or "anti-vaxx"
Or "racist"
Or "transphobic"
Or "liberal"
...etc.
I lived in Korea in the early 2000s before free trade happened and they were quite self-sufficient and proud of it.
Most of the cars were a little sad, but they could be repaired anywhere, and you could get a Matiz for a little more than a new scooter if you wanted.
Grocery stores were a little unusual. The Home Plus (a Samsung/Tesco partnership) had an entire aisle, a long one, of nothing but processed, tinned pork, and Spam was only a tiny section. Our first trip to the grocery store, we walked out with an overflowing shopping cart that was incredibly heavy and spent about $60USD.
People were tiny. When we started visiting again in 2012 there were a lot of properly fat people.
Self-sufficiency is a national virtue. Fuck globalism.