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Not sure if it’s adequate to list Tesla next to the Dow Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq as if they were equally important

Tesla is 2.4% of the entire NASDAQ market cap and serves as a significant chunk of financial portfolios across the banking sector. Hugely influential company, even before you get into how it’s revenues prop up Starlink and Twitter.

Changes in the Tesla price have big downstream impacts on bank liquidity, future demand for computer hardware, and pension performance. It quite literally moves markets.

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Anyone who has worked “unskilled” positions can tell you that every job has a learning curve and experience counts for a lot.

This is particularly true in jobs that require a degree of physical endurance and manual dexterity. Picking a vegetable is easy. Picking a thousand vegetables an hour (without bruising the produce or ruining the plant) for eight hours a day is quite difficult. And skilled workers are far more lucrative to the farm owner than clumsy neophytes.

What often defines a service worker as “unskilled” isn’t the work, but the degree to which automated capital and real estate ownership are integrated into the workflow. The more leverage the employer can exert over the hiring market, the more easily they classify labor as “unskilled”’ and downgrade the pay.

Elon runs a car company with a $800B market cap that makes cars at one tenth the speed of Toyota, valued at $250B market cap.

Really makes you question the valuation on some of these companies.

Damn, you think sales are bad now? Wait until we get another recession.

“I am neither right nor left” is what Nazis say to hide that they’re Nazis

Mussolini wasn’t hiding anything. He was drawing out political tendencies from the vulgar militarism of the monarchists and imperialists on his right while pandering and promising to win labor support from his left. Fascism was centrist at its founding. Italy was literally a kingdom governed by a monarch, with a large contingent of aristocrats who believed Mussolini was a DEI Woke Lib for coming out of a working class ghetto.

What’s changed over the last century has been the rise of a wealthy and well-positioned petite bourgeois and professional managerial class. People who predate on their labor peers through rent-seeking without ever rising to the level of unassailable inter-generational wealth. This “middle class” labor contingent has historically been a breading ground for fascism, particularly among military veterans, police, and other security service workers who never got to enjoy the economic windfall of the 70s/80s like their parents and grandparents.

They only stopped identifying with “fascism” explicitly because it fell out of vogue with the defeat of the Axis Powers. But they adopted plenty of alternative titles - Klansmen, Neo-Confederates, Patriots, Anarcho-Capitalists, Constitutionalists, Neo-Conservatives - to white-wash the root ideology through some popular pastiche. And they don’t hide the fact that they want a single party ethnostate. They trumpet it.

Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views

Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?

Con: LOL no…no not those views

Me: So…deregulation?

Con: Haha no not those views either

Me: Which views, exactly?

Con: Oh, you know the ones

Obama, Reagan, Bush and Clinton weren’t fascists.

Obama and Clinton were neoliberal to their bones, which meant lots of Realpolitik and backroom handshake deals with fascists in order to drive down the bargaining power of labor and transfer enormous volumes of wealth to business aristocrats. Whatever you might say of their methods, the consequences of their militarism abroad and their austerity economics at home was a steady rise in global fascist tendancy.

Meanwhile, if Reagan and Bush weren’t strictly qualified as fascists, they ran as close up to the line as they could get. Religious demagogues who leveraged a business media vomiting up disinformation and race panic to cultivate a white nationalist base of support and overthrow basic democratic institutions at home and abroad. The Brooks Brothers Riot was a coup in every way that mattered. Iran-Contra involved attempts at the illegal overthrow of multiple governments. Extremely fascist.

look, I know the Weimar Republic had its problems

The German state was doing a holocaust well before The Weimar Republic. They were just doing it to brown people in Africa, rather than white people in Eastern Europe.

Shark Island concentration camp

This is more than just “Pobody’s Nerfect”. It’s marginalized because it happened to people that modern western pop-historians don’t like to talk about on The History Channel or during NPR Story Hour. But it is absolutely fascism.

The invasion of Iraq was Fascism. The invasion of Grenada and the overthrow of governments in Chile and Honduras and Brazil and Argentina was Fascism. The constant feeding of racial resentment and inflaming of conspiracy theory among Florida Cuban ex-pats is fascism. The racial hysteria at the US/Mexico border is fascism.

Trump didn’t invent any of this.

But Cuba is also not on the list

Too much Ketamine

otoh, if DOGE really manages to mess up Social Security payments, there’s no way the GOP can recover.

Republicans straight up nuked the economy in 2008 and they were back in the Congressional Majority two years later. Same thing happened in 2020.

Gerrymandering makes many of these maps mathematically unwinnable for Democrats

Point to a second Republican that has actually been punished for their criminal misconduct.

Is Matt Gaetz in jail yet? Did Dick Cheney spend any time behind bars? What about Richard Nixon?

correlation between high IQ results and frequency of taking IQ tests

Oh yeah, because like basically everything else, IQ testing can be a learned skill.

But again, that goes back to factors like education and free time and nutrition and stress, all of which have a bigger impact on your mental capacity than a native aptitude eugenists are looking for.

the general public misinterprets them far too often.

I mean, they don’t recognize the Q part. What’s the point of chasing outlayers when the median is what matters.

The person with the 100 IQ can be scrounging a subsistence living, pounding widgets on an assembly line, or crafting high art, entirely dependant on the social structure they’re born into.

Adams has a small die-hard base of hustler-culture types and reactionaries who will keep voting for him. That’s where he’s getting his 8% approval from. But he’s dead weight against Cuomo, who wants a coronation based on name recognition, rather than a street fight with Zohran Mamdani.

So Adams is dropping out in order to clear the way for a Cuomo primary stomping. Meanwhile, he gets to salvage his pride by running as an independent against a guy whose own pile of dirty laundry will be all over the street by election day, which gives him a non-zero chance of keeping his job.

A great tool for making broad diagnostics with regard to childhood-to-adult brain development. Also useful for identifying disabilities and neurodivergence.

But useless as a means of stack ranking already demonstrably intelligent people or sifting for “genius” intelligence in a pool with variation in education and experience. Getting a “good IQ score” is like bragging about acing your “Do you have Alzheimers?” cognitive exam. “Oh! He can draw clocks twice as fast as any of his peers! Incredible!”

LinkedIn is a hotbed of recruiters, so any time I feel the urge to go jobs fishing I whisper “Interested in a new position” into my phone an instantly get spammed with a dozen different people posting positions.

It’s not the worst place to go job hunting, just because everyone shilling for HR departments is already there. It’s just full of silly bullshit, too. Like walking through the skeezy end of a carnival every time you want to go ride the Ferris Wheel.

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At the end of FFX,

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306859/us-imports-by-commodity-from-russia/

It does look like we import about $3B/year. Mostly fertilizers, which make up 1/3 of total imports, and some raw metals and a bit of heavy machinery. But that’s minuscule beside our trade balances with the top of his tariff list - China, the EU, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and India. We do $20B/year with tiny little South Korea, as a point of comparison. We bring in $6B/year from South Africa.

To my knowledge, we don’t import Russian vodka in any significant quantity. Anything “Russian” branded is typically imported from one of the neighboring states - Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania. Red Army Vodka, for instance, is from a Polish company.