Lord Ratner

You're there, and your work puts you in a much better position to know, but it's very hard to imagine the response you suggest. Especially considering the history. This is a real question: Are there still reputable groups that believe the pipelines were blown up by Russia? The public narrative seems to have settled on Ukraine-assisted-by-the-US/UK and then the story kinda faded. I'd expect the pro-Ukraine-support crowd (myself as one) to be talking about that more if there was still a credible argument that Russia did it. I remember you implied you saw or were told of very definitive evidence that it was Russia.

That sounds... diminished. Why doesn't the bomber Mafia run the AF anymore?

It was still a bad analogy. The girl at the party made decisions that ignore the reality of the situation she's in. She did not show up with a bucket of date-rape drugs and casually leave them scattered around the room, thinking it wouldn't ever affect her. There's a big difference between questionable *personal* decision making, and making the world worse for other people, then having that come back to bite you. The girl in the sexy dress never deserves to be raped. The politician who fucked up their city for everyone else absolutely deserves to be mugged.

Exact timing? Dunno. We are at a fork in the road between an asset-value-crash and reigniting inflation. I have no clue what the Fed picks, but I don't expect them to let the government go insolvent until they have no choice. That means a new tea-party wave of politicians replacing the entrenched incumbents and forcing the Fed to fix their mess. That too will take time. In the short term, they can't stop inflation and protect the government/stock market/investor class. These are now mutually exclusive interests. So if you want to invest in something, keep an eye on commodities. The government can't control the price of oil, copper, etc. But the safe answer right now is to shovel your money into short-term treasuries. No risk from rate-changes and a pretty good yield right now. Whatever you do, don't sit on cash right now. When the Fed starts cutting rates, move your money into something that will benefit from inflation. Fun Fact: Because the Fed has increased their balance sheet so spectacularly, the only way they are able to keep rates above ~0% is by directly paying the banks and money-market funds to not put their money into treasuries (which would push up the prices and lower the yields/rates). So as we speak, the Fed is paying the banks billions to sit on the reserves that the Fed forced them to take in the first place. If you don't think the system is rigged, your aren't paying attention. But I don't think this madness can go on for too long.

Yeah, not going to be great for him. A few more interesting stats: Right now, for the first time ever, the cost of new homes is the same as existing homes. This is an artifact of the reality that existing homeowners (as a group) never *have to* sell, but homebuilders do. So the rate increases have killed off the existing home sales (too expensive for buyers, and most sellers can't/won't trade a 3% mortgage for a 7% mortgage), leaving new homes as the "best" option. Homebuilders are doing mortgage buydowns to incentivize sales without lowering prices. If they lower prices, that sets the new value for all remaining homes (even the localities would hate this, as it would depress property taxes. Everyone is aligned against the homebuyer). So they pay the bank you drop the mortgage rate, 5.5% seeming to be the magic number for a lot of buyers. If we operate on the reality that most homebuyers base their budget on the monthly payment, not the home price, then a drop from 7.5% to 5.5% has the same effect as dropping the price of the home by ~19%. How do you think the market would react if the narrative for the housing market had a 20% loss of value in one year nation wide? Investor buying is falling off a cliff. The average cap rate (profit) on renting these homes out is now a percent or so below the risk-free rate of treasuries. It's about equal with the 10-year note. So... run a portfolio of thousands of homes that require maintenance, management, and renters, with the risk of losing value if the market drops, or just buy US treasuries and sit on them? Easy math... Home prices in the last bubble didn't drop for about two years after the sales dried up. Housing moves slowly, but we have a huge percentage of investor-owned homes now, so the drop could be steeper with more owners capable of quick sales. And if things turn, he who panics first profits best. This doesn't have to happen, but the alternative is massive inflation to bring our wages up to levels that can normalize these prices. The US government will benefit massively from inflation because it will diminish the debt, but that assumes they survive the usually-associated social upheaval that follows large inflation.

She's just not that into you. The only fools are the ones who stay. It may suck to be a warrior in a time when warriors are not needed, but it sucks more to be a warrior in an organization that is openly hostile to warriors. They court martialed Billy Mitchell. Nothing changes, just the numbers on the calendar.

Apparently something like 25% of the STR homes bought in the pandemic years are on adjustable rate mortgages. That'll hurt. I think you're in ground zero. PHX, AUS, and BOI are the holy trinity of pandemic housing bubbles. That's good to hear. Debt, as always, is going to ruin a lot of lives in the next few years I think.

Maybe the best summation I've read so far of what I think will happen. The concept of "expected and unexpected inflation tax" is a bit difficult to grok, but the basic idea is that inflation will be the chosen solution eventually.

