“you’re a mean one, mr. grinch” is my favorite christmas carol because it’s just a song about some guy who fuckin sucks. they don’t even mention christmas at all
So do people complaining about Canada’s “MAID” thing with doctors essentially prescribing suicide to tough-luck “no particular sickness, life just sucks” cases want to return to the status quo ante of “doctors see them, acknowledge that there are no immediate or even intermediate expectations their life will become net positive, and tell them to come back next year”?
(The American status quo without universal government-funded healthcare is “lol those people don’t see doctors”)
Or that they should instead somehow treat the life-suckage, even where it essentially comes from being down-and-out or superfluous? Cause the people I see pushing this line don’t normally seem like “the problem with Canadian single-payer healthcare is it’s not backed by a full-spectrum government welfare state or reconstruction of the social order” types
I’ve seen stuff around her recieved as some try-hard “pick me” (I never really parsed that phrase) thing for… cusper millennial men? And like no, the thing is the cycles line up for that
It’s like how when I went to high school in the ‘90s you saw my early '80s-born peers wearing Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin shirts
Admittedly, part of that is that their automotive-repair parents and older brothers listened to the classic rock station, but like no, the stuff that meant a lot to you at 20 is just what the next wave of 20-year-old girls are into.
Huh, okay, gone from 15g creatine and 18mg iron keeping me from falling into an energy hole for 18 hours or so to 24 and the deficit’s not even so bad when it’s time, that’s nice.
I hope the “each symptom is easier each time it echoes back” thing wears those 2 down, I don’t look forward to having to keep supplies of iron and creatine on me whenever I travel in case it comes back.
I like that reempowering the muscles first shows itself in the nonvolitional smooth muscles of the digestive tract and so the first sign the creatine’s taking after a night in bed is I just fart for a minute or so
Huh, okay, gone from 15g creatine and 18mg iron keeping me from falling into an energy hole for 18 hours or so to 24 and the deficit’s not even so bad when it’s time, that’s nice.
I hope the “each symptom is easier each time it echoes back” thing wears those 2 down, I don’t look forward to having to keep supplies of iron and creatine on me whenever I travel in case it comes back.
The obvious way to reconcile “the primary driver of American homelessness is housing prices, not addiction” with “the homeless people in my city are largely addicts” is that the first to be displaced by rising housing prices are the most economically marginal yet not previously homeless residents, who were disproportionately addicts
So every few years you hear about someone who was held as like, a sex slave in someone’s basement bunker escaping and like… what percentage of the total basement bunker sex slave population at any given time do these escapees constitute, d'you think?
So driving Darwin after the sun went down, quickly realized that all the pollen that fell on the windshield 2 years in the driveway which kinda degraded the image quality in the daytime makes everything an absolutely undriveable blur at night, I had to roll down the window, navigate with my head out the side, and park it on the street where I was a few blocks from home and plan to take it to a carwash tomorrow when it’s ambiently bright enough to find my way there.
Last night I dreamed there was a huge fandom on tumblr around a children’s animated series called “The Wall.” The series was based on a Bertholt Brecht play where characters in an imaginary country spend their days building a massive, pointless wall in the middle of nowhere. It was brutal, unsafe, labor for little pay. Workers either lived in makeshift housing nearby, or slept on the wall itself.
Most of the play was the characters talking to each other about their reasons for working on the wall. Only one of them was poor and desperate enough to do it for the money, most of them were there for ideological, philosophical or personal reasons. The wall alternately became a metaphor for capitalism, patriotism, religion, personal trauma, etc, depending on who was talking.
It was adapted into an animated series that replaced all the characters with modern-day kids who were forced to work on the wall by a mysterious, supernatural force. The plot was more episodic, i.e., stories where the kids had to deal with roadblocks to construction, or a monster that was picking off builders, etc.
The cartoon wasn’t especially violent, but it was shockingly intense and even cruel in its depiction of how much physical and psychological torture the kids building the wall were going through, and how sad and troubled their backstories were.
The fandom was intensely divided between people who were like “Aaaaaah, I just want these poor kids to get a break!! To be able to rest and relax and be happy!!” and ones who were like “I want them to keep working on this awful wall forever.”
i mean you gotta respect the alameda girl theres no truer display of the Poster’s Spirit than Posting about the actual crimes than youre doing while youre doing them. thats commitment to the bit. thats dedication. thats the real deal
I feel like gay fetishes these days have prerequisites I didn’t take.
Like, Tom of Finland stuff, I got that when I was straight – you like men, so you like big muscles and cocks.
And even the Mad Max leather harnesses I could vibe when I turned bi, I can see how that plays to and with notions of masculinity.
But pup play? Like, maybe if I had been immersed in the Mad Max stuff when it first showed up I could grok the transition and port aspects of my kink over, but coming in fresh it’s like… what?
Like we’ve accepted for a bit that Google search is borked, but trying to find a car wash on Maps kept zooming me to three towns over and then Notifications just told me that a Japanese restaurant was opening in Arcadia, CA, and guys, are you okay? Do you still have a handle on my mail at least?
isnt what we’re hearing about elon’s management of twitter like, pretty standard leveraged buyout stuff?
like… yeah he made the deal at a bad time and overpaid… but i feel like if borrowing money, buying a company, and then making it a horrible place to work didnt “work” in a certain way then we wouldnt have these private equity ppl and corporate raiders doing it routinely
Major tech companies are extremely bloated. Possibly money can be made by raising insane capital, buying software giants, then firing 90% of the people working there.
Carl Icahn did this in 1980s Corporate America. Perhaps Elon is the first person to do it to 2020s corporate California with its many UBI jobs.
If Twitter survives and thrives as it seems set to do, we might be witnessing a new model of capitalism emerge.
It might just be the real refuge capital is seeking, rather than failed fads.
also I’m not sure anymore that the timing was bad. Yes, Elon did it when the price was high, but he also did it when it was easy to get the loans. It depends on when he locked in the interest rates.
lol, I think one problem with Burja’s proposed strategy is… where are you going to borrow 1.3 trillion dollars to do a hostile takeover of google? It’s a pretty big bite to swallow.
yeah him generalizing from twtiter to “software giants” is uh it doesn’t work with the usual companies people think of when they hear the phrase “software giants”
It’s not a strategy that would work for someone the size of Google, but there are hundreds of smaller software companies where this strategy would (and has) worked. “Buy a software company, cut jobs, and jack prices” has been a very successful business model for three private equity firms in particular - Vista Equity Partners (owned by Robert Smith, at times the richest black man in America), Silver Lake, and Thoma Bravo. Software companies are often good candidates for PE because they are often founder owned, with all the idiosyncratic management practices that come with it, and they haven’t been through the decades of grinding cost cuts that something like an auto parts company would have already gone through, so there is potentially a lot of fat to cut.
the other thing private equity does is buy multiple software companies in the same industry for consolidation purposes of course
The additional thing about Twitter is that Elon is doing it very badly, Leveraged buyouts are too common to be even notable! Its the incompetence on display that makes it a story.
Also the buyout was extremely *not* leveraged, debt wasn’t even a third of the purchase price. Normally to LBO a good chunk of the point is structuring the debt to insulate you from the losses. Musk can’t do this to any notable way (he has done it in the small ways he can).
So its like saying “isn’t this corporate restructruing a corporate restructring” which, sure, it is. It doesn’t share enough traits for the comparison to be elucidating beyond the definitional.
This part is not similar to most LBO’s but i’ll admit its similar enough to a few of them:
The king Return To The Office showing some revealed preferences here.
“Also the buyout was extremely *not* leveraged, debt wasn’t even a third of the purchase price.”
Yes, you would normally see something like 2/3 of the purchase price debt financed (depending on the company and the state of the markets). Elon couldn’t get that kind of leverage because of the absolute size of the deal (it would have maybe ranked as the biggest LBO in history?) and the fact that it was a relatively risky tech company.
yeah, it seems like the absolute amount of debt is comparable to the largest leveraged buyouts, right? So it’s as leveraged of a buyout in dollars if not in percent
and what that’s supposed to explain is the drastic cost cutting at the expense of quality of service. Surely he’s doing that for the same reason as other deeply indebted buyers, and may get similar results
i dont think its the incompetence on display that makes it a story… not that he’s competent necessarily but thats just not why we’re talking about musk firing ppl and stuff
I always get Carl Icahn confused with Lee Iacocca, I think from overhearing about both of them on the ‘80s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour before I got my bearings in life.