Any Airbnb landlords feeling the squeeze? I'm trying to get a sense for if there's going to be a lot of surprise inventory as the post-COVID travel boom winds down.

Investing in the possibility of a societal collapse is a losing game. Even though it's possible. Think about what happens between now and a collapse, and invest in that. Inflation will be the name of the game going forward. Not immediately, but once "something breaks" and the Fed is forced to drop rates (from political pressure), the inflation fire will be reignited. The West has been at war with fossil fuels for 20 years now, and failed to produce an alternative. The lack of investment in exploration and extraction will come back to bite us. Fossil fuels and nuclear (the only viable alternative) will probably see huge gains as constricted supply and an inflated dollar collide. If the narrative shifts to entrenched inflation, gold probably does very well. The last time tech was this elevated, it fell 80%. Real estate looks ugly too. Healthcare is hard to bet against when the largest voting block is too old to survive without medical intervention.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN Sadly, the true best-case scenario would be for rates to stay just high enough to exert such extreme pressure on the global financial system that the world is forced into a very painful, but survivable, bad-debt detox. Laughably, that rate would probably only be about 3%. Looking at the chart above, it took from the founding until 1981 to get to $1T of debt. $1T in 2023 dollars is $3.4T. But remember, a debt gets cheaper due to inflation. This fact will matter in the years ahead. It took from 1981 to 2008 to get from $1T to $10T. 27 years for $9T increase From 2008 - 2018 it went from ~$10T to ~$20T. 10 years for a 10T increase From 2018 to now it went from #20T to $33T, with an additional $1.9T of additional debt planned for the second half of 2023, so lets say ~$15T of additional debt in 6 years The trajectory is parabolic. And keep in mind, we have never had such a high deficit-to-GDP ratio outside of wartime. If the government is taking on this type with record-low unemployment and record-high tax receipts (from 2021 and 2022), what do you think it will look like when the economy just slows down a little? So, the debt is spread out over a range of Treasury bills, notes, and bonds (just called "bonds" for now) ranging from a few weeks to maturity to 30 years. Because we only exist in a deficit now, when a bond matures, the government must issue another to cover the payout of the maturing bond. In the corporate world this is called rolling over the debt. When you do this, the new bond must be issued at whatever the prevailing interest rate is. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30 Click "max" on the chart to see the full series. You'll see that the yield on bonds has been steadily dropping for just under 40 years. That means every time the government had to pay out a bond, they were able to cover it with a cheaper bond. Imagine if every month your car payment went down through no effort of your own. You'd probably use the extra money each month to buy something else. So too did the government. The problem with a normal yield curve (the chart that shows the various interest rates of the increasing bond durations, click here) is that its usually cheaper to give out shorter-term bonds than longer term bonds. So in 2019-2020 when the government could have been issuing 30 year bonds at less than 2% to fund the government, they instead chose a whole lot of < 2year bonds yielding less than .25% (a quarter of a percent!), because lower is better, right? Well now the best rate they can get is 4%, which is devastating when you have to roll over trillions in debt from .25% to 4%. This article explains it well, but I'll include a couple highlights: "Net interest payments on the national debt rose from $352 billion in 2021 to $475 billion in 2022 — the highest nominal dollar amount in recorded history." "Much of that increase was due to higher interest rates on U.S. Treasury securities. Although borrowing rose sharply over the past few years to address the COVID-19 pandemic, interest costs were muted as a result of low interest rates." "Interest costs represented about 8 percent of total federal outlays in 2022. By 2033, that share will rise to 14 percent and will exceed programs such as defense and Medicaid." Keep in mind, the article uses CBO estimates which are grossly optimistic, and always wrong. Always. So basically, with interests rates anywhere above 1%, we have an unsustainable debt spiral. It's not just us. The EU was using negative interest rates to support their insane deficit spending. China plowed trillions into worthless ghost cities. Now you might ask, why doesn't the Fed (and other central banks) just lower interest rates if they are so devastating? Inflation. The great destroyer. Inflation is great for governments. It turns big debts into small debts. Ever wonder why the Fed targets 2% inflation instead of 0%? It's because they long ago realized that governments operating under fiat currency will never pay down their debts. But if you let inflation slowly erode the value of a dollar, you can keep the debts manageable, if you manage to keep the growth of the debt under the growth of the economy. We haven't. Unchecked inflation is the quickest way to social upheaval. Not just because people see their purchasing power decline, but because government money-printing always disproportionately goes to the already-rich and connected. Take a look here. Pay close attention to the differing slopes. Also notice that the runaway increase at the top coincides with the Fed interventions in 2002 (tech bubble popping), 2008 (quantitative easing from the Global Financial Crisis) and 2020 (Covid crash). So when inflation really comes to eat our lunch, and it hasn't yet, a 50% decrease in purchasing power is going to hit the bottom lines a lot harder than the top lines. You want a civil war? This is how you get a civil war. And overwhelmingly, all of this madness was brought to you by a federal reserve that decided that artificially-low interest rates would help government spending spur economic growth, and a congress that was all too happy to increase their spending ability through the roof, while telling the American people that it was actually good for the economy for the government to spend this way. Keynesian economics reaching it's only logical conclusion: collapse. Buckle up, kids. It's going to be an interesting decade or two.

No, that was never the problem. The problem is creating a spending pattern of deficits that the government can only sustain in an environment of zero interest rates (ZIRP). If you want a real laugh, look at what the government expense for interest has done over the last 2 years, and look at the projections if interest rates aren't very quickly reset to zero. Anyone who thinks the federal reserve is going to keep interest rates high in perpetuity has another thing coming. We have now spent ourself to a point where the government can literally not afford any meaningful interest rate on the short end. This will end poorly.

You are looking at the natural result of government-run healthcare. Decisions must be made to control costs. But it's the government, so the decisions will be idiotic. Instead of doing the obvious thing, and the only one that will actually control costs (limit care to the elderly as they age into an actual inevitable death), they will use stupid cases like this because there's no massive voting block of sick 19 year olds to be afraid of. The boomers created this fucked up system, and now for their final act they will bankrupt it.

Uh, what? You think Cuba resisted us successfully without the financial and military support of the USSR? Or is relying on a superpower benefactor to resist another vastly powerful invader only ok for some countries? Our entire system of modern geopolitics is predicated on the idea that we do not simply allow for the strong taking the weak. Your life has been incredible because of this, and a whole lot of people like us got to serve in the military with a remarkably low chance of dying because the world stopped the practice of empire building through force. Sovereignty matters. "It's fine because the Aztec are gone too" is a hot take.

The problem is not that Ukraine bought the American vice president. The problem is that the American vice president was for sale. There's not a country on earth that wouldn't make that deal.

In that regard we are in complete agreement. I've made it clear that I was not for any form of mandate with this particular vaccine. But that is different than supporting or otherwise spreading an objectively flawed claim about the vaccine impact. The person who is discrediting the false claim is not also obligated to make any further accurate claims. Creating a justification for a mandate is a separate issue with its own requirements. What you said is: "If you want to "debunk the conspiracy" then we'd need to know the number of miscarriages in a non-vaccinated control group compared against the number in the vaccine group, then curate for other factors (lifestyle risk choices, age, overall health, etc.). This should be easy to debunk given that data exists, I wonder why that wasn't part of your article?" That's not true. All that is needed to debunk the conspiracy is to discredit the evidence presented for the conspiracy. This is like the people currently claiming that some fuzzy video footage and unexplained lights are evidence of aliens and unless you can specifically prove that the lights in those videos weren't aliens, then the baseline assumption must be that it was in fact aliens.

Just because what took longer? The point is that those drugs had years and years of data behind them before they were forced on anyone. Decades in some cases. This was a vaccine with absolutely no data behind it, because it was invented in a matter of months before deployment, and the fucking thing didn't even work. Which should be all the proof that you need, because even if something isn't dangerous, you should not be forced to use it if it doesn't even do the thing you claim it does. To compare the covid vaccine mandate to other vaccine mandates is to be intentionally ignorant of the differences.

If someone makes a claim, especially a claim with a specific percentage in it, and you prove that the claim was impossible to make with the provided data, you are not then required to go through the data and come up with a corrected claim. The 44% claim was debunked. It is now on the conspiracy theorist to provide a newer number, this time with adequate support.

Yeah, that doesn't add up. The best case scenario is that you get experienced soldiers from this, but with so many soldiers in Russia being conscripted, it is unlikely they will have a whole lot of people sticking with the military whenever this fiasco is over.

Yup. Every Boomer: "Your generation is used to getting a participation trophy for everything!" Me: "And who exactly bought those participation trophies? Was it the 8 year olds, or their boomer parents?" Boomers: ..........

I'm a big Vivek supporter, but he got over his skis a little. The "bought and paid for" accusations were gross. I hate that crap. He has a couple other attacks that I thought were scummy. He needs to stick with being smarter and more open then the rest of the field. But I also think he's running for VP.

Same

If you read "the Fourth Turning" it suggests exactly this solution. Unfortunately.

Wait a sec, did you come around to my POV? Fuck, I still owe you a response. I'm a bad Internet friend 🤣😂